Podcast appearances and mentions of drew what

In this week's episode, I tackle your questions regarding image, sex and dating! I answered four questions regarding the best way to find the right partner for you, how to open up to your partner about orgasms, ways to explore sex outside of the bedroom, and how to find a willing third party for a threesome. This episode is a juicy one, enjoy! Please reach out and tell us your thoughts about the Q&A over on Instagram @celestemooreimage and don't forget to rate and review if you love the podcast! In this week's episode we discuss: [01:49] Question 1: (Drew) - What is the best way to find the right partner for me? [05:04] Question 2: (Lou) - My boyfriend rarely gives me an orgasm, how do I talk to him about it? [06:41] Question 3: (Corey) - I want to have sex outside of the bedroom, where do you recommend? [08:23] Question 4: (Stefan) - How do I find a willing third party for a threesome?  

In this episode, Allan and Drew tackle and interesting subject that was suggested by Drew and that Allan posted for the LinkedIn community to gather around: things we believe in cybersecurity that we cannot prove. The LinkedIn conversation was phenomenal, and Drew and Allan do a great job of summarizing it and calling out the underpinnings behind much of what we believe in this industry. Questions Allan asks Drew: What inspired this topic? What were some of your favorites from the LinkedIn thread? What are the underlying themes here? Is BYOD security really a thing? Are third-party risk assessments useful? Special thanks to LinkedIn posters: Peter Schawacker John Prokap Duane Gran Brian Campbell Matthew Dimmick Graham Lewendon Marcus W. Dmitriy Sokolovskiy And everyone who participated in a very lively thread... Sponsored by our good friends at Dazz: Dazz takes the pain out of the cloud remediation process using automation and intelligence to discover, reduce, and fix security issues—lightning fast. Visit Dazz.io/demo and see for yourself.

Das Ende des PhDs für unsere Hosts rückt mit großen Schritten näher, und damit auch das Ende unserer gemeinsamen Podcastreise. Das bedeutet gleichzeitig: es ist höchste Zeit, sich mit dem Thema akademischer Jobmarkt auseinanderzusetzen. Die Hosts, insbesondere Alexander, haben sich dafür zu viel Zeit gelassen und müssen jetzt im Eiltempo Informationen sammeln, verdauen und produzieren. Damit euch nicht dasselbe passiert, haben sich Philipp und Alexander zusammengesetzt, um ihre bisherigen Eindrücke und möglichen Konsequenzen Revue passieren zu lassen. Unter anderem besprechen die Hosts diesmal: - Die Unterschiede zwischen dem akademischen und Industriejobmarkt - Was von Kandidaten auf Juniorprofessuren (bzw. Assistant Professor Stellen) an Dokumenten erwartet wird - Um was es sich beim Job Talk und den Fly Outs handelt - Was sie gerne weitaus früher über den Jobmarkt gewusst hätten und noch einiges mehr (Philipp und Alexander reden sehr gerne). Des weiteren liefern wir euch unten noch ein paar Ressourcen rund um die Jobsuche. Job search resources: - google sheets "academic positions" - academics.de - akadeus.com - economic job market - european economic job market - econ job talks Resources zur Vorbereitung: - Henning Piezunka - Job Market Advice - Alex Albright - So you want to go on the job market? - Gray and Drew - What they didn't teach you in graduate school - Academic writing resources from Harvard, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina

- Kevin Castle runs down EXTREME RULES 2022- Shaemus is hitting his stride, Gunther is aimed to the top - A killer pretending to fight vs an imposter pretending to kill - Dakota Kai and Io Sky cut a great promo and fill in the gaps on RAW- Miz is a company guy who LIKES his job no matter what - A split in opinions on Kross v Drew - What happens when you do too good of a job building up interest?- The role of a valet isn't just standing around an being pretty- Kross with or without hair? - Bayley v Bianca and some influences in the match - Edge v Finn, great match? or great storyline? - Rhea Ripley is quickly becoming the most hated talent in WWE - Reys weekly beatdowns and where is this going?- Riddle v Seth did not deliver - Bray Wyatt returns and guessing who the Wyatt 6 are?Support Wrestling Soup on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wrestlingsoupSOCIAL CHANNELS ʕ̡̢̡ʘ̅͟͜͡ʘ̲̅ʔ̢̡̢Twitter: https://twitter.com/WrestlingSoupInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wrestlingsoup/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WrestlingSoup/Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/wrestlingsoup

Drew is an orthodontist who specializes in Invisalign. Initially, Drew, who will be a keynote speaker, describes the Seattle Study Club Symposium. The Seattle Study Club is one of the best resources for learning about dentistry. Drew has a chapter in Santa Barbra where they meet about nine times a year and bring in speakers to educate the providers, and therefore better the dental care their community receives. Drew discusses the importance of transitioning from analog to digital, given the digital culture we live in today. He compares braces to an analog experience and Invisalign to a digital experience. He shares ways that he has gone digital in his practice, including online exams and consultations. Drew also shares that going digital enables his work with other specialists to be more efficient and accurate. Next, Drew discusses the benefits of aligners over braces. He points out that because people are living longer and keeping their teeth longer, a lot of orthodontic work is being done on adults, and adults almost always prefer aligners. In his opinion, if a case can't be treated with aligners, it's because of the provider, not because it's not possible for it to be treated with aligners. Another massive benefit to aligners is the digital aspect. While there is usually only one diagnosis, there are multiple treatment plans. Drew shares that for him personally, he tries to learn about different specialties so that he can treatment plan more effectively. Moving forward, Drew explains what he is excited about in the future of orthodontics. One thing he appreciates is the amount of exposure there currently is to orthodontics. Far more people are aware of the importance of orthodontic treatment for functional purposes, not just aesthetic purposes. He values all that is available currently in orthodontics and all that is coming in the future, because of the ability to improve his patients' quality of life, not just their smile. He also shares how valuable it is to be a part of a group like Seattle Study Group Symposium, in order to be challenged and grow into a better clinician, and to stay informed about new developments within the field. Main Takeaways Seattle Study Club is one of the best ways to learn about dentistry The best way to future proof your practice is by transitioning to a digital approach Aligners are valuable because many adults need orthodontic treatment but are hesitant to receive braces Learning more about different specialties helps you treatment plan more effectively This is an exciting time to be in dentistry and orthodontics because of what's here and what's coming in the future Key Quotes “[Seattle Study Club] has evolved into essentially one of the best resources for learning about dentistry.” -Drew “Everyone expects to have a digital experience at this point.” -Drew “What's the best way to future proof the practice from anything that's going to happen?” -Drew “I think a lot of times dentists, and doctors in general, we just don't value our time as much as we should.” -Drew “We know that patients are living longer, we know that they're keeping their teeth longer, and we know that there's going to be more and more of a need for restorative work.” -Drew “My treatment planning has become better with aligners, because we are using that digital setup.” -Drew “Just learning the different aspects of different specialties then helps me treatment plan, and then execute my cases, better.” -Drew “It's amazing what we can do for a patient's quality of life that's more than just a pretty smile.” -Drew “In my practice, I want to provide the absolute best possible care that you can get anywhere.” -Drew “I think a key piece to anybody's development is just being in the right room, being in the right group.” -Kirk “If you're looking to just become a better, all around complete, clinician, then check this virtual Symposium out.” -Drew Snippets - Introduction of Seattle Study Club...

Seth Greene is the nation's foremost authority on growing your business with a podcast. Seth is the co-host of the SharkPreneur podcast with Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington that was just named “One of the Top 10 Podcasts to Listen to in 2019” by NASDAQ. He is the founder of the direct response marketing firm Market Domination LLC, and he is a seven-time best selling author who has been interviewed on NBC, CBS, Forbes, Inc, CBS Moneywatch, and many more. What you'll learn about in this episode: How Seth first connected with Kevin Harrington of TV's Shark Tank and then developed a consulting relationship and partnership with him How the Market Domination Dream 50 program works to build networking relationships with key centers of influence within the entrepreneurial community How Seth and his team are working through the coronavirus crisis and identifying new opportunities in spite of difficult conditions Seth shares an example of a real estate agent adding value and building a relationship and getting a large number of referrals in return How Seth and his team have 72 affiliate partners generating new business, and how the pandemic has actually caused business to increase significantly Why enjoying talking to people and having a fairly large, established client base are the keys to Seth's methods Why Seth recommends you read Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future by Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew What steps Seth and his team are taking to navigate the global pandemic by staying in front of prospects and adding value for clients Why the dramatic increase in social media use during the pandemic has created an incredible marketing opportunity for entrepreneurs Why virtual events in place of in-person events can be sustainable and worthwhile, even after the pandemic passes Resources: Seth's previous appearance on the show in Episode 75: https://smartrealestatecoachpodcast.com/podcasts/seth-greene/ Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/marketdomination Get a FREE copy of Seth Greene's book, Market Domination for Podcasting: www.Marketdominationllc.com/podcast Pendulum by Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew: https://amzn.to/3anbE09 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sethgreene/ Additional resources: Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/webinar Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/termsbook Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/ebook Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoach.com/QLS/ Smart Real Estate Coach Podcast Sponsor: Paul G. Dion CPA, CTC

TranscriptAaron Hixson: Hey Northridge, welcome to A Little Better, where our goal is to know God better and to do better, so that we can be a little better. Hey everybody, welcome back to A Little Better, thank you for being part of our podcast community. We're so grateful that you join in each week. I know during the middle of COVID, if you're anything like me, I feel like my podcast listening time has been drastically reduced. Not having a commute means that my amount of listening has gone down. I don't know, Drew, are you the same way? What's that going like for you?Drew Karschner: Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to play a podcast right now, it just is. No commute, it takes down my podcast time, for sure. Aaron: Yeah. So anyway, thanks for still listening in. I don't know if you are now shifting when you listen to, you know, whatever, doing the dishes time, or shower time, what? I don't know, is that weird? [Laughing]Drew: Trying to get away from your kids time. Aaron: Yo, whatever, actually that's the same thing, showering. [Laughing.] But, yeah, thanks for still tuning in. And we've actually got some good options available. If you're the kind of person who has found yourself where you don't any longer have time where you can listen to something and feel like you could drive and listen or whatever, we actually had a volunteer come forward who wanted to provide transcriptions for the podcast, which is pretty amazing. So shout out to Sara [stuttering]. Wow, I can't talk. Shoutout to Shara. Drew: Not to be confused with Shara. Aaron: Yeah Shara. Easily confused. Shout out to her. And that's amazing that she's willing to do this. We're gonna make them available as easily as we can. Now, this is a volunteer who's willing to do this. I'm not saying, she has not signed on to do this for the rest of eternity, and we're not expecting her to, so obviously we'll keep you posted about how that process goes, but we're running it as an experiment for now, and excited that we get to have these available. Drew: Thank you Sara. Aaron: Yes, thank you. In terms of how we will make these available, at the moment they are on our episode webpage, so if you're savvy enough to know where the episode webpage is, depending on how you listen to podcasts, there's a million ways to get to it, so I'm not gonna describe all of the ways, but that's a button that you're looking for. Maybe click the details button or something like that, and you'll find an episode webpage. It'll be available there in text format. If you're having trouble finding it, no problem. You know, you can email us, podcast@northridgerochester.com, or you can even just text me or Drew or anybody that works at our church and they'll get you to us, and we can make sure that we get that to you. You can text me personally at (585)484-7636, yeah whatever, I'd be happy to make sure we get that to you. But that's just another way to make it A) accessible for our deaf and hard of hearing community, but then also at the same time, some people just prefer to read instead of listen, so. That's fine. Engage however you can engage. Cool. All right, that was 2 minutes and 42 seconds of housekeeping. Thank you guys for your patience. But Drew, hit me with some stories from quarantine. Have you had any like, funny things that your kids have done or embarrassing work from home moments? What's that been like? Drew: I mean, you know, I got a lot of good stories. My kids are always trying to interrupt my meetings. I think the best one -- you have to understand my office. One, we took the door off way before COVID-19 