Podcasts about dorito

Tuesday, June 9, 2026Brock welcomes back his longtime best friend Josh Satterfield, and this time Josh brings his wife, Summer Satterfield, into the studio. The crew kicks off the morning with plenty of laughs, old friendship energy, and Summer slowly warming up to the mic after a few cups of coffee.The trending thread asks listeners about the random things they've found in or under their cars, which leads to some wild stories. Josh shares a nightmare grocery pickup story involving forgotten hamburger meat left in the trunk for weeks, turning his car into a rolling biohazard. Listeners also chime in with stories like Cheerios ending up inside a car's air cleaner thanks to chipmunks or squirrels, and a mechanic finding a Dorito bag taped behind a rattling speaker in a nearly brand-new car.The show also dives into plenty of “What the Heck” moments, including a New Jersey school that sends freshmen on a 55-mile Appalachian Trail hike to build character, a Texas child accidentally eating a THC lollipop from a school birthday goodie bag, a man in a Spider-Man mask robbing a storage unit on a moped, and a Florida sheriff describing a very awkward public indecency arrest in unforgettable fashion.Josh and Summer face off in the 7 AM Challenge with a round of The Feud, where the question is: “Name something you wish you could tell your husband but you're afraid it will end the marriage.” The answers get hilariously dangerous, ranging from bad bedroom performance and money problems to hating his mom. Josh wins, but the real victory is getting Summer talking on the radio.Later, Brock and the crew talk celebrity headlines, including Taylor Swift's rumored wedding plans, Nicolas Cage turning down huge roles, Taylor's new Toy Story 5 song, Guy Fieri allegedly not swallowing food on camera, and the idea of watching major events in virtual reality. Summer also shares that she is a wedding videographer, leading to a fun college throwback about Brock, Josh, and Summer all attending Evangel University together.The episode wraps with conversations about coffee shops, Onyx, Hot Shots memories, adulting, leftovers, pickleball addiction, softball plans, and a hilarious story about a 91-year-old pickleball player who fell twice, broke ribs, and still kept playing. It is a relaxed, funny, friend-filled episode with big “old friends hanging out in the studio” energy.

Nutrition Nugget! Bite-sized bonus episodes offer tips, tricks and approachable science. This week, Jenn is talking about Protein Doritos. Are these bold, crunchy chips actually a smart snack upgrade, or just clever marketing from one of the biggest food companies in the world? With 10 grams of protein per serving and a shorter-than-usual ingredient list for a Dorito, they might sound like a win, but is that the whole story? Jenn digs into the nutrition facts, the fat sources, the GMO disclosure, and that ever-important question of what "one serving" really looks like in real life. Could these actually be a better protein snack than a certain celebrity protein popcorn? And more importantly, do any of us really need protein packed into our chips? Tune in to find out where Jenn lands on this one. Like what you're hearing? Be sure to check out the full-length episodes of new releases every Wednesday. Have an idea for a nutrition nugget? Submit it here: https://asaladwithasideoffries.com/index.php/contact/ RESOURCES:Become a Happy Healthy Hub MemberJenn's Free Menu PlanA Salad With a Side of FriesA Salad With A Side Of Fries MerchA Salad With a Side of Fries Instagram90's vs NowNutrition Nugget: GMO to BENutrition Nugget: Khloud Protein PopcornKEYWORDS: Jenn Trepeck, Nutrition Nugget, Salad With A Side Of Fries, Health Tips, Wellness Tips, Protein Chips, Doritos Protein, Nacho Cheese Chips, Ultra-Processed Foods, Snack Food Nutrition, Food Label Reading, Nutrition Facts, Net Carbs, Protein Per Serving, Healthy Snacking, Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, Big Food Companies, Bioengineered Ingredients, GMO Disclosure, Casein Protein, Whey Protein Concentrate, Saturated Fat, Vegetable Oil, Corn Oil, Canola Oil, Soybean Oil, Artificial Flavors, Natural Flavors, Serving Size Awareness, Packaged Food Ingredients, Dietary Fiber, Calorie Count, Food Marketing Claims, Snack Food Comparison, Protein Popcorn, Healthy Chip Alternatives, Food Industry Trends, Weight Loss Snacks, Wellness Nutrition, Balanced Snacking, Ingredient List Analysis, Protein Labeling, Mindful Eating, How To Read Nutrition Labels On Protein Snacks, Are Protein Doritos Actually A Healthy Snack

Josh drops a chopstick at a restaurant and, without thinking, flags down the waiter for a new one. Dion and Christian are baffled. To them, you pick it up, you wipe it, and then you keep eating. To Josh, that's grub behaviour! We try to work out where the line is between sensible hygiene and prissy fussing, and whether wiping a fork on your t-shirt actually does anything. Then Christian gets pulled up over a request he made in a work meeting: He asked people to turn their cameras on. We try and establish when the camera-off culture took hold, and whether eating during a meeting is a fair play or rudeness of the highest order. Plus: would you rather eat a Dorito in its current form, or shaped like a Pringle and stacked in a tube? Christian thinks Pringles have figured something out the rest of the industry hasn't. The episode closes with the three of us trying to recreate a Vangelis instrument with our noses. You'll know the bit.Follow us on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook: linktr.ee/welcometopatchworkFor a couple of dollars a month you can sign up to our Patreon page and get a bonus Patch every off week! Check out: www.patreon.com/welcometopatchworkSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/welcometopatchworkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What were you doing 20 years ago?  We bring you another one of our Year in Gaming Episodes, where we go back 20 years to talk about the games we played from that year.  You never know what games we will mention or what will come up from one of these episodes. Grab some Mountain Dew and Dorito's and join us to reminiscence.  Starring Mike Albertin, Michael Colby, Phoebe Stanton, Kyle F, Tony G, and Mario.   Michael Colby's Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-bizarre-adventure/id1675264599 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jack-billings-presents-haunted-apartment-complex/id1572711048 Mario's Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/7Dj782USKkNpDWa2jmN21s A Gamer Looks at 40 - https://agamerlooksat40.com/ Carrying My Cross - https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/carrying-my-cross-a-faith-journey-podcast/id1865524685 Phoebe's Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/theletsplayprincess Phoebe's Podcast - https://nerdsabroadcast.podbean.com/ Zac's Podcast - https://linktr.ee/absolutelythebest Helena - https://linktr.ee/helhathfury Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/GamesMyMomFound Follow us on Facebook. Instagram - gamesmymomfound_ YouTube  - https://youtube.com/c/GamesMyMomFoundPodcast Discord - https://discord.gg/ Year in Gaming 1996 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-1996-gmmf Year In Gaming 2015 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2015-gmmf Year in Gaming 2005 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2005-gmmf Year In Gaming 1995 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-1995-gmmf Year in Gaming 2014 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2014-gmmf Year in Gaming 2004 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2004-gmmf Year In Gaming 1994 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-1994-gmmf Year In Gaming 2013 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2013-gmmf Year In Gaming 2003 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2003-gmmf Year in Gaming 2012 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2012-gmmf Year in Gaming 2002 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2002-gmmf Year in Gaming 2011 - GMMF https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/year-in-gaming-2011-gmmf Year in Gaming 2007 - GMMF 75 https://gamesmymomfoundpodcast.podbean.com/e/2007-year-in-gaming-gmmf-75

How technology fooled the world, the lies can't hide, Not every brand is designer, one view could be different, be. Careful what you wish for.   The boroughs, if wishes could kill, legends, re f the flies, should I Mary a murderer, swapped, running point, worst ex ever, good network. AeW   Hellmans burger mayo, Dorito taco salad, hamburger helper cheesy shells, red chimi churi, squiggly noodles, French dip bites, kabob pita wraps.   Happy hump day  stars

What if one ingredient could turn your weeknight dinners into satisfying dishes in less than 30 minutes — without ever feeling repetitive?Cooking dinner can sometimes feel like a dull routine, but a simple can of chickpeas can change that. In this re-release of a fan-favorite episode, and with the help of Sarah Bond, nutritionist and creator of Live Eat Learn, we dive into the world of vegetarian meals built around our favorite versatile, affordable pantry staple. By the end of this episode, you'll learn how to:Whip up the 15-minute viral “Marry Me Chickpeas” Discover the unique, simple spice blend for addictive “Dorito” chickpeas – a snack-turned-main-dish that even reluctant bean lovers will enjoyCook up easy-to-make meatless dinners, like crispy, golden air-fried chickpeas and a flavorful sheet pan meal packed with vegetables Hit play on this episode to uncover the endless possibilities of chickpeas! ***For more recipes and cooking inspiration, sign up for our free Substack here. And join us on our live monthly calls by upgrading your subscription to paid!***LinksSarah Bond's Instagram, her site: Live Eat Learn – Easy Vegetarian Recipes, and her cookbook!Marry Me Chickpeas (with creamy Tuscan sauce)Roasted chickpea gyros Roasted veggie glow bowlsCopy cat Cafe Yum sauceCrispy air fryer chickpeas 15-minute chickpea tacos with creamy cilantro sauceChickpea blondiesVegan chicken and dumplings (with chickpeas!)Chickpea pot pieVegan aquafaba + coconut popsicles****Got a cooking question? Leave us a message on our hotline at: 323-452-9084For more recipes and cooking inspiration, sign up for our Substack here.Are you a local to Portland or planning a visit? You can now book a private farmers' market tour with Sonya through Airbnb Experiences! Or order Sonya's cookbook Braids for more Food Friends recipes!

