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This week, we are bringing you another special bonus episode. This week, we are sharing a podcast that our host, Paul Barnhurst, recommends. The Run the Numbers podcast is hosted by CJ Gustafson. The podcast is designed to talk about things he wishes he knew during the early days of his career that no amount of Googling would answer. This week's Show Notes: Sebastian Duesterhoeft, partner at Lightspeed Ventures, joins CJ to talk about anything and everything start-up operators need to know about your Total Addressable Market. Request from you, the audience: We are constantly working to improve Financial Modeler's Corner, and this week, I would like to ask for your help completing the survey about the podcast. This will help us make future episodes better for you, the listener. The survey will only take a few minutes to complete, and your response is invaluable to the team at Financial Modeler's Corner. Link to survey: https://forms.office.com/r/K2fHfSUvFp TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode Preview (00:55) SEGMENT: CJ's opening “Off the Books” monologue - the Billion Dollar outcome (02:59) Start of interview (04:38) Why is TAM so important to investors? (09:19) Is a $2B TAM not good enough? (12:06) How big is enough TAM? (13:23) Sponsor: NetSuite (14:44) Frameworks to calculate TAM (19:19) Second and third growth engines (25:18) On "maturity of the market" (28:36) On extensibility (32:27) Why your initial insertion point is crucial to your business (36:22) ServiceNow and Datadog: why these companies are shining examples of expanding their TAM (45:03) SEGMENT: Long-ass Lightning Round (48:43) SEGMENT: Rep Yo Stack - Sponsored by Tropic
Do you ever wonder about the nature of God? Is God a loving god or an angry god? Is it possible that the creator of the universe really cares for you and is for you? What about Jesus? Was he just a wise teacher, or was he truly the Son of God? This series will look at some of the common questions that people ask when it comes to God, Jesus, and how He relates to His creation.
"You do actually need to know who to contact and know how to find the right support. And whether it is the right legal professional, or whether it is finding a mediator, or whether it is going to your business coach as the first step to find someone to be referred to. Knowing your first steps and finding the right support is really key. We don't want to be Googling for a lawyer close to you not knowing what the lawyers going to specialise in. We do have to have an understanding as well that, you know, the legal profession has general practitioners, just like the medical professional and specialists, you've got people who actually can help you in specific areas, and then starting to educate yourself a little bit about, you know, how lawyers charge and things like that.”Jacqui Brauman Top Five Tips For When A Deal Goes Pear Shaped 1.Keep your brain. 2. Prepare. 3. Get the right support. 4. Know your alternative steps. 5. Set intentions. TIME STAMP SUMMARY01:19 Not getting overwhelmed 06:22 Why getting the right support is so crucial11:51 What is the next best path16:10 Setting the right intentionWhere to find Jacqui?Website http://www.jacquibrauman.com.au/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqui-brauman Jacqui Brauman BioJacqui Brauman helps women facing a legal conflict to confidently take control for themselves, without spending tens of thousands on legal fees, without having decisions taken out of their hands and spending years in the legal system, and without any shame or embarrassment or fear of making a mistake. Jacqui is the Founder and CEO of Legally Wise Women, which is a social enterprise to address the gap in women accessing legal services, by helping them know where to start and guiding them to finding the resources they need, including their own wisdom.Jacqui is an Accredited Specialist, and an award-winning lawyer. She is an NMAS mediator, a collaboratively trained dispute resolution practitioner, and she has written and published three legal guides.
Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Brady Report - Tuesday November 21, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do you ever wonder about the nature of God? Is God a loving god or an angry god? Is it possible that the creator of the universe really cares for you and is for you? What about Jesus? Was he just a wise teacher, or was he truly the Son of God? This series will look at some of the common questions that people ask when it comes to God, Jesus, and how He relates to His creation.