happened, which was a great move until now. It's wide open, so you can hear everybody going on. And it's right next to the stairs that come downstairs, and so one day I'm sitting in my office. And I face the door to the stairs.And I'm in, I wouldn't call it a super serious meeting, but I would say semi-serious, and so I'm sitting there and I'm talking back and forth with the people in the meeting. And Ruby-Kate comes down the stairs, and she peeks her head out and she smiles, and she comes all the way down the stairs so she's almost looking in the door frame, and she's looking at me, she smiles. She's got her pajama top on, and she turns her back to me. I'm like, what is she doing? But she doesn't move. And then all of the sudden, she raises her hands in the air, which reveals her tiny, cute little butt cheeks, and she starts shaking and she goes, [singing] "shake your booty, shake your booty,” and she's just wiggling her little hiney back and forth. And like, I just straight burst out in laughter in the middle of this serious meeting. I'm like, "Guys, I'm sorry. There is nothing I could do in this moment but laugh." Aaron: You have been ambushed. Oh, that is so funny. How old is Ruby-Kate again? Drew: She's two, yeah. Two. Aaron: Oh my goodness, so cute. Drew: The better question is, what is Ashley teaching her while I'm in the office?Aaron: Oh my word, that's funny. Throwing Ashley right under the bus. Drew: What about you, Aaron, Grayson do anything crazy like that? Aaron: He hasn't bombed many of my meetings. Thankfully, being where I am, he's not really able to get there without some degree of help. If he's gonna come up, Lauren's usually checking my calendar or whatever to see if I'm in a meeting, which is very nice of her. So no booty shaking yet, but he did, in trying to explain to him, specifically with Gigi, who is Lauren's mom, Donna, they live in New Hampshire. He was talking to her about why he wanted her to come or something, he wanted to see her, so they were talking about why she couldn't come, and she said, you know, trying to explain -- how do you explain COVID to a three-year-old? She just said, there's a bug that people are getting, and it's making them sick, and so I don't want to get that bug or whatever. She was just explaining it on FaceTime or something, and then the next time -- I don't know, it was a couple weeks later. She was on FaceTime with him again, and he said "Gigi, are the bugs still outside of your house? Are they still making everyone sick? Where are the bugs? Have you gotten rid of the bugs yet?" And we were looking at him, like, what are you saying? And she's like, "I tried to explain it, this is the best I could come up with." And now he thinks there are, like, venomous bugs waiting outside of Gigi's house. Which, I'll deal with that. I'll take it. Drew: If it was really a bug, we'd be good in New York cause the snow would have killed it a long time ago. Aaron: Very true, very true. We would be hoping for a snowstorm. Oh wait, we had one last week. Unbelievable. Drew: It's only April 19th, I mean, like, no big deal, right? Aaron: Yeah, everybody loves an Easter snowstorm. Drew: Where I grew up, we got 8 inches. 8 inches. Aaron: What? This past week? Drew: Yeah, 8 inches of snow. Like, the power went out and everything. Happy spring, everybody! Aaron: I know. For once we get to say we're so glad we live in Rochester, we didn't get as much snow. Drew: Jesus is alive, spring isn't. [Both laughing.] Aaron: Seriously. It's still in that grave. Come on out. That's funny. But hey, one more -- I realized I have another housekeeping thing I wanted to mention before we jump into sermon discussion, and that is that we're recording this podcast these days Mondays around 3 o'clock. That's kind of our current schedule. We've done some pre-recording in the past, but because of COVID, we're doing it Mondays around 3. So I would really encourage all of our listeners, if you've got questions or comments or anything that you wanna say related to this podcast, from Saturday night services or Sunday services or whatever, if you have anything, just send it over to us, because we would totally engage with it, and now you have the opportunity to do so right now. We're in a phase where we absolutely could be bringing those things up. Like I said before, podcast@northridgerochester.com, if email's not your thing, text me or Drew or anybody on our staff, that will get a question to us. Literally any way that you can contact us, social media, it doesn't matter. Get it to us by Monday around 3, and we'll see if we can include questions or comments or whatever. We would love to do that, and we're in a phase where we totally can even easier than other times. Hit us up. Okay. So, week 1, A Life That Matters. And I have a couple questions for you. And Connor's listening in, so he might have to tune in as well, we'll have to see here. But that video, the title package, did we already talk about this? The title package was Devin Graf walking on 490 right by the Rochester bridge, right? It looks literally like he's in the middle of the road, I was thinking, ignore social distancing, say nothing about that, he's in the middle of the highway. How did he get there? So then I'm hearing rumors that it was a green screen and I don't believe it, so someone prove it to me. Drew: I believe Connor has confirmed it was a green screen. Matt Snyder was behind Devin, and he was holding up a green screen, and boom, magic. It just shows you how amazing our creative team is. Aaron: Where were they? In the middle of 490? Drew: I think they were standing somewhere on the side of 490, and they green screened him into 490. Aaron: So I'm guessing the reason they wanted to do it there was to match the lighting or something so that it would look the same? Connor's nodding his head. Okay. I just, that is crazy to me, because I've seen bad green screening, and that did not look like bad green screening to me, and I wouldn't have assumed we have the ability to do good green screening. No offense to Connor, I just assumed we don't have that kind of cool technology, but apparently you literally just need a green sheet. [Both laughing.]Drew: The green sheet they used to hang in our podcast studio. Aaron: That's right, "studio." I love when we call it a studio. That makes me so happy, because it sounds so legit, and it's a basement. But, okay. Now that that's cleared up, it was officially green screen, which was very surprising to me. Week 1, A Life That Matters. You talked all about how we need to begin with the end in mind, and I kinda want to enter into your experience. I know that this series came as a result of your dad's death. Talk to me a little bit about, we planned super far in advance. This was not the sermon series that was gonna be just post-Easter. I mean, I don't know. A month and a half ago? When did we make that change? That's a very, quote, "last minute change" for us, and I'd love to just bring everybody in to kind of the genesis of this series. Drew: Yeah, I think when my dad died, obviously the point I said, death brings perspective, or crisis, so, I feel like I walked through both of those things, a crisis with COVID, and my dad's death. It has really caused me to reflect on my life and what's important and what's valuable. I often teach out of the overflow of what God's doing in my heart. I just think those messages are more real. That's not always the case. I think there's series we do that we just talk about. It's not necessarily something that's churning in my heart, but this was just a series that God places on my heart. I've just gotta do this. If I don't, I feel like I'm gonna be disobeying God, cause I feel like he planned it in my heart. So yeah. I just, through the season of life I'm in right now, God's been teaching me a lot of things, and I thought it would be valuable to walk our church through it. Weirdly enough, we're probably all thinking a little bit of those things right now, with the crisis that we're all dealing with. And it's really cool, again, how, even if you go back to Unfiltered Jesus and this series, and how God kinda laid it out for our church, I just feel really blessed with how he has planned our series for us. So we could be really relevant and engaging and impactful in this season. Aaron: I agree. I remember when you first said, kinda like, coming out of the fog of your dad's death, with, you know, the first few days or 10 days or something, where your life wasn't normal. As you were emerging from that a little bit you were saying, like, "Hey, I wanna do this series," and I thought, well that's gonna be really cool to hear such fresh insights from you. But at the same time, wondering, I wonder if someone hasn't experienced a death recently, would they find this to be as interesting, or whatever? And then COVID hit, so it was like, we planned this, and I was like, all right, let's see how it is in terms of relevance, and then COVID hit, and it's like, oh. Incredibly relevant. Yeah, been blown away by how it all came together. And we had an original direction related to -- I think maybe the first title you had was like "Legacy" or something like that. Is that right? Or am I wrong? Drew: No, I think it was -- yeah, I think "Legacies" or "Lessons from Dad." Aaron: Oh, yeah. Drew: So I mean, it's quite shaped and molded. And I didn't want it to be completely about my dad's death, you know? I want it to be about what you learn through those seasons in life, and so. Aaron: Yeah, I think it is fascinating how, I can say this from even, death in our family. Lauren's cousin, this was June of -- I'm trying to think, a few years ago. It doesn't matter. A few years ago, her cousin, who's our age, passed away in a car accident. And student baptism was actually that same week, and so I ended up not being at student baptism, cause I was with the family up at the funeral and blah, blah, blah. And I just remember, even in that moment, there's something about a death that creates like an, "oh my goodness, we have to be at the funeral, and we have to process this, and there's so much I'm thinking about, and like what really matters." And there's an urgency to that, that it feels like I'll never forget what this feels like. But for me, I think about her cousin's death. We're leaving the funeral saying "man, we gotta stay more connected, and we gotta talk more, and let's make that phone call, pick up the phone, let's stay connected." And actually, I remember Lauren's brother -- sorry, I'm kinda going on a rant here. But probably about a year ago, Lauren's older brother was facetiming us or something. He was like, "Guys, I feel like we're still not talking as much as we said we were going to. Remember at Dylan's funeral we were all talking about how we were going to stay so connected, and here we are a couple years later, and we're already back to where we were before," almost like, did we learn nothing from this unexpected death? And I thought, yeah. There's something so true about being at a funeral where you have like, just this lucidity about what matters, clarity around -- these people matter to me so much. I would be devastated if I lost them. But it's just so easy to lose that clarity. And so I think it's so key for us to hear from you as you're still in that phase of like, "I've still got very clear pictures of what matters to me, and I wanna speak to our church while those things are still on my heart." Drew: Yeah, I think as people we have to learn how to keep those lessons fresh in our mind, you know? For me, it's easy right now cause everything I do reminds me of my dad, every place I go. I mean, my mom lives with us. But I do think, over the course of time, it's natural for us to just let that fade, or go back to the way it used to be or living the same way. I think we have to learn to create constant reminders of that perspective that death or crisis gives us so we can live in a manner with the end in mind, rather than what's in front of us. Aaron: Yeah, and I think that's a little bit reflective of why Moses' words are "teach us to number our days." This isn't something that we do natively. We don't automatically begin with the end in mind. We don't automatically remember that our lives are gonna end or just even a picture of our own mortality. We don't automatically remember that, and so it takes God's work in our lives to teach us to do this, like, teach me to keep track of the fact that I've got such a short life. Drew: I don't think it's ever a lesson learned, like "Check that off the box, I got that." It's a constant, daily reminder, whether it's a reminder you set in your phone, or circumstances remind you. You know, there's certain lessons in life you have to constantly learn. And I feel like this is one that God teaches me over and over again through the circumstances that I walk through. It's like, "Dude, you've got plans, which are great, they're awesome, but who knows if you're ever gonna make it to your plans." I've been at my Dad's lakehouse this last weekend trying to get things ready for Mom and situated. The constant thing that Mom and the family says is, "We've finally got this place the way we want it and Dad's not here." And this was Dad's place. It's called "Pop's Place." And so, you just constantly need those reminders that, man, life is short. Your plans might be great, but God's might be different, so how do we learn that lesson regularly rather than through the tragic or the crisis? Aaron: Yeah. First of all, once again, yeah, I'm so sorry. Drew: It's okay, man. Aaron: But, that's why Solomon's words are, he says it's better to go to a house of mourning than a house of rejoicing. And I love that you used a wedding as a comparative, because there really is something -- there's something to be learned at a wedding. Right? I mean, if you've got a strong marriage or even a struggling marriage, a wedding can be a great reminder of, like, almost like a vow renewal. If you've got a strong marriage, you're like, "Baby, I love you all over again, I'd pick you all over again." If your marriage is struggling, it's like, "We gotta get back to this." Whatever. There's lessons to be learned there. But it's different than the, like, "I had an unfixable, irreversible reality of death." That's what a funeral is. It's not like, “Let's recommit ourselves to our marriage.” You can change the trajectory of your marriage. Once someone's passed away, they've passed away. There's something permanent that's like, "What am I gonna do differently now?" And so, funerals just have an incredible ability to do that. But hopefully we don't have to go to a million funerals before we learn the lesson ourselves. You know? Drew: That's the hope. But, I'm guilty so many times of going to a funeral. I don't know if I'll