The Ultimate Nocturnal Hangout Step into the ultimate, unscripted nocturnal hangout with host Walter Sterling, tailored specifically for the 11% of people keeping the world running from 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM. Ditching boring politics, this unpredictably bizarre show bounces effortlessly from pop culture gossip and nostalgic TV deep-dives to gritty true crime stories. Buckle up for wild explorations into the paranormal and alternative history, including immortal time travelers, the lost empire of Tartaria, and rumors of FEMA directors teleporting into Waffle Houses. Toss in hilarious rants about downgraded Wawa hoagie bread, "Florida Stories" featuring Dorito-addicted alpacas, and Pokémon card shootouts at Kroger, and you have the perfect unfiltered audio companion for the true midnight lone wolf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to "Dishing with Stephanie's Dish," the show where we dive into the stories of people passionate about food, family traditions, and the recipes that connect us all. I'm your host, Stephanie Hansen, and today, I'm thrilled to sit down with cookbook author Sarah Peterson, whose new book, Dish and Tell: Recipes from the Heart, celebrates the beauty of vintage family recipes and the memories shared around the table. Dish and Tell: Recipes from the Heart highlights celebrated dishes from Peterson's recipe box—and collects stories from other passionate home cooks who opened their kitchens to share their own tried-and-true recipes. Peterson takes readers along as she visits, cooks, and bakes with friends old and new to present a smorgasbord of family favorites. She serves up stories about the people behind the dishes and offers special tips and tricks from the keepers of these recipes.Whether you're an avid home cook, a lover of kitchen nostalgia, or just here for some culinary inspiration, get ready to hear heartfelt stories, tips on cookbook writing, and a delicious conversation that will leave you hungry for more!Original Episode Transcript Follows:Stephanie Hansen [00:00:02]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Dishing with Stephanie's Dish podcast, where we talk to people in the food space who are as obsessed about food as we are. And today we're talking to the cookbook author Sarah Peterson. She is the author of Dish and Tell Recipes from the Heart. I'm going to hold up her book so that you guys can see it. It looks so cute. It's pink. Sarah, I am really excited to talk to you because I don't normally get to know people sort of along the whole journey of them writing a book and then seeing it released into the world. But that did happen with you and I.Sarah Peterson [00:00:37]:Yes, it did. We've known each other a little while, or at least I've known you. I've followed your career, and so it's been really great to have you to consult with a little bit, and you've really been a mentor to me throughout this process.Stephanie Hansen [00:00:50]:Well, and I think for you, coming from the PR world, which was where your background was, and then taking it into a cookbook, I'm seeing so many, like, similarities of how you're approaching things, and I think it's just super smart, and I can't wait to talk to you. So can you just give the viewer, the listener, a little bit of backstory about the book and why you wrote it and why it's special to you?Sarah Peterson [00:01:17]:Yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:01:18]:So.Sarah Peterson [00:01:18]:So about five years ago, maybe more, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my career. I'd been in PR a long time, telling other people's stories, writing in the voice of other people. I wanted to do something of my own. I had this love of everything vintage. I'm very nostalgic. I love any opportunity to, like, go back to my grandma's kitchens in my mind and, like, imagine them in their homes. And so this idea started brewing about, you know, what if I blogged about family recipes and shared some of these handwritten recipe cards, recipe boxes, my love of vintage. So I started with Instagram first, and I was posting a little bit, and then I.Sarah Peterson [00:02:00]:That kind of evolved into a blog, and that just really grew and grew, and it was just not my own family's recipes, but other people's families, too. Like, I started to just talk to my friends and my neighbors and ask them what are the recipes in their families that I've been handing down through the generations that are really close, you know, to their hearts, and started to share those stories on the blog and then thought, well, this could be a book. A book is daunting as you know, to write, but I had some encouragement from my dad and some other people and just pitched it to the Historical Society, and I'm just so grateful that they decided to publish it.Stephanie Hansen [00:02:37]:And what we're seeing in terms of trends for cookbooks is cookbooks that are AI proof, In other words, cookbooks that have a real narrative point of view on a story. And this book seems like it is exactly that and more. Did you feel uncomfortable or were you nervous about, like, being the keeper, the seed keeper, as it were, or the storykeeper of these stories and how you would translate them into an actual book?Sarah Peterson [00:03:07]:Yes. You mean for, like, other families? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what gave me maybe a little bit of confidence is that something that I had done in my career as a PR person and in one particular project for a client, I was tasked with shining the spotlight on small independent restaurants and the special role that they play in their communities. And so I had this chance to really interview them and tell their stories and talk about how they were making a difference in their communities. And so I was thinking about what I wanted to do with recipes and family stories, kind of drawing on that past experience of the storytelling, the type of storytelling I had done for restaurants and, like, small restaurant owners. And I think that helped give me some confidence. I think just seeing the difference it makes in someone's life, too, when they see a story printed about them. And I also love to shine the spotlight on, like, the underdogs.Sarah Peterson [00:04:03]:And I feel like home cooks don't get a lot of time in the sun, you know, So I wanted to do that. But, yeah, I do think there's a lot of responsibility you carry when you're telling somebody else's story. And it's not something I take lightly. So when I approach a story, I really, you know, lean on my journalistic background. I have a degree in journalism, try to get all the facts straight, run things by people, do fact checking, that kind of thing, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:04:33]:So you assembled all these stories and put them into a book along with your own family stories. And how has the book been received? Because it's really beautiful. It's super charming. There's lots of photos, recipe cards. It's very stylized in a sweet way.Sarah Peterson [00:04:51]:Thank you. I think it's been received really well. It's fun to see. Like, I've done a couple of events where people come up and they're just like, oh, this book is just so sweet. It reminds me of my grandma, and I can't wait to go look through her recipe box. That's like, the biggest compliment I can get. The Star Tribune editor, Nicole, she said she's the editor of Taste. She said it was like opening the book is like getting a big hug.Sarah Peterson [00:05:15]:And I think that's just so sweet, too. Like, I really wanted people to, of course, love the recipes and the stories, but I think, like, the imagery of vintage dishes, of recipe boxes, of grandmas and aprons, I mean, that's just like, so me. And I love all that, and I'm happy that other people seem to really love that as well.Stephanie Hansen [00:05:34]:I know it's hard to answer this question so soon after having the book come out, but this really does feel like it could continue on and be a series and continue to live on in your Instagram. Could even be like, audio, you know, version, or you could do television things with it because there's so much historical narrative in there. Has that occurred to you at all?Sarah Peterson [00:06:00]:Not so much yet. I mean, I'm trying to figure that all out now. Like, what do I want to do next? And I think, like, I would love to do more storytelling, more sharing of recipes, maybe more on my sub stack and my Instagram. But yeah, I mean, it could, there could be future editions of the book. But that's just so ambitious for me right now. Just kind of in the thick of it. Maybe I'll have to tap you for some more knowledge later on. But I mean, I do have, like, in talking to these families that I interviewed for the book, other stories would come up that they're, you know, other recipes.Sarah Peterson [00:06:34]:And certainly people that I've been meeting, doing events are telling me about their recipes. I had this woman come to see me at a book event at Kowalski's last weekend, and she brought her family cookbook that she had made, you know, just something that she had pieced together but was sharing with her family. And so it was really sweet, and I love seeing that, too. And I think, you know, sharing some of the recipes that other people share with me at events, but also talking about how they're recording their family recipes. Like, I think, if anything, I'd love to be an inspiration for other people or give people an inspiration to collect those recipes and show some of the formats that other families are using to share those with with their extended family.Stephanie Hansen [00:07:15]:As we talk about the nuts and bolts of making a cookbook, what was the hardest part for you in putting this book together?Sarah Peterson [00:07:25]:I think it was. It seemed so massive in the beginning, like, the organization of a cookbook. I've learned a lot in the process and, like, Have a rockin spreadsheet now. But that was very daunting in the beginning. Then I got into the thick of it, and I think toward the end, like, the editing. Oh, my gosh, that was really something because you don't know exactly when it's going to hit. Like, when are you going to have to look through this whole thing? Like, after. Even before it was in layout, like, just getting the manuscript and after the editor had done a first pass, and then you have to reread it all again, and you just have to, like, carve out a bunch of time and just get into it.Sarah Peterson [00:08:07]:And I thought that was really hard. It reminded me of being back in college when you're cramming for a final.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:11]:Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:08:13]:So I didn't, like, love that. But, I mean, it's just part of the process.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:18]:Yeah. Because the manuscript comes back and you don't know when. And then all of a sudden, like, your entire life is put on hold for however long it takes you to get through it.Sarah Peterson [00:08:25]:And for me, it was like a summer weekend. Like, oh, okay. I guess I'm gonna just be doing this for the next two weekend. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:33]:How did you feel about the photographing of the book? Because that can be a challenging part that stops people.Sarah Peterson [00:08:40]:I'm glad you asked about that because as you know, we have the same publisher. And it's really like, they were so great. They're like, sarah, just take photos like you're, you know, doing on your Instagram. These will be great. We'll make it work. Well, yes, but I just was, like, feeling I'm not a food stylist. You know, I do my thing and I take pictures in the moment when I'm making food, but I'm like, I don't know if these are cookbook worthy. And I do everything on my iPhone.Sarah Peterson [00:09:08]:I'm not gonna get a fancy camera. So as I got further along the process, pretty late in the process, I'm like, I just need some help, because I want somebody to help me get a really pretty shot for the COVID Help me shoot some of the things. Like, meat is so hard to take a pretty picture.Stephanie Hansen [00:09:24]:Yeah, for sure.Sarah Peterson [00:09:25]:Meatball. Or, you know, like, just. Oh. I was just really struggling, and I listened to your podcast and I know that you interviewed Rachel White of Set the Table Photography, who happens to be a food stylist as well. And I'd been following her on Instagram and really liked her style. So I reached out to her after hearing her on your podcast, and we met, and I just told her what I was doing. I said, I don't have a lot of money, but here's a few shots that I'd like to get. And she also took some headshots of me.Sarah Peterson [00:09:52]:But she came to my house for a few days, and we just banged out as much as we could. Not even like three full days. Like, two and a half days. I just was, like, cooking up a storm. We did headshots and lifestyle shots one morning, and then just a bunch of recipes and then, like, a bunch. A brunch spread one day, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:10]:So what that translated to me when looking at the book was we'll call them, like, some hero shots.Sarah Peterson [00:10:16]:Exactly.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:18]:That were. They were. It was funny because I couldn't necessarily tell when I was looking at the book, but I could see, like, just from the perspective of the stylized nature of the background and the more complete shot. Like, let's see if I can just find one that I can hold up.Sarah Peterson [00:10:44]:Yeah, A lot of the shots in, you know, the chapter intros.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:49]:Yeah, it's like, that one maybe.Sarah Peterson [00:10:52]:Yes, yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:53]:And I thought maybe that one.Sarah Peterson [00:10:56]:I took that one, actually. But I think just having Rachel, like, in. In the end, too, I was like, well, people are gonna. Is this gonna be weird to have a mix of really good professional pictures than my pictures? And then it was really important for me to have pictures that the families submitted, so candids and snapshots. And I know feature a lot of those in your cookbook, too. And I think those are so important, and I think they all came together. I hope so. Yeah, I did that one, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:11:28]:Oh, see, look at.Sarah Peterson [00:11:30]:I can't even tell if you look in the back. We credit which pages are definitely her pictures. But, you know, she did the COVIDStephanie Hansen [00:11:37]:shot, and that's this one. Yeah. No, I. I knew you had worked with her, but when I looked through the book, I thought I could tell, but I couldn't, so. Good for you.Sarah Peterson [00:11:49]:She helped me do the. The Dutch pancake.Stephanie Hansen [00:11:52]:Yep. Those are so hard to get because they deflate.Sarah Peterson [00:11:58]:I know. And the day that we did it, I just made the most gigantic one ever in my largest lodge skillet. And it worked. And, like, screaming in excitement that it came out so beautiful. And then it did deflate, but we made it look pretty with berries and powder. Powdered sugar. I did that one, too. That one.Sarah Peterson [00:12:16]:Handballs. But, like, she did these really pretty pictures of my recipe cards and recipe boxes, and she took pictures of me with my grandma's dishes. So she got a lot of shots, too, that obviously I Couldn't take because I was in them. Yeah, it was really nice. And I've been using her photos like crazy and all of my Instagram and marketing efforts, so I'm just so grateful that I had her. I wish I could have hired her for the whole thing. But I think, too, when you're making a cookbook, I don't know about you, but I like to eat what I make. And I'm, like, photographing it in the moment.Stephanie Hansen [00:12:49]:Yes.Sarah Peterson [00:12:50]:And I do like those kind of pictures too, so I'm really glad I have a mix.Stephanie Hansen [00:12:54]:I. I feel like, for me, if I'm not living that life or I'm not like, that is the life I live. So the intention is that it's happening in real time. I'm. I felt like this. Making this thing today, when I made it, this is what it looked like. This is how I ate it. This is how it.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:14]:The dishes I served it in. To me, that's what makes this food life fun. So when it becomes like a complete chore or a list or a job, that's when I find I don't like it as much.Sarah Peterson [00:13:26]:Right. And I do think that people resonate to real life pictures.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:31]:Yeah. We're lucky in that way, because if we would have been doing this during the fussy Instagram, first coming alive and everything being blown out white, beautiful shots,Sarah Peterson [00:13:42]:I don't know that we have to do that. And especially with AI now, you want things to look a little imperfect.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:47]:Tell me about how you scheduled your book tour and how you worked with your publishing company, because I feel like you're approaching it very methodically from a publicist standpoint, and I think that's helpful for cookbook writers.Sarah Peterson [00:14:05]:Well, I'm glad it appears so, because that is. That's been like a big surprise, like, book tour. Okay. I. You know, I didn't really know what to expect, and I've seen everything you've done, and you've done a phenomenal job. And I'm like, if I can do a fraction of what Stephanie does, that would be great. So really, right now, I'm in the thick of it. The book came out in February, but it was a little bit slow in getting events because I had a vacation and some other things planned.Sarah Peterson [00:14:33]:But then now, coming into April, I've got a lot more going on, and I've just been fielding requests that have come through the publisher or through my website, and I haven't said no to a lot. Although, know, like, there's things that come up, like speaking Opportunities. And I don't know that I'm there yet to do that kind of thing. So I'm just doing a mix of like, traditional book signings. The independent bookstores I absolutely love. I had a really sweet event in New at a bookstore called Luca. It was like, seriously, the set of the Gilmore Girls. It was so cute.Sarah Peterson [00:15:10]:That bookstore is amazing. And they had addition tell event where we talked about this. Like, how fun would it be to have people bring a recipe from their recipe box and we do a little recipe card swap. So we did that. And then they also made some of the dishes from the cookbook and we had like a potluck style event. So that was really sweet. So I think, you know, some of these events that come up are people that request them. Yeah, I do put on my PR hat and I'm like, well, how can we make this extra special and make it more an experience? And so I've been bringing.Sarah Peterson [00:15:42]:I've been hauling my grandma's china teacups to all these events filled with flowers. I gave you one places I use doilies made by my Aunt Jeannie. I bring pictures of the women in my family that I call the keepers that have been the keepers of our food traditions. So I sort of have this traveling roadshow.Stephanie Hansen [00:16:02]:A kid. Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:16:04]:But in terms of the events that I'm doing, I've just. Whatever comes my way, I'm kind of doing. I am not like seeking out things. I will say, though I do love the independent bookstores are really fun. And then this week I have an event at Fickers up in Duluth, which is my home. You know, Duluth and Cloquet. So that will be really exciting to do something like that where they're making the food and I just, you know, come in and speak and mingle with people. That will be.Sarah Peterson [00:16:32]:That will be nice.Stephanie Hansen [00:16:34]:We have an or we have a Taste Buds with Stephanie episode coming up with you. I know Michelle is editing it right now, and it is where we made sandwich loaf. And you have the recipe and the techniques for sandwich loaf in your book. Can you just talk a little bit about why sandwich loaf is important to you?Sarah Peterson [00:16:57]:I would love to talk about sandwich loaf.Stephanie Hansen [00:17:00]:It was the funnest thing I've done.Sarah Peterson [00:17:03]:Sandwich loaf is something that I just. I just love it so much. And for people who don't know what it is, it's basically a layered sandwich that comes in a loaf. It looks really pretty, like almost like a wedding cake. And then you slice it so it's like layers. It's Bread with layers of tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, pimento cheese, whatever you want to put on the inside. And then it's all encased in cream cheese and decorated with. You can decorate it with, like, piped cream cheese that's tinted so it truly does look like a pretty cake.Sarah Peterson [00:17:35]:Or. My friend Tony and I like to do it with vegetables and herbs and just make little flowers and whimsical butterflies. So my passion for sandwich loaf started when I was probably growing up. It just showed up at, like, wedding showers, baby showers, graduations. And I always loved it. I mean, I loved how it tasted, and it was just kind of enamored by how charming it is. And then my friend Tony had it at her wedding, and we just. We.Sarah Peterson [00:18:01]:We share a bond over sandwich loaf. And part of it. She has an aunt that works at the Super One Deli up in Cloquet and made these things. And that's how we'd get them growing up. They're always ordered from the deli. They didn't make them. But Tony and I were like, we should. We should make one of these.Sarah Peterson [00:18:17]:You know, we can buy the. It's called Pullman bread. It's that long, rectangular bread. She's like, we can just order that from the deli and make our own sandwich loaf. And wouldn't this be fun? And I think we were probably influenced by Instagram seeing other kinds of decorated cakes.Stephanie Hansen [00:18:33]:Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:18:33]:Pasture breads, where people are doing, like, fun, fun scenes. So we just started doing it a few years ago around Mother's Day. We've done it at her house. We've done it at my house, my parents house. And we'd share it with ladies in our life that we know would appreciate it. And we got such a great response. People that know sandwich loaf love it, and they're just so excited to get it. So we make, like, the big ones, then we'd cut them up and do little smaller ones, decorate them really cute and hand them out around town.Stephanie Hansen [00:19:03]:It was so fun to make that with you. I had seen sandwich loaf, but when Michelle, my producer, was like, hey, she wants to make a sandwich loaf. I was like, yeah, we can make whatever she wants to make. And then when I got there, I was like, oh, yeah, like, this is how we do it. And just making the pimento cheese and, you know, do you put tuna in? Because some people feel weird about fish. And then we had this. Do you have a salmon loaf? Like, do you have egg salad? Just such a blast making that. And I can't wait for us to show people what that's like on television.Stephanie Hansen [00:19:40]:This weekend it'll air Saturday at 8.30am it will launch on Instagram or, excuse me, it will launch on YouTube on Thursday and then it lives into perpetuity. And I'm sure they'll air it again. So it's nicely timed for your book. Thank goodness.Sarah Peterson [00:19:55]:And it's sandwich loaf season, I mean, in my world. So I'll be up in Duluth around Mother's Day and my friend Tony and I are planning to get together and make some. And it's just such a pretty spring thing and I think it would be great if people started serving them again at showers.Stephanie Hansen [00:20:08]:Yes, yes.Sarah Peterson [00:20:11]:Beautiful food item. And it's, it's tasty. You can customize it how you want. You know, you can make more than one if somebody doesn't like tuna or if you want to add some other salad. Yeah, I think it's going to be great. And it would be a fun group activity, wouldn't it, with your girlfriends?Stephanie Hansen [00:20:27]:Like. Yes.Sarah Peterson [00:20:28]:I love it because we just have fun decorating them together.Stephanie Hansen [00:20:31]:I also think it's a good multi generational thing, like for Mother's Day where, you know, you can have the kids, the grandkids, really, everyone can sort of get involved if they're, you know, I guess they have to be 10 or older probably. Unless they're. I mean, you see these little kids on Instagram making gourmet meals now. I don't know how that works. That wasn't.Sarah Peterson [00:20:51]:Well, you could make a peanut butter and jelly one. Like you could really modify the ingredients. I mean, that's not the way that I grew up with it, but it'd be fun to see what people do with it.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:00]:Yeah. And you could think you could frost it with peanut butter. Like that'd be pretty easy to do, actually.Sarah Peterson [00:21:04]:Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:05]:Or just frosting in and of itself and then have like a, a sweet with jam and kind of. That would be really good too. Or like a cream cheese buttercream for sure.Sarah Peterson [00:21:17]:And I just think it's so pretty when you cut into it too. Like it's pretty on its own when it's decorated in its loaf form. But when you slice into it, the picture of, you know, just how it looks when, when it's on the plate I think is really pretty.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:32]:I'm just gonna see if I can find it here so I can show it.Sarah Peterson [00:21:35]:Yeah, here's the. It looks kind of funny on the camera there.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:39]:Can you see it pull back a little bit? Yes, now I can. Yep. It looks great.Sarah Peterson [00:21:45]:That's like in its full, complete form. And then here it is sliced. And I like it on vintage luncheon plates that, you know, the kind our grandmas and our moms used years ago. And they have the little indentation for the coffee mug.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:01]:We just had Easter yesterday and my mother in law is 94, I think, and came for Easter dinner. And over the years she keeps giving me, you know, dishes and things that she's offloading, as it were, but I kept. I've kept stuff. And we used to have Easter all the time in Nebraska with her at her house there. So I made the Easter spread. I used her tablecloth, I used her silverware forks. I used these little paper mache bunnies that she used to put on the table that I still kept. And it was so sweet to see her come to the house yesterday and sit down and like recognize all this stuff that we had when Ellie was little and we would have Easter with her.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:46]:It was. I was so glad I kept it all. You know, it's kind of a pain, but I'm so glad I did.Sarah Peterson [00:22:51]:Oh, and you'll have that to enjoy for years. And what a great memory. I mean, and I bet Dolores was just tickled.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:56]:She was, she really, she. She really was. And the funny thing, I said, well, you know, that's your tablecloth. And she said, well, where are the napkins? And I didn't really remember that there were napkins because they were in a closet and probably in a box and I didn't unearth them. So I was like, oh, I have the napkins. I just didn't get them out. Like, you know, where are the napkins? All right, so we are going to feature you on the Taste Buds episode. It's a Dec.Stephanie Hansen [00:23:22]:Decades episode where we had to think of recipes that were important to us like through the decades. So sandwich loaf was one. Then I did a Chicken Marbella, which I don't know if you did any dinner parties in the 80s, but if you did, that was what everybody made into like probably the early 90s too.Sarah Peterson [00:23:44]:I can't wait to try that. I have not had that dish.Stephanie Hansen [00:23:47]:It is the simplest thing to make and it has a power punch of flavor. I always double the sauce just because I like it. Really saucy, but it sounds gross. And my producer was like, oh, wait, we're putting prunes in this. I was like, yeah, you just gotta trust me. It's gonna be really great. And then by the time it's all done, you have this really delicious Sauce and the cooked chicken and you can just throw it in one big pan or one big pot and then serve it right from the pot. So it's an easy dinner party.Sarah Peterson [00:24:19]:Dinner party, yeah. That sounds really good.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:22]:Do you have any, like 80s or 90s dishes that you. Not actual dishes, but things to make that you're like, oh, I. If I had to do a decades theme, what would you make?Sarah Peterson [00:24:32]:You know, let's see. So the 80s, I wasn't cooking too much, but I love.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:37]:Because you're so much younger than me.Sarah Peterson [00:24:38]:I'm not so much younger, but I was in that time of life where it was like high school. School.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:43]:Yep.Sarah Peterson [00:24:44]:Not doing a lot of entertaining or anything. I can't think of. I don't know if this is. I mean, we love Dorito. The taco salad with Doritos. I don't know if that's 80s or 90s, but like.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:56]:No, it's. I think it's 90s. And we actually talked about taco salads when we were trying to think about, like, what would be we. I couldn't think of anything of the 90s. And then my producer Michelle, like came up with a bunch of stuff. And taco salad was actually also mud pie.Sarah Peterson [00:25:14]:Yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:25:15]:So we ended up making a mud pie bar that was actually a recipe that my stepmom had. But, like, people were eating a lot of mud pie apparently in the 90s. And chocolate lava cakes.Sarah Peterson [00:25:27]:Oh my gosh. And chocolate lava cakes. Are they. They're back. I mean, I see they are back. My daughter Lucy is a big fan, so anytime we're out to eat, she's got to get a chocolate lava cake.Stephanie Hansen [00:25:36]:Have you ever made one?Sarah Peterson [00:25:38]:No, have you?Stephanie Hansen [00:25:39]:I have attempted it like three different times and it never works. I always get a delicious brownie but like getting that molten lava piece in the middle have not succeeded yet. So I didn't want to do that on camera because I was like, oh, I just don't know.Sarah Peterson [00:25:56]:So, yeah, in 90s dishes. I was just thinking of one thing that my mom has made throughout my life and is in the cookbook are Italian shells. So the big pasta shells. Yes, we ate them a lot in the 90s. We probably ate them definitely after. But just the big pasta shells loaded with Italian sausage, some torn up bread, a, you know, an egg base in there and some pasta sauce and cheese and then smothered with more sauce and cheese. That was like at every big occasion in my life.Stephanie Hansen [00:26:28]:I love it. So delicious. Well, Sarah, congratulations on the book. I'm happy to be on this journey with you, and I'm real proud of you. I think the book is beautiful, and I'm glad you're having so much success. And I can't wait till people see us make sandwich loaf on taste buds this weekend.Sarah Peterson [00:26:46]:Well, thank you. And I just have to thank you for everything, Stephanie. It's been so fun to watch your career and how you've evolved and. And done all these amazing things with your radio show, with your books, all your books and the TV show, too. It's been really fun to follow along.Stephanie Hansen [00:27:01]:Thanks. I. I had people that helped me along the way, so I feel like it's my obligation, but also my joy to help other people because, you know, I. There are things about being a freelance creator and freelance writer and cookbook writer that no one can answer for you unless they've done it. And, you know that first person that told you, like, how much they made and how long it took and what to expect for food costs and, like, those were really valuable lessons that I was so glad that I learned and that people gave me the real deal because I think that is part of, you know, some people write books for fame and fortune. Some people write them to document a historical time in their life or something that's important to them. And then some people just do it because they think it's fun. But all of it and getting, you know, the historical background about what it's going to cost and how long it's going to take, it's important information, I think, to learn before you set out on the journey.Sarah Peterson [00:28:01]:Right. And you're doing such a great service to find that information and share it with the world. So.Stephanie Hansen [00:28:07]:Yeah. And I think your story about the food stylist, too, like, people, you don't have to have a food stylist. Do the whole book. Like, you could have 10 shots or hero shots or the beginning of chapter shots. That's a great way to do.Sarah Peterson [00:28:19]:And just like spending that time with Rachel, too, for those two or three days, like, I just learned so much. So I've taken some of that experience and been able to piggyback on that and some of the photography and things that I'm doing now.Stephanie Hansen [00:28:33]:Yeah, she's really good at it. So I'm glad that Rachel was a resource for you. Her podcast, you can find it in the archives, too, of Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, because it's in there and it's a good one to listen to. So, Sarah, thanks for being with me today. Congratulations on the book. It is Dish and Tell. And where can people get the book and how do you want them toSarah Peterson [00:28:53]:follow you so they can find the book at, you know, online through the major retailers. And then if you're in the Twin Cities, it's at, like, Kowalski's and a lot of independent bookstores. It's even at Barnes and Noble. I went by and visited it this weekend at the Barnes and Noble in Roseville. I've been going around and seeing my book at different places. It's so exciting, and people can follow me. My website is vintagedishandtel.com. my social media handles are the same.Sarah Peterson [00:29:19]:Vintage, Dish and Tell. And then I have a sub stack too, which, if you can't find, just go to my website and you'll be able to link to it.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:26]:Has anyone told you that when you see your book in the wild, you're supposed to sign them?Sarah Peterson [00:29:31]:No, I've thought about that. Do you, like. Do you talk to the bookstore manager or the.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:38]:Sometimes I wouldn't. At a Barnes and Noble, I'd probably just do it. But there's a real rationale behind it, because booksellers can return books that don't sell. They can't return books that are signed.Sarah Peterson [00:29:50]:I'm gonna go sign every one I can find.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:52]:Yeah, I. Whenever I'm out and about, and if it's a small store, I will tell them, okay. But if I see it, I'm. I'll just. I go to the bookseller and I'm like, hey, I'm here and my book is here. Do you mind if I sign a couple? A lot of them have stickers and they'll put, you know, signed edition. But if I'm at, like, Barnes and Noble, I just sit there with my pen and sign them all.Sarah Peterson [00:30:11]:Oh, that's great. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:12]:So make sure you sign them.Sarah Peterson [00:30:13]:Thanks for that. Hot tip.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:14]:Yeah, hot tip. Hot tip. All right, Sarah, thanks for joining me today.Sarah Peterson [00:30:18]:Thank you.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:18]:Okay, bye. Bye.Sarah Peterson [00:30:20]:Bye.Stephanie Hansen's @StephaniesDish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to "Dishing with Stephanie's Dish," the show where we dive into the stories of people passionate about food, family traditions, and the recipes that connect us all. I'm your host, Stephanie Hansen, and today, I'm thrilled to sit down with cookbook author Sarah Peterson, whose new book, Dish and Tell: Recipes from the Heart, celebrates the beauty of vintage family recipes and the memories shared around the table. Dish and Tell: Recipes from the Heart highlights celebrated dishes from Peterson's recipe box—and collects stories from other passionate home cooks who opened their kitchens to share their own tried-and-true recipes. Peterson takes readers along as she visits, cooks, and bakes with friends old and new to present a smorgasbord of family favorites. She serves up stories about the people behind the dishes and offers special tips and tricks from the keepers of these recipes.Whether you're an avid home cook, a lover of kitchen nostalgia, or just here for some culinary inspiration, get ready to hear heartfelt stories, tips on cookbook writing, and a delicious conversation that will leave you hungry for more!Original Episode Transcript Follows:Stephanie Hansen [00:00:02]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Dishing with Stephanie's Dish podcast, where we talk to people in the food space who are as obsessed about food as we are. And today we're talking to the cookbook author Sarah Peterson. She is the author of Dish and Tell Recipes from the Heart. I'm going to hold up her book so that you guys can see it. It looks so cute. It's pink. Sarah, I am really excited to talk to you because I don't normally get to know people sort of along the whole journey of them writing a book and then seeing it released into the world. But that did happen with you and I.Sarah Peterson [00:00:37]:Yes, it did. We've known each other a little while, or at least I've known you. I've followed your career, and so it's been really great to have you to consult with a little bit, and you've really been a mentor to me throughout this process.Stephanie Hansen [00:00:50]:Well, and I think for you, coming from the PR world, which was where your background was, and then taking it into a cookbook, I'm seeing so many, like, similarities of how you're approaching things, and I think it's just super smart, and I can't wait to talk to you. So can you just give the viewer, the listener, a little bit of backstory about the book and why you wrote it and why it's special to you?Sarah Peterson [00:01:17]:Yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:01:18]:So.Sarah Peterson [00:01:18]:So about five years ago, maybe more, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my career. I'd been in PR a long time, telling other people's stories, writing in the voice of other people. I wanted to do something of my own. I had this love of everything vintage. I'm very nostalgic. I love any opportunity to, like, go back to my grandma's kitchens in my mind and, like, imagine them in their homes. And so this idea started brewing about, you know, what if I blogged about family recipes and shared some of these handwritten recipe cards, recipe boxes, my love of vintage. So I started with Instagram first, and I was posting a little bit, and then I.Sarah Peterson [00:02:00]:That kind of evolved into a blog, and that just really grew and grew, and it was just not my own family's recipes, but other people's families, too. Like, I started to just talk to my friends and my neighbors and ask them what are the recipes in their families that I've been handing down through the generations that are really close, you know, to their hearts, and started to share those stories on the blog and then thought, well, this could be a book. A book is daunting as you know, to write, but I had some encouragement from my dad and some other people and just pitched it to the Historical Society, and I'm just so grateful that they decided to publish it.Stephanie Hansen [00:02:37]:And what we're seeing in terms of trends for cookbooks is cookbooks that are AI proof, In other words, cookbooks that have a real narrative point of view on a story. And this book seems like it is exactly that and more. Did you feel uncomfortable or were you nervous about, like, being the keeper, the seed keeper, as it were, or the storykeeper of these stories and how you would translate them into an actual book?Sarah Peterson [00:03:07]:Yes. You mean for, like, other families? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what gave me maybe a little bit of confidence is that something that I had done in my career as a PR person and in one particular project for a client, I was tasked with shining the spotlight on small independent restaurants and the special role that they play in their communities. And so I had this chance to really interview them and tell their stories and talk about how they were making a difference in their communities. And so I was thinking about what I wanted to do with recipes and family stories, kind of drawing on that past experience of the storytelling, the type of storytelling I had done for restaurants and, like, small restaurant owners. And I think that helped give me some confidence. I think just seeing the difference it makes in someone's life, too, when they see a story printed about them. And I also love to shine the spotlight on, like, the underdogs.Sarah Peterson [00:04:03]:And I feel like home cooks don't get a lot of time in the sun, you know, So I wanted to do that. But, yeah, I do think there's a lot of responsibility you carry when you're telling somebody else's story. And it's not something I take lightly. So when I approach a story, I really, you know, lean on my journalistic background. I have a degree in journalism, try to get all the facts straight, run things by people, do fact checking, that kind of thing, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:04:33]:So you assembled all these stories and put them into a book along with your own family stories. And how has the book been received? Because it's really beautiful. It's super charming. There's lots of photos, recipe cards. It's very stylized in a sweet way.Sarah Peterson [00:04:51]:Thank you. I think it's been received really well. It's fun to see. Like, I've done a couple of events where people come up and they're just like, oh, this book is just so sweet. It reminds me of my grandma, and I can't wait to go look through her recipe box. That's like, the biggest compliment I can get. The Star Tribune editor, Nicole, she said she's the editor of Taste. She said it was like opening the book is like getting a big hug.Sarah Peterson [00:05:15]:And I think that's just so sweet, too. Like, I really wanted people to, of course, love the recipes and the stories, but I think, like, the imagery of vintage dishes, of recipe boxes, of grandmas and aprons, I mean, that's just like, so me. And I love all that, and I'm happy that other people seem to really love that as well.Stephanie Hansen [00:05:34]:I know it's hard to answer this question so soon after having the book come out, but this really does feel like it could continue on and be a series and continue to live on in your Instagram. Could even be like, audio, you know, version, or you could do television things with it because there's so much historical narrative in there. Has that occurred to you at all?Sarah Peterson [00:06:00]:Not so much yet. I mean, I'm trying to figure that all out now. Like, what do I want to do next? And I think, like, I would love to do more storytelling, more sharing of recipes, maybe more on my sub stack and my Instagram. But yeah, I mean, it could, there could be future editions of the book. But that's just so ambitious for me right now. Just kind of in the thick of it. Maybe I'll have to tap you for some more knowledge later on. But I mean, I do have, like, in talking to these families that I interviewed for the book, other stories would come up that they're, you know, other recipes.Sarah Peterson [00:06:34]:And certainly people that I've been meeting, doing events are telling me about their recipes. I had this woman come to see me at a book event at Kowalski's last weekend, and she brought her family cookbook that she had made, you know, just something that she had pieced together but was sharing with her family. And so it was really sweet, and I love seeing that, too. And I think, you know, sharing some of the recipes that other people share with me at events, but also talking about how they're recording their family recipes. Like, I think, if anything, I'd love to be an inspiration for other people or give people an inspiration to collect those recipes and show some of the formats that other families are using to share those with with their extended family.Stephanie Hansen [00:07:15]:As we talk about the nuts and bolts of making a cookbook, what was the hardest part for you in putting this book together?Sarah Peterson [00:07:25]:I think it was. It seemed so massive in the beginning, like, the organization of a cookbook. I've learned a lot in the process and, like, Have a rockin spreadsheet now. But that was very daunting in the beginning. Then I got into the thick of it, and I think toward the end, like, the editing. Oh, my gosh, that was really something because you don't know exactly when it's going to hit. Like, when are you going to have to look through this whole thing? Like, after. Even before it was in layout, like, just getting the manuscript and after the editor had done a first pass, and then you have to reread it all again, and you just have to, like, carve out a bunch of time and just get into it.Sarah Peterson [00:08:07]:And I thought that was really hard. It reminded me of being back in college when you're cramming for a final.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:11]:Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:08:13]:So I didn't, like, love that. But, I mean, it's just part of the process.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:18]:Yeah. Because the manuscript comes back and you don't know when. And then all of a sudden, like, your entire life is put on hold for however long it takes you to get through it.Sarah Peterson [00:08:25]:And for me, it was like a summer weekend. Like, oh, okay. I guess I'm gonna just be doing this for the next two weekend. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:08:33]:How did you feel about the photographing of the book? Because that can be a challenging part that stops people.Sarah Peterson [00:08:40]:I'm glad you asked about that because as you know, we have the same publisher. And it's really like, they were so great. They're like, sarah, just take photos like you're, you know, doing on your Instagram. These will be great. We'll make it work. Well, yes, but I just was, like, feeling I'm not a food stylist. You know, I do my thing and I take pictures in the moment when I'm making food, but I'm like, I don't know if these are cookbook worthy. And I do everything on my iPhone.Sarah Peterson [00:09:08]:I'm not gonna get a fancy camera. So as I got further along the process, pretty late in the process, I'm like, I just need some help, because I want somebody to help me get a really pretty shot for the COVID Help me shoot some of the things. Like, meat is so hard to take a pretty picture.Stephanie Hansen [00:09:24]:Yeah, for sure.Sarah Peterson [00:09:25]:Meatball. Or, you know, like, just. Oh. I was just really struggling, and I listened to your podcast and I know that you interviewed Rachel White of Set the Table Photography, who happens to be a food stylist as well. And I'd been following her on Instagram and really liked her style. So I reached out to her after hearing her on your podcast, and we met, and I just told her what I was doing. I said, I don't have a lot of money, but here's a few shots that I'd like to get. And she also took some headshots of me.Sarah Peterson [00:09:52]:But she came to my house for a few days, and we just banged out as much as we could. Not even like three full days. Like, two and a half days. I just was, like, cooking up a storm. We did headshots and lifestyle shots one morning, and then just a bunch of recipes and then, like, a bunch. A brunch spread one day, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:10]:So what that translated to me when looking at the book was we'll call them, like, some hero shots.Sarah Peterson [00:10:16]:Exactly.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:18]:That were. They were. It was funny because I couldn't necessarily tell when I was looking at the book, but I could see, like, just from the perspective of the stylized nature of the background and the more complete shot. Like, let's see if I can just find one that I can hold up.Sarah Peterson [00:10:44]:Yeah, A lot of the shots in, you know, the chapter intros.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:49]:Yeah, it's like, that one maybe.Sarah Peterson [00:10:52]:Yes, yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:10:53]:And I thought maybe that one.Sarah Peterson [00:10:56]:I took that one, actually. But I think just having Rachel, like, in. In the end, too, I was like, well, people are gonna. Is this gonna be weird to have a mix of really good professional pictures than my pictures? And then it was really important for me to have pictures that the families submitted, so candids and snapshots. And I know feature a lot of those in your cookbook, too. And I think those are so important, and I think they all came together. I hope so. Yeah, I did that one, too.Stephanie Hansen [00:11:28]:Oh, see, look at.Sarah Peterson [00:11:30]:I can't even tell if you look in the back. We credit which pages are definitely her pictures. But, you know, she did the COVIDStephanie Hansen [00:11:37]:shot, and that's this one. Yeah. No, I. I knew you had worked with her, but when I looked through the book, I thought I could tell, but I couldn't, so. Good for you.Sarah Peterson [00:11:49]:She helped me do the. The Dutch pancake.Stephanie Hansen [00:11:52]:Yep. Those are so hard to get because they deflate.Sarah Peterson [00:11:58]:I know. And the day that we did it, I just made the most gigantic one ever in my largest lodge skillet. And it worked. And, like, screaming in excitement that it came out so beautiful. And then it did deflate, but we made it look pretty with berries and powder. Powdered sugar. I did that one, too. That one.Sarah Peterson [00:12:16]:Handballs. But, like, she did these really pretty pictures of my recipe cards and recipe boxes, and she took pictures of me with my grandma's dishes. So she got a lot of shots, too, that obviously I Couldn't take because I was in them. Yeah, it was really nice. And I've been using her photos like crazy and all of my Instagram and marketing efforts, so I'm just so grateful that I had her. I wish I could have hired her for the whole thing. But I think, too, when you're making a cookbook, I don't know about you, but I like to eat what I make. And I'm, like, photographing it in the moment.Stephanie Hansen [00:12:49]:Yes.Sarah Peterson [00:12:50]:And I do like those kind of pictures too, so I'm really glad I have a mix.Stephanie Hansen [00:12:54]:I. I feel like, for me, if I'm not living that life or I'm not like, that is the life I live. So the intention is that it's happening in real time. I'm. I felt like this. Making this thing today, when I made it, this is what it looked like. This is how I ate it. This is how it.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:14]:The dishes I served it in. To me, that's what makes this food life fun. So when it becomes like a complete chore or a list or a job, that's when I find I don't like it as much.Sarah Peterson [00:13:26]:Right. And I do think that people resonate to real life pictures.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:31]:Yeah. We're lucky in that way, because if we would have been doing this during the fussy Instagram, first coming alive and everything being blown out white, beautiful shots,Sarah Peterson [00:13:42]:I don't know that we have to do that. And especially with AI now, you want things to look a little imperfect.Stephanie Hansen [00:13:47]:Tell me about how you scheduled your book tour and how you worked with your publishing company, because I feel like you're approaching it very methodically from a publicist standpoint, and I think that's helpful for cookbook writers.Sarah Peterson [00:14:05]:Well, I'm glad it appears so, because that is. That's been like a big surprise, like, book tour. Okay. I. You know, I didn't really know what to expect, and I've seen everything you've done, and you've done a phenomenal job. And I'm like, if I can do a fraction of what Stephanie does, that would be great. So really, right now, I'm in the thick of it. The book came out in February, but it was a little bit slow in getting events because I had a vacation and some other things planned.Sarah Peterson [00:14:33]:But then now, coming into April, I've got a lot more going on, and I've just been fielding requests that have come through the publisher or through my website, and I haven't said no to a lot. Although, know, like, there's things that come up, like speaking Opportunities. And I don't know that I'm there yet to do that kind of thing. So I'm just doing a mix of like, traditional book signings. The independent bookstores I absolutely love. I had a really sweet event in New at a bookstore called Luca. It was like, seriously, the set of the Gilmore Girls. It was so cute.Sarah Peterson [00:15:10]:That bookstore is amazing. And they had addition tell event where we talked about this. Like, how fun would it be to have people bring a recipe from their recipe box and we do a little recipe card swap. So we did that. And then they also made some of the dishes from the cookbook and we had like a potluck style event. So that was really sweet. So I think, you know, some of these events that come up are people that request them. Yeah, I do put on my PR hat and I'm like, well, how can we make this extra special and make it more an experience? And so I've been bringing.Sarah Peterson [00:15:42]:I've been hauling my grandma's china teacups to all these events filled with flowers. I gave you one places I use doilies made by my Aunt Jeannie. I bring pictures of the women in my family that I call the keepers that have been the keepers of our food traditions. So I sort of have this traveling roadshow.Stephanie Hansen [00:16:02]:A kid. Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:16:04]:But in terms of the events that I'm doing, I've just. Whatever comes my way, I'm kind of doing. I am not like seeking out things. I will say, though I do love the independent bookstores are really fun. And then this week I have an event at Fickers up in Duluth, which is my home. You know, Duluth and Cloquet. So that will be really exciting to do something like that where they're making the food and I just, you know, come in and speak and mingle with people. That will be.Sarah Peterson [00:16:32]:That will be nice.Stephanie Hansen [00:16:34]:We have an or we have a Taste Buds with Stephanie episode coming up with you. I know Michelle is editing it right now, and it is where we made sandwich loaf. And you have the recipe and the techniques for sandwich loaf in your book. Can you just talk a little bit about why sandwich loaf is important to you?Sarah Peterson [00:16:57]:I would love to talk about sandwich loaf.Stephanie Hansen [00:17:00]:It was the funnest thing I've done.Sarah Peterson [00:17:03]:Sandwich loaf is something that I just. I just love it so much. And for people who don't know what it is, it's basically a layered sandwich that comes in a loaf. It looks really pretty, like almost like a wedding cake. And then you slice it so it's like layers. It's Bread with layers of tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, pimento cheese, whatever you want to put on the inside. And then it's all encased in cream cheese and decorated with. You can decorate it with, like, piped cream cheese that's tinted so it truly does look like a pretty cake.Sarah Peterson [00:17:35]:Or. My friend Tony and I like to do it with vegetables and herbs and just make little flowers and whimsical butterflies. So my passion for sandwich loaf started when I was probably growing up. It just showed up at, like, wedding showers, baby showers, graduations. And I always loved it. I mean, I loved how it tasted, and it was just kind of enamored by how charming it is. And then my friend Tony had it at her wedding, and we just. We.Sarah Peterson [00:18:01]:We share a bond over sandwich loaf. And part of it. She has an aunt that works at the Super One Deli up in Cloquet and made these things. And that's how we'd get them growing up. They're always ordered from the deli. They didn't make them. But Tony and I were like, we should. We should make one of these.Sarah Peterson [00:18:17]:You know, we can buy the. It's called Pullman bread. It's that long, rectangular bread. She's like, we can just order that from the deli and make our own sandwich loaf. And wouldn't this be fun? And I think we were probably influenced by Instagram seeing other kinds of decorated cakes.Stephanie Hansen [00:18:33]:Yeah.Sarah Peterson [00:18:33]:Pasture breads, where people are doing, like, fun, fun scenes. So we just started doing it a few years ago around Mother's Day. We've done it at her house. We've done it at my house, my parents house. And we'd share it with ladies in our life that we know would appreciate it. And we got such a great response. People that know sandwich loaf love it, and they're just so excited to get it. So we make, like, the big ones, then we'd cut them up and do little smaller ones, decorate them really cute and hand them out around town.Stephanie Hansen [00:19:03]:It was so fun to make that with you. I had seen sandwich loaf, but when Michelle, my producer, was like, hey, she wants to make a sandwich loaf. I was like, yeah, we can make whatever she wants to make. And then when I got there, I was like, oh, yeah, like, this is how we do it. And just making the pimento cheese and, you know, do you put tuna in? Because some people feel weird about fish. And then we had this. Do you have a salmon loaf? Like, do you have egg salad? Just such a blast making that. And I can't wait for us to show people what that's like on television.Stephanie Hansen [00:19:40]:This weekend it'll air Saturday at 8.30am it will launch on Instagram or, excuse me, it will launch on YouTube on Thursday and then it lives into perpetuity. And I'm sure they'll air it again. So it's nicely timed for your book. Thank goodness.Sarah Peterson [00:19:55]:And it's sandwich loaf season, I mean, in my world. So I'll be up in Duluth around Mother's Day and my friend Tony and I are planning to get together and make some. And it's just such a pretty spring thing and I think it would be great if people started serving them again at showers.Stephanie Hansen [00:20:08]:Yes, yes.Sarah Peterson [00:20:11]:Beautiful food item. And it's, it's tasty. You can customize it how you want. You know, you can make more than one if somebody doesn't like tuna or if you want to add some other salad. Yeah, I think it's going to be great. And it would be a fun group activity, wouldn't it, with your girlfriends?Stephanie Hansen [00:20:27]:Like. Yes.Sarah Peterson [00:20:28]:I love it because we just have fun decorating them together.Stephanie Hansen [00:20:31]:I also think it's a good multi generational thing, like for Mother's Day where, you know, you can have the kids, the grandkids, really, everyone can sort of get involved if they're, you know, I guess they have to be 10 or older probably. Unless they're. I mean, you see these little kids on Instagram making gourmet meals now. I don't know how that works. That wasn't.Sarah Peterson [00:20:51]:Well, you could make a peanut butter and jelly one. Like you could really modify the ingredients. I mean, that's not the way that I grew up with it, but it'd be fun to see what people do with it.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:00]:Yeah. And you could think you could frost it with peanut butter. Like that'd be pretty easy to do, actually.Sarah Peterson [00:21:04]:Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:05]:Or just frosting in and of itself and then have like a, a sweet with jam and kind of. That would be really good too. Or like a cream cheese buttercream for sure.Sarah Peterson [00:21:17]:And I just think it's so pretty when you cut into it too. Like it's pretty on its own when it's decorated in its loaf form. But when you slice into it, the picture of, you know, just how it looks when, when it's on the plate I think is really pretty.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:32]:I'm just gonna see if I can find it here so I can show it.Sarah Peterson [00:21:35]:Yeah, here's the. It looks kind of funny on the camera there.Stephanie Hansen [00:21:39]:Can you see it pull back a little bit? Yes, now I can. Yep. It looks great.Sarah Peterson [00:21:45]:That's like in its full, complete form. And then here it is sliced. And I like it on vintage luncheon plates that, you know, the kind our grandmas and our moms used years ago. And they have the little indentation for the coffee mug.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:01]:We just had Easter yesterday and my mother in law is 94, I think, and came for Easter dinner. And over the years she keeps giving me, you know, dishes and things that she's offloading, as it were, but I kept. I've kept stuff. And we used to have Easter all the time in Nebraska with her at her house there. So I made the Easter spread. I used her tablecloth, I used her silverware forks. I used these little paper mache bunnies that she used to put on the table that I still kept. And it was so sweet to see her come to the house yesterday and sit down and like recognize all this stuff that we had when Ellie was little and we would have Easter with her.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:46]:It was. I was so glad I kept it all. You know, it's kind of a pain, but I'm so glad I did.Sarah Peterson [00:22:51]:Oh, and you'll have that to enjoy for years. And what a great memory. I mean, and I bet Dolores was just tickled.Stephanie Hansen [00:22:56]:She was, she really, she. She really was. And the funny thing, I said, well, you know, that's your tablecloth. And she said, well, where are the napkins? And I didn't really remember that there were napkins because they were in a closet and probably in a box and I didn't unearth them. So I was like, oh, I have the napkins. I just didn't get them out. Like, you know, where are the napkins? All right, so we are going to feature you on the Taste Buds episode. It's a Dec.Stephanie Hansen [00:23:22]:Decades episode where we had to think of recipes that were important to us like through the decades. So sandwich loaf was one. Then I did a Chicken Marbella, which I don't know if you did any dinner parties in the 80s, but if you did, that was what everybody made into like probably the early 90s too.Sarah Peterson [00:23:44]:I can't wait to try that. I have not had that dish.Stephanie Hansen [00:23:47]:It is the simplest thing to make and it has a power punch of flavor. I always double the sauce just because I like it. Really saucy, but it sounds gross. And my producer was like, oh, wait, we're putting prunes in this. I was like, yeah, you just gotta trust me. It's gonna be really great. And then by the time it's all done, you have this really delicious Sauce and the cooked chicken and you can just throw it in one big pan or one big pot and then serve it right from the pot. So it's an easy dinner party.Sarah Peterson [00:24:19]:Dinner party, yeah. That sounds really good.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:22]:Do you have any, like 80s or 90s dishes that you. Not actual dishes, but things to make that you're like, oh, I. If I had to do a decades theme, what would you make?Sarah Peterson [00:24:32]:You know, let's see. So the 80s, I wasn't cooking too much, but I love.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:37]:Because you're so much younger than me.Sarah Peterson [00:24:38]:I'm not so much younger, but I was in that time of life where it was like high school. School.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:43]:Yep.Sarah Peterson [00:24:44]:Not doing a lot of entertaining or anything. I can't think of. I don't know if this is. I mean, we love Dorito. The taco salad with Doritos. I don't know if that's 80s or 90s, but like.Stephanie Hansen [00:24:56]:No, it's. I think it's 90s. And we actually talked about taco salads when we were trying to think about, like, what would be we. I couldn't think of anything of the 90s. And then my producer Michelle, like came up with a bunch of stuff. And taco salad was actually also mud pie.Sarah Peterson [00:25:14]:Yes.Stephanie Hansen [00:25:15]:So we ended up making a mud pie bar that was actually a recipe that my stepmom had. But, like, people were eating a lot of mud pie apparently in the 90s. And chocolate lava cakes.Sarah Peterson [00:25:27]:Oh my gosh. And chocolate lava cakes. Are they. They're back. I mean, I see they are back. My daughter Lucy is a big fan, so anytime we're out to eat, she's got to get a chocolate lava cake.Stephanie Hansen [00:25:36]:Have you ever made one?Sarah Peterson [00:25:38]:No, have you?Stephanie Hansen [00:25:39]:I have attempted it like three different times and it never works. I always get a delicious brownie but like getting that molten lava piece in the middle have not succeeded yet. So I didn't want to do that on camera because I was like, oh, I just don't know.Sarah Peterson [00:25:56]:So, yeah, in 90s dishes. I was just thinking of one thing that my mom has made throughout my life and is in the cookbook are Italian shells. So the big pasta shells. Yes, we ate them a lot in the 90s. We probably ate them definitely after. But just the big pasta shells loaded with Italian sausage, some torn up bread, a, you know, an egg base in there and some pasta sauce and cheese and then smothered with more sauce and cheese. That was like at every big occasion in my life.Stephanie Hansen [00:26:28]:I love it. So delicious. Well, Sarah, congratulations on the book. I'm happy to be on this journey with you, and I'm real proud of you. I think the book is beautiful, and I'm glad you're having so much success. And I can't wait till people see us make sandwich loaf on taste buds this weekend.Sarah Peterson [00:26:46]:Well, thank you. And I just have to thank you for everything, Stephanie. It's been so fun to watch your career and how you've evolved and. And done all these amazing things with your radio show, with your books, all your books and the TV show, too. It's been really fun to follow along.Stephanie Hansen [00:27:01]:Thanks. I. I had people that helped me along the way, so I feel like it's my obligation, but also my joy to help other people because, you know, I. There are things about being a freelance creator and freelance writer and cookbook writer that no one can answer for you unless they've done it. And, you know that first person that told you, like, how much they made and how long it took and what to expect for food costs and, like, those were really valuable lessons that I was so glad that I learned and that people gave me the real deal because I think that is part of, you know, some people write books for fame and fortune. Some people write them to document a historical time in their life or something that's important to them. And then some people just do it because they think it's fun. But all of it and getting, you know, the historical background about what it's going to cost and how long it's going to take, it's important information, I think, to learn before you set out on the journey.Sarah Peterson [00:28:01]:Right. And you're doing such a great service to find that information and share it with the world. So.Stephanie Hansen [00:28:07]:Yeah. And I think your story about the food stylist, too, like, people, you don't have to have a food stylist. Do the whole book. Like, you could have 10 shots or hero shots or the beginning of chapter shots. That's a great way to do.Sarah Peterson [00:28:19]:And just like spending that time with Rachel, too, for those two or three days, like, I just learned so much. So I've taken some of that experience and been able to piggyback on that and some of the photography and things that I'm doing now.Stephanie Hansen [00:28:33]:Yeah, she's really good at it. So I'm glad that Rachel was a resource for you. Her podcast, you can find it in the archives, too, of Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, because it's in there and it's a good one to listen to. So, Sarah, thanks for being with me today. Congratulations on the book. It is Dish and Tell. And where can people get the book and how do you want them toSarah Peterson [00:28:53]:follow you so they can find the book at, you know, online through the major retailers. And then if you're in the Twin Cities, it's at, like, Kowalski's and a lot of independent bookstores. It's even at Barnes and Noble. I went by and visited it this weekend at the Barnes and Noble in Roseville. I've been going around and seeing my book at different places. It's so exciting, and people can follow me. My website is vintagedishandtel.com. my social media handles are the same.Sarah Peterson [00:29:19]:Vintage, Dish and Tell. And then I have a sub stack too, which, if you can't find, just go to my website and you'll be able to link to it.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:26]:Has anyone told you that when you see your book in the wild, you're supposed to sign them?Sarah Peterson [00:29:31]:No, I've thought about that. Do you, like. Do you talk to the bookstore manager or the.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:38]:Sometimes I wouldn't. At a Barnes and Noble, I'd probably just do it. But there's a real rationale behind it, because booksellers can return books that don't sell. They can't return books that are signed.Sarah Peterson [00:29:50]:I'm gonna go sign every one I can find.Stephanie Hansen [00:29:52]:Yeah, I. Whenever I'm out and about, and if it's a small store, I will tell them, okay. But if I see it, I'm. I'll just. I go to the bookseller and I'm like, hey, I'm here and my book is here. Do you mind if I sign a couple? A lot of them have stickers and they'll put, you know, signed edition. But if I'm at, like, Barnes and Noble, I just sit there with my pen and sign them all.Sarah Peterson [00:30:11]:Oh, that's great. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:12]:So make sure you sign them.Sarah Peterson [00:30:13]:Thanks for that. Hot tip.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:14]:Yeah, hot tip. Hot tip. All right, Sarah, thanks for joining me today.Sarah Peterson [00:30:18]:Thank you.Stephanie Hansen [00:30:18]:Okay, bye. Bye.Sarah Peterson [00:30:20]:Bye.Stephanie Hansen's @StephaniesDish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript Paper: Gearhardt AN, Brownell KD, Brandt AM. From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease. Milbank Q. 2026;104(1):0202.https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70066 https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/from-tobacco-to-ultraprocessed-food-how-industry-engineering-fuels-the-epidemic-of-preventable-disease/ Ashley, let's talk a little bit about, just set the stage for what this paper was all about, and since it was your brainchild, you approached Allan and me about being involved. Tell us what you set out to do and why you thought these issues were worth digging into. Ashley - You know, I've just been so struck that when we think of cigarettes, they were something that's so common, so normal that we kind of think, oh, they've always just sort of been there. But truly, they're just taking a natural plant from the ground and through advancements and corporate engineering and technology and knowhow, they took a poisonous plant and made it into the most deadly and addictive drug in human history. And yet that was, you know, just accompanied by tons of debate. It didn't look like other addictive substances. And I just really felt like, man, we're reliving this history right now when it comes to how we've altered our food supply. I wanted to really bring you all together and see if we could really lay that story out of the, the parallels of these two public health crises. We'll get in a minute into the issue of what you discovered, but tell us what you covered, what the paper was meant to do. Ashley - The paper really goes back from how you take the tobacco plant in the field, or the corn in the field, and walks essentially through all the kind of levers that are being pulled to transform it in very specific ways. And through specific technologies and corporate practices that are being shared by modern cigarettes and ultra processed foods. These products maybe look harmless on their face initially, or don't look like they're just maybe pleasurable or craveable. But truly, I would argue that they've crossed thresholds into things that are addictive and clearly damaging many people's lives. Okay, so several decades ago, I don't know who came up with a term, but there was a lot of discussion about similarities between tobacco industry behavior and food industry behavior. And the press started publishing cover pieces that would say food is the next tobacco. And it was a term that the food industry really didn't like, and they don't want that comparison at all. It'll be interesting to see whether they deserve it. You clearly made that connection in this paper. Allan, let's turn to you. Oh my God. I mean, we could do a 15-hour podcast and not cover the history of the tobacco industry. There's so much to say, enough that you wrote a massive book about it. But give an overall sense, if you will, of the kind of tactics and morality of that industry. Allan - Well, as Ashley already mentioned, early in the 20th Century we wouldn't really be thinking much of cigarettes, and they were just a very peripheral sales consumer item. And over the course of the 20th Century, we came to a point in the middle of the century of the 1970s, and '80s where about half of all American adults were smoking cigarettes regularly. I wanted to understand that. How do you take something that's at the very margin of the economy and culture and make it a dominant consumer force? And I think in that way, we have certain parallels to ultra processed foods. But then there were the questions, how do you make it so popular? Is it dangerous to use? Is it addictive? Does it cause disease? And how do you resist regulation and other public health approaches to try to keep people smoking? And I found a lot of evidence in each of those areas, both of how the industry acted. And when you say, you know, it's ultra processed food like cigarettes, we're learning a lot about ultra processed foods. But we know a ton about what the industry did to make the 20th Century what I call the Cigarette Century. And we have seen really important declines in smoking in the last 30-40 years. It's a remarkable public health effort. But at the same time, the industry worked incredibly hard and, in some ways brilliantly, to maintain the popularity of their product. And underlying all this is the idea that nicotine is highly addictive. And the industry came to understand that certainly before consumers did. And as a result, they could engineer, manage, manipulate the addictive character of a product that kills. I think looking for parallels, both in terms of how the industry did it and how perhaps public health law regulation can undo it, is the critical aspect of what we've been working on together. Okay. So, the tobacco industry did more than just take a plant, dry it out, chop it up, and roll it up in some paper. Then people might be driving whatever natural pleasure there would be from that product. But they did more, didn't they? Allan - Yes. And you talked about nicotine in particular. So how manipulated was this industrial process and was it designed to create such high levels of addiction? Allan - Well, for a long time we couldn't be sure about that. And we have learned that the industry had learned sophisticated techniques of industrial production of cigarettes. So, it wasn't like just chopping up tobacco and putting it in paper. You know, they added many additives. They added liquids. They dried it out, they put it in long strips of tobacco for cutting and packaging. And they had innovated the technologies, instead of human beings rolling cigarettes, they were able through machinery and technology to produce hundreds of thousands of cigarettes a day. And then they had to figure out how do we sell this tremendous volume of cigarettes in order to make our industry truly lucrative. So, there were those aspects. And certainly by the middle of the 20th Century, many people realize that - I smoke regularly and I crave my next cigarette and I'm smoking a pack a day, sometimes two packs a day. And people would ask, well, is it a habit? Is it habituating? Is it addictive? And as the science of addiction really grew in the middle of the 20th Century, we began to realize it had all the characteristics of addiction. But we really didn't know exactly what the companies were doing. And what we did learn in the '80s and '90s is that the companies had a precise ability to manage the nicotine in their product. And they did, so that even as they put filters on and they claimed they had safer cigarettes, they were also producing increasingly addictive cigarettes where we have craving, we have withdrawal, we have tolerance. The basic categories, that structure, how we understand addiction. Okay. We'll dive into some of those in a little more detail, but thanks for that background. Ashley, people kind of get it that drugs can be addictive and they know that alcohol can be addictive. They know that cigarettes can. But what about food? Ashley - Yes, so I think one of the things that when I take a step back, is that the reward and motivation system that alcoholic beverages, cigarettes can start to hijack and drive towards compulsive problematic use, that was laid down in the brain to make sure we were getting enough food. It's really sensitive to food reward, energy density. But the thing is you actually consume nicotine probably most days. Nicotine is actually in a lot of plants like tomato and eggplant, but nobody's getting addicted to the chemical in that delivery vehicle. I would argue the same thing's happening. When we look at our research nobody's getting addicted to minimally processed foods like bananas and broccoli, and salmon filets. It's when you're able to process and titrate and hedonically engineer food reward in a way that mimics the intensity and the sensory appeal and the spikes and crashes and the craveability of something like cigarettes, that you start to see people losing control. And when I read Allan's book, my husband was watching over my shoulder. And he's like, you know, if you highlight every single sentence, it's not gonna help you because you've highlighted the whole book. And reading what Allan laid out about how each wave of cigarette addiction, it wasn't because we suddenly discovered what nicotine was, it's because the industry got better at manipulating engineering, designing, flooding the market with it. And then health washing it, so people didn't really understand what they were getting into. And to me, that is what we've done to our food supply. And the result of that has been the astronomical increases in diet related disease and health concerns. Tell us about the concept of ultra processed food and how that fits in. Ashley - Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So, ultra processed food is a concept that actually came out at about the same time as the Yale Food Addiction Scale, that Kelly and I published together, about how to operationalize who might be showing signs of addiction and certain foods. Carlos Monteiro from Brazil was noticing that his grocery store was starting to be flooded by foods that you could not make in your home kitchen. I have exactly no idea how to make a double stuffed Oreo or a flaming hot Cheeto, or a Cherry Coca-Cola. And as these products that were industrially created with additives and flavor enhancers that are kind of biologically novel, that's when the disease risk started to go up. And so, these foods are so fundamentally changed in they're kind of most archetypal forms of things, like sodas and, you know, your sweet, savory sort of snacks, that a whole new category had to be created for them. To really distinguish them from, you know, grandma's homemade cookies or, you know, an apple or an orange. Ashley, you're brilliant at framing things. And one of the things that I learned from you a long time ago, and I've used a thousand times in discussions with people, is thinking about food, like turning the coca plant into cocaine and into crack cocaine. That if you take the coca plant into its natural form, people can live in harmony with it. You don't really have addiction. But when you process it and it becomes cocaine, then things change dramatically. And when you hyper process it, like the hyper palatable foods and the ultra processed foods, then the crack cocaine becomes incredibly addictive. So that same sort of phenomenon I think applies here. And it's a very compelling way to think about this. Allan, let's get back to the addiction thing and tobacco. One of the most stunning things I remember about the tobacco history. Is the videotape of the seven tobacco company executives testifying before Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive. Swearing, you know, sworn statements about nicotine. Tell us about that and what that kind of meant in history. Allan - It's a great story and it has a kind of visual linkage to many of us who actually saw those congressional hearings. And it was a brilliant sort of performative politics, if you will. And there had been more and more knowledge that the industry was manipulating nicotine to make cigarettes that they were claiming were safer and not addictive, even more highly addictive. And David Kessler, the head of the FDA under Clinton, had really been a major player in this. And one thing I should say is we were learning more and more about the industry because people were suing them. And they would typically lose the suits, but they would get hundreds, hundreds of thousands of documents. And the industry also had whistleblowers who were coming forward and saying, of course we know it's addictive. So, Henry Waxman, a really fantastic congressman who represented consumers invited all seven of the major tobacco CEOs to a hearing on nicotine. And he went one by one - do you believe nicotine is addictive? And they would say, Congressman, I do not believe that nicotine is addictive. And it's like any great prosecutor, he had figured out how to get them essentially to perjure themselves in front of a congressional, and video news audience. And in fact, the Department of Justice considered for some time whether they should be put on trial and indicted for perjury before Congress. But it was so in congress, with what we had come to know, especially experts, but even, you know, parents and the public and citizens had come to know that it was incredibly difficult to get off of nicotine. It just didn't comport with our existing knowledge. And we're not quite to that point with ultra processed foods yet, but I think we have a good chance to get there because as we understand what they're doing better and we have a sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of addiction, that same question will be put ultimately to CEOs of the food industry. Especially those who are producing these highly addictive products. And there are many people who are involved in this. So, they will tell a story of how we understood we could make our product sell better and be used at a much higher level if we could make it addictive. And regrettably, as we learn more about addictive addiction, we not only learn perhaps how to help people who are addicted. But we often learn how to make certain products even more highly addictive. Ashley, let's take what Allan said and apply it into the food arena. So, if you think about the criteria for addiction, like Allan had mentioned: cravings, withdrawal, and tolerance, and, tolerance being the need to have more of the substance over time in, in order to produce the same pharmacologic effect. How do those things apply to foods? Ashley - Yes. There there's very strong parallels there. And I actually have a paper I wrote with Dr. Alex DiFeliceantonio, where we took the 1988 Surgeon General's report on the addictiveness of tobacco and nicotine in particular. And we took what they identified as the necessary and sufficient criteria to prove that it was addictive. It was a watershed moment for tobacco. And the major one is that people consume it compulsively. Meaning, you know, they want to cut down and they can't. They know it's harming them and they can't. Clearly we see that with ultra processed food. That it shifts mood. It increases pleasure. It reduces negative affect through its mechanism on the brain. And I think if you look at any marketing, you know, they're always saying you're craving meet your maker, get your bliss point. You're not you unless you're eating a Snickers. They show that it was highly reinforced. And that is, you know, animals and humans will work really hard to get access to it. With nicotine one of the major points of that is that animals, about 20% of the time, would work to get nicotine over cocaine. And that was quite striking because cocaine is so powerfully addictive. Well in those same models, animals will work for processed sweet taste and choose it 80% of the time over cocaine. It just shows that when we start altering, processing food reward into these unnaturally intensely stimulating packages, our brains were not evolved to protect itself against that. And then the final pieces that's been kind of added over time has been the cravings. I mean, if you think about what is the core of addiction, it's the craveability of it. That they maximize that. So, you can't stop thinking about anything else. And when I read, and we even quote in our paper, spots where, you know, industries, the big food is having webinars and how to turn cravings into corporate wins. And how to take snackers who are consuming, because their cravings feel unmanageable, but here's how you can keep them snacking even though they want to quit. And so, the craving really seems to me, based on my read of what I've seen from the industry, is the core engine of driving and selling ultra processed food. So, these foods, and I've heard you say this, Ashley, you know, they have less to do with the farm and, you know, these sort of romantic ideas of the farmer growing crops and the crops being harvested and coming to a farmer's market. These are really industrial lab-based, you know, heavy duty factory related products. And there's a real question, isn't there, about what you even should call them food. Ashley - Yes, absolutely. I actually grew up on a farm and I never ate anything that we grew on the farm because it was all due to Ag policy. Just, corn to go into high fructose corn syrup, soy to go into soybean oil. And I was surrounded by what looked like lots of food, but in reality, it was not. And some of the things that I learned in writing this paper with you all is just to what degree ultra processing allows them to even control the molecular structure and size of the different starch chemicals. That carby kind of access point in food. Allan talks in his book about how you can treat tobacco. So, you break it down and make it molecularly more bioavailable so nicotine gets more rapidly into the body. That's a huge driver of addictive potential. I found in ours that they were actually using enzymes that mimic what's in the saliva in your mouth. And hitting starches with it. Essentially you were predigesting, pre salivating, essentially the starch creating what's called a starch slurry. And that's a base of so many common ultra processed foods like cereals and savory snacks. Many of these products really have far more in common with that cigarette and have almost nothing in common, you know, with the apple or the can of beans anymore. You know, that image that you said about pre salivating food. I mean, it's in some ways as if the industry is spitting in your food to bypass your own biological mechanisms that occur when the food gets in the mouth and. People get a kind of a yuck response to that, but it deserves that kind of a response. Let's dive into the paper and talk about what you reported, Ashley. You talk a lot about the kind of processes. You just mentioned one of them, but there are a lot more. What are some of the specific techniques to food processing that surprised you when you started digging in. How did you get this information? Ashley - Yes, so one of the functions that actually didn't surprise me, but it made me look at it in new light, is the work on how we really changed the way we saw cigarettes when we realized they weren't just taking a plant and drying it and rolling it up. But that they were actually curating and titrating these just right doses of nicotine. So, you get stimulated, but not too satisfied and you don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of nicotine. When we realized that was very intentional and designed and titrated, that really changed this from a natural kind of product, it's just a plant to, oh, this is an in industry engineered product. They're controlling so much of this. We all know that they are altering the amount of sweetened refined carbohydrates and fats in our food. I mean, that's just plain knowledge. And at levels that go way beyond what exists in nature. But I think I've become very obsessed with extrusion technology. Extrusion is something where they take really high pressure, high shear mechanical impact, high pH, high temperature. And they can break the corn or the potatoes and things into this slurry that is broken down again into this kind of predigested molecular base that on its own is nasty. No one is like, oh, starch, slurry, yes! They need all the sensory and flavor additives to blitz that and texturize it so it can trick your brain into thinking it's appealing. I realized that actually has such a strong parallel to modern cigarette where, as Allan talks about in his book, one of the major technological advances was creating reconstituted tobacco where they take the tobacco scraps and they do the same sort of process to create what they call a tobacco slurry. That was then very easy to manipulate by putting flavor and preservative additives in it, and that's what makes up a large component of modern cigarette. And so, when we look at these processes and those sensory additives, the flavors, that are put in it, cigarettes have more sugar and flavor additives in them by weight than they do nicotine. And so many of those flavor additives are actually in our ultra processed food supply. Why? Because the flavor and sensory profiles are what you start to become really emotionally attached to. And that starts to drive brand loyalty from a very young age. I could go on and on and on. Oh man, we could be here for a day, so I'm really inhibiting myself. I'll be exhausted. I'll have to go get an ultra processed food from this. But it was stunning to me to see how the goals of the engineering were so shared. And I guess it shouldn't surprise us because, you know, we know that the tobacco companies like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds actually created, manufactured and sold many of our favorite ultra processed foods that are now in our modern food supply, like Fig Newton's and you know, Hawaiian Punch and things. It really came from the same industrial practices. So Allan, I want to bring this back to the tobacco industry in a minute, but Ashley, I wanted to ask you first. I'm going to make a characterization. Tell me if I'm off on this. The industry is kind of manipulating every possible characteristic of a product. Its fragrance, its color, its texture, everything in the ways you mentioned. It becomes this industrialized product much more than a food. People consume it. They get immense reward from it because it's delivering a drug, basically, to the brain very quickly in a very efficient way. People then, of course, want more of that sensation. If tolerance exists, then it means they need more of the food over time in order to get the same reward. And then you've got a public health nightmare on your hand because people aren't just eating a little bit of these foods, they're eating a lot of these foods. And they're designed in order to produce that very impact. Does that seem fair? Ashley - Absolutely. That sums it up quite nicely. Okay, Allan, back to the tobacco experience. This kind of information that Ashley is talking about in the context of food, and you talked about in the context of tobacco. Manipulation of the product. As this kind of damning information became public knowledge, how did that happen in the tobacco arena? And then what was the consequence? Was it, you mentioned whistleblowers; was it investigative journalism? The hearings you mentioned were important. Scientific research, discovery. It sounds like a whole lot of things happened that made this information available to the public, which in turn changed public opinion against the industry. Allan - Yes, I think that's exactly right. It changed public opinion and it changed public policy and it took a long time. So, these are aspects that I think we have to, you know, acknowledge in thinking about public health and especially these powerful commercial interests that spend a lot of money on lobbying. They spend a lot of money on advertising. They know how to get to kids. These are very challenging. I do think, you know, early in the anti-tobacco campaigns, there were a few lawyers who said, well, we're going to sue them because they have misled, deceived, and in some instances probably acted criminally to build their addictive and extremely harmful life-threatening product. And people said, well, you know, it's everybody's decision whether they want to smoke and people quit all the time, so you're not going to do very well. And I think as a young academic type, I was very skeptical of the suits against the companies. But one thing that happened that I think was unanticipated, the lawyers asked for the company's records and their research reports and what people were doing. And they took depositions and the lawyers often lost the case, but they won an incredible archive that was incredibly self-incriminating of what the industry knew. When they knew it and how they continued to act to sell a harmful product. And I think that began to change things. So once you have documents, you know you're going to be more successful in court. Once you have some documents, you can call the CEOs in and say is it addictive? When they say no, you have documentation to challenge them about their own industry. Obviously, education is important. Investigative journalism. A lot of the documents not only came from the court suits, but from whistleblowers who snuck them out of law firms. Some of the whistleblowers came directly from the industry where they said, here's what my bosses told me. They need to know can you make this cigarette even more addictive? And they knew, for example, that taking nicotine out of cigarettes, which is not that difficult to do given the extent of manipulation, had to be something that was resisted. We could end the tobacco pandemic by just removing nicotine. Even if we did, you know, 10% a year. Many people would be able to stop smoking who cannot. But we had to array a kind of knowledge and practice and advocacy that really hadn't existed till the second half of the 20th Century. Ashley, when Allan mentioned these archives that exist on tobacco industry behavior, there's some food things in there, aren't there? Tell us about that connection between tobacco and food companies. Ashley - Yes, so you know, actually, Dr. Laura Schmidt at University of California - San Francisco, has done this just stunning work by using those same tobacco archives. Because they owned alcoholic beverage and ultra processed food and beverage companies she's been able to show really how much these industries kind of spoke back and forth. The different sectors of Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, you know, they're big conglomerates. They were pulling scientists working on the cigarettes, or the marketers working on marketing cigarettes to kids, and putting them on and intentionally using that playbook to sell their ultra processed foods and beverages. That's very clear and very intentional. They might not say as blatantly. I feel like they learned their lesson a little bit. Oh, we're going to make this more addictive. They use synonyms even out in the public. Some of it that we report in this paper is not hidden. It's industry trade newsletters. It's interviews on 60 minutes with labor scientists where they're saying, yeah, we design these products, so you get a big flavor burst. And then it fades really rapidly because that makes you want to keep coming back for more and more and more. And yeah, addictive is a good word for that. And so there is this moment where it just becomes so implausible that they don't know that they have crossed the Rubicon into something that is hooking people. That plausible deniability that we're just, you know, giving consumers what they want, not actually engineering their desires to override what they know they should have to nourish themselves. It just feels beyond the pale to me to believe that's the case. Allan, look, you mentioned delay. And I'd like to talk about that a little bit more. There's a point in time when the science on something becomes robust. And you're very certain say that tobacco is causing lung cancer and heart disease.  And then you can't change things the next day or the next week. So, a little bit of delay is probably acceptable and to be understood. But the delay in this case between that knowledge and significant public health action policy action wasn't measured in days, weeks, months, or even years. It was decades. And you can count the number of attributable deaths to that delay in the millions. What did the industry do to make that delay as long as possible in terms of planting doubt, conflicts of interest with science and things like that? Allan - This is highly relevant to our moment because I make a few claims in the book. One is that the industry invented disinformation and misinformation. And there's always this way that says, well, I know that study appeared, but we need more information. And this was very clever on the part of the tobacco companies because they said, well, you know, that science shows this, but that science is unreliable. And we need to use different methods. And lung cancer is not a result of cigarette smoking, it's actually genetic. And maybe there are a few people that shouldn't be smoking cigarettes. We should be able to identify what's different about them. They kept finding strategies of delay, manipulation, building uncertainty. There's one of the tobacco documents in this phase that says, from now on, our product is doubt. And what they really needed to do to sell the product was to create doubt about a science that was highly robust and really important to consumers. On the other hand, I think consumers are sensitive to being manipulated. They don't like that. They don't like being tricked. They know these industries, especially tobacco industry, you know, is disreputable. And as that became the case, what did they know and what are they selling. We began to see some slow shifts in public awareness. And, you know, it's so interesting presenting the cigarette problem to a jury in 1970 became radically different than presenting the case against the tobacco companies in the 1990s. And a lot had changed, A lot had been documented and, you know, we never even thought of the idea that a company would scientifically mislead us probably until in any consequential way till the middle of the 20th Century. And now we're incredibly skeptical and I think taking advantage of the public skepticism, both politically and culturally is going to be one of the important issues of pushing back against what I've called rogue industries. They're operating unethically; in many cases, unlawfully. They're misrepresenting what they produce. And they have the idea that having addicted customers is the best customer. And Warren Buffet once said, you know the tobacco industry, that's crazy. It cost a dime to make it. You sell it for a dollar and its addictive. He said, what industry could be more, you know, lucrative than tobacco? Ashley, how do those things apply into the food area now? Ashley - Oh, my brain is just exploding with all the things I want to say. But I think I have an answer to Warren Buffett, which is if you've pulled all those same levers and pretend to people that it's food, and it's because we all have to eat, you know? And I walk around a grocery store and I, in my head, I'm like, if I waved a magic wand, and all the products in here that are masquerading as food but are actually ultra processed, chemically adulterated starch, slurries essentially disappeared. There is so little food in my grocery store. Real food. And it's also expensive. We would be rioting in the streets if we really saw the degree that we're not being adequately nourished or supported in our current environment. And it's the mirage of abundance that is totally hooking us. You know, taking us hook, line, and sinker. And so, you know, I'll have people often say to me, you know, it's food. Like can't really be addictive. We all need to eat. And to me that is absolutely true. Just like we all need pain management. And there used to be a belief, a myth, that if you were in pain, you couldn't get addicted to painkillers like opiates which we now know is incredibly wrong. That just because we need calories to survive doesn't mean that if you manipulate and hedonically engineer those products, that it won't impact the brain in a way that can drive it in compulsive problematic ways. It's so essential for us to carve out, yes, you need real nourishing food. This is real nourishing food and these other things. I'd love it if the grocery store, it's like you're walking around this spot, you know you're getting real food. Sure, you want to go get those Cheetos, go for it. But it's in a very clear designated area that you're not being tricked into thinking that you're eating something that's nourishing you when it's really addicting you. So, people have very strong affective attachments to foods. Particular foods that they like. Some of it is kind of what you grew up with, what your parents gave you, but a lot of it's marketing as well. And you mentioned a Cheeto or Coca-Cola, or a Dorito or a Twinkie or whatever it is. People don't want that taken away from them. Tell me if this is correct, the problem isn't so much that people eat Cheetos. It's that they overeat Cheetos, and then you add to that all the other thing, not just that food. But then you've got a real problem. Could it be a matter of just removing some of the especially troublesome ingredients from that. If you look at the list of ingredients on these foods, there could be 25 or 30 different ingredients. Well, what if, what if 12 of them got taken out or 13 or 15 of them got taken out? You'd still have the food; it would still have its taste. People could enjoy it, but it's not hijacking your biology. Ashley - Yes, I'm very skeptical of that as the response, because as Allan lays out in his book, we were like, okay, if we just get the tar out of the cigarette. You know, it's all fine, Vapes, right? Oh, you're vaping. It's fine. It will be harmless because our reward system is so porous to different levers that signal food reward. We see it with the non-sugar sweeteners. Look, we took all the sugar out, we gave you Diet Coke, we gave you non-sugar sweeteners. It's a get out of jail free card. And now we're realizing how much that messes up our gut microbiome, could potentially lead to earlier brain aging and so, you know, abstinence, clearly making this stuff illegal, that's never the goal. But I think that sense of saying, oh, we can just engineer our way out of this is unlikely. And we have the alternative. You know, for what should be the majority of what we're eating. I love a Reese's Cup, right? I will have an ultra processed food, but it shouldn't be 60% of the food supply, or 70% of what my kids are getting for their calories. And so again, that clear understanding that this is something that's fundamentally different from the food that nourishes us. We have the answer which is real food. If we poured even a tiny amount of the investment, even closing the tax loopholes on things like ultra processed food marketing to kids that they get tax breaks on and invested that into technology to make real food in its original food matrix affordable, accessible, convenient. That stuff is tasty. Have a fresh apple. It's just everything's been wired for that to be the minority of our food supply. That's often unaffordable and we all feel really time poor. These are solvable problems. We've just been shoving all our money towards how we make new flavor additives to sell high fructose corn syrup, starch, slurries. So, we just need to have the right in incentives in mind. Your point is very well taken that government trying to say, okay, let take out this ingredient or that ingredient is stepping into a trap. It makes all the sense to me in the world that that is a trap because. Using that philosophy requires a trust in the industry that if you ask them to take out these 12 things, they're not going to put in 12 new things that might even make things worse. And both of these industries, tobacco and the food industry have done everything but earn our trust so that's a very good cautionary note that you raised. I would say in the tobacco area, the idea of that we think that, you know, vaping will be harm reduction. And there's been a strong political notion that we should be, you know, doing harm reduction. And of course, in many instances, harm reduction can be helpful. But I found in tobacco, that I can't trust the industry to make a harm reduction product that's not going to get kids addicted. That's going to, you know, make sure that we're not using both tobacco and nicotine in the form of vape or other products. And so while many people who I admire in the public health world have said, yes, harm reduction is the way to go. I don't think that's true with tobacco. We have a lot of children and adolescents today who are profoundly addicted to nicotine. So, this discussion has led to lots of, oh my God, kind of observations from both of you. Paints a pretty scary picture of the food supply. How much manipulation there is. And how much harm gets caused by it. I'm hoping we might end on a bit of a positive note if there is one here. I'd like to ask each of you, is there a reason to be hopeful about the future? Allan, let me start with you. You're looking in on this with a unique perspective because of your years and years of working on tobacco. As you look in on the food space and see what's happening, what do you think? Allan - Well, I tend to be an optimist. I believe public policies can make a difference. I believe the courts can be used to serve consumers who have been harmed in the market. So, I have seen those things work to a really significant degree around the cigarette. Especially in countries where we have resources for education, where we can make policies that sometimes work or mostly work. I don't think I ever would've thought when I started this work in like the 1980s that we would've gotten so far. I once said to my son when he was seven, he was taking a flight with me. And I said, you know, people used to smoke on airplanes. And he said, no, that's impossible. And he just couldn't believe the idea that we had let people smoke on airplanes. And I've been collecting cigarette packages that were given out by the big airlines. Of course, you and I, Kelly, remember probably, when they start to put smokers in the back of the plane. But the smoke was wafting throughout it. And a lot of things that seem almost impossible now, were actually reduced through regulation and politics and public health. I'm very hopeful that we can use what we've learned about how to get smoking from 50% of the population down to 15 or 12, as bad as that is. And apply it to other gigantic risks like ultra processed foods. All right, thanks for that positive note. Ashley, what do you think are there grounds for being positive? Ashley - Yes, I'm also a huge optimist. I feel wildly optimistic. I just, from listening to consumer sentiment right now, the degree to which corporations are able to hack our limbic systems, I mean, you see it right now with social media and sports betting. I think in our bones as a society, we're starting to just get fed up. And to me there is nothing that is more clear cut of how industries can manipulate us than taking food, the thing we most evolved to care about and to find rewarding and nourishing, and somehow jacking it up into an addictive, harmful substance. And I have two little kids. I have a five and 7-year-old and I am just as a mom full of rage every time I go grocery shopping because they've just shoved protein in a Pop-Tart, now they're trying to tell me it's a health food. I think we're catching onto them, and I think that there is no way to go but up. And again, we already have the solution. In opiates, we are still struggling to find non-addictive pain management. We have non-addictive food and it's called, you know, minimally processed real foods. So, it's just about putting the incentives in the right place. BIOS Ashley Gearhardt, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Science area at the University of Michigan. She also earned her B.A. in psychology from The University of Michigan as an undergraduate. While working on her doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University, Dr. Gearhardt became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process. To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) to operationalize addictive eating behaviors, which has been linked with more frequent binge eating episodes, an increased prevalence of obesity and patterns of neural activation implicated in other addictive behaviors. It has been cited over 800 times and translated into over ten foreign languages. Her areas of research also include investigating how food advertising activates reward systems to drive eating behavior and the development of food preferences and eating patterns in infants. She has published over 100 academic publications and her research has been featured on media outlets, such as ABC News, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Allan M. Brandt is the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine and Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, where he holds a joint appointment between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School.  Brandt served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2008 to 2012.  He earned his undergraduate degree at Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University.  His work focuses on social and ethical aspects of health, disease, medical practices, and global health in the twentieth century.  Brandt is the author of No Magic Bullet:  A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (paperback, 1987; 35th Anniversary Edition, 2020); and co-editor of Morality and Health (1997).  He has written on the social history of epidemic disease, the history of public health and health policy, and the history of human experimentation, among other topics.  His book on the social and cultural history of cigarette smoking in the U.S., The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, was published by Basic Books in 2007 (paperback, 2009).  It received the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University in 2008 and the Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2011, among other awards.   Brandt has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2015, he was awarded the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award by the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  In 2019-20, Brandt was a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  He recently served as the interim chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  Brandt is currently writing about the history and ethics of stigma and its impact on patients and health outcomes.  

