Podcasts about googled

It's that time of the year that Google releases their most googled things!Not a Kardashian or porn website to be found!Pete Davidson. Stimulus checks and Squid Game took some honors!Come see what else!!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/MistyandIke)

In episode 1058, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian and host of the Blakes Takes for God's Sakes Podcast Blake Wexler to discuss Jan 6 - a year later…, And the most Googled chain restaurant is…, Yellowstone Is Apparently Very, Very Popular and more! Jan 6 - a year later… Trump cancels Jan. 6 event amid GOP complaints Yellowstone Is Apparently Very, Very Popular And the most Googled chain restaurant is…. Follow: @BlakeWexler LISTEN: Nouveau Western by MC Solaar Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Happy New Year Everyone!!! I hope you're all well rested and ready for every amazing thing that's going to happen this new year

Aaron Thompson is a Chief Revenue Officer at SuccessCOACHING, the leading provider of Customer Success training and education. He is a connector, educator and public speaker with over 20 years experience helping companies improve retention rates, increase recurring revenue and recoup customer acquisition costs. Aaron enjoys skiing, kayaking and golfing with his family and friends.   Questions   Could you share with us a little bit about your journey? What customer experience is and then what customer outcomes are and maybe give us a practical example of that. Could you maybe share with us maybe one or two drivers that you think can help organizations to try and stay ahead of the curve as it relates to anything that may be impacting them as a result of the pandemic? Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently that has impacted you. Where can listeners find you online? Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote; it kind of helps to keep you on track or get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed. Do you have one of those?   Highlights   Aaron's Journey   Aaron shared that every job he's had his entire life has been customer facing. The first job he had was working at a health club, helping the members check in as they came in the front door, cleaning the club, etc. And he had a job all the way through high school, all the way through college, all customer facing in different regards, call centers, customer service, little retail here and there. And then about 36 years old, he actually got laid off for the first time in his career. And he had been down a technical track as a software programmer, he had been an implementation consultant, he had been a trainer and instructional designer and most recently was working in customer support at a SaaS company and they laid off about 100 people.   And for the first time he found himself without a job and he didn't know what he would do next. And so, he started looking at other kind of pivots in his career and thought maybe he would go into a sales track, he looked back into kind of the technical side. And long story short, there was this company in Portland, Oregon, where he's based that was looking for a new Head of Customer Success, that was going to be tasked with fixing the churn problem. See, they had a 40% year over year churn rate. And obviously, that was preventing them from growing. And so, they wanted to bring someone in to fix that hole in the bucket. And with his support background, he was able to get that job. And he tells this story when he does my classes now and his certifications in customer success.   His first day as the Head of Customer Success, he came in and again, he's tasked with fixing this churn problem. And he thinks he knows what customer success is at this point, it's like support on steroids or kind of account management 2.0.   And he came in on day one as the head of CS and he thinks, “Well, you know, what I've never actually Googled “What is customer success?” And long story short, he finds the industry, the technology players, the books, the authors, Jeanne Bliss and CCO 2.0 is really critical at the beginning of his development, of his strategy. And so, in a 12 month window, he was able to go and create his own customer success strategy, implement that strategy at that company, and take a 40% churn rate down to 8% in 12 months, by really doing some really foundational customer success practices, and starting to really, do quote unquote, customer success, not just customer support.   And so, at that point, he actually exited that company and founded his first company and at 38 years old, he became an entrepreneur for the first time, and not exactly how he would advise his son to do it. A seven year old son at 38 years old, to just kind of take that leap of faith, but alas, that's what he did. And he was an independent consultant, implementing that same strategy at some other SaaS companies. And then he met Todd and Andrew, the co-founders of SuccessCOACHING and they had the beginnings of this certification concept. And they were looking for another partner; he was kind of a lone wolf looking for a pack. And long story short, the three of them now own this business https://successcoaching.co/  and they have 4 levels of fully accredited certification in the discipline of Customer Success.   They work with B2B enterprise companies all around the world through an online learning management system. And then they also deliver live events. As their Chief Revenue Officer, he get to travel around, well, pre COVID, he got to travel around and do a lot of keynotes and meet with people in person. And for the last 18 months or so, he's been doing the same thing, but virtually, primarily into cameras, and then on the podcast like this.   So, he just loves to talk about customer success, he loves to learn from others and find new ways or better ways sometimes of doing things. And then they baked that into a certification. And then now like he said, they have multiple levels of it live, and they've certified about 7500 people around the world, they have nearly 10,000 on their platform today. And it's just been amazing to see this industry grow exponentially year over year, ever since he found it that first day when he Googled, What is customer success?   What is Customer Experience and What are Customer Outcomes   Me: So, one of your formulas for customer success is customer outcomes plus customer experience. So can we break that down, tell us exactly what customer experience is and then what customer outcomes are and maybe give us a practical example of that.   Aaron shared that he loves that formula. When he found that formula, he thought, okay, he can understand this just as a consumer and as having 20 plus years working with customers, it broke it down into such a simplistic approach he could wrap his head around it.   But, the customer's definition of success and when he says customer, he means human. And he means holistic human who has a personal life and a professional life and if they can impact them on the personal side in a positive way, by way of our professional relationship with them, so save them a little extra time, and they can now get home earlier or get off Zoom earlier, and spend some time with their family will profoundly affect their holistic life in a positive way that transcends their value proposition and B2B relationship, etc.   And so, for these holistic humans, keeping in mind what they want to accomplish, that's the CO (Customer Outcome).   So, CS (Customer Success) = CO (Customer Outcome) + CX (Customer Experience), the customer's definition of success, CS. And again, the human, accounts don't buy things, businesses don't buy things, make decisions, people do.   And typically speaking, we make business decisions based on personal preference. And so, there is a true blending both from the psychology as well as just building relationships and deepening and maintaining those with humans. And so that person's definition of success will always come down to what they want to accomplish, that's the CO (Customer Outcome). So what am I hoping to get whether it's time savings, and he oftentimes say that outcomes, the CO.   And they really come down to two kinds of outcomes, almost every outcome of any customer is either a pain to relieve or a gain to achieve, it's one or the other, I either got a pain point I need someone to solve it, or I'm looking to get bigger, faster, stronger, etc.   And so, when we can deliver what they want in terms of that outcome, and then we can do that how they want it, and that's the CX side.   And so, if we can deliver the same or better outcomes than our competition, and do it by way of the same or better customer experience than our competition, we will have delivered a higher volume of their definition of success.   And so, what that requires of us is to define what that definition looks like for that person, it's going to be different for your executives, stakeholder, then your subject matter expert, then your end user, then your system administrator, all the different roles have different definitions of success, but our job as CSMs is to define what that is for them, deliver on that, and then demonstrate to them that we've done so. That's where business reviews and reporting and benchmark data etc comes out.    And when we do all three of those, that then leads to renewal and expansion and advocacy from them in this concept of a customer success qualified lead, which is net new business coming into our funnel by way of the customer asset, as opposed to just filling the top of the funnel in sort of typical marketing approaches.   And so, when we do all of this effectively, we can grow our business from the customer asset outwards, we can unlock exponential growth because our acquisition costs go way down and our customer lifetime value goes up, either through renewal expansion, or like he said, advocacy which would be bringing us a net new lead, because we've made their lives so wildly successful. That's kind of the definition.   And that was when he found that, that was a big aha for him, because he thought he can wrap his head around this, he wasn't much of a math major growing up and so, to have a very simplistic CS = CO + CX, it allowed him to wrap his head around it and really start to use that as the North Star. And it's what they teach in their level one certification program as well.   Drivers that Can Help Organizations Stay Ahead of the Curve as it Relates to Anything that May Impact Them as a Result of the Pandemic   Me: So, a lot has been happening globally as it relates to different businesses and different industries and I'm sure it's become even more difficult to achieve customer success because I do believe that COVID has caused the bar to be raised for customer experience, especially for those organizations where there have been delays or I find a lot of companies sometimes are using COVID as an excuse as to why they're not delivering excellent service. So, could you maybe share with us maybe one or two drivers that you think can help organizations to try and stay ahead of the curve as it relates to anything that may be impacting them as a result of the pandemic?   Aaron stated that that's a really good point, actually. And he thinks Yanique is absolutely right when it comes to using COVID and quarantine, and everything that happened in March of 2020, as almost a cop out now. He feels like any company that is still revelling in, “Oh, well, we're still trying to figure out what the future looks like.”   And really kind of harkening to those early days of COVID, he genuinely just thinks it's a cop out at this point. Because we've been in it for pushing two years now and if you can't iterate, adjust, adopt new ways of doing things within two years, that says something about your company well beyond just this particular instance of COVID, and those early days of quarantine.   But the good companies, the agile companies, and he see this all the time. He watches Shark Tank a lot being an entrepreneur, he loves that show. And entrepreneur, after entrepreneur comes onto the carpet and tells their story about brick and mortar, this kind of products, direct to consumer, and then immediately having to shift and do that digital transformation to be completely digital because there was no other way to sell their products. And many of them were able to thrive in that scenario because of their ability to iterate and adopt.   He thinks it's probably trickier, he doesn't know if it's easier or harder for an early stage versus the later stage company, because you have more resources later stage, of course, as well. But he thinks that's the key is really making that digital transformation over to direct to consumer, if that's your business model. And if it's B2B, you still had to make a digital transformation, he's not going to be flying and taking you to dinner, and doing a business review in a boardroom with you, he's going to do it on Zoom and becoming adept at that, and really being able to pivot into that.   Like their business, they had the same problem. He was actually in London on March 12, 2020, speaking at a customer conference. It was crazy. And so, he's flying from Seattle to London and then he's going to do a keynote in London and a level one certification while he's there. And then he's going to hit New York City on his way back for the level one certification and then he's going to go home to Portland where he lives. And as he's getting on the plane from Seattle to London, this is March 9th, that's probably more like March 7th of 2020. His contact in New York emails him and says, “I'm sorry, we have to cancel the event because we just can't host people in one place.”   And he thought this is crazy. Like what are you talking about? This is nuts. What do you mean? you can't bring people together like this, it's just insane.   And so, he said, alright and he gets on the plane from Seattle to London now without needing to stop in New York on his way home. So he didn't have a direct flight back yet. And he'll always remember this Instagram post he made that day where it was the weirdest feeling to get on a plane headed out of country during a global pandemic without a return flight figured out yet. It was completely insane.   So he goes and he does the London events and about 25% of the attendees for this customer conference in London, about 25% actually came, 75% of them, their company said you can't go, a lot of the speakers had to pivot to a Zoom delivery, the conference company, Congress Geeks out of Israel did an amazing job of pivoting so that the speakers could do it virtually on Zoom, but he was there anyway. And so, he went ahead and did it.   And on March 13, he flew home and they had on Monday, the following Monday, the 13th was the Friday was when he was supposed to do his New York event and he immediately just pivoted to a virtual delivery. And they sent everybody a Zoom link and said, “All right, well, you're home. Now, I'm home. Let's see how this goes.” And now here we are 18 months later, that's how we will do it forever now.   Because he no longer has to take the time out of office to travel, he no longer has to find people in one given city; he can sell tickets around the world for any given event. They actually get more attendance and have a lower overhead for their business and so their margins went up and it's a delivery mode that they will forever do now, it's not to say he's not going to pick and choose different places to go in person. But they had to do that on a dime. And luckily, they were uniquely positioned, he thinks, to be able to make that digital transformation, literally overnight. And not every company could do that. But he thinks there's a lot of companies that have just used it as a cop out and haven't adopted this new world and kind of keep waiting for things to quote, go back to normal, as opposed to understanding that this is the new normal, and then using this to actually improve their customer experience and ultimately their customer success.   And just one more point on this, the difference between customer experience and customer success in that formula. Obviously, the CX is part of the CS formula, but how he likes to think of it and he did a keynote actually not very long ago on this. The customer experience is about the journey, it's about everything they do from the top of your funnel in marketing through the sales channels, to everything with on boarding and optimization and renewals, procurement, how easy it is to pay you, etc, etc, etc. All of the things of the journey from soup to nuts, from start to finish, that's CX it's all about the journey.   Customer Success is about the destination. It's about did we get you what you want, how you want it, and that how you want it is the CX side.   And so, he thinks a lot of companies haven't focused on that journey well enough and said, alright, now that we live in this COVID world, what can we do? How can we differentiate ourselves from a customer experience perspective?   While still delivering the same or better outcomes than our competition, iterating on the CX side is what ultimately creates the winners coming out of this pandemic.   And then, he doesn't like to say losers, but the not winners coming out of the pandemic. And so, he thinks that's a really good point and a good question. And that's a very long answer but he thinks at this point, if you haven't adopted or you're not in the process of adopting to this new life, this new way the world works, you're not going to succeed maybe how you did before the pandemic, and certainly not as well as the competition if they are able to iterate and adopt this new way of life better.   App, Website or Tool that Aaron Absolutely Can't Live Without in His Business   When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Aaron stated that that's a good question. So much of their business is online; they have their learning management system and that's obviously where they make revenue is selling access to that for people to become certified. The typical collaboration tools are very critical in their business; they run a pretty lean shop and so, to be able to use something like Slack that is just so widely adopted by this point.   Zoom he thinks would probably be one that he would be chagrined to not include it because he's on it almost all day long now. There's this new product, actually, that's super fascinating and they're going to be rolling this out as part of their live virtual events. It's called Class and it's built on top of Zoom, but it creates a true classroom experience, but virtually and so there's a ton of functionality in there and they're just getting started, they're looking to roll this out for their business in Q1, probably mid Jan. But that's one that's actually really intriguing.   You talk about a company that's been built in the pandemic, these founders, similar to rocketlane, these founders saw an opportunity, they saw this pandemic as an opportunity not to take advantage of people, but to capitalize on in a positive way.   There are new pain points; there are new outcomes that people are going to have out there. How can we deliver those outcomes in a enjoyable frictionless customer centric experience, and they can start to build and grow and just like rocketlane, go to market, just in the last 18 months, they went from not existing to now they're in the market because of this shift in this digital transformation classes a similar approach.   And it's so super impressive to him as an entrepreneur, when people can see that pain, see that opportunity, that window and just jump at it and then it create something that is as high quality as rocketlane or Class, for example.   Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Aaron   When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Aaron shared that Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeannie Bliss that was kind of his mantra as the first time he was the head of CS. When he did that Googling and he thought he knew what he was talking about and realized he doesn't know what customer success is, he better learn, that was a really critical book to doing that. And it's just so customer centric, the whole concept of earning the right to customer driven growth by making people's lives better, she really touches on that holistic human concept that he started the podcast with. So, that's a big one.   He's trying to think of another one that he's read that isn't customer success that has been critical, recently. Over the summer, he was doing the poolside reads, those are always nice. The Technology-as-a-Service Playbook: How to Grow a Profitable Subscription Business from TSIA, it's been out a long time, he got it for free years ago at a conference, they were just handing them out on a table. That was really big for him to understand the subscription economy and the shift in the business economics from the product era when we sold physical products that would then wear out or require the customer to go back into the market.   And now you shift over to selling the use of the product as a service, thus, it never wears out for the customer now because they never own it. And how do we get a little bit of revenue over time, instead of a whole bunch of revenue up front. Technology-as-a-Service Playbook is really critical as well.   And then there's some great customer success books out there, there's also some great leadership books that are out there as well. Another good one that he likes to recommend to people, Red Ocean, Blue Ocean – Blue Ocean Strategy, if you are an entrepreneur or even just have an inkling of an entrepreneurial spirit, that is a really profound book. It's all about when you find yourself in an ultra competitive environment, that's a red bloody ocean and you're really competing on price and kind of having this race to the bottom as they say, how to then innovate, how to pivot, how to adopt a new approach to break out of that and create and find yourself in a blue ocean that is wide open for you to fish within. They use the example of Cirque du Soleil.   And when they found in Cirque du Soleil, they thought why would you ever create a new circus company? That's insane. There are tons of circuses out there, and a lot of them are getting attacked or protested because of the animal rights and there's just so much gray area in there. And why would you ever do this? And so, what they do is they go and they create a circus that doesn't have any animals, it's all people and all of a sudden they find themselves in this blue ocean and they've got Las Vegas and all around the world, they're selling out these tents, like Barnum and Bailey's used to do back in the 70s, and 80s. But they're doing it without any animals; it takes all of the risk away and all they did was just take a very old concept, iterate it, take a new approach to it, and it just exploded worldwide. That's a perfect example of Red Ocean, Blue Ocean. And he thinks it's a good business book for anybody, even if you don't know what you want to do, but you want to be an entrepreneur, it can help you kind of see things in a more innovative way.   Where Can We Find Aaron Online   LinkedIn – Aaron Thompson Website – https://successcoaching.co/                 https://successhacker.co/   Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Aaron Uses   When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Aaron shared that he wished he can show it because it works a little better with visual. So he'll try to talk it through here. But think of whether it's customer sentiment, and you've just brought on a new customer or a personal relationship, or whatever it is, and everything goes as you expected. And you've got a pendulum and whenever they goes as expected, the pendulum kind of swings back and forth, right there in the middle, and everything, is fine, it's not crazy, it is what it is, no surprises, etc.   And on one end of the spectrum, you have good, happy, pleased, satisfied, whatever. On the other end of the spectrum, you have bad, mad, angry, frustrated, confused, whatever, offended maybe, etc.   And we're swinging that pendulum right in the middle. And then something bad happens, whatever it is, and it moves this pendulum all the way out to the bad, mad, angry, frustrated side of things. And we find ourselves in that situation, that time of adversity. And in that moment, it's really easy to ourselves get mad, frustrated, etc, disappointed, etc. And really kind of relish in the moment. And what he tries to do is to remind himself that, “Now I have the opportunity to create enough momentum with that pendulum, that I can move it on to the good, happy, pleased side, to a degree that I never could have had I not found myself on the bad side.”   And so, it's really just a visual of with, “Every challenge presents an opportunity and when we find ourselves in these challenging times, we just want to focus on the opportunity that's presented by it, not the challenge that's presented by it. See these times of adversity as gifts and opportunities to create momentum and swing that pendulum to a place on the good side that it never could have been had you not had to go through that difficult time.” So that's kind of the like he said, it's a little easier if he's got a visual, he's a big whiteboard person, a lot of webinars, podcasts are a little tough for him. He talks with my hands a lot; nobody can see him right now. But hopefully they can visualize that a little bit, but it's really just “Every challenge presents an opportunity.”   Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest   Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners   Links   Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeanne Bliss Technology-as-a-Service Playbook: How to Grow a Profitable Subscription Business by Thomas Lah   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience   Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, and welcome back to season three of That's My Jamstack. It's amazing that we've been going this long. I know it's been quite a bit since our last episode, but to jog your memories, That's My Jamstack is the podcast asks that time honored and tested question. What is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson and we've got a lot of great guests lined up for this season. So without further ado, let's dive in. On today's episode, we talk with Sean C. Davis. Sean is a passionate tinkerer and teacher. He's currently working as a developer experience engineer at stack bit. Bryan Robinson 1:04 All right, Shawn. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking with us today. Sean C. Davis 1:07 Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here. Bryan Robinson 1:09 Awesome. So first and foremost, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? And what do you do for fun outside of work Sean C. Davis 1:15 For for work, I am currently the developer experience engineer for stack bit. I've been in the web development space for about a decade or so the first nine years, were all in agency space building agency freelancing, building websites for folks. And just this last year, took a shift into the product space and spending some time with stack bid. And that's that's been so that's super exciting. That's what I've been doing every day. And I'm sure we'll we'll dig into that a bit. For fun on the side. Well, I feel like I'm the I'm the classic developer in the sense that there's always some, there's always some technical thing that's happening on the side. Right now that thing is, it's it's my personal site I've had, I've had a couple of different blogs that I've maintained over the years. And within the last two years or so I've been trying to focus that content, bringing it all into my personal site. But right now, it's still kind of just like a, it's just a, it's a blog, most of most folks who come there, Googled some problem, they get the solution, and it serves those folks really well. But I'm in this transition of trying to make it more of a learning hub. So that's, it's kind of a side project now. But that's but it's still like it's fun, but it's still I don't know, it's where it could still be in a developer. I'm so like, the the other part of me, I've got two little kids at home and like a lot of folks when the pandemic hits kind of focused a lot of energy and attention into the home. So it's various projects around the house or like like many people I am part of the reason you couldn't find flour at the grocery store because I got really into baking for a while and still doing that a little bit to some like some gardening kind of just fun fun stuff around the house. Bryan Robinson 3:06 In your in your baking exploits. Are we talking like bread, baking, pastry baking, but what kind of baking Sean C. Davis 3:13 where I spend most of my time and still doing a little bit today is the classic sourdough loaf. So mostly bread, mostly bread, at least I'm better at the bread. I've done a bit of the Sweet Treats and trying to learn a little bit about the decorating but it's just the presentation isn't my strong suit. So the flavor might be there. I've got a ways to go in the inner desert department. Bryan Robinson 3:37 Yeah, I've got I've got my own sourdough starter and all that. So I definitely feel I actually, I like a time I can be a hipster about something. And so when my son was born, actually so that was six years ago now. So pre pandemic, my wife my birthday that year, two months after he was born he got me a sourdough starter from King Arthur baking and amazing. I lapsed right because obviously like infant and all that and I baked for a little bit but yeah, then started back up during the pandemic as well. Because who, who doesn't want to do that? We're gonna do Yeah, exactly. You got something to focus on. Anyway, I actually love your site. I'm sure that when we do shout outs at the end, we'll talk about that Sean C. Davis calm but one things that came up on the little repeating thing on your homepage is you're afraid of bears and Bs. Is that Is that a thing? Or is that just a funny thing? Sean C. Davis 4:21 Oh, yeah, it's a it's a funny thing. I mean, I I I love both of them, but also am terrified of both that I do. I do. I guess I didn't mention this in the fun thing. I really enjoy hiking and camping. haven't done much camping since having little kids. We're gonna eventually get them out there. But we do a fair amount of hiking. And so yeah, I've had a number of run ins with both bears and bees. And it's terrifying every time but I also very much appreciate and respect them for what they do for us. Yes. Bryan Robinson 4:54 All right. So let's talk a little bit about the Jamstack. So what was your entry point into this space? It seems this idea of Jamstack or static sites or whatever it was at the time. Sean C. Davis 5:03 It that's an interesting question. Because Okay, so if you say, Yeah, entry point into Jamstack, or static sites, if you broke that apart and said, What's your entry point into Jamstack? And what's your entry point into static sites? I have two different answers. So I'll tell you a little bit about the the journey from one to the other. It's, I find it kind of interesting. So it static sites were was the first thing before I knew anything about Jamstack. In fact, before Jamstack was coined, because the gens Jamstack term comes from I think, later in 2015, I believe. So the first agency job, I had built a few sites with middleman, they were originally a PHP shop, and about the time I joined, were transitioning into becoming a Rails shop. And so Ruby was the bread and butter programming language. And there were a few clients that would come on, who didn't want to pay for a CMS or just like they needed something real quick, and it could be static and totally fine. And so we, we were building middleman sites, but deploying, deploying them to like a digital ocean or equivalent, it's still running on a web server still serving up these pages in real time, even though they're just HTML files city like kind of silly, but But there weren't great solid patterns at that time. And about that time, 2013 or so is also when I started building custom content management systems. I built it, I evolved, and I iterated on it. And I think I was looking at this recently, I believe there were four major, different versions that I built over the series, or course of about three or four years in there. And so I'll come back to that. But as I was, so set, this first agency working on middleman, I built a few middleman sites is when I switched to freelancing. And then at this at the last Agency, also, a few middleman sites like middleman kept kept popping up when I was when I was freelancing there. Actually, that's when I built the fourth and final version of that CMS. And at that time, this is probably I think we're talking about 2016, maybe 20. Yeah, I think that seems right 2016. And so the Jamstack term exists, the term headless CMS exists, but I had no idea that these things were things that people were doing. But I had this need, where I had a client who wanted a mobile native application, and a, also a website. And it seemed like a lot of the content was going to overlap. And I was like, Well, I'm building this next version of a CMS, what should it look like? Maybe it should be able to serve both of these. And so I was like, Oh, brilliant, decoupled architecture like this is this is gonna be great. And so that that last CMS I built was API driven. And, and I believe, I believe the website was a middleman site, it, it may have been some other framework, but it was like this Jamstack pattern, but again, still deployed, still using a web server to serve every request. So like missing that, that final piece that that Netlify gives us in the CDN in that instant cache invalidation. So fast forward to this last agency, and we're also a rail shop Sean C. Davis 8:40 and built a few middleman sites. But what happened was, why I think that the 2017, I believe, the the CTO, late 2017, early 2018, our CTO gets wind of the Jamstack. And so this is pre Jamstack. Conference, still really small kind of tight knit community. And we're like, and everything just kind of aligned because we won this work. For a company where it was going to be building them a new marketing website, it was gonna be a fairly big site. But this company also had a product and an internal product team. And that team had already switched to building that product with React. And so and we had heard a little bit about Jamstack. We heard about Gatsby and we're like, Oh, perfect, perfect time. Gatsby is the cool kid in town. Like we can jump all in on the Jamstack we think we can reduce development costs over time. You know, all the all the classic Jamstack benefits like we can get those and so we took a leap. We jumped all in and so that was like that was the real introduction to Jamstack and I find it I find it kind of funny looking back on it now because I spent all those years with Jamstack like patterns and using tool and middleman was part of all of those and then we're like, oh Jamstack, but also switched to JavaScript based frameworks at the same time, which I think a lot of folks went through that pattern. But I don't know if funny to reflect on. Bryan Robinson 10:11 Yeah, definitely. And like that that kind of journey is really interesting. Like in that agency world, the fact that, like you were having defined these patterns on your own, and then this community kind of sprang up next to what you were doing, and then look like we can do those things, maybe even slightly better than than kind of where we are now that we see kind of this broader scope, and there are products out there. That's really, really interesting. And it kind of mirrors on my own journey. I was at an agency when I discovered all this as well and never really implemented at the agency that we had a customer we had a full fledge, like custom content management system that like the agency had built, so never got a big we Sean C. Davis 10:49 did we did too, I don't it was like it was a compelling enough idea to our CTO, that he's like, we're throat, like we're throwing it all out where we're, I, we had a lot of, I mean, you know, there's issues with you, you have to maintain your own software. And it's it's another piece of the stack. And he's like that we were just getting bogged down with this site went down. And there's a bug in this CMS. And I think the crux was, there was one site where we didn't protect the slash admin route, like, should have done that. And we're like, Okay, well, let's, this is a way to never make that mistake. Again. I'm not Bryan Robinson 11:27 gonna speak for you on this. But my advice to anyone listening out there is if you think you should build a content management system, don't just don't do it. Sean C. Davis 11:38 Yes, yes. I don't know if I may have written a post about this at one point, or maybe it was just an idea in my head, but it was gonna be ashes, I should see if I can find it. The idea was, here's how you can build a content management system and my journey and exactly why you shouldn't do it. Like it's, it's, I think the the lesson I have baked in there is, it can be a really powerful experience for learning about content schemas and know how to organize pages and components and like structured data. But it's also just not a good idea to do it. Because there's there are how many dozens or hundreds of companies that are focusing on that problem every single day. Bryan Robinson 12:20 And let's be fair to our past selves, right, like in 2012 2013 weren't as many companies do, and they weren't as fully featured as they are today. I think it's kind of the same thing. A lot of people have probably created their own, like, custom static site generator in the past, like, Oh, I just made a couple include stuff like that. Let's just, oh, but we have them now. From from the middleman and Jekyll times all the way through to all the fancy ones today. Let's fast forward to now. How are you using Jamstack philosophies professionally? And personally? And obviously, you're at stack bet. So probably quite a bit professionally nowadays. Sean C. Davis 12:54 Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So Stackbit is, I mean, if the Netlify is the Jamstack tool, but also when you think stack bit like stack bit is, exists, because the Jamstack exists. And it's, I know, the, the Jamstack pattern was really powerful and felt like a great entry point for newer developers. But it, it turned out that it was it was kind of difficult, because it's like you could get started really, really kind of simple to get started. Really difficult to go to the next level, which requires stitching together all of these decoupled services. And so stack bit pops up originally three years ago, as a solution to basically say, well, your start, here's the starting point. And it's Netlify and Jekyll and some markdown files or you know, in some styles, something like that, and it has evolved and now as a full fledge visual editor, what's, what's interesting is, we're in a transition where we're just about to release a new version, or the beta version of a new version. And it's still largely following that pattern. It's a really powerful visual editing experience. But the the Jamstack I feel like Jamstack is kind of in this identity crisis sort of mode or, or maybe not like figuring out where they where they fit. You know, what Jamstack actually means and knowing that the web is going to continue to evolve. And so if you, depending when, when this episode gets released, it's like what we, if we look before this release, and what happens after it right now you go to the website, so pre pre release, and like Jamstack is plastered all over it real big, top of the homepage. And I I'm seeing that this, this language is going to shift a little bit and so we're still very much Jamstack tool. Websites are going to get deployed. They're going to be built with next they're going to be static by default. They're going to be deployed To Netlify using Marco. So it's like still, it's still very much Jamstack pattern. But I think how we, how we talk about that might change a little bit. That's, that's professionally and personally, I mentioned, the, the project I'm spending most of time on now is my personal site, that site is built with eleventy. and deploy to Netlify. And using Mark, just local markdown for content. I, I've been thinking a lot about like, well, what's the future of this? For me, if I really want to make this a hub, and I want to make it a content engine? And I'm thinking well, okay, well, eventually, I'm going to have to go to like a next or something like that. But honestly, I every change that I make, I say, Well, okay, well, can I get this done with eleventy? And I consistently finding that the answer is yes, like it has, there's probably a limit to this some point in my future. But right now, I'm in love with, but eleventy is giving me and so I've kind of have this classic Jamstack pattern happening on the side and loving that Bryan Robinson 16:08 perfectly. And then I mean, I can go on and on about love. And it is it is kind of where I'm at in the last of two and Zach Leatherman, the creator of 11. D, recently just even showed like gated content with 11, D serverless. And so like the, the line is blurring about what 11 D can and can't do, it used to be pretty solid, like there was a pretty solid point where like 11 D didn't serve you anymore. Little little iffy. Now, Sean C. Davis 16:30 I think that the big question for me was, oh, there were two. So one is that I'm I built my own kind of component system using nunchucks shortcodes in and so like, you have this smart transformers that make it nice and easy to work with. But it's I mean, it's still a little clunky, I would love to be able to use something like reactors felt and then hydrate them on the fly as needed. And fortunately, we have been homes and slinky, working on that exact problem. So that's really exciting to follow that. And then the second question I had, and second hurdle I thought I was going to run into was authentication, I don't need it now. But my plan is to start to build out some courses, and some of them will be free, and you don't have to track them. And other ones, you know, I feel like well down the road, I'm going to want people to people are gonna want to sign in, they're gonna want to track their progress, maybe some of them are paid. And just this last week, a video came out where Zach was going through the process of showing authentication with 11. D. And now I'm like I, I mean, I feel like the wall I'm going to hit now has less to do with features, and is probably going to have more to do with how many files can we read from the file system? And but I also think that it's getting smarter in terms of incremental builds. And so maybe I don't hit that. Well, I don't know. I'm gonna keep pushing it. We'll see what happens. Bryan Robinson 17:58 Yeah, that wall becomes smaller and further and smaller and further. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right. So we've talked about a few technologies. We've talked about a few methodologies. But what would you say currently? Is your jam in the Jamstack? What's your favorite service? Maybe its stack, but are your favorite framework or philosophy? What what makes you love working in the Jamstack? Sean C. Davis 18:19 Yeah, talk philosophically for a minute, I suppose. Yeah. So what I really loved about the Jamstack, especially in the early days of me discovering it, I'm thinking pre NextJs. JS blowing up. So like 2019. And before? Is that it? To me, it was it's, well, it's still very much this way like you. It's a methodology. It's not a prescription say this all the time. And there's something really powerful in that in that if here's a pattern that we think is a really strong way to build websites that it's it improves the developer experience, and delivers great experience for end users. But you can use whatever tool you think is best for your particular project. And I what I've realized is as the web continues to evolve, is that the there were more kind of guardrails on what Jamstack is than I originally thought, like there, there are more opinions baked in than I originally was, was seeing. However, it's still within within those guardrails and within that pattern, very open and, and not not prescriptive in terms of tooling. And I think what that has led to that even though the community is led by a product in in Netlify, that it's very open in talking about what tools you can use in the space. It's really everyone's really respectful in that space and empowering and so just like the My Favorite I'd love to philosophy itself, the community that came out of that philosophy. It's is like a really, really great thing to be involved in. But I think in terms of tooling, yeah, I can't. I mean, I love stack. But that's why it's why I'm at stack, but I think it's a, it's a great, I do think it's a great entry point into the Jamstack. space. And it it's, it's a such a unique tool that it can serve. The personal blogger, especially someone who isn't super technically savvy, wants to learn a little development. But it can also serve a serve enterprises that have hundreds 1000s of pages, but are storing those in Contentful, or Sanity, some other headless CMS. But really, I keep coming back to eleventy. Especially, there was some news in the last couple of weeks where Rich Harris, the creator of spelt joined, we joined Vercel. Right, so so it's he gets to work on it full time. It's still community driven, but it still also kind of feels a little bit like funding from Vercel. And with that, I, I don't Okay, I don't know if this is entirely accurate. But it's, I think of the group of static site generators or front end frameworks, popular front end frameworks today. The vast majority of them are funded by or have some ulterior motive for where they're there. The people are working for some particular company. And so even though they're open source, they're, I mean, I don't I'm not saying that they've done their communities to services in any way. But eleventy what I love about eleventy is that it is it for now. I mean, today, it's all about the community it is it is very much driven by the community. And it is. And I just I love the way that Zach leads that project. It's, it's really exciting. And similar to what I said about a stack bit and what we just mentioned about eleventy, it's, it's great, because you can get started and know if you know HTML, like you can, you're good, you can build a website, and you can just you can fly. And then you can you can piece together things a little bit at a time, like learn a little bit of nunchucks. Or eventually if we have if when slinky gets to version one, and maybe it's like maybe you just dip your toes into React and, and, but that it also seems like it's going to it's scaling well for a handful of folks. And so it's not like you learn it as an entry level tool. I think that's that's where it was for a while, like a great entry level tool. And then our I don't want to build a serious site. So I'm going to go get a serious framework. It's starting to become a serious framework, and, but without necessarily raising the barrier to entry. And I think that's, that's really cool. So that's, yeah, I just, I feel like I'm just gonna keep talking about stack bid and 11. D all day. Bryan Robinson 23:07 Yeah, no, that doesn't that that's a great combo. Anyway. Um, I also think it's entering you said, like, you know, rich, rich chains go into Vercel. And, I mean, Zack Letterman's at Netlify. But he's building sites for Netlify. And so I think the interesting thing that's happened there is that he's learned what a company the size of Netlify needs out of some of what it's doing. And that's what's been kind of powering is not that Netlify has been prescribing what he needs. But Zack as a developer using 11. D to build sites for an enterprise level company now knows more about what what 11 D needs for that area. I think that's an interesting bit of information that he's kind of feeding back into the the 11 D framework. That's Sean C. Davis 23:51 a great point. Absolutely. Bryan Robinson 23:53 All right, so let's shift gears a little bit. Let's go away from technology and let's let's find out what is your actual jam right now? What's your favorite song or musician? Or what are you listening to day in day out? Sean C. Davis 24:04 Alright, so I had I had to look this up because I'm I am all over the board in terms of music and I haven't hadn't been listening to as much recently as I have in the past it you know, excluding like, all the all the Disney soundtracks that are on all the time, kids. Okay, so just to tell you how weird my, my taste in music is. I was like, alright, well, what are what are a few of the what are a few of the albums that have been on in the last week or two? Okay, so I've had gone all the way back to the Beatles revolver. I love that one. Okay, then what I'm almost like chronologically What have I done? I put on I put on Jay Z's Black Album. I had. I forget what it's called is Sturgill. Simpson. He released a couple blue grass albums, I think I think they're called cutting grass. Maybe not. Do you know? I do not know. Okay. Blue Grass. And then what did I have? I've had the newer Lord and Taylor Swift albums on as well. So I'm like, all over all over the place all over the Bryan Robinson 25:18 place. Yeah. That's awesome. That's I mean, it's variety is the spice of life, right? Sure. Yes. Yes. I love that. Now, it's kind of open forum, right? Is there anything that you that you are doing right now you stack that whomever that you want to promote and get out into the Jamstack. Community. Sean C. Davis 25:34 I mentioned a little bit earlier, this this idea of the the Jamstack identity crisis. And I try to talk about this without sounding disparaging or critical, because I actually think it's a good thing. And I think there's a lot to come in come from being from the community being introspective and figuring out who we are. And so I had, I've had lots of conversations around this topic throughout the year. And in, in doing so what a few of us realized is that the, it? You know, I think we all kind of have a little bit of different opinion of like, well, where's the line? What exactly does Jamstack mean, but maybe it doesn't, maybe it doesn't totally matter. But it's still, like, like we talked about earlier, like, there's still a there's still that the the guardrail is in a sense, like, there, there is an established pattern, in a way to build websites, the web is going to continue to evolve, and it won't necessarily be the cool thing on the cool kid on the block forever. But that, that that community can still exist. So what what a few of us have done is we said, Okay, well, what if we step outside of that? And to say, What if we created a space where folks could talk about all sorts of different patterns and ways to build websites, and Jamstack and all of the tools and variations within within that community is part of that discussion, but it's not the only part of that discussion. So there's also folks who are building rail sites and are choosing rails for a good reason or choosing full stack WordPress for for a good reason. I'm sure there's a good reason in there somewhere. Maybe. And so it's it's goofy, and it's brand new, but it's called good websites club. And it's at you can visit the bare bones website. It's good websites dot club. And so we're there's, it's just a tiny discord community with a little bit of chatter now, but there are there are some grand visions for it. There's someone who's talking about conference and 20, to 23, maybe some, maybe some various meetups throughout there. Personally, I am starting a show that I'm calling the the good websites show, and I don't know exactly what it's gonna be, it's gonna, it'll evolve. But it's, it's gonna start as a live just like a live interview show. And in kind of, we'll talk about, yeah, grab various folks from around different communities and talk about problems they have solved on the web, all kind of in a way to help inform developers or even marketers, content editors just have different different patterns, different ideas that are out there, and kind of kind of help them hone in on what exactly they are. They're going after, and I think we'll see, my prediction is we're gonna see it largely be, there's, there's gonna be this huge fear to draw a Venn diagram, like a lot of overlap with Jamstack in the beginning, and maybe it evolves, I don't really know. But that's, I'm kind of excited to see where that goes, while also being really heavily invested in Jamstack. And seeing how that evolves, because this, this recent announcement of Netlify got got their next series of funding, and they're gonna pump $10 million investing in the Jamstack. And that is really exciting. I cannot wait to see what that means for the community. So that's, I'm working on Yeah, like, websites club, but but, but also really excited for the Jamstack at same time, Bryan Robinson 29:25 absolutely cool. I'm now a member of the discord as of two months ago. So I'm really excited to see that everyone else listening should go go sign up as well. And then keep an eye out for Shawn doing good websites show in the future as well. So Shawn, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And we look forward to seeing more amazing stuff you in the future. Sean C. Davis 29:46 Alright, thanks for having me, Bryan. Bryan Robinson 29:48 Thanks again to our guest and thanks to everyone out there listening to each new episode. If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review rating star heart favorite whatever it is in your podcast app of choice. Until next time, keep doing amazing things on the web. And remember, keep things jammy Intro/outtro music by bensound.com Support That's my JAMstack by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/thats-my-jamstack