ever go to a funeral the same way anymore. And I think I've had such a good life in the sense of, I haven't lost anybody really close to me that has hurt this bad or stung. You know, I've lost people, but no one like my dad, that close to me. And I think, you know, thank the Lord that he's protected me and my family this far, but I'm telling you. There are certain things in life that I just won't look at the same. You know, as a pastor, death is common. People getting sick is common, people having heart attacks. I think it's gonna reshape the way I pastor. It's easy for me to get numb to, "Oh, someone died." Nope. Not anymore. My heart is gonna break for people who lost people. As a young person, I could have easily been like, "Okay, this is part of life." It is a part of life, but that part of life really stings and really hurts. And I think I'll be able to weep with people and mourn with people and hurt with people in a way that I just couldn't. Aaron: Mmhmm. No doubt. That's so real for any life experience. Once you had it. It's the walk a mile in somebody else's shoes, but you can't walk a mile in somebody's shoes until you've done it in certain cases. You can't really put yourself in the same framework as someone who's had a parent die or something like that until it happens, and then you're in a whole new ball game, you know? Drew: Yep, and that's why I love what Moses said about refuge. It's unique that he brought that up. Of all the things as he's looking back at his life, I love -- and I'm learning this -- that God is the best refuge. He offers comfort that people can't offer. In this season, I'm actually tired of people saying "I'm sorry." I'm tired of people saying "Are you okay?" And they all mean well. I'm not saying people shouldn't do that, but there's just nothing like a refuge from God. A place where God just -- like, sometimes even with my own family, when I wanna cry, I don't want people around me. I wanna be with God, and I wanna just mourn with God because he is that refuge for me. I've read Psalms 90 so many times. It's one of my favorite Psalms. It's actually the first passage I ever preached. So my first message ever --Aaron: That's awesome. Drew: -- to a live audience was Psalms 90. And I've read those words, like "Lord, you are our dwelling place," you know. But again, I'm learning this. I think we've talked about this in other podcasts. Those words are so different to me right now in this season in my life. A dwelling place. Man, I dwelled with God in such a real way lately, where I'm just like, "God, I don't want to go to anybody else but you, because I believe there's a level of comfort, and security and stability that only you can give me, and that's what I need right now." Aaron: And you'll come out of this stronger in that sense, your relationship with God, having been to this place with God, it doesn't go away. Your connection to God that is now stronger, better. What you've just described is literally a longer version of the phase "crisis brings clarity." I mean, you now know things you didn't know. You experienced things you could have never experienced. You know God in a way you didn't know him before. And that's a super bitter pill. Nobody wants to take that. You know, that's horrible, but it's God at work in you. Drew: I also think about, you know, a lot of times when crisis hits, people run from God. What I'm going through, I realize that people miss on some of the best moments with God when they choose in crisis to run from God, because they miss out on what I think I'm experiencing now, it's this level of comfort and stability and security that God gives. And when you choose to run from him because you're mad at what he chose to do, or what he was in control of that didn't stop, you didn't like the circumstances. It's crazy that, in the midst of that, people who run miss out of something that's so beautiful that God offers only in crisis, only in the crazy and uncertain times of life. Aaron: I'm not gonna add anything else, cause we're gonna end right there, man. That's really helpful, and I'm trying to do my best right now to believe that, to lodge it into my soul so that, when my crisis, like yours, comes, I'm more ready for it. I'm glad we all get to learn along with you, and this series is gonna be all about that. So, very much looking forward to it. Is there anything we need to know about this coming weekend or that our people should hear from you about? Drew: Couple things. One, we're gonna talk about relationships this weekend. It's like Rodney said. We talk about our relationship with God first, and Rodney said the second thing is relationships with people. And so we're gonna talk about how we create a life that matters through our relationships. Also, we're gonna be having a baptism, so it's gonna be an awesome celebration. Aaron, I believe you have an inside look at that baptism, because --Aaron: Yeah, I do. It'll be a little bit different because we have an executive order from our governor that requires a mask for any time which you cannot socially distance, so it's gonna be the weirdest baptism we've ever done, most likely, but we're gonna try to comply with every restriction and also make sure that we still do more and better. So, I got to be a part of it, and I can't wait for you guys to hear Ritchie's story. It's a great one. I guess I can say, it's already done. That's probably okay to say. Oops if it wasn't. We recorded it this morning on Monday. Very excited about it. You guys'll love it. All right. Let's be done. My friend, talk to you guys later. Thanks Drew, thanks Connor, thanks to our listeners. Please send us comments, questions, and thoughts. We would love to interact with you. We will talk to you next week.

TranscriptAaron Hixson: Hey Northridge, welcome to A Little Better, where our goal is to know God better and to do better, so that we can be a little better. Well hey, Northridge family, welcome back to A Little Better. Happy Easter. We are glad that you're with us. Today is the day after Easter. I don't know if that has a name, but I'm gonna still call it Easter. I'm the kinda guy who says "Merry Christmas" well after Christmas is over, so, I guess I'm just that guy. Drew Karschner: Do you really say “Merry Christmas” after Christmas is over? Or before it has happened? Aaron: Yes. Both, both. I mean, it's just like the Christmas season. It's a generic timeframe. Drew: No, the Christmas season ends after Christmas. It just makes sense that way. You got 25 days that lead to Christmas. You say “Merry Christmas” all the time. But once Christmas is over, you're not walking around like "Merry Christmas!" December 26th. That's weird, bro. That's weird. Aaron: I still do. I don't know. Okay. Well, anyway, happy Easter. [Both laughing]So, tell me about your Easter, Drew. How did it go down in the Karschner household? Drew: Well, we had a beautiful day with my mom and my family and my brother and sister. We watched the services. And we had turkey, so we baked a turkey, and we had some good food, great celebration. We hid some eggs, and when I say "we hid some eggs," I mean I threw them in the most obvious places for a five, a three, and a two-year old to get them. So we had a little Easter egg hunt with candy and little pennies in there, and the kids loved it. It was great. Yours? Aaron: Awesome. It was good, it was good. How many services did you guys watch? I feel like you're the kind of guy that would watch -- you're always watching other churches and seeing what they're doing. So did you check out other churches or just Northridge or what did that look like? Drew: I watched every Northridge service and I watched other church services as well. It's amazing. All day long my computer was full of services, so. Aaron: Yeah, you're like -- you get so many bonus points for how many Easter services you watched. I was present for all three of ours as well, 9, 10:30, and 1. I guess -- wait, do we have a Monday? Drew: We have one tonight at 7. Yes. Aaron: Yeah, we have one tonight at 7, that's right. So I guess I haven't been present for all of them yet. I've been present for all of the ones that have happened. But actually we're switching around service times. Have we already talked about that? Why don't you tell us what's coming this week for service times? Drew: Yeah, we're just moving -- so, Monday night at 7, it's been a great little experiment, and so we're going to shift it to Saturday night at 7. So, we're gonna take that Monday service. The only thing that's changing with our weekend services is we're taking the Monday night at 7, and we're moving it to Saturday night at 7. One reason why, Monday night was just a harder night for people to engage. I think after Sunday, they kinda move on to the next week, and so, a lot of churches I have worked for have had a Saturday night service, so we're gonna try this out, see if it works, and yeah. Praying God does cool things with it. Aaron: All right, so it's moving, not adding. We're just moving. There won't be a Monday starting next week. Drew: Exactly right, yep. We are moving the Monday night to Saturday night. Aaron: Sounds good. Yeah, I definitely have never heard of a church with a Monday night service. I do think it was a cool experiment, but I can't recall ever seeing that before. Saturday does make some sense. And we have the ability to do it, since we're having to pre-record right now, so that's cool. But hey, the big thing about Easter, obviously Jesus is alive, that's amazing. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Did you guys grow up saying that in church, "he is risen"? Drew: I mean, I think everybody says that. Even now. Aaron: No, I mean, it was like a call and response. It was like a real live thing every easter, you'd say "he is risen" and the church would say like "he is risen indeed." Did you guys -- was it just me? Maybe it was just me. Drew: No comment. [Both laughing.] Aaron: Anyway. So, we're excited. Jesus is alive. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the response from Sunday? What are we hearing from our people? And even people placing their faith in Christ. Did you have any of your pi2 people show up? Talk to me about that. Drew: Yeah, so Sunday was an amazing celebration. So one thing if you watched on our live.northridge platform, you saw a couple unique things that we've been adding. One of those is you could see when I gave the gospel and people had a chance to respond, you could see people say "raise a hand if you prayed that prayer." Aaron: Yeah, that was a cool thing. Drew: Yeah, it was really cool. Our team worked hard on that. Over our three services, we saw 27 people say yes to Jesus Christ. Aaron: Wow. Drew: Plus, three more that came in from a different avenue in that way. And so 30 people said yes to Jesus Christ. If you think about that, over four weeks, that is 61 people. 61. Aaron: Amazing, amazing. Drew: I mean, how amazing is God? And you know, we're griping and moaning over this COVID-19, but God is totally using it to draw people to himself. I know we talked about it, but I hope that never gets old. 61 eternities have been changed because of this, and whew! Let's go! I'm ready for more, I'm ready. Aaron: I know. That is very exciting. And I just love that we were able to capitalize on this season. You know, not every series and not every timeframe would be perfect for that kind of a shift where we're offering opportunities every single week, but this was just like the perfect moment and God utilized it, so I'm really excited about that. That's a very high number. Of course the number is reflective of stories and people that know and people that we’re following up with. They're not just nameless numbers. These are stories we care about and that we're checking with. So, that's very exciting. Drew: Yeah, and kudos to the people of our church for inviting. I got a couple messages from people who texted me and said, "Hey Drew, my friend texted me and said they said yes to Jesus." And that, just stirs a fire in people's hearts. My contractor. We've been adjusting some things in my basement for my mom to move in, and my contractor texted me this morning, so today, I think it was around 9:30. He says "Hey, we tuned in and it was awesome. Thanks for that." I got a message from my high school sixth grade teacher, who said, "Hey, I haven't felt that much hope in a long time. Thank you so much." Aaron: Oh my goodness. Wow. Drew: I mean, again, cool stories of God just working. He's fulfilling our mission. More and better, baby, more and better. People are growing closer to God and people are meeting Jesus for the first time. So, let's go. Aaron: Beautiful. And Drew, dude, I love that you're living pi2. I mean, it would be easy in your position, I think maybe mine too. We've talked about pi2 endlessly, especially back in the Paul series. It's easy at times to feel like that's outside of our purview because we're, you know, we work with a bunch of Christians and stuff, but I love that you've got names of people that you're thinking about. I love it. I've sent out some invitations, and got some positive responses. Some people ghosted on me, but, you know, that's gonna happen. And so, anyway, we'll see what comes from that. I loved getting texts during that morning. Like “Hey, my friend from wherever is tuning in, please be praying.” You know, people just in the moment being like, “I'm so excited they came!” I love that feeling for people, and just that they're sharing and spreading and praying, and we're all kinda like waiting with bated breath for what God's gonna do. And yeah. It's an especially expectant time because of the sadness and the distress and the fear that people are feeling, but then also of course with the biggest Sunday of the year in terms of people being interested in church. Drew: Yeah. Aaron: Yeah, so let's jump in and talk about the resurrection a little bit. Let's talk about this sermon from Sunday. I have some random thoughts that I might end up sharing that just were from my own devotional time on Sunday morning before church. But that's a whole 'nother thing that I'm looking at my notes here. We'll see if that comes up. But for now, you talked about how the resurrection should impact our daily life, and I just kinda thought, what does that mean? What would it mean for the resurrection to, as a believer, impact my daily life? How does the fact that Jesus is alive change what I'm doing day to day? Drew: I mean, if you truly believe in what Jesus accomplished, I don't understand how it cannot change everything. I mean, it should change your motives for getting out of bed. It should change the way you think about life and eternity. It should change the way you choose to live and act towards the people you love and the people you don't