Ryan sits down with Anders Otteson of the Uncanny Expeditions YouTube channel, whose viral UFO footage and on-the-ground investigations have taken viewers closer than ever to restricted sites like Area 51, the Nevada Test and Training Range, and other classified black project locations. Anders shares how he began exploring secret military bases, what he's discovered filming near highly restricted areas, and the story behind his now-famous “Dorito” aircraft sighting. He also dives into a UAP crash site he was the first to explore, the mystery of S4 and Bob Lazar, underground facilities, and whether what people are seeing are extraterrestrial craft or cutting-edge human technology. From camo dudes and surveillance encounters to where the UFOs may actually be stored. Anders shares footage and stories that expose these classified aerospace projects and what might still be hiding in plain sight. Over on Patreon and Apple Premium, Anders reveals additional off-the-record locations, shares his most bizarre encounters in the field, and dives deeper into other secret facilities and unexplained phenomena he's investigated beyond Area 51. Subscribe to Uncanny Expeditions: https://www.youtube.com/@UncannyExpeditions Please take a moment to rate, review, and comment on Spotify and Apple. Use code words: "CAMMO DUDE" in your review for a special shoutout! Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: sprague51@hotmail.com Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All Socials and Books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: ryan.sprague51@gmail.com SpectreVision Radio: https://www.spectrevision.com/podcasts Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Closing Song by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #UFO #UAP #Area51 #UnidentifiedAerialPhenomena #UFOsighting #AlienTechnology #BlackProjects #SecretBases #ParanormalPodcast #SomewhereInTheSkies #Mystery #Unexplained #Conspiracy #HiddenTruth #SecretsRevealed #DeepDive #ExploreMore Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cancer is on everyone's mind right now, and the research has finally caught up. In this episode, Leanne and Susie unpack the largest ever study on diet and cancer risk, published just weeks ago in the British Journal of Cancer. With data from 1.8 million people tracked over 16 years, the findings are genuinely surprising, and not always in the direction you'd expect. In this episode: The big cancer and diet study (1.8 million people, 17 cancers, 16 years) A landmark new study compared cancer risk across meat eaters, poultry eaters, pescatarians, vegetarians, and vegans. The results are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Pescatarians showed lower rates of colorectal, breast, and kidney cancers. Vegetarians had lower rates of pancreatic, breast, prostate, kidney cancers, and multiple myeloma. But here's what almost nobody is reporting: vegans showed a statistically higher risk of colorectal cancer, and vegetarians had a significantly elevated risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Leanne and Susie break down what this actually means in real life, including how much red meat is too much, why processed meat is a completely different conversation to lean red meat, and whether most of us really need to go vegetarian to meaningfully reduce our cancer risk. Easter hot cross buns: what the nutrition actually looks like They're in supermarkets from Boxing Day and some of this year's flavours are genuinely surprising (yes, there's a Dorito one). Susie and Leanne rank the best and worst options, break down the calorie difference between mini, standard, and indulgent varieties, and explain when a hot cross bun can actually be the right pre or post workout nutrition choice. Product review: Noon protein milk drink A new breakfast-on-the-go drink has landed in Woolworths and the nutrition panel is genuinely impressive. 18 grams of protein, 6.3 grams of fibre, 580 milligrams of calcium, and a clean, milk-first ingredient list. Leanne breaks down whether it stacks up against Up and Go and who it is and isn't suitable for. Listener question: the best vegetarian meat replacements If you are vegetarian or cooking for one, this segment is worth listening to twice. Leanne and Susie name the specific products and brands they actually recommend in clinic, explain why Quorn mince beats most of the plant-based aisle on protein and fat, and cover the marinated tofu options that even tofu-sceptics tend to enjoy. Whether you eat meat every day, are trying to eat less of it, or are navigating a vegetarian household, this episode gives you real, evidence-based clarity without the extremism that tends to surround this topic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, the Queens are crunching on some familiar flavors in new forms with Frito-Lay's Flavor Swap! Have you been longing for a Dorito-flavored Ruffle? A Ruffle-flavored Dorito? Or a barbecue Lay's-flavored Cheeto? The 2026 edition of Flavor Swap is here to make all of our dreams come true. Special thanks to Pepsi Co for gifting us these snacks!