Today on the Fit is Freedom Podcast, I'm going to walk you through how you can figure out exactly what you need to do to get fit.Have you ever Googled “how to get fit”? Well, I have, and the results can be underwhelming. You'll find all kinds of cookie-cutter answers like “exercise an hour a day”, “count all of your calories”, and “lose weight”. This advice doesn't really do much for us (other than possibly make us feel defeated or overwhelmed).You see, everyone is different so getting fit looks differently to each person. We all have different paths, backgrounds, needs, and wants. So, the first thing I do to figure out what needs to be done for someone to get fit is ask them a series of questions including...What's bothering you? What's working right now? What in your lifestyle isn't working?Who around you is empowering you? What do you want in your life?What makes you excited? There's usually this one thing that starts making everything else fall into place. It tips over the domino of your fitness life, and by diving into the questions above, you will be able to find what you need to do to better your life by bettering your fitness.Trust me, you won't want to miss this episode if you're trying to figure out how to get fit!

Did you google this song in 2021 too?? (photo credit Getty Images) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As 2021 comes to an end, Chelsea and Judah reflect on the year by discussing the top trending searches of the year. They answer the questions you Googled, from “How to be mindful” to “How to be happy alone.” All that and more on this week's In Good Faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starting off on a somber note here for episode 32. The Scoop (1:53) features America saying goodbye to a one-of-a-kind fast food institution, when each state officially gets burned out by the holidays, a novelty seasonal food item that doesn't completely suck, bougie hot chocolate, a cream cheese cyberattack, and the most Googled food recipes of 2021. Last, PTE reveals his love for Shake Shack while eating multiple cheeseburgers in one day meanwhile Ashley mistakenly makes a family-sized chicken recipe for herself and the Sleepy Girl's Supper Club takes over a Peruvian restaurant before returning to Tipitina's for an Alanis Morissette cover artist in their best and worst food moments of the week (43:19).

12 - 10 - 21 TODD VS KELLY- TOP GOOGLED SONG by Maine's Coast 93.1

Birthday Shoutouts, GRACE V NATH: The Top Most Googled Things For 2021, Caller Of The Week (COW), Alphabucks, How good are the people of Hobart? Show Rating. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Day 2 of the LEO Santa Toy Drive, here's Paige with a check in Headlines with somebody in NYC setting a huge Christmas tree in front of FOX News on fire Sports with the top Googled athletes and teams of 2021 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy Dick checks in, we talk to a Va Tech student punished for booing, Alec Baldwin's angry again, People's Choice Awards, Josh Jacobs & DMX love children, RSN's door policy, and Jim Fouts wins in court & looks amazing.The victims of the Oxford High attack are being laid to rest.Alec Baldwin got angry with a reporter... at Woody Allen's house. Nice being aware of the optics of where you're seen, Alec.The door policy at the Red Shovel Network is baffling.Life is NOT fair at this retailer.Sean Lohr is causing an absolute UPROAR at Drew's alma mater, Virginia Tech. He has been punished for booing at a women's soccer match. We get the story from the 'Shirtless Boy' himself. Go Hokies!Tom Mazawey points out one of the greatest TV moments of all time... in his opinion.The most Googled items of 2021 include a lot of crypto, meme stocks and "get rich quick" ideas.They are rebuilding the Hudson's Building.... still. It might actually be completed someday.The mere mention of Service Merchandise earlier in the week triggered tons of response from our listeners.Schools are cracking down on threats.The People's Choice Awards apparently happened last night. People love Kenan Thompson.Astronaut Michael Strahan is bonding with his space "crew".MacGruber is back!Scott Peterson has been re-sentenced to life in prison.Billy Zane IS NOT in The Mummy. BranDon's mind is blown.Dan Dickerson has joined the Cameo family.We reconnect with Andy Dick after a long hiatus. He's engaged to Elisa Jordana again and John Travolta might have hit on him. Buy a Cameo from him and you won't be disappointed.The Las Vegas Raiders running back, Josh Jacobs, is doing his best Antonio Cromartie impression. Turns out DMX is the ideal father.Social media followers don't really translate to sales.Chris Cuomo Updates: He has lost his book deal. He is going to war with CNN, but Matt Lauer has his back.In the Courtroom: The Kim Potter trial is underway. Everybody seems to be suing Daunte Wright. The Jizzlaine Maxwell trial features sexy pics. Jussie Smollett was a jerk on the stand. He is definitely guilty of being an a-hole.Jim Fouts with a major court victory and looks great doing so.We're KILLING it in the Cayman Islands.Social media is dumb but we're on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Drew and Mike Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels and BranDon).

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Today we learnt about how Jono got away with free parking at the airport for YEARS. Cheeky! We also learnt what the top things New Zealander's Googled this year. Finally, we had Wow Wednesday return and spoke to a lady who birthed and resuscitated a baby at home! Enjoy the show.

You've been thinking about starting a podcast for a while, right? Maybe you've picked out a topic, Googled a few possible names, and have even purchased a microphone. But what are the 3 most important questions to ask before you hit publish on your podcast?That's what we're covering in today's episode! We're going over some of the big mindset shifts you need to make in order to not only create a podcast but have one that you're excited to come back to each week...and your audience loves too!This episode is great for anyone that's been stagnant with their current podcast and needs an energizing boost to get into the next 12 months and for the person who's been toeing the line trying to decide, "Is now is the right time to start a podcast?" (By the way, it is a great time to start a podcast!)Learn more about Proffitt Podcasting today! https://krystalproffitt.com/courseBuzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEFree Email Masterclass Join my mentor, Amy Porterfield, as she shares 7 simple solutions to attract new email subs.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

You started running in the morning and feel like a champion! But suddenly your side starts aching awfully. It's not because you're out of shape, as even professional runners might experience it. So why does it happen? Let me explain these 12 tricky facts about human body for you. Including why you can't hold your nose and hum at the same time. Try to do it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by a football hall of fame speech given by Jerome Bettis, this episode is all about the immense value of your name and reputation. Would you do business with you if you Googled your name and saw the reviews?

Can plastic surgery… remove scars? Remove scratch marks? Be reversed? Will plastic surgery… become more affordable? Go out of style? Last forever? We let Google autofill some common plastic surgery questions to see what information people are looking for. You might be surprised at what people are curious about. Dr. Martin and Amy answer the most Googled questions about plastic surgery. Comments, questions, clarifications? Leave a voicemail (303) 630-9038 or email Amy@JasonMartinMD.com. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qI_FvH2SRMA Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! Follow Beauty and the Surgeon: YouTube: Jason Martin MD > Beauty and the Surgeon Podcast Playlist Instagram: @beautyandthesurgeonpodcast Facebook: facebook.com/beautyandthesurgeonpodcast Website: beautyandthesurgeonpodcast.com Sponsored by: Let's Get Checked (trylgc.com/beauty code: beauty20)

Jana talks to Amy Compton, who is “Addicted to Marriage” and is currently on her 5th marriage! Jana learns a surprising lesson about relationships from someone who's walked down the aisle many times.  We hear about Jana's experience dating after she knows she's been “Googled”. And, Jana ever get married again?? We find out her answer! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

In this episode, Beans puts the important questions to Gaz and Andy. We look at the top 100 Googled questions so far this year and see if these 2 guys can do a better job than the search engine in dishing out the answers. We've not gone for the mundane, we've picked the stranger questions that have been asked. Can dogs eat bananas? Are unicorns real? Are jellyfish immortal? You'll find all the answers here so go grab yourself a cold one, kick back and enjoy! The opening music is "London Bayou" by Oscar Albis Rodriguez and the closing music is "BDS" by Lewis Pickford. This episode is also available on YouTube https://youtu.be/ZhPIgAh9NbQ tallboyradio.com

Ben reveals the last 10 things he's Googled. Homer joins to show to yell about Odell Beckham Jr. with Greg Scalzo. 1 or 0.