love. I mean, every fiber of who you are should be changed by the resurrection. Now, that doesn't happen in an instant. You know, it happens over a life of living in the perspective of the resurrection and how the resurrection gives you victory over your sin. And so, I think the major way that the resurrection has changed my life is the battle between my flesh and the Spirit. Living in light of the resurrection, man, my flesh wants to do things that I know I shouldn't do, and so the battle that wages within me, it helps me overcome the sin that I was enslaved to but now have freedom over. And so my daily choices of how to respond to my wife when she annoys me or how to have patience --Aaron: Wait, that's -- I'm gonna have to stop you there. That doesn't happen. Drew: It's actually usually in reverse, probably for my wife and me annoying her, but every once in a while --Aaron: Good clarification. Drew: But I think of patience with my kids, when we're locked in a house all the time together. I think of just the random emails that you get of frustration of people. Just every area of your life, the resurrection can impact. From my desire to want people to experience what I've experienced, you know. When you truly see the amazement of the resurrection and how it can change your life, it should create in you a desire for people to experience that as well. To love your neighbor, to tell your neighbor about Jesus. When I look at my life and I think about the resurrection, that Jesus is alive, what it really does is it makes me alive. It gives me life. And out of that new life, it changes everything I do. Aaron: That's great. I was thinking even to -- I don't know -- at the kind of really granular level, or really practical level, the fact that Jesus is alive, the reason you're saying it should impact everything is you're walking through the implications almost in an unstated way. You're like, if Jesus is alive, that means . . . and there's like five or six boxes that you're checking as a result of that truth, but like, why would a person 2000 years ago change my life? It's because what that resurrection means, as you said. That he's conquered sin. That resurrection means every claim he's ever made is true. That means that, if we have victory over death, even now in the midst of COVID, I don't have to be terrified of anything. I don't have to be terrified of even getting COVID and dying. I don't have to be afraid of people that I love having this disease and dying. I don't have to be afraid of economic ruin, or anything, global conspiracy that's making this whole thing up. Literally name your fear or whatever. None of it stands a chance against the fact that the worst thing that can happen to you is you lose everything and you die, and none of that can be -- the resurrection is more powerful than any of that. Drew: Right, and you think about this series. We've talked about, okay, you go back to Jesus' baptism, right? We talked about that giving him his identity. We talked about the temptation. It gave him his credibility. I think the resurrection gave Jesus -- it validated him as the son of god. It just took every claim Jesus had made in his life, as crazy as they were, and they said, check that box off, because that was true. You know, I think of even when he was crucified, the soldier, after he died, the veil was torn, the earthquake happened, the soldier says, "truly this must have been the son of god." It's like yep, checked that box. This was God's son. He did exactly what he said he was going to. And out of that, out of his resurrection, whew. The implications of that are endless in someone's life. Aaron: Yeah, and I don't have to -- if my spouse annoys me or if life isn't what I was expecting or if I never get married or if whatever, none of those things, as disappointing, frustrating, and hard as all of those things are, they're not ultimate. We have an ultimate truth in the form of Jesus' resurrection that overcomes everything. And so, it's kind of one of those "if all else fails" things, like, but it's not just an all else fails, break the glass in case of emergency, like, if your house is on fire, "oh no!" Quick, grab this last ditch effort. It's like, this is so important, so ultimate, that it actually can be pervasive in every detail of your everyday life. It's not just helpful in the biggest things. If you allow it to be, it's life-changing in the smallest of things. Drew: Exactly. And we're not saying that there are times in life where -- you know, life is hard and difficult. Right now, people are dealing with some really difficult things. And we're not saying, hey, walk around like "Oh, I got COVID-19, but don't worry, Jesus is alive." Like, yeah. He is alive. But that doesn't take away from the things in life that are hard and difficult. What the resurrection does in the midst of COVID-19, or in the midst of my dad dying or in the midst of anything that happens in life, the fact that Jesus is alive can change my perspective on any situation I go through. Aaron: I love it. In the midst of the story that we talked about on Sunday, there was obviously two guys, they're walking away from Jesus, and from faith. It's just insane to me. I was reading my Bible on Sunday morning before church in light of what I knew was coming in your content. It's just so remarkable to me how no one was expecting him to come back to life. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, and so we know how this whole story ends, but these two guys, it's not like they were walking away because they hadn't heard. They had already heard that the women had come, they had gone to the disciples, it had spread enough through the disciples. These guys had already heard. There are already claims of a resurrection. They're like, “Yeah, but we didn't see him, so...” They're just walking away. And here's what I was struck with as I was reading my bible. After Jesus dies, Joseph of Arimathea comes. He goes to Pilate. He gets Jesus' body. He puts him in a new cut cave, puts the stone over the entrance. So immediately Jesus is buried. First of all, that's fine. It's to be expected. But it does indicate to me at least on some level -- they didn't want him laying out on the ground rotating, but I'm wondering like, why are you doing this? If you genuinely expect him to come back to life, it might be a little weird, but like, I don't know. Put him in your backyard on a patio chair or something. Like, he's coming back. Just give him a minute. You want to be there when it happens. But they put him in a tomb. Okay, that's fine. But then the religious leaders -- this is what blew my mind -- immediately they go to Pilate and say, “Hey, this guy claimed to say he was gonna be resurrected.” That's interesting to me. They knew that. Second of all, they said he's gonna be resurrected on the third day. That's what he claimed. So they had comprehended and, at least to some degree, believed it was going to happen. At least they expected that his disciples would be expecting it and they would try to fake it. So they're like, “This dude's gonna try to pull off that he came back to life. Can we just put a guard and seal the tomb?” And Pilate's like, “Yeah, that's fine. Do whatever you wanna do to seal the thing.” So they put two guards. And they're standing there. And then the women go on the first day of the week, and they're bringing -- again, this blows my mind -- they're not bringing party hats and kazoos, waiting for the third day to happen, they're bringing burial spices because they expect him to die and rot, and they don't want him to smell. It's like, the only people who took Jesus' words seriously about coming back to life were the Pharisees. All the disciples were like, "Aw man, he's dead. And now he's gonna be dead forever." And the more I was reading that, I was so confused. And these disciples, Cleopas and whatever his friend is, we don’t know the name, they're walking away too! I'm like, what is happening? Why did no one comprehend it? And I would cut them some slack if it weren't for that the religious leaders did! Sorry. I just went on a random rant. I told you I had stuff from my devos. But I've never put it together before that the Pharisees were legit like, “Yeah, he definitely thinks he's coming back and it's gonna be on the third day, so let's make sure that doesn't happen.” And the disciples are like, “Well, I don't know what's gonna happen.” Drew: I think the Pharisees were worried that the disciples were gonna come and steal the body. I don't think they actually believed that Jesus was actually gonna be alive. I think they thought, okay, they're going to try to do some trickery to spread this lie. But, think about it. It doesn't surprise me. Can you imagine if someone came into our world and made claims that Jesus did? I think this is a really good question. How many of us would have recognized Jesus if he walked on the face of our earth right now? What's crazy is, the people who claimed to know the most about God were actually the people who killed God. The Pharisees were the ones who walked him through court. They're literally in a circle, looking at God, and they don't know him. Aaron: I guess the thing that's blowing my mind about it is they knew enough, they had understood Jesus' teaching about the resurrection thoroughly enough that they were taking active steps to prevent him from being able to fake it. Like you said, they weren't expecting it to actually happen, but they're like, “Let's just post a guard to make sure these guys don't try to fake it.” I guess I'm thinking, the disciples, what would have been cool is, even if they weren't sure I'm telling myself -- and I'm being way too generous to myself -- but I'm telling myself, I think I would have gone, "Okay, he said he was gonna come back to life, he said it was gonna be on the third day, it's Sunday, can we just go chill? Let's just go sit there and let's just see what happens." You know what I mean? "I'm not actually expecting it, I don't really want to get my hopes up, but let's just go." Now, at the same time, I recognize it was dangerous for them and blah blah blah, and I'm being way too kind to myself, but it just never clicked to me that the religious leaders were like, "Yep, this is probably gonna at least get faked, so let's work against it," and the disciples were not taking any actions. Drew: But that's exactly what these two guys did, Aaron. They didn't leave until Sunday. They waited around, I don't know if they waited around because they thought at some level Jesus was going to come back --Aaron: That's true, that's a good point. Drew: But they obviously didn't believe it that strongly, because they heard the rumors that he did come back and still left! Aaron: They're like, “Yeah, I know.” Drew: That's pretty pathetic if you really think about it. Okay. “Jesus is dead. Okay. He's gonna rise again. Oh, he did? Nah, let's go.” Aaron: I know. So bold. They're just like, yeah, probably not. Let's at least go find out. Normally I'm not a disciples basher because I recognize I've got my issues. I would not have handled this better than Peter or whatever, but some aspects of the resurrection are like, guys, why not just stick around a couple more days and just see if you can at least find out who stole his body or something. Then you'll be on the inside. Don't just peace out. Then I love that Jesus walks with them the whole time, explains the Old Testament scriptures, gets to the very end, and they realize it's Jesus. I love what you said in the video where you're like, at first they probably were really embarrassed or whatever. I loved that point because I would have just been like, "Oh no. We look so dumb.” Drew: What do you say to Jesus? I mean, like -- Aaron: Thankfully he disappeared. Drew: I was just gonna say, I betcha they were so glad he disappeared. Because do you know how embarrassing and how shameful? I mean, in all seriousness, it's funny, because we're not them, but sometimes we are, aren't we? How many times do we doubt God? Like even right now. You think of COVID-19 and all that we're going through. We say things like this all the time as Christians. “Hey, but God's got this, he could take this away in a second.” But do we really believe he can? Aaron: I know if he did, and he were standing here, I would be like, “Well, I gotta say I didn't see that coming.” Like, I intellectually believe it, but I'm fairly certain I don't actually believe it. Drew: And think about how, I mean, it's one thing to take a disease away. To raise yourself from the dead. Again, we've heard this story so many times that what we say and what we claim feels so normal because we get the repetition of Easter, the repetition, but like to hear it for the first time, to believe someone's actually going to do it, it's hard to put ourselves in their shoes, because we know the story. We've heard it over and over again. This was so fresh and so crazy in their culture and their day that, if I'm being real, I probably would have been the guy that would've been like, "Jesus, I love you. But you're crazy. You're crazy, dude." Aaron: Yeah. Obviously my life indicates that I'm no better than these people when it comes down to the details, but it just does sound -- I love what you said on Sunday too, about how it's just another -- I actually can't remember exactly how you said it. It's just another thing with more traditions that's lost its meaning or something like that. You kinda compared Easter to Christmas. I heard it three times. I should be able to quote it, but I can't. But I love that because I do think that that's true, where it's so common. They're like ah, Jesus rose from the dead. But it actually is a crazy sounding thing. Cause it is a crazy thing. And I've even found -- I don't know if this is true for you, Drew -- but like, occasionally encountering other religions and studying them a little bit and finding out what they claim, all of their claims sound so audacious, like what? Like "Mohammed is capable of what?" or you know, whatever. Like that's just ridiculous. But then I go, “Oh no, wait.” That's of course exactly how all the claims I make sound about our God. I just have grown up with them and so it's very kinda, "Oh yeah, Jesus came back to life and that's what we celebrate." So, that brings us to how we lost the amazement of Easter. And I think that's so relevant for all of us to think through whether or not this has just become one more Sunday where we dress up, or where we have a nice lunch. Have we lost the amazement? When do you feel like you've been most amazed, and when were low times for you in terms of amazement of what Jesus did? Drew: Well, I think one thing that's been really helpful for me in recapturing the amazement has been my kids. You know, telling my children, like