This week Jes commissioned a vase, Jon is desperately neutral, Cody is a Dorito's Guy, and Dave needs more staples. Also, it was a totally wild guess! Show Notes:  00:00 - The Beginning  01:31 - A Hearty Thank You to Linsey!  04:41 - Style It!: Hieronymus Bosch  13:54 - Jon's Segment: Conference Call  24:38 - Cody's Segment: Oscar Moment  30:24 - Dave's Segment: Paterson's Premises  37:23 - The Ending ~~~~ Come hang out on our Discord server! Check out Jes on her Twitch channel Jenga136 for chill art vibes Check out Cody on his Twitch channel PracticalRook for gamer Cody vibes Check out Dave's other audio projects Catch Me Up and Dave's Estate Reserve Podcasts We no longer recommend bugging Jon on "Twitter" If you're REALLY bored, go to Patreon and support our timewasting efforts!

In 1947 Dave Pace spiced up America with Salsa and this turned into a 90 Billion Dollar category. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those. [ECO Office Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young here talking to Stephen Semple. And the listeners may not know this because we only release these every week or so, right? Stephen Semple: Mh-hmm. Dave Young: But we often record them one after the other. And we just got done recording the episode about Doritos and Tostitos. And now you’re telling me that we’re going to talk about dip, Pace Salsa. Stephen Semple: Pace Salsa. Yeah. Dave Young: So the picante sauce people. Stephen Semple: Correct. Correct. Absolutely correct. Dave Young: And that’s great with Doritos. Stephen Semple: I never thought about it being with Doritos. Dave Young: Really? Stephen Semple: Tostitos, I would, but not Doritos. Dave Young: How about both? Stephen Semple: Okay. Dave Young: I say you can dip a Dorito into anything. I’m in that camp. I’m firmly in the camp that anything dippable is- Stephen Semple: You’re all-inclusive in your attitude towards Doritos and dip. Very open-minded. Here’s the thing I’m going to say. If someone has not listened to the Doritos, Tostitos story, you really should go back and listen to it before listening to this one because there’s certain things that kind of come together in terms of what’s happening in the world. Dave Young: Like chips and dip. Stephen Semple: And these stories are kind of linked even though this story starts in 1947. Well, the Doritos story starts in the late ’50s. They still have kind of a bit of a shared history. Dave Young: These stories that are on a collision course, a deathening. Stephen Semple: They are. And this story’s also not just about pace salsa, but it’s really about the origin of the salsa in the United States as a category, which is a $90 billion category. And the business was started by David Pace in 1947 in San Antonio and was sold to Campbell Soup in 1995 for $1.1 billion. Dave Young: All right. Stephen Semple: So not a bad little payday. Dave Young: Not a bad deal. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So now David Pace was from Louisiana and he moved to Texas after World War II. He had been running a small food business processing sugar substitutes, which were popular both during the war and shortly after the war with rationing because of the sugar rationing. But as rationing was coming off, what he knew is there was going to be less and less of a need for these sugar substitutes. So he was looking for a new idea. And so we have to remember, it’s 1947, food’s kind of boring in the United States. It’s not diverse. It’s bland. It’s meat and potatoes. The condiment that was used to improve food was ketchup. That was the condiment to improve food, right? And Mexican food was not really a thing. About the only thing that people knew about Mexican food, it was spicy. Here’s the part that I came across that really surprised me the most. In New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world, and certainly the most diverse city in the United States, there was just one Mexican restaurant in the city and New York at the time. Dave Young: In the ’40s? City. Stephen Semple: In the late ’40s, ’47. Dave Young: Okay. Wow. Stephen Semple: There was only one. That was it. Now, you could get Mexican food in the South because let’s face it, 100 years previous, a lot of parts of the South were part of Mexico, right? Dave Young: That’s right. Stephen Semple: As we like to remind ourselves. So here he is in- Dave Young: Well, Tex-Mex started just spreading in. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So here he is in San Antonio. He was stationed in Texas during the war and he’d settled in San Antonio, but he had never had Mexican food because now he’s off the base living in San Antonio and he tries salsa for the first time. And he’s like, wow, this is great. And he decides he needs to bring it to the market. A couple of challenges he ran into. First is how to make it. There’s lots of recipes around. He wanted to make his own version to sell the non-Mexican, so he wanted to tone down the intense flavors. He also needed to be able to jar it so it had shelf life. Here’s one of the fun challenges he ran into. A couple of the recipes he worked with would ferment once put in a jar. Well, what happens in a jar when something ferments? Dave Young: Botulism? Stephen Semple: No, kaboom. They blow up. Dave Young: Kaboom. They blow up. Okay. Yeah. Stephen Semple: So exploding jars, exploding jars of salsas, not really the objective. Dave Young: That’s never a good look either. Stephen Semple: Not really. But he gets it figured out and he brands it as Pace Picante Sauce. So it was first of all, promote it as a sauce, not a dip. And he starts selling it locally. He advertises it in the newspapers, but again, not as a dip as a sauce, like a marinade, something you brush on meat before baking. That was how it was being positioned. Dave Young: Well, it’s still, that’s the label on the jar is Pace Picante Sauce. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: I’ve always wondered about that. He did that so he didn’t have to… Well, go ahead. Stephen Semple: But that was just kind of how he thought about it. And so for over a decade, he works on building up a following in Texas. It was building slowly. He liked spicy food, but most people didn’t, because even though he took the spice down, it was still spicy. Now he hires his son-in-law, Kit Goldsbury, and Kit hates spicy food, like can’t stand it, but still thinks he can sell it. And Kit starts at the bottom working every job and works his way up. And there’s a point where Kit becomes more senior. And Pace is now in five states and is making some money. They’re having some success. Dave Young: Good. Stephen Semple: But Kit’s goal is he wants us to become coast to coast. He wants to turn this into a big thing. But here’s what he notices. It’s too hot for northerners, but northerners want flavor because they’re eating Doritos. They’re eating nacho Doritos and cheese Doritos. They’re eating those things. So it’s not like they don’t want flavor. They just don’t want the heat. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: There’s a marker for something interesting, unique, and different, but to go national, he needs to mute the heat. Dave Young: Needs to call it mild. Stephen Semple: Right. And around this time, Tostitos takes off and which is being used for dipping and it’s a massive success. So he decides to lean into the dip angle because he saw what was going on with Tostitos and he said, “You know what? We need to make this as a dip, not as a sauce, but I still need to take down the heat.” So he hires tasters to try all the jalapenos out there to find out which is the one that would work the best. Here’s the problem. Taster’s results were really inconsistent. He goes, “Okay, so I’ve still got to solve this heat problem.” So he hires a food scientist to engineer a heat-free jalapeno. Dr. Rasplicka, I think is how you pronounce his name, who basically created this measurement system for capsaicin, which is about how hot it is. And from this, they were able to figure out how to remove the heat because they were able to identify each one, able to identify the source of it and create this non-heat version of salsa. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Now, you jump the gun on it a little bit, as you often do. So remember, while Americans didn’t want heat, they wanted something interesting. So of course they didn’t call it bland. What did they call it? Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell Ad] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: Well, Americans didn’t want heat. They wanted something interesting. So of course they didn’t call it bland. What did they call it? Dave Young: Mild. Well, they’ve got the three. They’ve got mild, medium, and hot. Stephen Semple: Right. And that’s exactly what they did. They had the other spice levels, but they didn’t go with bland. They went with mild. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This the Goldilocks rule, right? Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: Wow. Stephen Semple: And so therefore, and with mild, everyone can enjoy it. And then of course they offered the other spice levels and they market it as a dip. Very quickly, sales went from $3 million to over $50 million. Dave Young: I can imagine. Stephen Semple: So successful, supermarkets started placing salsa in the chip aisle because it was not in the chip aisle previously. In 1991, salsa passes ketchup as the number one condiment in the United States. Dave Young: Not till ’91. Stephen Semple: Not till ’91. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: 1995, Campbell’s buys the business for over a billion dollars. Dave Young: All right. Stephen Semple: Now, I forget what year it was. I think it was ’92, but anyway, early ’90s, Campbell’s actually created a Heinz Salsa. Dave Young: Really? Stephen Semple: Yes. And it failed miserably. Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: But if you think about it, we often bump in these situations where companies do these line extensions, right? Where it’s like, “Well, why not? It’s tomato. It’s a condiment. It’s all this other thing. We can do a Heinz Salsa.” Why wouldn’t a Heinz Salsa work? People love Heinz ketchup. They’ll love Heinz Salsa.” It bombed. It totally bombed. Like bombs so much to the degree that it only existed for about three years and they went, “You know what? Instead, we’ll spend $1.1 billion buying a competitor rather than trying to develop our own.” Dave Young: Heinz is what it is and you know what you’re getting. Stephen Semple: But how often do we see that whole line extension happen and it fails? Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: Right? Like Gerber’s wanting to make adult food. Dave Young: No. Stephen Semple: Doesn’t work. Heinz making salsa. Dave Young: Make adult food and call it something else. Stephen Semple: Coke understood this when they went into the energy drink market because it was not Coke energy drink. They knew that would fail. Coke understood that. They were like, “No, no. Coke’s a pop. It’s a soft drink. It’s not an energy drink. We’re going to have to do something completely different.” But it’s amazing how often businesses will make that mistake of, “Oh, well, we do this thing. Let’s also market ourselves this thing and do this line extension.” And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Dave Young: I think there are just invisible boundaries that if you don’t know them and you try to cross them. And in this case, it’s the style of food, right? Heinz goes on certain things, but it doesn’t go on Mexican food. You don’t dump ketchup on Mexican food. You don’t dump mustard on Mexican food. And Heinz makes ketchup and mustard and relish. Stephen Semple: And pickles. Dave Young: Pickles and all of those things, but they’re definitely not things that you put on Mexican food. Stephen Semple: It’s interesting. I was having this conversation with Michael Torbet, one of our partners, because we’re dealing with a situation with a client, an existing client where we’re struggling with getting them to think about not doing a line extension. And I was sharing with him this whole story of Heinz and we were talking about Gerber and a bunch of other companies that tried to do line extension and have failed. And we got talking about ketchup. And I was saying to him, “Well, I think the reason why it didn’t work because ketchup is something that you put on hamburgers.” But I like how you put it. It’s not specifically about hamburgers, but the foods that you put ketchup on, because again, Heinz is successful in pickles and they’re successful in mustard, but there’s foods where pickles, mustard, and ketchup go together. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And none of those foods does salsa go on it. It’s a different food category that salsa goes on. So you could make salsa and you could probably make cheese and that would actually work. Where you think about it, ketchup and salsa from a manufacturing standpoint are closer than salsa and cheese. Dave Young: Yeah. Those are weird associations. Stephen Semple: In fact, those companies do make cheese. They make cheese with a little bit of jalapeno. Dave Young: Yeah, absolutely. They’re right there next to the picante sauce. Stephen Semple: But I loved how you expressed it, hidden barriers, but they exist. And if you cross those barriers, it doesn’t work. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Very cool. I didn’t think about them as being hidden barriers. That’s an amazing observation. Dave Young: Like Rolex should never make a phone. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: Right? Well, phones keep times like, yeah, but that’s not right. Anyway, that’s just an example. There’s just lanes. Stephen Semple: Right. But there’s a couple of luxury watch brands that tried to dip their toe into the smartwatch market and it didn’t work. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And Rolex was not one of them, but I can’t remember who did, but they did and it failed terribly, failed terribly. Part of the appeal to a Rolex is the handmade and craftsmanship and all this other stuff. Dave Young: Well, and I don’t know. I have an Apple Watch and I have an Apple Watch not so much so I can tell time, but so it can do some other things for me. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: It can notify me. I use the timer function all the time and I could just carry a stopwatch around my neck or some kind of timer. But I also noticed that Apple sells, you can buy really fancy, upgraded, shiny, gold, sparkly, diamond encrusted versions of Apple Watch cases. The thing still does the same thing, but I don’t know how popular that stuff is. I’m guessing it’s pretty niche. Stephen Semple: I’m going to guess it probably is. And again, it’s not a line extension. It’s an add-on to an Apple Watch. It’s not a different watch. It’s an add-on. Dave Young: I think the guy that’s buying a Patek Philippe… I don’t know. Stephen Semple: Philippe Patek? Yeah. Dave Young: Or even a Rolex. Stephen Semple: Were you? Yeah. Dave Young: You’re not buying it for the same reason you’re buying an Apple Watch of any sort. And you’re not going to be fooled by the glitz and glam of the accoutrement on an Apple Watch into thinking that you’re buying a fancy watch. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: It’s still an Apple Watch. Stephen Semple: It’s still an Apple Watch. Yeah. It’s a different thing. Dave Young: Interesting. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Anyway. Dave Young: That’s a fascinating subject to just these invisible barriers. Stephen Semple: In a great book that covers this a little bit is the 22 by… Is it Al Ries and somebody? Dave Young: Trout and Ries, 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And one of the laws that they go through is basically don’t do line extension. And they’ve got some great stories in that book around it. And anybody interested in branding, it’s a great… I have it on my desk and it’s a bible I refer to because those 22 laws, yeah, they are like you break them at your peril. With all of Heinz power, it couldn’t extend that and instead gave up and spent a billion dollars buying a competitor. Dave Young: And probably didn’t rename it Heinz. Stephen Semple: They did not. They kept it as Pace. Yeah. Dave Young: And they learned their lesson. Stephen Semple: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Dave Young: We’ve spent this time talking about Pace and just before this recording, we talked about Doritos, Tostitos. I’m getting kind of hungry. Are you getting hungry? Stephen Semple: Yeah. And of course we also talked a little bit about Taco Bell. Dave Young: Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Semple: As a sidebar. Yeah. A lot of food conversation here late in the afternoon. Dave Young: If people hear my tummy grumbling in the microphone, you know what’s going on. If we weren’t in different cities on the same continent, I’d suggest we go out and grab a bite somewhere, Stephen, but we’ll have to do that another time. Stephen Semple: We’ll have to do that another time. Exactly. Dave Young: I’ll bring the dip, you bring the chips. Stephen Semple: All right, you’re on. Dave Young: Thanks for bringing us the Pace story. Stephen Semple: All right. Thanks, David. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

Arch West had the heart of an entrepreneur and liked to take risks. Unfortunately he worked for Frito-Lay and had bosses to convince. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those. [AirVantage Heating & Cooling Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young and Stephen Semple is here with another Empire Builders story. And today, whispered in my ear as the countdown started that we’re going to talk about Doritos and Tostitos. And my brain instantly had electric shot go through it because are they the same? Are Tostitos and Doritos, is it the same company? Is Frito-Lay- Stephen Semple: Same company. Yeah, yep. Frito-Lay. Dave Young: Yeah. How about Takis? Stephen Semple: Oh, I don’t know. Dave Young: They get bought up yet? Stephen Semple: I don’t know. But [inaudible 00:02:04] did, they were actually created by Frito-Lay. Dave Young: By Frito-Lay. Again, back to my childhood, we’d go to the lake in the summer and always had bags and bags of nacho cheese flavored Doritos. Stephen Semple: There you go. Dave Young: And my mom used to say, “We’re going to eat so many of these. There’s just going to be corners poking out of us.” Oh my gosh. They’ve been around a while. Stephen Semple: They have been around a while. Yeah, they were launched in 1966. Dave Young: Doritos or … Stephen Semple: Doritos was done first and it was launched by Frito-Lay in 1966. Dave Young: All right. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Today, Doritos is part of Pepsi. And the estimated sales coming from Doritos is like 2 to $3 billion a year in sales. That’s a lot of cheese nachos. Dave Young: It is. Stephen Semple: It’s one of the top snack brands in the world sold in over 100 countries. So now while it’s a product inside of a big company, there’s a reason why I feel like it’s a bit of an empire building story because it’s an interesting little story of risk taking an entrepreneurship inside of this big corporation. That’s why I felt like it still kind of fits. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: And it’s all because of the actions of a guy by the name of Arch West, who’s a Frito-Lay executive. And when you hear this story, you realize he’s got a heart of an entrepreneur and is a bit of a risk-taker. Dave Young: Arch West. Stephen Semple: Arch West. So Arch came from nothing. He was raised in a youth home. He went to the military. And after the military, he gets into food marketing and he becomes a VP at Frito-Lay. Now, our story starts in the late 1950s. And like all good stories, it starts with a visit to Disneyland at Anaheim because that’s where all great stories start. Dave Young: So Arch goes to Disneyland. Stephen Semple: So Arch goes to Disneyland. And in Disneyland, there’s a restaurant called Casa de Fritos, which of course has been created. I don’t know if it’s still there, but at the time Casa de Fritos, which was basically created for distributing Frito’s products. It’s like this made up Mexican restaurant in the international food area of Disneyland. And remember, this is the ’50s. Dave Young: So Frito’s was in existence. Stephen Semple: Yes. Fritos was in existence. Dave Young: The little curly corn chip thingies. Stephen Semple: Correct. That was in existence. Dave Young: So I keep thinking like Lay’s Corporation- Stephen Semple: Frito-Lay had already merged at this point. Dave Young: So Frito became Frito-Lay? Stephen Semple: Yep. So it was Frito-Lay, wasn’t part of Pepsi yet, but it was Frito-Lay. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And they had this restaurant in Disneyland called Casa De Fritos for distributing Frito products. And as I said, it’s this made up Mexican restaurant, because remember this is the 50s in Disneyland. So how authentic is it? Probably not at all. Dave Young: Probably had Speedy Gonzalez and his friends. Stephen Semple: Right- Dave Young: … Taking orders. Sure. Stephen Semple: As you can imagine. But as the story goes, what was happening was they were throwing out … At the end of the day, if tortillas were left over, they were throwing them out. And a Mexican delivery guy said, “You shouldn’t be throwing these things out. You should cut them up and deep-fry them and serve them as tortilla chips.” Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So Arch tastes these tortilla chips and he was like, “Wow, these have a really interesting flavor.” And he thinks to himself, I think there’s an untapped opportunity here and we can make something of this. So first he’s got to sell the ideas to his bosses. So Arch West makes a presentation to the executives and they’ll look at him and say, “Yeah, leave development to R&D. They create the stuff you sell it.” Dave Young: Stay in your lane, buddy. Stephen Semple: Stay in your lane, buddy. Now remember I said at the beginning, Arch is a risk-taker and has the heart of an entrepreneur? So what does Arch do with this no? Dave Young: I mean, he’s going to take them home and fry them. I don’t know. Stephen Semple: Yeah, he ignores it. He takes some discretionary funds that he has and he applies them to developing the chip. Dave Young: Okay. Good for Arch. Stephen Semple: He does this for three years. Dave Young: Three years- Stephen Semple: … Inside of Frito-Lay, he’s developing these chips with these discretionary funds for three years because he can’t make them the way they made them in the restaurant because it’s got to be shelf stable. So there’s kind of a bit of a challenge to making them. So after three years, he creates this secret shelf staple tortilla that he now has to get approved by the bosses, the very same bosses who three years ago told him, stick in his lane that he’s used company funds to develop. Dave Young: Oh, Arch, I love you. Stephen Semple: Right. Do you see why I believe this story deserved to be here? So he has this plan to convince bosses. He arranges to have the chips secretly supplied to the bosses before the meeting and he arrives late on purpose because he figures they’ll all try them. And his hope is, well, they better like them. Dave Young: They better like them. Yeah. Stephen Semple: So it turns out the board likes them. And at this point, he already has a name for them because he wanted it to sound like something easy and he wanted to have this foreign feeling. And he also liked this idea of combining Fritos and Cheetos because Cheetos had already been out there. So Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos. Dave Young: Doritos. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And they decide to launch it. So they launch it in 1966. Doritos is launched and it’s the only tortilla chip around. And the Baby Boomers are coming of age. They want to market this chip to the Baby Boomers. So if you’re going to market to it, what do you call it? You call it the With It Chip. This is the With It Chip because that’s the with it generation. Dave Young: Because it’s with it. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just tell people it’s with it and it’ll all work out because they’ll all think it’s hip and cool. Dave Young: Yeah. I can see that happen. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Bombed- Dave Young: … Calling it riz. Stephen Semple: Yeah, it bombed because here’s the problem. The chips were plain and chips at the time are used for dipping and dips were popular at parties, but that was with the Boomers’ parents, not the kids. So it was not so with it actually. Turns out to be not with it at all. So there was this great disconnect because the kids are like, “We don’t do dip.” The parents were the ones doing dip and the parents didn’t want to do … It was this complete failure in terms of positioning. So around this time, Wayne Calloway joins the company. Wayne doesn’t see that product as a failure because he looks at it and he says, “Look, here’s the problem. Boomers don’t want to use it as a dip, but they still want the flavor, so we need to add flavor.” And around this time- Dave Young: “We need to make the dip into a powder and apply it to the chips.” Stephen Semple: Right. And around this time, Frito-Lay had been investing tons of money into food science. And there was this new emerging technology called gas chromatography, which basically breaks down the elements so you can figure out how to make an artificial powdered form of things. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: So after months of experiments, the team presents a range of options. So they now have to choose a flavor. And here’s how they looked at things. And this is the other reason why I think there’s great lessons here, because we always talk about looking around the world for ideas. Taco Bell had come on the scene around this time and was growing really, really quickly and was super popular. When Taco Bell first came out, it exploded. So the first flavor they looked at was … Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: Taco Bell had come on the scene around this time and was growing really, really quickly and was super popular. When Taco Bell first came out, it exploded. So the first flavor they looked at was taco flavor. Dave Young: Okay. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Because they’re like, “Well, look, there’s this thing going on over here.” Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: And it sells well, but they’re still not completely satisfied. So what they noticed was as Mexican food is growing, they noticed that nachos are starting to become a common restaurant idea. Dave Young: Yeah. And that’s just cheese. There’s no such thing as nacho cheese. It’s just cheese. Stephen Semple: It’s just cheese. So in 1972, they launch nacho flavored Doritos and in the first year, sales rise $60 million on the back of that. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So West gets promoted, Calloway’s now President. Dave Young: What year? Stephen Semple: That was 1972. Dave Young: ’72. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So West gets promoted. Calloway’s now President. And the other thing, trend that’s going on U.S. is in the 1970s, vacationing in Mexico becomes really popular. It’s happening in record numbers and Mexican restaurant chains are popping up all over the place because people experience Mexican food, want to have it at home. And what’s really popping up? Guacamole. Big trend is guacamole. So they decide they need to create a restaurant style chip for dipping. Isn’t it interesting now we’re going back to dipping? Dave Young: Now we’re going back to the dips because people love this guacamole. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So dipping is back. And so what they do is they create Tostitos, a restaurant style chip for dipping and guacamole. And in less than a year, they do $140 million in sales and it’s the most successful product in Frito-Lay history. Dave Young: Wow. Stephen Semple: The other fun thing they do is in 1986, they create a flavor for Doritos called Cool Ranch flavor. And the only reason why I love sharing this is this has a really funny circular story because they came across this ranch dressing from this little tiny company called Hidden Valley. Dave Young: Right. Stephen Semple: And they looked at that flavor and they went, “That’d be a great flavor for the Doritos.” And they just called it Cool Ranch Rather than Ranch. And it was another home run, $120 million in the first year, but it worked out so well that it actually inspired Hidden Valley to take their product national. Dave Young: Oh, wow. Okay. Stephen Semple: So it was like Doritos discovered from Hidden Valley, sold all this stuff. Cool Ranch became so popular that Hidden Valley went, “Wait a minute, we could do this salad dressing now nationwide.” And in 1990, Doritos becomes the most popular chip in the world with a billion dollars in sales. Dave Young: Wow. Okay. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So while it was already a big company well established, I still kind of felt like there was a cool little story in there because again, it was about … They’d be looking out and looking at these trends and going, “Well, let’s tap into this trend. Let’s tap into this trend. Let’s tap into this trend,” while it was in the food space, it wasn’t in the snack space. So it was still an industry beside them. I have to admire his chutzpah of being told no and then taking company discretionary funds and basically spending three years developing the product right under their noses. Dave Young: Yeah, definitely an entrepreneurial streak in there. Stephen Semple: Yeah, no [inaudible 00:13:56]. Dave Young: Well, cool. I’m glad I know all this now. Back in the day, I started eating those chips right when they first came out, Stephen, I’m pretty sure. Stephen Semple: Yeah. The other part I found interesting on it was that, again, this whole idea of, let’s call it the With It chip and thinking just by saying that, that that’s enough. And then on top of that, having a product that was also completely out of sync with the market that you were trying to go to because it had to be dipped and their target market was not dipping. It was their parents that was dipping. I just found that so interesting that there was that much of a disconnect in terms of, “Well, let’s just call it, let’s just call … Our socioeconomic studies say this, so let’s just call it that and we’ll make it so.” And we see that so often as a mistake in marketing where it’s like, no, you actually have to freaking understand your customer and not just from, “Oh, they’re 26 years old and they drop …” How do they think? How do they behave? How do they act? Where are they consuming? Oh, they consume. Oh, they consume the product while at the beach. Okay. Well, they’re not freaking taking dip. Dave Young: Right, right. Stephen Semple: Right. It was such a miss and so typical of how a lot of companies look at things when they put together their marketing plan. Dave Young: Here’s the thing. People were starting long distance cross country road trips too. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: Man, it’s hard to eat. It’s hard to eat chips and dips while you’re driving. Stephen Semple: Not happening. Dave Young: You can eat a bag of Doritos all day long behind the wheel of a car and stop and get another [inaudible 00:15:28]. Stephen Semple: So I also have to give credit to Wayne Calloway that he came along and saw that disconnect. He said, “No, this is a great product, but here’s the disconnect. The disconnect is not that the product isn’t great. The disconnect is people aren’t going to dip it. That’s the disconnect.” But then to later notice that dip is coming back, because it’ll be easy to go with dip is out, later noticing dip coming back in the form of guacamole and saying, “Hey, in fact, let’s go back to really what the original Dorito was, which was this unflavored tortilla that you could use for dipping.” It’s kind of funny that it went full circle. Dave Young: But even so, like my parents, because they were of the dipper generation, had a recipe for chili cheese dip that you would use with the nacho cheese Doritos. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Okay. Dave Young: It was really good. Stephen Semple: All right. All right. Dave Young: Not so much if you’re driving. Stephen Semple: But you were a very sophisticated family having something like that. Dave Young: Well, yeah. Absolutely. Stephen Semple: So again, I just thought it was an interesting story. And again, one of those ones, keeping your eye out, looking a little bit outside of your industry, because all of these ideas came from trends they saw in the restaurant industry, not the snack food industry. Dave Young: Yeah. Yeah. Good observations. Well, thank you. Now I know a lot more about Doritos and Tostitos and why I don’t dip anymore. Stephen Semple: And it’s funny when you think about the recent Doritos advertising, when you talk about your mom making the comment, Doritos now runs a lot of ads where they don’t even use the word Doritos in the ad. They just show the triangle. Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: And as soon as you show that triangle, what do we all think? Dave Young: That’s classic brand code. Stephen Semple: Right. Yes. Dave Young: McDonald’s is doing that. They’re just either using- Stephen Semple: The arches. Dave Young: Yeah. Just the arch or- Stephen Semple: Or even a piece of the arch. Dave Young: And then just the sound, just ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. That’s it. Once you get into empire territory, you can start doing fun things like that. Stephen Semple: Yep. And really own the mind and really own the space. Hats off to the host of Frito-Lay in terms of the stuff that happened over there. And I just, again, didn’t exactly fit our stuff, but I thought it did enough just because of the craziness. So that happened inside the company. Dave Young: I’m down for a fun story about business and food. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Rebels inside the four walls. Dave Young: That’s right. Thanks, Stephen. Stephen Semple: All right. Thanks, David. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

In an AN first, Dave and Jeff take the show on the road to the Michigan state capital. Hosted by the world-class nerds of the Michigan Junior Classical League, the guys slush their way into Lansing to talk Ovid once more—specifically the crushing demise of "gym bro" Acis, who stood zero chance against that hulking, one-eyed colossus, the Cyclops. Here is your opportunity to master the geometry of emotion: do Polyphemus, Acis, and Galatea form a love Dorito, a rectangle of spite, or a dodecahedron of nostalgia? Join us for a unique, live format, featuring crowd participation with sharp questions and comments from bright Classical minds across Michigan. Plus, listen in for a chance to win the collected works of Aristotle from Hackett, edited by C.D.C. Reeve and Pavlos Kontos!

One company is tracking every football at the Super Bowl… And it's a publicly-traded stock.Elon Musk is merging SpaceX and Xai… It's a sugardaddy acquisition.Pepsi is cutting prices on Dorito's and all snacks by 15%... It's inspired by Greek mythology.Plus, the surprise car trend? Minivans… Driven by 40-year-old Millennial dads.$ZBRA $PEP $XXXX Buy tickets to The IPO Tour (our In-Person Offering) TODAYAustin, TX (2/25): SOLD OUTArlington, VA (3/11): https://www.arlingtondrafthouse.com/shows/341317 New York, NY (4/8): https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0000637AE43ED0C2Los Angeles, CA (6/3): SOLD OUTGet your TBOY Yeti Doll gift here: https://tboypod.com/shop/product/economic-support-yeti-doll NEWSLETTER:https://tboypod.com/newsletter OUR 2ND SHOW:Want more business storytelling from us? Check our weekly deepdive show, The Best Idea Yet: The untold origin story of the products you're obsessed with. Listen for free to The Best Idea Yet: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/NEW LISTENERSFill out our 2 minute survey: https://qualtricsxm88y5r986q.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dp1FDYiJgt6lHy6GET ON THE POD: Submit a shoutout or fact: https://tboypod.com/shoutouts SOCIALS:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tboypod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tboypodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tboypod Linkedin (Nick): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-martell/Linkedin (Jack): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-crivici-kramer/Anything else: https://tboypod.com/ About Us: The daily pop-biz news show making today's top stories your business. Formerly known as Robinhood Snacks, The Best One Yet is hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Lionel for a chaotic "Ventilation Friday" on The Other Side Of Midnight that swings wildly from political theories about Minneapolis protests being "color revolutions" to the absurdity of modern pop culture. One minute he's roasting Bruce Springsteen's "lame" work and debating if Taylor Swift is a 1,000-year-old reptilian, and the next he's horrified by rodent waste in Nutella and the trauma of learning to shave. Tune in for listener calls on "Dorito-shaped" UFOs, arguments over gender differences, and the reason AI is killing horse racing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Lionel for a wild ride through the eccentric and the unexplained. The night kicks off with a diagnosis of "Atwood's Disease"—the compulsion to yell out punchlines or state the painfully obvious—and a look at which rock stars are aging gracefully versus those who might need a welfare check. Things get gritty with a listener's "dead serious" tale of inadvertently delivering a truckload of rats to a Buffalo food processing plant, sparking Lionel's own traumatic memories of glue traps.The hour shifts gears to the extraterrestrial, fueled by reports of a mysterious "Dorito-shaped aircraft" over Area 51. Lionel opens the lines to eyewitnesses who describe everything from "bouncing white balls" in Nevada to "cigar-shaped" craft and silent, floating "subway trains" over Staten Island. The episode culminates in a heated debate with a skeptic who insists UFOs are just weather balloons, leading Lionel to question why aliens would ever want to talk to us anyway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Hysteria 51, we're chasing two flavors of “are we alone?” and one of them is suspiciously nacho-adjacent.First, the skies over Area 51 served up a late-night special: a mysterious “Dorito-shaped” aircraft spotted cruising near the world's most side-eye-worthy patch of desert. Was it a classified test flight, a stealth prototype, or the most aggressive brand sponsorship in aviation history? Either way, if it looks like a triangle and haunts the Nevada night, we're legally obligated (by podcast law) to investigate.Then we rocket to Mars, where NASA says the Perseverance rover found a rock with intriguing “leopard spot” patterns inside Jezero Crater that could be a potential biosignature, meaning ancient chemical reactions that might be consistent with microbial life. Not “we found Martians,” but definitely “this rock is acting extremely sus.”So buckle up for an episode packed with UFO vibes, Area 51 sightings, Mars rover discoveries, and the eternal question: are we staring at evidence of secret tech… or secret life… or just humanity's unstoppable urge to turn every weird shape into a headline?Links & Resources

D&P Highlight: ANOTHER Dorito in the sky?! full 388 Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:56:00 +0000 lE4dmqb8rRCTzSHiLVfC5psaSTCAv4VQ news The Dana & Parks Podcast news D&P Highlight: ANOTHER Dorito in the sky?! You wanted it... Now here it is! Listen to each hour of the Dana & Parks Show whenever and wherever you want! © 2025 Audacy, Inc. News False https://player.amperwavepodcasting.com?feed-link=h

Join the team for a look at the latest aviation news from around the world and across the UK.  In this week's show we have an NTSB update on the MD-11 crash, a Ryanair whoopsie, a hard landing in Orlando, plus the dos and don'ts of powerbanks onboard aircraft.    In the military news we've got a story about a flying Dorito (hopefully Chilli Heatwave flavour), and 3D printing technology being used on fighter jets.     We'll have an update on our 600th show, which is coming up in May, and as always, the ever popular Retro Airline Ad of the week.  You can get in touch with us all at : WhatsApp +447446975214 Email podcast@planetalkinguk.com or comment in our chatroom on YouTube.

