Podcast appearances and mentions of craig what

Patrick answers challenging questions about faith, shares tips for talking to young adults about belief in God, and recommends useful books on Catholic apologetics. He also explores the curious practice of proxy baptisms in the Mormon church, especially regarding well-known Catholic figures like popes. Patrick addresses listener questions about confession, cremation, and ways to support friends interested in joining the Catholic Church. For insightful advice and real-life wisdom on living your faith, Patrick delivers content you won’t want to miss. Ellie (email) - I need to be first proven that the Christian God exists to believe in Heaven and then be comforted, but I’m unsure about his existence and therefore I’m unsure about any afterlife. (00:51) Craig - What do you do if your friend is dating someone who says that Jesus failed because he didn't get married? (13:22) Lee - How can I help someone else convert? (15:18) Audio: Will Mormons baptize the Pope after his death? (18:21) Was Jesus really nailed to the Cross? (37:27) Mary Joe - Thank you for explaining something I learned in my Theology class when I was young. You explained Causality perfectly! (39:14) Ellen (email) – Can cremation ashes be held in reserve? (41:57) Joan (email) – Patrick said you can’t commit a mortal son unless you know it’s a mortal sin when you commit it, which I assume goes for venial sin as well. Why then, at their first confession, do RCIA candidates confess their sins from the past if they weren’t aware that they were sins until going through RCIA? (47:12)

On the evening of August 29th - Craig was on his early evening Ruck when he found himself confronting a cemetery vandal.In this episode he shares details from the event along with sometimes serious - sometimes whimsical takeaways from this ordeal. This event triggered an abundance of reflection for Craig regarding the challenges faced when communicating under stressful circumstances. From word choices - to frantic calls - and de-escalation.In conversations with law enforcement it became apparent that the culprit in this destruction was an individual that may be known to police - and possibly afflicted with addiction and/or mental illness. Craig shares how the general knowledge that this crime was not one of passion or desire - but the acts of an afflicted individual served to reduce the outrage that members of his community felt initially upon learning of the degree of destruction.Note: Craig's takeaways from this event are based on his perspectives and from trusted counsel. If you have feedback or analysis for Craig (What could he have done better? What did he do well?) regarding this event and are trained in law-enforcement, security or related fields - please reach out via email to speakup@craigoneill.net. Professional perspective is appreciated and we'd be happy to share your tips or advice with our listeners.Three separate local news stations interviewed Craig in the wake of the event.Watch Full Video EpisodeLinks to Local News Stories:Wood TV 8 - https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/several-graves-damaged-at-grand-rapids-cemetery/Wzzm13 -https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/caught-camera-runner-captures-moments-man-vandalized-grand-rapids-cemetery/69-eb719d08-0b90-43b0-8872-abb795e999bbFox17https://www.fox17online.com/news/local-news/grand-rapids/its-heartbreaking-major-damage-overnight-at-grand-rapids-cemeteryThank You To Our Partners:The Institute at WeAreTheInstitute.com. "Stop stressing over your business, you deserve a good night's sleep. The Institute's coaching helps you achieve success and financial peace.AutoFlow at AutoFlow.com. Your partner in technology, Autoflow consolidates your client interactions - before, during and after the visit to a single thread. Learn more at Autoflow.comAutoLeap at AutoLeap.com. Are you tired of juggling multiple tools to manage your auto repair shop? Say hello to the streamlined efficiency of AutoLeap, the #1 all-in-one Auto Repair Shop Management Software! Shop Dog Marketing at Shop Dog Marketing.com. "Want to see your auto repair shop thrive? Let Shop Dog Marketing be your guide. Our customer-first approach, combined with AI-driven creative

Brodie updates the Run Smarter Scholars on Shin Splints by recapping a past podcast episode on this topic along with fresh new tips. Recap episode 1: Talking Shin Splints with Dr Duane Scotti Recap episode 2: Shin Splints is there a Solushin with Ben Lindsay Answering the Patron Questions: 1.) Karen: Any updates on bone vs. muscular issues and/or when you should be more concerned about the former? 2.) Craig: What are the main causes of shin splints? 3.) Stephanie: Is it okay to ice shin splint soreness after running? Run Smarter YouTube Channel Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android  Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.

“It’s not just a problem in the United States. Deaf people are underestimated and are not given the same opportunities as hearing our goal is to see that change.” – Craig What is it like to live as a deaf person? How can these folks enjoy the same opportunities and privileges as the hearing ones? […]

This is round 2 with John Sherman aka “The Verm”. We sat in the desert near Hueco Tanks and chatted over a few beers. We talked about ‘Wheatiesgate' and the lost art of heckling, finding and developing areas before the internet, dealing with aging, photographing and studying birds, life lessons, injury stories, and John's favorite beers.*I recommend listening to my first episode with Verm (EP 108) before this episode.Check out Crimpd!crimpd.comOr download the Crimpd app! (Available for iOS and Android)Check out PhysiVantage!physivantage.com (link includes 15% off coupon)Use code "NUGGET15" at checkout for 15% off your next order!Check out Rhino Skin Solutions!rhinoskinsolutions.comUse code “NUGGET” at checkout for 20% off your next order!We are supported by these amazing BIG GIVERS:Leo Franchi, Michael Roy, David Lahaie, Robert Freehill, Jeremiah Johnson, Scott Donahue, and Eli ConleeBecome a Patron:patreon.com/thenuggetclimbingShow Notes:  thenuggetclimbing.com/episodes/the-verm-returnsNuggets:0:06:39 – The Michael Salem catalog0:09:33 – West Texas in the early 80s0:17:02 – ‘Wheatiesgate' and the lost art of heckling0:27:16 – Patron question from Eli: As bouldering has evolved, what has stayed the same?0:28:39 – Adventureland, and the experience of climbing boulders without names or stars or grades0:34:39 – Finding Ibex, UT, and discovering new areas before Google Earth0:41:40 – Patron question from Brandon: What advice would The Verm give to a new climber?0:48:09 – Aging, prostates, and swollen knuckles0:55:34 – Hangdogging, new-age tactics, and why John feels like Jason Kehl is a kindred spirit0:58:33 – What has surprised John about aging, and how baby birds poop1:02:09 – Cognitive decline, and other scary things that come with age1:06:32 – Taking his foot off the gas, getting out of shape, and calorie counting1:10:29 – Getting an amazing personal trainer, and fixing his elbow issues by fixing his shoulders1:17:52 – Patron question from Brandon: What got you into birding? And what about it got you hooked?1:24:27 – Patron question from Brandon: Has birding taught you any life lessons?1:42:27 – Injury stories and life lessons2:31:29 – Developing bouldering in Ibex, UT2:37:02 – A year in Verm's life, and tick marks2:44:10 – Return of the harrier, and more bird facts2:52:10 – Favorite books and short stories2:57:59 – Verm's memoir idea, favorite books, and sports3:07:50 – Climbing with Paul Robinson and Michaela Kiersch3:14:59 – The compression revolution, John Gill, slab dynoing, and the Hoover Maneuver3:23:59 – Patron question from Brandon: Top three beers? (and the De Garre story)3:38:20 – Patron question from Craig: What bird best represents your personality? (and duck penises)3:46:15 – Patron question from Craig: What bird would John Gill be?3:53:04 – The baboon story

Periodization is an idea that has been around since the middle of the 20th century. If you listen to other endurance-themed podcasts like this one, I'm sure you have come across it before. The basic concept revolves around structuring your annual training in such a way as to have you "peak" for a specific event or series of events. In order to achieve this, many great coaches have adopted styles of training that involve focusing on specific areas of fitness at different times. Over the years, different methods of periodization have evolved, you may have heard about linear, traditional, non-linear, block and other methods of periodization. Personally, I've read quite a bit about these methods over the years in a quest to improve my own training. I wanted to bring my guest on the show today to discuss these methods and how we could implement them as self-coached athletes. However, what emerged was an interesting discussion on the practical application of these training philosophies when applied to the real-world recreational athlete. Craig Schmitt is a Physiotherapist, Triathlon Coach and Kona-qualifying Ironman triathlete. Said another way, Craig is a lot like me, only better, by every metric. However, I tried to set my jealousy aside for the interview and I hope you'll agree that it was well worth the effort. Craig is a wealth of practical information for the recreational endurance athlete. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. In this interview, I asked Craig What are your thoughts on formal periodization methods? Do you use a formal periodization approach with your athletes? How do you approach annual training planning? How should athletes decide how to structure their annual training? What should athletes work on during the fall and winter? Does it depend on when they intend to race? How should they work back from their goal race to make a plan? How many races is it sensible to schedule? How far apart do they need to be? Follow Craig Website: gritperformance.ca Instagram: @gritendurancephysio Facebook: @gritperformance Would you like your running or triathlon questions featured in a future episode? Just click here to leave me a voicemail. Music By The Passion HiFi --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theadaptivezone/message