Joelle, who is really on the cusp of fully understanding the gospel and believing in it. I think seeing it through her eyes is so refreshing. It takes me back to when I was a new believer. Just explaining to her what Jesus did and that he rose again from the dead, the amazement in her eyes is the amazement that I want, hearing the story like as the first time. If you've got kids, I encourage you, share the stories with your kids and watch their reactions. Listen to their questions. I think this is why Jesus says to have childlike faith, where you can believe in something and you can submit to something even if you don't fully understand it. And kids, they believe things greater than we do, because they don't have, you know, the logic of life just stripping away from the faith that you have. Aaron: That jadedness that develops. Drew: Yes, and I see the lack of jadedness in my daughter and in my son when I tell them the stories. Joelle, just looking and watching her listen to the story and watching her eyes and her being in awe that God could do that, I'm like, "God, give me that again." You know, like just give that back to me. It has really helped me recapture. I think I'm in a season now too where I'm emotional cause you know, my dad's dead. I just think God is refreshing and giving me a new sense of amazement for life. I mean, my mom said while we were watching services, she was like, "I wonder what Easter's like in heaven." Aaron: Ah, yo. Drew: I wanted to cry. But I also wanted to rejoice. Aaron: I'm trying not to right now. Drew: Because like, man. Dad is literally with the risen Savior. It was a hard Easter for our family, but it was also helpful in recapturing how amazing Easter is, and to know Dad is with Jesus. Again, what are Easter services like in heaven? Come on, you wanna talk about a party, let's go. Jesus is alive! Aaron: I bet they have Monday night services. Drew: I betcha they get a little charismatic in heaven. Aaron: [Laughing.] Oh man, I had so many other things I was thinking about saying, but I'm fighting back tears right now, so I think we should end on that. In fact, I want to use that as a segue to talk about what's coming next. I'd love for you to just give us a little bit of even just excitement about what's coming in our next series, and I think obviously it's got some ties to what we were just talking about, so what's next? Drew: Yeah, so one, I'm saddened to see Unfiltered Jesus go away. What an amazing series. Aaron: Oh man, me too. Drew: And you know, again, I wanna just say thank you to the Davidsons, Drew and Meg. They're volunteers in our church that have put so much blood, sweat, and tears into this series. They got regular jobs, but they're making and creating these videos. God did some amazing things through these videos, and so, Drew and Meg, thank you for --Aaron: I don't think he's done using them. Drew: He's not. He's not. And thank you so much for your time and energy. You guys are amazing. I also am excited for our new series. It's gonna be different, but it's called A Life that Matters. And really, I'm gonna be just kinda teaching you what God's been teaching me in this series, through, you know, my dad's death, through COVID-19, what really makes a life that matters? I think death and crisis brings a level of focus to our lives, where we really understand what is important and what's not important. And really that's what this series is all about, getting us to get back to the place in life where we're not distracted, where we're zooming in on what truly lasts for all of eternity. And so, it's gonna be a fun, and challenging series, but I think it's what we all need right now in this season. Aaron: I love it. Crisis brings clarity, and I'm looking forward to the clarity you can bring us starting this Sunday. It's gonna be a great series. Thanks for jumping in and joining us again, and everybody thanks for listening. We've got some cool things coming for the podcast, just some updates even just to make it a little more accessible that we're hoping to be integrating, so we'll talk more about that in the weeks to come. Thanks for listening, sharing, send in your questions, podcast@northridgerochester.com, we'd love to be able to interact with those. And especially now that we're in a season where we're recording after Sundays, if you've got things that come up while you're listening on Sunday, if you shoot those off on Sunday, we might even be able to talk about them in the podcast. We'd love to be able to do that. Please reach out, podcast@northridgerochester.com, or, since Drew puts up his email every single week these days, you might as well just email him. Actually, email whatever you want @northridgerochester.com. It'll probably make its way to us. That's if you can stay awake long enough to type “northridgerochester.” Thanks, guys for listening, we'll see you next week.

Download PDF Welcome to Larisa English Club #16 What’s in The News? Electric Cars Charge While Traveling Down The Highway. Speaking Practice. Making a Date. English Grammar. Comparative Adjectives. What’s in The News? Electric Cars Charge While Traveling Down The Highway. Volvo and other car manufacturers are getting closer to the day where all they make is Electric. Gas and diesel have been the traditional refueling method forever. It’s time for change. Ironically, Ford was the first major US car manufacturer to build and lease a fleet of electric vehicles over 20 years ago. Most of those cars ended up in the trash compacter. Ford kept it quiet for many years. Now, they are far behind the curve. Some types of innovation, you just can’t stop. For now, electric has found it’s way into the mainstream as the next fuel. By 2024, some manufacturers will stop producing gas autos all together. After that, it’s anyone's guess at what will be next. With new technology comes change and the need for further innovation to supply what’s needed, making everything work for the masses. While there might be a gas station just around the corner from your home, electric is a little more complicated than that. As technology continues to evolve, so will the availability of recharging stations. Those too may become as popular as the eight track sooner than you think. Highways that offer recharging as you drive are in the headlights of engineers today. In fact, there are a number of tests with charging roads being developed now. Speaking Practice. Making a Date. Drew: What time are you leaving tomorrow? Paul: You mean to go to the graduation ceremony? Drew: Yes, I’d like to go with you if I may. Paul: I’d be delighted to take you. I plan to leave here about nine thirty. Drew: Fine. I can be ready by then. Paul: Okay. I’ll pick you up at your house. Drew: See you tomorrow, then, about nine thirty. English Grammar. Comparative Adjectives. Not as ______ as… “The white wine is not as expensive as the red wine.” You know how to compare two things by using comparative adjectives: Add -ER (taller, older, faster) Add -ER and double the final consonant (bigger, hotter, thinner) Remove -Y and add -IER (easier, friendlier, prettier) Add “more” or “less” to long words (more expensive, less popular, more interesting) Irregular comparatives (better, farther, worse) There’s another structure that you can use: not as (adjective) as. Running is not as fast as biking. Biking is faster than running. Canada is not as hot as Ecuador. Ecuador is hotter than Canada. Helen is not as friendly as her husband. Helen’s husband is friendlier than she is. Movies are not as interesting as books. Books are more interesting than movies. Read more here https://larisaenglishclub.com/pdf-resources/larisa-english-club-16-pdf-version/

Drew Manning knows what it’s like to be overweight, out of shape, unhealthy and uncomfortable in his own skin. He knows the burden of being physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.   If that’s where you are currently, he can relate.   He also knows how amazing it feels to be healthy, lean and muscular. He has experienced what it’s like to have almost limitless energy and unshakeable confidence.   If that’s where you want to be, he can show you how.   Drew is a Fitness Expert, Personal Trainer and the creator of the #FitToFatToFit TV show and www.fit2fat2fit.com.   He is also the NY Times Bestselling author of the book, “Fit2Fat2Fit: The Unexpected Lessons from Gaining and Losing 75 lbs. On Purpose,”, host of the Fit2Fat2Fit Experience Podcast and the founder of the keto focused supplement line, Complete Wellness.   As a Personal Trainer he became discouraged by the number of his clients who were quitting their exercise and nutrition programs long before achieving their goals.   A fitness fanatic since childhood, Drew had never experienced what it was like to be overweight, out of shape, unhealthy and unhappy. In effort to better understand the challenges his clients were facing he decided to put his own body through an experiment.   He intentionally gained 75 lbs. of fat within 6 months by stopping exercise and eating the kinds of processed foods that are typical in the average American’s diet.   Once he gained the weight, he turned to the pillars of exercise and nutrition to help him lose it all within the next 6 months.   Drew not only gained weight, but he also gained a much deeper understanding of and respect for the difficulties overweight people have and the challenges they face when trying to achieve their health and fitness goals.   If you want to learn more about what this journey taught Drew, and how it can help you become physically, mentally and emotionally healthy and strong, listen as we discuss:   How did he first get into fitness? [3:46] What was his training like in the early days and how has it evolved? [4:51] What was the inspiration behind the Fit2Fat2Fit experiment? [7:27] Physically, mentally and emotionally what happened to him when he gained all the weight? [10:13] How did he eat to gain so much fat so quickly? [11:07] How he ate and trained to get his body back! [16:47] Why going keto changed the way he looked at nutrition. [19:31] The connection between your mental, emotional and physical health and how stress impacts the body. [24:30] How did he get to a place of self-love? [26:46] How the ketogenic diet healed him and why he is sharing it so passionately with others. [29:31] What are some of the RIGHT and WRONG ways of doing the keto diet? [31:31] Does he adjust the keto diet based on how his body feels? [35:23] What is his argument to people who say you cannot lift while being low-carb? [38:59] Are there specific carb sources he recommends? [40:00] What are is “go to” supplements while on the keto diet? [41:59] When did he start his supplement line, Complete Wellness? [46:11] A week in the life of Drew: What his current diet and training looks like. [46:54] What are non-negotiables when it comes to his recovery? [50:24] What does he currently have going on and what’s in store for 2019? [53:08]   This episode is brought to you by Cured Nutrition. CBD is a game changer when it comes to reducing inflammation and improving sleep quality. Cured Nutrition makes CBD-infused products from Colorado-grown organic hemp. Their spices and nut-based cookie dough are delicious and so easy to incorporate into any well-rounded health and fitness program. For deep relaxation and ultimate recovery try their concentrated oils and gel caps.   Visit www.CuredNutrition.com and use the coupon code, “JAY” for a 15% discount.

It's a tradition that has remained in the hands of the family for generations. Willett Distillery is one of the most recognized brands for bourbon enthusiasts and has accumulated a cult status. Even Kulsveen has seen the struggles and highs of his industry but had foresight to buy aged whiskey stocks when they were plentiful which put the spotlight on this brands. With Britt Kulsveen at the helm as their new President, this family is making bigger waves than before. Listen to their story as Fred Minnick moderates this Kentucky Derby Museum Legend Series. Sponsors: Sterling Cut Glass is the Official Glassware of Bourbon Pursuit. They are offering FREE etched samples to whiskey societies nationwide! Simply email spirits@sterlingcutglass.com, include your logo, and mention Bourbon Pursuit. Show Notes: This event is being moderated by Fred Minnick. This years theme is all about family Even, where did you grow up? Did you do a lot of ice fishing growing up? Did you ever fall through the ice? Talk about your time in the Merchant Marines What were your events in college sports? So we found out before we started that you're not an American citizen Britt, can you give us a story about your father's kindness? Even, was there a moment where you saw Britt in action and said she's got skills? Britt, is there a story behind you always wearing boots? Even, did you train Drew? What are you looking for in the barrels when you are creating your small batch composition? What is something that doesn't taste right? What was something you learned from Thompson Willett? Did he ever show you his secret spots in the warehouses? Talk about the Frosted Yeast Rolls. This is the High Corn Mashbill. Barrel entry at Even, How did you meet your wife? All the big brands were bailing out on bourbon, what was that time like? When did you come out with your small batch series? Did you ever travel to Russia in the 90s? Did you ever have trust issues with distributors there? Britt, what was it like as a kid watching your dad living around whiskey? Let's drink the wheated bourbon now. Entry Proof at 115 When Drew brings you something, do you ever turn it away and tell him its bad? You were also bottling stuff for a lot of other people back in the day. Can you talk about that? You had to acquire bourbon from other distilleries, what sort of other whiskey were you looking for? Was there is an age limit of something you wouldn't buy? Would your early batches include barrels from lots of different distilleries? What's your sweet spot for an aged bourbon? Lets taste the 6 year old Rye now, 51% Rye, 34% Corn, 15% barley, Barrel entry proof is 125, but now goes in at 110. Dipping back into the great barrels coming out during the early 2000s, how does this new stuff rank? We talked about the 80s and 90s, but Willett becomes really popular in the late 2000s. There are a lot of fans. Have you ever been a part of the fandom? How many times have you been asked to get bought out? Bill Thomas from Jack Rose has been a big supporter of Willett. Talk about the Willett 80th anniversary. It's the original Willett mashbill, 72% Corn, 13% Rye, 15% Barley and this one is bottled in bond There aren't many bad things to be said about your whiskey. Do you think it's harder to stay on top? Are there any other mashbills or barrel finishes you are working on?