More Andew, Lord of the Hams? https://www.youtube.com/playli... In this episode of r/neckbeardstories we have the displease of meeting OP. I mean, yeah. There is a neckbeard there sometimes. And he seems sort of weird, but aside from some bonehead jokes he seems alright. Though that may change on a dime. I'm never surprised in a neckbeard story. It doesn't matter what your background is, you always need to treat people like people and not use them simply to get off. Neckbeards seem to learn this lesson particularly slow and it really does make my blood boil... So we must bring it to light so others don't suffer alone. For your fill of neckbeard stories we've got you covered with the freshest weeaboo, niceguy, and neckbeard happenings on reddit. Stick with ReddX for your daily dose of cringe with a side-dish of relatability. You might even feel good for dessert... But who can say? ------------------------------------------------------------ #reddit #neckbeard #doritos Join me on Discord dude: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu One-time PayPal donation: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Support this channel on Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Stalk me on the Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Visit me over on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Got a story? I got a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReddX... Here's an Amazon link to my microphone: https://amzn.to/3lInsRR Wanna rock the ReddX merch? https://teespring.com/stores/r... Character animations are by: https://twitter.com/DarkleyStu... Check out my other channel: https://www.youtube.com/dayton... Wifey's channel is right over here: https://www.youtube.com/channe... ------------------------------------------------------------ Did I mention that we have playlists??: Full neckbeard story compilations: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All of our neckbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All of our legbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All of our RPG Horror Stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All of our weeaboo tales: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ------------------------------------------------------------ Podcasts can provide some ReddX on the go! Check it out! Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/... Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/reddxy iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/... Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/fe... Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/... Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podc... Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show... Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podc... JioSaavn: https://www.jiosaavn.com/shows... We are working on getting listed on Castbox, Audible, and iHeartRadio ASAP! Have you ever met a neckbeard or a nice guy? They are frustrating to deal with, but luckily you aren't alone! These r/neckbeardstories from Reddit are among the top posts of all time and include some of the funniest Reddit stories ever posted on the neckbeard stories subreddit! rSlash NeckbeardStories have all kinds of funny neckbeards in them, but especially the nice guy. And the weeaboo. There is a wide spectrum of neckbeards, and this is but a small slice of it. Listening to ReddX's neckbeard stories playlist is a great experience! These neckbeard stories Top Posts of All Time from Reddit are made for you to enjoy any time you feel like it, so be sure to save my rSlash neckbeard stories playlist to your favorites! Some of the top rSlash entitled parents channels I recommend checking out are the original rSlash, Redditor, fresh, r/Bumfries, VoiceyHere, Mr Reddit, Storytime and Darkfluff. These Reddit story channels inspired me to start my own Reddit story channel, with a focus on Entitled Parents stories and at times going into the r/pettyrevenge and r/choosingbeggars subreddit as well. Because most of my audience prefers Entitled Parents stories of Reddit, I tend to just stick with reading the r/EntitleParents Top Posts of All Time. But I also enjoy getting up close and personal with neckbeards and weeaboos from time to time. Subscribe to ReddX for the freshest daily Reddit content. I post relatable readings of Reddit posts and Reddit stories every single day! Journey with me as I relate these amazing Reddit stories to my personal life journey. I'm greatly inspired by the top reddit posts of all time videos and reddit stories on YouTube which is why I started doing them myself. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... Discord: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/daytondo... PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Merch: https://reddx-shop.fourthwall....

The guys discuss The Game Awards and the disappointment of most of the stuff. Bryan also talks about his first time flying (a young 41 year old boy) and Josh gushes about Tool and their 25 or 6 to 4 timing.

In This Hour: REBROADCAST- In a surprise move, Beretta buys 9 percent of Ruger's stock.  What's going on? Shooting Wire creator Jim Shepherd explains. --  Glock announces it is discontinuing most of its pistols and replacing some of them with a new series which can not be modified with the "switch," a device that illegally converts them to full auto. --  The AI powered security system at his school said his bag of Dorito chips was a pistol, so the cops rolled in, handcuffed him, and pointed guns at him.  Gun Talk 11.30.25 Hour 2Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/gun-talk--6185159/support.

No dyes. No artificial flavors. Just pure crunchy chaos — and The Big Bald Buddies are diving into the entire Simply NKD lineup to see what's actually worth snacking on!In this long-form taste test, we crack open every bag and give you the real deal Bald Buddy Verdict:

When sixteen year old Maryland high school football player Taki Allen ate a bag of doritos following practice earlier this year, he crumpled up the bag and stuffed it in his pocket. All Allen was doing was waiting for a ride along with several of his teammates when several police cars showed up. With guns drawn, police instructed Allen to put his hands up and get on the ground. After getting handcuffed, police searched Allen for a gun, which he did not have. The sixteen year old was surprised by it all and wondered why this was happening. It seems that the school uses a video security system which relies on Artificial Intelligence to detect threats, including the presence of guns. In this case, the AI detection system failed miserably, as it mistook Allen's Dorito bag for a gun! This story could have ended quite differently due to an AI mistake. This goes to show that our move into this new AI world is going to be fraught with unexpected consequences. We need to tread carefully onto this new frontier.

n this episode of "Mike Dell's World," host Mike Dell discusses Clinch Park in Traverse City. He starts with some light-hearted comments about himself, joking that he has a Dorito chip under his hat. The main topic is Clinch Park, a public park located along West Grand Traverse Bay. Mike describes its amenities, including a large beach, splash pad, concessions, and access to the municipal marina, along with its popularity for walking, biking, and waterfront viewing. Mike reminisces about Clinch Park's history, mentioning that it used to house the Clinch Park Zoo, which focused on local Michigan wildlife instead of exotic animals. He shares that the zoo began in the early thirties and was a favorite childhood destination. He provides background on the miniature city attraction within the park, initiated by local civic leader Con Foster during the Great Depression, which included scaled replicas of downtown buildings. Mike recalls that the miniature city was active until 1973 and later moved some of its models to the Music House Museum in Acme, Michigan. The conversation shifts to the park's miniature steam train, which offered rides around the zoo until 2007. Afterward, he describes the marina's features, noting the availability of boat slips and facilities for visitors. He then talks about the removal of the zoo and aquarium in 2007 and how they were replaced by a splash pad, which faced several issues shortly after its installation. Mike further discusses changes in the park, including the removal of other structures, such as the coal fire electric plant, to expand open spaces. He mentions that the Clinch Park has become a central waterfront area, ideal for outdoor activities and close to downtown Traverse City. He points out that the park is a great spot to watch airshows during the Cherry Festival. In concluding the episode, Mike says he will return for another podcast the next day but is unsure of the topic. He wraps up by calling it a podcast and signs off.

n this episode of "Mike Dell's World," host Mike Dell discusses Clinch Park in Traverse City. He starts with some light-hearted comments about himself, joking that he has a Dorito chip under his hat. The main topic is Clinch Park, a public park located along West Grand Traverse Bay. Mike describes its amenities, including a large beach, splash pad, concessions, and access to the municipal marina, along with its popularity for walking, biking, and waterfront viewing. Mike reminisces about Clinch Park's history, mentioning that it used to house the Clinch Park Zoo, which focused on local Michigan wildlife instead of exotic animals. He shares that the zoo began in the early thirties and was a favorite childhood destination. He provides background on the miniature city attraction within the park, initiated by local civic leader Con Foster during the Great Depression, which included scaled replicas of downtown buildings. Mike recalls that the miniature city was active until 1973 and later moved some of its models to the Music House Museum in Acme, Michigan. The conversation shifts to the park's miniature steam train, which offered rides around the zoo until 2007. Afterward, he describes the marina's features, noting the availability of boat slips and facilities for visitors. He then talks about the removal of the zoo and aquarium in 2007 and how they were replaced by a splash pad, which faced several issues shortly after its installation. Mike further discusses changes in the park, including the removal of other structures, such as the coal fire electric plant, to expand open spaces. He mentions that the Clinch Park has become a central waterfront area, ideal for outdoor activities and close to downtown Traverse City. He points out that the park is a great spot to watch airshows during the Cherry Festival. In concluding the episode, Mike says he will return for another podcast the next day but is unsure of the topic. He wraps up by calling it a podcast and signs off.

The Context of White Supremacy hosts the weekly Compensatory Call-In 11/01/25. We encourage non-white listeners to dial in with their codified concepts, new terms, observations, research findings, workplace problems or triumphs, and/or suggestions on how best to Replace White Supremacy With Justice ASAP. This weekly broadcast examines current events from across the globe to learn what's happening in all areas of people activity. We cultivate Counter-Racist Media Literacy by scrutinizing journalists' word choices and using logic to deconstruct what is reported as "news." We'll use these sessions to hone our use of terms as tools to reveal truth, neutralize Racists/White people. #ANTIBLACKNESS The Caribbean Island of Jamaica was struck with a devastating hurricane this week which killed at least 19 people - probably all classified as black. Neighboring Haiti and Cuba also reported damage and multiple fatalities from Hurricane Melissa. In the United States, the so-called shutdown has reached a full month with no end in sight. Federal employees have begun to miss paychecks, and critical services - like the Head Start program and air traffic control, anticipate crippling shortages and/or indefinite delays. Food banks around the continent are bracing for a massive influx of employed, malnourished citizens. And a black Maryland teen was detained at gunpoint after his school A.I. program erroneously categorized the male student's bag of Dorito's tortilla chips as a firearm. Be careful eating snack chips in public. #EndStageWhiteSupremacy INVEST in The COWS – http://paypal.me/TheCOWS Cash App: https://cash.app/$TheCOWS CALL IN NUMBER: 720.716.7300 CODE 564943#

Wow the lads ride again with their friend and comedian Max Fine to get into it about what every rapper needs, ARFID influencers, spotting your ex in the wild, hit the Energy Drink Corner and more!

This week on the Super Fun Time Trivia Podcast, we discuss George Bush's Bush, how awesome warcrimes are, and make several puns about a zombie Robert Redford called Robert Deadford. Patreon: Super Fun Time Trivia Website: superfuntimetrivia.com Facebook: superfuntimetrivia Instagram: superfuntimetrivia Twitter: @sftimetrivia Email: superfuntimetrivia@gmail.com Intro Music By David Dino White. Welcome to Super Fun Time Trivia: The known universe's only live improv comedy trivia podcast.

Your latest round of crazy news stories! Middle-Schoolers served food with oven-cleaner, Dorito bag mistaken for something else and a new gross candy released just in time for Halloween! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In This Hour:-- In a surprise move, Beretta buys 9 percent of Ruger's stock.  What's going on? Shooting Wire creator Jim Shepherd explains.--  Glock announces it is discontinuing most of its pistols and replacing some of them with a new series which can not be modified with the "switch," a device that illegally converts them to full auto.--  The AI powered security system at his school said his bag of Dorito chips was a pistol, so the cops rolled in, handcuffed him, and pointed guns at him. Gun Talk 10.26.25 Hour 2Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/gun-talk--6185159/support.

Send us a textThis week's topics include getting paddled at school, crinkle cut french fries, a woman has been calling Darin at very late hours, Mike's dream job of tasting new Dorito flavors, and a review of another classic episode of Gumby!This podcast almost got canceled 3 times this week, so thanks to our censors for saving our butts!Be sure to tune in next week for Irritable Dad Syndrome's Best of Volume 5 Special!#DORITOS #ORE-IDA #FATBEARCONTEST #U2 #SOUTHPARK #GUMBY #COMEDY #IRRITABLEDADSYNDROME #PODCASTS #APPLEPODCASTS #SPOTIFYPODCASTSupport the showThank you so much for listening to this episode! If you like what we do, please check out our other content! Follow our socials for announcements when we go LIVE and to become part of the show!All episode, videos, and more can be found on our website at: https://www.irritabledadsyndrome.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IrritableDadSyndromeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@irritabledadsyndromeTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@irritabledadsyndromeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/irritabledadsyndrome/Threads: https://www.threads.net/@irritabledadsyndromeTwitter / X: https://x.com/DadIrritableTons of bonus and premium content (including archived, uncensored videos of episode recordings, unique merch, and more!) is all on our Patreon page! Join our Patrons today and support our show!Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/irritabledadsyndrome

Who will coach Penn State now? Also, what is the Dorito theory? We talk about our football picks from the weekend, the government shutdown causing chaos in Yosemite, and lots more!

Welcome back! After only having a couple games to talk about last week we have quite a bit this week, including the new Silent Hill, Hades II, and catching up on recent presentations by Sony, Nintendo, RGG, and more!00:00 Mad Max, Dorito flavor10:42 Final thoughts on Chrono Gear: Warden of Time, Wanderstop27:14 Gothic Remake, LISC43:55 Cyberpunk is real fun, isn't it? Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Justin's turn)52:09 Hades II, Final Fantasy Tactics remaster woes01:18:37 The Void, Hell is Us, Silent Hill f01:40:51 Justin's move round up (Jacob's Ladder, every Mad Max movie)02:09:33 Catching up on recent gaming events (007: First Light, Nintendo Direct, Sony State of Play, TGS)02:42:14 CQC (Comments, Questions, Concerns)Theme song and interstitial music by Megan McDuffee: https://meganmcduffee.comLogo and artwork by John GholsonAnnouncer: John GholsonJoin our Discord, learn about how you can support the show, and more: https://linktr.ee/TheStageSelectEmail: thestageselectpod@gmail.comTheme song lyrics:What could this possibly be?Seems a lot like a podcast… Wonder what specifically?Talkin' bout video games,With your hosts, you're in good hands.Not more of the same!Now we'll jump right in,So expect the unexpected and more. Now we'll get groovin,'Never know who's gonna walk through the door!There just might be some treasure in this chest,Having fun with our special guests,Time for Stage Select!Copyright 2024 Space Monkey Mafia Productions

Join Spencer as he navigates stuck images, wrong music, and the eternal mystery of what this show is actually about. In this episode, Spencer holds down the fort in California while Kevin broadcasts live from what can only be described as the most historically problematic Airbnb ever, a 400 year old mayor's attic in Amsterdam, complete with wooden beams and presumably several centuries' worth of ghosts judging his snack choices. We tackle the hard hitting issues you expect from us like expired Dorito reviews, the ongoing European peanut butter controversy that has apparently broken the internet, and Spencer's brilliant plan to insert himself into every dramatic TV show as a voice of reason. We've got travel stories, snack science, and just enough existential podcast crisis to keep things spicy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week YKWD on YKWD Colum Tyrrell, Lev Fer, and Drew Dunn unpack their past arguments w/ Bobby and they have a fat test to see who can go the longest without eating Dorito's. Get the EXTRA YKWD, Watch LIVE and UNEDITED AT https://www.patreon.com/robertkelly LIVE FROM THE SHED AND MORE ON PATREON DUDE!!! https://twitter.com/robertkelly https://twitter.com/YKWDpodcast http://instagram.com/ykwdudepodcast https://www.facebook.com/YkwdPodcast/Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DUDE and use code DUDEand get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup. One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code DUDE at https://www.ridge.com/DUDE #Ridgepod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's Chat!!Boo, witches! Ever tried to make a crystal grid and ended up with something that looks less like sacred geometry and more like a Dorito after last call? Don't worry — we've all been there. In this episode of C3: Crystals, Cauldrons & Cocktails, River and Glim dive into the magick of crystal grids: what they are, how they work, and why intention matters way more than perfect symmetry. We'll talk history, unusual ways to grid, and a few witchy hacks to turn your sparkly rock piles into actual energy amplifiers. Grab a cocktail, gather your stones, and let's see if we can make our drunken Doritos do some magick!

In this iconic Dallara F398 Episode 398 of Everyone Racers;Chris  tells us to visit the Dorito,  Chrissy is not going to bring pants, Tim is playing in a golf tournament at Augusta…Maine while Mental dreams of racing at Monaco…. Missouri…on a lawn mower around a gas station.  Really!What We're Working On:Chris sold a car, dealt with a new leak, and is prepping for an upcoming race. Mental got some quality time with his wife's Mercedes and stripped his Formula Vee chassis. Chrissy's deep in race prep mode, while Tim took a scenic break at Moosehead Lake before gearing up for his golf tournament.News & Notes:Tesla Cybertruck Drama: Turns out Tesla's structural adhesive is so strong, it literally held a Cybertruck in the air. Greg Poggioli at Jalopnik explains how a glue patch suspended a 6,600-lb truck from a crane. Genius? Terrifying? You decide.https://www.jalopnik.com/1924239/cybertruck-dangles-mid-air-tesla-glue/ Some New Yorkers are now paying people to sit in their parked cars during street sweeping hours to avoid tickets. Yes, it's a real thing — and a growing business. https://www.jalopnik.com/1921245/new-york-city-tiktoker-car-sitter-avoids-tickets/ Gas Can Relief: The EPA might roll back the hated “no-spill” gas can design regulations, possibly ending years of consumer frustration with modern ventless gas cans. https://www.fleetmaintenance.com/in-the-bay/fluids-and-chemicals/article/55305702/epa-makes-gas-cans-easier-to-use-againOur Racing Junk Find of the Week:A very competitive 1987 Mustang Coupe Champ/Lemons car is up for grabs in Tennessee. Turn-key, well-built, zero penalty points, and a long race history — could be your next race winner.https://www.racingjunk.com/24-hours-of-lemons-cars-and-equipment-for-sale/184735748/1987-mustang-coupe-champ-car-current-and-competetive.html?category_id=4520&np_offset=1Plus it's our Thompson 2025 Race Prep:Everything you need to know about the upcoming Lemons race at Thompson, including:- Full Race Weekend schedule- Track rules, paddock logistics, and fuel access tips- Saturday night potluck details (food drop at 6:30, feast at 7!) Sign up here:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BrQJpisB8hTj-K_qctN0ODdnMgKHEc90ok-Dmp9cWQc/edit?usp=sharing Of course our patented, detailed turn-by-turn track walkthrough with driving strategy for each cornerAccuMental Weather Forecast:Mixed weather Friday, sunny skies over the weekend — ideal racing conditions!So, whether you're wrenching on your car, gluing your truck back together, or just figuring out what corner to apex at Thompson, this episode has the mix of nerdy race tech, news weirdness, and team banter you tune in for. Don't forget to check the links in the show notes for the potluck sign-up and tech schedules.

INTRO (00:23): Kathleen opens the show drinking a Swarm Golden Ale from Exile Brewing Company. She shares her sentiments over the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, reminiscing how excited she was to see his Blizzard of Oz tour in St. Louis when she was a teenager.    TOUR NEWS: See Kathleen live on her “Day Drinking Tour.”   COURT NEWS (20:51): Kathleen shares news announcing that Stevie Nicks is re-releasing the Buckingham Nicks album, and Snoop Dogg released a new album.   TASTING MENU (3:47): Kathleen samples Town House Everything Pita Chips, and Doritos Twisted Queso chips.  UPDATES (25:54): Kathleen shares updates on “Chimp Crazy's” Tonia Haddix recent arrest, the last Sear's store in the US is closing, and Prince Harry offers his diary to the Royal family.   HOLY SHIT THEY FOUND IT (40:05): Kathleen reveals that a 50,000 year old extinct lion was found in Siberian permafrost, and a 3-year-old boy discovers a $4M 16th century gold pendant in the UK.    FRONT PAGE PUB NEWS (48:30): Kathleen shares articles on Pope Leo extending his summer vacation, the Vatican is soliciting hot priest influencers to connect with young Catholics, Augusta's Hooters location is permanently closed, full-time cheetah monitors are being hired in Mozambique, wealthy Telluride residents fight over 14 parking spots, Canada has been named the most loved country in the world, hordes of tarantulas are coming to the Southwest, and Pope Leo extends his vacation.   TOURONS (43:02): Kathleen reports on a man in the Philippines attempting to take a selfie in an alligator pond, and a car carrying 5 people runs off the road and into a hot Yellowstone geyser.    SAINT OF THE WEEK (1:16:25): Kathleen reads about St. Ignatius of Loyola.    WHAT ARE WE WATCHING (14:35): Kathleen recommends watching documentary “God Bless Ozzy Osbourne” on Prime Video, and “Being Evel,” the Evel Knievel documentary on Amazon Prime Video.    FEEL GOOD STORY (1:15:15): Kathleen reads highlights of Colorado's construction of the “world's largest” wildlife overpass on I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs. 