What if I told you that there's a way to keep yourself young? It takes a lot of hard work, and it's a continuing process. However, the payoff is definitely worth it. It also offers a lot of benefits aside from longevity. The secret? It's developing a lifelong passion for learning and growing. In this episode, Craig Harper joins us once again to explain the value of having a growth mindset. We explore how you can keep yourself young and healthy even as you chronologically age. He also emphasises the importance of fun and laughter in our lives. Craig also shares how powerful our minds are and how we can use them to manage our pain.    If you want to know how to develop a growth mindset for a fuller life, then this episode is for you!   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third-party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third-party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combats the effects of aging while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how to develop a growth mindset to keep yourself young and healthy, regardless of your chronological age. Understand why you need to manage your energy and plan fun and laughter into your life. Discover the ways you can change your mindset around pain.    Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits Episodes: #60: Ian Walker - Paraplegic Handbiker - Ultra Distance Athlete #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #188: Awareness and Achieve High Performance with Craig Harper  #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova Connect with Craig: Website | Instagram | Linkedin Interested to learn more from Craig? You can check out his books and his podcast, The You Project. T: The Story of Testosterone by Carole Hooven  Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin M.D. Lifespan - Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To  by David A. Sinclair PhD Neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman's Instagram  Dr Rhonda Patrick's website A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!   Episode Highlights [06:50] A Growth Mindset Keeps Us Young and Healthy It's helpful to take advantage of the availability of high-level research and medical journals online. If you're prepared to do the hard work, you can learn anything.  Learning and exposing ourselves to new things are crucial parts of staying young and healthy.  Age is a self-created story.  With a growth mindset, you can change how your body and mind works so that you feel younger than your real age.  [12:23] Develop a Growth Mindset It's vital to surround yourself with people with the same mindset — people who drag you up, not down.  You can also get a similar experience by exposing yourself to good ideas and stories. Be aware of what you're feeding your mind, on top of what you're feeding your body.  School is not a marker of your intelligence. Your academic failures do not matter.  With a growth mindset, you can keep growing and learning.  [17:40] Let Go and Be Happy People tend to have career and exercise plans, but not a fun plan.  We can't be serious all the time — we also need time to have fun and laugh.  Laughter can impact and improve the immune system. Laughing can change the biochemistry of your brain. Plan for the future, but also learn to live in the now. Having a growth mindset is important, but so is finding joy and enjoyment.  [23:31] Look After Your Energy Having fun and resting can impact your energy and emotional system.  These habits can help you work faster than when you're just working all the time.  Remember, volume and quality of work are different.  [30:24] Work-Life Balance Many people believe that they need to balance work and life. However, when you find your passion, it's just life.  Even doing 20 hours of work for a job you hate is worse than 40 hours of doing something you love. There's no one answer for everyone. Everything is a lot more flexible than before. Find what works for you.  [35:56] Change the Way You Think It's unavoidable that we think a certain way because of our upbringing.  Start to become aware of your lack of awareness and your programming.  Learn why you think of things the way you do. Is it because of other people?  Be influenced by other people, but test their ideas through trial and error. Let curiosity fuel your growth mindset.  Listen to the full podcast to learn how Craig learned how to run his gym without a business background!  [44:18] Sharing Academic Knowledge Academics face many restrictions due to the nature and context of their work.  He encourages the academic community to communicate information to everyone, not just to fellow researchers.  He plans to publish a book about his PhD research to share what he knows with the public. Science is constantly changing. We need to keep up with the latest knowledge.   [50:55] Change Your Relationship with Pain There is no simple fix to chronic pain.  The most you can do is change your relationship and perception of pain.  Our minds are powerful enough to create real pain even without any physical injury. Listen to Craig and Lisa's stories about how our minds affect our pain in the full episode!   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘My mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind, and my mental energy optimally.' ‘If you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult.' ‘We're literally doing our biology good by laughing.' ‘Living is a present tense verb, you can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future.' ‘Often, more is not better. Sometimes more is worse.  So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work.' ‘It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward... That growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial.'   About Craig Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading educators, speakers, and writers in health and self-development. He has been an integral part of the Australian health and fitness industry since 1982. In 1990, he established a successful Harper's Personal Training, which evolved into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.  He currently hosts a successful Podcast called 'The You Project'. He is also completing a neuropsychology PhD, studying the spectrum of human thinking and behaviour. Craig speaks on various radio stations around Australia weekly. He currently fills an on-air role as a presenter on a lifestyle show called 'Get a Life', airing on Foxtel.  Want to know more about Craig and his work? Check out his website, or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin!   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how to develop a growth mindset. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits with Lisa Tamati. This week I have Craig Harper. He is really well known in Australia. He's a broadcaster, a fitness professional, a PhD scholar, an expert on metacognition, and self-awareness. And we get talking on all those good topics today and also neuro-psycho-immunology, very big word. Really interesting stuff; and we get talking about laughter, we get talking about pain management. We sort of go all over the show in this episode, which I sometimes do on this show. I hope you enjoy this very insightful and deep conversation with Craig Harper.  Before we head over to the show, I just want to let you know that Neil and I at Running Hot Coaching have launched a new program called Boost Camp. Now, this will be starting on the first of September and we're taking registrations now. This is a live eight-week program, where you'll basically boost your life. That's why it's called Boost Camp. not boot camp, Boost Camp. This is all about upgrading your body, learning how to help your body function at its base, learning how your mindset works, and increasing your performance, your health, your well-being and how to energise your mind and your body. In this Boost Camp, we're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, easy-to-follow process using holistic diagnostic tools and looking at the complete picture.  So you're going to go on a personalised health and fitness journey that will have a really life-changing effect on your family and your community. We're going to be talking about things like routine and resilience, mental resilience, which is a big thing that I love to talk about, and how important is in this time of change, in this time of COVID, where everything's upside down, and how we should be all building time and resources around building our resilience and energising our mind and body. We're going to give you a lot of health fundamentals. Because the fundamentals are something simple and easy to do, it means that you probably aren't doing some of the basics right, and we want to help you get there.  We're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, sort of easy, process. So we are now in a position to be able to control and manage all of these stressors and these things that are coming at us all the time, and we want to help you do that in the most optimal manner. So check out what boost camp is all about. Go to www.peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp. I'll say that again, peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp, boost with a B-O-O-S-T, boost camp. We hope to see you over there! Right, now over to the show with Craig Harper. Well, hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits! Today, I have someone who is a special treat for you who has been on the show before. He's an absolute legend, and I love him to bits. Craig half and welcome to the show mate, how are you doing?  Craig Harper: Hi Lisa! I'm awesome but you're not.  Lisa: No I'm a bit of a miss, people. I've got shingles, a horrible, horrible virus that I advise nobody to get. Craig: What it— do we know what that's made? What causes it, or is it idiopathic as they say? Lisa: Yeah, no, it is from the chickenpox virus. Although, I've never, ever had that virus. So I'm like heck how, you know, it's related to the cold sore virus and all of that, which I definitely have had often. So it sits on the spinal cord, these little viruses, dormant and then one day when your immune systems are down, it decides to attack and replicate and go hard out. So yeah, that'll be the down for the count now for two and a half weeks. In a lot of pain, but— Craig: What is it like nerve pain or what kind of pain is it?  Lisa: Yes, it's nerve pain. So this one's actually, it hits different nerves in different people, depending on where it decides to pop out. My mum had the femoral nerve, which is one that goes right down from the backbone, quite high up on the backbone, down across the back and then down through the hip flexor and down the leg. I've got all these horrible looking sores, I look like a burn victim all the way down my leg and across my back. And it comes out through the muscles of your like, through the nerves and nerve endings and causes these blisters on top of the skin but it's the nerve pain that's really horrible because there's no comfortable position. There's no easy way to lie or sit and of course, when you're lying at night, it's worse. It's worse at nighttime than in the day. So I learned a lot about shingles. And as usual, we're using these obstacles to be a learning curve. Craig: Why on earth are you doing a bloody podcast? You should be relaxing. Lisa: You're important, you see. I had, you know, I had this appointment with you, and I honour my appointments, and I— Craig: Definitely not important. What's the typical treatment for shingles? Lisa: Well, actually, I wish I'd known this two weeks ago, I didn't know this, but I just had a Zoom call with Dave Asprey, you know, of Bulletproof fame, who is one of my heroes, and he's coming on the show, people, shortly. So that's really exciting. He told me to take something called BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene, which is a synthetic antioxidant. They actually use them in food additives, they said that kills that virus. So I'm like, ‘Right, get me some of that.' But unfortunately, I was already, it's— I only got it just yesterday, because I had to wait for the post. So I'm sort of hoping for a miracle in the next 24 hours.  Also, intravenous vitamin C, I've had three of those on lysine, which also helps. One of the funny things, before we get to the actual topic of the day, is I was taking something called L-Citrulline which helps with nitric oxide production and feeds into the arginine pathway. Apparently, while that's a good thing for most people, the arginine, if you have too much arginine in the body, it can lead to replication of this particular virus, which is really random and I only found that out after the fact. But you know, as a biohacker, who experiments sometimes you get it wrong.  Craig: Sometimes you turn left when you should have turned right.  Lisa: Yes. So that, you know, certainly took a lot of digging in PubMed to find that connection. But I think that's maybe what actually set it off. That combined with a pretty stressful life of like— Craig: It's interesting that you mentioned PubMed because like a lot of people now, you know how people warn people off going Dr Google, you know, whatever, right. But the funny thing is, you can forget Dr Google, I mean, Google's okay. But you can access medical journals, high level— I mean, all of the research journals that I access for my PhD are online. You can literally pretty much access any information you want. We're not talking about anecdotal evidence, and we're not talking about theories and ideas and random kind of junk. We're talking about the highest level research, you literally can find at home now. So if you know how to research and you know what you're looking for, and you can be bothered reading arduous academic papers, you can pretty much learn anything, to any level, if you're prepared to do the work and you know how— and you can be a little bit of a detective, a scientific detective.  Lisa: That is exactly, you know, what I keep saying, and I'm glad you said that because you are a PhD scholar and you are doing this. So you know what you're talking about, and this is exactly what I've done in the last five years, is do deep research and all this sort of stuff. People think that you have to go to university in order to have this education, and that used to be the case. It is no longer the case. We don't have to be actually in medical school to get access to medical texts anymore, which used to be the way. And so we now have the power in our hands to take, to some degree, control over what we're learning and where we're going with this.  It doesn't mean that it's easy. You will know, sifting through PubMed, and all these scholarly Google articles and things in clinical studies is pretty damn confusing sometimes and arduous. But once you get used to that form of learning, you start to be able to sift through relatively fast, and you can really educate yourself. I think having that growth mindset, I mean, you and I never came from an academic background. But thanks to you, I'm actually going to see Prof Schofield next week. Prof Schofield and looking at a PhD, because, I really need to add that to my load. But— Craig: You know, the thing is, I think in general, and I don't know where you're gonna go today, but I think in general, like what one of the things that keeps us young is learning and exposing ourselves, our mind and our emotions and for that matter, our body to new things, whether that's new experiences or new ideas, or new information, or new environments, or new people. This is what floats my boat and it keeps me hungry and it keeps me healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, creatively, sociologically. It keeps me healthy. Not only does it keep me in a good place, I'm actually at 57, still getting better. You know, and people might wonder about that sometimes.  Of course, there's an inevitability to chronological aging. Clearly, most people at 80 are not going to be anything like they were at 40. Not that I'm 80. But there's— we know now that there's the unavoidable consistency of time as a construct, as an objective construct. But then there's the way that we behave around and relate to time. Biological aging is not chronological aging. In the middle of the inevitability of time ticking over is, which is an objective thing, there's the subject of human in the middle of it, who can do what he or she wants. So, in other words, a 57-year-old bloke doesn't need to look or feel or function or think like a 57-year-old bloke, right?  When we understand that, in many ways, especially as an experience, age is a self-created story for many people. I mean, you've met, I've met and our listeners have met 45-year-olds that seem 70 and 70-year-olds— and we're not talking about acting young, that's not what we're talking about. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about pretending you're not old or acting young. I'm actually talking about changing the way that your body and your mind and your brain and your emotional system works, literally. So that you are literally in terms of function, similar to somebody or a ‘typical' person who's 20 or 25 years younger than you. We didn't even know that this used to be possible, but not only is it possible, if you do certain things, it's very likely that that's the outcome you'll create. Lisa: Yeah, and if you think about our grandparents, and when I think about my Nana at 45 or 50, they were old. When I think about now I'm 52, you're 57, we're going forward, we're actually reaching the peak of our intellectual, well, hopefully not the peak, we're still going up. Physically, we got a few wrinkles and a few grey hairs coming. But even on that front, there is so much what's happening in the longevity space that my take on it is, if I can keep my shit together for the next 10 years, stuff's gonna come online that's gonna help me keep it on for another 20, 30, 40 years.  For me now it's trying to hold my body together as best I can so that when the technology does come, that we are able to meet— and we're accessing some of the stuff now, I mean, I'm taking some of the latest and greatest bloody supplements and biohacking stuff, and actively working towards that, and having this, I think it's a growth mindset. I had Dr Demartini on the show last week, who I love. I think he's an incredible man. His mindset, I mean, he's what nearly, I think he's nearly 70. It looks like he's 40. He's amazing. And his mind is so sharp and so fast it'll leave you and I in the dust. He's processing books every day, like, you know, more than a book a day and thinking his mind through and he's distilling it and he's remembering, and he's retaining it, and he's giving it to the world. This is sort of— you know, he's nothing exceptional. He had learning disabilities, for goodness sake, he had a speech impediment, he couldn't read until he was an adult. In other words, he made that happen. You and I, you know, we both did you know, where you went to university, at least when you're younger, I sort of mucked around on a bicycle for a few years. Travelling the world to see it. But this is the beauty of the time that we live in, and we have access to all this. So that growth mindset, I think keeps you younger, both physically and mentally. Craig: And this is why I reckon it's really important that we hang around with people who drag us up, not down. And that could be you know, this listening to your podcast, of course, like I feel like when I listen to a podcast with somebody like you that shares good ideas and good information and good energy and is a good person, like if I'm walking around, I've literally got my headphones here because I just walked back from the cafe, listening to Joe Rogan's latest podcast with this lady from Harvard talking about testosterone, you'd find it really interesting, wrote a book called T.  When I'm listening to good conversations with good people, I am, one, I'm fascinated and interested, but I'm stimulating myself and my mind in a good way. I'm dragging myself up by exposing myself to good ideas and good thinking, and good stories. Or it might even be just something that's funny, it might— I'm just exposing myself to a couple of dickheads talking about funny shit, right? And I'd spend an hour laughing, which is also therapeutic.  You know, and I think there's that, I think we forget that we're always feeding our mind and our brain something. It's just having more awareness of what am I actually plugging into that amazing thing? Not only just what am I putting in my body, which, of course, is paramount. But what am I putting in, you know, that thing that sits between my ears that literally drives my life? That's my HQ, that's my, my mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind and my mental energy                                                                                  optimally. Lisa: Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people if they didn't do well in the school system, think that, 'Oh, well, I'm not academic therefore I can't learn or continue to learn.' I really encourage people, if you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult. The school system has got many flaws, and it didn't cater to everybody. So I just want people to understand that.  You know, just like with Dr Demartini, he taught himself 30 words a day, that's where he started: vocabulary. He taught himself to read and then taught— Albert Einstein was another one, you know, he struggled in school for crying out loud. So school isn't necessarily the marker of whether you're an intelligent human being or not. It's one system and one way of learning that is okay for the average and the masses. But definitely, it leaves a lot of people thinking that they're dumb when they're not dumb.  It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward and becoming, you know, that growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial. You talked there about laughter and I wanted to go into that a little bit today too, because I heard you talking on Tiffany, our friend Tiffany's podcast, and you were talking about how important laughter is for the body, for our minds, for our— and if we laugh a lot, we're less likely to fall victim to the whole adult way of being, which is sometimes pretty cynical and miserable. When you think, what is it? Kids laugh something like 70 times a day and adults laugh I think, six times a day or some statistic. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Craig: Well, I used to sit down with you know, I don't do much one-on-one coaching anymore, just because I do other stuff. I would sit with people and go, ‘Alright, tell me about your exercise plan and blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your career plan, blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your financial plan, blah, blah, blah.' Tell me about, you know, whatever. And they have systems and programs and plans for everything.  I would say to them, 'Do you like fun?' And they're like, they look at me like I was a weirdo. 'What do you mean?' I go, 'Well, what do you mean, what do I mean? Like, do you like having fun?' And they're like, very seriously, like, 'Well, of course, everyone likes having fun.' I go, 'Great. What's your fun plan?' And they go, 'What?' I go, 'What's your fun— like, is laughing and having fun important to you?' 'Yeah, yeah.' 'Okay, what's your fun plan?'  They literally, like this idea of just integrating things into my life, which are for no reason other than to laugh and to have fun. Not to be productive and efficient and to tick more boxes and create more income and elevate output and tick fucking boxes and hit KPIs and you know, just to be silly, just to laugh like a dickhead, just to hang out with your mates or your girlfriends, or whatever it is. Just to talk shit, just to, not everything needs to be fucking deep and meaningful and world-changing. Not everything. In fact, it can't, you know?  Our brain and our body and our emotional system and our nervous system and— it can't work like that we can't be elevated all the time. And so, literally when we are laughing, we're changing the biochemistry of our brain. You know, literally when we are having fun, we're impacting our immune system in a real way through that thing I've probably spoken to you about, psychoneuroimmunology, right? We're literally doing our biology good by laughing and there's got to be, for me, there's got to be, because, like you probably, I have a lot of deep and meaningful conversations with people about hard shit. Like, I'm pretty much a specialist at hard conversations. It's what I do. But, you know, and, and I work a lot, and I study a lot. Then there needs to be a valve. You can't be all of that all of the time because you're human, you're not a cyborg, you're not a robot. And this hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, work harder, sleep less, you can, you know, you can sleep when you're dead, it's all bullshit. Because, also, yeah, I want to learn and grow and evolve, and I want to develop new skills. But you know what, I want to also, in the moment, laugh at silly shit. I want to be happy and I want to hang out with people I love and I want to be mentally and emotionally and spiritually nourished.  Like, it's not just about acquiring knowledge and accumulating shit that you're probably not going to use. It's also about the human experience now. This almost sounds contradictory. But because of course, we want a future plan and we want goals and all of those, but we're never going to live in the present because when we get there, it's not the present. It's just another installment of now. So when next Wednesday comes, it's not the future, it's now again, because life is never-ending now, right?  It's like you only like, live— living is a present tense verb. You can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future. You cannot. Yes, I know, this gets a little bit, what's the word existential, but the truth is that, yeah, we need to— well, we don't, we can do whatever we want. But I believe we need to be stimulated so we're learning and growing, and we're doing good stuff for our brain and good stuff for our body. But also that we are giving ourselves a metaphoric hug, and going, 'It's all right to lie on your bed and watch Netflix, as long as it's not 20 hours a day, five days a week,' you know. It's okay to just laugh at silly stuff. It's okay, that there's no purpose to doing this thing other than just joy and enjoyment, you know.  I think that people like you and me who are, maybe we would put ourselves in the kind of driven category, right? You and I are no good at this. Like, at times, having fun and just going, ‘I'm going to do fuck all today.' Because the moment that we do sometimes we start to feel guilty and we start to be like, 'Fuck, I'm not being productive. I've got to be productive.' That, in itself, is a problem for high performance. Like, fuck your high performance, and fuck your productivity today. Be unproductive, be inefficient, and just fucking enjoy it, you know, not— because in a minute, we're going to be dead. We're going to go, 'But fuck, I was productive. But I had no fun, I never laughed, because I was too busy being important.' Fuck all that. Lisa: I think both of us have probably come a long way around finding that out. I mean, I used to love reading fiction novels, and then I went, ‘Oh, I can't be reading fiction novels. I've got so many science books that I have to read.' Here I am, dealing with insomnia at two o'clock in the morning reading texts on nitric oxide, you know. It is this argument that goes on, still in my head if there was an hour where you weren't learning something, you know, I can't. Because I know that if I go for a big drive or something, and I have to travel somewhere, or going for a long run or something, I've probably digested a book on that road trip or three, or 10 podcasts or something and I've actually oh, I get to the end and I'm like, ‘Well, I achieved something.' I've got my little dopamine hits all the way through.  Now I've sort of come to also understand that you need this time out and you need to just have fun. I'm married to this absolute lunatic of a guy called Haisely O'Leary, who I just love, because all day every day, he is just being an idiot. In the best sense of the word. I come out and I'm grumpy and you know, had a hard day and I'm tired, I'm stressed, and I come out and he's doing a little dance, doing some stupid meme or saying some ridiculous thing to me. I'm just like, you know, I crack up at it. That's the best person to have to be around because they keep being—and I'm like, ‘Come on, stop being stupid, you should be doing this and you shouldn't be doing that.' Then I hear myself, and I'm like, ‘No, he's got it right.' Craig: Well, I think he does, in some ways, you know. It's not about all, it's not about one or the other, it's about— and it's recognising that if I look after my energy, and my emotional system, and all of that, I'll get more done in 8 hours than 12 hours when I'm not looking after myself. So more is not better, necessarily. In fact, often, more is not better; sometimes, more is worse. So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work. Also, you know, quality of experience.  