Drew Covi: @drewcovi | about.me Show Notes: 01:04 - Honeywell User Experience (HUE) 05:00 - Deliverables 06:55 - Being a “Devsigner” 17:26 - Flash and Leading to Unique Skills 30:00 - Advice for People Straddling Roles 35:27 - Leveraging Design and Development Skills Together 39:41 - Embracing the Hardware Element 42:05 - Why the “Devsigner”? Resources: AOLpress CSS Beauty CSS Zen Garden Contribute Crave Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #76. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me is Elrick Ryan, also a developer at The Frontside. Hello. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Not much. Are you excited about today's topic? ELRICK: Very excited. CHARLES: Yeah. You got a personal stake in it because today, we have in the room, not only you but also two developers who are also designers or designers who are also developers. Our guest today is actually the first person who fit this description that I ever worked with. It was a great experience, a great collaboration and his name is Drew Covi. Drew is a senior supervisor of product design at HUE Studios in Golden Valley, Minnesota. DREW: Howdy. How are you doing? CHARLES: Good. Thanks for joining us. Now, you're going to have to explain to us two things, one, what is a super senior product designer and let's start off talking about HUE first. What exactly is HUE because I think it's a cool organization? DREW: I'm working with four people and I'm working on all sorts of brand new ideas. I think the greatest opportunity that I've had in my career at this company, Honeywell is just working with physical product and the digital space. It's a unique opportunity. Not all companies focus on both so it's really been a learning experience for me and working with a great group of creative individuals is also been a real privilege. They say that at the end of the day, the most important thing is other people that you work with and really the entire team here has been fantastic in welcoming me and letting me explore and grow as a developer and as a designer. It's been great so far. CHARLES: Fantastic. Working with that group was absolutely wonderful. What does HUE stand for? DREW: HUE is Honeywell User Experience. Our previous CEO, Dave Cote often called it 'huey' but it's just HUE, without the Jersey accent. I'm going to probably misrepresent but we have over eight to 10 studios throughout the world. Each one focuses on different businesses for the most part. The one here in Golden Valley tends to focus on homes and buildings technologies. The studio out of Seattle, actually tends to focus on, again I'm going to get the acronym wrong here but it's essentially worker safety in industrial safety. CHARLES: What is it that you all do at HUE? DREW: What we do here at the studio here in Golden Valley is we support various businesses throughout the homes and buildings technology space. About fall of last year, Honeywell went through a bit of a shift in their business and they used to do all automation control solutions. Last fall essentially, we saw that one large business that was headquartered and based out of Golden Valley, break into two areas of more direct focus. Out of Seattle, we have folks working on, I think I mentioned before but Seattle works on sensing and productivity solutions. We focus on homes and building space so we're both providing upfront research to understand what the customer needs. We're actually creating everything from very rough user flows to final UIs and we're also working with industrial designers to create final products. Those industrial designers work very closely with engineering. Honeywell has a long reputation of very strong engineering when it comes to the hardware space. We've prided ourselves on excellent instruments and excellent performance. One thing that very few people understand is that we don't just do thermostats. We're in the business of turbos. We're creating the turbos for your car. We're creating all sorts of HVAC equipment. We're also handling various safety equipment. All of these items need designing, not just for end users and consumers but they also need designing for the workers in the field. If we make a product that is more efficient, easier to use and in some cases, more attractive, not only it does lead to more sales, it leads to more efficient work forces that can work quicker essentially. You could get up on a roof and get off in record time. We're not just designing consumer products. We're actually focused on a lot of other items as well, with oftentimes very large returns on investment. CHARLES: In the work that you do and HUE does in general, it sounds like there might be a large software component. Digital design is kind of we know in the web space but then also a lot of industrial design of just how does this thing going to look, how is it going to feel, how is it going to persist, how durable is it going to be, how is it going to withstand usage. Would you get involved in that process? DREW: Usually, the entire organization gets involved with the process very early on. One of the other shifts that happen in the fall as we get involved less in the production and more on the actual marketing side, like marketing deciding what's going to be built. We're actually really at the beginning and understanding what problems need to be solved at first. As far as my practice and my skill set, we do get involved with all that discovery phase work but when it comes to actual deliverables, we oftentimes see our deliverables around the actual creation of understanding user interactions. We will take research from our user research in OVOC, which is an acronym for Observational Voice of the Customer and we'll take those learnings and translate them into whatever solution we decide to build as a team. My output is going to look like a user flow, something you build in OmniGraffle or Visio and then it can start there, which is in the physical space and then we'll actually revolve those concepts into wireframes as well. Wireframes that will then be handed off to other team members who specialize and focus on visual design. Basically, it's kind of a very hands on process from the very beginning to the very end. It's essentially just understanding everything from the physical to the digital. CHARLES: When we were working together, at least in your case, it doesn't stop there. You're actually doing a significant amount of the implementation as well. Let's explore how did you actually end up getting to that position where you were working through interactions, wireframes and workflows and then also, getting to actually build the product in the form of a complex single-page application. DREW: Sure. Absolutely. One of the components that I kind of brought here to the team was a bit of a deeper understanding of frontend web development. I'm often pulled into conversations here and there. In the case of the project that we were working on specifically, it was essentially kind of early days on that project. We had a product that was pretty old and need a lot of work and it was basically, need to be rebuilt. We hadn't seen a lot of single-page applications at that time. In my case, I actually had worked on a couple small projects in my previous job and we can get into that in a little bit, where my career path took me. But essentially, it was me trying to kind of pave the way and eventually have that work scale. It was kind of proving that it could be done, showing how it could be done and then getting other developers on board. My role here has oftentimes involved, basically becoming a liaison between our design teams and our development teams. Ultimately in this case like you mentioned, it did wind up in turning into code that ultimately got factored into production code. It was definitely a time where we were experimenting with what role we would play. I will say in full disclosure that more or less which we're trying to move towards, basically making better informed decisions but not playing as much of a role in actual production code writing. It's something that we want to help scale. I think we'll talk about that kind of role and how well it scales hopefully in a little bit here but ultimately, it kind of changed a little bit. I don't do as much code as I used to. CHARLES: Right but nevertheless, the skill is there. Don't sell yourself short. You weren't slapping together a bunch of jQuery plugins. You were standing up, basically a full stack system with a StubDeck background, then Node.JS. This is back in early days where there was a custom-build tooling. You were using CoffeeScript. There was a lot of exploration and clearly, there is a fierce curiosity which you are actually exploring and actively kind of skinning and moving into the development space, which doesn't happen until people achieve a certain level of comfort. Whether or not you're exercising those skills, I think they have served you well in terms of the things that you've been able to build but also acting in that liaison and understanding what's possible and stuff like that. Obviously, once I met you, you were already there. I'm curious in exploring that journey of coming up the design ladder but also coming up the development ladder too. Maybe we can talk about each one separately and then see how they intertwine. Let's start with the design side. How did you get into that? DREW: I can take you way, way back. I love to talk more about this in a little bit but I think we, as a generation, are kind of very unique in that. We were raised in the birth of the internet. Some of us are old enough to remember the early dial up days and I certainly was one of those. I grew up basically obsessed with drawing and art and painting. I was a designer and artist raised by an engineer, essentially. My dad didn't really have a lot of opportunities to explore his creative side to basically make a living. I want to say that although graphic design existed to a certain extent, there wasn't really the same blend of engineering skills required so he decided to take the tack of I'm going to become an engineer so I was raised in a household where he was building everything but he was also a talented artist. As a kid, I basically did a lot of advanced art classes. I'm kind of a nerd, pretty much a huge nerd. I dropped my entire tenure as a high school student. It was also kind of dawn of video games as well so we had computers coming of age. We had video games coming of age so I was raised looking at digital art effectively, 8-bit, super accessible. It's kind of so early on that it was something that I could actually fathom getting into and creating on my own. I never got to creating any games but I will say that by my late high school years, I was using a tool called AOLpress. For anybody who has ever heard of that, congratulations. You're one of the few. CHARLES: I've never heard of that. AOLpress, we're going to have to link to that in the show notes. ELRICK: I've never heard of that either. DREW: It's awesome. It's got a Wikipedia page. It's got hieroglyphs and stuff. They really went all out on this product. It's basically the precursor to the Dreamweaver. It was a very, very WYSIWYG. I'm sure you've heard of Microsoft FrontPage, maybe. It was basically a precursor to FrontPage, I would say. Same thing, those are the days of framesets and all of that. I was a kid in scouting at the time and I wanted to build a web page for the troops so I built one and put it out there. I kind of remember that moment where I was like, "I'm going to write something and put it on the internet and anybody can see it." That whole experience was just super exciting. I know that if anybody's following Kickstarter, there's one that was started called 'What Comes Next Is the Future.' It was made by Matt Braun and Matt Griffin and it really explored the birth of the web. I would recommend it on your listeners to want to really dive deep if you didn't live through it, check it out. It's a great, great film. All the regulars are there as you'd expect. Zeldman on there, talking about it amongst others. But if it were for the web, I don't know that I would be who I am or where I am today, just because it's such a unique platform. It's so open. It's so readily available. There's no barriers. I would say that I was just an arts student in high school that picked up AOLpress and then got addicted to the web. From there, it was kind of off to the races. In fact, I didn't even know that I could make a living as a graphic designer until late high school. I decided that I wanted to go to school for graphic design, went a year at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and at that point in time, it was pretty much all print design and then Flash. Flash took over in my second year and at that point in time, it was Flash and framesets and tables. There was no CSS for layout. It's very early days. It sounds like you might know what I'm talking about. Have you been there? ELRICK: Yeah. You know, they say everyone in the world has like a twin and I'm like, "Drew is like my technology twin." DREW: Yeah. When we were raised in that time and we had to hack it with framesets and whatever tool -- FrontPage or AOLpress -- you basically, from very early days, realized that you had to force this stuff to happen. It was not easy. There was no documentation and where there was documentation, you were grateful to have it. I remember when I was, probably just about to graduate and if I look back at my portfolio piece, it was definitely still Flash. It was Timeline-based Flash. I also think that in many ways the way the web evolved was perfect. As a designer, I was very comfortable in the Timeline tool. Before ActionScript 3.0 and before they went on object-oriented on us, it was super accessible. You could add little bits of code here and there and create animations. It kind of got you hooked. Then suddenly, I found myself needing to create full screen Flash applications and needing to actually write code. I actually having to say, "If I want this Flash experience to scale, then I need to calculate where things go. I can't just X-Y coordinate and done," so that's where I jumped off and started getting into CSS. CSS was kind of early days as well. Again, this is before iPhone. This is like people were using CSS but people didn't really think it was that important. It was actually kind of discouraged because everybody in the world was using Internet Explorer and why would you need to know CSS. It was unreliable for different browsers and Internet Explorer was the worst. I remember sitting in a Dreamweaver conference, when it was Macromedia had a conference and they showed a webpage and then they hit the print button and they said, "Does anybody here know how this happened?" because the layout had changed, everything looked better and different. It was perfect for print. I remember my hand shot up because they was like, "Nobody was really familiar yet with that print style sheets?" Incidentally, I don't think that people still are familiar with print style sheets but it was a time when finally people were starting to understand that style sheets were more than just a layout tool. You could change them for all these different form, factors and all these different platforms. It was a fun time to be coming up in this age. CHARLES: It sounds like one, CSS and two, Flash were actually kind of gateway drugs into the