We Didn't Know What We Didn't Know- Stories of Teaching Over Three Decades
Do you constantly reminisce about days gone by? Are you quite certain that education was simply better "back in the day?" Well, Sue and Lisa beg to differ. By the way, our students COULD read and write in CURSIVE and they SAID THE PLEDGE of allegiance every day. Plus, they could TYPE their 5 page essays after GOOGLING how to SPELL tricky words like reminsce and allegiance.So there...Please contact us with comments or questions at podcastwedidntknow@gmail.com. We will be so thrilled when someone FINALLY emails us! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SueandLisaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wedidntknowpodcast/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgpsWcy93XJpleqVCML4IBQThanks for listening! -Sue and Lisa
This episode is brought to you by the wonder people over at Magic Mind! Check out this awesome product by going to https://www.magicmind.com/gofo and use our promo code GOFO20 at checkout for a sweet discount. Magic Mind has made our daily lives a little more clearer and less cluttered. Order a pack and see what it does for you! Pris and Matt are back for that monthly check-in? How's everyone? We're doing okay? We're alright out in this scary cruel world? We google the film history of Ryan Gosling, talk about all the things we have put off, and watch the F1 Las Vegas Opening Ceremonies. All that, and so much more! Follow us! https://www.instagram.com/gofopodcast https://www.instagram.com/artby_peaches https://www.tiktok.com/@artby_peaches?lang=en --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/geekoutfreakout/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/geekoutfreakout/support
Do you ever wonder about the nature of God? Is God a loving god or an angry god? Is it possible that the creator of the universe really cares for you and is for you? What about Jesus? Was he just a wise teacher, or was he truly the Son of God? This series will look at some of the common questions that people ask when it comes to God, Jesus, and how He relates to His creation.
Do you ever feel like you are more sensitive to rejection, teasing, criticism, or your own perception that you have failed or fallen short? Or maybe you know someone who seems to be particularly hard on themselves and reactive to others? Everyone experiences some reaction to rejection, but individuals with RSD find themselves more likely to perceive harsh rejection and criticism where there might be none and can sometimes feel like they live in a chronic state of rejection. In this episode, Patrick Casale and Dr. Megan Anna Neff, two AuDHD mental health professionals, dive deep into the complexities of rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD) and its impact on neurodivergent individuals and the people around them. Top 3 reasons to listen to the entire episode: Understand the impact of RSD and how it can lead to chronic pain, affect relationships, and cause avoidance behaviors in professional and personal settings. Hear about some ways that RSD can impact relationship dynamics and major life changes and decisions. Learn about treatments and strategies to help with RSD, as well as ways to adapt therapeutic modalities to be more effective with neurodivergent individuals. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria can be difficult to navigate both internally and externally and can have a profound impact on the way you experience the world, but there are ways to address it that can help with reducing the intensity around feelings of rejection and finding ways to improve relationships through collaborative communication around RSD. Resources plus Exclusive Coupon Code Dr. Neff's Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria Workbook Bundle (Clinical Use): https://neurodivergentinsights.com/neurodivergentstore/p/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-clinical Dr. Neff's Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria Workbook Bundle (Personal Use): https://neurodivergentinsights.com/neurodivergentstore/p/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-bundle Use Code: “DivergentConversationsListener” To get 20% off anything in the shop, including the RSD bundle. Dr. Neff's free blog posts on RSD: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/blog/category/Rejection+Sensitive+Dysphoria The EFT attachment infinity loop can be downloaded here: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/couples-resources A Thanks to Our Sponsor, Tula Consulting! ✨ Tula Consulting: We would love to thank Tula Consulting for sponsoring this episode. Workplace communication can be messy. Considering the lens of neurodiversity can be helpful for understanding this. Maybe you found yourself frustratedly typing "per my last email" in an office communication, perplexed about how a colleague or client doesn't seem to understand your very clearly written email. Consider this. Visual information processing isn't everyone's strength. Perhaps a quick call could make a world of difference. Or how about including a video or voice message with your email? And this technology exists! Simple steps like these can make your work environment more accessible and bring out the best in everyone. Tula Consulting is on a mission to help organizations build more neuro-inclusive