I wrote a little thing yesterday, just talking on social media about the fact that I, like all of the things that I do, even study, although it's demanding, but I enjoy it. My job, you know, like, right now you and I do podcasts. I do seven podcasts a week, apart from the ones like this, where I'm being interviewed by someone else, or spoken to by somebody else. My life is somewhat chaotic, but I don't really, in terms of having a ‘job'. Well, one, I don't have a job. I haven't had a job since I was 26. Two, I don't really feel a sense of work, like most people do.  Like the other night, I did a gig. I don't know if you, if I posted a little thing about this on Insta, and I was doing a talk for Hewlett Packard in Spain. Now, how cool is the world? Right? So I'm talking here, right here in my house, you can see, obviously, your listeners can't. But this is not video, is it? Just us? I wish I knew that earlier. Sorry, everyone, I would have brushed my hair. But anyway, you should see my hair by the way. I look like bloody Doc from Back to the Future. Anyway, but I'm sitting in here, I'm sitting in the studio, and I'm about to talk to a few hundred people in Spain, right, which is where, that's where they're all— that's where I was dealing with the people who are organising me to speak.  Just before I'm about to go live at 5:30, the lady who had organised me was texting me. So it's on Zoom. There's already a guy on the screen speaking and then lots of little squares of other humans. I said to her, ‘How many?' and said, ‘You know, like a few 100.' I said, ‘Cool.' I go, ‘Everyone's in Spain,' and she goes, ‘No, no, we're in Spain, but the audience is around the world.' And I go, ‘Really? How many countries?' She goes, ‘38.' I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, I'm wearing a black t-shirt. I'm wearing my camo shorts. I've got bare feet. I'm talking to hundreds of humans from this big organisation in 38 countries, and I'm talking about the stuff that I am passionate about, right? I don't have to do any prep, because it's my default setting. I'm just talking. I had to talk for an hour and a half about high performance. Well, giddy up, that's like an hour and a half of breathing. You know?  I just had such fun, and I had this moment, Lisa, halfway through, I don't know, but about halfway through, where I'm like, I remember growing up in a paradigm where pretty much when I was a kid everyone went and got a job and you went, you became a cop or you sold clothes, or you're a bricky or sparky or you're some kind of tradie. A few of my super smart friends went to university. That was way over my head, I'm like, ‘Fuck university.' But there was literally about 50 jobs in the world. You know, it's like there was only 50 jobs, and everyone or nearly everyone fitted into one of those 50. There was a few other ones but for the most part, nearly everyone fitted into about 50 jobs. I'm sitting there going— I won't say what but I'm earning pretty good money. I'm sitting in bare feet in my house talking to humans around the world about this stuff that I want to tell everyone about anyway.  I do it for free on my podcast and your podcast and I do it anyway. I have this great time, it's a really good experience. Then I finish at 7 pm. Then I walk 15 feet into the kitchen and put the kettle on and check my messages.  Lisa: No commuting, no travelling, no flying. Craig: I'm like, ‘How is this a job?' I'm like, ‘How is this real?' ‘This is a scam. I'm scamming everybody.' Like, how great is 2021? I know there's a lot of shit going on and I'm not trying to be insensitive, and it's smashed my business too. All of my live events for 2020 got kicked in the dick in two weeks, right? I got financially annihilated, but you just go, ‘Oh well, improvise, adapt, overcome and figure shit out.' But, I think when you can have it and a lot of people and it's a very well-worn kind of idea. But when you're, what you love, and what you're curious about, and how you make a few bucks, when that can all collide, then life is a different thing. Then there's not work and life, there's just life.  You know, and so when we talk about this idea of work-life balance, you know, it's like the old days that talk about that a lot. And it's like, almost like there was some seesaw, some metaphoric seesaw with work on one side and life on the other. And when you get balance like that— because what happens, think about this, if we're just basing it on numbers, like all 40 hours of work versus however many hours of non-work or however many hours of recreation and recovery. But if you're doing even 20 hours of a job that you hate, that's going to fuck you up. That's gonna, that's gonna mess with you physically, mentally, and emotionally. That's going to be toxic; that's going to be damaging; that's going to be soul-destroying, versus something else like me studying 40 hours a week, working 40, 50 hours a week doing 90 in total, depending on the week and loving it, and loving it. And going, ‘I feel better than I've ever felt in my life.'  I still train every day, and I still, I live 600-800 metres from the beach, I still walk to the beach every day, you know. And I still hang out with my friends. You know, it's like, it doesn't have to be this cookie-cutter approach. The beauty I think of life, with your food, with your lifestyle, with your career, with your relationships with the way that you learn, like the way that you do business, everything now is so much more flexible, and optional than any time ever before that we can literally create our own blueprint for living. Lisa: Yeah. And then it's not always easy. And sometimes it takes time to get momentum and stuff. Being, both you and I have both said before we're unemployable. Like, I'm definitely not someone you want to employ, because I'm just always going to run my own ship. I've always been like that, and that's the entrepreneurial personality. So not everyone is set up for that personality-wise. So you know, we're a certain type of people that likes to run in a certain type of way. And we need lots of other people when doing the other paths.  There is this ability now to start to change the way you think about things. And this is really important for people who are unhappy in where they're at right now. To think, ‘Hang on a minute. I've been I don't know, policeman, teacher, whatever you've been, I don't want to be there anymore. Is there another me out there? Is there a different future that I can hit?' The answer is yes, if you're prepared to put in the work, and the time, and the effort, the looking at understanding and learning, the change, being adaptable, the risk-taking, all of those aspects of it. Yes, but there is ways now that you can do that where they weren't 30 years ago, when I came out of school I couldn't be, I was going to be an accountant. Can you imagine anything worse than that?  Craig: Hi, hi. Shout out to all our account listeners, we love you and we need you. Lisa: I wasn't that— Academically that's I was good at it. But geez, I hated it. And I did it because of parental pushing direction. Thank goodness, I sort of wake up to that. And you know, after three years. I had Mark Commander Mark Devine on the show. He's a Navy SEAL, man. You have to have him on the show. I'll hook you up. He's just a buck. He became an accountant before he became a Navy SEAL and now he's got the best of both worlds really, you know, but like you couldn't get more non-accountant than Mark Devine. We all go into the things when we leave school that we think we're meant to be doing. And they're not necessarily— and I think you know, the most interesting 50 year-olds still don't know what the hell they want to be when they grow up. Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on www.patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two Patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us. You know, I'm still in that camp. Craig: You raise a really interesting point too, and that is programming and conditioning. And, you know, because we all grow up being programmed, one way or consciously or not, we grow— if you grow up around people, you're being programmed. So that's not a bad thing. That's an unavoidable human thing. So, situation, circumstance, environment, school, family, friends, media, social media, all of that stuff shapes the way that we see the world and shapes the way that we see ourselves.  When you grow up in a paradigm that says, ‘Okay, Lisa, when you finish school, you have to go to university, or you have to get a job, or you have to join the family business, or you have to work on our farm,' or whatever it is, you grow up in that. You're taught and told and trained. And so you don't question that, you know. And for me, I grew up in the 70s, I finished in the 80s. I finished school in 1981. And I grew up in the country, and most people go to trade or most people worked in logging or on a farm or— and I would say about five in 100 of the kids that I did— by the way, doing year 12 was a pretty big deal in that time. ‘Geez, are you a brainiac?' Definitely wasn't a brainiac. But year 12 is a big thing now. Now, even if you have an undergrad degree that it's almost nothing really enough. It's like, you kind of got to go get honours, or masters or maybe even a PhD down the track. And that landscape has really changed. So it's just changing again to— you know, and I think to become aware— like this is for me, I love it; this is my shit; this is what I love— is starting to become aware of our lack of awareness. And starting to become aware of my own programming and go, ‘Oh, I actually think this. Why not? Because this is how I naturally think about, because this is how I've been trained to think about work. I've been trained to or programmed to think this way about money, or relationships, or marriage, or eating meat, or being a Catholic or being an atheist or voting liberal law,' or whatever it is, right.  Not that any of those things are good or bad, but it's not about how I eat or how I vote or how I worship. It's about how I think. And is this my thinking? Or is this just a reflection of their thinking, right? So when we open the door on metacognition now we start to become aware of our own stories, and where they come from. And this is where I think we really start to take control of our own life, and our own present, and our own future that doesn't exist, by the way, but it will, but it won't be the present.  Then, we start to write our own story with our own voice, not our parents' voice, not our friends', not our peers' voice, you know. And we're always going to be influenced by other people. Of course. Just like people are influenced by you and your podcast, and your stories, and your thinking, and your lessons for them. They're influenced. But I always say to people, ‘Don't believe me because you like me. Listen to me, if you like me and consider what I say. If what I say sounds reasonable for you, maybe a good idea to test drive, take that idea for a test drive, and see if that works for you, because it might not.' Right?  I think, I really encourage people to learn for themselves and to listen to their own internal wisdom that's always talking. So listen to smart people. I don't know if Lisa and I are in that category, Lisa is, listen to her. But at the same time, do your own, learning through exploration and trial and error, and personal kind of curiosity and drive.  For me, I opened my first gym at 26; first personal training centre in Australia, there weren't any. I'd never done a business course, I've never done an admin course, I knew nothing about marketing. I knew nothing about employees. I knew nothing. But I learned more in one year than I would say, most people would learn in five years at university studying business, because I was in the middle of it, and I was going to sink or swim. So in one year, I started a business and I acquired overwhelming knowledge and skill because I had to, because of the situation. But that was all learning through doing.  The way that you've learned, you know you said earlier that, like, a lot of people think that they're not academic; therefore, they're not smart. Some of the smartest people I've ever met, and I don't— and this not being patronising, but like, mind-blowingly brilliant, how they think, live outside of academia. One of the reasons some people are so brilliant outside of academia is because they're not forced into an echo chamber of thought. They're living outside the academic paradigm, where we're not trying to restrict how you think or write or speak. There are no rules out here. So there's no intellectual inhibition.  Lisa: Yeah, I love that. Craig: When you do a PhD, like me, and I can separate the two, thankfully. But there's a way of communicating and writing in PhD land, which is incredibly restrictive because of the scientific process, which is fine, I get that. But it's having an awareness of— this is what I'm often talking to my supervisors about is, yes, I'm studying this thing, which is deep, deep neuropsychology, and everything, the way that you do your research, get your data or interpret your data. The whole process of creating new science, which is what you're doing as a PhD, creating, bringing something new into the world. That's one thing. But you write your journal articles, which is my PhD process, you get them, hopefully, you get them published in academic resources and magazines. But then, I don't want that to be it. I'm going to write a book when I finish about all of my research totally in layman's terms so that people can use the knowledge, so that people can— because that's the value.  For me handing in some papers and going, ‘Oh, Craig Harper is an academically published author.' That's cool, but it's not— and I'm so respectful of people who have had hundreds of things published, but that doesn't blow my socks off. I'm not really— like that's a real, you really hang your hat on that in academia. Oh, how many things he or she had published, publications, which is cool. They're all smarter than me. But I'm not. I'm like, yeah, that that's cool. But I want to connect with the masses, not the few. Also, by the way, people who read academic papers, they raise it— they're reading it generally, just like I am right now, for a specific reason which relates to their own research. There ain't too many people like you. You're one of the rare ones who just thumb through fucking academic journals to make your life better. Lisa: Yeah. And it's just some real goals. So you've got the wisdom of having lived outside of academia and being a pracademic, as Paul Taylor says, and then actually seeing the pre— and this is a discussion that I had when I was talking to someone about doing a PhD and they say, ‘But then you're going to become a part of the establishment, and you're going to be forced into this box.' And I said, ‘No, not necessarily because it's— I can see where you're coming from. But you can take that, because you have that maturity and that life experience and you can fit yourself into the box that you have to fit into in order to get those things done. That research done, but you don't have to stay there.'  That's what you know, one of my things has been, I don't want to spend however many years doing a PhD, and then that's not out on the world. To me that that needs to be taken out of the academic journals, wherever you go to publish, and then put out into a book or something that where it's actually shared, like you say, with the masses, because otherwise, it just collects dust like your MA does, or your whatever, you know, that sits on your bookshelf, and how you got hey, your exam your piece of paper, but you didn't actually do anything with it.  Of course, lots of people do their thing, they're going like they're in research, and they're furthering research and so on. But I— my approach, I think yours is too, is to be able to communicate that information that you've learned, and then share it with everyone, so that they can actually benefit from it, and not just the people that are in academia. The other thing I see after interviewing hundreds of doctors and scientists and people is that they are, actually, the more specialised they are, the more inhibited they are by what they can and can't say.  While they need to be doing that because they need to protect what they are doing in their studies and what they're allowed to and what they're not allowed to do and say, it also is very inhibiting, and they don't get the chance to actually express what they would actually like to say. That's a bit of a shame, really, because you don't get to hear the real truth in the qualifying everything flat stick. Craig: I reckon you're exactly right. But they don't need to be that. And the reason that a lot of academics are like that is because they get their identity and sense of self-worth from being an academic. They're way more worried about three of their peers hearing something that might not be 100% accurate, and then being reprimanded or, rather than just going— look, I always say to my academic, super academic friends, when I talk with them, not everything that comes out of your mouth needs to be research-based. You can have an idea and an opinion. In fact, I want to hear your ideas and opinions. Lisa: You're very educated. Craig: You know, that's the— and as for the idea of you becoming an academic, No, you go, you do your thing you study, you learn the protocol, the operating system, and you do that you go through that process, but you're still you. Right, and there's— you and I both know, there are lots of academics who have overcome that self-created barrier like Andrew Huberman.  Lisa: Yeah, who we love. Craig: Who we love, who, for people listening, he's @hubermanlab on Insta, and there's quite a few academics now, like the one that I spoke on before, on Joe Rogan. She's a Harvard professor, she's a genius, and she's just having a— it's a three-hour conversation with Rogan, about really interesting stuff.  There's been a bit of a shift, and there is a bit of a shift because people are now, the smart academics, I think, are now starting to understand that used the right way, that podcasts and social media more broadly, are unbelievably awesome tools to share your thoughts and ideas and messages. By the way, we know you're a human. If you get something wrong, every now and then, or whatever, it doesn't matter. Lisa: Well, we'll all get, I mean, you watch on social media, Dr Rhonda Patrick, another one that I follow? Do you follow her? Fantastic lady, you know, and you watch some of their feeds on social media, and they get slammed every day by people who pretending to be bloody more academic than her. That just makes me laugh, really. I'm just like, wow, they have to put up with all of that. The bigger your name and the more credibility you have as a scientist, the more you have to lose in a way.  You know, even David Sinclair another you know, brilliant scientists who loves his work. And I love the fact that he shared us with, you know, all his, all his research in real-time, basically, you know, bringing it out in the book Lifespan, which you have to read, in getting that out there in the masses, rather than squirrelling it away for another 20 years before it becomes part of our culture, and part of our clinical usage. We ain't got time for that. We have to, we're getting old now. I want to know what I need to do to stop that now. Thanks to him, you know, I've got some directions to show them. Whether he's 100% there, and he's got all the answers? No. But he's sharing where we're at from the progress. Science by its very nature is never finished. We never have the final answer. Because if someone thinks they do, then they're wrong, because they're not, we are constantly iterating and changing, and that's the whole basis of science. Craig: Well just think about the food pyramid. That was science for a few decades. Lisa: Lots of people still believe that shit. That's the scary thing because now that's filtering still down into the popular culture, that that's what you should be doing, eating your workbooks and God knows what. This is the scary thing, that it takes so long to drip down to people who aren't on that cutting edge and staying up with the latest stuff, because they're basically regurgitating what there was 20 years ago and not what is now.  Now Craig, I know you've got to jump off in a second. But I wanted to just ask one more question, if I may, we're completely different. But I want to go there today because I'm going through this bloody shingles thing. Your mate Johny that you train, and who you've spoken about on the last podcast, who had a horrific accident and amazingly survived, and you've helped him, and he's helped you and you've helped him learn life lessons and recover, but he's in constant chronic pain.  I'm in constant chronic pain now, that's two and a half weeks. For frick's sake, man, I've got a new appreciation of the damage that that does to society. I just said to my husband today, I've been on certain drugs, you know, antivirals, and in pain medication. I can feel my neurotransmitters are out of whack. I can feel that I'm becoming depressed. I have a lot of tools in my toolbox to deal with this stuff, and I am freely sharing this because what I want you to understand is when you, when you're dealing with somebody who is going through chronic pain, who has been on medications and antibiotics, and God knows whatever else, understanding the stuff that they're going through, because I now have a bit of a new appreciation for what this much of an appreciation for someone like Johnny's been through. What's your take on how pain and all this affects the neurotransmitters in the drugs? Craig: Do you know what? Lisa: You got two minutes, mate. Craig: I'm actually gonna give you I'm gonna hook you up with a friend of mine. His name is Dr Cal Friedman. He is super smart, and he specialises in pain management, but he has a very different approach, right? He's a medical doctor, but look, in answer to, I talked to Johnny about the pain a bit, and we have, we use a scale, obviously 10 is 10. 0 is 0. There's never a 0. Every now and then it's a 1 or 2, but he's never pain-free. Because he has massive nerve damage. And sometimes, sometimes he just sits down in the gym, and he'll just, I'll get him to do a set of something, and he'll sit down and I just see this, his whole face just grimaces. He goes, ‘Just give me a sec.' His fist is balled up. He goes, sweat, sweat. I go, ‘What's going on, mate?' He goes, ‘It feels like my leg, my whole leg is on fire.'  Lisa: Yeah. I can so relate to that right now.  Craig: Literally aren't, like, burning, like excruciating. I don't think there's any, I mean, obviously, if there was we'd all be doing it. There is no quick fix. There is no simple answer. But what he has done quite successfully is changed his relationship with pain. There is definitely, 100% definitely, a cognitive element to, of course, the brain is, because the brain is part of the central nervous system. Of course, the brain is involved. But there's another element to it beyond that, right.  I'm going to tell you a quick story that might fuck up a little bit of Dr Cal, if you get him on. He has done a couple of presentations for me at my camps. He's been on my show a little bit. But he told this story about this guy at a construction site that was working and he had a workplace accident. And he, a builder shot a three-inch nails through his boots, through his foot. Right? So the nail went through his foot, through the top of the leather, and out the sole, and he was in agony, right? He fell down, whatever and he's just rolling around in agony and his mates, they didn't want to take anything off because it was through the boot, through his foot.  They waited for the ambos to get there, and they gave him the green whistle. So you know that whatever that is, the morphine didn't do anything, he was still in agony. He was in agony. Anyway, they get him into the back of the ambulance and they cut the boot off. And the nail has gone between his big toe and second toe and didn't even touch his foot.  Lisa: Oh, wow. In other words, psychologically—  Craig: There was no injury. But the guy was literally in excruciating pain, he was wailing. And they gave him treatment, it didn't help. He was still in pain. So what that tells us— Lisa: There is an element of—  Craig: What that tells us is our body can, our mind can create real, not perceived, but real pain in your body. And again, and this is where I think we're going in the future where we start to understand, if you can create extreme pain in your body where there is no biological reason, there is no actual injury, there's no physical injury, but you believe there's an injury, now you're in agony.  I think about, and there's a really good book called Mind Over Medicine by a lady called Lissa Rankin, which we might have spoken about. L-I-S-S-A, Lissa Rankin, Mind Over Medicine. What I love about her is, she's a medical doctor, and she gives case after case after case of healing happening with the mind, where people think placebos and no-cebos, people getting sick, where they think they're getting something that will make them sick, but it's nothing, they actually make themselves sick. And conversely, people getting well, when they're not actually being given a drug. They're being given nothing, but they think it's something. Even this, and this is fascinating, this operation, pseudo-operation I did with people where—  Lisa: Yeah, I read that one. I read that study. Craig: Amazing. Craig: Oh, yeah, it's look, pain is something that even the people who are experts in it, they don't fully understand. Lisa: Well, I just like, if I can interrupt you there real briefly, because I've been studying what the hell nerve pain, and I'm like, my head, my sores are starting to heal up right. So in my head, I'm like ‘Whoa, I should be having this pain, I'm getting more pain from the burning sensation in my legs and my nerves because it's nerve pain.' So I read somewhere that cryotherapy was good. So in the middle of the night, when I'm in really bad pain, instead of lying there and just losing my shit, and have I now have been getting up every night and having two or three cold ice-cold showers a night, which probably not great for my cortisol bloody profile, but it's, I'm just targeting that leg. That interrupts the pain sensation for a few minutes.  What I'm trying to do as I go, I'm trying to go like, can I—am I getting pain because my brain is now used to having pain? Is it sending those messages, even though there's no need, the sores are healing?  Craig: That is possible. Lisa: Am I breaking? And I can break the pain for about 10 minutes, and then it will come back in again. But I'm continuing on with it, that idea that I can interrupt that pain flow. Then of course, during the breathe in, the meditation, the stuff and sometimes you just lose your shit and you lose it, and then you just start crying, ‘Mummy, bring me some chicken soup' type moments. But it's really interesting. I mean, I just like to look at all these shit that we go from and then say, ‘Well, how can I dissect this and make this a learning curve?' Because obviously, there's something wrong, but I just, I feel for people that are going through years of this. Craig: It's, yeah, I'm the same I feel. Sometimes I work with people, where I work with and as do you, I work with a lot of people who have real problems. I don't have any problems. I mean, they have real problems. And I'm, despite my appearance, I'm quite, I'm very compassionate. It's hard for me because I, it upsets me to see people in pain. I feel simultaneously sad and guilty. How do I deserve this? But it just is what it is. But people like John and a lot of the people that I've worked with and you've worked with, you know, people like that inspire me.  I mean, they're— I don't find typical heroes inspirational. They don't really inspire me like the people we normally hold up as, I mean, well done. I think they're great, but they don't inspire me. People who inspire me or people who really, how the fuck are you even here? How do you turn up? He turns up. He's actually in hospital right now because he's got a problem that's being fixed. But, and he's in and out of hospital all of the time. And then he turns up, he hugs me and he goes, ‘How are you?' I go, ‘I'm good.' He goes, ‘Now look at me.' So I look at him. And he goes, ‘How are you really?' And I go, ‘I'm good.' This is the guy who—  Lisa: Who's dealing with so much. I've got a friend, Ian Walker8, who I've had on the show, too, so he got hit by a truck when he was out cycling, I think it was years and years ago. He ended up a paraplegic. And then he recovered, he didn't recover, he's still in a wheelchair, but he was out racing his wheelchair, he did wheelchair racing, and he's part of our club and stuff. And then he got hit by another truck, now he's a quadriplegic.  This guy, just, he is relentless in his attitude, like he is, and I've seen him dragging himself like with his hands because he's got access now to his hands again. After working for the last couple of years, and he kind of, on a walker frame thing, dragging himself two steps and taking a little video of him, dragging his feet, not the feet out, working, they're just being dragged. But the relentless attitude of the guy, I'm just like, ‘You're a fricking hero. You're amazing. Why aren't you on everybody magazine cover? Why aren't you like, super famous?' Those people that really flip my boat. Craig: Yeah. And I