In this weeks episode of Master My Garden podcast John answers a listener question from a novice gardener the question is.I have a new  raised block planter on two sides of my patio. Can you give me some direction as to where to start. I have Googled this but it hasn't helped and I am very intimidated by the planter and don't know where to start. Its a great question and John answers it in depth in this weeks podcast episode .With episode 100 of Master My Garden podcast coming up I want to celebrate with you the listeners of the podcast. With that in mind I am looking for listers to tell me their gardening story and how the podcast is helping you in your garden.  Please drop me an email to info@mastermygarden.com or message me through my website https://mastermygarden.com/contact/Look forward to hearing from you to make episode 100 a great one. Did you know you can now support the podcast on "Buy me a coffee"  you can support the podcast on a one off or monthly member basis here all support greatly appreciated https://www.buymeacoffee.com/MastermygardenThere will be a blog post on this episode very soon on my website. This blog and previous blogs along with all podcast episodes are be available on my Website :https://mastermygarden.com/If there is any topic you would like covered in future episodes please let me know. Please like and follow Master My Garden on the following channels  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mastermygarden/Instagram @Mastermygarden https://www.instagram.com/mastermygarden/Twitter:https://twitter.com/tweetsbyMMGor email info@mastermygarden.comUntil the next time Happy GardeningJohn      

We've all wondered why there's so much air in a bag of chips, but what about your soda bottle? Did you ever notice soda bottles are never filled to the top? There's a simple reason for so many details on common objects we all missed. Here are everyday items with a hidden purpose or important detail we all missed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ONLY way way you should pick your cosmetics is to check the most Googled products of the year so far (not really)!Have you used any of these products this year?Let us know @thedoublecleansepodcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, it's the thrilling finale of this chapter of Ancient Kisstory, and our excavation of The Bachelor US Season 1! What high-concept fantasy dates did the producers select for the apex of the season? Who did Alex pick to spend the rest of his life with - and how much of the rest of his life did he spend with her? What became of the happy couple, and what of the scorned cast-off? Why am I pretending nobody has ever Googled any of this information before?

SUMMARY:  There is nothing I love more than sharing the success stories of people who are using ERP to manage their OCD and intrusive thoughts.  In this week's podcast, I interview Taylor Stadtlander about her OCD recovery and how she used ERP School to help her manage her intrusive thoughts, compulsive behaviors.  Taylor is incredibly inspiring and I am so thrilled to hear her amazing ERP Success story. In This Episode: Taylor shares how she learned she had OCD  Taylor shares how she created her own ERP recovery plan and the challenges and successes of her plan  Taylor shares how she used ERP School to help her put her ERP recovery plan together and how she now uses her skills in her own private practice. Links To Things I Talk About: Taylor's Private Practice: https://www.embracinguncertaintytherapy.com/ Taylor's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/acupofmindfultea/ ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION Kimberley: Welcome. I am so excited to have here with me Taylor Stadtlander. Taylor: Yes. Thanks. I'm so excited to be here. Kimberley: Oh, thank you for being here. I am so excited about this interview. You're someone I have watched on social media, and it's really cool because out of there, I realized you were someone who had been through CBT School and I just love hearing the story of how you things get to me. I love that story. So, thank you for being on the show. Taylor: Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Kimberley: Tell me a little bit about you and your mental health and mental wellness journey, as much as you want to share. Tell us about that. Taylor: I'll start with, I am an OCD therapist right now. And I start by saying that because, honestly, if you were to tell me when I was in high school, that I would have become an OCD therapist, I would have laughed at you because I, at that time, was really when my OCD started in high school. Of course, now, knowing what OCD is, I can look back and I can see definitely symptoms back as young as eight or nine years old. But when I was in high school, it was really when I had my sophomore year, pretty intense onset of compulsions. And then, of course, the intrusive thoughts, and it really was all-consuming. But the interesting part, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, is it was something I kept very hidden, or I at least tried to. So, a lot of the earliest compulsions I had were checking compulsions. So, it was these intense, long rituals before I would go to bed, checking that the door is locked, the stove was off, all safety things. I felt this immense amount of responsibility. And I remember thinking like, where did this come from? One day I was just so concerned with safety and all these different things. But no one would have known other than, of course, my family, who I lived with, and my sister, who I shared a room with, who of course saw me getting up multiple times at night to recheck things. But from the outside, it looked like I had everything together. I was the A student, honors classes, volleyball captain, lacrosse captain, and just kept that façade of that picture-perfect high schooler. I did end up going to a therapist and she wasn't an OCD specialist, but I have to say I got very lucky because I actually have some of the worksheets that she used with me back when I was 15. And it is in a sense ERP. So, I was very lucky in that sense that even though I wasn't seeing a specialist, because I don't think any of us knew what was going on, to even see an OCD specialist, I did get to-- and it helped. And that's where I was like, “Okay, you know what, I'm going to go to college and become at least major in Social Work.” So, I went to college, majored in Social Work, got my Master's in Social Work, and my OCD pretty much went away and I thought I was cured or whatever that means. And I thought that, “Okay, that was a chapter of my life. And now for whatever reason, I had to go through that. Now I'll become a therapist and help other people.” I say that because I had no idea what was coming. My first year out of grad school, I began working and I had the most intense relapse of OCD ever. It came back stronger than ever this time. We call it “pure O.” So like mainly intrusive thoughts. And I had no idea what ERP was. It's sad because I went through grad school for Social Work and we never talked about that. I remember this one day, and this is circling back to even how I found you, I had stayed home from work because I was just for like a mental health day, and I didn't want to be on my phone because going on social media was triggering, watching TV was triggering, all these different things. But I was like, you know what, I'm sitting at home. I might as well turn on the TV. So, I turn on the TV, and an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians is on. I am a fan of that show, so shout out to them. And I remember watching and I was listening half not. I think I was trying to take a nap. And one of the family members had this OCD specialist on the show. And I remember pausing the TV because they had the name of the OCD specialist on the TV. And I wrote it down and it was Sheba from The Center of Anxiety and OCD. So I was like, “Okay, let me Google that.” That was the first time I've ever even heard of an OCD specialist. So, I stopped watching the show, went on my phone, Googled her name and her Instagram came up and I just started scrolling. It was like my world, my eyes were just open and I was like, “Oh my gosh, other people have OCD, and there's a treatment, ERP.” Then I just kept scrolling. And then funny enough, I came across your page, Kimberley. And through that, that's where I discovered CBT School. Anyway, long story short, at that time, I wasn't able to afford an OCD specialist. So, I was seeing a therapist, a different therapist from high school because now by this time I was married, on my own insurance, trying to navigate that. In the back of my head, I knew that I needed to see an OCD specialist. I just, again, couldn't afford it. So, I had a conversation with my husband. I'm like, “Look, I'm going to pay for this, the CBTS course.” And I said, “I know it seems like a lot of money, but it's really not. If I was going to see an OCD specialist, this is probably what one session would cost.” And that's how I learned about ERP. That's your course. It's how I learned about ERP. So, it honestly traces back to Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I love telling that story because it's so weird. And honestly, that changed my life because learning ERP, it finally clicked that, okay. Because I was just applying CBT techniques. Like, think of a red stop sign when you have an intrusive thought, thoughts popping, and things like that. And as we know, that was making it so much worse. So, I just dove into your course and taught myself through your course what ERP is, which then led me to seeing that at work, and then wanting to specialize in ERP, and now working with clients who have OCD. So it's really been an amazing journey, to say the least. Kimberley: I'm nearly in tears hearing this story. Oh my goodness, how funny, your story has gone from reality TV to here, and that's so cool. That just blows me away. Taylor: Well, and it really goes to show. I know that there can be negative sides, like technology and Instagram, but for me, most of, if not all of my education, initially about OCD and ERP was from Instagram accounts, like yours or Sheba's. And it was like, again, I knew that, okay, this can't replace therapy, but it was such a good in-between for me, especially being in the place where I was, where I was trying to navigate. Because it can feel like you're stuck when you either can't find an OCD specialist or you can't afford it. And I know what that feels like. So, to have that in between, not as a replacement, but just as a bridging point was so helpful for me. Kimberley: Wow. And for the listeners, I have not heard that story. This is new to me. So this is so cool. So, actually really, I'm so curious. So, when you took ERP PA school, were you like, “She's crazy, I'm not doing that”? Or what was your first take on that? Taylor: I think I was at the point where I was so determined to find relief, I was willing to do anything. And I had researched about ERP before I took your course. I wasn't like, “Oh, I'm just going to trust this randomly.” Kimberley: Random lady. Taylor: Right. So, I did do my own research obviously. And again, I'm in the field and I have a degree in Social Work. It's just so interesting to me that that was not discussed, and I think that's lacking in a lot of programs. So, once I researched it myself, I was like, “Okay, this is the evidence-based treatment. This is the gold standard. It looks like I got to do this.” I just remember I would come home. I was working at the time at a partial hospital program and I would come home from work. And that would be my routine. I would get my little notebook out, I'd pull my laptop out, and I treated it as if I was-- again, I know it doesn't replace therapy, but I treat it as if I was in an intensive program. I would spend an hour or so going through your videos and then printing out the worksheets. And that's just what I did. And I just started to do it. I had had before that a brief, very minimal understanding of exposures. And I think I was trying to do them on my own. But through your course, I was able to understand the response prevention piece. I was just exposing myself to all these things and then leading myself in a tailspin. But yeah, I see this again, even in my own clients now that there's just I think a certain point that you reach, that yes, it's scary to take this step, to start ERP, but because we're so determined to not feel the way we're feeling, it makes it so worth it. Kimberley: Wow. Oh my goodness, I'm seriously close to tears listening to your story. So, thank you for sharing that with me. I mean, wow, what an honor that I get to be a part of your journey, but how cool that you were the journey. You deal with these works. So, what was that like? Okay, so you said you would come home from work and you would sit down and you would go through it. Tell us a little bit about how you set your own. Taylor: I think I mentioned this, I was still seeing a therapist. What was funny is, I would come to my sessions and be teaching her about ERP, because in a way I was becoming this mini expert. And as I think a lot of our clients do, because it is such a unique treatment, you do have to become an expert. So, yeah. I mean, I remember using that worksheet where, okay, identify the what-if fear then list out the compulsions. I remember at the time I was like, “All right, I need to print out 10 of these because I have so many themes right now.” I remember doing that. And then, yeah, I would just pick away-- I would write them and then go through the whole process really as if I was going through ERP treatment. That's what I was doing. Like the same process I do now with my clients is just what I did. And I'm so lucky and blessed to have a background in mental health to have that. And even the resources that I could have had self-taught myself ERP because I know that that's not everyone's situation. And then what was really helpful, and I think this is really important to mention, is my husband. And I think a lot of people can relate to this. We all have our one person who we seek reassurance from. So, when I was still living at home, that person was my mom. Once I got married, it became my husband. And so, he had to learn a lot about OCD treatment and ERP and not providing reassurance. So, the poor thing, I would have him sit down and watch your video, and he would. And he is amazing and just the best support system. But that was really helpful because again, even if you are in therapy and doing this as a supplement to therapy, to be able to have those resources to watch again and again, once you buy the course, you have it. And I still reference it to this day if I am for myself or even if I'm working with something with a client. So, that piece was huge because then I could say, “Hey, look this is the science behind what I'm doing. This is why you can't give me reassurance and things like that.” Kimberley: Right. This is so cool, and it's so cool that he was able to watch it and wasn't intimidated by the whole process. I mean, he probably was, but he still went through with that, which was so cool. Taylor: 100%. Yes. This was about two years ago almost to the date actually. And because now I can look back on it, I think I do lose the anxiety that I had with starting it. And I'm sure him wondering, “What the heck are you doing?” But I think that's so important to have your partner or just your support system understand ERP because it can be very confusing to the outside. If you're doing exposures. What was very upsetting and hard for me that I really had to come to accept is, a lot of my harm obsessions were unfortunately targeted around him. So, I'd be writing these scripts and I would feel this guilt, this horrible amount of guilt and shame, similar to what I felt back in high school when I was trying to hide my compulsions. Here I have this amazing supportive husband and I'm writing these scripts. So, I would want to try and explain that. And him understanding it, I think made the whole process so much easier, for sure. Kimberley: Yeah. And those scripts can be hard, right? I even remember-- Taylor: I think that's the hardest part for me. Kimberley: Yeah. I even remember recording that and looking into the camera and saying, “You need to write a story about this.” And I do these with my patients all the time, but thinking like, “Why would anyone trust me?” That's a hard thing to do when you haven't-- so that's really amazing that you did that. The good news, and I'll tell you this, you're the first person to know this, is we just renewed the whole imaginable script module. They're three times as long now. Taylor: Oh, amazing. Kimberley: Yeah. So, you're the first to know. By the time they start, everyone will know, but yeah, we tripled the length of it because people had so many questions about that process. Taylor: In fact, I had a session yesterday with one of my amazing clients and she's fairly new in the treatment and we were introducing the idea of scripts. And you're absolutely right. When you're describing it, you're like, “What am I saying? This sounds horrible.” I was like, “All right, we are going to pretty much write out your worst fear coming true in as much detail as possible.” And she was like, “What the heck is going on?” And sometimes I have to take myself back to that starting point, especially with working with clients, because now I'm like, “I have an intrusive thought come up. All right, I know I have to go write a script when I get home.” So for me, it's become second nature. But I think remembering how painful it was the first several times to actually write down those thoughts and then not only write down them but say them out loud and look into them, that-- I was reminded yesterday, I can't lose sight of how painful that is initially, but then how rewarding it is once you realize it works. Kimberley: Yeah. You get so much bang for your buck, don't you, when you use those. This is so cool. You're obviously a rockstar. So exciting. I can't tell you how much this brings me such joy to hear. What would you say to somebody who's starting this process? What was important to you? What got you through? Tell us all your wisdom. Taylor: I think the biggest thing would be to know that you're not alone because I remember that was the biggest thing for me. Before I knew what OCD and ERP were, I thought that I was the only person on the planet experiencing these intrusive thoughts, these horrible, violent images or sexual intrusive thoughts or whatever it was. So, first and foremost, knowing that you're not alone, that there are so many of us who have experienced this, not only experienced the pain of it, but have gone through and are now in recovery. And that you don't have to let fear dictate the choices that you make because that's how I lived my life. I avoided things because of my OCD. So, I wouldn't be triggered. I let fear make the decisions for a lot of my life. And when you do go through ERP treatment, you get to be in control again and you get to live again according to your values. For example, I've always wanted to be a mom and I've always dreamed of having kids. And I remember so many times OCD in so many different ways that I can't even get into, say, “Oh, you could never do that.” Actually, I'm in my first trimester right now, which is so exciting and has been such an incredible journey. That's a completely different topic for another day. I'm handling my OCD attached to that. But I was thinking and reflecting about it the other day of just like, wow, I now get to live life according to my values and not let fear and OCD make the decisions. Even though the treatment seems so scary and weird at first, it is so worth it because it works. And that's why I wanted to become really a specialist in this specific field because I fell in love with the treatment. I fell in love with the fact that it gives people their lives back. And that's so cool to witness. So, you're not alone. You're also not a bad person because of the thoughts that you're having. And I'll briefly share, I'm a Christian and I know that a lot of the thoughts that I've had for a long time, I just thought, okay, I'm a horrible person, or I'm a sinner. And whatever your faith is, whatever spirituality or anything, whatever morals you have, just know that you're not your intrusive thoughts. You are just a person with thoughts and that's it. Kimberley: Yeah. That's so powerful. So, number one, congratulations. I just love when people say, “I have OCD about it, but I did it anyway.” Taylor: I know. Talk about facing your fears, it's like-- Kimberley: Right. And then the second piece where you're really, again, speaking from a place of values, even your religion, I'm sure got attacked during that process. And it's really hard to keep the faith when you're being harassed by these thoughts. So, I just love that. What motivated you to keep going? Besides you said just the deep wish to be better and well, how did you keep getting up? Was there lots of getting up and falling down or did you just get up every day? Taylor: Oh my gosh. In fact, there's times where I still feel like I am picking myself up because-- I'm so happy you brought that up because that was something that I wasn't prepared for, the feelings of relapsing I call it, where you feel like, oh my goodness, my symptoms have gone away, whatever. And then it hits you like a ton of bricks. And I always find that it comes back so strong. And it can be really discouraging at first. And I've even experienced that with the first couple of weeks of this pregnancy of just like, “Wow, I thought we were over this.” Even themes coming back from when I was 15 or 16 and like, “Okay, looks we have to deal with this again.” I'm able to laugh about it now, but in the moment, it's really hard. And so, I think the biggest thing for me that I try to keep myself reminded of in those moments where I do feel like I'm-- because it feels like you're taking a step backwards in a sense sometimes. And I always try to remind myself that so much can change in a matter of a day and that this is temporary. And even the worst moments of my ruminating or obsessing or the nights where I would literally spend hours completing compulsions, they always passed, if that makes sense. It sounds so cliché, but the sun always rose again. I always got another chance. And I would say that I am a naturally driven and motivated person. So I think that definitely did help me. But that's not to say that there weren't times where it's a hopeless feeling when you are living in your own personal hell of intrusive thoughts. The way I remember describing it to the first therapist I went to is that I was, and I don't play tennis by the way, but I was like, I pictured myself in a tennis court with a tennis racket and someone just throwing balls at me. And those are the entries of thoughts. And I walk one away and another one comes back. It was exhausting. But being reminded that-- And also now too, and I wrote this down, I definitely wanted to talk about this, was you have to find the community support and that has been so vital for me. And again, thank you, Instagram, I've been able to connect with so many people who have OCD or a related disorder who I text or DM and are now some of my closest friends. And we hold each other accountable on days where it's like-- because OCD can be really weird sometimes. And it's really nice to have people who understand and have been there. So, that's really helpful for me too on days where it's like, man, it just feels like I can't pick myself up. Kimberley: Yeah. It's so important. In fact, I'll tell you a story. A client of mine, who I've been seeing for a while, could do the therapy without me. And she knows it as well as I do. And we hit a roadblock and it kept coming up. I just feel so alone. And not having support and other people with similar issues, it was a game-changer for her. And I think we're lucky in that there are Facebook groups and Instagram and support groups out there that are so helpful. Taylor: Yes, totally. And that's one of the reasons I actually decided about a year ago to create a mental health Instagram because I knew how much Instagram and using that platform helped me. I literally remember saying, “Even if it helps one person.” And at first, it was really scary sharing some of the things, talking about the more taboo themes and different things like that, and thinking like, oh man, what are my coworkers thinking of me or my family members when I post this. But what's been so rewarding is countless people have reached out to me who either I know and I've either grown up with my whole life or people across the globe really of just saying, “Hey, thank you for letting me know I'm not alone.” And to me, that makes it totally all worth it. So, it's so important to find that connection. Kimberley: Yeah. And is there anything else that you felt was key for you? Something that you want people to know? Taylor: I think that it's so important to-- a huge piece of it too was incorporating act, like acceptance and commitment therapy, which I also believe I learned from one of your podcasts. So, thank you. And that was a huge piece for me too, because again, I think that-- to be very honest, I didn't even say the words “OCD” until two years ago. I knew in my head that I met the criteria in the DSM, but I never-- that label for me was so scary. I don't really know why, looking back, but maybe because it was just so unknown. So a lot of the work that I've had to do personally that's been really helpful is just acceptance of any emotion really, especially learning that acceptance doesn't mean that you have to love something, and it ties into tolerating uncertainty. Tolerating, I was talking about this with a client yesterday. Tolerating is not an endearing word. If someone says, “Oh, I tolerate that person,” that's not a compliment. We were not being asked to love uncertainty or love the fact that we have OCD or whatever we're struggling with, but just learning to sit with it and tolerate it has been an absolute game-changer for me. As much as the exposures and response prevention was so new to me, that whole piece too was a game-changer. Kimberley: Yeah, I agree. I think it's such an important piece, because there's so much grief that comes with having OCD too, and the stigma associated. I've heard so many people say the same thing. They had to work through the diagnosis before they could even consider-- Taylor: And I also had a lot of anger in two ways towards the fact that I had to deal with this. I always thought, and of course, I think a lot of us think this about anything else, I was like, “If only I just “had” anxiety and not OCD, or just had depression, that would be so much easier to deal with,” which I know is ridiculous. But in the moment, it's like, I think whatever we're going through seems so impossible. And then the other piece of the anger was just the misuse of people saying, “Oh, I'm so OCD,” or seeing it displayed on TV or on social media in the wrong way. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, if only you knew what OCD was, you would never say that.” So now, it's been cool because I can turn that frustration more into advocacy and education, but that was a huge hurdle to jump to. Kimberley: Yeah. Well, especially because you're over here tolerating OCD. And then other people are celebrating and it just feels like taking the face. Taylor: Oh my gosh, yes. Kimberley: Yeah. I love all of that. Thank you so much for sharing that story. Number one, it brings me to tears that we get to meet and chat. I think that that is just so beautiful and I'm so impressed with the work that you're doing. So, thank you. Tell me where people can hear more about you or follow you and so forth. Taylor: Sure. So, my Instagram is acupofmindfultea, and there you can also find-- I definitely share my personal story, but just also ERP tips. I'm also very big on holistic findings. So, obviously, medication has been a huge part of my story as well and helpful, but I also love finding natural ways and different ways that have helped my anxiety and just building my toolkit. So, I share a lot about that on there as well. So, yeah, I would love to connect with you guys on social media, for sure. Kimberley: Yeah. I would have to admit, when I saw your pregnancy announcement, I was with my kids and I was like, “Woo-hoo!” And they were like, “What?” And I'm like, “Oh, it's just somebody I've never met, but I'm so excited for her.” Taylor: Isn't that so great? I know, I love it. I feel the same way for other people. Kimberley: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Number one, thank you for coming on the show. I love how that creates itself organically. And number two, thank you for sharing this because I think this will hopefully give some people some hope. We were overwhelmingly encouraged to have people with stories of their recovery. So, I think this is a really wonderful start of that. Taylor: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I've been listening to your podcast for two years now, and it's been such an encouragement for me and such a huge form of education and help. So, this was truly special. So, thank you. Kimberley: Thank you.