products and work environments. Tula does this by bringing curious minds to solve curious problems. Find out more by visiting tulaneurodiversity.org. Transcript PATRICK CASALE: Hey, so we are about to do an episode on RSD today, which I think we are going to turn into a two-part episode. One, because there's so much to cover. Too, because Megan just wrote a 170-page workbook on the subject. Three, because I am unbelievably jet lagged and haven't slept in days. And Megan is not feeling well and is sick. So, we're going to do what we can today to kind of jump into the introduction to this topic. But a lot of you submitted questions to our Instagram, a lot of you submitted questions in general, and we want to cover all of them. We just may not get there today. But this is certainly a topic that we are going to circle back to. So, because Megan just wrote a 170-page workbook, I'm going to turn it over to you to kind of set the stage. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, well, one problem is when you've been swimming in the literature it's hard to know where to start the conversation. So, yeah, how do I synthesize RSD? Well, RSD stands for rejection sensitive dysphoria. Yeah, I guess I'll go over the history of it briefly. So, it was coined by Dr. William Dotson, who if you don't know who that is, like, I recommend Googling him. He's got a lot of really awesome articles up. He's got a lot of webinars that are free through ADDitude Magazine. And he's, like, done a lot in really emphasizing kind of the emotion regulation struggle that often happens with ADHD. But yeah, he's the one that coined RSD. Although, you could actually go back to the '60s and there was a psychiatrist before him, Dr. Paul Wender, who was describing symptoms that now we realize are RSD, who's using the language of atypical depression. But looking back, we actually see, like, okay, that was undiagnosed or often undiagnosed ADHD. And it was RSD and emotion regulation struggles that he was describing. So, there have been breadcrumbs of this in the literature since the 1960s. But it was really in the last 20 years or so that it's become an actual term. It's not a diagnosis. It's not something you'd be diagnosed with. It comes out of the ADHD literature, so there's some debate, like, is this a specifically ADHD thing? And there's several people that say, yes, this is like a distinctive ADHD thing. So, that's the kind of, I guess, clinical definition of RSD. Oh, I guess what it is. So, the question that Dr. Dotson would ask his… and he's a psychiatrist, he's not a psychologist, he's a psychiatrist. But what he'd ask his people when they come in is this question, "For your entire life, have you always been much more sensitive than people you know to rejection, teasing, criticism, or your own perception that you failed or have fallen short?" And he said, 99% of ADHDers would have this like, yes. And not just, yes, but like, "Oh, my gosh, I feel like you know something about me that I've been so embarrassed to tell the people in my life." And then about a third of ADHDers said, "This is the hardest part of ADHD to live with." So, it's pretty significant when we think about kind of the clinical picture of ADHD. Okay, I'll take a breather there. So, that's, I guess, the clinical definition, is it's a really intense, physical, emotional response to the perception of rejection. Or even, like, I guess self-rejection in the sense of like, I didn't live up to my own standards or bar, yes. PATRICK CASALE: And this is very different than other forms of rejection. And I think that's important. Like, you went over that in your... was it Misdiagnosis Monday that you created the diagram for recently? MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, so I created a Venn diagram comparing, like, what is normative rejection sensitivity and then what is RSD? And that's actually typically where I start the conversation. Earlier I was like, "Oh, I don't know where to start the conversation. I usually start with like the evolutionary history." Rejection sensitivity is like a human experience and thank goodness it is. So, if we look at it from an evolutionary lens, the idea that belonging to a group literally meant survival for most of human history. You know, we're pack creatures, and we're not the biggest or strongest species, but it's our ability to think together, to be together, to problem solve together that has meant humans have survived. So, the thinking goes, and this is, you know, any evolutionary psychology is going to be an oversimplification, but kind of the thinking goes, so our anatomy hasn't caught up, right? So, if we perceive rejection, we can experience that as a threat to belonging, therefore a threat to survival on a very kind of automatic level because it's like it's baked into our DNA. And so we haven't caught up to the fact that we don't actually have to belong to the group to survive in modern life. But our body chemistry or our nervous system hasn't caught up to that. So, I like to frame, like, rejection sensitivity through that lens of, yeah, this makes sense as a human experience and it's a spectrum. Some people have really intense. So, like, if you have RSD, you're going to have a really intense rejection sensitivity, whereas other people have more mild rejection sensitivity. But yeah, that is what I did on the Venn diagram and the articles. I walk through, like, this is what normative rejection sensitivity looks like and this is what RSD looks like because RSD is above and beyond that normative sensitivity to rejection. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, thanks for setting the stage like that because I think it's important to delineate between the two. Like, it's absolutely a process of human experience to feel hurt when they feel rejected, or to feel vulnerable, or to feel insecure, or to feel unsafe. But this takes this to a whole new level, right? Because the symptomology, the struggles that come with RSD can really intensify very quickly and be unbelievably debilitating. MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, debilitating. And like, yeah, I think that captures it. And that is part of, like, that's one of the ways I distinguish between, like, RSD versus normative of how much is influencing the person's decisions or daily life. And if, like, a fear of rejection, a fear of putting ourselves out there is significantly influencing our decision, that has a lot of control over our day-to-day. And typically, it's not a great thing for our well-being when fear is controlling. There's a lot of avoidance that can often happen for people when they have RSD. Like, avoidance of social situations, or putting themselves out there for like a job promotion. So, there can be career implications, romantic implications. Like, I can't even imagine asking someone out on a date, right? What if I'm rejected? So, yeah, it can be really debilitating. PATRICK CASALE: I see it show up a lot in the coaching that I do because of the entrepreneurial side of my business with a lot of my ADHD coaching clients, where it's really hard to even put themselves out there on social media, it's really hard to create content, it's really hard to put their own spin on something because God forbid someone comes in and critiques it or says something that really sends them down that shame spiral. MEGAN NEFF: So, I actually just had a really interesting consultation around this. And right now I'm working with a psychoanalyst because I'm wanting to… this is a little bit of a divergent trail, I'm wanting to… So, as a psychologist, when I work one-on-one with people, I have a relational framework for the work I do. And I've realized having a framework is really helpful. So, I'm wanting to figure out how to adapt that relational framework to what I do as a public psychologist. So, I've been consulting with… a lot of people consult with like business coaches, I'm consulting with a psychoanalyst to figure out how do I bring a relational framework to the work I'm doing? PATRICK CASALE: That's right. MEGAN NEFF: But part of what came up was this, I've realized in writing this workbook that RSD is probably the number one block when it comes to, especially, social media because social media is just such a vicious space right now. It can be, I shouldn't make global statements, it can be. And one thing I was talking about was how as an autistic person, my ideas, and my emotions are not separate. So, as an autistic ADHDer, right? Like, and I see that a lot with autistic people, our ideas, and our emotions, our ideas, our values, and our personhood are so integrated. So, when I put my ideas out there, I'm putting a lot of myself out there, and then you layer on top of that RSD, damn, that's hard. PATRICK CASALE: It is. That's such a great way to kind of just put that out there too. And I know that you've been on the receiving end as I have too, your audience is significantly bigger, so you probably receive more of it, but I've been on the receiving end of text messages with you where someone said something nasty, or really like offensive, or just inappropriate, and how debilitating… why do I keep using that word? How painful that [CROSSTALK 00:10:1]1- MEGAN NEFF: ...today. PATRICK CASALE: I don't know, I feel like my brain is moving at like MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, we're both struggling. PATRICK CASALE: [CROSSTALK 00:10:19] but how painful that experience has been for you and how it makes you kind of retreat inward, and then a void. MEGAN NEFF: It does. So, I just recently switched things up. And it's actually been so good for my mental health. Like, the way I joke about is that I've emotionally broken up with social media because what I was noticing, I noticed a few things and it's so helpful to have the RSD lens. Like, probably for the first six months, when I was growing, it was really exciting. I'd open the app, I'd be excited to see like how many like, you know, because I had these little posts that would just go viral. And it'd be exciting to see that. And then it shifted to where I'd open the app and I would dread like, "Oh, no, did it go viral?" Or like my stomach would drop every time I open the app. Or every time I open a DM or the comments, like, half the time I literally kind of open the comments because I would feel so stuck of like, what am I going to see? 99% of the comments are really incredible things to read. But of course, those aren't the ones that stick to my brain. It's the 1% of it. Again, I want to tease apart, some of the comments that are critiques have been really, really good learning experiences for me. And then some of them are just like rude, and unkind, and come