Things discussed: HAIL TO THE VICTORS 2021 is HAPPENING: Let's get this funded today!  Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC? Who leaked it? Mizzou and A&M possibly, since they seem to be hard no's. Are there two other No's in the SEC? Florida/Georgia don't want Bama in the East perhaps? Seth's plan: If Texas & Oklahoma go to the SEC the Big Ten's only play is to combine with the Pac-12, rotate cross-country games, and play your pods every year, then play a championship at the Rose Bowl. Big Ten can send Nebraska to the West to even things out (and restore Nebraska-Colorado). Craig: What about Toronto? We…can't argue against it. Duke? Their lawyers can get them out of the ACC. Should academics/AAU membership play a role in Oklahoma to Big Ten? Seth: Hell no. That's a legacy from the early 1900s when certain schools like Notre Dame had professional teams of players who weren't enrolled at the school. Seth talks about the Ticket Watch column from yesterday.

We're often told not to care too much about what other people think of us. However, understanding how others perceive us can play to our advantage. Sometimes we fail to see our own mistakes or flaws, and to overcome this, we need to develop self-awareness by looking at ourselves from a different perspective. Once we realise our flaws, we can do better and achieve high performance. Craig Harper joins us in this episode to discuss how self-awareness can lead to high performance. He also explains the importance of external awareness or the ability to understand how others perceive us. We also talk about events that changed our life perspectives and how to live aligned with our values. If you want to increase your self-awareness and achieve high performance, then this episode is for you.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program optimising fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance for your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. You can also join our free live webinar on epigenetics.   Online Coaching for Runners Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Consult with Me If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again. Still, I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   My Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Discover what external self-awareness is and how it can help you achieve high performance. Find out why motivation alone doesn't work. Learn how to live in alignment for a healthy and meaningful life.   Resources The You Project Podcast with Craig Harper The You Project #360: Embracing the Suck with Lisa Tamati Check out Craig's books. Connect with Craig: Website | Instagram | Linkedin BrainPark   Episode Highlights [03:44] About Craig Craig used to be the fattest kid in school until he decided to lose weight at 14 years old. Curious about fitness and nutrition, he started working in gyms.  Craig eventually set up his first personal training centre in Australia. At 36 years old, Craig went to university to study Exercise Science. Realising the importance of understanding human behaviour, he's now taking a PhD in neuropsychology. [08:58] External Self-Awareness Being self-aware means understanding how other people perceive, process and experience you. You can make better connections when you know what it's like for people to be around you. Going into a situation assuming others have the same mindset can create problems. Acknowledging your lack of awareness is the first step in overcoming it.  [15:20] On High Performance High performance answers the question of how you can do better.  It applies to all aspects of life.  For Craig, high performance means getting the most out of your potential, resources and time. Listen to the full episode to get a rundown of the principles you need to achieve high performance. [16:14] Recognising Your Programming Humans have the power to recognise and change how they see the world. Because we do the same things daily, we fall into living unconsciously.  When our approach doesn't give us the results we want, it might be time to try something different. It may be not easy, but going out of our comfort zones makes us stronger.  [28:43] Working Around Genetic Predispositions What you're born with doesn't change the fact that your choices have power. Focus on things you can control and own the situation at hand. Be careful that self-awareness doesn't become self-deprecation. From there, focus on how you can attain high performance.  [33:42] Reflecting on Your Relationships Despite his nutrition expertise, Craig faces a constant battle to make good food choices.  Reflect on your relationship with food. Is it good or bad? Healthy or unhealthy? You can apply this to other aspects of your life as well. Doing this opens the door to self-management and self-awareness.  [37:51] Where People Get Their Sense of Self We learn that self-esteem, self-worth and identity is an outside-in process. Craig's theory is that it's an inside-out process.  The external and observable things don't matter as much as the things happening internally. Listen to the full episode to find out how two experiences in Craig's life put his life into perspective. [1:00:38] Motivation Alone Doesn't Work A lot of people rely on their current state of motivation to get things done.  What's important is how willing you are to put in the work despite the inconvenience and discomfort. [1:02:25] Live in Alignment Ask yourself if you're willing to put in the work to achieve your goals.  You can live in alignment with your values by following an operating system based on them.  Listen to the full episode to know the questions you need to ask yourself to create this operating system.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘Firstly, I've got as many issues as anyone that I work with. And this is not self-loathing; this is me just going, "Okay, so how do I do better?" And this for me is the process of high performance’. ‘Nobody is totally objective or open-minded because the human experience is subjective’. ‘Real awareness and consciousness is to first be aware of your lack of awareness’. ‘The only person that can ever really get in my way is me, you know. But also, I'm the solution to me’. ‘So we get taught directly or indirectly that self-esteem and self-worth and identity is an outside-in process. My theory is that it is the other way around—it is an inside out journey’. ‘Of course, there's nothing wrong with building a great business... or whatever. That's not bad, but it's not healthy when that's the totality of who we are’. ‘I don't care what you get done when you're motivated; I care what you get done when you're not motivated because everyone's a champion when they're in the zone’.   About Craig Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading presenters, writers and educators in health, high performance, resilience, self-management, leadership, corporate change, communication, stress management, addiction and personal transformation.  Craig has been an integral part of the Australian health and fitness industry since 1982. He has worked as an Exercise Scientist, Corporate Speaker, Consultant, University Lecturer, AFL Conditioning Coach, Radio Host, TV Presenter, Writer and successful Business Owner. In 1990, Craig established Harper's Personal Training, which evolved into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.  Craig currently hosts a successful Podcast called 'The You Project'. He is also partnering with the Neuroscience Team at Monash University, where he's completing a neuropsychology PhD. There, he studies the spectrum of human thinking and behaviour.  Craig speaks on various radio stations around Australia weekly. He also hosted his weekly show on Melbourne radio called 'the Science of Sport' for a decade. Craig currently fills an on-air role as a presenter on a lifestyle show called 'Get a Life', airing on Foxtel.  As an Exercise Scientist, Craig has worked with many professional athletes and teams. While still working with groups and individuals regularly, Craig delivers more than one hundred corporate presentations annually. Want to know more about Craig and his work? Check out his website, or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin!   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so that they can develop their self-awareness and achieve high performance. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. This week I have Craig Harper to guest. Now, Craig is a very well-known media personality, exercise scientist, crazy fitness guru, owns some of the biggest personal training gyms in Australia, has a huge track record as a corporate speaker, motivational speaker, worked with Olympians, worked with all sorts of athletes across a number of different sports. And he's absolutely hilarious. I really enjoyed this interview, I was on Craig's show a couple of weeks ago, The You Project, you can go and check that one out as well. A great podcast. And today we sort of did a deep dive into everything around self-awareness and understanding your potential and realising your potential. And just it was a really interesting conversation with a very interesting man. He's doing a PhD in understanding the experience that people have when they meet you. So, understanding how people see you. So it's a really interesting conversation. So, I hope you enjoy that.  Before we go over to the show, please give us a rating and review. We really appreciate any ratings and reviews that you give us. It's really hugely helpful for the show. It is a labour of love. We are about to if we haven't already, by the time this podcast goes live, developing a way that you guys can get involved as audience members of Pushing The Limits if you want to support the show. So stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, if you need help with your running or you need help with your health, then please reach out to us. You can reach us at lisatamati.com. You can check out our programmes on lisatamati.com. We have our epigenetics programme and our running programmes where we do customised run training systems, video analysis, working out a plan customised fully for you and you get a consult with me. We also do health optimisation, coaching. So if you are needing help with a really difficult health journey, then please reach out to us as well. Right, over to the show with Craig Harper.  Lisa Tamati: Well, welcome back everybody to Pushing The Limits. Today I have an hilarious, amazing, crazy, awesome guest for you, Craig Harper. Who doesn't know Craig Harper? If you're in Australia, you definitely know who the heck Craig Harper is. If you're in New Zealand, you probably know who Craig Harper is. And if you don't, you're about to find out. Welcome to the show! Craig, how are you doing? Craig Harper: Now I feel like I've got to live up to some kind of bloody pressure, some expectation. Nobody knows me in New Zealand. Let's start, you do and your mum. That's about it. Lisa: Me and mum, you left quite an impression on my mum. Craig: And my family, and relatives, and a few randoms over here, know who I am. But thank you, Lisa, for having me on. I'm really glad to be here. Lisa: It's awesome. Now, this is gonna be a bit of a hilarious show because Craig is a bit of a character. I was on Craig's show in Australia, The You Project and it was one of the most fun podcast interviews I've had. I mean, I love getting into the science and deep with stuff, but it was really fun to just slip my hair down so to speak and rant and rave a little bit in here, but it’s fun, so today there'll be no doubt a bit of it. Craig, can you tell the ones who don't know about you? You're in Melbourne or just outside Melbourne in Hampton, Victoria in Australia. Can you tell us a little bit of your background, your crazy amazing career that you have had? Craig: Sure. So I'll start with, well, maybe I'll go a little bit before my career because what happened before was a bit of a catalyst. So I had a pretty good childhood, all that stuff. I won't bore the listeners. But one of the things that was part of my growing up was being a fat kid, the fattest kid in my school. So that became a bit of a catalyst for me to explore getting in shape and all that stuff. So when I was 14, I lost a whole lot of weight. I was 90 something kilos, I went down to about 60 and I started training.  Lisa: Wow. Craig: I started running and I started doing bodyweight stuff I lost about—I literally lost a third of my body weight in 15 weeks. And it wasn't like I had a horrible childhood, it was fine. But I was called jumbo all through school. That was my name so the kids called me that, parents, teachers all that but believe it or not, it wasn't really hostile, or horrible, it was I don't know it's because I was this big, fat, pretty happy kid, right? But anyway, so, I got in shape, and that led me into a lot of curiosity, and exploration, and investigation in fitness and nutrition. And so I started working in gyms when I was 18 and had no idea what I was doing. The qualifications and the barriers to entry then were very low. So, I started working in gyms, Lisa, when I was 18, which was 1982. I'm 57 and I ended up in 1989, I think, I set up the first Personal Training Center in Australia.  Lisa: Wow. Craig: So, lots of other things around that. But I owned PT studios for 25 years at the biggest centre in the southern hemisphere in Brighton a few kilometres from where I'm sitting now, which was 10,000 square feet. It was bigger than lots of commercial gyms. But it was just a PT centre. Worked with elite athletes, work with the AFL over here Australian Football League with St Kilda footy club, Melbourne Vixens in the national and the Trans-Tasman League, it was then Netball League, Melbourne Phoenix, Nissan motorsport, a bunch of Olympians, blokes in prison, corporates, people with disability, normal people, abnormal people. I put me in the abnormal category.  Lisa: Yeah, definitely. Craig: And later on when—I didn't go to uni until I was 36 for the first time.  Lisa: Wow.  Craig: Did a degree in exercise science. It was hilarious because I'd already been working with elite people as a conditioning coach and a strength coach. And yeah, lots of stuff. I did radio over here for about 20 years. I started my podcast a few years ago, I did television for a few years, three years on national telly. I wrote for the Herald Sun, which is the main paper in Melbourne for a while. Lots of magazines, I've written a bunch of books. I've written seven, I've written nine books, I think seven or eight of them are published. I'm looking at the books on my table, I should probably know that number. Lisa: Can’t even remember, there's so many. Craig: And, like, but really the thing that I guess where we might go today, but for me was, I realised by the time I was about 19 or 20 working in gyms, I realised that how much I knew about bodies wasn't nearly as important as how much I understood human beings. And so while my understanding of anatomy and physiology and biomechanics and movement and energy systems, and progressive overload, and adaptation and recovery, and all of those things wasn't great, to be honest, like I was 20.  Lisa: Yup. Craig: But it was all right. And it improved over time. But what really mattered was how well I understood human behaviour. Because as you and I know, we can give someone a programme and direction and education and encouragement and support and resources, and not knowledge and awareness. But that doesn't mean they're going to go and do the work. And it definitely doesn't mean they're going to create the result. And it definitely doesn't mean they're going to explore their talent or their potential. And so yeah, it's been from when I was 18...  Lisa: So you've gone in it? Craig: Yeah, from when I was 18 till now, it's just been lots of different roles and lots of different places. And I guess the other main bit before I shut up was I realised when I was about 20, that I didn't like having a boss much. And not that...  Lisa: We got that in common.  Craig: In my back, my boss was a good dude. But I thought I don't want to be, like, I could do this for me. I don't need to do this for you. And so the last time I had a boss was 32 years ago. So I've been working for myself since I was 25. Lisa: Wow, that's freaking awesome. And what an amazing career and so many books, and I know that you're actually doing a PhD at the moment. So what's your PhD? And why did you choose this sort of a subject for your PhD? Craig: Yeah, so my PhD is in neuropsychology/neuroscience. So, I'm at Monash over here, we have a facility called Bryan Park, which is cool. There's lots of cool stuff there. That's where I'm based. And my research is in a thing called external self-awareness, which is understanding the ‘you’ experience for others. So in other words, it's your ability to be able to understand how other people perceive and process and experience ‘you'.  Lisa: Wow, that is a fascinating subject.  Craig: Which is, very little research on it. So I'm, I've created a scale, which is to measure this component of psychology or communication or awareness. And so I'm doing—I'm putting that through the grill at the moment, getting that validated. I’m doing two studies. The first study is being run kind of soon. But yeah, the whole research is around this thing of ‘What's it like being around me and do I know what it's like being around me'? Not from an insecurity point of view, but from an awareness point of view because when I understand, for example, the Craig experience for Lisa or for an audience or in front of all for the person I'm coaching, or the athlete I'm working with, or the drug addict, the person with addictive issues that I'm sitting with, then if I understand what it's like being around me, I can create greater and deeper connection. But one of the mistakes that a lot of leaders, and coaches, and managers, and people in positions of authority make is that they assume that people just understand what they're saying. Or they assume that people think like them. When in reality, the only person who thinks exactly like me in the world is me.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And the only person who thinks like Lisa Tamati exactly all the time, 24/7 is Lisa, right?  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: So when I go into a conversation, or a situation, or a process, or a negotiation, or an encounter with somebody, and I assume that they think like me or understand like me, or that my intention is their experience, which is rarely the case, I'm more likely to create problems and solutions.  Lisa: Yeah. And you're not going to hit the nail on the head and actually get the results for where that person that you are wanting to get.  Craig: Yeah, and that is... Lisa: This is a real powerful thing because you know what I mean, just maybe as you were talking there, I was like, ‘Well, how do people perceive me?', that's an interesting thought because you just sort of go through your daily interactions with people, and you think you're a compassionate, empathetic person who gets everything in, you’re sort of picking up on different cues and so on. But then to actually think how is that person experiencing me, and I like, as a coach, as I develop as a coach, I've had problems when I'm doing one on one, and that I'm overwhelming people sometimes because I'm so passionate and so full of information. And I've had to, and I'm still learning to fit that to the person that I'm talking to. And because, for me, it's like, I've got so much information, I want to fix you and help you. And I was like, ‘Woohoo', and the person was like, ‘Heh'. Craig: So you and I connect because we're kind of similar, right? And I love that, I love your craziness and your energy, and you're full-onness. But you and I, unless we are aware around some people, we will scare the fuck out of them.  Lisa: Yup. Craig: So, that's why it's important that people like—all of us really not just you and I, but that we have an awareness of what is the leisure experience for this because like, let's say, for example, you've got five athletes, and you want to inspire them and get them in the zone, motivate them, and they're all in front of you. And so you give all of them in the same moment. And let's say they're five similar athletes in a similar, if not the same sport with a similar goal—doesn't matter—but the reality is they are five different human beings, right? They've got five different belief systems and backgrounds and sets of values and prejudices and like and emotional states, and so you're not talking to the same person. But when you deliver the same message to five different humans, and you expect the same connection? We're not thinking it through.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: So and of course, you can't create optimal connection with everyone all the time. But this is just part of the, ‘What's it like? What's their experience of me like?' And again, it's not about ‘Oh, I'm insecure, and I want them to like me'. No, it's about, ‘I need to understand how they perceive and process me so that I can create connection'. And look, the other really interesting thing about psychology and the human experience, and metacognition, thinking about thinking more broadly, is that all of us think we're open-minded and objective, but none of us are. Nobody is totally objective or open-minded because the human experience is subjective.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: So, even me who understands this and is doing a PhD in it and teaches it. Well, people go back and you objective and I go, ‘No, I wish I was in it. I'd like to say I am because it sounds fucking great, but I'm not'. And the reason that I'm not is because wherever I go, my ego, my issues, my beliefs, my values, my limitations, my biases, go with me.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And they are the window through which I view and process the world, right?  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: So, our ego wants us to say, ‘Of course, I'm objective. Of course, I'm open-minded'. But the truth is, and with some things, we will be more objective and open-minded because we don't really have a pre-existing idea about it. But on a global or a broad level, our stuff goes with us everywhere, and the beginning of, without getting too deep or philosophical, but awareness—real awareness and consciousness—is to first be aware of your lack of awareness. Lisa: Love it. That is amazing. Yeah. Craig: You can't overcome the thing you won't acknowledge, or you can't get good at the thing you won't do. Right? And so I have to go, 'Firstly, I'm flawed. Firstly, I've got as many issues as anyone that I work with.’ And this is not self-loathing, this is me just going, ‘Okay, so how do I do better?' And this for me, this is the process of performance, high performance, whether it's at sport, at life, at recovery, at relationships, at connection—doesn't matter—high performance is high performance. For me, high performance means getting the most out of you and your potential and your resources and your time.  Lisa: Yup. Craig: And so the principles that work with becoming an elite athlete, most of those principles work with building a great business.  Lisa: Yep, they grow further. Craig: Which is why physicians follow through, get uncomfortable, do the work, show up, don't give up, ask great questions, persevere, roll up your sleeves, pay attention to your results, improvise, adapt, overcome. Like, this is not new stuff.  Lisa: Know that it rolls off your tongue pretty damn well because you've been in this space for a long time. And a lot of us like to go into that whole, our bias and yell at the future that we see the world through the lens, which we look through. We're not aware like, we love the programming. And this is what I had done a lot of work on for myself, the programming that I got as a kid, that I downloaded into my subconscious is running the ship, basically, and I can, as an educated, hopefully, wiser woman now, go ‘Hang on a minute, that little voice that just popped up in my head and told me, ‘I'm not good enough to do that', is not me talking. That's the programme. That's the programme I downloaded when I was, I don't know, seven or eight or something. And it's a product of that conditioning.’ And I can actually go in, and then it's that to change that story. Because that, and I think a lot of us are just running on automatic, we're still playing.  I'll give you an example. So when my mum was a kid, she was up on stage and doing a speech at school when she froze, right? And she got laughed off the stage. And kids can be nasty. And so forever in a day, she was like, ‘I will not ever speak in public again'. Because she'd had this experience as a what, a seven or eight-year-old. And she was telling me the story as a 40-something, 50-something year-old. 'No, I'm not ever getting up in a public space because', and I'm like, 'But that's just—you are not that seven or eight year old now. And you can have a choice to make that changes', and she couldn't make that change until she had the aneurysm. And then she forgot all those memories, some of those memories were gone, and that inhibition was gone. And now she'll get up and talk on stage in front of like 500 doctors. Craig: That's amazing. I love it. And what you just articulated beautifully. The core of a lot of what I do, which is recognising your programming and where does my stories, or my stories finish? And where do I start?  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: So, you think about it, from everyone listening to this from when we could reason anything, or process any data around us or understand anything from when we—I don't know, two, three months, really probably earlier but until listening to this podcast right now, all of us have been trained, and taught, and told, and programmed, and conditioned. And then, now here we are. And it's being aware of that and me to everyone is like, ‘Well, my beliefs', like think about when did you choose your beliefs?  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Pretty much never. They’re just there, and they’re there as a byproduct of your journey. Now that's okay, that's not bad or good. That's normal. Well, the next question is, are all of your beliefs, do they serve you? Well, the answer is no. Do any of them sabotage you? Well, a shitload! Okay, so let's put them under the microscope. So you know that word that I used before metacognition is, in a nutshell, thinking about thinking where and this is where we go, hang on. Let's just step out of the groundhog-dayness of our existence which you also spoke of, like, and let's go hang on. Because what we do, on a level we live consciously that is I've got to think about where I'm driving, and I've got to figure out what I'm giving the kids for dinner or what I'm getting, what time I'm training or, but really, on a real fundamental macro level. We live largely unconsciously...  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: ...because we kind of do the same shit the same way...  Lisa: Everyday. Craig: ...same conversations, even you and I know. Like, I've been training in the gym since I was 14, that's 43 years, I watch people go to the gym who always do the same fucking workout.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: Same rep, the same set, same treadmill, same speed, same inclines, same boxing, same everything, same intensity, same workload, same machines. And then they say, why isn't my body changing? Well because it doesn't need to.  Lisa: No. Given the status quo, you don’t. Craig: Because you're stimulating it the same way.  Lisa: I was working in that for years. Craig: And we can expand that to life. Whereas we, kind of, I was talking to a lady yesterday about this, and she was telling me about a conversation she has with her son who's got some issues, who's 17. And I will be really honest, ‘How many times have you had a version of that conversation with him?’ She goes, ‘1,000'.  Lisa: Wow.  Craig: I go, ‘And how's that going?’ Now, that might be an exaggeration. But the bottom line is, but nonetheless, despite the fact that it didn't work the first 999 times, she's doing it again.  Lisa: She’ll keep doing it.  Craig: So it's about, and again, it's not about beating ourselves up, it's about gamble, whatever I'm doing, whether or not it's with this relationship, or this training programme, or this habit, or behaviour, or this business, whatever I'm doing isn't working. So let's have a new conversation or no conversation, or let's try a different protocol, or let's change the way I sleep.  Lisa: Isn't that like the circuitry in the brain, when you do something for the first time that’s really hard. Because you're creating a new connection in the brain. And therefore, we go into these old routines and habits, even though we don't want to be doing them anymore, but the groove and the brain is so well-worn, that path is so—those synapses of connected or whatever they do in there, and that path is so well-worn, that it's the path of least resistance for our lazy brains, and our subconscious to do what it does all the time. So, when you're driving a car home, and you can have a conversation and be singing a song, and thinking about what you're cooking for dinner, and then you get to halfway into town, and you realise, ‘Hell, I can't even remember driving there', but you were doing it, and you were doing it safely. Because it was all on that subconscious, automated level. When you were first driving the car, it was a mission. And it was like, ‘Oh my god, I got to change the gears and steer and keep an eye on,' and it was all like overwhelmed, but then it got easier and easier and easier. And then with our rituals and habits that we develop, we make these well-worn grooves, don't we? And then we just follow the same old, same old even though it's not getting the results that we want. And when we try and step out of our comfort zone and start doing a new habit and developing a new way, there's a lot of resistance in the brain for the first few weeks, isn't there? Until you get that groove going. And then it gets easier and easier and easier once you've done it 100 times. Is that what you're sort of saying here? Craig: Yeah. I mean, that's perfect. I mean, you nailed it. Look, the thing is that everything that we do for the first time, for most of us, nearly everything, unless we've done something very similar before, but it's hard.  Lisa: Very. Craig: So I always say everyone starts as a white belt. In the dojo, you start as a white belt.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: When as an ultramarathon, if I went, Lisa, which I wouldn't, but if I went, ‘I'm gonna run an ultramarathon'. Well, if I started training today, metaphorically, today, I'm a white belt.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: I'm a black belt at other stuff.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: I'm a green belt. I'm a yellow belt. Depends what I'm doing. Depends what—I'm not bad at talking to audiences that's... I should be pretty good at it. I've done it a million times. But take me to yoga, and I'll hide in the corner because I'm as flexible as a fucking ceramic tile. I’m a white belt. Right? I bet, put me in the gym lifting weights, I go okay, right? And so, again, this is all just about awareness, and development, and ownership. And, but the thing too, is that you're right, everything is very—we do create not only neural grooves, patterns, but also behavioural, and emotional, and cognitive grooves too, where we’re very comfortable in this space. And one of the challenges for us, it's like, it's a dichotomy. Because if everyone listening to this could somehow be involved and put up a show of hands, and we said, ‘All right, everyone. How many of you want to change something about your life or your outcomes or your situation or your body? Or your operating system or your current life experience?’ Nearly everyone's going to put up their hand.  Lisa: Yes. Craig: For something, right? Something. Then if you said, all right, ‘Now, at the same time, be brutally honest with yourself, how many of you like being comfortable?’, everyone's gonna put up their hand. So the problem is, on the one hand, we say I want to be strong, and resilient, and amazing, and produce great results, and do great shit, and grow, and develop my potential and fucking kill it, and but I don't want to get uncomfortable. Well, good luck, princess, that isn't working. It doesn't work. Lisa: The world’s a bitch really, isn't it? I mean, like it is the way it works. You need resistance. Craig: How can you get strong without working against resistance?  Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Craig: Yes. Lisa: This is just the… in my boxing gym, there was a saying on the wall, ‘Strength comes from struggle', and it's just like, ‘Oh damn, that's so right'. Like it's not what we always want. And I wish sometimes that the world was made another way. But we constantly need to be pushing up against what hurts, what is uncomfortable, it's painful just from a biology point of view being in the thermonuclear range, being nice and comfortably warm and cozy is really bad for us. And for you in that all the time, we need to go into an ice bath or cold water or go surfing or something and get cold, we need to be hot, go into a sauna. And when you do these things outside of those comfort zones, we need to lift weights in order to build stronger muscles, we need to do fasting in order to have autophagy, we need—all of these things are those stuff that is outside of pleasant. And you better get used to that idea. It's not because I want to be, like, masochistic in my approach to life. But it's just the way that the world works. If you sit on your ass being comfortable eating chips all day watching Netflix, you're not going to get the results that you're looking for. Craig: That's right. And also there's this—because we only live in the moment. And because we are, and I'm generalising, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are not what I'm about to describe. But because many of us are very instant gratification based.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Right? It's like, the story is I'll eat this, I'll do this, I'll avoid that. But I'll start tomorrow, or I'll start Monday, or I'll start January 1. And that goes on for 15 years, right?  Lisa: Yep. We’ve all done it. Craig: And now I've backed myself into an emotional, and a psychological, and physiological corner that's hard to get out of because now, I'm 49. And my body's kind of fucked. And I've got high blood pressure. And I've got all these issues because I've been avoiding, and denying, and delaying, and lying to myself for a long time. Again, this is not everyone, so please don't get offended.  Lisa: And It's not a judgment. It's just the way it goes. Craig: No, because, I mean, this is what happens. Like, we live in this world where you can't say the truth.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And I'm not talking about being insensitive or moral judgments on people. But the thing is, it's like, when I talk about being fat, I talk about myself because then no one could get injured, insulted...  Lisa: Insulted, yup. Craig: ...or offended, right. So when I was fat, I wasn't thick-set, or full-figured or voluptuous or stocky? I was fucking fat. Right?  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And, but I was fat because of my choices and behaviours.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: Now, there are lots of variables around that.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: But at some stage, we have to say, and again, there are people with genetics that make stuff difficult...  Lisa: Absolutely. Craig: ...for medical conditions and all that we fully acknowledge that, but at some stage, we need to go, ‘Alright, well, I'm making decisions and doing things which are actually destroying me'.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: ‘They're actually hurting me'. And this is just about ownership and awareness and my, like, the biggest challenge in my life is me, the biggest problem in my life is me. Like, the only person that can ever really get in my way is me. But also, I'm the solution to me. Lisa: I think it's a willingness to work on it. And like, I've looked into addictions and things quite a lot too, because I know that I have an addictive personality trait. I have genetics that are predisposed to that, and I do everything obsessively. So whether that's running for like a billion kilometres, or whether that's running five companies, or whether that's whatever I'm doing, I'm doing like an extreme version of that because it's just, like, I have that type of personality and it is genetics. And I find that that's one of the study of genetics for me, it's so interesting, there's a lot of predisposition in there. However, that does not negate the fact that I can still make choices, and I can turn the ship around. And I need to be aware of those predispositions, just like mum's got some predispositions towards cardiovascular disease and putting on weight very easily. That's just a fact of life for her, and it's not pleasant. And compared to other genetic types, it's a bit of a disadvantage. However, it is a fact. And therefore, she can still make the right choices for her body.  And this is why I like working in the genetic space is really, really powerful because then I can say, well, it's not my fault that my genes are like this, but they are what they are, and we can remove some of the judgment on ourselves because I think when we—if we're judging ourselves all the time, that's not helpful either, because that stuff we’re like, ‘Oh, well, I'm just useless. And then I'm never gonna do anything,’ rather than empowering and say, ‘Well, it is what it is, the genes that I've been given are these, the environment that I've exposed to is this, the advertising and all that sort of stuff that's coming at us with McDonald's on every street corner and all of that sort of stuff, I can't influence there. What I can influence is I can educate myself and I can start to make better choices from my particular body and start taking ownership of that process and not just going, well, it's not my fault that I'm bigger boned.’ You may be bigger-boned or bigger, have genetics that are all about conservation. Then you need to be doubly careful. And put in the education, and the time, and the work, and I think it's about taking ownership and not judging yourself by getting on with the job. Like I know, like, I know my own personal and—what did you say to me the first time I met you? Something that was real self-aware anyway, without self-deprecating, and it was self-aware? I can't remember what it was that you said, it is a man who knows his own weakness and is working on it. And I think that's really key. Like, I know what I'm shit at and... Craig: And that’s not self-loathing, that's self-awareness. And here's the thing, we're all about learning and growing. And I love my life, and I'm aware that I've got some skills and gifts. I'm also aware that I've got lots of flaws and shit I need to work on. And for some people, that's part of just the journey for other people, they are in a bit of a groundhog day. I always say if you're in a bit of a groundhog day, but you're happy then stay there. Because don't change because this is how I—don't be like me, for God's sake be like you. But if being like you, if your normal operating system equals anxiety, and sleeplessness and a bit of depression, and a bit of disconnection, and I'm not talking purely about mental health, I'm just talking about that state that we all get in, which is a bit like, ‘Fuck, I don't love my life, this wasn't where I thought I would be.’  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: Then maybe start to work consciously on and acknowledge, there's some things that you can't change, some you can, and literally what you were talking about a minute ago, which is literally, ‘Okay, so there's what I've got, which is I've got these genetics, I've got 24 hours in a day. I'm 57. I've got this, these are the things I have, then there's what I do with it all.’ So I'm an endomorph. I walk past a doughnut, my ass gets bigger. That's my body type, right? So I need to go, ‘Alright, well with these, or with this disposition, how do I manage optimally with 24 hours in a day without them using the least?’  Lisa: You’ve done a lot by the little sea, Craig. Craig: How do I manage my 24 hours optimally?  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: How do I? It's like, I eat two meals a day. I don't recommend anyone else does that.  Lisa: For even the most, it’s great. Craig: But for me, I don't… Lisa: For an endomorph, that’s great. Craig: I’m an 85-kilo dude with a bit of muscle. I don't need much food. Like, I would love to eat all the fucking food because I love food. What happens when I eat what I want versus what I need is I get fat. So I differentiate between: what does my body need to be lean, strong, functional, healthy versus what does Craig the fucking ex-fat kid want to inhale?  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Because, and the other thing too. And this is probably a bit irrelevant. Maybe relevant, though, for a lot of people. Like I would say, of the people that I've worked with closer over the years, which is thousands and thousands.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: I would say most people, including me, have a relationship with food that’s somewhere on the scale between a little bit disordered and an eating disorder, right?  Lisa: Yup. Craig: And a little bit not always...  Lisa: I’ll cook my end up then. It’s always an issue. Craig: At the other end of the scale, I'm a fucking lunatic around food, right? Now, you're educated, I'm educated, but I tell people all the time. So if I was an addict, and by the way, I've never drank, never smoked, never done drugs. But if I have started drugs or alcohol, I would have probably...  Lisa: Done it well. Craig: ...a drunk and used for Australia, right? I probably would have been a champion because I'm like you. I'm addictive. Now my addiction is food. So you know people think, ‘But you're educated. But you're this, you're that.’ It doesn't matter. Like, I need to manage myself. Lisa: Still won’t hit pie. Craig: Yeah, I need to manage myself around food. Lisa: Yeah, daily.  Craig: Because if I open the cheesecake door, get out of the fucking way. Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Right?  Lisa: I hear you.  Craig: If I open certain doors that derails me, so I need to know. And this is the same with everybody. And it's like, we all have a relationship with food. Okay. Is yours good or bad? healthy or unhealthy? Don't overthink it, just be real. We all have a relationship with our body. How’s that going? We all have a relationship with exercise, activity movement. How’s that going? We all have a relationship with money. We all have a relationship with our ego. It's like, this is opening the door on self-awareness and self-management law to a new level. Lisa: Yeah, love it. Yeah, and this is going to be a fascinating PhD. I really—I can't wait to find out more about it. And I think just having that self-awareness, like I will freely say like, I've struggled with my body image, and who I am, and am I acceptable, and I was always trying to be the skinny little modern girl when I was young, and gymnast, and as a kid, and so struggled immensely with body image issues. And people will look at me now and they go, ‘Oh, whatever, you're lean and you're fit obviously and you don't ever—you wouldn't understand.’ Oh, you have no idea how much I understand. And there's still a constant daily battle: even though I'm educated, even though I know exactly what I should be and shouldn't be doing, I don't always succeed against my —that in a sort of drive that sometimes when you get out of balance, and this is why for me like keeping myself, when I say imbalance, I mean like keeping my neurotransmitters under wraps like in a nice, ordered fashion because I have a tendency to dopamine and adrenaline being my dominant hormones, right?  So I'm just like, go, go, go! Do your absolute blow, take a jump and risk, don't think about it, do go and then burn out, crash bang! And so I need to, I need to have constant movement, I need to do the meditation thing regularly. Like before this podcast, I took five minutes to get my brain back into this space because I wanted to do a good interview. And I wasn't going to do that in this stressed-out body, I'd been doing too much admin work for 10 hours. So, I know how to manage those things. And it's the management on an everyday basis that I think and having those tools in your toolkit so that you know how to pull it up, I can feel my adrenaline going, I can feel the anger rising, I better go for a sprint out to the letterbox and back. Whatever it takes. Does it resonate with you? Craig: Yeah, 100%. What's interesting is I've been around—I worked, one of the things I didn't mention, I worked at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre for three years just as their kind of, what’s my title? Buddy health something, manager something, but I would only work there one day a week with them, but work with lots of addicts and alcoholics, and also athletes and all those things. But the thing is, especially with athletes, athletes tend to get their sense of self and their identity from their performances.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: And not all, but a lot, and which is why I've known many athletes who got retired earlier than I thought. Lisa: Broke down. Craig: And well, they went into straightaway, most of them a depression or form of depression. And so this is a really interesting thing to just talk about briefly is—from a happiness and a wellness and a cognitive function, and a mental health, emotional health point of view, is to think about where you get your identity and sense of self from. Now, one of the challenges for us is, we live in a culture which is very much externally focused.  Lisa: Totally. Craig: So who you are, Lisa, who you are is what you have, and what you own, and what you wear, and what you look like, and what people think of you, and your brand, and your performance, and your outcome. All things, your shit. And I grew up in that because I was an insecure, fucking fat kid who became an insecure, muscle-y bloke. And then I woke up one day, I was 30. And I was huge, and I had muscles on my eyelids and veins everywhere. And all I was was just a bigger, more insecure version of what I used to be. Because I was still a fuckwit just in a bigger body, right? Because I wasn't dealing with the issues. Because my problem wasn't my biceps or deltoids and being my problem is, I'm mentally and emotionally bankrupt, and perhaps spiritually depending on your belief system. And so, we get taught from an early age that who you are essentially is about all things external. So we get taught directly or indirectly that self-esteem and self-worth and identity is an outside-in process.  My theory is that it is the other way around. It is an inside-out journey. It is, it's differentiating between who I am and my stuff, and recognising that everything that I have and own, and earn, and do, and my profile, and my podcast, and my results, and my brand, and my house, and my biceps, and all those physical, external observable things don't matter nearly as much from a mental and emotional health point of view as what is happening internally.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: So, and I'll shut up after this.  Lisa: No, that’s brilliant. Craig: But this is cool not because I'm sharing it, just this idea is cool, is that is the duality of the human experience. And what that means is that we live in two worlds. So where we do life is in this physical external place of situation, circumstance, environment, traffic lights, other humans, government, COVID, weather, runners, running, sport, all that external stuff, which is not bad. It's awesome, but that's where we do life. But where we do our living, where we do living is that inner space of feelings and ideas and creativity and passion and fear, and depression and anxiety and hope and joy, and overthinking and self doubt and self-loathing, and excitement and creativity. Lisa: Wow. Craig: It's trying to understand—because you and I know, at least a few people, maybe many who from the outside looking in their life is fucking amazing. Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Craig: It's the Hollywood life.  Lisa: It’s so nearly like that. Craig: It's a life on the outside of shiny.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: But I've coached many of those people, trained them, worked with them, set with them. And not all, of course, some are great. But there are many people who from the outside looking in, you would go, they're really successful. That would be the label that we use in our culture.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Why are they successful? Oh, look at all of their stuff.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: All of that stuff. Those outcomes, that house and that equals that money, that equals success. But when you sit in, you talk to that person, you go, ‘Oh, this successful person doesn't sleep much, this person needs to medicate to sleep, and also for anxiety, and also for depression. And also they hate themselves, and also they feel disconnected, and also they're lonely.’ And, or if not all of that, some of that, if not all the time, some of the time, and you got all the outside and the inside don’t match.  Lisa: Don’t unlatch. Yeah.  Craig: And so it's going. And by the way, of course, there's nothing wrong with building a great business and writing five books and being an awesome runner, or whatever, building an empire. That's not bad. But it's not healthy when that's the totality of who we are. Lisa: Yeah, and spending time on the inside, and being okay with who you are. Because I often ask myself this question. What if it was all taken away from me again and I've lost—I went through my 30s, lost everything, hit start back from scratch. We've been there, done that. I've had to go through the wringer a couple of times. If everything was taken off me, my house, my achievements, my business, which could happen tomorrow, who am I? And would I be able to get back up again? And I reckon I would, because I've got tools to rebuild. And I know that resilience is the most important thing.  Craig: Yeah.  Lisa: The question I ask myself sometimes, so, is it whether, like, I lost my father this year, last year, sorry, six months ago, so that knocked the crap out of me...  Craig: 100%. Lisa: ...out of my resilience because that was like, up until that point, it didn't matter. If I lost my job, my car, my career, and anything else, but my family were safe, and they were all alive, then that's all I needed. And then when the chief gets taken out, the cornerstone who'd been a rock, my mum was too, but that was a cornerstone, then it didn't, it was a bit of an existential bloody crisis for me because I was like, ‘And now, life is never going to be the same again.’ And that resilience, I really had to dig deep to stand back up again. And I think, so grief is one of those things. So I asked myself constantly, and one of the reasons I drive myself so hard is to protect my family, and to look after them, make sure I don't miss anything. And this one of the things I study so hard for. Just sharing a personal story there to sort of get people to understand, ‘If you lost everything, could you get back up? What would it take to break you?’ That nearly broke me, to be brutally honest. Craig: Well, I say to people who are in a bit of a—and thanks for sharing that, and sorry about your dad. God bless him.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Like, I say to people, ‘Okay, let's forget all the fucking KPIs and the deck and success mantras and all right, that's good.’ I can stand in front of people and motivate, and inspire, and make them laugh, and tell stories. And that's all good. But I go, ‘I've got three words for you one question three words. And the three words and the one question are, what really matters?’ Now, what really matters is not your fucking tally. It's not your bank balance. It's not your biceps. It's not your hair colour. It's not your fucking lippy, or it's in my case, it's not your abs or and none of those things of themselves are bad. But I've been really lucky that I've worked with people who are in a really bad way, people in prison who got themselves there, of course, but then probably more impact for me was people with really bad injuries.  Lisa: That’s amazing. Craig: I work with a bloke at the moment, a mate of mine who got blown up in an accident. I trained him three days a week, and he was literally given zero chance of living like, or having any function similar to your mum.  Lisa: Wow.  Craig: And he started. He was in, like your mum, he was in a coma. I started, they said he'd be a quadriplegic. If he—firstly, they said he wouldn't live, and he lived in our luck out, mesmerised how that happened.  Lisa: Yeah. Craig: Got through the operations, he got blown up by gas bottles, which were in the back of his unit while he was driving.  Lisa: Oh my god. Craig: That blew the car apart, that blew the roof off, they shattered windows for 800 meters in the houses. And he was given zero chance of living. And he was in a coma for a long time. And I'll go in and talk to him. And when he obviously was not awakened, all the stuff that you did, and I just say to him, that I don't know, like, that'd be gone. I don't know. Like, I don’t be guessing. I don't know, I might just get well enough to get out of here. And I'll start training him. I started training him in a wheelchair, with a broomstick. And so and the broomstick literally weighed, I don't know, maybe 100 grams. And so I would put the broomstick in his hands. And I would pull his hands away. So his arm’s away from his body.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: And I'd say now try and pull that towards you.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: And that's where we started.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: With a 100-gram broomstick.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Now it's three and a bit years later, I've trained him for three and a bit years.  Lisa: Wow. Craig: He is now walking with sticks. He drives himself to the gym. His brain function is fucking amazing.  Lisa: Oh my god. Craig: He’s still in constant pain. And he's got a lot of issues. But the bottom line is the dude who they went, you will never ever walk, you will never talk.  Lisa: You’ll never survive. Craig: They'll never be any—you'll never have any function, right?  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: So my two big perspective givers. That's one and the other one is—so...  Lisa: What a dude. Craig: What’s that? Lisa: What a legend. Craig: Yeah, he's amazing. He's amazing. So about 14 months ago, I was at the gym and I was training with my training partner, who's like me and he’s all buffed. He's in good shape. He’s fit. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, him and I are very similar. Anyway, one of the stupid things that he does is he takes I don't want to get in trouble. But he takes pre-workout, doesn't do drug. Don't do anything. I don't know. But anyway, he took a pre-workout. We're training and he's doing a set of chins. And he did 30 chins, Lisa, and he held his breath for the whole time because that's what he does. He thinks he gets more reps when he holds his breath. By the way, folks, not a great plan. Holds his breath for 30 reps. Lisa: He’s training his chemoreceptors. This for sure. Craig: Yeah, comes down, falls on his face on the floor. And I think he's having a seizure.  Lisa: Oh. Craig: And it had an instant cardiac arrest.  Lisa: Oh my god.  Craig: So, not a heart attack, a cardiac arrest. So, his heart stopped. So it took me kind of 20 seconds to realise it was that, and not... And there was—I won't describe what was going on with him.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: But as you can imagine, turning all kinds of colours... Lisa: Yep.  Craig: ...stuff coming out of his mouth. It was messy, right?  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: So, he was dead for 17 minutes.  Lisa: Oh, my God.  Craig: I worked on him for 10 until the ambos got there or the paramedics and God bless him. fricking amazing. But what's interesting is in that, firstly, that 17 minutes could have been 17 days. That's how clearly I remember those minutes.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And I'm on the floor, kneeling down next to one of my best friends in the world.  Lisa: Yep.  Craig: And I'm doing compressions and breathing, and I'm trying to save his life.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And it's funny how in that moment, everything comes, without even trying, to everything comes screamingly into perspective about, ‘What is bullshit?’ Lisa: Yes.  Craig: What matters?  Lisa: Yes.  Craig: What fucking doesn't matter?  Lisa: Yes.  Craig: What I waste energy and attention on. And literally those seven, eight minutes. I mean, I think I had pretty good awareness but they really changed me.  Lisa: Yeah. I hear you. Craig: Nothing matters except the people I love.  Lisa: Exactly. Craig: I'll figure the rest out.  Lisa: Yep. It's an amazing story. Did he survive? Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's five-to-two here in Melbourne.  Lisa: And he's waiting for you?  Craig: We're training at five. Lisa: Brilliant. Say hi for me. Craig: He’s still an idiot.  Lisa: He’s awesome, he's lucky he got you.  Craig: He’s still an idiot, but at least he prays when he chins. Lisa: Yeah, but like just the experience I went through with my dad. And I haven't done a whole podcast on it, and I tend to, because the two weeks fighting for his life in the hospital and fighting up against a system that wouldn't let me do intravenous vitamin C in that case that I was trying to because he had sepsis, and fighting with every ounce of my body and every ounce of my will, and in knowing that, and for those—it was 15 days that we were there, and they all blend into one because there was hardly any sleep happening in that time, a couple hours here and there and I'd fall over. But they changed me forever, in the fact that because I'm a fixer, I like to fix things and people. And when we're in the fight, I’m the best person you want in your corner of the ring. If we're in a fight for your life, or not as an, like, I'm a paramedic, but if you want someone to fight for you, then I’m the biggest person to have in your corner. But when we lost that battle, man, I was broken. And to actually not to come out the other side and to have that win and to get him back and to save his life, especially knowing I had something that could have saved his life had I been able to give it to him from day one. And you said that about your friend who got blown up and you said, ‘Just get out of here, mate, no, take it from there.’ And that's what I was saying to my dad. And as he had, ‘You just get yourself—you just hang in there, dad, because I will do what I can do here, and I've got all my mates and my doctors and my scientists all lined up ready to go. As soon as I get you the hell out of this place, I will do whatever it takes to get you back.’ But I could not do anything in a critical care situation because I had no control over him, his body, what went into him. And it was a—he was on a ventilator and so on. And so that was out of my control, you know? And that's fricking devastating.  Craig: Yeah.  Lisa: To know that and to feel that. Craig: How did that change you? Like, how did that change you in terms of... Lisa: It's still an evolving process I think, Craig, and there's a burning desire in me to get that changed in our ICU for starters, to get recognition for intravenous vitamin C, which I've done like a five-part series on my podcast for status, but I'm working on other ideas and projects for that because we're talking thousands and thousands of doctors and scientists who have the proof that this helps with things like sepsis, like ADS, like pneumonia, and it's just being ignored. And it's, we’re just 20 years behind this is one of the reasons I do what I do, is because I know that the information, like going through that journey with my mum too, the information that latest in clinical studies, all of what the scientists are doing now and what's actually happening in clinical practice are just worlds apart. And with like a 20-year delay in from there to there, and the scientists are saying this, and the doctors at the cutting edge are saying this. And so things have to change. So that's changed me in a perspective because I've never been a political person. I don't want to really get—I love being in the positive world of change, and it's, do things. But I do feel myself going into this activism space in a little way because I need to get some changes happening and some systematic things and you know you're up against the big fight.  Craig: Yeah.  Lisa: This is a big base to take on. But I'll do what I can in my corner of the world, at least but it has changed. And all that matters to me now is my family and my friends, and then from a legacy perspective, is impacting the world massively with what I do know and the connections that I do have and bringing information like we've been hearing today and these very personal real stories to people's ears because it changes the way people have their own conversations and hence start to think. Craig: Well, I think also, and thanks for sharing that. That's it. Somebody's got to step up, and you're stepping up and quite often the things that we need to do to live our values are not the things we want to do.  Lisa: No, scary.  Craig: Like, Fuck this. Yeah, I'd rather watch Netflix too. But that's not what I'm about. So it's good that you recognise that and you step into that, but I think what's encouraging about this conversation for everyone is that neither of us, well, I was gonna say, particularly special, you're quite special with what you do. But even with what you do, as an elite athlete, really, you've just put in an inordinate amount of work. Like, you've done all of the things required to become elite and to become an exception, but in many other ways, like with me, you've got issues and bullshit and flaws. And that's why I think—I'm not saying this is a great podcast by any means that or this is great conversation because that's very fucking self-indulgent. But what I mean is, I think people connect with podcasts, conversations that are just that.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Where it's not like two people who are... Lisa: Scripted.  Craig: ...just shooting off like experts. It's like, yeah, we're both figuring it out, too.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: And by the way, I'm a dickhead too. By the way, I don't know, I've got a lot of shit wrong. Don't worry about that. It's like, I'm just having my best guess. And I always say, even as a coach, I've never changed anyone. All I've done is influenced people, but I've never done the work for them. They've always done the work. So, everyone that I've coached that succeeded, it's because they did the work. Like I didn't run the race. I didn't lift the weight. I didn't play the sport. I didn't go to the Olympics. I didn't walk out onto the arena. I didn't do anything. I'm just the guy going, ‘Fuck, come on, you can do it.’ And like, here’s a plan and here’s—it's like, I'm just the theory guy. I don't put it into—the only life that I put it into practice in is my own. Lisa: Yeah. And that's powerful. And as a role model, too. I mean the shape that you're in and the stuff that you do, and you walk the talk, and those are the people that I want to listen to. And those are the people I want to learn from. Craig: Well, my dad, my dad used to say to me, a couple of it, my dad's like a cranky philosopher. But he used to say to me a couple of things. This is irrelevant. The first one but it's, ‘You can't go to university and get a personality', right. Which is funny because my dad's like, ‘And university, it's overrated'. I agree, dad.  Lisa: Yeah.  Craig: Second thing.  Lisa: For most things. Craig: Second thing. He used to say, ‘I wouldn't trust accountants or financial planners who weren't rich'. Lisa: Or trainers who are overweight. Craig: It's like, I remember him saying to me, like a friend of his disrespect Toyota, but not a friend, but a dude he knew. He was a financial planner or an accountant. And he used to drive this old beaten up Corolla, and my dad's like, ‘Why would I listen to him?’ Like, look what he drives, like, if he knew anything about making money or maximising whatever.  Lisa:

In today’s show, we discuss the benefits of not taking profits too early during huge price moves, how a Trend Follower might be trading Bitcoin, if March 2020 may have impacted a Trend Follower’s approach to the markets, why the S&P 500 could be considered just as much of an ‘alternative’ market as Iron Ore, our most memorable trades, Bitcoin as a great diversifier in a Trend Following portfolio, and how a retail trader can gain access to managed futures.  Questions we answer this week include: What prompted Moritz to place his Tesla short trade recently, and how did it play out?  What are your views on stop-losses? If you would like to leave us a voicemail to play on the show, you can do so here. Check out our Global Macro series here. Learn more about the Trend Barometer here. IT's TRUE

As my pizza journey continues, I meet more and more interesting people to learn from. Whether you're thinking about pizza as a business for the first time or you are a serious vet in the game, I really think there is a lot of knowledge that you can learn from Craig. He is the owner of Gracie's Apizza in Portland Oregon and we get into talking about locally sourced flour, amazing vegetables and quality cheese. We also talk a lot about the business side of things and there are some legitimate opinions that he has that you should probably consider as a pizza business owner. This episode is on the longer side, but I enjoyed listening to it multiple times and I have a feeling you will to. Follow Them on IG @graciesapizza Address: 8737 N Lombard St, Portland, OR 97203 https://www.graciesapizza.com/ Phone: (971) 512-0007 Full Transcript Here Craig: We did it super modest. I mean, I opened the restaurant for like, a little bit more than I opened the cart, maybe 50, 60 grand max. It doesn't take tons and tons of money to do that. And that's really what it boils down to. I think is being really realistic but also knowing you got to know what you're doing. Eidref: What's happening? What's good dough? It's your boy Eidref. How y'all doing? How are y'all doing? I'm doing great In case any of you were wondering. Today, we have Craig with Gracies of pizza. Craig is doing some awesome stuff over there in Portland, Oregon, where he has moved from a mobile unit to a storefront. And, he's really killing the game with a unique take on pizza using whole wheat, using some Kraft flour, and really just using quality ingredients. But really the highlight of this podcast isn't just about the pizza, we really dive in deep on lifestyle, business, a lot of the things that, you know, both rookie business owners and seasoned business owners should really consider. This is a great episode so sit back, relax and enjoy the show. And remember to always ask what's good dough? How are you? Craig: I'm pretty good. Eidref: Awesome, man. So, I want to start these off with this question. And there's no wrong answer. What's good dough? Craig: What's good dough? What a good question. Well, I guess for me, we'll go super technical about the dough itself. And to me, it's all about the wheat. I like to think that more than human being a pizza person or a dough person or a bread person that it really comes down to being a wheat person, which really goes down to being an agriculture person.

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fornier who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito this morning. We discussed a some of the new technology being used in the film industry that is coming from the gaming sector and the new LED soundstages and the difference that is making for actors and filmmakers. Then we discussed the Coronavirus and remote work and online education. So, here we go with Steve Fornier. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Allowing them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information, intellectual property, and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. Craig Good morning. Craig Peterson here. Mr. Jim Polito is out touring Ireland right now. He called in to the show this morning, saying that all of the St. Patrick's Day parades in Ireland have been canceled. We know that they canceled our local parade in Boston, which is one of the biggest in the country, and I think New York City, which might be the most prominent St. Patrick's Day parade, as well. He was telling us a little bit about the difference between the Irish marches and the parades here in the US and Boston. Well, of course, the Irish ones tend to be a little bit more Catholic. Ours tend to be a little less religious. Anyhow, I was on Steve Fornier, he's the producer over in Springfield on those iHeart stations. We talked a little about two things. First of all, some very cool new technology for moviemaking and then a bit about working from home with the Coronavirus. That's right. So here we go with Steve. Steve Tech Talk's Craig Peterson in the house, and I don't know if I've ever actually had the pleasure, so this would be great. It's Steve Fornier, how are you doing today? Craig Doing well. How are you doing, Steve? Hey, you are doing a great job, by the way. Steve Hey, thanks I am trying Craig I think we met sideways once or twice, and I think you were on with Jim, and he had you kind of jump in, so yeah, man. I believe we have met. Steve Yeah, that's they usually just like to keep me out on the side. Let me out of my cage, now and again. Let's talk about movies. Because I haven't seen the Mandalorian, but I do remember the day, maybe the PlayStation two time frame where they started putting movies into video games. I thought that was the coolest thing. Now it seems like they're shooting movies with video game technology. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Craig Yeah, this is cool. I remember the very first movie they shot using almost entirely green screens. That's been the way it's been for quite a while now. So what will happen is, let's say that there's a desk and a chair, maybe some flowers and one or two other things in the room, those will be real. Then the whole rest of the set is green. You know, think of movies like Jack Black's King Kong, right, Steve? So there he's trying to pretend, and he imagines what's all around him, you know, the jungle scene, the King Kong himself, right, all of these other things. They may get to interact with another actor, but for many, that's not necessarily even the case. And that makes it difficult for actors. It makes it difficult for the director, the production staff, there's remember, there's not just even one director, there's somebody who's in charge of the found somebody who's in charge of the lighting of the cameras, the camera angles, etc. Steve Well, Michael Jordan, I always give him credit because he's not an actor. But in Space Jam, he had to act with a bunch of cartoons. I bet Bugs Bunny was not standing there on stage next to Michael Jordan. He's not on set. Craig Yeah, but what they do for Michael Jordan in that movie in Space Jam. They had little puppets on sticks that they move around, so he kind of know where to look what to do. Then they remove them afterward. They're not like full puppets but little green things on a stick, right. The Mandalorian, which is quite a good show. It is slower-paced than many. Think of it like Breaking Bad in a movie. They shoot the Mandalorian using an entirely whole new technology in a soundstage. As we've been talking about with green screens and such. Television screens surround the soundstage. The roof was all screens though all Walls are screens. Everything covered with screens. As you mentioned here, Steve, this is using some of the technology from video games. It is amazing. So there's the actor on an LED set, and he can see all of the backgrounds. Nothing is greenscreen. It is a whole new change and an entirely different way of doing it. Steve I would like to take a vacation in one of these things. Just plop me in that thing with a chair and put on a beautiful Sunset over seascape and let me hang out on that thing for three days. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. Craig Like a holodeck, right on Star Trek. Are you familiar with that? Steve Oh, yeah, of course, of course. But I have to assume from an editing perspective, that it makes it a lot easier to edit because it would reduce the process. The time it takes with the green screens removing puppets inserting the characters. I imagine on the back end of things it's got to make the production faster. Craig What surprised me was looking at an article with pictures of the whole stage, including the cameras. Now, remember, again, the camera director and the film director and everybody can see what's going on, which is enormous. And they are in real-time said you know what? That building there in the background is distracting. Let's move it over as though it's 50 feet to the right. Wow. And they were able to do it right then. Right live. The other thing that surprised me about it was that if you look at it with your regular eyes, it seems severely distorted. I mean, like the straight line isn't necessarily straight, right it can be going off in all kinds of weird angles, some of them are curved, and it's all rendered based on what the camera sees and what the camera is seeing. So the camera sees everything correctly. The actors can see what's around them. They can even see the horizon. They can see the sunrise. They can see the bad guys coming at them. They're not there, but now they have something to act around. It's like a 75-foot long set 21 feet tall, and it is impressive. So expect this to be used more and more in the future. It can be the deck of a ship that can be the middle of a desert. It can be anywhere it can be your vacation with Jim right now over in Italy, right? You go to one of these. Steve Yeah, it could be the next video game at Disney World where you're in one of these things, and you got stormtroopers coming at you, and you can use lightsabers and do all kinds of stuff. It sounds like all kinds of different use. Yeah. Craig Very cool. Steve Yeah, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, and you know, let's move on here to the Coronavirus. At the same time, we still have time here, Craig, because everybody's telling their employees just work from home, don't bother coming in, take your work laptop, go home, set it up, connect to the VPN, and we'll do everything remotely. But when everybody's doing that, it is taxing the World Wide Web in general. Craig Yeah, I have training coming up tomorrow. I'm going to repeat this a couple of times because I think it's essential. We're going to do a webinar on working from home because there are so many things people in Businesses just don't understand. And I've been shocked to see what some of them even slightly larger businesses are doing. Working from home is a whole different world. You've got your home computer that might not have patches installed. It probably isn't patched up to date, right? So you have security issues there. Many businesses have people VPN into the office. That can allow that potentially infected home computer or another computer on the network, and it's enabling them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information and intellectual property and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. So I'm going to go through and explain what some of the better ways to do it are. When should you use a VPN? What kind of VPN should you use? And when should you Just try and remote to your desktop that works? What are the pros and cons of that? What kind of people can do that? Or can't do it. I'm going to go through the critical approaches that tactics and tools to get the most from remote work. And if you want to know about this, just go right now to Craig Peterson dot com if you sign up, it comes up on the top of the screen sign up for my mailing list. I'll be sending out an email later today. But this whole trend of working from home, Steve, I think is going to stick because of the aside the myriad of security problems. Yeah. That I think companies are going to have Steve, though. The bottom line is that as a rule, people are more productive working at home. They get more done in the people love it. Right who likes to get stuck in a traffic jam, right? Steve Oh, yeah, I mean, look, I gotta I buzz through. Have concocted a little radio studio in the basement, you know, because I'd rather have to if I'm an emergency do stuff from home than have to, you know, it's a short drive, but have to have it in here and do it, you know? Craig Yeah, it's, I think it's a great environment for most people. And most of the time at work, people are wasting money. Of course, you can make money in the meantime. Of course, you can waste-time at home, right? Get sucked into Facebook or something that you don't want to do. But there are tools for that as well. I use a few. We know we could talk about those. Because these are going to be live webinars. I'll answer everybody's questions. But it is, I think, going to change the economy, this Coronavirus, not not the virus itself, but the panic that's ensued. And so many employers have not tried to have people work at home. They haven't tried to use these digital collaboration systems, which we'll also talk about what they haven't tried to use. We don't things like zoom or WebEx, by the way, zoom, extremely unsafe, very poorly designed versus WebEx. You know, some of these things like, like WebEx has its teams, the same thing people use slack for, etc. We will cover all of those you understand it, and that's the point, Steve, I don't think most businesses have looked into these seriously enough as they grow in popularity. There are businesses, I think, Steve, that we are going to see some significant improvements in productivity, and they're just going to let more and more employees work at home. However, IBM last year pulled back on the whole work at home thing. IBM found for them, anyway, it was more important to have people bump into each other in the hallways and have an impromptu discussion than to have everybody really kind of siloed away. Unknown Speaker 11:57 Real quick, Craig. While I have you on that same topic. Let's talk about college campuses because we're seeing her in Mass colleges sending everybody home and saying work online. Is this the kind of thing that I mean, we've seen a lot of these universities trend online? If there are going to be campuses shutting down for periods, and we know how expensive colleges is, is it something that we could see trending in the college environment? Craig Yeah, it already is. Steve, we're seeing colleges that are now 100% online, and are doing very well. Two of my kids got their MBAs almost entirely remotely, and it's worked out very well for them. So yeah, watch out colleges, with your big fancy campuses and high tuitions. They are getting threatened. Steve, I think it's going to make a big difference. Steve Yeah, Craig, we get it. You have smart kids. Thanks for rubbing it in. I know. If you want to take part in that webinar tomorrow, which btw, sounds fascinating, and I feel like I need to be a part of that. I go home and fire up that VPN, and I don't pay any attention to it, and I probably should. If you want more information like this, from Craig, you can text My name Steve to this number? Craig You can text Steve 855-385-5553, or you can email me anytime with a question. Just meet me at Craig Peterson dot com or text Steve to 855 385 5553. Steve Excellent. Standard data and text rates apply. Again, Craig doesn't bother you or anything, but he does give you the updated stuff. I mean, still, everyone everywhere in all departments and all facets of life is trying to adjust to this Coronavirus. Craig is this staying ahead of it in his line of work. So we appreciate that Craig, thanks for the time as always, and we'll catch up next week. Craig Hey, take care of Steve. Thanks again. Craig It is happening. Keep an eye out on your email Wednesday. I'm planning on having one of these at four, and I may try and do one in the evening as well on Wednesday and then another one Thursday. Watch for my emails today. Take everybody, talk to you tomorrow. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig was on with Jim Polito. Today, they discussed the latest in Chinese offensive military weapons.  This new Chinese armored attack vehicle that can launch a swarm of autonomous drones. They also talked about the absolute need to install Parental Controls for some of these streaming and social media sites.  These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Lack of Media Parental Controls Contributing to Suicides Ready For An Autonomous Robot Army? ---  Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 05/28/2019 Chinese Have A New Offensive Weapon and Why You Must Install Parental Controls. Good morning, everybody. Hopefully, you had a happy Memorial Day. I certainly did. I spent it with friends and some family as well, business associates, you know how that all goes but having the freedom to be able to associate with the people you want and have a fantastic barbecue that came to us at a very high cost. There are a lot of people out there who want to run our lives, control our lives. And my gosh, have you watched the series Chernobyl, if you haven't seen Chernobyl on HBO, you should take the opportunity to view it. Chernobyl shows some of the significant ultimate pitfalls of socialism, and what it does to us. Here we have all of these people who are willing to put their lives on the line, even though there may be significant issues with why we are somewhere, why they think we shouldn't be there. Just the fact that they are volunteering to do it, that they're stepping forward, and so many have lost their lives. My heart goes out to them and their families. And thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, I came to this country, I'm an immigrant myself. And I am so glad I have the opportunity to be an American, to be a citizen of the United States and to be with so many like-minded people. I'm sure many of us disagree on things. I know. I've got people who vehemently disagree with me, Wow! There are trolls out there. Overall, I think we agree that we have a right to free speech, although so many on the left don't appreciate it. They want that to squash free speech. We still have it, and there's been an enormous price that paid to protect that right. Sorry, this was not meant to be a lecture. Okay. I do want to go to our friend, Mr. Jim Polito. We had a great conversation this morning. So, right now, we'll go to Jim. Also, I'm going to be changing the format of these podcasts here a little bit in the weeks ahead. So, some might be a bit delayed. Some might be just changing dramatically. We'll see how it goes. Be sure to let me know what you think about this podcast and maybe some changes you'd like to see. Just me at craigpeterson.com. Here's Mr. Polito Jim: Welcome to our good friend, and Tech Talk guru with, Wow, with a full plate today. Just like the cookout yesterday on Memorial Day. Here is Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig: Hey, good morning. Yeah, I had a great Memorial Day yesterday, I was impressed with those gentlemen from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. And the work that underway there. It's kind of a letdown to be on after them. Jim: This Morning. You're all very, very important. No, no, that was good. That was a good lead-in for you. And speaking of Vietnam, I want to talk to you about this autonomous robot army. Now we've, we've discussed World War three and how it has already begun in cyberspace, but there's still conflict on the ground. And then my question to you is, is it going to be run by machines and drones? Craig: Yeah, it kind of looks like it might be at least for the most part. Now. We've got China who has licensed from Russia, this, this thing, about the size of a Humvee, more or less, right. It's a small military vehicle. And what China has done with this vehicle is to combine this technology with the knowledge they gained from producing drones. Think of all the drones we have flying around our country. Did you know 80% of the drones that we buy, civilian drones, are made by one manufacturer in China. They've got this technology down, nowadays. But what is surprising is that China has been accused, even recently now, of sending GPS coordinates for these drones back to China. Jim: Whoa. Right. They are using the products they sell us to spy on us. Craig: Exactly. And in this case, to map this out, right. They can map where things are because the drones are taking pictures or video and equipped with GPS and cell capability. A beta test has been conducted to see what it might be sending, and it looks like GPS coordinates. It is all a fascinating, albeit troubling problem. What China has done now with this kind of Humvee type thing is they have installed launchers. And these launchers are designed to launch small military drones. Now, it makes sense to have a drone that was associated with let's say a Humvee, right, a small drone, you can launch, you can see what's around you may be on the battlefield, see if there's EDIS in the road up the head, all these things makes a lot of sense. It appears that this particular vehicle, which is being advertised online right now by the Chinese manufacturer, has been sold, by the way, to other countries. It is comes equipped with four of these drones that are for reconnaissance type drones. However, it also has eight other drones, known as killer drones. The idea with this platform is that they can go to any place that you want to and drop a very, small bomb with high explosives on it. We saw something like this happen in Venezuela late last year to the President of Venezuela. Yeah, the big, you know, burst in the air up front, was a from a drone, what do we do? Situations like this could be very, very, bad because think of a drone army coming after you. But let's put a bunch of pieces together. Craig: China is number one in the world right now for facial recognition, which they are using to track all of their people, right? They're not citizens. I guess civilians would be a better term to call them right, in a socialist state. They are tracking these citizens and know if they jaywalk, they lose the social credit points, or other things happen, and it gets to the point where they can't even get on a train or fly anymore. If you're China who has these drones, and they are in a small vehicle like a Humvee. They can be used to go to any location. The next step is, if they're not there already, is to identify a face or a person and have them go after that person. Thank you. Yeah, the biggest scary thing is what you might call a drone cloud. So let's think about a hundred drones looking for one person. Jim: Yeah. And so I mean, we see that stuff in the Terminator movies, and you know, the drone looking and getting a facial recognition scan, and then going after that person. I mean, that's science fiction. Not anymore. Craig: Not anymore, and that's downright scary when you get right down to it. This armed tactical truck is loaded with what they call blowfish, autonomous drones, by the way. It's reminiscent of the Borg and, and Terminator, but it's here. So your question, what can we expect in the next world war? Well, we are sure to see nation-states and going after our infrastructure, our base technology, and instead of them sending out a whole bunch of troops onto the ground, all they have to do is send out some of these anonymous elements, drones, and they could take out almost anything. So now you know why the White House Secret Service and all these other people are so concerned about it. The FAA has gotten involved, with not only the licensing of drones, that happened before but in setting up drone routes and tracking them. These things have become very dangerous. Jim: Wow, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And at the end of this segment, we're going to give you a number you're going to text my name, Jim. And you'll be able to pick up all of this information plus a lot of other stuff. And that's what I want to get to lack of parental media controls, is contributing to suicides. Tell me about this Craig Craig: I hate this story. It's very, sad. And it goes back to a study that was just completed by the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Amen, he's a doctor down in New York City. And he deals a lot with brain injury and helping people recover from it. If you know someone that has had brain injuries like the football players, right, the concussions and things take a look at and check out Amen Clinics online it is just phenomenal the treatments they are doing there. Craig: What happened here now, and I found out from Dr. Amen about this. There is that there is a TV show on Netflix right now called "13 Reasons Why." Yeah, this is a story of a teenage girl who took her own life, left behind 13 audio cassettes for her friends to listen to, to unravel the reasons why she killed herself. That so there is a study that was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. And it appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child adolescent psychiatry and analyzed five years of suicide rates amongst people between the ages of 10 to 64. Now adults, basically over the age of 18, showed no significant change in the month after the show was released. However, the kids, from the ages of 10 to 18, showed a 30% increase in suicide, the month after that show was released. Okay. We've got to remember, and this even goes to giving kids iPads, iPhones and going on the internet, all of this stuff, young kids brains are still under construction, right? And our, you know, our brains develop until your mid-20s. Girls brains typically develop faster than boys, and we know that, right? But this is very, very, scary. Our physical brains aren't mature until the age of 25. One of my kids, who is I think he's 25. Forgive me, I have eight, so I'm not sure. I came down, and he was playing this video game. I have never seen such violence. It just it blew my mind. I don't even want to describe it on the air. I sat down and talked to him about it. Now for me, It was shocking, but to him, it was just a game. And there have been debates over the years as to whether these types of games are hurting kids or if they matter or don't matter. One thing I can see is desensitization. And now with this latest study about this movie, this video series, this TV show called "13 Reasons Why" it seems apparent that it is dramatically affecting the younger kids. And that goes back to what you started with, again, using parental controls, we have to turn them on because this show is not rated for kids to watch. And if we don't have these controls turned on this 30% bump in suicide rates can't is directly attributed to it. But my gosh, the correlation is very scary. Jim: That is something that we can prevent. I mean, we can't prevent everything, and there are always kids may have other issues but you know, you can reduce the risk. There's a lot of great additional information that Craig has, and unfortunately, we don't have a lot of other time. So Craig for folks to get the this these stories and other things they need to text my name, Jim, to this number Craig: 855-385-5553 that's 855-385-5553 Jim: Standard data and text rates apply folks Craig will not sell your name to somebody else, and he won't hack you. Craig that was a great segment. Thank you so much for your time. Craig: Right. Take care, Jim. Bye-Bye. Jim: Take care. Bye-bye. All right, we have a very important --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig is on the Jim Polito show as he discusses with Jim the Equifax breach and the new bug that left your Microsoft account wide open to hackers. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: A Bug Left Your Microsoft Account Wide Open To Complete Takeover Equifax Breach Was Just As Infuriating And Dumb As You Thought, New House Report Finds --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 12/18/2018 Big Data Dirty Little Secret Ties To Government - Microsoft Vulnerability Craig Peterson: 0:00 Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning I was talking to Jim Polito about security and safety online. The report came out from Congress what happened with the Equifax hack? We talked about that I gave away a dirty little secret here about our government and kind of another type of spying operation that's been going on. And we started out by talking about another major ability over Microsoft, although this one was finally closed after being at least wide open for five months for at least five months. So anyhow, I hope you guys are having a great week. I am so looking forward to Christmas next week. I hope you guys are to having a great year whether you celebrate Christmas or not, and I will be back tomorrow as well. So here we go with Jim Unknown 0:54 Here he is the man myth and legend by he's actually from the future or you know, he's a machine and he's masquerading as a man. It's part of that whole matrix thing. Here is our friend Craig Peterson Good morning, sir. Unknown 1:12 Hey, good morning. And greeting to our robot overlords. Unknown 1:19 I do love the Matrix movies. It's great, but it scared the Matrix. And of course, the Terminator movies. They all scare the heck out of me. So before the machines take over Unknown 1:32 what's going on with Microsoft and your Microsoft account? Like my office documents, my outlook emails, which just happens to be two programs that I use, Unknown 1:48 the hackers could have gotten in there, or did they get in there? Craig? What's the story? Unknown 1:54 Yeah, there's a lot to worry about this year. And if the FBI has out some new warning about some different types of scams going on. You got to be careful if you're buying gift card we can talk about that ticket scams oh my gosh, what's going on this year, but Microsoft gave us a special kind of a pre Christmas precipice here they laugh consumer a series of different vulnerabilities your account if you have Microsoft accounts, everything from your Office documents your Outlook email yeah pretty much wide open to hacking and there was this whole calc takeover thing you know I'm shaking my head gives you think that these companies would know better and this is a very big problem but if this is a little bit complicated but basically what happened is the security researcher was able to take over our Microsoft domain what are their sub domains success office.com and he was able to trick the applications to ask off success at office calm the Microsoft applications on potentially millions of people's computers trick them into sending all of the users confidential information to him now he reported it to Microsoft in June they finally fix that but he never took control of the domain but he received any and all data coming to it's going from it and again it's you know we've got these large complex systems and everybody silos so that the office people you know you're working on on word I'm working on best you're working on that you're working on the authorization you're working on the lock in your and those teams don't have any oversight because the whole system is just so powerful complex How can somebody know everything about everything this is just frankly bound to happen and and that's where my Christmas present comes in. Jim Unknown 4:11 yeah and early I'll take Unknown 4:12 it a week early Sure. Okay. We finally finished that special report on what to do to freeze your credit freeze your information so the bad guys you know they almost certainly already have all of your termination check back yeah but because they have all of that and because of the new tax law there are new ways now to protect your credit your personal you know my whole personal side of it that you didn't have before they're absolutely free so I'm going to play around this yeah but I finally got this report all finished we're sending it out this week so I'm going to send out an email keep an eye out for the probably Thursday and you're going to love this is it step by step what do you do how do you do it how do you stop the bad guys now from using your stolen information and as usual absolutely free and absolutely I think very very useful it just took us like two weeks to get it together but that's my Christmas present or or Hanukkah Happy holidays or wanna call it Unknown 5:29 What about festival yeah yes that's right Unknown 5:35 favorite Unknown 5:35 yeah Unknown 5:37 so that's something that if you are on Craig Peterson's list you will get and at the end of this segment I'm going to give you a number I recommend that you text My name to that number Craig will know where you're coming from and then he will provide you with that information and then as you go forward folks who have already registered with Craig they'll get it anyway way so any won't sell your name you won't exploit you and standard data and text rates apply that's a nice little that's a nice little early present now the folks at Equifax which don't they happen to be the gift that keeps on giving speaking of the Now there were in a holiday and Christmas motif Unknown 6:27 there remember they had their the folks who do credit rating and they had a big data breach and once again Craig Peterson to the rescue for listeners to the show as to what to do but there's a new report by house investigators Congress as to Unknown 6:49 the breach and it's actually worse than we thought it was right again why is it every time there's one of these hacks data breaches every time I'm we hear about it it gets worse Unknown 7:03 yeah yeah this is the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and they released on Monday and 96 page long report and this is just absolutely astounding to me because I have clients that have come to me and they say hey Craig Can you help us out Unknown 7:27 because they lost just credit cards just credit cards and the Payment Card Industry if you accept credit cards now requires you to sign this document that is almost 250 pages printed out yeah and and they say hey we lost some of these credit cards were getting fined and that they they ended up settling some of the fines but I had one company come to me Jim and the fines were in the millions of dollars because his face on how many credit cards you have accepted over the years okay yeah but this company so very very big deal What do you think you know Equifax is fines were what do you think you know how many people got fire people went to jail Unknown 8:19 now folks the whole Equifax thing and and as I said Craig Peterson did a lot to help people to protecting and you're still recommending that people freeze their credit. Right? Unknown 8:33 Yeah, that's the only way around this and you know it really is ok. But here's what Unknown 8:39 I want to get. I want to get to your points. Are you freezing credit. But Unknown 8:44 how many people got fired? Zero? Maybe maybe one and he was the intern every other Tuesday who came in from Columbia University finds. Unknown 9:00 I don't know a $5 for every person who was hacked because that's what you had to pay wasn't it originally to freeze your credit or $1? I don't know Unknown 9:13 yeah, basically that's what it was it was Equifax has to offer free credit reporting services right and then they offered a free credit freeze but that was only one of the agencies you've got a freezer that all three major agency right Unknown 9:30 right Unknown 9:30 so yeah and you're right about the intern basically nobody I'm at upper level got fired on that was absolutely Unknown 9:38 crazy credible. Unknown 9:40 It's incredible. So here's There are five key findings. First of all of our house report says it was entirely preventable. There was a lack of accountability management they had complex and entirely outdated IT systems. These are a little legacy systems been around a long time and they hadn't bothered to update anything that was essential here. They were unprepared to support affected customers. You you remember we talked about this, what they sent them from these weird email addresses. The sites weren't working and here's the worst one right. But in terms of animal Equifax, a wild over 300 security certificates to expire, including 79 security certificates for monitoring the business critical domains. And they did not renew an expired digital certificate for 19 months. This one important 119 months which left Equifax without visibility on the X filtration of data during the attack. And other words that the data was being stolen was being pulled out of echo fact they didn't notice they couldn't know Unknown 11:01 employee. They didn't keep their certificates up today. Can you imagine that? Unknown 11:08 I mean, I mean, like a company. Okay. It's one thing if you have to say to me, Tim, did you update your antivirus? Did you do this? Do you have the latest software for your Wi Fi? And for this? It's one thing if you you know, that's me. Now we're talking about a corporation Unknown 11:29 that what do they do? These are the crowded guys, they have everything. You and I we don't even do business with them. Right. When was the last time you said that factor check because of that wonderful service? Unknown 11:43 Because you're doing a great job. Unknown 11:45 Yeah, yeah. Are you kidding me? And the laws that we have in place allow for all kinds of exceptions for them where they can do just tons of stuff that would if you and I were collecting some of this data, we will being serious trouble that the federal government can't even collect it. And you know what Jim Bakker the deep dark secret here to end this foldable discussion. Yes the deep dark secret is the federal government cannot collect information certain information on our that citizens. And so what did we do we want to the Five Eyes apparently we went to the UK we went to Australia and said, Hey, can you spire Trump for us? That's what it was like happens because we can't do it. Here's the dirty little secret you don't want. They go they go to these data aggregation providers. They go to companies like Equifax and they say hey, has Jim done this or that? Who are they talking to? What's he been buying? What are the trends in his Spencer's look like and these data aggregators have everything, what kind of car you drive, how old it is, if it's registered, if they even have your photo and your driver's license information, depending on the stage you're in, and the federal government uses them to track Unknown 13:05 and so are they really incentivized to come clamping down on these data aggregators? No, we're not Unknown 13:14 trying Unknown 13:15 a little dirty secret for Christmas Unknown 13:18 a little dirty secret. Now, here's another gift for everyone. If you text My name to this number Unknown 13:25 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553 Unknown 13:33 standard data and text rates apply. Craig Peterson will get back to you with all of this information. Plus more you'll be honest list when there's a big hack when there's a big problem, he will reach out to you and don't worry again because he won't sell your name to anyone and won't give it to hackers. And again, standard data and tax rates apply. Craig, thank you so, so much. Hey, a very, very Merry Christmas to you, sir. Unknown 14:02 Hey to you, too. I'm looking forward to listening to you on Tuesday. All right. Oh, wait a minute. Unknown 14:07 And Happy Happy Boxing Day. Okay. Yeah, I know very. My Canadian friend. Happy boxing. Say Craig. Everybody. Craig Take care. Unknown 14:18 Bye bye. All right, don't go anywhere Unknown 14:22 and as you heard I finally have a document ready about what to do and I don't know we might want to turn it into a whole course for people so it's step by step you know screen instruction and helping them out but anyways it is finally available make sure you're on my list http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe and take care. Talk to you tomorrow. --- Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating! Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year!  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Craig Greenfield is the founder and director of Alongsiders International and author including The Urban Halo and Subversive Jesus: An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness in a Broken World (Amazon affiliate link). Craig grew up in a home of generous hospitality which shaped his view of what it means to follow Jesus. Instead of merely inviting the poor into his home, Craig and his wife make their home with the poor. Today, Craig shares the story of how he became convinced the Gospel is for the poor, moving to one of the world's highest drug dealing neighborhoods, and the “God questions” that led him back to Cambodia to lead a movement of children mentoring children. Craig inspires me to think about the Kingdom of God in new ways and I know his story will do the same for you. Please listen and share Craig's story! Stories Craig shared: The Alongsiders movement that he leads Growing up in an affluent neighborhood in New Zealand His parent's radical hospitality and the impression it made on him The spiritual warfare experience that led him to choose Jesus When the Gospel he shared didn't sound like good news to the poor How the Magnificat speaks the Gospel to all aspects of our lives The beggar's shirt that challenged how he followed Jesus His battle with claustrophobia and how Jesus's time in a cave helped him Facing death when he had cancer six years ago His book The Urban Halo about his first seven years in the slums of Cambodia Subversive Jesus and his time in Vancouver to the Downtown Eastside The “God-question” that led him to reevaluate his next five years How he worked through ministering to the poor with his wife Why North American Christians need to get out of the bubble Great quotes from Craig: What the eye has not seen the heart cannot grieve. When you come face to face with real poverty it rocks your world. We tend to romanticize those who are far away and marginalize those near us. People have enough condemnation in life. What we need is more love, more joy, more welcome. Resources mentioned by Craig: The Urban Halo, Craig's first book Subversive Jesus: An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness in a Broken World Alongsiders International Craig's website where you can connect with him Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus by Ched Myers Chasing the Dragon: One Woman's Struggle Against the Darkness of Hong Kong's Drug Dens by Jackie Pullinger Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. The post Craig Greenfield and Good News for the Poor appeared first on Eric Nevins.