People. You need them. You need people to buy your art, people to show your art, people to attend your shows, people to write about your work and let's face it. You need people to support you emotionally along the way. You need other artists around who get you. It's in these friendships that you will find understanding as well as ideas that challenge you to be a better artist. The relationships you nurture can sustain you, but you'll never know to what extent until you start taking them seriously, until you believe with all of your soul that you can't do this on your own. But what do you do if you move to a new place and don't know anyone, or if you're just getting started? Where do you begin? In this episode of The Art Biz, I talk with Laurence de Valmy about how she has used her bonus talent as a writer to make connections in all areas of the art world. It started with the thought that there were people out there who knew more about how to be an artist than she did. She trusted that she could learn from them. Even if you aren't a writer, you'll be inspired by her boldness and creativity. Here's my conversation with Laurence de Valmy. Highlights “This is the place to take the leap.” Laurence reflects on her artist journey. (2:32) Have you ever Googled ‘how to be an artist'? The birth of The Curious Frenchy blog. (5:42) Laurence's publishing schedule is shaped by the artists she meets. (8:14) How to more effectively learn from others while promoting their work. (9:52) What was it like interviewing Henry Matisse's granddaughter? (13:40) Embracing the value of personal relationships with people. (15:30) Opportunities that have come to Laurence as a result of her blog connections. (17:05) How Laurence leverages and promotes blog content on social media. (21:17) The difference that one-on-one relationships can make in your business. (23:29) Tools for organizing your connections and contacts. (25:58) A look at Laurence's typical workday and schedule. (27:57) How to meet people when you move to a new location. (31:32) Simplifying the sharing of content on social media (32:29) Laurence's advice for artists who are intimidated about reaching out to form new connections. (34:08) A look at what's coming up next for Laurence. (36:16) Mentioned Sophie Matisse Dominique Lévy of Lévy-Gorvy Gallery Allan Gorman French Quarter Magazine Femmes d'Art Unik Magazine Laurence de Valmy Laurence on Instagram The Curious Frenchy The Curious Frenchy on Instagram Resources Show notes, images, and listener comments Grow Your List program at Art Biz Success Free e-course: 31 People Who Can Help Sell Your Art Quotes “All I knew was that I didn't know. And so I had to learn a new job and in order to do so, I started to connect with other artists.” — Laurence de Valmy “I quickly realized that's how things happen. It's through the people you know.” — Laurence de Valmy “People work with people that they like.” — Laurence de Valmy “The worst that can happen is that nothing happened. It's as simple as that.” — Laurence de Valmy “If you are prepared, you will know what to say.” — Laurence de Valmy   Guest Bio Laurence de Valmy invites us to reflect on the links between artists through times and the relationship between art and social media today. In her POST paintings, she revisits art history through imagined Instagram feeds of the past. Her recent work explores the place of hashtags in our communication. Laurence is French American and lives in the U.S. She writes about art on her blog The Curious Frenchy and for art publications. First posted: artbizsuccess.com/reaching-out-devalmy-podcast

Shiba Inu is the third-most Googled cryptocurrency this year. Cigarette sales are on the rise. Plus, a look at Biden's Build Back Better plan. Host: Jacob Passy. Producer: Katie Ferguson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 10 ESV

Listen to Brian Clark's podcast https://unemployable.com/podcast/intersectional-positioning/ 20mins inhttps://www.nerdfitness.com/Transcript [00:00:00] Hey folks. It's Swyx so today's clip is the longest one. I'm sorry about that. Basically. It was such a good story from beginning to end and I could not cut any of it out. It covers nerd fitness, which is one of the fitness blogs I've been tracking for many years. Um, I fell off the radar. A while ago, but I still have very high opinion of it.  Um, I have been one of the passive leaders, but I think the message definitely resonates that it finds a niche, which is nerds. And then it tries to do something to serve that niche. And I think the journey of Steve as a creator, as a writer who went through SEO, Uh, just the exploration and understanding how to do contents for living.  And then starting to build a business on top of it, and then exploring how to productize this stuff that he did. Like don't teach me what to do, just do it for me. I think it's a very typical business journey for bootstrappers that is extremely successful. He's essentially one guy, maybe if a team of 20 something, people making millions of dollars a year. And I think. What's great about that is that it also helps people be fit so it's just one of those ideal bootstrap businesses that is just win-win. So my origin story. After college, I was living in San Diego and I was selling construction equipment. I was in sales because I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. Both my parents were in sales, so I just figured get in, get into sales. I've lived by the beach. I worked in sales and I was terrible at it. So, so bad. I had very little experience with construction equipment, renting. I was renting out forklifts and boom lists. Giant downtown projects in San Diego 22 or 23 at the time. And just have no idea what I'm doing and on a particularly miserable. Day at work on my lunch break. I walked into a bookstore and I felt like the sun was shining through the window and spotlighted this book that had just come out. I had no idea who the author was or what it was all about, but I saw the cover and the book is called Tim Ferriss's four hour workweek. So I see this book as like, it was literally the first week it came out. So this was 2007, I think, or somewhere in there. And I picked it up and I read it and. A big part of the book was like, pick something that you're good at and a social group that you're a part of and see where you can find that overlapping, gap. And for myself, I was like, well, I just cracked the code for myself personally, about my health and fitness. And I was spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games. I was like, well, I don't think I could write like the best fitness website, but. I could probably help people that are beginners. And who else has big, is a beginner fitness. That's self-conscious and like, can think of fitness, like a video game nerds do that. It's like, all right. I Googled nerd and fitness, nothing popped up. I was like, huh. All right, let's do that. So I bought nerd fitness.com and then I did nothing with it for like two years. Cause I was so afraid to get started. Eventually quit. The first job started a sec or went to work at a different company. It was while I was at that second company, I got certified as a trainer. I got further education and finally worked up enough. To start writing basic articles about beginners getting started with health and fitness. And that was it, but like, I didn't start it because I saw that nerd culture was going to become popular. Like, I didn't know, Disney was going to acquire star wars and Marvel and like, it was just going to become cool to be a nerd. I was just like, I'm playing 40 hours a week of EverQuest, which was like, even nerdier than world. Like I'm playing all of these video games and I want to talk about nerd stuff. Like let's just stick the two together and see what happens. And fortunately I didn't know any better, which is what I started at before.  Yeah, that's amazing. Because now of course you look like a genius, like just a complete marketing guru who saw how these two things would work together because the stereotype of course, is that nerds don't work out. Did it well, but you were an exception, I guess. So in many ways it seems like you created this. That someone like you would want. And it just happened to also resonate with a lot of  exactly. I, so when I was starting my fitness journey I did what most guys do. I went out and bought like muscle and fitness magazine and I followed like the bodybuilder workout programs. And after like three weeks, I'm like, well, I don't, I look like that guy. It's like, well, because you're not on steroids and you don't eat like that dude. And he's been training for 25 years. So I most stuff that I found. I felt either disconnected from like, I have nothing in common with this guy, or I felt almost like, I want to say ashamed, but rather like most of the fitness marketing is built around like, Hey, you're not. And you're not good enough, but if you buy this thing, then you will be good enough and everything will get better. And I was like, that's [00:05:00] just that's bad shame on you for doing that. And let's try to give people like actually helpful information without the hype and the nonsense. And just like, here's what you need to know. Here are the, all the mistakes that I made. Like let's get rid of all that. Let's do some basic stuff and get you started. And then we can also still talk about Harry Potter and star wars and talking,  right? Yeah. The whole shredded bro aspect of fitness. They're all trying to outmatch show each other. And I think that turns a lot of people off it doesn't work with me at all. So I, for further, I linked to nerd fitness guides all the time, because you've got the humor you've got the pop culture references, which is something I did at Copyblogger early on. I mean, that's literally how I was able to make myself write two long articles. Like it's because I would go, well, how can I use a prince metaphor to explain content? So when you first started, was it was just you, right? You were  writing about the content. It was just me a long time. And interestingly, so I guess I started really working on the blog at night while I was working the day job in 2009. And back at that, then. Which is the same today. Everything I read on the internet was like, you need to write short posts. You need to publish five days a week because nobody has the attention span to read long stuff. So for like six weeks, I think again, I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I was doing. I spent six months writing like 400 word articles. A lot of them were like very topical, but quickly out of date. Cause it was about something that happened that week and after like five months, six months, something like that, I had. I don't know, 20 subscribers. Like I don't even think I had an email list yet. I was just like, people could subscribe the RSS and who's like, oh man, this is cool. 20 people are reading. And then I started stumbling across Bloggers that were writing long form content. And almost overnight, I was like, I'm going to try something different. Like instead of writing these short posts, I'm going to write one long article, but it's going to be like 2000 words. I'm going to cover an entire topic and just see what happens. And like right away, it felt better to me because it was long. I had to keep myself entertained, which is where the pop culture nerdy references came in. I was like, if I'm not enjoying writing this, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it. So like, I have to keep myself. Entertained throughout the writing process. Like if I'm laughing, maniacally, as I'm typing about vegetables, like I'm doing something right. So I would write these articles and they started resonating very quickly with the people that were already reading, but it started bringing in new people. And then over that next year, things really exploded because like you, Brian, I was doing two long form articles a week and I did that every week for years. But yeah, it was literally just me. Right. And two articles a week answering every email, replying to every comment while also still working the full-time day job.  That's interesting that they were still saying the short article thing in 2009, because don't  forget.  Yeah, well, I mean, w in the blogging space in 2005, it was like, well, you got to write every day and it's 250 words, and it's your opinion. And I was like, no. And so I wrote thousand word articles that were educational twice a week because I couldn't fill all five of them. And that's why Copyblogger, I think really took off quickly. Once you were offering a little more high-impact value, then of course, we got to the point where everyone, it was like, what I called the content arms, race. Everyone was trying to out value the other person, especially. People in the SEO community early social media, that was what would make it to the dig home page and all of that kind of stuff. Pre Facebook and Twitter. But yeah, I would have thought by 2009, They would stop giving that bad advice, but apparently  you found, I was clearly taking the advice from the wrong places and didn't, I didn't know what he didn't know. Like my, my, I wasn't, I probably had never even heard of the term SEO at that point, digital marketing. Like those weren't even thoughts in my mind. It was literally like, if I can just start a website, like I'm a nerd, but I'm a video game and bookworm a video game player in bookworm. Developer or programmer. I don't know much about internet marketing. So first, like, man, if I can just write it and like this WordPress thing seems cool, like, all right, I'll put some stuff up there and probably Googled like how to blog. And some of the stuff I found was unhelpful. Luckily I then stumbled across a few bloggers back in the day that were helpful. And I tried to emulate them by as like, yeah. Two articles a week. I'm putting out good stuff and just focusing on.  Did you have aspirations to write had you written before you started the blog?  No. It wasn't until, so I quit the sales job and I moved to Atlanta, Georgia where two of my college roommates were looking for a third roommate. And I went to work at this company called six men and six men [00:10:00] produces floating music festivals. It's literally like rent a cruise ship and then put John Mayer and 20 other bands on the boat and then sell every other cabin to fans of those musicians and create this floating music festival. So it was while I was working for the. My job was like marketing assistant for something to start. I got paid very little, but it was so much fun. And I learned a lot. And part of my job is building or fostering the community for each of the each of the different boats. Each one had a different music genre and thus a different audience that needed to be spoken to in a different language. So. Working with them. They said, Hey, we're going to start this thing called a blog. And we're going to put it on our company website. And everybody needs to take a turn, writing an article. And then I wrote something and this was like the first time probably. Probably maybe the first time ever that I got to do truly creative writing where it wasn't a term paper for college about, Abraham Lincoln or it wasn't a business deep dive into something, but it was like, truly write about a band that you love, that you happen to just watch perform on the deck of a cruise ship, parked in The Bahamas and let's have some fun with it. And I wrote, and I was like, oh, this is way different. And then they very quickly said like, okay, you're now in charge of the blog. Okay. We just want you to write all the time. So I just started writing all the time and learned like, oh, like if you write about things that are fun and interesting to you, like time flies by. And that's when it finally clicked for me, it was like, okay, I'm not going to become like a personal. That trains people that are nerdy with nerd fitness. That's one-to-one what if I start a blog or turn it into a blog that is, one to a hundred, one to 1,001 to a million, like, I can have some more fun with this. So I never, as a kid growing up, I didn't, I never imagined I would become a writer that could happen to accidentally I guess serendipitously as a result of some other opportunities that came up.  Okay, well, that seems like a good segue into product. Like at what point after you started the blog, did you understand what type of coaching or courses that you would develop? What was that process like  for you? Yeah, very organic. It was, I didn't know what I was going to sell, but I figured if I can just get a good. Number of people reading the website and then ask them, how can I help you? Like. What is the thing that you're struggling with, then it's going to give me an opportunity to create either a product or a service in that space and and then serve those people and they'd be happy about it. So there was about 18. After I had started after I had started a website, part-time and over those 18 months, I just kept getting the same questions over and over again, it was like, Steve, can you just give me a workout? Like, I think I even had an article that was like how to build your own workout and all the comments and all the emails I got were like, can you just do this for me? Like, I'll pay you. It's like, oh, all right. Well, that seems like an easy place to start. Why don't I create I'll, my community at that time, I called it the rebel. I think I started calling it the rebel Alliance, but then it evolved now where the nerd fitness rebellion, it was like, let's call it the rebel fitness guide. Well, I'll make a PDF charged. Like I think I was like terrified. I asked for $30 for this thing that was going to, it was like six months worth of workouts and everything you needed to know about nutrition and my. And I asked for 30 bucks and managed to sell enough of them to buy me like a month or two's worth of income. It's like, okay, this is now officially a business. I should probably try to start taking this thing a little more seriously. Let's go to find, let's go find more people that are like the people that are currently buying this and continue down this path of like, okay, this is no longer a hobby. This is a thing that I think I can devote my. So, what is the current product offering that you have at nerd fitness? So wait you rebel Alliance to nerd fitness Alliance. That's  finish rebellion  rebellion. Okay. The rebellion is from Disney. They're like you can't be the rebel Alliance.  I mean, it was very comically. I asked the community, I said like, Hey guys, I don't want to just call us. Like welcome to the nerd fitness community. Like that doesn't seem nerdy enough. So I was like, what do you guys want to do? Like, I think you can even still, I think the blog post still exists maybe, but I was like, do you guys want to start an empire? And I was thinking like, Roman empire, I wasn't even thinking star wars, empire. And then I was like, or do you want to like, help me build a or like run a rebellion and like overwhelmingly the response came back. Dude, we hate the empire. Like we're all rebels. We hate that. I was like,  you can't be the empire,  but like, I wasn't even thinking like star wars, empire inexplicably, like I was thinking like, like, oh, the Roman empire, that was cool and expanding. So, so stupid or so funny. Luckily the community said we're going to be rebels. And then I Googled rebel Alliance and I found this beautiful artwork of somebody had drawn the rebel Alliance [00:15:00] logo in maroon on like a concrete wall. Like at that time, I think the nerd fitness colors, it was like blue and white. And then it was like, oh, okay, here we go. Like nerd fitness logo is already circular. Like it's just right here. I already drew it on a napkin and had a friend digitize it. So it was like, okay. Our color scheme is now red and gray and white and black, like the rebel Alliance. We're going to be the rebellion. We're going to have rules of the rebellion. Welcome to the rebellion. Joined the rebellion. And like things clicked. It was like, okay, this feels like something that people are interested in being a part of. And it was still a small group of people, but people were very passionate about becoming a part of it. And so now I think you mentioned that you work with a team of writers, is that correct? You're no longer  the chief writing guy. Right? So it's evolved a bit. We have we have a few people on the team that have edited past content of mine or I've partnered with, to write other contents. So I have two of them. We'd have 25 w we'll talk about the different aspects that nerd fitness offers now, but one of them is online coaching and two of our coaches are also pretty darn good writers and content creators, Jim and Stacey, and they have also created content. Stacy is a. Powerlifting woman who can deadlift 450 pounds. We just shared, we've shared her success story all over the site. She loves Zelda and and power lifting and has transformed as a result of discovering nerd fitness. Being confident or building up the confidence to pick up a barbell. So now it's not just me. There are other people. We have a mental health expert that has written articles. We have another guy in my team that has helped edit content and kind of repurpose it to make sure that it gets its way around the internet. So, nerd fitness went from just me to now it's at the point where we have close to 50 team members scattered throughout the globe, working on. Different projects and finding different people and helping different people in different ways. Wow.  Wow. That's amazing. So yeah, the reason I asked about the writing aspect is because again, going back to the incongruency, if you will, how do you even find someone. It was a power lifter and is into Zelda. I mean, that's just, I guess they find you just like with Copyblogger, we got up to 65 people and they all came through the audience and they all understood the mission. You didn't have to have like, the break room manifesto on the way. Everyone knew what Copyblogger stood for. It. It's the same thing with nerve fitness.  Yeah. You either get it or you don't and if you don't get it, then it's probably not for you, but if you do get it welcome aboard, let's go. Exactly. So you've evolved from that initial $30 PDF thing. To where you're actually doing one-on-one coaching. Is that right?  Yeah. So we I've had to reinvent and transform nerd fitness as a company in a community like a dozen times in the past dozen years. Like, it seems like every year we're trying, we're reinventing ourselves. As things changed, the community remains the same, but the services or products or whatever it may be have evolved over that time. So we've simplified things lately. Two ways to support nerd fitness are two ways to paid services that nerd fitness offers. One of them is called nerd fitness prime. It's our online private community. We have an app that you get as part of joining our fitness prime called nerd fitness journey. You get to create a superhero character. You have daily missions to complete your character earns different items. You carefully craft your alter ego, your origin story. And then there's, there's villains to battle and storylines that go along with each aspect of it. So that's the that's nerd fitness, prime and or fitness journey. The app is free to download and try out. And then the higher tiered project or process for people that are interested in more one-on-one instruction is our online coaching program which very similar to everything else that nerd fitness happened organically. I had those two coaches, Jim and Stacey were creating content. But I said, Hey, I wonder if we can I have a car, I have a, at that time I already had my, I had an online coach myself and I still have the same coach to this day, five or six years. So I wonder if people in our audience are interested in this. So before building anything, we sent an email out to our, the women of our community. And we sent an email out to the men of our community and said, Hey, we're thinking of doing this online coaching program. You have to fill out this really long application. It's going to be expensive, but you're going to get one-on-one instruction from Jim or Stacy. And let us know if you're interested and we got a hundred. A hundred applications for both sides of that. It was like, okay, here we go. Seems like this is something we're interested in. I mean, we were using Evernote to track workouts and people were like texting to coach and very quickly we pivoted to a third-party software and then eventually built our own. So, and that has just continued to grow and blossom through we're. Now at the point where we have. 25 full-time coaches. We just hired two more. This week, we hired three last week or three, two weeks prior to that we built our own custom software where each coach now has a dashboard that they see, they know which clients did they need to interact with. Each client gets, one-on-one instruction from the type of workout they're doing. They can tell [00:20:00] their coach that they're traveling the following week and the coach builds them a travel workout. They take pictures of their food and the coach helps them slowly adjust their diet. It's and it's all done with a superhero theme to it. So it's a, so that's really like nerd fitness is super simple. Join our email list. If you're interested in learning more about our community, come check it out. Try downloading our fund habit, building superhero app, or if you want one-on-one instruction from one of our certified instructors that lives and breathes the nerd fitness philosophy, check out our coaching program. Again, you see that 20 minute journey going through his writing, you know, a serving on a music party boat through whatever. Uh, turning into a blog and then turning into coaching and then turning into productized services. I think it's a very repeatable process and I think it's just amazing to watch. 

Support the podcast on Patreon: www.patreon.com/bookishthoughts Follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/thatsancient And check out our website: https://www.jeanmenzies.com/podcast Check out host Jean's book on greek myths: https://amzn.to/3oVrqKv And discover more about antiquity in video format on her YouTube channel: https://www.jeanmenzies.com/ancient-history-videos And tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeansthoughts In this week's episode Jean Menzies and regular guest Jill Scott welcome back the podcast for a new season by finding out what the most googled questions about Ancient Greece are and have a go at answering them. Books recommended: The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey: https://amzn.to/3aveXF3 Democracy by Paul Cartledge: https://amzn.to/2YN8mTY The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek by G.E.M. De Ste Croix: https://amzn.to/3iTkcCX Greek Myths by Jean Menzies: https://amzn.to/3oVrqKv

Lucy was raised in a low socioeconomic household and neighborhood, by a young single mother in New Zealand in the early 1980s. The lack of resources available in childhood resulted in a shrinking of her outer world to what she thought of –  years later - as a kind of welfare-child ashram. Within the home, and outside of it, there were few distractions or ability to go anywhere else, and significant trauma – all forcing her to go within to what she thought of as “the deep stillness and light inside” to rest, find nourishment, solace, and strength. At 19 she experienced her first shift, seeing through the personality, and subtle perceptions revealing themselves. She never thought much of it, there had already been so much light inside, and she was so thrilled to be in the world finally so she simply went on with living. After a brief stint in television journalism, Lucy spent 15 years in Europe and New Zealand working for international humanitarian aid agencies. On return to NZ at age 31, she suddenly became extremely ill.  For six months, she was mostly bedridden. Doctors, both natural and traditional, could not find the source of the illness. Over the next few years, she had to work to earn an income but there was no strength for much else. The pain in her body was ever-present, and the fear of not knowing if this was her life forever now, was sometimes crippling. She was forced to exist in a kind of in-between world again - of much aloneness and silence, aside from work. After a few years of significant illness, she recovered strength enough to live a semi-normal life. But any time she tried to do too much, she was knocked back into illness. By 35 she was in a leadership role at a non-profit, married, with a baby on the way, just surviving day-to-day with the pressure on her physical body. On becoming a mother, she was plunged into a level of blackness that was completely shocking and previously unknown. For more than two years she descended into complete separation and couldn't hear the guidance that had always accompanied her in her life. For the first time ever she couldn't feel God. In 2018, after more than two years of immense struggle, an unexplainable and absolute surrender took place within, in a moment, as her two-year-old cried and reached for her. Within two months she had left the career she loved to rest in what she thought of as silence. For around a year and a half, she couldn't do much else. Lucy had never been exposed to spirituality, nor did she know anything about its concepts or traditions. She thought meditation was for “those hippy people.” Because there had been no conscious spiritual search, she had no context for what was happening. Often it was so beautiful and joyful – she didn't need to know. There was an innate sense of trust and recognition that went beyond what needed to be seen or understood with the mind. When the need to understand did arise - some online searches helped a little, but often it all felt overwhelming, and she preferred sitting in silence to hear from within. Guidance and teaching were always present and given through hearing and images. Despite this, when particularly strange things would occur the need for the mind to understand would return. One night in 2019, before sleep, in heartfelt prayer she asked for help to cut through all the online noise and finally really grasp what was going on. There was a felt sense of need for community. As she was awakening in the morning, she heard the words “Buddha at the Gas Pump”. Lucy says, "I was stumped. I had no idea what that meant, but Googled it and found BatGap. As a result, my life has changed. Over the years BatGap has supported me deeply in the process – nurturing trust and allowing everything to unfold as it wants to." From then until now, Lucy has been called over and over into deeper surrender. She has had further shifts and many clearings. Her career of 15 years,