with a lot of hostility. And I do value the ones that are hard to take in but those have been good learning experiences for me. Yeah, I got to a point where I would feel physically sick opening the app. So, what I've done is I've turned comments off. I have an auto DM. And I will go days without opening the app. So, I will open it on Monday and Wednesday when I post. And you know how you can see on your phone how much time you've spent, like I spend like five minutes a week on Instagram. And it's amazing. And I feel like I've so much of my nervous system back, I have so much my mental real estate back. And I'm reinvesting that. I've launched my more community-oriented membership. And I'm reinvesting that energy in people who are really committed to showing up and engaging authentically. And I cannot explain what a difference that has made for my mental health. PATRICK CASALE: I'm really happy that you've done that for yourself because I know the amount of energy it takes. I also know how impactful it becomes. And it becomes a situation where you have… I, typically, in these moments will shut down, I will avoid, I'll turn everything off, I have to disconnect from everything. And then you're right, there's like this fearfulness of even opening the app back up. There's this like overwhelming dread sensation of like having to look at anything where you may perceive it in any sort of way that feels critical or… and not in a bad way because criticism is not always a bad thing, like you mentioned. But there are just people who like to just say stupid shit just to say stupid shit. And you have free rein to do that on the internet. So, it becomes really hard for people who are in online practices who are therapists who will have to network virtually, who have to show up online because that can really intensify very quickly and all of a sudden that leads to that shutdown or the disconnection. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah. No, I love how you're connecting it to entrepreneurship because I think there's a lot of, particularly, ADHD entrepreneurs and RSD is very ADHD thing. And like, that double-edged sword of, yeah, like, you have to put yourself out there to be an entrepreneur. And oh, my goodness, if you put yourself out there, you're going to face criticism. You just are. Like, you can't please everyone. And something I like that's a mantra I remind myself, but when you have RSD you have to. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, you're right. And that's why I keep bringing up the entrepreneurial side is because so many ADHDers that I know are entrepreneurs and it makes sense. Like, it works with the way the brain functions, and the creativity, and the spontaneity, and all the innovation. And like, it's also really challenging because it is about showing up. And you mentioned something before that's sticking in my mind about like, the inner connection of like the inner woven thought, feeling, experience for autistic people. And I get that very much and so much of ourselves when we put ourselves out there in that way, is like this is an extension of how I'm feeling and how I'm moving through the world. So, for it to be picked apart at times of like, "Oh, well, this isn't that character, this doesn't sound right, or like, I don't like the way this came across." All of a sudden it becomes this, like, sensation or this experience of my personhood, like, my sense of self is being under attack right now. And that makes me want to, like, bury my head and hide. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then, again, I guess, to bring it back to the AuDHD experience, like, another thing I see and I experience as an autistic person is like the fear of putting something out there and it being factually wrong. Like, I think that's one of my biggest fears. And I see that with a lot of autistic people. Like, what if I write something, and then in five years new research comes out, and like that language, and that, like, I've been talking to my spouse a lot about… my business has just become a huge source of stress if I'm working way too many hours, and I'm chronically sick. So, something has to change. And one of the things I was realizing and talking with my spouse, the reason I'm so stressed is I'm frantically because I have this membership that I've historically published a workbook a month that also means I've got like 20 workbooks, and I'm like, what is wrong in that, that I now want to go back and update? Because the idea of like, anything being out in the world that has my name on it, that might be factually wrong, from an autistic lens is also, like, very unfathomable. PATRICK CASALE: And I imagine how unmanageable that becomes too, that it's like, "Oh, I have a 170-page workbook. Now I have to go back and add or edit and revise." And like, very time consuming, obviously. But, you know, Luke is obviously a God sent too, so… MEGAN NEFF: Yes, that's what he is [INDISCERNINBLE 00:16:44] one. But yeah, so I think, especially, the autistic ADHD experience, it gets complicated because there's a lot of different layers that we can feel rejected or criticized. So, this, I think, is a really important part of RSD. And I think this becomes an important part of learning how to work with RSD when our brain is hyper-vigilantly scanning for signs of rejection, what it means