Randall Jacobs, Co-Founder of THESIS Bike drops in to talk about the development process and vision for the OB1 bicycle. THESIS Bike Online THESIS OB1 Specifications CRAIG: All right. Hello everyone. Today we've got Randall Jacobs from THESIS Bike here, live in person. We're going to talk to him about the THESIS Bike Company and what his inspiration was. We actually just got back from a sample ride here in Marin county riding the new OB1 bike and I'm really excited to introduce everybody to Randall. So thanks for joining us.   RANDALL: Thanks for having me.   CRAIG: I always like to start by finding out a little bit about your background as a rider. Did you start more on the mountain bike side or on the road side?   RANDALL: So I started racing mountain bikes as an undergraduate. I was playing football and broke my foot. Cycling was the first thing I could do and I took to the bicycle on the mountain bike side and did the collegiate series, found that I was reasonably good at it and stuck with it. It's become a real lifestyle ever since.   CRAIG: And did that lead you into other elements of the sport?   RANDALL: I went on to move overseas for a period and rode on and off. When I was 25, I had a life event where my father became sick. I was looking at where he was. He had a brain tumor at the time, so pretty bad prognosis. I said, what are the things I'd like to have accomplished in his position? Being a pro athlete was one of those things. So I started training full time. I was lucky to win a couple of national championships as an amateur shortly after he passed and then spent the subsequent couple of years living out of my Honda Element traveling around the country with a fleet of bicycles that was worth probably 5X what the car was worth.   CRAIG: So you're racing on the national mountain bike scene at that point?   RANDALL: Yeah. I was, you could say, pack fodder on the US Cup circuit, and then I'd have a few good results in the local circuits.   CRAIG: What a great journey. Spending that much time doing it. I think it's something that a lot of people aspire to just following their dreams of bike racing and going out there and doing it and it's certainly not without its sacrifices.   RANDALL: It's certainly is.  I was fortunate in my case in that I had started a career in international trade and supply chain architecture where I could work remotely anywhere in the world. So in that regard it didn't cost too much, but you definitely put certain other things on hold being on the road all the time.   CRAIG: So when you hung up your racing cleats, what was next for you professionally?   RANDALL: From there I started a product development company where we were working with the same set of Chinese manufacturers that I had cultivated during my period running product and market development for the Chinese trading and manufacturing company. I then sold that company to one of our partners and went to work for Specialized in 2013. At Specialized, the Diverge project was in its early days. I actually ended up naming that bike and was the product developer for the project, so doing all the bike builds and negotiating all the deals with the vendors and so on, and coordinating the product and supply chain sides.   CRAIG: So you were helping sort of spec out the supply chain and the specifications for the original Diverge bike while you were there?   RANDALL: Correct. And doing a lot of the field testing and component compatibility testing to make sure everything was fully dialed, which is where you see my obsessive attention to detail come in.   CRAIG: The Diverge bike, it was really one of the first production, quote unquote gravel bikes to hit the market from a big manufacturers that right?   RANDALL: For sure. The first bike that was called a gravel bike. I mean, there had been people riding such bikes for quite some time. When that bike came out, it was the early days of drop bar disc brakes, which really opened up a lot not just for braking power and modulation, but also for tire clearance. That was a key enabling technology that allows you to have the sort of bikes we have today, the other one being tubeless tires. And in today's world, tubeless tires with really wide rims allows you to have a bicycle, a drop bar bike, that is fast like a road bike on the road and as capable or more so than what a mountain bike would have been not too long ago.   CRAIG: Gotcha. So the Diverge, was it the end all be all?  Was it everything you wanted to make in a gravel bike?   RANDALL: No. Of course, there are constraints on what we were able to do at that time for a variety of reasons. When you work for a big company, there's always going to be product decisions that are more due to a cost structure or needing to support a certain margin and marketing story. So with the OB1 it was really something I had been incubating for quite some time and it's my opportunity to take an unfettered approach to product from the ground up. I've had to compromise on nothing: not tire clearance, not stick-on or bolt-on magic elastomers attached to the frame, nothing. I just went ground up with pure evidenced-based curation of the components and the setup.   CRAIG: Interesting. So we're here to talk about your new company that you cofounded, THESIS Bike, and you just referenced your first model, the OB1. Some of the motivation has already come out in the conversation about why you wanted to start this company, but why now? What are the trends you're seeing? You're doing some unique stuff at THESIS that we'll get into as far as the bike itself and the business model, but why now and why are you guys the people to do it?   RANDALL: If you look at what we're doing, the primary innovation here is this business model. But the product itself is really cool and one I've been thinking about for awhile, so let's start with the product itself. So you saw bikes like the Open UP come online, which really brought an almost monster cross capability in a form factor that is more akin to an endurance road bike that's slacked out a little bit.   We wanted to go a step further. So if you look, we don't do a frame set. We do a complete bike for the cost of a frameset from the companies were competing with, and that's enabled by the business model innovation.   On the product side of things, [we have] a flat top handle bar with a shallow drop and a 10 degree flare so you’re narrow and relatively aero on the hoods, but in the drops you have that additional control which has benefits not just in gravel but also when you're just doing a road descent. You just had that much more leverage. Or even like in a sprint. You see this on ENVE’s road handle bars. They have a model that has a four degree flair, a little subtle thing. And I think you'll see flare bars start to catch on across disciplines, even with roadies or at least the more progressive roadies who aren't so traditional in their equipment choices.   On the wheels, we do 650B and 700C wheel pack package options. In our case both wheel packages use a high end carbon rim. With the 650B we go really wide, 27.3 internal width, so 33.3 external. And what that does is it takes your tire, like the WTB Byway we have as standard, and it brings it out from 47 to almost 50 millimeters and changes the profile such that the side knobs engage a bit sooner and you can drop the pressure down and not have the tire flopping around. So I'll ride out to the trail chasing down roadies at 45 psi and then I'll drop it down to 30 and the rear in 27 in the front and ride it like a full on cross country bike. And I'm passing people on dualies. So that's another kind of small detail along with the flare bar.   The other thing is the dropper post, which you experienced today, which really transforms the bike. Anyone who's coming from the mountain scene knows that you'd probably rather give up a couple inches of suspension rather than your dropper. On the gravel bike gets that much more game changing because you're starting with no suspension.   CRAIG: It was certainly an interesting moment for me. Randall generously let me take the dropper post on all the descents today. So I had a good time doing that and it was interesting because I've obviously I've ridden the dropper posts on my mountain bike quite regularly for the last half dozen years or so. And I was quite familiar with the benefits to that with the gravel bike. It was interesting creating that sort of pocket of space underneath me because I simply wasn't familiar with it ever doing that on a drop bar bike. And I definitely appreciated the tight integration with the lever so that on the SRAM shifter, Randall has hacked it so that it controls the dropper post for you. So instead of having a front chain ring, a shifter, I can shift the dropper posts down right from the handlebars.   RANDALL: Yeah. And that's a pretty simple hack that we will be documenting with a video real soon. But essentially with SRAM’s modern hydraulic front shifters, there's a one minute hack that's fully reversible to remove the ratchet mechanism and allow that shift lever to swing freely and thus actuate the dropper post, which is really slick. I use it more than I ever used the front derailleur.   CRAIG: So that was interesting. As most people who listened to his podcast know, I tend to ride my gravel bike on more mountain biking style terrain than the kind of flow and fire roads that are often known in other parts of the country for gravel. So for me, this is something I've been thinking about for awhile, checking out a dropper post. So it was a lot of fun. And I definitely will say that if you're on the type of steep terrain that sort of characterizes the terrain in Marin County, it's definitely a value add. And there's a small weight penalty but not a dramatic weight penalty given that sort of benefits of speed going down.   RANDALL: Yeah. There is this common misconception I'll describe where you pick up a bike and you say, “Oh, that's really light. It must be fast”. But really there's a lot of ways in which you can make a bike heavier and faster. So as an example, with a dropper post, you're able to descend that much faster, not just on the super steep terrain that we were riding today, but even on less steep but really fast terrain with loose sweepers where you don't drop it all the way down. You drop it down just enough so that you have a little bit more control and you can shift your weight back and so on, and you go through with more confidence. The other thing is you can brake that much harder. So you're braking vastly more with the rear brake versus the front brake. And you can break with both of them in a “holy crap” sort of situation and have more traction and not be ready to go over the handlebars like you would be if you were sitting on top of a fully extended post.   CRAIG: Yeah, I think it's one of those things that we will definitely start to see more and more of. I think there is a somewhat of a sentiment in gravel to be respectful of our road brethren and then the changes maybe are slower to be adopted for more aesthetic reasons than anything else, but I can definitely vouch for the, the sort of performance benefits of the dropper post from what I've evidenced today in today's short ride. I do want to talk about a little bit more about the frame set too. It's a carbon frame set, correct?   RANDALL” Yup. Full carbon frame set.   CRAIG: And you've got a lot of mounts spec’ed down there, which I think is interesting. So let's talk about the mounts and some of the other things that make this bike essentially a quiver killer. Something that you can replace your road bike. And many other bikes in your garage.   RANDALL: The frameset [features] a full carbon frame and fork. I'm using the same Toray carbon fiber that everybody else uses. In our case it's T700 to T800 other people give it some fancy acronym for the same thing. It's all mostly coming from the same place.   We've done a few things that are common and few things that are unique. So on the common side, we have a full suite of bosses: cage mounts inside the frame, third cage on the down tube, a bento up top. But we've [added] to the fork blades more bottle cage bosses that are also sturdy enough to handle a front rack. We have rear rack mounts as well. So you could set this up as a full touring setup and put 10 kilos or more on the front and 15 on the back, plus a frame bag, and be on your way for your next epic adventure.   Some other smaller details that I think are really important are on the fork. Steerer tube failure has always been a big concern of mine or you've seen a bunch of recalls in the industry, some of them associated with improper manufacturing but some of them associated with the clamping force of the stem actually crushing the carbon. And so if anyone in the audience has built a carbon frame of the carbon steer before they'll see that you have this expansion plug that goes in. And we looked at all of them and none that can be found on the open market did a good job of fully supporting the steerer. So we actually bonded an aluminum tube with a built in star nut into our forks, which you can then cut and shorten. And that's a safety feature. You really have no way to install it improperly because you don't install it. It's already there. And if you're traveling a lot and you're removing your stem and reinstalling it, you can over-torque it, but it's still not going to crush the carbon. Carbon is a brilliant material in tension, but it's terrible in compression. So that was another small detail where we really paid a lot of attention.   The other thing that you noticed is we decided to forego the drop stay which you see on a bike like the Open or the new Ibis Hakka. Those bikes accommodate a slightly larger tire. I think they can go up to like a 2.2. Our bicycle is optimized around a 700C x 40 or 650b x 47, which has the same radius as a 700C x 30. And that [the 700C x 30) is actually what we use on the road.   For our [650B] wheelset, we went with a wide rim that expands the tire to almost 50 millimeters. And what we found is that’s kind of the sweet spot for maintaining a road geometry, look and feel while still giving you all the capabilities of a borderline monster cross or light XC bike.   CRAIG: Gotcha. And you're offering both a single chain ring and a double chain ring. Correct?   RANDALL: Yeah. If you're considering going with the 1x, go for it. I’m all in on 1x myself. We’re offering the double because there's a lot of people who want to go that route. We can talk about pluses and minuses here. With the 1x you get the clutch so the chain’s not slapping around. It also frees up the left shift lever for the dropper, which I think, once you've experienced it, you won't want to ride without it. I think it's really a game changer as much as anything else you can do. But yeah, we'll do a 2x as well.   In both cases you have a few different gearing options so you can really dial it in. If you're not super fit and you live in a really hilly area, go with a 38 or 40 in the front. If you're super fit and live in a flatter area, go with a 46 with a 10-42 in the rear to give you plenty of high end. Same with the double. We're working on 46/30 or 48/32 options. We're just doing the compatibility testing right now before we offer it.   CRAIG: In addition to designing the frame, you've also designed the wheel set and some of the other components. Is that right?   RANDALL: Well, so this word designed. We started with a frame set that had all of the characteristics that we wanted. The same is true for the rims. And that's true in wheels in particular. Almost nobody is designing their own rems or if they do, they just spec a profile and they say to an engineer at the factory, please do the layup for me. So we started with a frame that met the vast majority of our criteria and then worked with the factory on over 100 different line item changes to bring it up to where we thought it needed to be. So simple things from additional chainring clearance, to adding 3K carbon reinforcement under every single boss and cut out in the frame to give it that much more strength and fray resistance, to adding fiberglass at all the interfaces with metal so you don't get galvanic corrosion. All these little granular things that you don't think about until it's a year down the road and you're trying to remove your seat post and it won't come out because it's bonded to the carbon. We did all of those things.   CRAIG: Presumably you were traveling overseas to work directly with the factory.   RANDALL: Oh yeah. Yeah. So I've spent a couple of weeks in the factories and then quite a bit of time late at night on calls. That gives us a big advantage.   I've been working in supply chain since I started working. This was back when I was 21. I'm approaching 36 now. I'm a fluent mandarin speaker, so that allows a degree of relationship and interaction that's just not possible if you're an English speaker. So I go into a factory and I don't just speak English with the boss, I am speaking Mandarin with a line worker to understand the process that they're going through as they're making that part, what are the common failure modes as they're doing that so we can then work the engineers to design around it. And this is something that's really important to me and that I enjoy doing tremendously.   CRAIG: For those of our listeners who aren't that familiar with the bike industry, how different is that process from what a major manufacturer goes through? Are you dealing with the same types of factories, the same types of materials that you would be at a Specialized or a Trek?   RANDALL: Everyone's using from the same subset of factories, using the same materials, the same manufacturing techniques. There's almost nothing new in our industry. It’s rare that you come across something new, which is why you see quite a bit of odd looking “innovation”. It's really just a way of trying to stand out in some way. So part of our thesis is that we innovate only where that innovation provides a genuine benefit to the customer. So as an example, on our wheelset, we didn't design a custom profile. We went and found one of the best manufacturers in China, who's manufacturing rims for all the big players. They had an off the shelf rim. We worked with them to modify the layup slightly to make it optimized for a gravel application. So in our case, that meant taking a mountain bike rim with a mountain bike width that gives you that tire stability on the 650B set, and lightening the layup because it doesn't need quite as much of a burly build as it would for, say, the enduro application for which it was designed.   CRAIG: Gotcha. So in addition to the sort of manufacturing processes of the bike, you're reinventing how you're going to sell to customers. Obviously selling direct is not something totally new, but for the bike industry and customers purchasing a bike, it is a relatively new experience to go direct to a smaller brand and buy online. Can you just talk a little bit about that decision and the type of relationship you want to foster with the customers and why you thought it was important to direct?   RANDALL: Sure. From a product standpoint, it allows us to offer a very granular degree of customization. When you buy a traditional bike, you're buying a complete bike. If the handlebar width isn't right, the crank length isn't right, the gearing isn't right, you're then spending money after the fact to swap that out or you're just dealing with it. And that's unfortunate given how many times that bike has been marked up and what you're paying for it.   The other thing is, our price point is $2999, and for what we offer, that is, I mean, there's nothing else that approaches that. You can buy competing frame sets that cost that much or even slightly more. The way that we're able to accomplish that is by being as close to factory direct as you can get.   And it's actually better than factory direct because when you go factory direct, first off, no factory is going to sell you one handlebar, right? So you need a certain amount of buying volume to get that pricing. Additionally, component compatibility.  You'd have to deal with “how do I high spec my bike with all these components that I've curated”. You don't have the same access to information and resources that say somebody on the inside like myself is fortunate to have.   We took a model where we work directly with the same factories who are supplying all the big brands. We work with the top of the line, open components. So we have a hollow forged crank from Samox that is lighter than Rival and comes with a spindly chain ring, and it's a really stiff and bomb proof package that can take a rock strike.   That’s one example. It’s the same with our frame set, same with our wheel packages and so on. We do assembly of the wheels and bundling of certain components in China and ship those out. And then we bundle all the components from Taiwan and we ship those out from there. So you receive two boxes of components that have been validated to work really well with each other and that you've been able to customize to your particular body, your use case, and even to your style if you want to. If you had a baby blue car with little metallic flecks in the paint when you were in high school or something like that, and you want to replicate it, send us a Pantone number and for a small up-charge we’ll get you exactly the color that you want.   CRAIG: Wow. So you mentioned two boxes are going to get shipped. The bike is not assembled correctly when it arrives. That's a little bit different than some of the other direct to consumer brands who are touting [that] all you need is an allen wrench and we'll be ready to go in five minutes. Let's talk a little bit about that.   RANDALL: So there are some brands that I've heard do a pretty good job there. Canyon is one that stands out, they do a pretty good quality build is what I've heard from mechanics, but that is not the general standard. So if you talk to many who work in shops, the really good ones tend to disassemble a factory built bike and then reassemble it to make sure it's done right. It's just hard to get that attention to detail on a mass assembly line and furthermore, they're not fit to the rider. And so you're still having to do a bunch of tweaking and so on.   So going back to why we named the company THESIS, we saw a way to both have the net cost to the rider be lower and get them a product that fits them and their riding style much better. A frame up assembly at Sports Basement [a Bay Area retailer] is 280 bucks. And now you have a local mechanic who did that build to your standard, helped you tweak it and fit it and so on. Obviously a full on custom fit is going to be a little bit more money, but that's the case with all of these bikes. Nobody's bundling in a fit, and furthermore, it would cost us more to ship everything to a single facility, have it assembled poorly or not as well as it could be done locally, and then put it in a big box with yet another bit of packaging, and put everything in a big box and then ship it with higher tariff codes to some location where you receive it and still have to finish putting it together. And it's probably not dialed in and tuned properly. Right? So we looked at the experience and quality of product and the net cost to consumer all having a big advantage with this type of model.   CRAIG: Interesting. So the bike, the OB1 really can be quite a versatile chassis, if you will. It can be almost a platform for every type of riding that you want to do. As we've talked over the day that we've talked about road riding. So talk about the OB1 as a road bike.   RANDALL: Gravel bikes in general are just the road bikes that the industry should have been selling regular people all along. So you look road bikes and generally they’re race replicas. The head tubes are short. The steering is more aggressive. The tires are really skinny. People are still riding 23mm tires at 130 PSI, which not only is not comfortable, it's actually slower than a higher volume tire. Not to mention the braking on carbon rims in the wet and all these other issues. The OB1 we designed to be...the one bike for every road.   So as a road bike it's got an endurance road type geometry and the road wheel package that’s a 44 depth, 22 internal, a 30 external rim that we pair with a supple 30 millimeter tubeless tire from WTB that rides super smooth and super fast. So I'll take that bike and go out and hammer with the local hammerheads on Scotty's ride or do some of the longer road rides that we see out here and keep up just fine. There's no deficit., and actually with the dropper, I'm descending faster than they are because I can do it more confidently and more aero because I can get into that crazy tuck.   You get a lot of questions on the gravel side. We spoke about the advantages of the flare bar and the dropper and swapping in the 650B wheelset. In my case, on my road we'll set I run an 10-42 [cassette] to give me a little bit taller gearing on the high end. And then on the gravel set I run an 11-46, which gives me a little bit more low end so I can climb up all the dirt walls here in Marin. For touring. the geometry is long and stable enough where you can do light touring, which with today's gear makes it entirely capable. It’'ll take 10 plus kilos in the front and the rear. It has all the bosses for that. If you’re bike packing, it has plenty of room in the front triangle and again, has all the mounting points for anything you'd want to take.   If you look at the actual differences between these types of bikes, it's mostly tire clearance, mounting points, and marketing. Those are the primary differences between a road bike and gravel bike and a cross bike and all these other bikes. Some might add geometry, but that's more at the extremes. With the OB1, we have a geometry that is at the overlapping point in the Venn diagram of all these different sub-niches. So you really can have one bike for everything. And with this bike, we wanted to demonstrate that the myth of N+1, which is used to sell more bike, is false… At most, you need one bike with two wheel sets.   CRAIG: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to think that's a realization that many cyclists will come to in time. And it's, it's fascinating to me. And for those of my listeners who have listened for a long time, they know my journey to gravel riding came from this notion of bike packing that I never truly realized. But having a bike in the closet that enabled me to ride on the road, ride on gravel, which is my primary pursuit, and occasionally get out there and do some light touring or bike packing really was a revelation. And the realization that one bike really could do it all. And frankly when I'm in a group road ride, it's not my bike that's the limiting factor. It's generally my legs which goes to show [it’s not] the bike I'm riding. And I think your bike...can do it all. When you're really honest about the type of rider that you are and can be like, neither one of us are on the pro tour, so we're not looking for marginal gains that on the extremes.   RANDALL: And those marginal gains are very marginal. 80% of aerodynamic drag is your body. A good chunk of what remains is the wheels, and we have an aerodynamic wheelset that's paired with the wide tires so you really can get very close to the bleeding edge and still not have a machine that is compromised for every other application. If you're gonna go out and do the local crits, you might want to get a road bike. For all the rest of us, get one really good bike that you'll have a much better time on. You'll probably be faster with that one good bike versus spreading those same resources over several mediocre ones.   CRAIG: Yeah. Well it's a really interesting bike. It's a beautiful bike. I encourage everybody to go to the website. I'll put that in the podcast notes. So people can check it out and I think it's a bike that begs to be looked at. I think you show a lot of the different ways in which the bike can be used on the website, which is great. I think it gives our listeners a lot to think about. So what's next for THESIS bike? When can we order one? How can people find you? How can they learn more about the philosophy and just get to understand the brand and you as a designer?   RANDALL: By the time you broadcast this podcast, we will probably have sales live or be approaching it. We have a waitlist currently that is getting increasingly long. We've done a few sales with friends and family at this point just to run them through the buying process and work out all the kinks before we open it up to a general audience. But yeah, we're expecting within the next couple of weeks, so by the time this podcast goes out.   As far as what's next for THESIS, we mentioned that the bike comes 90 percent unassembled. We have some very interesting partnerships in the works for local assembly and are hoping to have that as a checkbox option at checkout when you buy your OB1.   A part of the vision here, in addition to wanting to make a great product and an innovative business model, is to really provide an opportunity for the unsung heroes of the bike industry, your mechanics and fitters as well as the factories that are actually producing and increasingly engineering things...for them to have new and better opportunities to be compensated for the work they do. Having a model where a mechanic can get paid for their expertise in helping you with your curation and fit, and then make money on the assembly experience as well. And have, instead of an oppositional relationship between mechanic and customer where the customer doesn't know if the mechanic is just trying to sell them something, to have a relationship. We work with those parties to provide the rider with the best experience possible, whether it be with equipment or maintaining that equipment.   The single best return on investment that you can get in cycling is not equipment. It may be diet, but after diet and training it is definitely a professional build and fit. You'll be more comfortable. Your equipment will last far longer. And we want to have a model that provides the right incentive structure where people take advantage.   CRAIG: Interesting. Well we definitely look forward to learning more about that. If people have questions for you are there social channels they can connect with you on, or an email address, website and the like?   RANDALL: You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can contact me at randall@thesis.bike. or if you just have general questions, hello@thesis.bike.   CRAIG: Okay, great. Well best of luck with the brand. I look forward to riding with you again and continuing to spend a little bit more time on the bike. As I said, my initial ride shows it's a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to that and I wish you guys all the best. For my listeners, definitely check out the website. I'll put it in the notes, put that in the media podcast notes so people can find you easily. And yeah, I hope you have a great summer with this.   RANDALL: Yeah, thanks a lot. Looking forward to that next ride.   CRAIG: Awesome.