In this interview former NFL player, American Ninja athlete, and transformational public speaker Anthony Trucks breaks down the three phases of his "Shift Method".  See, Shift, Sustain.  And the best part, he gives actionable steps within each phase.  You can literally listen to this interview and begin to transform your life.  And he tells amazing stories about crushing quarterbacks in front of 50,000 people!  Um…it's amazing. Administrative: (See episode transcript below)Check out Anthony Trucks here: https://anthonytrucks.com/Take his Identity Quiz that helped me so much here: https://go2.bucketquizzes.com/sf/4e63da08Get his book and free gifts here: https://identityshiftbook.com/Check out the Tools For A Good Life Summit here: Virtually and FOR FREE https://bit.ly/ToolsForAGoodLifeSummitStart podcasting!  These are the best mobile mic's for IOS and Android phones.  You can literally take them anywhere on the fly.Get the Shure MV88 mobile mic for IOS,  https://amzn.to/3z2NrIJGet the Shure MV88+ for  mobile mic for Android  https://amzn.to/3ly8SNjGet A Course In Miracles Here! https://amzn.to/3hoE7sAAccess my “Insiders Guide to Finding Peace” here: https://belove.media/peaceSee more resources at https://belove.media/resourcesEmail me: contact@belove.mediaFor social Media:      https://www.instagram.com/mrmischaz/https://www.facebook.com/MischaZvegintzovSubscribe and share to help spread the love for a better world!As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Transcript: [music]0:00:06.4 Mischa Z: Welcome back to The Tools For A Good Life Summit. Right now, I would like to introduce to you Anthony Trucks, Ex-NFL player. This is a foster kid turned NFL athlete and serial entrepreneur with one serious superpower; making shift happen no matter what, by assessing the power of identity. You have overcome 30-plus traumatic life events, navigating the identity shifts that followed. Anthony has come to be known as the leading expert in shifting, which is making a shift internally to elevate how you operate externally, which in turn changes your life. Your system is called the Shift Method, and you weave together neuroscience, psychology, technology, and hard fought life lessons to help anyone with a desire for more in their life, achieve any goal they want or have ever wanted. I especially like this next sentence, "Before making it apparent that their goals were actually set far below their true potential in the first place." I love that. Like tapping into the potential that people don't even know that's there, it's beautiful.0:01:29.0 Anthony Trucks: And it's beyond, yeah.0:01:30.2 Mischa: Yeah.0:01:30.5 Anthony Trucks: Usually, it's far beyond their thoughts. We set limitations on our dreams without even knowing it.0:01:35.2 Mischa: Yeah, it's amazing. Buckle up, it's time to make shift happen.0:01:39.5 Anthony Trucks: Shift, shift and move.0:01:43.6 Mischa: [laughter] So first off, thank you so much for jumping in the fray with me. Very excited. And let's just maybe spend a few minutes, we can talk a little bit about your history and your 30-plus traumatic life events. I just... Looking at your history, one thing that jumped out at me was, you were 14, perhaps struggling a little bit in the foster home system. Yes, and then...0:02:09.6 Anthony Trucks: Yeah.0:02:10.3 Mischa: I read a note, you said, "Hey, I was a self-aware kid," and I recognized your pattern and you perhaps needed to change at that point. Maybe speak to that just quickly.0:02:21.5 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, well it's interesting, when I got to the age of 14, I'd already gone through years of crazy, We'll call it. I was given away at three, so I had a lot of different dynamics woven all into the personality and identity of who I was. It took a lot of years, but after a while, you start to see yourself for who you are. The problem is, I think, we are all self-aware, but we're aware of a self that we've crafted that's not always the most positive, so that's where why we beat ourselves up, "And we're not that good, not that great." And I think there's a separation when you can... In a positive way, a separation when you understand who you are seeing yourself through of the filter of the world, and then who you actually are. There is a difference. And so I think at 14, 15, I was still developing that. It wasn't until I was really like 15, that I got a chance to really see who I was. And I was like, "Oh, that's who you are," 'cause prior to that moment, I saw myself in a light that wasn't the best.0:03:15.3 Mischa: And was this a conscious change? Or was it sort of it just happened and looking back on it, hindsight, you're like, "Oh." Or was it... Does that question make sense, or...0:03:31.7 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does make sense. It was more of a hindsight, I think it took time and in the distance, and the background to get it.0:03:38.6 Mischa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just on the phone there, now you wanna put the...0:03:42.3 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, there's someone at the front door, but I'm not gonna talk to him.0:03:44.9 Mischa: Okay.0:03:45.6 Anthony Trucks: Somebody delivered flowers to my house, and it was the wrong person. So I think she's taking them, which is good, I hope she takes them to the person that deserves them 'cause someone deserves them, and they were not my flowers, but I'm good now.[chuckle]0:03:58.9 Mischa: All good. I'll be able to... We'll strike that. Strike that.0:04:02.1 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, yeah. Well, we could leave it in, it would just be weird, but that's the scatter brain-brain that is my brain. I'm the only one home, so my dog started barking, I gotta like, "Is someone at the door?" So yeah.0:04:10.9 Mischa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.0:04:11.9 Anthony Trucks: Now, we're good though. That's part of my identity. I can keep rolling, man. I mean you can keep it in, you don't have to keep it in.0:04:17.9 Mischa: Yeah, no, I love it. And we'll keep rolling. I think it's good.0:04:21.0 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, it's life.0:04:21.7 Anthony Trucks: What's that?0:04:22.4 Mischa: It's life, man.0:04:23.2 Mischa: That's life, especially these days.0:04:25.7 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, seriously.0:04:27.5 Mischa: Yeah. And then of course there was the, your very brief stint in the NFL. And I think the...0:04:37.5 Anthony Trucks: Yes, three years.0:04:39.3 Mischa: Yeah, yeah, the striking part there was you only got to play in one pre-season game and then you had an injury, or?0:04:44.8 Anthony Trucks: Well, my third year, I got hurt in my first pre-season game. So my first year, second year, I was cut the first year, cut the second year, third year, I was finally looking like I was about to make the team. And then I tore my shoulder and the season was over. So that was the first pre-season game. So no, I played in games. It wasn't like I just was there for a year and out of there, but it was, it's unfortunate man, there's a lot of build up to that whole situation, but the NFL is an interesting beast. It's the highest level in the world. So any time you get to the highest level in the world for anything, I don't care if it's the highest level of the world for, I don't know, kitten sock knitting, there's gonna be crazy things that go on, 'cause you got so many people involved, it's cutthroat.0:05:25.3 Mischa: Cutthroat.0:05:26.1 Anthony Trucks: It's ruthless. It is demanding at levels that are beyond human typical logic. 'Cause the typical human, I don't think that they... And this is not like saying people are better, right? But you're not typically in a race or in a competition to be the best in the world out of seven billion people, you know what I'm saying? So you're not... You're not at that... So now that you do, it's like the average human doesn't get the logic behind, why would you subject yourself to so much difficulty and pain and anguish? Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense. And I'm like, "It's right, it doesn't make sense that I would live a mediocre life, that is one I don't want to see what I'm fully capable of." It's a back and forth, you know what I'm saying?0:06:05.6 Mischa: Yeah.0:06:06.5 Anthony Trucks: So it's not that anybody is right or wrong, it's just, what's logic. And I don't think people use that... "Well, it's not logical." No, it's not logical to your brain, and that's okay. It's not logical that you would marry that person because they're a horrible person. There's just different things that are logic, and so I just... I've got to the point of realizing in life, the beauty is the difference. What is good for me isn't good for everybody else. I'm not a good fit for everybody, and that's okay. That's completely okay, and if you can get to that point, it alleviates so much more stress and anxiety and just weirdness that happens in life.0:06:40.3 Mischa: It's so empowering, it's very empowering.0:06:42.4 Anthony Trucks: Freeing, yeah.0:06:43.1 Mischa: A Place to be. Yeah, frank, I love that. I was curious, did you have any glory moments, sort of those stadium, 50,000 people.0:06:53.2 Anthony Trucks: Did I? Oh man.0:06:55.9 Mischa: Yeah.0:06:56.1 Anthony Trucks: How many do you wanna know about, man?0:06:57.3 Mischa: Tell me a couple. Tell me, I wanna know.0:07:00.7 Anthony Trucks: Here's a good one. Here's a good one. Here's a good one. It's two. These two are gonna be Oregon ones 'cause I had fun in Oregon. I had fun everywhere else but Oregon was a good one. So there's one play where we're playing against Arizona State, they had come to our house, junior year, and I'm trying to find, we're trying ball, right? And what happens, it was junior year, it's what it was. And they're at our house and we gotta beat them, we're trying to obviously make our way to get to another level and trying to get some ball game stuff going on, and they come to our house. And there's just this one specific play to where if they line up a certain way I blitz, and if they shift out of that, I don't blitz anymore because they have an extra person. Because if I blitz, somebody's open, so we'd be screwed. It's like 3rd and 12 or something, and the ball is... They get up to the ball, they get lined up. I'm supposed... Slits, they move. I don't realize it. So I am supposed to cover and in my head, I'm like, "I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going."0:07:52.5 Anthony Trucks: I can see in the video, my line back with a mic sitting next going, "Don't go." You could see his hand motion, but it's Austin Stadium and Austin Stadium is one of the loudest in the country. You can't hear anything. So you gotta know it, and I'm just dialed, "I'm gonna get this dang court," as my head's here. And all of a sudden like you can see me in the balls hike, and I take off. Now, I don't know how that's happened, but their right guard was the guy who's supposed to guard me, guard or tackle, completely misses me, doesn't whatever it is, and the quarterback rolls out to me, and as he's rolling out, I barely... And he gets like a step away, I have to leave my feet, and if both of my hands don't grab this man in mid-air and grab him like a carnival game. You Know. I jump out, I'm in full Superman, I get one hand on his shoulder, one hand on his hip, I take him down and I celebrate, and the whole stadium just erupts, turn over on run downs, and we get the ball back. It was crazy. That was one of them. Another one...0:08:52.6 Mischa: So first of, wait, wait a minute. So that's on accident that that happens?0:08:56.0 Anthony Trucks: Oh yeah. After the play, if you look at the video, we have it after the play, I'm cheering my linebacker guy comes up, grabs my helmet, and you can see him yelling at me, "You've messed up, but you didn't mess up. Great job. Don't do that ever again."[chuckle]0:09:07.5 Mischa: That's so good. Okay, next one. Okay.0:09:09.8 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, and then other one was, we're playing against... So at my senior year, I'm balling against... All the teams are playing. I end up leading my senior year, the Pack-10 at the time, in sacks, tackles for loss, forced fumbles and fumbles recovered, I was like 6th in total tackles, but I missed a game against USC to a high ankle sprain, but I was balling that year. And I was doing well, I had three sacks against ASU, as a matter of fact, the next year at their place, and so I'm feeling good about myself and my coach ran a meeting one time we were about to play Cow, Cow is coming up to Oregon. And I'm talking I'm proud of how good I am, he's like great job. He goes, "Hey I don't want you to think you're the greatest," he says, "You ain't the greatest until you go in there, you sack, you force a fumble, you recovered the fumble, you pick it up and score a touchdown. Then you can start talking, right? So he says this and he's serious, but joking at the same time.0:10:00.5 Mischa: Of course.0:10:00.6 Anthony Trucks: This was like early in the week. Now we come to the game, I was like the second or third quarter, I can't remember what it was. And they line me up and they give me a blitz, so I'm like, "I'm gonna go get this guy," right? And in my head, I'm not thinking about what he said earlier in the week, I'm just doing my thing. So I come around the bend and the running back goes to block me. Somehow, he misses me completely. I sidestep him, he goes flying by. So I go up, the quarterback doesn't see me, blind sight, sack him. Forced ball comes out, forced the fumble. Fumbles on the ground. We both go to the ground. I recovered the fumble. Now it's college football, so your knee is down, so I didn't score a touchdown. I mean, the whole crowd's erupted. Everybody is crazy. Everybody's... I'm excited, I come to the sideline. I'm high five'ing. Hey man. Hey man, I come to a coach. He looks me dead in eyes, and he goes, "But you didn't score a touchdown." That was Don Kellum.0:10:54.0 Mischa: Ruthless. Don.0:10:54.3 Anthony Trucks: Ruthless dude. That's how he was. He was the hard-nosed dude. But he...0:10:57.3 Mischa: That's cold-blooded.0:10:57.9 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, I got a whole bunch of weird ones like that. I got stuff from the NFL, High School. We got a whole bunch, but those are two of my fun ones.0:11:01.3 Mischa: That's beautiful. Yeah. And so when you hurt your shoulder, and career is over, that's pretty deflating to go from those highs to those lows, obviously.0:11:14.5 Anthony Trucks: Pretty much though. Yeah, you go from being somebody to being nobody, at least in your head, internally. Any time a human being has put their heart into something, whether it's being a parent and the kid goes to college, leave the military, you leave sports, you lose a job, you leave a job, you sell a business. When you no longer can show up in the capacity of that role anymore, you lose a sense of yourself. And so for me, it was football and I've lost a sense of myself in that realm, and so yeah, I definitely had a little downward spiral, we'll call it.0:11:43.0 Mischa: Yes, and then you were able to make it through a dark time, come out the other side. Have a pivot point where, "Hey, I think coming through that perhaps close to suicide moment," yeah?0:12:00.3 Anthony Trucks: Most definitely. Yeah, unfortunately.0:12:01.9 Mischa: Yeah, unfortunately, it's a dark place to be. So you create a tool, which I'm staring at, at least the result of the tool, so now you...0:12:12.2 Anthony Trucks: One of them.0:12:12.7 Mischa: What's that?0:12:12.8 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, it's one of them for sure. I make a whole bunch of weird stuff now.0:12:15.5 Mischa: Yeah, cool. Oh, go ahead.0:12:17.5 Anthony Trucks: That's a good tool you got right there. That's the slow or go identity. It's a good grid right there.0:12:22.3 Mischa: Yeah, it's great. I just wanna tell you that, as I said before we started recording that you are very influential in me helping get the summit.0:12:33.1 Anthony Trucks: Nice.0:12:34.2 Mischa: Continuing with the summit process, because I took your little... You go to... Anybody can do this. They can go to Anthonytrucks.com and click on the what's my identity type button.0:12:46.8 Anthony Trucks: Easy.0:12:47.8 Mischa: Yeah, super easy. And the quiz I was taking it like... Yeah, we'll see. Honestly, I was like, "Yeah, what's this?" And I took it and that it was right on the money, my friend, and I was [0:13:00.4] ____.0:13:00.4 Anthony Trucks: Is it kinda weird?0:13:00.4 Mischa: Yes, it's very weird. Turns out, I hate to admit it, but I will, I'm a dabbler. And so it helped me... One thing you have on the dabbler is to find little successes to help propel you forward and to have a contingency plan for when you go into that dark spot, that shiny object.0:13:27.2 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, 'cause dabblers are people who chase opportunity, but they shut down in oppositions sometimes.0:13:31.3 Mischa: Yes.0:13:31.7 Anthony Trucks: So in order to push forward to be a doer, all you have to do is spend time doing more, which means you have to tackle the oppositions.0:13:39.6 Mischa: Yeah, perfect. Love it. So that moment helped me progress forward with my summit, 'cause it's lots of inviting and potentials for rejection and stretching, right?0:13:53.2 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, I agree.0:13:54.3 Mischa: So thank you for that, Anthony.0:13:54.4 Anthony Trucks: You're very welcome, man. What it's for? What I made it for, man. Yeah.0:13:57.8 Mischa: Yeah. So that was... I just... Beautiful. So I'm gonna get to the point here. So you're gonna answer a question for me. I'm gonna set up a scenario and why we're all here. So here's the scenario. We've got somebody... And it sounds like you have been through it multiple times in your life, so you are gonna be familiar with it, so we've got... Let's look at life, the three-legged stool, relationships, finance and health, and then... Yep, now, so now someone who is successful or once successful, and they... You have two legs of those stool come out from under you, that can be a very dark place, and you were there.0:14:40.1 Mischa: And so for me, I had that. I had had success in my 20-year sales career, all of a sudden, career upheaval. I went through a divorce out of nowhere, financial distress, and both my parents died in rapid succession within two weeks of each other, and it was a very dark time. And the thing was, was that to pull myself up from my bootstraps attitude that, "Work your way through it," wasn't working. I needed extra, I needed a little nudge, I needed something like this. So my question to you is, thinking of your tool, your modality, all your bag of tricks, what are the exact next steps you would offer a person like me that was in that scenario, so that I know that I'm headed in the new, right direction, that I'll have positive momentum towards getting my life back on track?0:15:36.4 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, so the one thing that's good about this is it's not a guessing game. I think some people, they will navigate this by guessing little pieces that could be beneficial, and for me it's like, I look at the whole revamp. See you've mentioned and alluded to earlier, I've had 30-plus randomly weird situations that have... I could say each one of them would have... Has knocked other people off track for an entire lifetime.0:15:56.2 Mischa: Yes.0:15:58.7 Anthony Trucks: Very odd. It's very odd, and I didn't even think of it and notice it until I was in my early 30s, to be quite honest. I was like, somebody else brought it to the forefront and I was like, "Yeah, I did, oddly have a way of doing this, and so I'll tell you what I've done every time that that's happened to me."0:16:12.0 Mischa: Fantastic.0:16:12.7 Anthony Trucks: So I did it accidentally at first, and now I do it proactively. I think we do have that unfortunate life, we do proactively choose to eat healthy sometimes, but most of the time we react to life, we're not responding in a chosen manner. So what I've done is I've gone back and said in those moments, I needed to look at who I was, not so much what I knew or what I had access to. And in my life now, I'm always like, "I got a problem. Who is Anthony right now? My wife and I are arguing, who am I? I'm not the best father. Who am I? I'm not working out the way I'd like to, Who am I?" And there's a reason why I say, "Who am I?", not, "What do I gotta do?" Because if you are the person to do those things, you wouldn't even question what you have to do, you just do that stuff. That's just the simple nature of it. Like if I'm the person who just... If it's who I am to work out every day, I'm gonna work out every day, I'm not gonna worry about that. If it's who I am to be the most amazing, loving, caring, paying attention husband, that's who I'll be every day.0:17:09.5 Anthony Trucks: And so when someone's in that space, typically we say, "What's wrong? What do I gotta fix? What do I gotta do?" And I'm more like, "Who do you gotta be?" 'Cause if you don't realize that there's a certain core person of you running all this, then you're gonna keep repeating the same situation, you'll keep landing in the same place. And this is why a lot of my work is in identity, it's all in that realm of, "Who are you?" So what I first have people do is you have to have them see. And the see phase... It's a three-step phase called the shift method. The first stage is the see phase, and the see phase is where you get to go in and take a look at what is really going on, and it usually isn't fun to see. It's the stuff where you get exposed to the true aspect of your humanity and you go, "Yeah, I don't like that part of me," but for the first time in your life, maybe you actually accept it and go, "I gotta work on that." 'Cause not everybody does.0:17:58.4 Mischa: Oh, absolutely. It can be hard. Can I ask you a question in that regard?0:18:01.6 Anthony Trucks: Please.0:18:02.0 Mischa: So is there like... Give my audience an actionable step in that regard to...[overlapping conversation]0:18:06.7 Mischa: Yeah, absolutely.0:18:07.6 Anthony Trucks: Here we go. So this is dead serious, is we have something we call triad talks, and it's a certain series of questions in a certain order and a specific way we do it, but I'll give you the overarching. What you do is you go and select a group of questions that essentially would get to the root of you, that you don't even... That you'd be scared to hear the answer to. We'll call it that. Get to the root of the questions. And then what you do is you go find people who you know and that you like and that they're positive humans, and you ask them, "Hey, can you answer these questions for me, about me?" And this is something where there's a way you go through it to where you do certain things to where you're not actually, we'll call it, cannibalizing your ability to get great answers, but what you'll do is you'll get feedback if you do it the right way. You'll get feedback from people that is really hard to swallow.0:19:00.0 Mischa: And usable, so let's just... I wanna tackle that. So we've got step one of the see... Step one is the see phase and a tool within that is a triad talk, and so... Fantastic. So give me an example of one, two or three questions, so like...0:19:19.3 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, easy. So I guess, well, one question I ask them is, if you were to get rid of a part of me, like, okay, you'll remove a certain part of how I do things. What would it be and why? If you were to rate my... If you could do this actually. Rating is usually fun. If you were to rate and you'll give me a number based from zero to 10 on how good of a friend I am or how good of a blank I am, is a good question there. What is the most frustrating thing about me that you feel like you have to endure, and I'll never change? Like little stuff like this.0:19:56.2 Mischa: Oh, those are good.0:19:57.1 Anthony Trucks: And they let them... And you ask the questions, but you have to be prepared for the answers. You have to actually absorb those answers a certain way, and if you do it right, it will break your heart, you'll feel like you wanna retort and you can't, but you'll get gold, you'll start to see yourself, and that's I think one of the biggest gifts is to see through the veil of really what's going on that other people can see, but I'm just blind to it, there's a statement that I love is you can't see the label when you're inside the jar. And a lot of us are in that jar and we don't even know what's going on or operating.0:20:33.2 Anthony Trucks: It's like, "How come no one's coming around? 'Cause it says poison on the outside," dude.[chuckle]0:20:36.5 Anthony Trucks: Like, Have you seen yourself?[laughter]0:20:38.2 Mischa: Right. Oh my God.0:20:38.7 Anthony Trucks: You gotta figure that out.[laughter]0:20:40.4 Mischa: Oh my gosh, that is amazing.0:20:43.6 Anthony Trucks: That's one of the first pieces, man, is, is going to a level of actually, that's the tactical thing is, What in the world do I gotta work on? And then the second thing that we do is we go through the shift phase, which really is where the action is taken, we are shifting internally and making shifts actionably externally because of those internal ones. And what it allows us to do is take a look at our life and then you actually change your life, 'cause shifts make the change, right? If I wanna change the destination of a plane, I am shifting the trajectory, right? I'm not... I wouldn't call it like I'm gonna change the trajectory. You'd kinda shift it like, I'm gonna go a little bit one degree this way. And I'll change the destination, right? That's what we're doing, we're trying to change the destination in your life. It's just a shift, not crazy.0:21:25.2 Mischa: You know what's so good about that and so hopeful about that is we don't necessarily need to do a 100, we don't need to move the ship completely.0:21:33.7 Anthony Trucks: No.0:21:33.8 Mischa: Right, it's like, "Hey, let's take those next little incremental things to get us going in that right direction, Right?."0:21:40.0 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, if you go... I literally Googled this, if you were to choose to go from San Francisco to the, say, Orlando Airport, if you on the way there made a one degree shift in trajectory from the get-go you would land 40 miles south in Lakeland, Florida.0:21:57.5 Mischa: Wow.0:21:58.3 Anthony Trucks: One degree.[laughter]0:21:58.9 Anthony Trucks: Isn't that crazy?[chuckle]0:22:00.2 Mischa: It's crazy, one degree.0:22:01.0 Anthony Trucks: That's the difference. So people are like, you don't gotta go and overhaul your entire life, man, just... 'cause the plane's always in the air. It's always going somewhere. Just adjust the trajectory. It's a shift and you're good.0:22:15.1 Mischa: I love it. So let me ask, how about an actionable step in the action step phase, so you've gone out and you gave me a few questions, so give me like an action step to help make that degree change.0:22:27.7 Anthony Trucks: Oh, yeah. So it's just fun but everybody can do this. All you gotta do is ask yourself, what's that one thing that's been lingering, and I'm gonna say why this is important. Let's purpose it with this, if something didn't scare you, it wouldn't be important to you. There are things that scare you that wouldn't scare me because they're important to you, and vice versa, there's things that I would be deadly afraid, deathly afraid to do it. You wouldn't even care. Like surfing, I'm gonna get eaten by a shark. I'm not gonna do that. But you're like, "No, bro this is easy." You see what I'm saying.0:22:55.5 Mischa: Yes.0:22:56.0 Anthony Trucks: The difference is, it's because what's important to you. Now, here's the thing, if that thing is lingering didn't scare you, it would already be done by now. It just would. If I'm like, "Hey, I want a hamburger and a milkshake," and I'm not gonna feel guilty, I'm going to the store right now.[chuckle]0:23:12.1 Anthony Trucks: I'm going to get it now... Any of you've done, I'm not afraid of it, I'm looking forward to it.[laughter]0:23:16.2 Mischa: Yes. Yes.0:23:16.6 Anthony Trucks: So a lot of these ideas and things that linger for a lot of folks, they're like, "I'm good, I just gotta get... " No you're afraid of it, and that's okay.0:23:25.2 Anthony Trucks: Right? So the first action you take is in the direction of the fear, and if you don't know how to do that, you take the fear and you find ways to open it up until you find the smallest pieces of it and then start attacking the small pieces, right? It's... What is that earth invaders? When you hit the...0:23:42.7 Mischa: Oh, space invaders?0:23:42.8 Anthony Trucks: And it turns into little ones and little ones...0:23:44.0 Mischa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.0:23:44.8 Anthony Trucks: You gotta make it the small ones, that's obviously the wrong game to do that, but when you can make things small. 15 minutes, it's much easier to overcome the fear for that 15 minutes than it is to perceive, "I gotta do this for the next week. Oh my God, okay, I'm gonna do that next week," and then next week and the next month, and then... So chunk it down to the smallest minute steps and then attack it that way, but it's usually gotta be in the direction of something that scares you or could linger for too long.0:24:12.1 Mischa: So any real-life example you've seen recently or you see...0:24:14.9 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, you wanna launch a podcast, you wanna launch a summit, right? Summit or podcast, right? And I'm not saying you're afraid of it at all, but I'm just saying, this is what... Some people are probably afraid of doing it. Yeah, he's maybe a little bit afraid, right?[laughter]0:24:25.8 Mischa: Yeah, maybe.0:24:26.5 Anthony Trucks: So you didn't just one day go, "Alright, I'm gonna do everything today," you're like, "Alright, I'm gonna send an email first." Small step.0:24:32.6 Mischa: Yeah.0:24:33.0 Anthony Trucks: Write the email, send it out, you wanna do it. Okay, great, okay, okay, now I gotta buy some equipment, I gotta figure out what the email thing look like. I gotta say, Okay, how do I time this? How am I gonna deliver it? How people are gonna opt in? When they opt in what are they gonna get? How I set a checkout page? How am I gonna get 'em to pay for this? Do I do a PayPal? This is all the stuff that goes into it. It's minute little steps, but you didn't just wake up one day, say I'm gonna figure it out today, you looked at little by little by little, and chunked it apart to where now it's real, it's live and it's coming to fruition.0:25:01.7 Mischa: I love that. Yes, thank you. Perfect, so then, so we've got the see phase, the action phase or the stuff... What did you define?0:25:11.2 Anthony Trucks: Shift. The see and shift.0:25:12.3 Mischa: Yes, yes.0:25:12.8 Anthony Trucks: And the last stage is sustain.0:25:19.7 Mischa: Sustain.0:25:19.9 Anthony Trucks: The sustain phase. See, Shift, Sustain.0:25:20.7 Mischa: See, shift, I couldn't read my own writing. See, shift.0:25:25.3 Anthony Trucks: Me either.[laughter]0:25:25.4 Mischa: Sustain. Sustain. So tell me about sustain.0:25:27.2 Anthony Trucks: Sustain phase is the one where... We as people unfortunately get to the point of we have success and then we stop doing what it took to get there because it either wasn't who we were, we just were pushing, or we got lazy. We're like, "I'll have this and maintain it'll be there," but we don't realize that you've gotta sustain the amount of effort to sustain a level of success and if you wanna have more success, you have to sustain the drive to continue to keep achieving more. So what happens is some people will... Like I had my gym business. I would focus on, "Let me get past this hump, I gotta make some money." And I would do all these things to get to the point that I make that money to pay the bills and go, "Oh, I can relax now." And then three months later, I'm in the exact same place. I gotta fight real hard because every time I would get to the top, I would stop doing what it took to get to the top.0:26:13.7 Anthony Trucks: Imagine if I just kept doing that stuff, the amount of momentum. So people don't have sustainability in life and it's not because they don't know how or don't have the skillsets, they just stop when they feel like they don't need to have that kind of effort and push 'cause they're not looking at shifting into being that person. And there's reasons that this happens. I think sometimes we lose sight of why we're doing things. It's not anchored consciously as to why I'm moving every day, I'm just getting up and doing it 'cause it's what my job is now.0:26:41.0 Mischa: Yep.0:26:41.0 Anthony Trucks: And then also I think sometimes we float around the wrong people. I think the hive, the environment's difficult 'cause there's a statement of, "You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with." And I think it's halfway right. I think you're the average of the expectations of the five people you surround yourself with. If you think about it, if I wanna... Say I have a million dollars and I wanna make $2 million dollars. Well, there's people I could hang out with that maybe have a million dollars, but what if it's a person that makes a half a million dollars, but they wanna make 2 and the million dollar people are content?0:27:15.7 Mischa: Yeah.0:27:16.5 Anthony Trucks: Well, the expectation of the half a million dollar person, they're like, "Look, I'm not shooting for 1, I'm shooting for 2." "Well, I'm shooting for 2 also. Let's figure it out." Whereas the million dollar people are like, "We've got a million dollars, we're cool." There's nothing wrong with them, but for what I want, I need to be around the expectations of what it takes to get there 'cause that half a million dollar person is not gonna let me sit idle at 1.2 or 1.3. They're gonna be like, "No, you keep pushing. You gotta get to 2." Whereas the 1 million dollar people, they're like, "Well, you're good. Slow down. What are you doing? Are you crazy?" So I think when you get into the sustain phase, if I'm gonna sustain my trajectory, I must consistently have a hive of people who have expectations at a level that are at or above where I wanna have them myself.0:28:00.0 Mischa: That's a great... I like the expectation piece in there because the... I like that added bit because the perception is, "If I hang out with a millionaire, bam, that's gonna... That is gonna help me elevate." Not that that's the all end all, but as an example.0:28:16.3 Anthony Trucks: Yeah. You'll get there. You can, but then, you can, but it's hard to get past there. Not that you can't, but it's hard to get past there 'cause you'll get to the point of... Think about what I just... Logically. "I got a million. Alright, cool. I'm gonna hang out, put my feet up. I'm gonna golf with Bob." And I'm like, "No, bro, I wanna make a $2 million dollar business. I can't go golfing and do that. I gotta go keep working." You know what I mean? There's just things you gotta look at. And so it is. It's an expectation piece and then if you don't sustain it, man, you'll lose it.0:28:44.8 Anthony Trucks: You'll just lose to be in place. And then I think at a certain level, for me, the sustain phase is, "I gotta find out why I gotta keep growing." And what I've found is anybody that's had a nominal level of success, there's a certain heart, for the majority in my opinion, to give back. They thrive, they wanna do well, and I found that there's this thing called marginal utility. And if I have 10 hamburgers, well, if I eat one 'cause I'm starving, that first one is delicious. Now the second one, it's still pretty good. Third one, I don't know. Fourth one, I can't do it, I can't do it. I got seven more hamburgers, what am I doing right now? I wanna feel good though. What do I do? I can't keep eating hamburgers.0:29:23.7 Anthony Trucks: Well, if I wanna feel good, what if I give them to somebody else who's starving? Different kind of good, but I feel good, so I give him the hamburgers. He does the same thing. He eats three and he's like, "Alright, I got four more." He keeps on passing it along. Well, the idea is if you do that, you'll notice, "Wow, I really like how it feels to give back and to serve. Who do I have to be, to be able to do that at a higher level?" And guess what it does? Puts you right back to seeing who you are and who that next person is that can do that. It's a cycle.0:29:54.6 Mischa: I think that's such a great space to work from as well. It's initially where perhaps when we're younger or what have you, it's that financial, build the family, find that success that pulls us forward and then it can be such a great place to work from, to shift to that, "Alright, how can I be of service on a broader scale?" So that's a great... That's a great thought as far as sustaining. So what are two or three habits that you have to help propel you on a daily basis or perhaps to find that...0:30:38.8 Mischa: That service piece, yeah. Go.0:30:40.3 Anthony Trucks: Yeah, yeah. So here's one thing is I fall in love with the day, not the destination. I think sometimes we spend way too much time looking at, "Well, am I there yet? Am I there yet?" like a 5-year-old in the car. But I love the days and I have a certain amount of space and time in my day that I operate and I love it. I love to be in motion. I think all humans... We love the motion. There's magic in the motion. There's something too... Like I can sit here with all this stuff off in my office and hang out, but there's more joy talking to you. Just like you. I'm sure before you could be in your house and be content, but when we get on like this, it's a different kind of joy we get to hang out in. There's no anxiety, there's no stress, we're just chatting, two guys talking. This is the motion of the magic, right?0:31:25.2 Mischa: Yeah.0:31:25.6 Anthony Trucks: And so what I look at is I need to be always in a position where I'm doing things that are keeping me moving, but the right things. So when you say, "How do I keep that consistent?" I just... I have a certain block of my day. I love being in the groove of working, but I make sure the things inside that groove are the ones that still scare me, are the ones that move that move the needle, are the ones that are useful to what I'm doing and habitually I just commit to falling in love with the day. And if I do that enough and if I have things that I enjoy, eventually, 'cause they're the right things, I end up at a destination and then I'm like, "Cool. I wanna get back to climbing the mountain." You spend way less time at the peak than you do on the journey. I want to enjoy the journey. So that's a big piece of it. And then if I'm hiking a mountain, I don't wanna be with a person who won't shut up that's annoying.0:32:17.9 Anthony Trucks: I wanna be with people who are like... Cheer me on, who could have similar conversations. 'Cause the thing about whenever you're out for a hike, time flies by with great conversation.0:32:27.6 Mischa: It does.0:32:28.6 Anthony Trucks: It melts away. So if I'm gonna be on this hike and I'm gonna enjoy the journey, I wanna have people that I can enjoy it with. And then when I get to the peak, I get to celebrate. They're taking a picture of me, I'm taking a picture of them. We get some lady I don't know to take a picture of us. It's this cool experience because you have the people and you are loving every step of the journey, quite literally.0:32:49.3 Mischa: Yeah, that's great. Do you calendar your sustainability, those activities?0:32:57.3 Anthony Trucks: Oh, man. I have a very ridiculous dialed in calendar for how my life is. It's right here. It's like my life is rolling it's... But here's the beauty of it, I have the method I use that I teach people, it boils down to execution. I think that's the one thing. Some people give a lot of insight, information, theory, and then leave it on you to figure out how to make it real in your life. Whereas for me, we teach, we talk, we boil things down to very specific actions, and even then I don't leave you hanging. Then I'm like, "Alright, great. We're gonna go... We're gonna put them in your life now, we're gonna make sure... " I just had a client call today, we broke down her entire morning routine down to the exact hour and a half she'll do it. I think an hour and half's kinda long, but for her it fits. But the idea's like I'm not just saying, "Go make a morning routine," and she's like, "Alright," and then walks away. We work through all of it, every piece, so there's understanding for it and the timing behind it, and then it's like, "Alright, now we take the action on it."0:33:54.6 Anthony Trucks: And it's that action that creates the difference, it creates a change. And so when I'm doing these things, I'm not just theory, man. I'm like, "I want you to finally have these things real in your life, because when they are that's when the true confidence comes in, the transformation comes in. It's not in the planning." We as humans feel better there. I think people fall in love with a safe work. "I wanna start a business." "Okay, start a business. What are you gonna do?" "Okay, I'm gonna get my business cards done, I'm gonna make a landing page, I'm gonna think of a name, I'm gonna, follow the... " That's not the stuff that you need to do to make the business. It sounds like it is. It's the safe work, though. You could do it in your house at night, making a little website, it looks pretty.0:34:29.0 Anthony Trucks: But the scary thing that actually makes it a real business, not you in the background, or having a hobby, getting bored, is when you can go, "Okay, pay me for this. This is what it's gonna cost you to actually get this improvement in your life." It's a business and that's the scary work. Now, the safe work and the fun work that has a place, but that's not what does it, man. And that's the thing is people are afraid of doing the scary work. They don't understand the sacrifice that it takes sometimes.0:34:58.3 Mischa: Yeah. It sounds like you are not only gifted at doing that scary work yourself, but you've systemized a way to...0:35:08.0 Anthony Trucks: Oh, very much.0:35:09.7 Mischa: Yeah, to pass it on to other people.0:35:10.2 Anthony Trucks: I have to. If I don't, then I'm just talking. If I was to sit here and give people all this information and not give them some way to apply it, I have done a massive disservice. I think we have a lot of people in this space that are doing a disservice because all they do is talk. Which means all you do is point the problem out and you inspire and motivate, but then you don't tell them what to do. It's kind of like people leave events and they're, "I'm excited. I'm gonna do this." And they're all gripping the steering wheel, they can't... They go to bed and one day they wake up like, "Where did it go? What do I do now? I don't feel completely inspired. I forgot how I'm supposed to feel, what's the next step?" And then it turns into this, I think, an immediate switch, it turns into, I don't know, sadness, a lack of self-esteem because I'm like, "Man, I didn't even do anything. I suck." And now it's even worse.0:36:00.5 Mischa: Yeah, it's like that emotional roller coaster, right? The one that... Yeah, I get that.0:36:05.2 Anthony Trucks: Yeah. I'll inspire you, but I'm gonna be very clear. The real motivation comes from “can you get up in the morning and do something?” And it's like that will come from, did you do it? Did you take an action? Because the moment I can give someone a guiding point and then they go execute on it, they feel amazing. It's palpable. You can't take it from them. That person is the one that's gonna get up every day because they're looking forward to that feeling. It's not how I yelled at them or that video that I made that was super cool with great drone shots. That's alright, but the thing is “is did you do something with your life that I guided you to do yourself so you created the pride that you get to keep”?0:36:42.6 Mischa: Anthony, that's beautiful. I think that that is a great place to end this section. Don't forget, we're gonna do another interview, but I just wanna say quick to everybody watching and listening to Anthony and I, if this was fantastic and you want to get more of what Anthony has to offer and see more, upgrade to the All-access pass for the bonus interview because Anthony and I are going to go even deeper. And I have a few more amazing questions and I'm gonna go let you pick what we wanna talk about. Before we end this section, is there anything that you think we missed or you wanted to say before we stop this bit?0:37:27.9 Anthony Trucks: I don't. No. I believe those who wanna be better will go join. There's always this thing that years ago someone explained to me was like, "You wanna make an investment, but you can go and try to invest in a company, right? But the best investment is always in yourself." And those who pay, pay attention, because it's worth more. And if it's worth more, you'll do more with it. So those who are like, "I really wanna commit to doing something great," yeah, go ahead and take that next step because we're gonna get in here in a second and those are the people that can raise their hand and we'll look back years ago and go, "That person is successful." Why? It's not by accident. They took those next steps.0:38:04.1 Mischa: Yeah, thank you so much for that, Anthony. And then again, a quick reminder to everybody, you can go to anthonytrucks.com, click on the, “What's my identity?” Take this test. It is awesome. It helped me. And then you can also book a call, there's a link to book a call with you. So I would encourage anybody, if they don't upgrade and see the next section, to at least click on anthonytrucks.com and take the identity type quiz.[music]——————-