Title: How to Make Millions with Vending Machines with Mike Hoffman Summary: In this conversation, Seth Bradley and Mike Hoffman delve into the world of vending machines as a business opportunity. Mike shares his journey from a Midwest farm boy to a successful entrepreneur in the vending industry, highlighting the evolution of vending technology and the potential for passive income. They discuss the importance of location, understanding demographics, and the scalability of vending routes. Mike emphasizes the need for upfront work and learning before delegating tasks, while also addressing the misconceptions surrounding passive income in the vending business. In this conversation, Seth Bradley and Mike discuss various aspects of entrepreneurship, particularly in the vending machine business. They explore the importance of capital raising, the journey of self-discovery, influences that shape business decisions, and the definition of success. The dialogue emphasizes the significance of flexibility, discipline, and focus in achieving entrepreneurial goals, while also touching on financial milestones and the attributes that distinguish successful entrepreneurs. Links to Watch and Subscribe:   Bullet Point Highlights: Mike's journey from a classic Midwest farm boy to a successful entrepreneur. The evolution of vending machines from traditional to smart technology. Understanding the importance of location in the vending business. The analogy of baseball levels to describe starting in vending. Scaling up from single A to big leagues in vending routes. The significance of demographics in product selection for vending machines. The potential for passive income with proper systems in place. The need for upfront work before achieving passivity in business. Vending is not a get-rich-quick scheme; it requires dedication. The future opportunities in the vending industry are expanding rapidly. Raising capital can dilute ownership but may be necessary for rapid growth. Self-discovery often leads to unexpected career paths. Influences in business can come from personal experiences rather than just mentors. Success is often defined by the ability to prioritize family and flexibility. Entrepreneurs work harder than in traditional jobs but gain flexibility. Discipline is crucial for saying no to distractions. Successful entrepreneurs often focus on niche markets. High foot traffic locations are ideal for vending machines. AI is transforming business operations and efficiency. Networking and connections can lead to valuable opportunities. Transcript: Seth Bradley, Esq. (00:04.898) Mike, what's going on buddy? Doing great brother, doing great. How about you?   Mike (00:06.748) Don't worry,   Mike (00:11.664) Good, I'm a little flustered. I usually have my mic set up over here, but I guess we just moved and it's not here today. I guess, yeah, new office and it's been a whole hot mess.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (00:19.822) New office or what?   Seth Bradley, Esq. (00:27.862) Nice man, nice. I see you got the whiteboard cranking back there. Love to see that.   Mike (00:33.114) Always. I love your background. That's sweet.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (00:38.03) Thanks man, yeah, I'm on camera all the time so I like I need to just build this out instead of using like a green screen so Made the investment made it happen   Mike (00:44.86) Totally.   Yeah, absolutely.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (00:49.442) Have we met in person or not? I don't know if we've met at a Wealth Without Wall Street event or I couldn't tell. Okay. No, I did not go to Nashville last year.   Mike (00:58.478) I don't think so. don't think you're... Were you in Nashville last year?   Mike (01:04.634) No, okay. No, I don't think we've met in person. Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (01:08.256) Okay, all good, man. All good. Well, cool. I'll just go over the format real quick. We'll do kind of a shorter recording. We're do like 30 minutes, something like in that range. And then we'll just kind of like break. And then I'll, want to record a couple of other quick segments where I call it Million Dollar Monday. I'm kind of asking you about how you made your first, last and next million. And then 1 % closer, which would just be kind of what separates you, what makes you the   top 1 % in your particular vertical. So we'll just kind of record those separately. Those will be real short, like five minutes or so.   Mike (01:44.924) Okay, yeah, I'll follow your lead. All good.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (01:47.15) Cool. Cool. Let's see. I think I already have this auto recording. So we're already recording. So I'll just jump right in.   Mike (01:55.377) Okay.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (01:57.782) Welcome to Raise the Bar Radio, hosted by yours truly Seth Bradley. We today we've got Mr. Passive, Mike Hoffman. Mike, welcome to the show.   Mike (02:08.189) Thank you for having me fired up to be here.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (02:10.855) Absolutely man, really happy to have you on. I know it's been a little bit of a trek here to get our schedules lined up, but really stoked to have you on today, man. I see you said you moved into a new office. You've got the whiteboard cranking, so love to see it.   Mike (02:25.372) yeah, whiteboards are the only place I can get my thoughts down.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (02:29.399) Yeah, man, it makes a difference when you actually write something rather than type it or even on a mirror board where you're doing it online. just there's something about physically writing something down.   Mike (02:41.328) You know, I'm glad you said that because yesterday I flipped to Seattle for a quick work trip and I didn't have wifi and I literally had three pages of just, I, was so like the clarity of some of these kinds of bigger visions I have now from just being able to write for an hour on a flight was, I was like, man, I gotta do this more often.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (03:00.363) Yeah, for sure. The key though is once you write it down, it just doesn't go into the trash or into a black hole somewhere where you never see it again. So that's kind of the disadvantage there. If you have it on your computer and you're taking notes or you have it on a mirror board, at least it's there to reference all the time. If you write it down on paper, sometimes, I've got my Raze Masters book right here for notes, but it's like, it might go into the abyss and I'll never look at it again. So you gotta be careful about that.   Mike (03:27.184) Yeah, yeah, I need to check out the Miro boards. I've heard a lot of good things about them.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (03:31.467) Yeah, yeah. Awesome, Mike. Well, listen, for our audience who doesn't know anything about you, maybe just tell them, you know, tell them a little bit about your background. Tell them about your your main business and we can take it from there.   Mike (03:43.354) Yeah. So I think for those that don't know about me, I'm a classic Midwest farm boy started with a classic, you know, showing cattle at the county fair and all of that and had a lemonade stand growing up. And then my first job was actually at McDonald's, you know, thinking about the whole success of that business model. But when I was coaching and, out of college, I got my first rental and I was like, wow, this is crazy. making money without.   really much time involved. and then with my work in Silicon Valley, know, Seth, was classic Silicon Valley, you know, cutthroat job that, startup life and traveling three weeks out of the month. And I was on, I was in airports all the time. And was like, these vending machines I would run into at airports were just so archaic. And so I went down this path of like unattended retail and kind of the future of, of that. And that's really where I just see a huge opportunity right now.   And so it's kind of what led me into all these different income streams that I'm passionate about.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (04:49.431) That's awesome, man. Well, let's dive into that a little bit deeper. me about these income streams. It centers around vending machines, right? But I'm sure there's a lot more to it. I'm sure there's a lot of different entry points for people. Maybe just kind of give us a general synopsis to start out.   Mike (05:06.78) Yeah, so I think the big thing with, you know, if we're talking vending specifically as an income stream, you know, most people think of vending as the traditional machines where you enter in a code, you put your card on the machine and then a motor spirals down a Snickers bar or a soda and you go into the chute and grab it.   Nowadays, there's these smart machines that literally you just unlock the door, or even if you go into, land in the Vegas airport right at the bottom of the escalator where it says, welcome to Las Vegas, there's a 7-Eleven with gates and AI cameras, and there's no employees in the 7-Eleven. And it just tracks whatever you grab and to exit the gate, you have to pay for it. So like, there's just this huge market now where we just installed it in urgent care.   less than two months ago and we can do over the counter meds in that machine because it doesn't have to fit into a motor. It's just shelf space. You identify with the planogram with the AI cameras like, okay, Dayquil in this slot or Salad in this slot and then whatever they grab, gets charged to the person that pulls it from it.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (06:15.469) That's interesting, man. Yeah, I mean, my initial thought too, was just like the traditional old vending machine where you're getting a candy bar or a cola out of there. But yeah, nowadays, now that you mentioned that, you see this more and more every single day where you've got these scanners, you've got kind of self-checkout, that sort of thing. So that's kind of, that expands that world and really opens it up to the future, right? Like it just really, that's what we're trying to get to, or at least we think we wanna get there, where we're kind of removing humans and...   kind of working with technologies and things like that.   Mike (06:49.488) Yeah, and I think, you know, removing the whole human thing. mean, those machines still got to get stocked and you know, there's not robots running around doing that. But I just come back to, I was a Marriott guy when I was on the road all the time and I'd go to these grab and goes at a Marriott and grab a, the end of the night, I'd grab like a little wine or an ice cream sandwich. And I literally had to go wait in line at the check-in desk behind three people checking in just to tell them, Hey, put these on.   room charge and I was like if I had a checkout kiosk in that grab-and-go I could have just removed all the friction for this customer experience.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (07:27.772) Right, 100%. Yeah, I mean, there's a place and time for it and there's more and more applications for it that just pop up every single day and you can kind of spot that in your life as you're just kind of moving through, whether you're checking into your hotel or whatever you're doing.   Mike (07:41.456) Yeah, yeah. So that's just kind of what excites me today.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (07:45.973) Yeah, yeah, so when a stranger asks you what you do just in the street, what do you tell them? Because I have a hard time answering that question sometimes too, but I'd love to hear what your answer is.   Mike (07:56.804) Yeah, I would just say it depends on the day. You know, what do you do or what's your, you know, it's like at the golf course when you get paired up with a stranger and they're like, tell me about what you do for your career. And I just say, I'm a classic entrepreneur. And then I'm like, well, what do you do? And it's like, well, tell me about the day. You know, what fire are you putting out? Like today we just got the go ahead for five more urgent cares for our local route. But then, you know, we have a community of operators across the country that we help really build.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (07:57.933) haha   Ha ha ha.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (08:09.879) Yeah. Yeah.   Mike (08:25.616) Vending empires and so we had a group call this morning. So literally, there's a lot of just, you know, it's classic entrepreneurial life. You never know what the day's script is gonna be.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (08:36.161) Yeah, for sure. And you focus a lot on not only on your own business, but also teaching others, right? Teaching others how to kind of break into this business.   Mike (08:45.402) Yeah, that's my passion, Seth. When I got into my first investment out of college was a $70,000 rental, you know, putting 20 % down or 14K and using an emergency fund. like my background in going to college was as a coach. like I knew I wanted to kind of take that mindset of like coaching people, you know, teach them how to fish. I don't want to catch all the fish myself. It's just not fulfilling that way. So that's really where my passion is.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (09:15.373) Gotcha, gotcha. tell me about like, tell me about step one. I mean, how does somebody break into this business? Obviously your own personal business is probably very advanced. There's probably a lot more sophisticated investing strategies at this point and you've got different layers to it. But somebody just kind of starting out that said, hey, this sounds pretty interesting. This vending machine business sounds like it can be passive. How do you recommend that they get started?   Mike (09:40.57) Yeah, so I'm always, I view like the whole vending scale as similar to Major League Baseball. You got your single A all the way up to the big leagues. And if you're just starting out, I always recommend like find a location where you can put a machine and just learn the process. Like to me, that's single A analogy. you know, that always starts with, people want to jump right to like, well, what type of machines do you recommend?   products, how do you price products? And the first question I'll always ask Seth is, well, what location is this machine going in? And they're like, well, I don't know yet. I was just going to buy one and put it in my garage to start. And it's like, no, you need to have the location first. So understanding that, is it a pet hospital? Is it an apartment? Is it a gym? Where is the foot traffic? And then you can cater to what's the best machine for that type of location.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (10:36.887) Got it, got it. Now is this a kind of a rent, you rent the space to place the machine with that particular business or wherever you're gonna place it or how does that all come together?   Mike (10:47.644) not typically, some people are kind of more advanced, like apartment complexes are used to the revenue share model. So they're going to ask for a piece of the pie for sure, for you to put the machine in their lobby. but like, you know, when we're talking urgent carers or even pet hospitals are viewing it as an amenity. And so we probably have, I don't even know how many machines now 75 now, and we, you know, less than half of those actually,   Seth Bradley, Esq. (10:50.423) Okay.   Mike (11:15.1) us rent or ask for a revenue share to have them in there. So I never leave lead with that, but we'll do it if we need to get the location.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (11:23.989) Interesting gotcha. So it's really a value add for wherever you're gonna place it and that's how most people or I guess most businesses would look at that and then you're able to capture that that space   Mike (11:27.366) Mm-hmm.   Mike (11:34.236) Yeah, absolutely. So, um, a great case study is we have a 25 employee roughing business here in Oregon. And you might think like, only 25 employees. It's not going to make that much money. Well, we do $1,200 a month. And the cool thing about this, Seth, is the CEO of this roughing company literally did napkin math on how much it costs for his employees to drive to the gas station during their 20 minute break. And then   How much they're paying for an energy drink at the gas station and then how much gas they're using with the roofing like the work trucks to get to and from the gas station So he's like I want to bring a smart machine into our warehouse Set the prices as half off so that four dollar monster only costs his rofers two dollars and then we invoice him the the business owner every month for the other 50 % and so he actually   Calculated as a cost savings not asking for money to rent the space   Seth Bradley, Esq. (12:35.597) Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. That makes sense. That makes sense. I love the baseball analogy with the single A, double A, triple A, even into the big leagues here. know, a lot of the folks that listen to this are already kind of, you know, in the big leagues or maybe think about some capital behind them. Like how would they be able to jump right in, maybe skip single or double A or would they, or do you even suggest that? Do you suggest that they start, you know, small just to learn and then maybe invest some more capital into it to expand or can they jump right to the big leagues?   Mike (12:48.891) Yeah.   Yeah.   Mike (13:03.966) I think they can jump right to the big leagues. this is, I'm glad you brought this up because just listening to some of your episodes from the past, there's no doubt that you have people that could buy a route like a off biz buy sell today. And I think this is a prime opportunity. it's very similar to flipping a house. you, you know, there's a route in Chicago, I think it was for $1.1 million, you know, whatever negotiating terms or seller financing or, or what have you, got a lot of, your, your   audience that is experts in that. But the cool thing about these routes is they have the old school machines that have the motors and that are limited to, this type of machine, you can only fit a 12 ounce cannon. Well, guess what? The minute you buy that route, you swap out that machine with one of these micro markets or smart machines. Now you just went from selling a 12 ounce soda for $1.25 to now a 16 ounce monster for $4.50.   Well, you just bought that location based on its current revenue numbers and by swapping out that machine, you're going to two or three acts your revenue just at that location. And so it's truly just like a value play, a value upgrade, like flipping the house of, okay, there's a lot of deals right now of these routes being sold by baby boomers where it's like, they got the old school Pepsi machine. Doesn't have a credit card reader on it. They can't track inventory remotely via their cell phones. So   They're not keeping it stocked. Like all those types of things can really play in your favor as a buyer that just wants to get to the big leagues right away.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (14:37.651) I love that. When you say buy a route, what are you really buying? Tell me about the contractual agreement behind that. What are you really buying there?   Mike (14:47.184) You're just buying the locations and the equipment associated with it. So like this Chicago route, it's like, we have machines in 75 properties all across the Chicago suburbs. And they could be medical clinics. could be apartments. could be employee break rooms at businesses, but that's when you start diving into those locations. It's like, I have a snack machine and a soda machine here. Well, you swap that out with a micro market that now instead of.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (14:49.279) Okay. Okay.   Mike (15:13.626) that machine that'll only hold a small bag of Doritos that you charge two bucks, well now you get the movie size theater bags that you can really put in there in a micro market. Like naturally just that valuation of that route based on those 75 machines current revenue, I mean you're gonna be able to two or three X your revenue right by just swapping out those machines.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (15:35.959) Wow, yeah, I love that analogy with real estate, right? It's just like a value add. It's like, how can I bring in more income from what already exists? Well, I need to upgrade or I need to put in some capital improvements, whatever you want to call it. Here's the vending machine upgrades or a different kind of system in there. And you get more income. And obviously that business in itself is going to be worth more in a higher multiple.   Mike (15:58.396) Absolutely. mean, a great example of this is we had a machine in an apartment complex and it was your traditional machine with the motors and you have to enter in the code. Well, we could only put in four 12 ounce drinks and then chips. Well, we swapped that out with a micro market. Well, now that micro market, we literally put in bags of Tide Pods for laundry, like these big bags of Tide Pods. We'll sell those like hotcakes for 15 bucks. And our old machine,   Seth Bradley, Esq. (16:25.281) Yeah, let's say those aren't cheap.   Mike (16:27.246) Yeah, our old machine Seth, it would take us to get to 15 bucks, we'd have to sell eight Snickers. That's one transaction.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (16:33.547) Right, right. Yeah, yeah. How do you do an analysis kind of based on like what you think is gonna sell there, right? Like you're replacing, let's say a Dorito machine with Tide Pods, you know? So you have to individually go to each location and figure out what will work, what will sell.   Mike (16:47.738) Yeah.   Mike (16:51.834) It's all about demographic. Absolutely. So, you know, we have, we have, we have a micro market and a manufacturing plant that's, it's a pumpkin farm and there's a ton of Hispanic workers. So we do a lot of like spicy foods, a lot of spicy chips. do, we do a ton of, mean, the sugar or sorry, the glass bottle cokes. They do, they love their pastries.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (16:53.431) Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (17:06.349) Yeah.   Mike (17:15.868) So we just doubled down on the demographics. So yesterday I was filming at one of our micro markets that's in a gym and they crushed the Fairlife protein shakes, like the more modern protein shakes, but they won't touch muscle milk. So we're literally taking out one row of muscle milk just to add an extra row of Fairlife shakes. So you're constantly just catering to the demographics and what's selling.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (17:40.632) Yeah, yeah, this is awesome. I mean, this is literally just like real estate, right? Like you go and you find a good market. You're talking about demographics, right? Find the market, see what they want, see how much you can upgrade, how you can upgrade. If it's an apartment, it's a unit. If it's here, it's the product that you're selling and the type of machine, or maybe it's a mini market. A lot of things to kind of tie your understanding to here.   Mike (17:45.926) Yeah.   Mike (18:05.904) Yeah, absolutely.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (18:07.615) Yeah, awesome, man. Awesome, Where are you at in your business? Like what, you know, what are the big leagues looking like right now? You know, what are you doing to expand your business, raising the bar in your business?   Mike (18:18.692) Yeah, I'm going after that's a really good question. I'm going after kind of these newer markets and we're kind of past that point of like, okay, let's pilot in this location. For example, that urgent care, we didn't know if it was going to be a good location two months ago when we installed. Well now it's already crushing it. Well, there's six other urgent cares in town and we just got to go ahead on five of those six. So like for me, it's doubling down on our current proof points of where.   okay, we know that manufacturing plant, the pumpkin farm does really well. So let's start getting intros to all their, manufacturers of the products they need to grow pumpkin. know, like we're just doubling down on scaling because now we have the operational blueprint to really just kind of to go after it.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (19:03.917) Gotcha, gotcha. Tell me about how passive this can really be, right? So I used to have, before we switched over to the new brand, Raise the Bar podcast, it was the Passive Income Attorney podcast, right? I was really focused on passive investments, focused on bringing in passive investors into my real estate deals, things like that. And I think that word passive gets thrown around quite a bit, right? And sometimes it's abused because people get into things that are not truly passive.   Mike (19:18.427) Yeah.   Mike (19:28.784) Mm-hmm.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (19:33.517) What's your take on that as it relates to the vending business?   Mike (19:38.49) Yeah, so I think as far as with the vending business, there's clearly upfront leg work that needs to be done, whether that's finding locations or any of those things. So I have a route that is here in Oregon, and then we bought a route last year in Illinois and have scaled that route. I spend 30 minutes a week on each route now. that these urgent cares and stuff, like we have an operator that's running the whole route.   Here's the problem, Seth. It's like people are so scared to build systems to ultimately systemize things or they're too cheap to hire help. And I'm the opposite. like, you know, kind of like Dan Martell's buy back your time. Like I have like a leverage calculator and like I constantly think about is this worth my time? Cause as you know, you're busier than me. Like it's so limited.   for me, my routes, I would consider them passive, like one hour a week is, is nothing in my mind. But as far as like, you know, I'm, I'm also a passive investor on, we're building a, an oil loop station in Florida and I sent my money a year ago to, to my, active investor and I haven't talked to him since. Like that's actually truly probably passive now, you know, I'm not doing anything, but there's, there's different levels to that. And I'm a huge believer like.   don't delegate something until you know what you're delegating. So people that want to start with the vending routes, sure, if you want to buy a route that already has an operator, that's one thing. but these, if you're starting a vending route for your kid or for your stay at home wife or whatever, as a side hustle, like get in the weeds and install that first machine. So when you hire help to take over the route, you know what you're delegating.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (21:09.773) Mm-hmm.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (21:27.021) Yeah, that's key. That's key. And you you described just like any other business, right? I think that's kind of where people get themselves into trouble. That sometimes they get sold the dream that is truly passive. And eventually it can be. I mean, you're talking about an hour a week. To me, that's pretty damn passive, right? But you know, upfront, you you've got to learn the business. You've got to know what you're getting yourself into. Like you said, you've got to learn before you delegate so that you know what you're delegating.   There is going to be some upfront work and then as you're able to kind of delegate and learn Then you can make it more and more passive as you go   Mike (22:00.88) Yeah, I mean, it's no different than what's the same when people tell you that they're busy. I mean, you're just not a priority. Like that's a fact. you're not. People say it's the same thing when people come to me and they're like, I'm so busy. It's like, okay, well let me, let me see your schedule. Where are you spending your time? You know, it's like when people are like, I can't lose weight. Okay, well let me see your food log. What did you eat yesterday? Did you have ice cream? Like this is like the same kind of thing. That's where passive I think has been really abused.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (22:16.097) Yeah. Yep.   Mike (22:29.638) To me, the bigger issue is like, vending is not get rich quick. And so like, if you're expecting to leave your nine to five tomorrow and vending is going to make up for that in one day, like that's not going to   Seth Bradley, Esq. (22:41.089) Right, Makes sense. Speaking of passive, do you raise capital or do you have any kind of a fund or have you put together a fund for something like this?   Mike (22:51.48) We haven't put together a fun, we're definitely buying routes is definitely becoming more and more intriguing. And I know there's some PE players starting to get into the vending game, but it's something we've been definitely considering and on our radar of do we want to.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (22:58.541) Mm-hmm.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (23:10.231) Gotcha. Cool. I mean, you brought in money partners for some of those routes yet, or is that still something you're exploring too?   Mike (23:18.168) No, I think it's just something we're thinking about. mean, what do you recommend?   Seth Bradley, Esq. (23:21.089) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd recommend I mean, it depends, right? Like I'm I'm scared to turn you by trade, but I don't like to say you should always raise capital no matter what. Right. Like you've been able to scale your business as you have and grown it to where it is without bringing outside capital. It sounds which is great because you own 100 percent or with whatever business partners you might have. You know, when you start raising capital, you're giving a large chunk of that piece away, not necessarily your whole company. But if you're buying   you know, a set of routes or that sort of thing. You you're gonna give a big piece away to those past investors if you're starting a fund or even if it's up. Even a single asset syndication here for one of these, you know, these routes, you could put it together that way. You know, it's just something to consider. But a lot of times when people are looking to scale fast, right, if they wanna grow exponentially, you've gotta use other people's money to get there or hit the lottery.   Mike (24:08.294) Mm.   Mike (24:15.856) Absolutely, no, agree. That's spot-on and I actually before you know the Silicon Valley company That I was part of we had a we went through probably series a B C D C ground   Let's just say we weren't very fiscally responsible. So I come from the, you know, it's like the ex-girlfriend example. I don't want to just start taking everyone's money.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (24:42.413) Yeah, yeah, that tends to happen with some startups, right? Like before you get funding, you're super frugal because it's your money and every single dollar counts. And you're like, I don't want to pay, you if it's software, you don't want to pay the software engineers. I'm going to out, you know, put it, you know, hire Indian engineers, that sort of thing. And then once you get a few million bucks that you raised in that seed round, then it just goes and you're like, whoa, wait a minute, let's hire 20 people. You know, it's you got to be careful about that.   Mike (25:05.606) Yeah   Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great take on it.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (25:11.245) Yeah, it's, yeah. It's a question I love to ask and I think it's about time for that. So, in a parallel universe, tell me about a different version of you. So a different but likely version, right? Like, for example, for me, I went to med school for a year and a half and then I dropped out and I ended up becoming an attorney. So that was like a big turning point, right? So I could have easily at some point just said screw it and became a doctor and that would have been a totally different route than I'm going down right now.   What's an example of something like that for you?   Mike (25:42.524) Wait, are you being serious about that? I took the MCAT too. I got into med school and then I, yeah, I was pretty mad in school. And then the more I learned about exercise science, I was like, organic chemistry is not fun.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (25:44.321) Yeah, totally.   yeah? There you go.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (25:57.39) It is not fun. I did not love that. I majored in exercise physiology and then I ended up switching to biology because it was just a little bit of an easier route to get my degree and go into med school and I went for a year and a half and then I dropped out because I absolutely hated it. I knew I didn't want to do it. I was just more attracted to business and that sort of thing.   Mike (26:16.346) Yeah, that's crazy. That's awesome. parallel universe. I, that's a really good question. I don't know. I, kinda, I have two kids under three and the other side of me wishes I would have traveled more.   you know, I mean, we'll get there hopefully when they get out of high school and someday. But right now I just think there's so many different cultural things and ways to skin the cat. And it's just fascinating to learn some of those things.   Mike (26:55.352) yourself in those cultures.   go to different cultures and really like understand how they did things for a time, a period of time to really just learn their thinking.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (27:07.777) Yeah, I love that man. I had a similar experience of what you're describing. I didn't travel abroad really other than like, you know, Canada and Mexico until I studied abroad in Barcelona during law school and I got to stay there for a couple of months. So you actually had some time. It wasn't like you're just visiting for a week or a weekend or anything like that. You got to kind of live there right for a couple of months and it just totally changed my, you know, my outlook on life and just the way that you see things like I feel like we're in the US and we just think   Mike (27:19.627) Seth Bradley, Esq. (27:37.76) US is number one and there's only one way to do things the way that we do things that kind of attitude. And then when you go to Western Europe and you see that culture and you drive or get on a train, it's like an hour away and you're in a totally different culture and they're doing it a certain way as well and it's working. You just see that other people are doing things differently and still being successful at it, still having a thriving culture and it's just awesome to see.   Mike (28:03.312) Yeah, absolutely.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (28:06.251) Yeah. Tell me about some major influences in your life. What turned you or got you into that, the vending business? It's not one of those typical things. mean, I know you're in the education business, so you're kind of really spreading the word about this type of business. But I would say when you started, there might not have been a mastermind or educational courses around this. mean, how did you kind of get drawn into that? Were there any particular people or influences that brought you in?   Mike (28:29.308) you   Mike (28:36.188) Yeah. So the, biggest influence for me to get into vending, uh, wasn't actually a person. It was actually, was, um, I had landed, I was coming back from the Pentagon from a trip back to the Bay for the startup we were talking about. And I was in the Denver airport and 11 PM, you know, our flight was delayed. And then they're like, Hey, you have to stay in the airport tonight. The pilot went over their hours for the day, blah, blah, blah. So I went to a vending machine and I remember buying a bottle of water.   I think it costs like at the time three bucks or something. I knew that bottle of water cost 20 cents at Costco. And I was like, there is someone that's at home with their kids right now making money off me and they're not even at this mission. Like the machine is doing the work. So I had like an aha moment of like, what are my true priorities in life? And like, why am I chasing this cutthroat startup from.   Palo Alto and trying to make it when reality was my priorities are freedom to spend more time with my family. So that's really kind of what led me into this path of starting a vending machine side hustle to keep our lifestyle as we had kids. We wanted to have a nanny and we wanted to be able to still go on dates and things like that as a couple with my wife. So that's really kind of my family and just like...   having the freedom to do things. Like that's what I'm really passionate about.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (29:59.084) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, building on that, and you may have already answered that, but what does success look like for you?   Mike (30:01.766) next   Mike (30:06.268) an empty calendar.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (30:08.621) Good luck with that. Good luck with that.   Mike (30:11.516) Oh man, I was gonna say, how do we crack that code? No, yeah. No, but I think success to me is doing things like picking up my daughter at three and even being able to say no to the things that aren't gonna get you to where you need, like the discipline piece of this too.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (30:15.708) man.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (30:33.995) Yeah, yeah, mean, you know, for me, it's kind of similar, right? It's not going to be able to empty that calendar. Not yet, at least maybe here in the future. But for now, it's pretty filled. But it is it's flexible, right? Like us as entrepreneurs, you know, we probably work more than we ever worked when we were in our W-2s. But at the same time, it's you know, we're working in our own business for ourselves, for our families. And we have the   Flexibility, a lot of people will say the freedom, right? But we have the flexibility to move things around. And if you want to pick your kids up at school at three, or you do want to take a weekend off, or something comes up in your schedule, you have the flexibility to do that. Whereas if you're kind of slaving away at the nine to five, you can't really do it.   Mike (31:04.486) Yeah. Yeah.   Mike (31:20.198) Yeah, that's spot on. mean, I just wrote that down, but flexibility is, cause you're right. When you started becoming an entrepreneur, this is what I tell people all the time when they want to get a venting around is like running your own business. You are going to work harder than you do for your boss currently at your W-2. Like you have to do payroll. You have to do, like you gotta like make sure there's money to actually do pay, you know, like all those things that you just don't even think about when you have a W-2. It's like, today's   Seth Bradley, Esq. (31:39.543) Yeah   Mike (31:48.89) You know, this Friday I get paid. Well, when you run a business, mean, that money's got to come from somewhere.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (31:51.905) Yeah   Right, yeah, 100%, man, 100%. All right, Mike, we're gonna wrap it up. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Tell the listeners where they can find out more about you.   Mike (32:05.286) Yeah, so thanks for having me. This has been great. I have free content all over the place. can find me on the classic Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, but I also have vendingpreneurs.com is where we help people that are more interested in actually the vending stuff. But I've been really trying to double down on YouTube lately because there's just a lot of content and you can't get it off a one minute reel.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (32:32.417) Love it, man. All right, Mike, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show.   Mike (32:35.91) Thanks for having me.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (32:37.227) Hi brother. Alright man, got a couple more questions for you. We do like a quick, kind of do the full podcast episode and then I'll just do kind of a quick episode that'll follow up on a Monday and then another one on a Friday. Cool.   Mike (32:55.814) See you.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (32:59.693) We out here.   Welcome to Million Dollar Mondays, how to make, keep, and scale a million dollars. Mike is a super successful entrepreneur in the vending machine business and beyond. Tell us, how did you make your first million dollars?   Mike (33:20.922) Yeah, Seth. It was probably actually through real estate and just getting a little bit kind of lucky with timing with COVID and short-term rentals and some of that. But yeah, that's probably how I got the first million.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (33:25.229) Mm.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (33:37.079) Gotcha, cool. Yeah, real estate usually plays a role in the everybody's strategy down the line, whether they're in that primary business or not, whether they start out there or they end up there, real estate usually plays a part. How'd you make your last million?   Mike (33:53.956) Yeah, that's a good question because it's completely different than real estate, but it's actually been vending machines. So that's been kind of fun. just, you you talk about product market fit whenever you're an entrepreneur with a business. And that was just kind of the perfect storm right now of traditional vending really kind of being outdated. And we found a product market fit with it.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (33:57.57) Right. Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (34:16.215) Gotcha. Cool. that was from, was this maybe mostly attributed to kind of buying those routes, those larger routes?   Mike (34:23.32) Exactly. Yeah. Buying old school routes and really kind of flipping them like a house with modern micro markets charging, with different products and what would fit in a vending machine, like more of the unorthodox, you know, toilet paper and tide pods and things that wouldn't fit in a traditional vending machine. I mean, we'll sell $35 bottles of shampoo in these micro markets. So just kind of, go and add it in a different way.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (34:49.857) Yeah, and then with the aging population, there's gotta be more and more of these things popping up. So there should be more opportunity for people to get involved or for people like yourself to just snag everything, right?   Mike (35:01.102) Yeah, I think there's no chance I could snag everything, not even just in this town alone that I'm currently in. I mean, machines are getting cheaper, the technology is getting way better with AI. And nowadays, it's not what fits in a vending machine motor. It's okay, what's shelf space? if it's a bottle of shampoo or a glass Coke, it doesn't matter because it's not just getting thrown down the chute of a traditional machine.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (35:05.387) Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (35:27.521) Makes sense, makes sense. Last, how are you planning on making your next million dollars?   Mike (35:34.3) I think probably with AI, we're doing a lot of interesting stuff with helping people scale their, their vending routes. that is applicable to any, small business. And so I'm really intrigued. Just every time I go down a rabbit hole with some new AI tool, I feel like there's another better one that just came right behind it. So I just think it's kind of that time where you can really get ahead by just learning.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (36:06.209) Yeah, totally makes sense. mean people that are not paying attention to AI whether it's simply using chat GPT instead of Google search are getting left behind quickly because it's just advancing so fast. I can't even imagine what this world's gonna look like five years from now the way that things are moving.   Mike (36:23.132) It's crazy. Three years ago when I was working for a tech company selling software into the government, I would have to work with three secretaries to schedule a meeting with the general to sell their software. Now my EA is literally an AI bot and everyone that's scheduling time on my calendar, they don't even know they're talking to a non-human, which is pretty   Seth Bradley, Esq. (36:43.479) Yeah, 100%. We're gonna, I predicted within five years, everybody's gonna have a humanoid robot in their home with AI instilled and they're gonna be doing physical things for us at our homes. Yeah. Yep. Yep. 100%. Awesome, All right, moving on to the next one.   Mike (36:50.181) Yeah!   Mike (36:57.917) I hope so. I hope they can go to Costco get all our groceries do our do our laundry The dishes   Seth Bradley, Esq. (37:11.501) You're clearly in the top 1 % of what you do, Mike. What is it about you that separates you from the rest of the field?   Mike (37:19.056) Ooh, that's a good question, Seth. I think it's just discipline, know, discipline and focus. One of the hardest things is being able to say no with the things that don't align. And when I was growing up, I had a quote that has really stuck with me. That's like, it's better to be respected than liked. And I think that really resonates. Like naturally as a human, you want to be liked and help people, but the 1 % are really good at saying no.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (37:47.649) Yeah, I love that man. That's a great answer. Kind of building on that, what do you think the number one attribute is that makes a successful entrepreneur?   Mike (37:57.468) probably focus. Yeah. Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (37:59.212) Yeah, focus. Yep. The one thing, right? The one thing.   Mike (38:04.186) Yep. That's why you come back to like the most successful entrepreneurs. They always niche down and they niche down because they just, got hyper-focused. Like this is kind of why for me, you know, I started this passive Mr. Passive on social media before I even got into Vendi. Well, now everyone's like, well, how passive is Vendi? And well, it's like, what's really interesting is I was posting all these different, what I thought passive income streams in the time, but everyone, 95 % of the questions I got about   Airbnbs are all my different investments was about bending. So I just niche down on, on bending and I just looked back on that and I was like, it really forced me to focus.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (38:43.263) Awesome, awesome. What's one thing someone could do today to get 1 % closer to success in the vending machine business if they are really interested in learning more?   Mike (38:53.892) tap into your connections and find a location that has high foot traffic, whether that's a friend that works at an urgent care, a sister that lives at an apartment. You know, you take your kid to that gymnastics studio that has a ton of foot traffic between 4 PM and 8 PM. Like all those locations are prime locations to put one of these modern smart machines in. so, tapping into your connections, well, you know,   Seth Bradley, Esq. (39:24.567) Love that man. Awesome. All right, Mike, I appreciate it, brother. We'll to meet in person sometime,   Mike (39:30.574) I would love to. Where are you based, Seth?   Seth Bradley, Esq. (39:31.789) I'm in San Diego, where you at?   Mike (39:34.78) I am in Eugene. Yeah, Oregon. I'll come down your way though.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (39:37.39) Cool We're planning on doing yeah, we're planning on doing so me and my wife we have a Sprinter van and Last May we did we did going back to the flexibility piece, right? We did 32 days in the van up through Wyoming Montana and then into like Into Canada and they're like Banff and Jasper and all the way up to Jasper and then we circled back on the west coast Through Vancouver and then down back to San Diego Yeah   Mike (40:05.52) What?   Seth Bradley, Esq. (40:06.829) Pretty wild, pretty awesome. And the reason I brought that up is this year we're gonna do shorter trip. We're probably gonna do two, maybe three weeks at the most, but we're gonna do kind of the Pacific Northwest. So Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver and all those parks and stuff up there.   Mike (40:17.254) Yeah.   Mike (40:21.744) Yeah, you definitely have a, have you been to Bend before? Bend is like my, that whole area, Central Oregon is, and even Idaho, like all those kind of, yeah. That's awesome. Please let me know when you're up this way. I mean, I'll come meet you wherever. That'd be amazing. Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (40:24.641) Yeah, yeah I have.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (40:38.861) Sure man grab a coffee or beer. I appreciate it. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah all right brother great to meet you and I will send the information on when this is gonna get released and give you you materials and all that stuff so we can collaborate on social media   Mike (40:51.964) Okay. Okay. Yeah. Is a lot of your audience, like passive investors?   Seth Bradley, Esq. (40:58.593) So most of that, so now I'm rebranding. I rebranded because I'm gonna be speaking more towards like active entrepreneurs, Active entrepreneurs, people raising capital, that sort of thing. Whereas before it was based on passive investors and people really focused on attorneys. So I'm an attorney and I was raising capital from attorneys for my real estate deals. Now I'm really more into selling shovels. I'm scaling my law firm. I'm chief legal officer for Tribest, which is, we've got a fund to fund.   Mike (41:20.262) Mm-hmm.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (41:28.085) legal product there as well. So we're really trying to bring in active, active entrepreneurs and people raising capital.   Mike (41:29.777) Yeah.   Mike (41:36.572) Okay, because I got that, I was just thinking through when we talking about that oil development project, that could be a good, the guy that runs that fund could be a good interview for you. Just thinking through your audience, because he's always looking for investors into his fund and like these oil lubs are just crushing it.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (41:49.901) Cool. Yeah.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (41:58.464) Yeah, cool. Who is it? Just, I don't know if I know him or not.   Mike (42:02.183) Um, Robert Durkey, he's out of Florida. has, his problem is he's sitting on a gold mine that has no, like he's old school, doesn't know social media, any of that. So that's why I think he'd be perfect for you. Cause I think you could help him and he could definitely help you with some kickback. Yeah. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we meet soon. Okay. See you Seth. Bye.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (42:05.645) I don't think I know. I don't think I know.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (42:13.889) Yeah. Gotcha.   Seth Bradley, Esq. (42:20.705) Cool, okay, sounds good man. Yeah, I appreciate the introduction.   Yeah, all right brother. Talk soon. See ya. Links from the Show and Guest Info and Links: Seth Bradley's Links: https://x.com/sethbradleyesq https://www.youtube.com/@sethbradleyesq www.facebook.com/sethbradleyesq https://www.threads.com/@sethbradleyesq https://www.instagram.com/sethbradleyesq/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethbradleyesq/ https://passiveincomeattorney.com/seth-bradley/ https://www.biggerpockets.com/users/sethbradleyesq https://medium.com/@sethbradleyesq https://www.tiktok.com/@sethbradleyesq?lang=en Mike Hoffman's Links: https://www.instagram.com/mikehoffmannofficial/ https://x.com/mrpassive_?lang=en https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikedhoffmann/ https://www.tiktok.com/@mr.passive