development world? DREW: Absolutely. CHARLES: We still have CSS, clearly but do you feel like Flash, despite what some people might think about it, it was a full virtual machine that was running. You could code on it with ActionScript. It's kind of like the JVM but only for running inside the browser. Do you feel like designers might not have that gateway available to them anymore or maybe is the web just as big of a gateway to move into that? DREW: Yeah, for sure. I certainly think, beyond a doubt that had it not been for Flash, we would see a lot less creativity in the space. I say that only because at the time, if we had just gone from tables and tried to slowly evolve things, we'd have a much different feel, I believe. Certainly, it's a gateway drug. We'll be in a different web today without it. Is it still required? Are there any equivalents? I've seen a number of drag and drop web UI on the web tools out there and many of them claim to create production quality code. It's certainly possible to get there without Flash. I think, it's certainly its time has passed but we do see tools like Sketch for instance. These are all very much screen-based design tools that seem to leverage a lot of the same web styles and the web approaches. I think we definitely have the tools there to replace Flash. But I think from my perspective, it would be very interesting to go back and imagine, would we have immersive full screen web experiences without that Flash? CHARLES: Yeah. I remember it being very much a topic of conversation, certainly at the beginning of each project or when you were going to implement a feature is, "Are we going to do this using Flash? Are we trying to do this with native HTML? Are we going to use EGADS or Java applet?" ELRICK: Oh, man. Java applets. CHARLES: That was a conversation that was had before the web eventually went out but I think when it was, everything was very, very static. I do think that Flash definitely set the expectation higher and forced the web to evolve so that it could be the natural choice in those conversations. ELRICK: The time when Flash was around, I called it the 'golden age of user interface' because you can literally build any user experience, any user interface with Flash that you could dream up. There was no limitations creatively in the world of Flash. Nowadays, we're kind of limited without box model but it's getting better year-by-year. DREW: It's interesting to me because before Flash really died out, we had these... Let's put it this way. I feel as though, for a long time the web was a very much like a poster site kind of approach. You would have tools that were pretty rough on the eyes, pretty hard to use and then like for certain films, you have these very high budget, fully immersive Flash experiences. For a blip, that did actually translate at some point into Canvas-based and then Three.JS, like 3D WebGL-based experiences in native HTML but I don't see a whole lot of that anymore. It seems as though, it kind of settled down and in many ways, I would say killing Flash kind of evolved the web from more of a presentational platform to more of a usability first platform. It was a bit of a double-edged sword. You could build anything you want like you said but there wasn't a framework to it. It wasn't really responsive and then certainly, when Steve Jobs decided he wasn't going to Flash an iPhone, that was the end of it. Essentially now, we have -- ELRICK: Steve Job dropped the hammer. CHARLES: That was the memo that was heard around the world, right? DREW: Yeah. CHARLES: I just realized that was like 10 years ago. DREW: Yeah, they're celebrating the anniversary for the last couple of months here. It's been a huge deal. CHARLES: There's probably listeners that never heard that memo but it's definitely worth a read. The memo obviously, that you guys are referring to is when Steve Jobs basically said that Flash would not be on iPhone or iPad, not now, not ever. That was the end of it. DREW: People often forget too that when it was first launched, there was no app store. He basically said point blank, "Anything you need to do on this phone, you should be able to do using the web, using native web coding," and Safari at that point in time is really paving the way to bringing those native APIs into the web. You had geolocation through web. In many ways, that too is a huge gateway drug. Suddenly, you start looking at the web, not as just like, "I could use this as a poster site or as an informational site or a new site. I can actually use this to get things done." They're actually treating this platform as a first-class citizen. That to me was super exciting. I don't know if it gets as much attention anymore in the days of Swift and the App Store but I will say that if your listeners do get a chance to check out the show I mentioned earlier, 'What Comes Next Is the Future,' they even dive deep into just how limiting the app store experience can be. At least with the web, you can create whatever you want to create and people seemed to go that you URL and install on their home screen. This is a feature that nobody uses from what I've seen but if you bookmark a web app on your home screen, you can have an icon, you can have a loading screen, you can have all this stuff and nobody really uses it for whatever reason. CHARLES: I think it's the install, it's getting the knowledge about the fact that you can do that. It's not widely disseminated. ELRICK: Yeah, I think its capabilities starting to come up now with people making progressive web apps. They're starting to utilize that being able to put icons on people screens and loading screen and splash and etcetera. CHARLES: Flash really was kind of the gateway into the development world. I'm curious what opportunities do you feel opened up as you started taking on more web technologies, more JavaScript, more CSS and mixing that with the design that you were doing? What unique skills/superpowers do you think that gave you, that made you, that helped you at that stage in your career? DREW: Yeah, for better or worse, it really was the opportunity to get a job first of all. I know that the job market has been in all sorts of flux in the last couple of decades but I would say 12 years ago, in 2005 when I was entering the workforce, graphic design was not necessarily a hot field. I can say with relative certainty that the majority of the people I graduate with, didn't necessarily make their way into graphic design as a profession. I would say probably maybe 30% to 40% actually wound up following their degrees. For the obvious reason at that time, we were starting to see digital replace print. It meant that I was able to get a job for one. It wasn't a dream job necessarily but I was basically a one-stop-shop. I was designing and developing websites as working for a company but in many ways, shapes and forms, I was kind of freelancing as things were. I had a very direct relationship with the clients that I worked with. It was basically churning out websites. If I recall correctly at the time the company wanted to essentially create a Domino's Pizza of the web where we could use CSS to essentially build the actual HTML once and then restyle it. This is actually was a time when a site called CSS Beauty was just coming of age, I think the site still exists but back then, if you want the CSS Beauty, it's big thing was you have one website and people could upload their own CSS and completely change the layout, completely change the look. CHARLES: Are you talking about CSS Zen Garden? DREW: Maybe that was it. There's two of them. CHARLES: I remember that one. DREW: CSS Zen Garden was one of them and I think CSS beauty was a clone maybe of Zen Garden for sure. Maybe you're right, Zen Garden was the one where you actually had a website and Beauty was just showcasing certain CSS sites. I think you're right. Zen Garden was the one. When they saw that, they're like, "Wow, business opportunity. We can build a whole site." We were using something called 'Cold Fusion' and... Oh, it will escape me now. I think it was called 'Contribute.' There's a product called 'Contribute' that Macromedia come up with that worked on Cold Fusion. It was basically a WordPress. You basically set up editable regions, you basically code the site once in that regard in the backend coding and then just rework CSS to create multiple sites. Actually, the opportunity to open up for me, that job was very squarely-focused around the benefits of leveraging CSS. Eventually, that grew tiring. I kind of wanted to get into the actual marketing and advertising space. From there, I started to just jump to the next job. I worked for a very, very small marketing agency. It was called 'Vetta-Zelo' at that time and we focused on lots more Flash, a little bit of CSS websites but mostly Flash Experiences and they actually used Flash in a lot of kiosks and physical spaces. I started to jump into that, understanding PHP, understanding databases because we would do things like we would install Flash Experience on little portable tablets that would then sync up survey responses to a web URL that it would then dump it into a database. About that time, I was always trying to teach myself how to get really deep into the backend of the stack. CHARLES: That was just to make sure that these Flash sites that you're developing would be scalable and more robust? Was that the natural next layer to dig down? DREW: Absolutely. At the end of the day, we wanted to have immersive Flash experiences and we wanted to have the content easy to update. I would build these really crude backend with text areas and they would update a database and then the Flash Experience would pull that in as content. In that way, we didn't have to go in and re-publish the Flash every time, essentially. It was a much more streamlined process. I think we even gave some of our clients the keys, gave them a login and password and they could change certain things. There's an outfit around here called 'Crave.' They are a restaurant in town and we built the website for them -- one of the earlier websites. When you have to do things like update times and menus and things like that, it became pretty essential to having some sort of a CMS behind it. It was all based on necessity, in other words. What you said is absolutely true. We had to evolve what we learned and I had to push what I did to lever on different needs. Throughout my career, I've been the guy who does web and design. One of the things about that is it's kind of a lonely place to be and find yourself in creative agencies, where the majority of skill sets are not in development and trying to explain what's going on or make commitments on timelines and deliver on them. Whenever a bug shows up, it's never really fully understood. It's also a challenge to manage expectations, certainly as a young professional at that point. CHARLES: Yeah, I would say, what would be some advice you would give to somebody who is straddling these roles at that early career stage where they're maybe working for creative agency and fulfilling these two roles but most of their surroundings is towards the design end. DREW: Yeah, I would say for the most part, just be upfront. If there's anything that's unknown, be upfront about it and explain. If you are early in your development career as a designer, do your homework before you committing any commitment certainly. I think it's always better to be upfront about these things than to try to over-promise and then scramble at the end. I will say that a lot of my career has been marked with the term code 'code cowboy' as a designer and teaching myself to code. It was a disparaging term, I guess. I didn't really necessarily take it that way but I think other developers are trying to use it in that way. CHARLES: [Singing to the tune of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys] Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold... ELRICK: It's so true. DREW: You know, I'm not even embarrassed to say it because the truth of the matter is when you're a designer, you're used to just making a mess before you kind of landed on what you're done and what's right. The entire creative process is messy. I think it's inherent. If you're one of these designers turned devs and you basically just hack it until it comes together, that's kind of a natural flow from the creative process. Certainly, as you get more experienced, you want to reduce all that uncertainty and potential for error so you do learn to hone your craft, to use version control, to embrace a framework or embrace some model-view controller approach but none of that really existed in the early days of the web. I kind of came up in a time when you had to hack it. CHARLES: Well, there's a lot of learning that can happen when you're hacking and building things that are kind of ad hoc. As you go, you get to perceive firsthand the problems with them. Without perceiving those problems first, it's hard to really understand the solutions that the internet has come up with to deal with those complexities. DREW: I would say I was like a solo designer developer throughout the early years, because at 2010, I found my people in a local agency called 'Clockwork' and for the first time, I wasn't the only developer on staff. There was a whole team of developers. In fact, the shop was started as a development shop and they were making headway into the creative space and eventually, becoming full digital partners. But had it not been for my opportunities at Clockwork, I wouldn't have picked up my skill set as a backend coder. From the very beginning at Clockwork, they expected you to get your hands dirty and code and get your hands dirty in the terminal, honestly. Command line was required even in our design work. CHARLES: And this is all designers needed to be familiar with the terminal tools --? DREW: Correct. CHARLES: -- Basic coding? DREW: Yeah. Essentially, all of our work, whether it was creative or whether it was documents, were all managed in Subversion. As a part of onboarding, you basically learned how to use Subversion. There were some GUI tools for it but for the most part, it wasn't that steep of a learning curve. It was pretty easy to follow instructions and that was the second gateway drug, I would say. My first gateway drug, again was kind of coming up in the age of the web and getting into CSS and Flash. The second gateway drug was basically being required to learn command line and learning how to navigate a computer without a display. Had not been for that, I don't think my career would have taken the turns that it did. I basically got more into the IoT space. I had set up a home NAS server with Drobo FS, is what it was called at the time and it was just a really basic machine but by jumping into that, I could start to play around with UNIX and tools there. I started using home automation, playing with that and at some point in time, I made the jump from just web into the role that I play here at Honeywell, which is Internet of Things. We do a lot of Internet of Things. In fact, our latest tagline is 'the Power of Connected' so we've embraced it all the way down to our wood mark. It's becoming the new normal for most products so it's a good time to be at the center of all these different areas of expertise, to be in development, to be in IoT and to be in design. That's my path. That's my journey. I would kind of pick