(October 8) Have you ever Googled the same thing?? Find out what it is at 10:35. Tonight is a BIG night in Coyote Country, Jeff and Aimee talk about it while going a LITTLE off topic! HA! Listen at 3:00. Finally, Nathan nominated his wife Sonia for the Friday Flowers Delivery. His letter to her is SO […] The post Aimee Had To Google How To Do Something EVERYONE Does appeared first on 102.7 Coyote Country.

Do you Google people before you met them? Turns out, pretty much everyone does that for you as well. Kim Kaupe is the creator of the brand new cohort-based course called Career Capital. In her course, Kim aims to help you improve how you show up when you are Googled. Kim is also an expert on using LinkedIn and Kim shares actionable tips for you in this episode. You will also learn how Kim has created a portfolio of online courses. Excited for you to Build and Grow your Portfolio Career!Learn more about Kim's Career Capital course that starts in October HEREAs always, this episode with notes is available on my website HEREConnect with Kim on Instagram!  

Get In Touch Website: https://psychopathinyourlife.com/Contributions to the show are greatly appreciated.https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=MCPE4SS8U7P3A The post TRANS GUY ANSWERS MOST GOOGLED TRANS QUESTIONS appeared first on Psychopath In Your Life.

Exactly how long do couples spend together?  Find out..  The reason one guy sued his fiancé..  How a dumb criminal got caught..  Plus the crazy things we found out when we Googled ourselves. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's National Coffee Day, San Jose is banning menthol cigarettes and flavored vapes, the dumbest questions people have Googled, Vinnie's neighbor worked on the Amazon robot, and many people say shared love of music can help avoid fights with your family!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes certain random questions just pop up in your head, but you never actually bother to find the right answer. Lucky for you, we've found the answers to some of the most popular questions everybody's asked themselves at least once in their life. So, let's finally get to the truth! Being an astronaut is such a vastly different profession and way of life from what we know that we've got all sorts of questions! For example, what time zone do astronauts on the ISS use? Back in the day, using UTC was convenient for both the USSR and the US, and it's stayed that way to this very day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gary gets a call from an upset "Robert Hossenpepper" in a new #PhoneTap about those Christmas decorations going up way too early in the store! We talk about some crazy awkward living arrangements YOU found yourselves in! We get an update from Beth about her coworker that got free drinks for wearing scrubs...there was a confrontation! And in another Group Therapy, she didn't find what she expected when she Googled her new boyfriend!