Keith and Jenny discuss a pair of jeans that Jenny ordered, which weren't quite what she was hoping for; they test out new Doritos flavors, and Jenny loses her mind over Pop-up Pitbull. Presented by Iowa Distilling Company Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tiff and Britt dive into the nitty-gritty details of turning all that CE energy you have into an implementable system in your practice. They give insight on establishing a point person, training the team, identifying patients, and more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. Thank you for being back here with me and I have Miss Brittany Stone. What is it? No BS Brit. Miss BS Brit. I don't remember what Carrie calls you. This is one of them, right? One of them. But also soon to be Grand Canyon champion. If you didn't listen to our case acceptance one, go listen and hopefully soon we will have some results from Brit killing it. Yeah, you will be a survivor.   Britt (00:10) What fun of them!   Winner survivor. One of the two. At least one.   The Dental A Team (00:29) but then I wanna know how much you sleep on Saturday when you're done. So that'll be the big question. Exactly, yeah, how long does it take for you to get back on the bike once you're done? But thank you for being here with us today, Britt. I think we've gotten, I love podcasting with you, your hygiene brain, like Dana's hygiene brain, you guys just kind of come at it from a different angle. I know the rest of us all have dental assisting backgrounds and.   Britt (00:32) Yeah, like that. I if I can reach my legs or not.   The Dental A Team (00:55) you know, hygiene assisting, but that hygienist brain just shares a different section. ⁓ And I think you do really well relating with the doctors and kind of that support team space like we spoke to on the case acceptance one. So I'm excited for today, Brett. Thank you for being here. ⁓ You've got the Grand Canyon, but like, gosh, what else is what else is new and exciting? You just went to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants not too long ago. So that's true.   Britt (01:21) conferences, I went to PNDC, that   was a good time. Luckily it was gorgeous weather there. mean, podcasting today is special. I wear my tooth earrings for us today since we're podcasting, know, just lots of fun things.   The Dental A Team (01:35) Getting a little fancy. I like it. And you guys, so you just went to that conference, you went to the Arizona Dental Convention that was in March, right? I think that one's always March for like the last, I don't know, 50 years. It's always been in March. ⁓ And then you just went to the other one and then you're heading out again in a couple weeks to dentist advisors. Yeah.   Britt (01:55) Yeah, Dentist Money Summit   is by Dentist Advisors, which will be in gorgeous Park City, Utah. So, you know, it's a rough life over here.   The Dental A Team (02:01) Yeah, I   know, right? And actually it's perfect timing because they, I think we've all like our, our seasons were a little bit off this year. So we are barely getting hot, which normally we're at like 110 already, um, which has been fantastic in Arizona, but that meant that Nevada and, um, Salt Lake area, both Reno and Salt Lake area have had snow longer. So I think you're going to hit Salt Lake for Dentist Money Summit right as the like peak.   summer season starts. So you're gonna get some beautiful weather and I'm a little jealous. I will be in California or something like that. But anyways, somewhere.   Britt (02:36) somewhere else. It'll be great.   And my second, my nephew, second of my nieces and nephews graduate. So I won't go to graduation, but I'll get to go. I'm like, I'll be coming like a couple weeks later to see you. So I'll go get to see them while I'm up there too.   The Dental A Team (02:50) Okay.   Okay, good, good. I was like, wait a second, how do we get you there? That's good.   Britt (02:55) I'm not fighting the crowd up there for graduation,   which he's like, mom, everybody graduates. I'm like, no, it's still a big deal. We'll just celebrate when I come see you on my own instead of along with everybody else.   The Dental A Team (03:06) gosh,   that's funny. I was just talking over the weekend, we had a graduation party that we had to drop in on yesterday. So was like, gosh, I'm gonna have to, which is, I don't like thinking about it, but I have to start thinking about it that Brody's in a year. So was like, Aaron's like, is he gonna want a party? And he, said, no, he's gonna be the kid that's like, everybody graduates. It's fine. Like it's no big deal. But it is a big deal. same, Exactly.   Britt (03:26) But they still want it, even though you know it, even though they're like, they're   disappointed, it's like, oh, come on. But like, they want it.   The Dental A Team (03:33) Exactly. It's like my birthday where I was like, it's fine. Like just a dinner, but like, had they not done a big deal for my 40th, I probably would have, you know, been in shambles. So when it comes, he's surely going to want it, but graduation season is upon us and it's wild that we are in the space of life that we're experiencing it with them. think that's crazy. And anyways, you've got some fun travels. if you guys aren't heading CE events, make sure that you do and make sure that you check out.   a lot of RCE events. So if you're a listener, if you're a client, whatever, you're a listener and a client, like whatever you guys want, we have, what is it? Every third Wednesday, we have a CE webinar. We've got a really cool webinar coming up in August that we do. ⁓ Every year the content shifts and changes, but.   Britt (04:20) to like check out our Instagram if you don't follow us. If I'm there, come find me. Let me know, message us. I got at PNUC to see a few clients which is really fun. It's always nice when we get to meet up in person. So, whether you're a client or just a listener, come find me.   The Dental A Team (04:22) Yeah.   Yeah.   Yeah,   especially in Brits position because you have a handful of your own clients, but you oversee a lot of the company. So you know all of the client names, but you don't get to see them and meet them. So I know I have a few clients that are asking if I was going to be there and I'm not. I was like, you got to go find, seek out Brit, like go meet Brit. So definitely, definitely follow the Instagram, make sure that you reach out to Brit.   If you're there, look for her, say hello, take a little picture with her, and then make sure you're hitting those CEs and make sure you're hitting all the free ones, you guys. We put out a ton of free CE and why not? Because I know you need to stack those hygienists and doctors. You guys need to stack those CE credits. So do it for free wherever you can. And then, like I tell one of my prized clients, set up a CE bucket so that you're saving money for the CE that's not free. And on that note...   I think, ⁓ we were actually just talking and I think it's funny because I do think this was like super high thing and right now it's like, I think it's kind of stabilized. It's not quite as sought after as heavily as it was, but for the clients that are doing it or still trying to implement it, there are still some really great CE avenues out there. Today we wanted to talk a little bit on the sleep apnea avenue, systems wise, not to sleep apnea. That's not our genre. You can go take CE for that, Britt can probably tell you a ton.   medically, but you know, that's not our genre, but our genre, our space, our niche is the systems behind it. And so on the note of CE and implementing, do think even if you're not doing sleep apnea, or you're not considering sleep apnea, a lot of what we talk about today is copy pasteable, like systems are systems, you guys, and we we overcomplicate it in life. And what we say for one thing can easily be duplicated and slightly altered for something else. So if there's CE that you're doing, which doctors we love you.   so much. And when you go to CE, you come back just like ecstatic. And if you didn't take team with you, you're the only one. And it's so hard sometimes to get that generating. Typically, it's that there's not, it's just all a fun idea. There's not a really good system behind it to get that momentum. So taking these systems, even what we talked about for sleep apnea, whatever CE you do, apply it to that. And like you said with the sleep apnea, if they're not taking team members, like it can be really hard to implement. And that's a space too.   if you can bring team members to any of that CE or sign them up for the webinar and get them included in it, I think that's a great space too. anyhow, sleep apnea side and system side, Britt, you've worked out the hygienist. So I know that this is some of the stuff like the questionnaire style and that stuff. Like what do you see and what you've actually helped practices implement the systems for sleep apnea. So what do you see as?   Britt (07:10) Thank   The Dental A Team (07:24) the biggest ticket items of implementing sleep apnea or just CE style in general that is easy, that's duplicatable like that.   Britt (07:34) And I think sleep and my yo that's coming in pretty strong for a lot of people too. I think you can similar areas when it comes to looking to implement something successfully. I think that you would look for. So if you're doing one or the other, ⁓ number one, I think is making sure that our team knows what it is. Like Tiff said, doc, you can go to a CE and you get all excited and you understand all the things behind it to see all the dots connect and why this is so important.   because it is, but the team often is behind. So whenever you're looking to do something, you might just take a course as like an exploratory, right? And then you're like, no, this is something I really want to do. When you start to get into that phase of like, no, I really want to work on implementing this. I want you to look for things that are going to help train your team because your team is going to be needing to have 90 % of these conversations with patients and you're going to   Goal is for you not to have all of the conversations with all of the patients. The goal is for the team to be able to help support you, identify patients and start to educate patients and warm them up to the idea. Because just like for your team, it's kind of a newer thing or a different thing or something they don't know all the details about, it doesn't come easily to them. Patients even more so. So that's why our team needs to be really confident in knowing what it is, the reasons why, and being able to talk about it.   I think is number one place to start. Along with that, would say have someone call it your champion, call it your lead of that thing, whatever title you want to give them of someone who is going to be that person who is going to make sure the team has all the things. We educate the team on all the things and they're going to be the one to really ⁓ kind of take point on implementation and keeping this going and getting it to where it becomes a program that's ingrained within our practice.   we need someone to be that person. So from the get-go, education, someone who's gonna be a point person before we even start on implementing anything with our patients. So that would be my number one thing, Tiff, to start with is education and identify as someone who's gonna be the point person, because they're gonna start thinking of implementation, what are all the things we need in our practice to get this program going.   The Dental A Team (09:54) Yeah, and even like ortho, I have like the same I'm thinking the same thought process because anything that you're trying to grow that doesn't you don't put attention on isn't going to grow. So to your champion conversation there, whether it's sleep, my ortho implants, like anything that's not crowns, fillings, bridges, you know, and even I do have a lot of practices that even do it for crowns, whatever that champion making sure there's a   Britt (09:57) Hmm. Yeah.   The Dental A Team (10:22) a job description. And I love that you said the education piece because that I think even when I've seen practices implement the champion space, it's still the education piece falls back to the doctor. But putting that I think that's brilliant putting that on the champion of scheduling out the lunch and learns making sure that they're doing the role playing with the with the team and that they're having these meetings with the team on the education and the why behind it, so that they can take that information and   and tackle it with the patients. And then it made me think too, like KPI is their key performance indicator. So that champion is responsible for seeing, how many times, how many patients do we need to talk to about this to get our case acceptance where we want it or to get that many cases? I know like for ortho, we might do, we want five starts this month or 10 starts this month. So then you look at how many patients do we need to talk to about ortho in order to get.   that because your case acceptance might be like 25%. So you're doing the math for that. then, Brett, I'm thinking that champion is then responsible for collecting the data from the team on how many patients do we talk to, how many patients signed up, and kind of championing all of the results and then looking at how do I control and manipulate the results based on the education implementations, all of those pieces.   Britt (11:46) agreed and that's I think probably you Tiff right with clients. Like you said, the new thing, right? Name the new thing that we're doing within the office and you know, they want to do more of that thing and I'm like, alright, well, what's going on? Why aren't we even getting it presented to patients? What's happening? Well, we're just not talking about it, right? Like it really comes back to that. That's one of the biggest hurdles to get over is just talking about it and making sure patients know what it is.   The Dental A Team (12:05) Yeah.   Britt (12:16) what benefit it would be to them if they're a candidate, if this is something that they need. So that's why I say, make sure we've got that foundation first. And then we go into, okay, we've got a team more comfortable talking about it. How do we identify opportunities with patients? And then that's where we move into what kind of screening do we want for this specific treatment for sleep apnea? Then all right, what kind of screening do we wanna incorporate?   across the board. So it's not reliant on a human thinking, this one would be a candidate. Like, no, what are you screening to where we know when these things are checked or we get this answer to this question, they are someone then that we are going to talk to about a sleep appliance or sleep apnea, we're working on getting them tested, whatever it may be.   The Dental A Team (13:01) Yeah. And within that, asking those leading questions so that the patient starts thinking, because I think like back to, I think a lot of people do ortho. So back to ortho, you come in and you're hot and heavy. Like I got to get, I'm getting ortho cases and the patient has not had any like leading questions to make them start thinking that there's a problem or a solution needed for a problem. And then you come in and you're like, have you ever thought about ortho? And they're like, no, I haven't.   Right? Because we didn't make them think about ortho kind of the same. Like, do you, you know, ⁓ I hear you might be a snorer, right? Or just coming in and being like, Hey, you've got these weird scallops on your tongue and I think you might need this. And then we just go on this tangent of sleep apnea and they're like, I have no issue sleeping. But if we start asking those leading questions of, do you find yourself tired in the middle of the day? does your partner, you know, do you wake your partner up a lot? Do you toss and turn a lot?   night? Like, are you getting up to use the restroom a lot at night? Like different things that are preheating and leading into there might be something going on there, I think is a space that we kind of overlook sometimes. And we just jump into this is the solution. And it kind of gets lost in translation. And then right on to like layering on top of that, you've got your questionnaire, you've got your team, they're ready to go. You've got all of these pieces.   there, you know what your lead and lag measures are, then you set like identifying the patients, we're identifying the patients and then that layer, like it never stops, there's always the next layer. And that next layer is okay, if we can identify the patients, now we get to track and see, are we getting those patients? So then we say, okay, well, most of my patient base is 18 to 26 years old.   might not be getting like that might not be the patient base you need for sleep apnea or for implants or whatever it is that you want to specialize in. then you've got to look and see, do I need to determine something different in my patient avatar to fit what I'm trying to implement what I'm trying to get because there's only so much you can do with the patients that you're getting in. So it just like keeps layering but comes down to I love like step one it feels like Brit from what you're saying is   Find that champion and make sure that champion is thoroughly educated in what their job is and what the procedure is so then they can, step two, help you to train the team, get the team on board, figure out the why. Step three, find the patients. Step four, how do we get more of those patients?   Britt (15:42) Yeah, which I think then plays into marketing, right? Marketing at the end of the day is the number of times of exposure. So, right, when it comes down to it, then what are we putting out there? What do we have around our office? What, even if it's peripherally, are our patients seeing to know that this is a thing and that it exists? Because then it won't be as much of a surprise to them when we have a conversation or they're like, well, why aren't you know, I don't even know what that is. They at least, oh, I've seen XYZ about that.   thing in your office or on the TV out in the waiting room, whatever it may be, to start warming them up to it as well. And then depending on how much you want to grow that and be known for that thing, mean, Tiff is the marketing queen. Then there's like a lot more marketing that goes behind it.   The Dental A Team (16:29) Yeah, I do love marketing. don't know why, but I really do. ⁓ But you're making me think of, because it's subliminal. I think that's why I love it. Because it's like, what can I do to make someone think this way, right? Like I love, I love the way the brain works. I love communication. That's why. So I'm thinking as you're speaking to that, like you're saying like have it off to the side and have it on a TV like 100 % because most of the time we're just being again, preheated.   to the possibility of needing something. So if you think of like a Doritos commercial, right? Like they don't just in the beginning come out with the, like they're not like Doritos, right? It's like, hey, we're grabbing some Doritos out of a chip bowl and all of the like tortilla chips, the unnamed tortilla chips over there is full, but the Doritos are like empty, but we're having conversation, we're having fun, we're in a party because now you're thinking about Doritos associated to fun. So that's how marketing works. It's like little snippets of   this thing and how it's going to benefit your life. Not just like, hey, have some Doritos. Because if somebody came by and they're like, hey, Doritos are amazing, have Doritos. They're just, they're so tasty, you're gonna love them. You're like, I'm okay actually, like, I don't need a Dorito, right? But if they're like, hey, like, let's have fun, let's have a party, let's get people talking, it's gonna be so amazing and you can have these Doritos over here that's gonna, everybody's gonna stand around the bowl and they're gonna socialize.   then you're like, yeah, let me try these Doritos. So it's kind of that same thing. Like how is this thing, this sleep apnea, this ortho, this Botox, these injectors, the fillables, how is this going to benefit the patient's life and speak to the benefits and the problem, not the solution? Because being like, Botox, Botox, Botox, Botox, right? Like Botox is cool, but like why do I want Botox? Because I wanna look 30 when I'm 45.   That's why I Botox. And when do I need to start? When I'm 28. Like, how do we get this subliminal messaging into different aspects of our practice and our speaking? And then what it also does is gets your team speaking that language too, because they're constantly seeing it. So they're constantly being reminded. And as you guys are checking on...   Britt (18:23) Perfect.   The Dental A Team (18:44) KPI is and how is it working and how is it growing? We're constantly coming back to this space that you're trying to implement and grow. Caveat of one at a time. Botox and color is fine. Sleep apnea.   Britt (18:56) I was thinking the same exact thing.   The Dental A Team (19:01) you can't come home and be like we're doing sleep apnea we're gonna ramp up our ortho and guess what guys I need five more implants and it's like I don't know which one to focus on so one major change at a time and let it sit let it ruminate and see how it goes I like six months at least for like a big implementation like that ⁓ but   Britt (19:22) Be   good at that thing, right? I think that's when we do too much at once. You and your team, right? And the bigger the team, the more people you're trying to move. You're not gonna get good at it. And then let's be honest, if I'm not good at it, I'm not gonna do it as much. Let's just welcome to human nature again. Like it's a harder thing to do. It takes more effort. But if we focus on one and that one thing we get really good at and it becomes really easy, then that will stick and then we can move on to the next thing.   The Dental A Team (19:52) Yep. Yep. And always come back again to everything else too, because I've had clients that I've done, you know, let's focus in on implants. we're getting we're talking about it this many times, we're getting this many, we're looking for this many, you know, whatever all the pieces so   we're speaking to implants, we get really good at that. And they're like, cool, like, I want to do more ortho. It's like, okay, well, now we're laying on ortho. But then they're like, hey, wait, I haven't done an implant. I'm like, well, why? Because you lost focus on the implants, because you're so focused on the ortho. So you've got to just layer it in there and be like, on top of like being good at this, we also need to become good at this. So don't lose sight of it or stop tracking the one because you layered on something else, you literally just layering another level to it. And now you're doing both because   honestly, just those two, right? Implants and ortho go hand in hand, you know, do ortho before you place the implants or do ortho so that you can place an implant because the space is too small. Like how are you, how can your team help layer those together and support you in getting those things done? And firstly, Baphne, it's exactly the same. How can your team support you in getting it done? Because you've got what? 1500 to 3000 patients. You've got a team of five to   25 30 you cannot do it all you've got to have at least one champion who is helping you and when you do have those spaces to Britt's point of not doing too many and losing sight if you have a champion of each your phone you they are focused on that thing and so they're ensuring their thing their needle is moving so you've got your   champion of sleep apnea that's like, hey guys, nope, we lost focus, don't forget. And you got your champion of ortho that's like, cool, I've got my metrics over here and making sure that those are staying in line.   Britt (21:41) And I think once you start doing some cases, especially things where there's more of a knowledge gap, even in Visalign, right? Make sure you're getting results. So like you're getting testimonials, you're getting pictures at the end. Whenever there's a big investment, people want to know like what that means for them. Like what can that be for me? And so that's where   Having something to look at to see before and after and having testimonials for people goes a long ways, especially on things where there's more of a knowledge gap like sleep apnea. Because those patients are gonna really highlight what is important to them, which then is gonna be most likely what's important to all of your people that are in their same seat.   The Dental A Team (22:22) Yeah, I love it. love it. one, step one, figure out what you're going to do. If it's sleep apnea, it's sleep apnea. One thing, choose the one that you're gonna focus on right now. Step two, figure out what your champion's position looks like or lead or whatever you wanna call it. Quarterback, I don't care what you call it. That position, what's that job description? What are the metrics? Like what does that person need to do? So step one, figure out what you're gonna do. Step two, find your champion.   Britt (22:26) One thing, one thing.   The Dental A Team (22:52) figure out what that champion's gonna do. Step three, train your team. Step four, do the thing and track the results every time. I think really easy duplicatable systems that we tagged here as like Sleepapnea, Myo, whatever you wanna focus it on, but literally this system can be duplicated for any major change you're trying to make in procedures within your practice. And then I think the last layer is   within your metrics, watch your marketing and figure out what needs to shift and change there. Brit, brilliant. Brilliant Brit. That's the one. Brilliant Brit. Brilliant Brit.   Britt (23:27) That's the one I like   more. That's the better one.   The Dental A Team (23:32) one   I'm gonna use. Brilliant Brit. ⁓ thank you or brainy Brit right but anyways thank you ⁓ for being here with me today for doing this. I knew ⁓ with the implementations you've done before with Sleep Apnea and Mayo you've worked with the you've worked with that before so I knew that you would have some great ideas so thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to hear from you on Saturday that you survived the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim happily and you're still smiling and you're just sleeping.   Britt (24:02) Maybe I'll stream my before and after. We'll see. Maybe even with Dental A Team. We'll see. It depends on how bad it is afterwards.   The Dental A Team (24:08) Yeah.   Oh my gosh, that's fair. Yeah, that's fair. You can at least share with me and then we can decide. everyone, go find your thing. What's your one thing right now? What are you going to put? This is something I've been living by. You guys, we can talk about the book. can Hello@TheDentalATeam.com and ask me for it. But what are you putting a 10x effort into? What's your 10x problem that you're putting 10x effort into? Choose that thing. Focus there. Go do it. Duplicate.   create a system that can be duplicated and have so much fun doing it. Again, if you need help with it, you have questions, you want recommendations, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. We are all here to help. We all help answer those questions. So reach out and as always drop us a five star review below. We love to hear that this was implementable for you, that it was helpful and any ideas you guys have for future ones, we're always open to those. So Britt, thank you for being here. Listeners, thank you for being here and we'll catch you next time.

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Huge Monday ShowFind out which show member stayed the night at a QuikTripSexy Time Fun FactsRizzconnectionsOlive Garden loses its spot as top US casual dining restaurant after 7 years to resurgent chainReceding hairlines now have sex appeal (if you style yours correctly)Tinder's new game tests your flirting skills with AI personas powered by OpenAILove is blind: Dating app Tribal promises a match without seeing your partner's face  Follow us @RizzShow @MoonValjeanHere @KingScottRules @LernVsRadio @IamRafeWilliams - Check out King Scott's Linktr.ee/kingscottrules + band @FreeThe2SG and Check out Moon's bands GREEK FIRE @GreekFire GOLDFINGER @GoldfingerMusic THE TEENAGE DIRTBAGS @TheTeenageDbags and Lern's band @LaneNarrows http://www.1057thepoint.com/Rizz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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