In this episode, Craig speaks with Andrew More, Owner and Managing Director of More CA, a chartered accountancy firm.  Andrew has set out to add value to his services by not just helping his clients with compliance but also offering them real world advice, assistance, and guidance.    When asked about the kinds of problems Andrew helps his clients with, he explains that his practice puts an emphasis on the ethos of collaboration.  This involves brainstorming with his clients to solve issues and problems they are faced with.  They work with technology to facilitate processes and ensure accuracy in the figures, along with other specialists to help improve their clients’ businesses.   Unlike the run-of-the-mill accounting firms most business people see once or twice a year, Andrew is more hands on.  He engages with his clients on a more regular basis and encourages them to ask questions no matter how simple they may seem.   Andrew has had to differentiate More CA from the rest of the traditional accounting firms by adding more value to his clients.  One way More CA has done that was by educating the practice’s clients on what they must expect from their accountants.  As he starts to work with his clients, he asks four basic questions such as What is your structure? What are your issues? How do we contact you? What are your goals?”   More CA’s purpose in asking the clients what their goals are is to determine whether their personal goals and business goals are in alignment.  Once they understand what their client’s goals are, they can advise them on the manner of which will be relevant to helping them achieve their goals.   When asked about what he enjoys about being in business, Andrew mentioned that he enjoyed working with his clients.  In his previous job, he knew he could offer them more than what the same old accountancy model offered.   Andrew feels that he has succeeded in what he has achieved.  However, he says his goals are constantly changing.  These goals push you to be better and not content with who you are.  He reviews his goals about once a year.   His assistant, Claire, holds him accountable for his goals.   Sometimes, his friends and family do the same.  Most of the time, he engages in introspection and what he calls “self-review.”  Bouncing ideas around with a trusted friend or colleague. From these discussions, he is able to get clarity and allows him to identify what to prioritize and what not to prioritize.  It comes back to the Paretos Principle, also known by other monikers such as the Law of the Vital Few, the 80-20 Rule, and the Principle of Factor Sparsity.  Basically, it states that approximately 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the causes.   The one thing Andrew has been able to uphold in his professional demeanour and personality has been developing his empathy.  It’s about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand where they are coming from in terms of their matters, issues, accidents, and failures.  This hit home for Andrew because it made him realize that nobody comes into work to do a bad job.  In the same manner, none of the clients are out there to harm you as well.  You cannot be judgmental.  Things need to be taken from their intentions that were made.   Turning his clients into aspirational go getters takes a lot of work as well.  The clients need to understand what their preferences, their approach to risk, whether conservative or moderate, and what they want to achieve.   Andrew’s advice for small business owners in New Zealand is that if your accountant hasn’t asked you what they’re trying to achieve or what your goals are, then you’re not getting your money’s worth and you probably have to look around.  He advises small business owners to work closely with their accountants and allow them to help the business owners achieve their goals.   When asked what the difference was between bookkeepers and accountants, Andrew says it really comes down to the price.  Accountants are now sharing a lot of their business with bookkeepers.  Chartered accountants, however, have more to offer in terms of knowledge, educational background, and experience.  Offering value added services to the clients sets More CA apart from the rest.  When the client needs advice, wants to do anything important, wants to grow, has plans to grow and succeed the business, and the like, he or she would need a chartered accountant.   Mistakes that are regularly made by business owners include budgeting for tax.  Many people don’t do that.  Some businesses have gone under because of their failure to budget for taxes.  Second, business owners need to have goals or connect to something.  These goals need to be written and shared.  This starts that collaborative movement in your business and in life.  It also allows you to achieve or realize something that was totally unreachable.   One way to do this is to collaborate.  Andrew considers that as the key.  With the help of specialists, business owners will be able to focus on what matters to them .     THE PROJECT GUYS PODCAST ANDREW MORE INTERVIEW   WHAT WE NEED TO BE ASKING OUR ACCOUNTANTS   Craig Oliver: Welcome everybody!  Craig here from the Project Guys once again. Today, I’m talking to Andrew More, who’s the owner and managing director of More CA. More CA is an accountancy firm. Andrew set out the business and the frustration with the traditional accountancy firm model. He really wanted to be able to partner with his clients and offer a bit of value for their money. So, rather than just doing compliance for his clients, he wanted to be able to offer real world advices, assistance and guidance their financial health to help achieve their goals. So, I’m really excited to have Andrew here as a philosophy on what we should be asking for our accountants and what have them move forward with us with things. So, welcome, Andrew! Andrew More: Thanks, Craig. Thanks for having me along. Craig: So, let’s start off. Tell us a little bit of your background, how you got to where you are now… obviously, you’ve got a funny accent, how did that all come from? (laughter) I mean, why did you decide to go into business? Elaborate on that a little bit more. Andrew: So, I’m not from around here. I’m from Edinburgh, Scotland but I grew up in the family business and my best friend, they were in a family business as well. So, yes..I was influenced by that in an early stage. My education, I attended towards  math and physics and ultimately accountancy.  I tended to have a natural flair for those sorts of things and hey, I love autonomy. I love doing this my own way. So, I think a natural progression to business was where  I was gonna go and when we’re expecting our first child, I decided it was time to risk everything and go out  on my own.  Maybe not best for the partner but it gave me enough time with the family and it let me do things the way I wanted to. So, it was a pretty good move. Craig: Cool. So, tell us more about your business. What is it you do? What problems are you solving for your clients? Andrew: Okay, so my firm, More CA,  is substantially a chartered accountancy practice and a small one at that but we have an emphasis on an ethos of collaboration. Now, by collaboration, I simply mean people getting their heads together and solving the issues and problems which are facing the business people. So, we do this and we collaborate with technology to make things easier, make things more accurate, re-collaborate with specialists such as accountants, lawyers, business advisors and all of these sorts of things and we involve ourselves, as specialists in our own wee way and also obviously the business owners because they do a lot of the work and they make their business the best. We do all the basic compliances.  You’ve mentioned earlier, the kind of financial reporting, the tax returns but our main emphasis, as I said is, collaboration.  So, the problems that we tend to find are quite varied. So for instance, yesterday, I was dealing with a restaurateur, guy owns a quite successful wee restaurant and what he’s come to know is that he’s made such a success of himself. He doesn’t have any time. Craig: Roger. Andrew: So, he’s asked us to take all his admin work off him. So, we freed up a lot of his time to progress other projects by helping him out by putting out flexi-time payroll.  He’s doing all this rostering and we’re helping him do that. We’re putting in a lot of add-on apps for zero in order to take care of the necessary paperwork and then we’re doing the book keeping and we packaged it all up into a nice monthly bill that he’s happy with. So, he’s now focusing on what he wants to do. Other areas, other problems, we routinely get around growth.  We help people kind of, work out their plans towards growth, set targets, those sorts of things and work towards them. Some people have succession issues and we try to help them out. Succession is always best dealt with early on. Craig: Yeah. Andrew:  You set out what the goals are and work towards that plan. Craig: So, you’re really getting involved with these businesses. So like, collaboration, partnership…you’re not just an accountant you might see once or twice a year.  It takes time. It’s sort of, understanding your business and working with them to help them achieve what they’re trying to achieve and their little personal goals.  Isn’t it? Like you said. Andrew: That’s correct. Craig: It’s a real hand on type philosophy. Andrew: It’s very much hands on. It’s very much based around engaging with our clients regularly, giving them the confidence to be able to ask those question which they might feel that are silly. So, we’re making them comfortable within themselves and yeah, we appeal to people who have that sort of idea. Craig: Cool. So obviously, that a different way of thinking about accountancy services, no doubt when you were started off, you  came out of wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and gung-ho about it all. Tell us a bit about of some of the challenges and learnings you’ve had on from the early years right through now, the different challenges, different things that you have learned. Andrew: Okay, so I think that the major challenge or the major hurdle which I had to overcome as being an outsider in provincial New Zealand and this might sound a bit strange but professional service operators such as  accountants, lawyers tend to be passed on down the family chain like heirlooms. Craig: Yeah. Andrew: So, really just getting my foothold in this province and actually appealing to people that I’ve actually got the skills and services that they require has been a challenge. Nowadays, it’s getting people to understand that as a charted accountant, I offer more than the traditional accountants you store from. Craig: Yes. Andrew: So when I say traditional accountants, I mean, maybe the big, big firms when they’re dealing with small business have tended to just give their clients a set of accounts, a tax return, a letter and a bill once a year. Craig: Yup, yup and we’ve been guilty of that. Andrew: Yeah and that’s not very enjoyable for anyone and there’s very little added value and so we’re trying to step away from that and teach our clients that, that’s not all we do.  That’s very much the first stepping stone of the first foundation stone in regards to actually being involved in helping them get ahead, achieve goals. Craig: Yeah. Andrew: We’ve never had that conversation because charted accountants are never offered. They’ve dictated terms and nobody came to step ahead and show that we would have a lot to offer. Craig: So, I dare say some of the challenges would have been around perhaps,  educating the market place, educating the clients to almost expect  more  and teaching them “This is what you can expect and these are the sort of things you should be asking for or demanding” type of thing, rather than going to an accountant or your lawyer towards a scary time, going down to the dentist at a scary time. It’s actually someone who can help you progress your business Andrew:   Yeah, so we’ll probably ask her routinely and we have our contact chief that we fill in with our clients and it goes through a whole various kind of,  “What’s your structure?”, “What’s your issues?”, “How do we contact you?” All of these things. Craig: Cool. Andrew:  And the major point of it is our goals section. We ask our clients what they’re goals are. If we don’t know their goals, we can’t advise them appropriately. So, if we understand our goals or if they don’t have goals, we’ll help find their goals. Craig: Yup. Andrew:   They might not be goals based on business, they might be personal. Craig: Yup. I’ve always had to look out for that. You got your business and your personal, yeah. Andrew:   Yeah, at some point they’ve gotta converge. You can’t have personal goals which are tangential from your business goals because then you’re gonna be at a constant state of hating yourself for being in business. Craig: So, often the business funds the personals Andrew:   Correct. Craig: Yeah. Andrew:   So, everyone’s got goals.  It’s just the case of documenting them and if we can understand their goals then we can advise them on the manner of which will be relevant towards to actually achieving these goals. Craig: Yeah, cool.  Awesome. So, what do you actually enjoy about being in business? What is it like to expand your wills? What do you enjoy about your business or your industry? What do you base your success at? Andrew:   Okay, so, what do I enjoy about my business? Craig: Yeah. Andrew:   I like doing business my own way. (laughter) Andrew:   One of the main things with getting at and going out to business by myself is that I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing for our clients and the firm that I was working for.  We were just giving that same old accountancy model of no added value and I knew we could do so much more. So that’s why I went to business by myself and that’s why I like to plow my own lawn thoroughly as they have warned me against and I’m not trying to be a disruptor. I think I’m naturally disruptive and the fact that I am offering a bit more .Key to my success, I could say that my success is moderate so far. Craig: C’mon! Andrew:   And I guess if you, if I still look at where I am now compared to when I’ve first started out, I’d say yes, I’ve succeeded in what I have achieved.  But the thing about goals are, we are constantly changing them. Craig:  Yup. Andrew:   So, you look back in it now and you look at yourself now and you probably think, “Oh, I’m only a moderate success because I’ve reassessed my goals.” And I think that’s probably one of the keys, you’ve gotta have goals. If you don’t have goals, you’re probably just gonna plod along, doing things that you may just be content with who you are. Nothing wrong with that. Craig: No. Andrew:   But I’m fairly aspirational. So, I set goals and I review them. Craig: So, how far would you review your goals?   Andrew:   I would review them at least once a year and well, I’d reassess myself on it once a year. I think it really comes down to what your goals are and how quickly you need to respond to maybe adverse events. That’s how quickly and how often you review them.  If you got projects and you’ve got a short time scale. You’ve obviously need to review your actual milestones regularly but my goals have been pretty much annually based on two-year, three-year, or  five-year goals. I’ve got milestones placed along the way to six months annually. Craig: Do you review them yourself or do you bring advisor parties to help you play devil’s advocate or a third party influence or external…do you know what I’m saying? Like, with your clients, do you bring in your professional… Andrew:   It’s always nice to be held accountable. (laughter) Sometime though, I don’t personally do that. I have done with my assistant, Claire, she knows what my goals are and certainly used some people to bounced ideas off. So, I do use that devil’s advocacy and that could be friends, family and those sorts of things. Craig: Yup. Yup. Andrew:   But a lot of the time, I’ve done self-review. I’m searching for doing this for others like I can do it for myself. I write loads of business plans. Craig: Okay. Andrew:   I write loads of them with these great ideas I conjure up over Christmas time. (laughter) Craig: Over Hanukkah Andrew:   And I review them on the second day and I go “Oh, that’s rubbish.” Craig: [incomprehensible] One day, there’s going to be a great idea in there and you could be the next great Mark Zuckerberg. (laughter) Andrew:   Yeah, you understand it right? You need tough collaborators and for small business people, it’s pretty hard to find collaborators. Craig: Yes. Andrew:   So even if it’s your partner, your colleagues, your friends, share your ideas. And hey, if one of them is happy to be a devil’s advocate and maybe just to help you ask those questions that justify your own ideas, hypotheses, your philosophies, just have them justify it. Craig: And sometimes, it’s just like and all in fairness as well, you have so many ideas in your head, so many businesses plans the clarity as to which you should follow and which ones you should bin. Andrew:   Yeah, just like your goals. Craig: Yeah. Yeah.  And I just went through the process myself, last week, I had lots of little projects on the go, not quite sure if  they were gonna amount to anything. So, I had a meeting with someone I trust on Friday,  bounce my ideas around. This was a big mess of brains from this section down, got massive clarity out of it, know which ones to prioritize and which ones are not.  Yeah. Andrew:   It comes back to that whole paretos principle of that 80-20. Craig: Yeah. Andrew:   So, what are you trying to achieve? Figure out your goals? If this project doesn’t actually fit in with your goals, what you’re actually trying to achieve? There’s probably no point of taking it on. Craig: No. Andrew:   If you’re wanting to have a lifestyle balance and you take on a project which is gonna consume a hundred hours a week and you’re not gonna do it. Craig: No. Andrew:   You’re not gonna achieve it. So, you need someone to go, “Hey, Craig. That’s a massive project, you’re not gonna do this as well as you actually want to.” Craig: So, work out your genius. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So later you might not think yourself as a leader but as a leader in at sort of industry or community, what have you learned personally and professionally, perhaps of yourself in the last few years, being in business for yourself rather than working in the cooperate? Andrew:   Okay, well.  I guess even working in the corporate world or doing any sort of thing, you know in a business leader, you gotta  have certain things. You gotta have a sort of, systematic process driven. You gotta have some sort of discipline, those sort of things that are pretty much standard. Probably the main thing, I’ve learned, which I’ve tried to uphold in my professional demeanor and personality is empathy. Craig: Yes. Andrew:   And really by that I mean, putting yourself in that predicament of the other person and trying to look at matters and issues, accidents and failures from their perspective.  This kind of hit home to me was dealing with the staff in my previous and realizing that nobody comes into work to do a  bad job. Craig: Yup. Andrew:   Likewise, none of your clients are out to harm you, none Craig: None. (laughter) Andrew:   Would you say that your clients are the few you deal with that set out] to harm you? Craig: Yes. Andrew:   And so, when things do go awry and things do fail and accidents happen, just step into their shoes and understand what their intentions were and more often than not, you’ll find that they’re well-intended and they’re good people. It just wasn’t the right call.  So, I hold hese beliefs and I hold myself to them in a professional manner. Personally, unfortunately, as I take to the football field, my fight club fever comes around and I become a horrible, mouthy center forward. But I… (laughter) Craig:  There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s where you take your aggression out. So long as you don’t do it with a client. Andrew:   Yeah, so empathy would be the main thing there. Craig: Yeah, now that’s a good thing to have there, empathy. Like you said, it’s  often…people having a bad day but it’s been a build-up of all sorts of things. It’s like the straw that breaks the camel’s back in the morning.  It’s totally irrelevant with what you’re doing with them.  But you just, felt it rough for the day. Andrew:   Yeah. So, when have people have issues as well. Craig: Yeah. Andrew:   A lot of people have far greater issues  or hang ups than you will ever have. Craig: Yes. Andrew:   So, you’ve gotta  just take time. Don’t be judgmental. Craig: Yeah. Cool. Andrew:   Take everything from their intentions that was made. Craig: Cool. Cool.  So, the majority of the  listeners, listening to this will be small to medium business owners in New Zealand and Australia. In your opinion, what sort of things us, as business owners been asking in and or demand you from our accountant? Andrew:   Well, I’m guessing that all accountants will be offering the same thing. So… Craig: Yes, let’s assume that. Andrew:   …pretty much the traditional model that I was talking about.  Craig: But that’s the bare minimum though, there’s the expense and the expectation. Andrew:   That would be the bare minimum but really , it comes down to what you’re trying to achieve. So, if you’re happy and content with what you’re doing and that’s probably all you’ll ever need. And so, maybe you’ll differentiate between providers and price. If you’re looking for something or if you’re aspirational or goal-driven or you have ideas of who you want to be then what you’re really wanting is somebody to be interested ,to show interest, to maybe document with what your interests are, to know what your goals are and ask these questions. If they haven’t asked you that, then how can they possibly try and give you professional advice which is gonna ba appropriate for you if you don’t know what you want to achieve. So, I’d say if for a small business owner in New Zealand , if your accountant hasn’t asked you what you’re trying to achieve or what your goals are then you’re probably lacking and you probably need to look around. Craig: Good. Good. That’s good. I haven’t thought of it that way. I thought it was the other way around with the push-demand stuff but like you say, often you don’t know what you don’t know.  At least, they’re asking you their questions and you’re willing to share them as well and then you know you’re on the right track, don’t ya? Yeah. Andrew: Well, the thing with accountants is that if one character came and had this great amount of knowledge and experience and education. But we’ve tended to use our dispense the advice purely for the bigger corporates, the really big clients who pay huge fees. Craig: Yes. Andrew:   And it’s never actually filtered down to small businesses. So, the small business person comes in and they dictated what they’re getting. Craig: Yes. Andrew:   The thing that I can’t say is that tax returns, they don’t really get the opportunity to sit down and say, “Hey, Mr. Jack the accountant. You got all this knowledge. Can you get me the benefit of it?” and when the client is sitting right across the table from this old school chartered accountants, dictating terms. They don’t feel comfortable enough to ask those questions. They don’t feel comfortable enough to ask what the previsions is, “What’s provisional tax?”,  “Why are you sending me these bills?” Craig: It’s an intimidation factor, isn’t it? Andrew:   It’s an intimidation factor. So, if they could have broken that down over the years and actually given some real value to their clients, we wouldn’t be having this issue that we’re currently having. Craig: Yeah. Cool. Awesome. So, how often should we be reviewing our accountant’s offerings? Let’s face it, men today, we just walk around, new financial year, is it too late to ask my accountant these question or do I have to wait next year? What should I be doing? Does it matter?  Andrew: It really doesn’t matter. I would say that with anything, you should review the value in it.  The problem being that a lot the cases we take on or a lot of the clients we take on do have goals or issues. They’re not issues and goals that can be fixed in a silver bullet.  There are some things that might take a year or two to gain the understanding, embed the knowledge, empower the individual to make decisions, understand their goals and to progress.  Let’s say if you’re reviewing once every one or two years then that would be fine.  However, it comes back to the fact that, “Has your accountant ever asked you these questions?” , “What are your goals?”, “What are you trying to  achieve?”, “How can we help you?” Craig: “Why are they in that business?” Andrew: If they haven’t asked you that then they aren’t putting the right amount of  effort in. They’re not interested and why would you have a business adviser that wasn’t specifically interested in  what you’re trying to achieve? Crag: I guess also, it’s very well that they could ask where in your goals you’re at because it’s sort of a new way of thinking. But this is actually following through with taking interest in those goals. It’s easier to say, “Oh, what are your goals in your business?” and then they go “ Oh! I’ve never been asked by that. I don’t really know what I wanna share with you today, Mr. Accountant.” But they need to follow through that. They need to say, “Oh, well. Tell me more about that. How can I help you achieve those?” or “What do you need from me?”   Andrew: You ask what their goals are, you ask them how they could be most of help so you can follow up and ask people right there who are stuck in that mindset of traditional accounting.   Crag: Yup. Andrew: They still come to us, on price or efficiency or convenience and we  get from that basic compliance but are happy with that  and we wouldn’t change that if that’s what… we’d want to make them some aspirational goal-getter when they don’t want to be so understanding that, understanding what their preferences are, understanding their approach to risk, whether they are really private  or whether they are gambling-oriented, whether they want to take risks or whether they really came to shine retiring. If you know all this, then you can  better meet  their demands, meet their requests and fulfill or satisfy the clients Crag: Yeah. Cool. Lovin’ that, lovin’ that.  So, maybe we can identify say, maybe  our current accountant is not doing as much as they could be possibly doing but like changing banks, changing lawyers, changing dentists, it’s a pain in the bum. How to change your accountant? I don’t know. That’s perception would be, wouldn’t it? It’s almost as if breaking up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, ain’t that though? Andrew: Yeah, man. Crag: It’s a big move. Andrew: Unfortunately, text messaging doesn’t work. (laughter) Crag: No. No Andrew: Or not calling her back Crag: Facebook messenger Andrew: And you still get the bill for their blah Crag: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew: So, it’s always been an issue that we’ve come against as well. We had previously told our clients, “Hey, just give your accountant a call and tell them that you’re moving on” and that courtesy that was shown was never, very rarely, reciprocated by the accountants. Crag: Yes. Andrew: Our position nowadays is to leave it to us and provisions within our ethical guide which require new engagements to ratified or disputed and for information to pass within seven days. Crag: Okay. Andrew: Most accountants will adhere to that and that’s all that’s required. We do find people, especially in provincial New Zealand have deep seated relationships with their accountant and has  been passed on to them. They’ve had a long standing agreement and they may find that changing and having that conversation’s really kind of awkward, really uncomfortable. Crag: Yes. Andrew: So, if they don’t want to do it then that’s where we step in, doing it in a professional manner. If they do still want to do it then they’re perfectly allowed to do so. But they are under not required to justify their decision and it really comes down to “But the accountant was such a good friend.” Then friendships are reciprocal. So, you’re paying them a fee to do a certain service for you and you’ve asked for extra help and they’ve taken their fee on their in their arm, giving you that extra help. What kind of friendship’s that? Crag: Yes. Andrew: It’s not your issue, it’s the accountant’s issue and they probably deserved to lose you. Crag: Yes. Andrew: We see the same way with our services. We don’t tie people up because we want them to be comfortable enough to say, “Andrew, you’re not doing a good enough job. Stand up and give us our service or we’re gonna cut of our monthly installment of our fee.”  Crag: Yes. Andrew: And that will give me moving. Unfortunately, we don’t have that. Craig: And the consumerist of the client saying, “Oh, I don’t see… I’m struggling to understand the value of what I’m receiving from you.”  And then as the supplier, they  need to justify that or lift the game or or whatever Andrew: Absolutely, just life their game. As we talked about earlier, transitioning to an accountant, dictating terms…the power is now moving to the consumer. Crag: Yeah. Andrew: The subscription-based packaging, the ability to shift between different packaging, different accountants. That’s how it should be. Crag: Yeah. Andrew: That should be the flexibility that a small-business owner should demand. So, we are offering it, there’s other people in the market that are offering it and moving between accountants should not be difficult and it doesn’t need to be. Crag: Yes. Andrew: We can do that all for you. Crag: Awesome. So, on the more personal note, now that you’re a big advocate of good work and life balance which is why I guess is one of the reasons why you went into business for yourself. Andrew: Uh-humm. Crag: Since you’ve been in the business, you’ve become a father to two. Andrew: Yes. Crag: You’re also a husband and now a business man, obviously. Andrew: Yeah. Crag: So, how do you manage? How’s your work-life balance going? What’s the tip? What’s the golden nugget about that? Andrew: Well, I had so many diminished. (laughter) Having no business in the first year was great Crag: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew: I couldn’t pay the bills then.       Craig: But great for the golf swing. Andrew: Got two holes in one. Craig: There you go.! (laughter) Andrew: Yeah. Sometimes you gotta fill up some holes in. It is becoming more difficult, my business is growing. I’m very happy with it. Craig: Yep. Andrew: What’s demanded is our systematic and process-driven approach and if you invest upfront in these sorts of things then you can actually still achieve it. Technology, we’ve put out on stuff like receipt bank. We’ve got zero-running. We’re doing all these sorts of stuff. We’ve got different portals in our website where our clients can engage with us routinely. They can set up their own meetings and they do everything. We use Skype so our clients don’t have to suffer traffic or parking things. We’re able to get across the country. So, we are working on work-life balance for both us and our clients. Although our own work-life balance may have diminished since the early days, I still play sports and I still drop my kids of at daycare, I pack them up most days. I’m normally home to make dinner. So, I’ve still achieved it. It’s really just about having a plan, understanding what you’re requirements are ,understanding what your resources are required and working towards your goal.  You can achieve it. Craig: And I guess, it comes back to reminding yourself as to why you did it in the first place, isn’t it? Andrew: That’s true. Craig: I’ve seen too many people start off with having this idea of a good work-life balance but then the work is 60-70 hours a week, forget why you’ve ever done it. Then once again, work in a job. Back to the first job. Andrew: Correct. Craig: Obviously, you’ve embraced technology. How has technology changed the industry since you walked out of the University so many years ago. Andrew: I walked out of University at ’99. Craig: Oh, there you go. Andrew: So, it’s been a while… Craig: 18 years ago. Andrew: I was looking at this recently, it took me back to my first job. I was working as an auditor at Edinburgh, Scotland and in 2001 and 2002, I was senior auditor on a job in Edinburgh, it was one of our bigger clients. They were manufacturing in home sale, you know one of those paper products, lever arch files, different kinds. Craig: Yup. Yup. Andrew: It’s a huge turn over though, but they’re full accounting system was purely manual and I mean hand written. Like, volumes upon volumes, libraries of books, day records and ledgers, trial balances, the works. So, they employed our financial director who’s a chartered accountant on a ridiculous salary and he was doing what we regarded these days as, menial tasks…  Craig: Right. Andrew: And taking days over them because that was what was required. Craig: Yes. Andrew: So, what you were spending days over can now be done automatically through inventions such as zero… Craig: Yes. Andrew: Fantastic new invention and to produce a trail balance report is a click of a button. To balance, to reconcile your bank is probably 20 minutes work in a week. Craig: Yep. Andrew: So, we’ve moved from days of work done by a skilled individual to minutes of work done by a layman or somebody in business who has probably never done accountancy papers. Craig: And has got no interest in it whatsoever. Andrew: So, we’ve seen a massive shift in technological movement of huge disruption and that has men that are  time-involved has reduced massively and the accuracy of the work that has been prepared or the reported that have been prepared are far more accurate than what was done previously. So that has given, I think this has probably been the basis whereby governments kind of deregulated those. Craig: Right. Andrew: Allowing people to do it a lot more  themselves, allowing more bookkeepers in the market at the expense of chartered accountants. So, that’s a real problem for our industry and as chartered accountants but we’re our own worst enemies. We never gave out enough information away, we never engaged enough with small business when they needed it. The traditional accountants just profit those for years. Craig: So, obviously, technology we know has taken over the world, so to speak. It’s not going away. So what do you think the industry is going the next five to ten years? Andrew: I personally think it’s probably a bleak future. It will probably take a backwards step for a point, for a certain time. Craig: Yeah. Andrew: But in the short term, it would be very beneficial for the consumer because there’s currently  a price war. When you look at the services of a traditional accountant gave compared to what bookkeepers today giving, they are substitutable. Craig: Yes. Andrew: So, for their easily substitutable services, because financial statements by one is roughly the same as financial statements of another. You’re just pressing button to create them and it comes down to price. So, people are going towards the cheaper one and the bookkeepers are charging a third or a fifth of the price of a chartered accountant. Craig: Yes. Andrew: And they’re just small business people. After all, you have to be very savy when it comes to cost. So that’s what’s happening in the big firms, sharing a lot of business with the bookkeepers. Craig: Right. Andrew: The problem with that is, the chartered accountants do have enormous educational backgrounds, huge experience. They have wealth of knowledge which bookkeepers just do not have. Craig: No. Andrew: Bookkeepers are very good bookkeepers which I think is a very good business advisers. The problem when it comes to  small businesses is that they’ve never given advice and are probably blah with small business. So, now they’re losing out because they’re substitutable products and book keepers are getting in. So, come to tipping point where people are realizing, “Hey, I could do a lot more for my clients.” like we are. Craig: Yes. Andrew: And we’re telling people, “Hey, we’ll give you this advice and we’ll patch it up with the same sort of price as a bookkeeper.” Craig: Yeah, Andrew: “And we’ll give it routinely for you.” We’ll engage or we’re going to avenge the end up by the dumbing down of our profession and I think, more likely, we’ll get the dumbing down of the profession first of all be fore anyone can take a stand to exchange things. Craig: Yes. Andrew: It tends to be a compromise of convenience, price and quality. Probably, the most evident one of recent time is journalism. Craig: Right. Andrew: When was the last time you bought a newspaper? For me, probably a couple of years, maybe more and that’s because I can log into my iPad and I can read the news in the morning and get a gist of what’s going on in the world and never have to go to news and I’m quite happy with what it is.? The photographs are awful, they’re better from an iPhone. There’s no artistic merit. The grammatical and spelling errors are deplorable. These people struggled to get through school and they’ve chosen a profession where they’re writing English. So, we’re seeing them dumbing down as people go for convenience, quality and price.  Craig: Yup. Andrew: Over here, we got technology that’s running these reports and could be creating what the accountants used to do and they are accurate and they are, 90% is good, maybe? Maybe just as good in some cases then are easily substitutable. So, it’s easy to see why the consumers are going down that way. Craig: I guess it comes back down to educating the market place. There’s a bookkeeper who can do your work, your account in just a push of a button. But now we’re gonna educate, you actually need more than that and here are some service providers who offered the value and this is sort of something the account has shifted from being a compliance to adding value to your business. As a key partner to your business, isn’t it? Andrew: Okay. Craig: Like you said, transition and re-educating to market place. Andrew: Bookkeepers are great bookkeepers. If you’re wanting advice, you’re wanting to do anything important, you’re wanting to grow. You want to have plans on how you want to grow and succeed your business and how you sell it and how you value it whether the business you’re buying is actually making sense. You’re going to need a chartered accountant. Craig: Yes. Andrew: If you can get that information and you can get that sort of engagement, and that interest from someone then you should take every time because otherwise you’ll be with a bookkeeper and hey, if you’re content just kind of pottering along and doing the things that you want to do, you’ve got a lifestyle that you’re very happy with then a bookkeeper is the way to go. Craig: Yup.   [33:40] Andrew:  . If you want something more important or you want someone to advise you and collaborate with you and you really need someone who is going to give you that. But not off track the Craig: There’s gonna be no Andrew: There’s gonna be a few of those. Try not to get some bad ones. We see ourselves as more of collaborative. Craig: I guess also, in a way, it’s good that a small business like yourselves and there are other people with the same size as you that can change in a whim. But the corporates can’t have that flexibility. They can’t change overnight, they can’t adapt overnight, can they? Andrew: We’ve invested the last 6-7 months getting our review of our business up and running. Getting it done, understanding what we’re trying to achieve and reconfiguring our mindset around, “What does our client base want?” and we’ve invested our time and quite significant resource in getting our website up. So, we engaged a portal where people can ask questions, drop information, set up appointments. Engage over us with media and over Skype and all of these sorts of things. So, it’s not so much of a web…but I do agree that bigger firms have, if they wanted to undertake this, they would have a huge made up of systems and process to set up, maybe some staff to lose, maybe staff to be brought on, huge up scaling coming a lot longer. Craig: Yeah, you got the flexibility to make change and we can see what you’ve just been through yourself in the last 6-7 months. It’s that sort of thing that could potentially help your clients to do the same thing. Nothing happens overnight but you can help walk through that procedure, that exercise because you’ve done it yourself. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Craig: And if I had a big pocket full of money there to implement these sort of things,  you’d realize that it takes time to implement things, it takes time to redesign our website because that costs money. It doesn’t happen overnight. Andrew: We’re very happy sharing our thoughts and these things because really, that’s what we do. We give advice and when people are saying , “What portal should we use?” We’ll say, “Well have a look at   blah. It’s been great for us. ” Craig: “Better stay away from this one because this was a nightmare for us.” Andrew: Yeah. You’re going to have to pass on this knowledge because that was what we really suppose, we are collaborators. Similarly too, I started my business myself, I started it worth nothing, like 3 climbs(?). I’ve had to build my own business myself. So, if you’re starting a business, why would you go to someone who is fourth generation inheriting a chartered accountancy firm, who’s never started a business?  Craig: Never been but yeah Andrew: How can they advise you? {36:00} Craig: How could they know the pain of not being able to or pay the groceries that week?   Andrew: How could they not know what the hurdles are? Craig: Yes. Andrew: They might know from a theoretical standpoint but are never gonna know from a practical standpoint because they’ve never done it. Craig: No. Exactly. Exactly. So, from your experience, what are some of the mistakes that you see business owners are making? And what advice would you give both established and start up small businesses? Andrew: I guess when we look at the mistakes which are regularly made which was really made to put into effort to emphasize when taking on clients. First one is, budgeting for tax. You’d be surprise how many people don’t. We had businesses go under simply because they don’t budget for tax. But it’s very easy to actually get your mindset the right way that you could actually put money aside and never have that problem.  The other one is you’ve gotta write down goals or connect to something.  Write it down, it’s far more powerful than just keeping it in your head.     Craig: Do you think that you could share those goals? Andrew: Absolutely. Sharing your goals, sharing your knowledge, sharing your dreams. Craig: So, writing them down and sharing them. Andrew: It’s very important because as I said earlier, it starts that collaborative movement. You feel that you are being held to account by even if you tell your partner. She’ll go, “Oh, how are your goals going?” Craig: Yes. Andrew: “How are you actually achieve these?” “When are  you going to achieve this?” Or your friends, share them.  We see it with startup businesses and startup land with who is next door. Craig: Yup. Andrew: And they had a lot of people putting up different ideas and sharing all their knowledge and by doing so, they’re actually moved their businesses forward to their business ideas. If you keep your dreams to yourself then you’ll probably never realize it. If you share them then you might find that  there’s a movement. You might find somebody and they go, “Hey, that was a great idea. Let’s push this forward. I can help you here. I can get someone else to fill the void here and then we’ll move forward. ” Andrew: So, very true there. Craig: What’s a good advice would give them about these sorts of things? Andrew: I would say, write them down. Have a plan. Be mindful that your plan might change. Be mindful that if you set a goal now, in three years’ time you might have achieved it or you might have realized that it was totally unreachable. So that would change your path too. Craig: ..to a moving target sometimes. Yeah. Andrew: And let’s say, “Yeah, we’re very essential to this and we emphasize this.” Collaboration is key. Craig: Cool. Andrew: Use specialists. We do. There’s no point in trying to reinvent the wheel and trying to create your own resource where are resources out there which are free.  Even look at the tools of business on the IRD website. Very useful, it’s like, given in layman’s terms and answers all of the question that you have about your accountant. IRD gives you free GST classics. So, sign up for them. Craig: Yeah. Andrew: Otherwise, you’ll pay for your accountant, $600-700 to teach you the same thing that you’ll get for free. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use the people who are meant to give you these stuff. Craig: Awesome. Awesome. Hey, that’s been awesome, Andrew. Thanks very much for your time. I got some really cool tips from that and especially around the need to collaborate either friends, family, other business advisers, other business people, networking…just find some people. That’s great stuff. Seek advice. Expect more from our accountants. Ask what value are they providing you apart from just compliance. Big one, obviously is set your goals. Write them down and show them to some key people that you can keep in touch. Like what Andrew said, “ You share your goals with them and they’ll share your goals with you”  and you can review them for each other with a beer or something and keep in touch with your accountant. So, if someone wants to talk about the products and services that you provide, how do we get a hold of you, where could we find you? Andrew: So, we’re at www.moreca.co.nz  so that will give you direction as to how to engage with us. Craig: So, that’s more with one o or with two? Andrew: One. m-o-r-e-c-a.com That’s our platform. That’s our new website. There’s a lot of free resource on there. Craig: Awesome. Andrew: It’s pretty basic. It’s meant to start a conversation or to help you understand where you’re at. If you need more specific or particular advice…contact us through the portals. There’s plenty of them there. We offer a free consultation. Go by skype meeting if you’re outside the province or you can pop into the office but you can book that online as well. Craig: Awesome. Andrew: So, really, really became a helpful tool there to start the process and we’ll try to expand our blog in time. If you have any particular questions that are coming up, send them in. We might add them to the blog and add some feedback. Craig: Throw in an email if you need help. Andrew: Absolutely. Craig: Awesome. Now, we really appreciate it, Andrew. Thanks very much for your time. Andrew: Thank you, Craig.    

Lococast.net Episode 20 - Power is good... Intro Events Ohio Linuxfest - we'll be there, see us at the Michigan Loco booth Interview with Mike Pirnat Howoldismykid.com Links/Tools of the week(s) Sass - for firebug Live Reload Retaliation Webdev and caching discussion Books Rick Gost in the wires Craig What would google do Craig's Kobo […]