Have you ever GOOGLED your date? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we sit down with Ewan Shepherd from Trek Travel to discuss their upcoming Girona Gravel Tour trips. We learn about the city, the cycling community and the abundance of gravel that surrounds the city. Trek Travel Gravel Tour Girona  Join The Ridership Support the Podcast Automated Transcription (please excuse the typos): Trek Travel   [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton.  [00:00:06] This week on the podcast, we're joined by UN shepherd European logistics manager for track travel. Based out of Girona Spain.  [00:00:14] As the longtime listener knows I've been super keen on the idea of gravel travel and super excited to see this industry grow up.  [00:00:22] We had an earlier discussion with Juan De La Roca about Southern Colorado and building that up as a gravel destination. And now we're seeing events like LIfeTime's Rad Dirt Fest crop up over there. We've also talked to event organizers over in Europe, around the gravel epic series that was conceived. During the COVID time and didn't actually get to get its races off the ground.  [00:00:46] But one of the locations we talked about in Europe was Girona. Now for road cyclist, Girona has long been part of the discussion about where professional athletes live. And there's a reason why they live there. Amazing road, riding all over the place. So I was really excited to learn originally from the gravel epic team about Girona as a travel destination for gravel cyclists.  [00:01:11] But even more excited to learn about this trip that Trek travel is putting together their Girona, gravel bike tour.  [00:01:18] They've got a couple more departures this year in November that you can still sign up for as well as a whole host of dates for 2022, starting in the spring.  [00:01:28] After talking to you. And all I can say is sign me up. It sounds amazing. I'll let him explain it in his own words, but it sounds like Jerome has a very special place for cyclists of all kinds.  [00:01:39] And the opportunities for gravel cycling are abundant outside the city center.  [00:01:44] I'm excited for you to learn more about Girona and gravel. With that said let's dive right in to my conversation with you and shepherd  [00:01:52] Ewan welcome to the show.  [00:01:53] Ewan Shepherd: Hey Craig, thank you very much for having me and thank you everybody for listening.  [00:01:58] Craig Dalton: I appreciate you joining us on a Friday evening over there in Spain, I'm super excited about the topic we're going to discuss today as the listener or the longterm listener has known. [00:02:08] I've talked about gravel travel as something I'm super excited about because as we all know, it's such a great way to explore the world and the idea of packing my bike and going somewhere exotic, like Girona Spain is super exciting to me. So when I got the opportunity to connect with Trek travel, Dig into this trip and dig into Jarana grab gravel jumped at it. [00:02:31] So you, and thank you for joining me. And let's just get started by a little bit about your background.  [00:02:37] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, no worries. Thank you again for having me. And I guess we share something in common that we both enjoy eating well by bike. So gravel travel is definitely evident between us all. Huh. So Bob, my background it's been varied. [00:02:50] I started off as a kid, not really enjoying the power of two wheels on my own preferring Moda, power of motocross, bikes, and motor sport, and pursue the a career in motor sport. I am, I'm only 29, so it's not, it wasn't a long career. And then I decided to jump into the cycle career really because my brother threw me on an old racing bike of hairs and said, we're going trick racing of what is this. [00:03:14] And yeah. That's how I got into cycling and kind of started to learn about it. Then love cycling, all things cycling really threw me on the amount of bikes for the first time. He threw me on a cyclocross bike for the first time, took me to attract for the first time. And just more and more, I ate it up and started falling in love with with cycling and And then I thought, why not help out in my local bike shop? [00:03:37] Because I was in between jobs and bugging the owner and the mechanic calling in on the bike and asking for them to help me with this, or could they get pots or for that? And then they were like, Hey, we need an extra hand here. And you're pretty mechanically minded. Can you want to come and help us out? [00:03:53] And that's how I, it. Wrenching in a bike shop. And from there, it took me to I was actually living in Australia at the time and working in a shop debt. And then I started working for the initial prompt and dealer in Australia, which was pretty fun and interesting. Little folding bikes, which were going all over kind of the Australasia and New Zealand even send a bite that prompted the Fiji. [00:04:17] And then I moved back to the UK and was starting working for old mountain bike brands that maybe some of your listeners have heard of head of pay cycles. They're one of the first UK monocyte grants set up by, by a young family at the time who did same as me. They love motocross and enjoy bike riding. [00:04:38] And they wanted a bike to, to train on during the time that they weren't racing on the road. And so they imported mountain bikes yet to important Gary fishers at the time, because there was nothing else in Europe and or in the UK. So he, Adrian is the main designer of the car. And he designed his own on mountain bikes. [00:04:57] Did y'all say 100, was that famous plus bikes, square tube. aluminum that they rooted out pots of the frame to make it lighter. So I started working for them after they did the whole amount of bike brand and we They had two shops at the time that they just started and started in rental centers. [00:05:14] So I joined them a running one at that shops. And then they got back into the frames. And that's when started to learn more about frame design, different bikes, and the whole Enduro scene was mounted bike and jurors scene was growing. And that was something that we were really interested in the time. [00:05:34] And. I was starting to cyclocross race at a time. I would go off a weekend, so cyclocross race and come back to work. And we were designing 29 S slack long, low amount of bikes. And we also had a total. Version cause Adrian and his wife happy love to go off to all sorts of places. [00:05:53] The, they did Chile, they went and wrote the Santiago combo skeleton and Northern Spain, all of these cycle touring. And he adapted one of the hardtail Enduro steel mountain bikes and put lugs on it. So he could take. And I was like, I liked the look of that bite, but I don't really I don't want to put drop bars on it. [00:06:14] Can I put drop bars on it? Let's try it. And so here I had a 29 mountain bike slack long, whoa, with with a draw bar on it. And I was like this pretty cool. And they were looking to, they already had an exi carbon bikes. I was like, can we do this a bit lighter? Because. Yorkshire is, I know you're you have family that Craig and it's up down. [00:06:35] Dale is Dale is a small valley and it's really steep at each side. And I live in between the two national products of the north York Moors and the Yorkshire Dales. And they have so many of these little Dales. So riding across that, you'd go down and it's like down 25% down to a flat valley, then literally back up the other side, 25 to 30%. [00:06:57] So I wanted something nice and light, but to go all day across the Dales and the malls And so we were making this and thinking, oh, this could be a cool and gravel was coming on the scene at the time. And I was interested in bike packing with it and just testing out something that was a good touring bike. [00:07:18] But at the same time, I just saw touring at the time as being something that my parents did or all the people did when they retired. So I wanted something fun cause I still enjoyed enjoy mountain biking. So I wanted to take it down some trails at the same time as doing a hundred K on it, which I certainly wouldn't do on my one 60 mil. [00:07:36] Enjoy a bike, do a hundred K, but so that's where I discovered this cyclocross gravel mix. That we all call gravel today. Which Adrian at the time was like, we used to race on my, on a bikes would drop handlebars XC and downhill back in the 1980s. Cause inventing anything new it's all coming round in circles, the wheels going round, as they say. [00:08:00] So that was really my early years in the cycling industry playing with that. And then. Being honest, Googled cool bike mechanic jobs in one places which took me back to Australia. And then I wanted to go back to Europe and it took me to the warmest place at the time, which was the Canary islands which was great for gaining some exposure of just massive cyclists all at once. [00:08:24] Thousands of people on the road, just riding the bikes, having fun on holiday guided, worked in rental shops. Love the Canary island lifestyle. And then I just stumbled across Trek travel. I told the global logistics manager at one day, I was like, I want to come work for you because I want to help out on some of your big trips. [00:08:41] They were doing tour de France and big Pyrenees trips and out trips. And I just really liked the idea of offering support to. To other people, not the I'd been guy, a guy that I wanted to support the guides. I knew all the tricks of all the problems of being a guide. So I wanted to help them most of all, help back help their guests. [00:09:04] And that kind of leads me to here where I'm the European logistics coordinator for Trek travel and in our home base of drones.  [00:09:11] Craig Dalton: Amazing. It's such a, it's so interesting. As people who have been around the sport of cycling for a long time to trace back when you first started doing the thing that later became gravel cycling. [00:09:25] Because obviously as you've indicated, as we've discussed before, People have been riding drop bar bikes off-road for a long time, but it was this kind of gradual progression of componentry, frame, design, methodology, tires, brakes, all these things combined to making what was once somewhat a hacky type experience where you were maybe bringing a bike that wasn't exactly suited for the job to where we are now. [00:09:53] That depending on where you are and how you want to set up your bike. There's such a wide variety of ways in which you can configure these bikes to ride on the roads and trails wherever you live in the world.  [00:10:05] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. It's always fascinated me coming from like a motor sport design element. [00:10:10] Always into aerodynamics working with formula two, formula three. And then I had to, I always had a love for kind of classic cause I raised something in the UK or Europe rally cross, which I don't think you have in us, but it's it's exactly that it's a cross between this second is gravel road and dirt, and you drive a little bit of each and we always used to race the classic mini Coupa's. [00:10:35] That was my classic love of cause. But yeah, that was a tangent. Sorry.  [00:10:40] Craig Dalton: No, it's an interesting perspective. I hadn't, no, one's brought that up before, but it's totally true. There's parallels in that experience because you had to have a car that drove well on the road. Capable off-road and presumably every driver, just like every rider had to make those difficult choices of, okay. [00:10:57] Do I want it to be higher performing on-road or off-road and what's that happy medium for me as a, as an athlete.  [00:11:04] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. And I think that changes with your with you personally, you may be a road cyclist, but you have that instinct to what's down there and it's a gravel road to go off road and explore it. [00:11:18] And you want to feel safe and comfortable. You don't want to necessarily take your 23 mil tires, cotton road bike down a. The track you want a bike that's comfortable and safe to do it all.  [00:11:31] Craig Dalton: Yeah, exactly. Talking about Trek travel specifically, obviously with the track name associated with it, people associated directly with the brand, but the company itself as Trek travel. [00:11:43] Can you tell us a little bit about its origins and how long it's been operating?  [00:11:47] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah it's actually a 20th year of fun. 2020 years since charter travel was thought up in the, in Trek itself where it started with just three people brought into to en enhance the experience that people were getting when they were not just buying a bite or buying into the Trek brand, which. [00:12:09] Is ride bikes, have fun, feel good. And Chuck just wants to get more people on bikes to have fun. And one of the ways was to offer them a trip of a lifetime of vacation, of a lifetime to somewhat. And that idea grew over the last 20 years studying in the U S and then Trek bought into the protein of yeah. [00:12:30] Trek. And they started running a VIP trips to the total France and bringing clients across. But that specifically to see the tour and see the classics that the ring in Europe have the outs to, to climb out west, to do Mon Von to go to the pyramids and do the tour of my life. The real bread and butter of your. [00:12:51] And that's grown just more destinations, more places to ride more great experiences by bike. And yeah, that's brought us to now at 20 years  [00:13:01] Craig Dalton: old. Yeah. And for those of you who have not done a bike tourism trip, it really is amazing. And a luxury. It's obviously a luxury to be able to afford it, but to be able to go over and do this and to have someone plan out the best of the best to plan out the best roads, the best routes when you're coming off the Tourmalet or a mom volunteer to knowing the right cafe to stop in having extra gear for you, having a guide that, speaks the language, but more importantly can help you get integrated into the culture in my personal experience, having done several trips over and yeah. [00:13:37] It was just such a great time. If you can afford to spend that time on your bikes, spend a week on one of these trips. It's just so amazing, which is why I remained super jazzed and excited to talk about the gravel tours that track is introducing. When did you first start to see gravel cycling as something that you could package a trip around? [00:14:01] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. I don't know who or when the first kind of the idea here's what talks about it. Cause I'm sure it's been something we're always looking at new trends, new you, new ways to travel that that people want to do. And new experiences and to we're primarily on the road, we started with mountain bike trips. [00:14:20] Think I wouldn't say five, six years ago. And dos were in small pockets in Iceland, Norway, and that's a great way to get completely off the road. But then we found a a lot of people. They still want it to, they still want it to do a bit of everything. They want it to go on the road still. [00:14:38] They wanted to do the classic climbs as well as being off the road. So it was like that mix of, we took you to this beautiful forest, but actually you want it to be on the road as well in the same week. And, but you didn't want to do it on the amount of bike. And at the time there was no real bike that we had. [00:14:56] Do it and then as the Demani that tried to money evolve, it's got this name as being the, do it all bike. Whether it's ISO speed and its ability to take why the tires it's really comfortable Fabienne Cancellara famously designed the bike to to win Piru bay and and Flanders of all the couple and mixed terrain. [00:15:14] Yeah, this this is a bite that we can use for multipurpose. And three years ago we started using it as just guides and company. People would come to drone and all they say is, Hey, can we go right gravel with, we don't want to ride the road round here. We heard the gravel is amazing. So we'd stick some hybrid tires on the demand and off we'd go, just exploring off the beaten track. [00:15:36] And that's. Where it came from and grew from that with into a week long trip here in Barona. And yeah that's why I came. That's  [00:15:46] Craig Dalton: great to hear it. It's interesting to hear that it came from the riders up and great to hear that you, as a company, listened and started to build more experiences around that, as we've talked about a little bit offline, Girona for anybody who's follows. [00:16:01] Professional road. Cycling has always had this huge allure as a destination for a lot of pros live there. So we presume there's a lot of great road riding out there. Do you feel that in the city, is, are there a ton of road cyclists around every week?  [00:16:20] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, I would say there's, I wouldn't say there's a ton of road cyclist. [00:16:23] I'd say there's thousands of cyclists in general. On any given weekend, you can see mountain bikers road bike as gravel bike is like trick bikers nowadays. But. All the time. You can see people on bikes. It's a city which has a big network of city bikes and like docs every way. When you can pick up the city bikes for three years, you can rent the bike for the day to ride around town. [00:16:47] It's not a no that we call it a town. Although it's a city, it's very, it's a small, condensed old town. So it's great to explore by bike with all this small streets and things. And yeah, as you said it's known it's gotten more well-known because of all the professionals that live here modern, the bike roads you name it, there's many triathletes Yan for Dino to name one of the big biggest triathletes pulls this, his house. [00:17:11] And it's yeah, in Europe, it's known as one of the places where particularly I'm going to say foreign writers come from Australia and New Zealand, Canada, us they use this, is that is that personal? And I'd probably say right now in Jarana you have upwards of 8,200 pro cyclists living here which is really high for any city in the world. [00:17:34] Given the amount of pros in general, living in Jonah, and you have three of the biggest teams here locally, you have EDS Israel cycling academy have a small base here. You have a couple of continental teams, a couple of the U S continental teams have their European basis here. So you not only have teams, you have sorry. [00:17:56] You not only have writers, you have the support here as well. And they say, if you just want a massage, it's the best place in the, in Europe. Go from mass massage because of the level is so high, they used the pros. You never get a bad massage here at all because the misuse could have been rubbing right. [00:18:14] Chris from the day before he attends to you, so you get pro service, whatever you're doing, and that's not just in cycling related. I'm sure we're going to talk about this, but the coffee scene, the food scene everything has that little twist towards catering. Which is amazing. Yeah. I think that's  [00:18:32] Craig Dalton: super interesting, obviously the writing I want to be doing is off-road, but as someone who's a fan of professional cycling in general, just having that be infused as part of the city, in addition to the culture, which maybe we'll talk about a little bit more. [00:18:46] It's just going to be a fun addition to that trip for us geographic challenged Americans, where Israel.  [00:18:53] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, so Girona is it's in Spain. It's in the region of Catalonia which is to the Northeast. We border on Spain. We bought it with Spain and Dora and France. And. Yeah. [00:19:09] And the Northeast, and  [00:19:10] Craig Dalton: It's not specifically on the coast, but how far of a ride is it to the coast from Jarana city center?  [00:19:16] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, so Girona is it's probably for any cycling destination is really well situated. It's just a 40 minutes drive to them. And 40 minutes drive from the Pyrenees. [00:19:28] So yeah, slap bang in the middle of mountains and see and give you perspective in writing terms. I'm sorry, I'm going to talk in kilometers. But we're looking at about a nice 50 mile loop to the coast and back.  [00:19:43] Craig Dalton: Okay. And look at just having Google maps open as we speak, it looks like there is a lot of, kind of national parks base in green space, just outside the city. [00:19:53] Ewan Shepherd: literally the back of the town has a very famous climate song of UVS might be of huddle of L's angels. It's just over seven, 10 K climate just over 6% is always say to the first and last day, you're hearing Jerone. You're going to write this. If you don't write it every day. [00:20:10] And that leads into a beautiful national pocket, the bat at the back, which has miles of more, more challenging gravel all the way to the coast. And then on the inland side of Jerome, just straight into two massive valleys, which just keep going up and up and before, it you're in the parodies. [00:20:29] Craig Dalton: For those clients immediate,  [00:20:31] Ewan Shepherd: very little flat writing.  [00:20:33] Craig Dalton: Yeah. It's going to ask for those climbs immediately outside of Dharana. How much elevation do you gain to get to a local peak? Is that a thousand feet or 200 meters?  [00:20:43] Ewan Shepherd: L's angels is about 600. Elevation was very, to the very peak the closest high point around here, you're looking at about a thousand meters up to the highest peak in Catalonia itself is just shy of 2000 meters. [00:21:00] So the elevation is not super high but you are going from sea level. Most of the time But it's all the little undulations. It's a rolling terrain. I would say, yeah.  [00:21:09] Craig Dalton: Gotcha. Yeah, it certainly sounds like those, they jet up pretty quickly as a lot of coastal ranges do so for the writing, when we talk about the gravel riding in Jarana, we've talked about how great the road riding is. [00:21:21] But what does it look like to get on these gravel roads and what are they like? Are they super chopped up or are they smooth or did you get a little bit of both? I'd love to just get a sense for what you're out there. Riding.  [00:21:33] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. I think you have a bit of everything we say, Girona is the Disneyland of cycling. [00:21:40] And I first experienced kind of the gravel, as I said, we just. Through some hybrid Taya, some 32 mil hybrid tires on a demise and went straight on lucky living out slightly outside of Toronto. So just 10 K from drone essentially itself. And it's mainly farm lands and going back to my kind of love for cycling in in the UK. [00:22:02] With the Dales and we have things called bridleways and I was in search of these things to start with because it's not well publicized gravel anyway. So you just go out the door and go, okay, take the first, left off the road. That doesn't seem like a road and see where it heads. [00:22:17] And sometimes you end up with a beautiful, smooth gravel track with that. Evidently to S at a, an extra road to people's houses all you get unlucky and you end up and it tends into single track and actually becomes quite flowing. This is actually it's maybe a mountain bike route, and you guys through a single track, really nice employee through the woods can be quiet Rocky in places. [00:22:40] This part of Spain is very Rocky with granite. I'm limestone. Costa brother, the literal translation is like a rugged coastline. So that is evident all the way through. But you have also what they call via Verde green routes, which are smooth, hard-packed almost manmade smooth gravel, Sandy tracks which becoming more and more common. [00:23:05] From Girona itself to the little towns, to get people off the roads from all levels of cyclists, from kids to families, you can see them just packed on these green ones. Which a fantastic to start a new route on, and then you head either to the mountains, or maybe you want to go to the coast and you can just hop off on to onto something. [00:23:24] As long as it doesn't say, don't go this way. Is such a friendly kind of feeling towards cyclists. The even if you I've ended up some days, just going along a little, same little track down a shoot and I'm in the back of someone's garden and raking up leaves. Oh, sorry. That's the end. To direct you back onto the track and you were meant to be down that I take you're meant to go that way, but yeah. [00:23:48] So it's a bit of everything. That's amazing.  [00:23:52] Craig Dalton: It's so cool that, to be able to leave the city and choose your own adventure and just have that ability to explore and find all kinds of different terrain that, that sounds like such a special area and not surprising why you guys decided to introduce the Girona gravel bike tour trip, which looks amazing. [00:24:13] Can we talk about that trip and what it entails?  [00:24:16] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. So to give you an an idea of the overall of the trip, it's it's a one hotel trip based here in Jarana. Chose to base it right out of the center. We work with a really great hotel, Nord in the center. It's really cycling focused. And we do that. [00:24:33] It's based kind of off our right camp, which not to diversify what I'm talking about. It's all about eat, sleep, ride, repeat. So we make it nice and simple to focus on the writing and it's for four days of writing and it's designed to. The slightly taken on the more intermediate to advanced side of kind of people's levels. [00:24:55] So we say the most people should be have some experience. It shouldn't be their first time writing a gravel bike to get the most out of it. And we have easy days which are, like I say, just using these Greenways, getting out of the city, heading to see some of the beautiful, rugged coastline. [00:25:13] And then we have some more avid days which heads. What's the mountains. And we actually found some of our routes through used to calm. Are you still does? Comes here every year in the spring to do some training before he started his road season. And we'd always wait till he hummed, we see him here. [00:25:30] And then when we're looking on struggling, why did he go? Where did he go? Because he always seems to find some stupidly hard climbs, some great gravel climates. We didn't know that. And we actually introduced some of these to the trip and it's like a, like an outdoor as of gravel, just snaking switchbacks one after the other, up to this beautiful peak point with a big cross on the top. [00:25:53] Yeah. And then you're trying to work out where he went and then you look down the other side and oh, he went down there and you you try it. But then for. For many people, it's probably too much of a Rocky rock garden. So you end up heading back down like a beautiful the switching snaking all the way back down is the safest way sometimes. [00:26:14] But yeah, that's a, an overview of a gravel trip.  [00:26:18] Craig Dalton: Nice. I've done trips of my two trips. One. We were moving basically every year. And the second we had a home base and I have to say my preference is for that home base, because I think it allows you to just absorb the culture a little bit more and be a tourist in the city that you're staying in. [00:26:35] You don't have to pack your gear up every night. So there's something nice about having that hub and ride mom.  [00:26:41] Ewan Shepherd: Yup. Yup. It definitely just opening your suitcase, getting it, your kid out, put it in the wardrobes and you don't have to pack it again. The following day to move on. I like that it's focused on eat, sleep, right? [00:26:53] Repeat, enjoy your writing. The guy. Take care of everything else. And you're in the center of the city and you're a Stone's throw from the old town. You can go for a walk on the evenings, your afternoons and evenings. yours your own to either relax, take a massage or wander the town, go sit and sip coffee. [00:27:12] Do all the locals. Do any afternoon, go have a beer and get ready for your evening meal. And and that's what people want.  [00:27:18] Craig Dalton: Now our writers on these trips typically bring in their own bikes or are you providing a bike for them?  [00:27:23] Ewan Shepherd: Just really most people take a bike from us, the Trek demonic. [00:27:28] You can bring your own bike. It doesn't does it affect price? It doesn't affect the price, but we do it because it saves you having to pack your by like in a box and all the hassle of bringing it to the building it. Yeah. All of that. You just turn up and on the first day, your bikes there, it's already set up with your measurements, to your bike from home and ready to go. [00:27:46] You don't need to worry about it. And our guides full train mechanics and take care of your bike throughout the whole week. And particularly as gravel can be hot on your bikes. And you don't want any problems with your own bikes, cause it's only going to compromise your riding,  [00:27:58] Craig Dalton: as someone who can be hard on the bike. I appreciate that. So at the end of the day, I can hand my bike off to someone and it's going to come back to me better than I left it.  [00:28:05] Ewan Shepherd: Yep. Every day, I'm sure the guides gonna look after that bike and and give you it in the morning. Like it's brand new, no issues,  [00:28:14] Craig Dalton: particular trip. [00:28:15] Are you providing the routes like GPX files? How does it work from a kind of a day-to-day practice perspective?  [00:28:22] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. So normally day to day, you'd wake up do your morning routine get dressed, go for breakfast. Get a hot tea, Catalan breakfast. Then head down to, to pick up your bikes from the bike room. [00:28:35] Your guides would meet you dad. Give you a kind of a morning briefing. The route has to go. We provide every guest with a Garmin, with preloaded GPS routes. And your guide is going to typically you have one guide on the bike, possibly two, and then a guide in a support vehicle following behind not only any issues that you have, but also by signature snack tables along the route. [00:28:59] So you could be riding through a wood and then suddenly. The van is just there and your guide has gone out a table and put some beautiful snacks out. So right in the moment when you're like, I wish I had put more water in my bottle, I wish that I brought an extra bar. That's when you're going to get to find your guides. [00:29:18] We know those spots well,  [00:29:20] Craig Dalton: nice. And, as athletes are going to be coming over with different ability, levels and fitness levels and sort of interest in flogging themselves levels. Is there an ability for, if we look at it a daily route and say I'd fancy doing a little bit more. [00:29:35] I want to come home with my legs broken every day. Are there those types of options and flexibility built into these things?  [00:29:41] Ewan Shepherd: Yup. Yup. It sounds like most of our guides they always want to go do more. So yeah, we yeah. Have a standard route for the day and then w what we call that the avid group for the day. [00:29:51] So I guess, Craig, this is for you the extra little add on which could be anything from an extra climb or an extra loop that you just hit the route on your GPS and adult. It'll take you. And we have a, an ethos of ride at your own pace. Yeah. I don't really ride. It's nice, right. [00:30:11] As a group, but also it's nice experience at your own pace. So we definitely encourage that. Guides will move around you rather than you having to stick to your guide. And they'll accommodate if if you've got slow riders or if you want to go up and do the route quite often you're going to have the guide wanting to go with you and show you that extra little climb or. [00:30:30] Take you on a, an extra level route or redo a route from two days ago because you, it was such an amazing experience. Definitely it does something for me.  [00:30:40] Craig Dalton: That's good to know. Yeah. For me, when I'm able to carve out this time in my life and I may be unique, but maybe not, when I go on one of these trips, since I don't have the responsibilities that I have at home, I don't have to care for my son. [00:30:54] I don't have to do, I need the things I need to do around the house. All I want to do is ride my bike and really, as long as I can prop myself up at the dinner table that night, that's about all I need to achieve in the rest of the.  [00:31:06] Ewan Shepherd: Yup. Yup. Did that have. A full vacation of a lifetime that's that's catered for you. [00:31:13] And that's definitely why I think people do a group trip or an organized talk because you mentioned that if you can afford to do it, but can you afford not to do it? If you've only got 20 days holiday a year, To spend spend your time planning for your holiday, and then once you get that to spend time working out, okay, what should I ride today? [00:31:34] Or where should we stop for lunch? Or where's the best place to have dinner tonight? It's all done for you. You can just make the most of what you want to do, which if you want to go on a cycling holiday and you want to ride your bike as much as.  [00:31:47] Craig Dalton: Yeah. And I think it's, it's further complicated when you're trying to ride gravel. [00:31:50] So I did a self guided tour in the Alps and there were it was pretty easy to understand the road routes that were famous to the famous climbs and figure that out on my own. But when it comes to gravel and this is something I've spoken about a lot on the podcast, there's just so much to be gained from having a little bit of local knowledge. [00:32:09] Because you cannot look at a path necessarily. And know, is that a super Rocky path that I'm going to be going four miles an hour on? Or is it actually, a smooth, single track that I'm going 16 miles an hour. And we can't know that from the outside, without talking to cyclists in that local area, while we still want to have that sense of adventure and allowing the ride to unfold. [00:32:34] It's just really nice in my opinion, particularly if you're going to spend the money to go travel to a destination, to just have a little bit of this served up to you and be able to get out there, worry for you.  [00:32:44] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. Yeah, no, I definitely agree in something that you spend all the time working out, attract to go down and then suddenly it leads to nothing and you've wasted an hour of your ride to, and then you have to backtrack. [00:32:59] And that's yeah. With a small amount of time in Europe or wherever you're traveling, you want to make money. My  [00:33:06] Craig Dalton: Spanish is bad enough that if I end up in your garden, there's probably going to be an international incident. [00:33:11] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. Yeah. But everybody's friendly hand signals are just, yes. It's I like, I think I've written in a lot of places in the world and definitely definitely Spain is a really good for.  [00:33:26] Craig Dalton: Yeah. When you have that many cyclists moving through a community, obviously the locals are experienced seeing these people and they realize, they're good for the community. [00:33:36] Hopefully we're good. Environmental stewards and polite cyclists. So it's just a symbiotic relationship for the committee.  [00:33:43] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah. Yeah. And as we are in a. Company we're based in Madison, Wisconsin. And we've also been in Jerone now for nearly six, seven years. So we have a good hold in the community. We employ, we have lots of people that work for attract travel, who live here locally. [00:34:00] Who are deep rooted in the community. So we often we work a lot with our subcontractors. We work really hard to find the best people who not only have the best winery or the best restaurant, but they have the best ethos to, to work with us and help our guests have the best experience. [00:34:19] It's not just about the product that serving, but how they're making our guests and us as a company feel. So it's really important that local aspect, but everything that's involved,  [00:34:29] Craig Dalton: such an amazing opportunity that travel affords the traveler, just the ability to see how things that are important in the culture. [00:34:37] Are manufactured and meet people who are doing them and, meet you, meet the restaurant tours. Like all of that is just what has kept me traveling my entire life and hopefully will have me continue traveling. So a couple of final questions for you. UN what is your favorite local cuisine? What can't we miss when we go there? [00:34:57] And what is your favorite part of Sharona from a tourist perspective?  [00:35:01] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, that's a definitely a hard question. I don't even have a closer prepared, good answer. Where do I want to start? Definitely Girona has a lot of local cuisine Catalan cutline cuisine. It's a very simple way of cooking in one aspect. [00:35:18] And why. One thing that people often. Think of it all. I'll Paya, no, throw that away. It's it's not Paya that you'd come to get here. They have something called pinch Hills, which is very similar to tapas and it's one of my favorite local it's not a particular dish. [00:35:37] It's a way of eating and. In the restaurant, you have lots of little plates on the counter with little chunks of bread with on top of them, either fresh fish with with all sorts of toppings or. Saw or booty FADA, there's the sausage which they do in many different kinds of blood sausages. [00:35:56] And lots of little dishes. And often you don't sit down at a table. This is going to freak people out in COVID at times, but it's a great social way of eating because you're taking small plate and you're taking it and you're just standing in a bar basically. With everybody else who's enjoying it, but it's that great atmosphere of eating together in the center of town, which often spills out into the streets on a Friday and Saturday of just people standing out on the streets with small plates and a little what they called Canada, a little glass of the local beer, which they have a lot of really good local breweries here. [00:36:30] Which I know a lot of people love to test out all the local. And Catalonia to the complete other scale of things has some of Europe's best Michelin star restaurants like per area, just in, in Rona, this small area, up to 45 Ks from the center, you have 35 Michelin star restaurants. [00:36:50] For gastronomy it's an amazing place because of all the local ingredients of the winery. You have a lot of cider production with apple and pear farms, which you ride through. One of my favorite rides to the coast air takes you through just miles and miles of apple orchards and tail orchards which is just going to be picked in about a half a month's time. [00:37:13] It's main picking season here. Delicious. Yeah, it's a, and I haven't even talked about coffee coffee, the culture of coffee, drinking. Was brought to your owner with cyclist, cyclists, need coffee, and they need good coffee. And the Canadian Chrystia and Maya was one of the more well-known people who brought the coffee culture and his own roastery of the service costs. [00:37:34] And Lamatsia his his coffee shop. And from dad nearly 10 years ago, it sprung into. That each corner was developing its own taste for coffee. And as the locals really have a passion for it now at brewing really good speciality coffee, which, like I said, we can't live without it. [00:37:51] They definitely have a captured audience. Indeed.  [00:37:54] Craig Dalton: This is amazing. Girona has always been tops on my list of places to go and it certainly remains. In that post COVID top slot for me, I can't wait to join you on one of these trips. At some point, I know there's a couple trips left this year. [00:38:09] It looks like November 7th and November 14th are available for departure dates. And obviously once again, in the spring in 2022. So for all the listeners out there, you can just visit Trek, travel.com and just write search for Jeronica dry gravel. And you'll see the trip we've been talking about. It looks like a heck of a lot of fun and you can almost guarantee you that I'll be there one of these days. [00:38:32] Ewan Shepherd: Yeah, I will look forward to it. Look forward to meeting in person and hopefully you'll get to experience your own home and it won't be your last visit to drone, or I can assure you for that much.  [00:38:44] Craig Dalton: Thanks for all the great information you and I appreciate you joining us.  [00:38:48] That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel ride podcast. Big thanks to you and for joining us and telling us all about that great trip that Trek travel has organized. Again, those dates are November this year. As well as throughout the Springs to go, please visit truck travel.com. To figure out what itinerary might work for you. I hope you're stoked. Like I am.  [00:39:10] I'm desperate to get my tires overseas. And sample some of that great gravel in Spain and elsewhere in the world. We'll leave it at that for this week. If you have any questions, feel free to join us over at the ridership. Just visit www.theridership.com to join that free community. [00:39:29] If you're interested in supporting the podcast, ratings and reviews are hugely helpful. It's something easy you can do to support what I'm doing. And if you have a little bit more energy or means feel free to visit, buymeacoffee.com/thegravelride  [00:39:44] To help underwrite some of the financial costs associated with this broadcast. Until next time. Here's to finding. some dirt onto your wheels

Listen to Valentine in The Morning every weekday from 5a-10a on 104.3MYfm in Los Angeles.