it up at a bunch of fortunate circumstances, honestly. ELRICK: Having these two skill sets: your design skills and your development skills, what do you believe that that gives you in terms of an advantage? Having these two skills set and being able to leverage these two? DREW: From my perspective, having both skill sets allows me to understand. I think the biggest challenge when working with large teams, particularly in this space or in any space is to really have a common level of understanding, stepping aside from a functional role and becoming more of a liaison between design development and to be honest with you, as we look beyond that, I took a three or four or five month course in business administration, actually. It was just a night class but I wanted to be able to speak to those needs as well. I think it really is becoming a translator. Serving as a translator between those items and then also being able to understand where the actual boundaries lie, there are a lot of very talented engineers and talented designers and sometimes opportunities are missed because, either timelines are pushing engineers to cut certain functionalities or certain features and there's a lot of pressure. Where we can lend a hand, where we can point to possible alternatives, I think that's where we really build cutting edge products. When we really know each domain, we can push those boundaries. That's where I'd enjoy bringing my skill set to the table. CHARLES: Yeah. I can second that. Having actually worked with you, I think one of the greatest things was the one just with the interactions that you were coming up with, were just really spot on. It wasn't ad hoc. It wasn't some -- ELRICK: Helter-skelter? CHARLES: Yeah, it wasn't helter-skelter. It wasn't some developer coming up with like, "Hey, this is what this looks like," Or, "This is some designer putting up pie in the sky stuff." It was, "I understand what's possible and I'm going to use that to design the best thing that can be possible." It made the designs very pleasant and some of them were just really fun, I think. Thinking especially like that, the hierarchical tree selector was one -- ELRICK: Yeah, that was fun. CHARLES: -- Which the implementation of that was just a joy. But then the second thing is being able to speak with you on the development challenges and really know that you understood that language. It really is being bilingual, I guess in the sense that I'm talking to you in French and you're talking to product owners in German or whatever. But because you're bilingual, the flow of information is as frictionless as possible. DREW: I will say that it was a real pleasure from our end working with your team as well because one of the trends in many businesses throughout the world today is embracing a lean and agile approach to product design development. One of the growth opportunities, I would say in any business is fully understanding how that process works, having the courage to be upfront about what can be accomplished in the time available. I think one of the other things is fully understanding those three pegs of the stool. There's always the budget, the time and then the features of any projects. I think that working with a team that understands that really changes the dynamic. I will say that it was equally a pleasure for us to work with your team because there was just a level of courage in being very forthright and very upfront about what do we need to get the job done? What has to happen? You made my job as a translator, essentially. CHARLES: We aim to please. ELRICK: Absolutely. DREW: Absolutely. The latest evolution of kind of where my career has taken us in the company is embracing the hardware element. We've talked a bit about the web and then how that evolved and then having to get comfortable of the command line and where that took place. I've always wanted to build. I've loved designing but I always want to build it and I want to put it out there. In the last six months actually, I finally decided that I would pull the Band-Aid off and jump into soldering hardware, writing what code I could and building actual physical hardware prototypes. I think the next step for anybody who likes to follow this maker trajectory, for a creative looking to become a maker or a developer looking to get into creative is just not stopping. There's always something there and we're also fortunate to live in a time when I can go on at Adafruit, pick up a kit of parts for under $100 and build something that's completely new. Then by the way, they have a full-on tutorial that takes you through every step of the process and gives you bits of code to get started so what's your excuse at that point? If you've got $100, then you can throw and toss into a hobby, pick up a soldering iron and go to town because there are videos, there's the documentation. Documentation is just everywhere now, where it was never there before. I think the next step for us is seeing how can we very early on show real physical world products to end users and get feedback. How we're taking design now is beyond the digital and into the physical. CHARLES: That's fascinating. I feel like there's this pendulum that swings through the tech industry of things moving from hardware to software and back again. We're in the middle of the swing towards the outside or towards the hardware again, like the distributed hardware versus the dumb terminals. It's distributed across a bunch of devices rather than concentrated on one super-powered desktop computer. The pendulum is going to swing in it but it's just always fascinated to see what the actual arc that it takes is going to be. This has been a fascinating conversation and the reason I wanted to have it and we were actually talking about this before the show started officially, why this topic of 'devsigner?' I think that it's a role that is emerging. I think it's still in the early days. I think that I went from three years ago having never really met this type of person to having met and worked with you. Now, I would say having met and worked with three people here at Frontside who fulfill that role and now knowing a couple professed devsigner or people who operate clearly in the design and the developer space on Twitter. I feel like it's this emerging career track that might not be fully understood or defined right now but clearly, there's something there so we wanted to explore that. I'm curious if we might be able to open up the discussion a little bit on what is the future of this role? What tasks will it be set to accomplish? When you're assembling your team, you say, "Get me one of those because we're going to need that." How is that going to be further refined and designed so that it scales as, perhaps an official career in one, two, five, 10 or 20 years? DREW: I can only speak to my experience in this area and I can say that for the most part, it is a very unique skill set and sometimes, it's hard to come but like you said, you're working now with three people. I think it's growing in prevalence. I believe that where coding was less common in the past, it's becoming so much more common now that it's almost like an expectation just like typing. It is an expectation now. People expect you know how to type. It's not a surprise that we're going to see more and more of these individuals. I would say that any design team out there could almost invariably benefit from having somebody with this skill set, somebody who can translate design concept into a working prototype. I've seen it manifest as a prototyping role, more or less just so that we can have a tangible deliverable for developers. I think it does depend on the team, certainly. If you have small teams with talented frontend developers, then certainly you can work in a lean and agile environment and make very quick iterative change. If you have very large design teams and very large development teams, I would say that having a frontend developer with the skill set in a creative team allows that communication to happen without routine phone calls and lots of meetings, essentially. It's a crystal clear example. I've see it manifest as a prototyping role because the expectation is this code will end up in production but some of the code may. The layout code may end up in production but the functional bits may not. That's not to say that the functionality isn't a part of the experience and that, designers don't care about how well an experience performs. But typically where many designers see the disconnect is in the presentation layer. Having somebody who can carry that over is usually something that is far smaller team can handle. Does that align with your experiences? CHARLES: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I would say that the compliment from having this person on your development team, if you're in mainline development mode or maybe you are a small team, even if it's a production system but you don't have full time design resources, this person can slice and dice the features and understand the hierarchy of interactions and being able to put together some wireframe, some very concrete goals and set those goals for the rest of the development team. But yet also understand what goals are achievable in the iteration. I think it works from the flipside as well. Maybe what we're seeing is the agile of the [inaudible] of everything. What we've seen over the past 15 years or 20 years, what has been the arc of my career is just seeing these feedback loops in every element of product development getting smaller and smaller and smaller. On the development side, we recognize this as being able to feedback loops and verification. Having your tests, you don't actually have to deploy your system to be able to get feedback about whether it works or have it be fully assembled to get feedback about whether it works. But then that manifests in terms of continuous integration and deployment. You're bringing down the feedback loop of getting this out in front of people versus these long deployment cycles that maybe you really have a release every year. It was hard to believe but that was the norm when I started. It was yearly, maybe even once every 18 months. It was not uncommon at all to have released cycles like that. Certainly, three months was very, very short but then those tight feedback loops can also manifest itself, internally in terms of team communication and I think having people who can make those feedback loops between the product and between the implementation, every time you shorten that feedback loop, you're unlocking an exponential amount of time. DREW: Yeah, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you talk about setting scope and understanding things as well. Strictly speaking from agile terminology, having a product or a role that can bridge those gaps is critical. I think that the best product owners that I've worked with have understood, have had an appreciation for design but also have had some degree of a development backend as well so they know how to make those critical decisions. In any sort of iterative or agile environment, you have to dice up these features and figure out which ones are going to ship when they're going to ship. I think, yeah you hit it right out of the park with that. Whether or not you can ever have a full-on team of just prototypers, I'm not as convinced that that's necessarily scalable. It seems like there's certainly a role for teams of developer that will break down features and then there's teams of creative as well. CHARLES: I think in terms of the person who would lead that team, this role definitely seems very well fit. DREW: Exactly. CHARLES: I think it's a great opportunity for someone who's looking for a leadership position in terms of developing and seeing products to market, which is kind of similar to what you're finding yourself in today or where you're headed towards, it sounds like. DREW: Yeah, for the most part. It seems like I do find myself in a number of calls in kind of bridging those gaps. It's certainly a different dynamic in the agile environment when work with hardware. That's something that I think we're still exploring and still understanding. Certainly, there are companies that do agile with hardware but there's a whole slew of different challenges. You're not just deploying anymore. You're actually building manufacturing understanding what needs to ship with what. I think the next evolution of our company's growth into this space is how do iteratively produce hardware. ELRICK: Interesting. CHARLES: You got to keep me posted. The next time we have you on the podcast, you're going to have it all figured out, you're going to be presenting your thesis, it's a conference talk upcoming, agile hardware. ELRICK: Yeah, that would be pretty interesting. DREW: Yeah, I'll let you know. CHARLES: In the first iteration, you just throw a bunch of boiling solder on the breadboard and see what works. "Okay, now, that didn't work." DREW: I'll be honest with you. The 3D printing is making lots of possibilities open up in that space but ultimately, you got to ship. We use 3D printing and now we are using these low-cost computers to really prototype real world experiences and near-to-final industrial design. We can do that. CHARLES: Drew, this sounds like you have the coolest job. ELRICK: I know, it sounds awesome. DREW: It become even more exciting than I had initially intended. It's fun times. I think, again we're living in a time when we can 3D print stuff and have it done within a couple of hours. What better time to embrace these technologies and this creative spirit. It's kind of all around us. Honestly, it's just being fortunate. CHARLES: Yeah. Fantastic. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Drew for coming on. DREW: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. CHARLES: It's an amazing place. It sounds like even more fun since we got to work with you. If anybody is out there and they're in the design space and they think that, "Oh, maybe I can't do development," or it's too hard. It's not. There's a lot of people out there who are doing it and experiencing lots of good benefits. I would say that the other thing is if you're a developer, you should think about looking into the design space, something that you might be interested in. I think it's probably less common that the vectors people move from development into design and not vice versa but there's nothing that says that it can't go that way. Mostly, it's because people just aren't doing and they think that that option is not available to them but clearly, it is and clearly, it's a valuable role. I think this role is going to only get more valuable in the future. DREW: I would second that thought and that notion. I give a quick shout out to Erin O'Neal. She's a former colleague of mine who's given a number of talks about that very topic -- backend developers caring about user experience, caring about the design. She's given some talks. You could probably find her on YouTube. Anybody who wants to talk about it, I'm all over the web as DrewCovi. I think I pretty much have that user name in every platform so if you Google me, you'll find me. CHARLES: We'll look for you. Obviously, you can find us at @TheFrontside on Twitter, TheFrontside on GitHub and feel free to drop us a line at Contact@Frontside.io. Thank you for listening everybody and we'll see you next week.