Have you had a few failures in the agency world? Everyone is afraid of failure. But when you change perspective and treat it like a lesson instead of a defeat. That's the lesson from today's guest, Frank Kern, a well-known marketing consultant and agency owner who has ventured to start several agencies over the years. In this episode, Frank discusses some of his failures from these past businesses, the lessons learned, and what he would do differently. He offers valuable advice for anyone starting a digital marketing agency. He offers an honest and upfront take on every stumble, from starting in the advertising world without really knowing the rules, not listening to his own advice, and taking on every client, even the bad ones. Don't be afraid to start over. Frank shares the knowledge he has gained over the years starting different agencies and learning from the mistakes made in each new venture. He has never been afraid to start over. “That's what I love about the advertising business,” he says, “it's never going away”. So there's always a new opportunity waiting for the ones who dare to take that step and learn from past mistakes. He is now enjoying his most successful venture and is very glad everything happened as it did. Don't try to grow too fast. This is the first lesson Frank has taken from his past agencies. Where in the past he used to take as many clients as he could get, now he sets a target. Five clients a week. This enables him and his team to not be reactive and build out operations. It's been a learning curve for them. Drilling into the process, making sure there are checklists, getting better at inner team communications. But Frank says it's been worth it and that he's definitely seeing the results. Take accountability. Having a business partner is not easy and takes serious commitment. Some prefer to not even attempt it. Frank has been lucky to have a few amicable separations from past partners. The secret? He doesn't really know, but he shares the importance of taking accountability for your mistakes. “If things are your damn fault, you have to realize they're your fault”. YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Sponsors and Resources Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Don't Be Afraid to Start Over in the Agency World, Just Like Frank Kern Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I have another amazing guest, Frank Kern. If you guys haven't heard of, uh, he is amazing. I've learned so much from him over the years on writing copy and marketing and direct response. Kind of the godfather of direct response marketing. A lot of you guys know Frank Kern and he's done a bunch of agencies in the past, so we're going to talk about his experience with marketing and his agency. Let's go ahead and get into the show. What's up, Frank? How's it going? Frank: [00:00:40] Dude, I was just watching the intro roll. I love the just two seconds of pensive staring off into the distance. Jason: [00:00:47] Well, I don't want to lose anybody's attention. Especially people with ADD like us. So, you know, you got try to keep them there. Frank: [00:00:55] I didn't tell you this pre-interview. So if I don't make any sense today it's because I have dyslexia and ADD and I woke up at 12:52 and… No, or 12 something, and my dyslexia… I mean, I have the biggest font size ever on my watch. And I thought it was, I thought it said 4:52. So I took my ADD meds, which I keep right beside the bed. And they kicked in. I've been awake since 2:00 AM I'm just like… so stupid right now. Jason: [00:01:24] There you go. Well, that makes it fun for a podcast. Frank: [00:01:28] Yeah, that's my disclaimer. Jason: [00:01:30] Awesome. Well, um, for the people that have lived under a rock for a little bit… Tell us kind of a little bit of your origin story about how and why you've wanted to create an agency over the past couple of years. Frank: [00:01:45] Uh, okay. I'll be mercifully brief because this isn't even remotely interesting for anybody. Um, sold credit card machines door to door. Hated it, very bad at it. Um, Googled or there wasn't Google back then, it was 1999. Did a search for how to sell credit card machines on the internet cause I didn't wanna have to talk to people. They were all mean to me because I was going door to door and interrupting their, uh, place of business. Discovered direct response marketing and advertising that way and started selling courses. Sold one that got me in trouble with the government. Um, it's important to learn the rules of advertising if you want to do advertising. I did not learn them, but, uh, after that I did. And um, then, sold stuff about dog training and kind of cut my teeth on that and sold a lot of marketing-related information. And always felt like… It's going to sound really weird, but I always felt like it didn't count, you know? Like that's… to use my, uh, my late grandfather's term it's Mickey mouse BS. And I was like, I need to do it for real. I need to actually build campaigns and do stuff with real businesses. So it was for that reason and because I absolutely love advertising and I get to hit refresh on other people's stats besides my own. Um, that's why I did it. Jason: [00:03:00] Yeah. Well, um, you, uh, like I told you a couple of years ago, you kn… I found you and Jeff Walker and a couple other people through a Tony Robbins event I went, where they sent out the, I guess the money masters or something. And that's right when I was coming off selling the agency and I'd never heard of direct response at all. And I was like, wow, if I could put this together with what I know here… I was like, man, this could be a pretty good machine. Uh, so I want to thank you for, for, for doing what you've done over the years. And, and, uh, you've been… Someone that has really figured out how to make someone kind of respond to you. You know, especially in the marketing front. What what's kind of like, how did you go about figuring that out? Or was that just kind of intuition? Like I know you were saying, well, I just hated getting kicked out of strip joints and all these kinds of restaurants I was going into. I needed to get them to come to me. You know, how did you figured it out? Frank: [00:04:05] Well, I started by making horribly egregious unsubstantiated claims in advertising because that's what I responded to. And of course, I didn't realize there were things like regulatory bodies. This is again in 1999. And then I learned that you really can't do that and it's frowned upon. Um, so I wanted to see, well, what, what if you don't do that at all? And, um, I kind of stumbled over the whole philosophy of results in advance, which is the easiest way to convince somebody you can help them is to actually help them in advance of asking for their business. So that's always been my big secret, you know, and it was just doing that. Jason: [00:04:43] Yeah. And so when, when you started the first agency, what were some of the challenges that you experienced? Uh, and how did you overcome them? Frank: [00:04:57] Dude, so the first one… I think this is number four for me. We've got it right now, finally. But I've been attempting this since 2010, all right? So we're 12 years into your boy, Frankie, trying to make, trying to work 30 times harder for way less money, basically. When you, I know, but I like it. I can't help it, you know, and I would rather do this and make less money than do the other stuff. I don't know why. But anyway, the first one was a partnership between my cousin, Trey Smith and I and Jordan "Wolf of Wall Street" Belfort. And we had a plan, Trey and I mainly had this plan, which was we would create lead gen pages for home services companies and then manage their Google PPC accounts. We would charge a flat fee and then like, you know, let's say it was 600 bucks a month or something. And we'd spend 400 bucks on traffic and we'd keep the $200 bucks. It, uh, we did roughly 15 seconds of research, you know, and were convinced that we were geniuses. And Jordan's job was to, uh, hire and train salespeople. Cause neither Trey nor I are qualified to do that at all. So, um, that failed spectacularly, you know? So we, uh, by we, I mean, I leased a bank building in, uh, on Prospect Street all the way in California that… You know, we hired, I wanna say 40 people off of Craigslist. You know, and Jordan was training them up and then he had to go on tour to sell his stuff. And then like, nothing really happened. I got to, I got to have a lease on a bank building for a couple of years. So that was fun. Jason: [00:06:41] So why did that fail though? Like what, looking back, what could you have done to make that work? Frank: [00:06:48] Um, I could have, uh, used ads to get them, you know. So for whatever dumb reason, uh, I oftentimes fail to heed my own advice, which is all right if you want to grow the business, take the thing that's working real good and do a whole lot more of that. And then find a way to systemize and automate and scale from there. So we had this method of getting customers, which was internet ads. But when we partnered with Jordan, we were like, nope, we're not going to do that, we're going to do something we have no idea how to do, which is to call them out of the blue and then, uh, try to sell them something, you know, and so that was dumb. Uh, I mean, I'm sure people make it work, but we didn't know what the heck we were doing. And of course that model, I think would probably have ultimately doomed us because there wasn't enough margin in it. Jason: [00:07:42] Yeah. So what was version two? Frank: [00:07:46] Uh, let's see. Version two was current branding. It, that was so close to working. That's where, uh, we would do video campaigns for people. So we'd script their videos. They would shoot the footage. We would have it edited. We would run them. Excuse me, I'm losing my voice already. That's what happens in the wake up at two. Um, we would run their Facebook media for them and everything. And that actually was going pretty good. Um, I did what, uh, what I think a lot of people who are creative types do is I immediately outsource the operation. And I outsourced it to someone who didn't understand advertising. Really good understanding of operations, but didn't understand advertising. And all of this is on me because I never sat down and said, here's how the business works and here's how all the moving pieces work. So we ended up over-hiring tremendously and didn't make any money, you know, but that was, that was pretty close. Jason: [00:08:46] Okay. And then what about option three or version three? 3.0. Frank: [00:08:50] So version 3 was, uh, we tried, um, in-house again, uh, current branding once again. But instead of doing all that production for people, we were like, you know what, man? We're just gonna run their media for them at a pretty decent price. I just arbitrarily pulled 2,800 bucks off my butt. You know, like seems like an easy yes. And, um, that was going great. And then I decided it would be a good idea to partner with Grant Cardone and, uh, form Cardone Kern. I did that because I made a lot of assumptions that I'd never discussed with Grant. Uh, so again, I, I want to take full responsibility for this. I'm not here to say Grant is a bad guy or anything. So I partnered with him thinking that they would have the infrastructure that we needed to grow the agency. Cause you know, you go down to his operation, it's pretty impressive. They got meetings and stuff and… you know, meetings and stuff and people wear suits and they, they really look like they know what they're doing. And they do, but not for an ad agency. So when we partnered together, oh, and I also thought his audience was primarily business owners like brick and mortar people. So my vision for that, and this was incidentally, a conclusion that I drew after going to one event and talking to one attendee who was a roofer. And I was like, this would be the easiest client to win forever. This must be what all of his customer base is like. We should partner up, you know, and so zero foresight on, uh, on my part. So we, it, it blew up. Um, well it blew up in a good way. We got to walk clients really fast. We grew it to damn it, it was $895 a month, just under $900, a grand. And then, uh, we started hemorrhaging because the operations were bad. We, uh, by we, I mean, I, uh, had to hire a team. And then I had one dude to help me manage them. And he was good, but he was inexperienced too, in terms of trying to manage a team that big. So we just did a bad job, ultimately. Mainly is a result of operations, like missing calls, you know, like dumb things that operations people know how to do. Jason: [00:11:04] So what were some of the… I don't want to put words in your mouth about some of the assumptions, like thinking about, you know, if you were going to partner… Because a lot of people listening on the show, they, they reach a, a plateau or they're, they're kind of an inner plateau and they go, I need a partner because I can't, I don't, I feel like I've reached my max and I need to work with someone. And then they were like, well, let's just join together. So, you know, so many people are doing this and then it blows up in their face. So what would, what would have been some of those questions or assumptions to check with your partner and go, and then be like, oh, well let's kind of try this out or no, this is probably not going to work out that you could have avoided. Frank: [00:11:48] Yeah, I probably should have said, okay, I'm operating under the assumption that you're going to provide this team. Is that a true assumption? And he would have said no, because he doesn't lie. You know, he's not a bad person. Just, I've never had the damn sense to ask him. And Grant so busy he's like, all right, cool. Don't mess it up. Sounds like a good idea. Let's go. You know, so it was, we didn't really talk it out. So that probably would have been the first question was, you know, here's my assumption is this accurate? And, um, that would, that really would have been it. I think we could have overcome everything else. You know, he would've said, no, dude, I don't have that. And I'm not going to give you that you got to go build your own. I would have said, oh, I could do that on my own; I don't need us to partner together for this. We would rather keep all of the money and… You know, if I'm going to have all the headaches anyway, I might as well keep all the money. Jason: [00:12:38] Yeah. And so what, what are we looking like at version four now of, you know, post, you know, kind of making that partnership go away? I think this is the version you're on right now. Is that right? Frank: [00:12:53] Yes. Yeah. So we're looking great. What I learned is number one, don't try to grow too fast. So our target is five clients a week, you know, where it used to be as many as you can get, let's just hire more people, right? Nope, five a week. That's it, you know. So that was lesson number one. And that enables you to not be reactive and building out your operations. And lesson number, whatever number we're on is most of this stuff, I mean, I don't know about you dude, but ads are easy, you know? It's not, I mean, don't, don't tell clients it's for God's sake, but it's not really that hard. But the operations behind it, especially when you do it, we do, which is we're full service. So we'll, you know, the first thing we typically do is go fix their email. Cause that makes everything work better and they get immediate sales and then they're happy, you know? So that requires so many tiny little things to go right. That, um, that's just been a tremendous. Um, a lesson it has been that big of a learning curve, really. It's just more. Okay. Let's just keep drilling into this process, you know? And make sure there's checklists and yada yada, yada, yada. So it's been good. And then inner team communication is still we're good at it, but we could really be better at that. Um, but with clients we're good. But between ourselves, you know, we're doing… Jason: [00:14:28] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry, leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. When I, when I look at kind of the stages of agency owners that go through, they go through, there's like six. And I look at kind of the first stage is like, figuring out, like, how do I get the clients? And then the next is like, how do we get the right clients? The next is like, like, how do I replace myself from not being the salesperson or being the account manager for the clients? And then it's like, how do I build the team? And it's just like all these little stages you have to go through or systems that you need to actually set up in order to kind of, you know, get you to a point where you can pick and choose and do the things that you love doing. Like, cause I was telling you years ago it was like most agency owners are accidental. They don't want to get into it. They just, they knew how to do something really cool in marketing. And someone's like, hey, do you do this for me? And they're like, okay, you're going to give me money to do this? Like, all right, let me go do more of that and, uh, you just kind of fall into it. And then, like you're saying you're being reactionary. Um, one thing I, I have a question and probably a lot of people have a question on is, let's say you have a partner now. You got in, we didn't go over the assumptions that we figured out. Um, how can they actually go to their partner… Like how can we make a pleasant split up? Uh, you know, in order for us to go our own ways, because a lot of people, even including me, I had a partner and I looked at it like, if you don't know the bad partner, you're the bad partner. Um, that's kinda how I looked at it. And that's one of the reasons why we sold, um, you know, it was a good offer, but still I probably would have been still doing it. Um, I'm lucky that I had did have a partner that we disagree. But like what, what, what would you suggest to these people listening? Like how can you do a, a good breakup? Frank: [00:17:17] I have no idea. Um, I just ended up giving everything to the partner. I'm like, okay. Like, well, our very first one, you know, it was clear that it wasn't working and everything was in my name. So I was able to be like, all right, guys, this isn't working. Um, I'll keep paying the lease. It's in my name. See y'all later. And nobody, you know, no one cared, uh, because they're like, oh, thank God we have to mess with this anymore. This was way harder than we thought. With Grant, I just gave him the agency. I was like, we were still doing, um, I can't remember, maybe half a million a month or something in billings? At the time, I was like, you can have it. And I never talked to him, actually. I talked to other people in the organization. I voiced some things that I needed and I wasn't able to get them. And I was like, well, this isn't really gonna work for me. Um, y'all can just have this, if you want. We can just be cool. And they're like, alright. Jason: [00:18:18] So how do you get to a point where… I love that, because a lot of people would spend years and years fighting back and forth. No, I did this, my name is on blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And like tons of resentment versus you're like, fucking take it. Like, let me restart. Like, how do you do that? How do you, how do you get rid of those emotions that a lot of us would struggle with? Frank: [00:18:46] Well, if things are your damn fault, you have to realize they're your fault. And so like if it was a different scenario and Grant had misled me. And said, yeah, we got this, dude. Here's everything I'm going to do to the letter and then just didn't do it. And then it was like F you Frank. Then I would be mad, you know, we'd have a really serious problem. Um, but he didn't, I just didn't ask. So I had to, it was my damn fault, you know. It wasn't his. So what am I going to do? But you know, pitch a fit? If some dude, you know… he's got other stuff going on. He's gotta roll on out. But also in our business, it's like, it's easy to just to start another one. There's this, this is what I love about the advertising business. It's, it's never going away. You know, it doesn't matter what the economy does. It's like we ain't going anywhere. It could be world war three, you know. I've always made this joke and it's old by now that the world war three could happen and there'd be like seven people left. One of them selling cockroaches or something. And he's going to go to the guy with a bigger cave wall and be like, hey, I'll give you five cockroaches. If I can advertise my cockroach sales on your wall there, you know, like in, it'll take off from there. It's just never going anywhere. So I have no scarcity around it. Jason: [00:20:10] Well, you know, that's how I look at agencies is, you know, when we had the big gold rush, right? And the people that got the richest were the ones selling the stuff to make gold. That's kind of how I look at agencies. Um, especially as when COVID hit and everything started shutting down, I was like, you know, hey agencies are going to get a lot of business because people can't do what they used to do anymore. And, uh, and I, I guessed right on that. But I love how you, you say take ownership in your own mistake. It's like, it was my fault. And I, I think too many times, including myself, probably, I mean, that's a hard thing to do. Admitting, going, hey, I could have avoided this. This is my mistake. Let's just move on. And hit the reset button. And it's kind of like monopoly, let's play another game, here we go. It's like, I screwed up that one. Frank: [00:21:05] Yeah. I'm glad I screwed up that one. Cause this one's great. And I get to keep all of the money. So like, okay. You know, this actually worked out pretty good. Otherwise, it'd be giving most of the money to Grant. Nice enough guy. But, um, I'd prefer that I keep it. Jason: [00:21:22] I think he's got enough money too. Frank: [00:21:25] Oh, yeah. I think he, I hope they're doing well. Jason: [00:21:28] Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, Frank, this has been amazing, man. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Frank: [00:21:37] No. I want to ask you something. Because you said something that really hit me at the beginning. You were like, I've never even heard of direct response until after I'd sold the agency. And I think me and you were joking around about this by email. I was like, if I didn't have this damned, uh, I guess like moral compass and inability to sell something that is not measurable. I would be a zillionaire, you know, but I just can't do it. And I don't even know how to attempt to do it. Because I know there was some value to it and like having cool stuff and well-branded things. I don't know how to make those things, but that's why God made other people, you know. Um, how do you sell that kind of stuff? Not with a clear conscience. I, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it as long as a client knows the game going in, you know.  But how…? Jason: [00:22:25] Well, we… Yeah, our agency, we developed, um, user experiences, you know, from websites and then we built applications. So if you think of sites like Legal Zoom, we built that, uh, you think of Hitachi Power Tools or Lotus Cars, their website, like none of those websites back then had really caught actions other than find my dealer, you know, Legal Zoom did about getting in, but we never really ran ads. Um, so we always said, you have to have this amazing, like when someone comes to your website, you have to have this amazing experience and tell the right story in order for them to, um, you know, build an trust you. You know, we never really, we, we, we didn't get their people's email addresses; even though looking back at the agency, we were one of the first to build e-commerce stores. We were one of the first to build an email marketing system. So our clients could broadcast to their clients. Like, and we were one of the first to build a CMS system, but we did what typical agency owners did was we kept working on our clients that kept paying the bills and we couldn't keep up. And then we, uh, started using other partners, like MailChimp. Like, we started all that before MailChimp. So, you know, everyone, uh, misses the boat. Uh, I think we missed the boat, but at the end of the day, I'm right where I'm supposed to be. I'm loving life and doing everything, so… Frank: [00:23:54] You get to have the pensive view off the balcony in your opening for the Podcast, man. The only way is like, we will make you more than you pay us or we'll refund the difference plus 20%. I mean, the company is called Grow Ads for God's sake, but that's like hard work. I mean, it's actually not because you just choose the right clients, but you know what I mean? It seems to me, hey, the grass is always greener, but I'm like, man, these dudes that are getting paid half a million bucks to make a commercial. Those are the ones that are the smartest people in the room. Jason: [00:24:24] Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, you got to do what you enjoy doing, right? Like you said, the grass is greener on the side that you water. So, you know, whatever side you want to water, like it's going to be, you know, you're going to enjoy it. I always just hate when people do something that they don't want to do in the agency just to make money. I think that's a big, big mistake. I'm like the money will come. Like all the, you know, the mastermind members and the clients I've worked with over the years that have had, you know, the best lives, it's the ones that they, they didn't care about the money. They just cared about doing the right thing and doing what they wanted to do. And that made all the difference. So… Frank: [00:25:03] Well, you've made a whole boatload of it. And I've made, spent a whole boatload of it. At the end of the day. That's really it, you know, am I going to have a good time today? Jason: [00:25:15] Well, I look at it as like you make money to save time in other things. So you have time to, um, you know, one of the things when, when I ask our mastermind members… I probably shouldn't tell people listening because now you know my trick question, but I ask them the first question usually is what do you do for fun? If they say I work all the time, I don't let them in. Frank: [00:25:37] Oh, dude, you wouldn't let me in then cause I really do all the time. But I love it so much, man. But because it's because I'm finally doing. Jason: [00:25:44] Yeah, but you surf and you do all… or do you still surf or no? Frank: [00:25:49] Seriously. Like, I'm in this little room right now and it's my pool house.And so I get up kind of pool house, go back. Um, I've gotten that routine, you know, during COVID and everything. But really, I really like it, you know, like to me, it's so cool. But I'm an addict. Like I'm a hard core ad person specifically with direct response. So I get to hit refresh a whole lot of other people's stats all the time. I get the dopamine hit constantly. You're like, ooh, hit, refresh on this to see how this is going. Okay. Is it refreshing over there? Hot damn. Moving on. What else can we do? You know? So to me it's not work, really. Jason: [00:26:27] Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. But I still, I do want you to take some time off. Gotta have some time. So... Frank: [00:26:37] Well, you know, weekends and stuff. I'll sit around and walk over to the other house, the main house. Hang out there. Jason: [00:26:44] Well, awesome. Well, what's the website people go in and check out? Is it growads.com or…? Frank: [00:26:49] It's .org. I didn't have the money for the.com. Actually, I never even looked to see how much the.com costs cause .org seemed cooler to me. Jason: [00:26:58] Well, I think .org usually ranks higher anyway .org ranks higher in Google anyway. Frank: [00:27:04] Oh, I don't even know about that stuff. Jason: [00:27:06] Claim that. Frank: [00:27:10] I have no idea about SEO because I have ads. You know, it's like, you want to get known? Run ads. Yeah, or go to frankkern.com. Both of those sites will cure your insomnia pretty well. I think if you have it. Jason: [00:27:26] Whatever. Everyone goes, check out both those sites. And thanks so much, Frank for coming on the show. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners where, you know, we have a lot of fun, we're going over constantly what's working, what's not working. Sharing and being able to see what you're not able to see because we're too damn freaking close to it. I want you guys to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our inclusive mastermind. And until next time have a Swenk day.

Do you know what the most Googled sex questions are? Are any of your sex questions on the list? In this episode, Kevin & Céline take the top 15 most Googled sex questions and answer them in the style of a call-in radio show. They cover some of the most common questions they hear as well. You are likely to learn something while having fun! ❤️ FREE EXCLUSIVE CONTENT  ❤️The Passion Vault →  https://www.celineremy.com/vault OUR SPONSORS: (Affiliate links)

When you have a kid, no one hands you a manual on how to be a parent. You learn from trial and error. Or in Kristin's case, you Google everything!After her son was born, she had a TON of questions. So she turned to the internet for answers. Can you guess what she googled? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.