is that, like, the wiring around that is going to become like, and the neural pathways are going to become really forged around, like, perceiving rejection, which means we're going to perceive it when it's not actually there. And this is where I think partnerships and friendships really suffer. Like, let's say two ADHDers, right? So, like, someone forgets to call or someone forgets, like, because working memory, it can be a struggle, and the person with RSD that might trigger, like, that person doesn't care about me, and it could trigger so many narratives, when it's really like, oh, something came up and they forgot. And I think that is part of what causes so much pain around RSD is it's like someone is perceiving it chronically when they're not actually being rejected. PATRICK CASALE: That's what I come across the most too when people are asking questions around RSD is like, well, if I'm moving through the world where I'm constantly feeling this pain of rejection or experiencing it this way, how do I then move through the world? Because it's so hard to maintain friendships, working relationships, professional relationships, etc. when I'm experiencing RSD so intensely in all of these situations. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, for a lot of people it's like, okay, it's easier just not to put myself out there. It's easier not to be in a relationship. It's easier to make my world small. And that's a really sad solution. PATRICK CASALE: It is because there's so many feelings of isolation, and loneliness, and disconnection as there is for a lot of neurodivergent people, so intentionally shrinking your world to protect yourself from potential harm, it's really, really hard. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We haven't even talked about that aspect of RSD of, and this is why, like, you also hear autistic people talk about RSD. I'm really curious, we haven't seen a study on this but I'd be curious if we did a study that controlled for the ADHD because we know so many autistic people have ADHD, like purely autistic people, would they still have RSD? I'd love to see a study on that. But the neurodivergent experience of just perpetual miss-attunement, like we have had more rejection. So, that's another complicating factor, right? We're more likely to perceive it, but partly that's because we are more likely to have experienced social victimization and rejection. And then it becomes this kind of vicious feedback loop of if we show up anticipating rejection, we might have developed psychological defenses and ways of being in the world that actually make it more likely for us to be rejected. And, yeah, it's vicious. PATRICK CASALE: We've talked before about, like, how we always lay out the pain points because so much of the experience is pain points, honestly. But if we're saying this, right? And then we take a step back from the clinical lens for people to say, okay, this is my experience, this is my world, this is every day, this is how I move through relationships, this is how I perceive conversation and feedback. What do we do? MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, no, I mean, there are things we can do. And I'm going to kind of put it in two buckets, psychopharmacological. Okay, big words and brain fog don't mix well today. And then kind of psychological treatments or therapeutic, like, more traditional type treatments. And again, this comes from Dr. Dotson's work, but he has talked about, so there's a class of medications, I'm going to actually look it up so I make sure I'm using the right words, that it's a non-stimulant medication, that it's a class of medications that's sometimes used for a for ADHD. So, alpha agonist is the class, and clonidine and guanfacine are the two medications within that class. Okay, this is really technical, but both have about a 30% response rate. So, a response rate when we're talking about medication is kind of significant reduction of symptoms when the person is on it. So, 30% isn't great. But these two medications are different enough that if you try one, and it doesn't work, and you try the other, there's about a 55 to 60% response rate that one of these will work for you. That's actually a pretty good response rate when it comes to medication. And Dr. Dotson, and again, he is a psychiatrist, but like, he will talk about how he's worked with people who have maybe been like, psychoanalysts for 10 years. RSD wasn't touched, they go on medication, and it's like they ask a girl out for the first time or they apply for that job. Like, it provides emotional armor that they needed. A, to just get out of that avoidance suit, but B, to actually be able to engage like the talk therapy tools. We often need some sort of armor or just regulation to be able to engage the tools that are useful. So, I think that's a really helpful frame just to realize, like, there are medications out there that might be helpful for some people. PATRICK CASALE: That is definitely helpful. And then, you know, on the other bucket, the psychological framework and toolkit that we're talking about, what are strategies that you think are useful? MEGAN NEFF: So, yeah, like a lot of kind of the traditional emotion regulation strategies, but then like, a little bit more targeted. First of all, I think, learning about the rejection sensitivity lens, I say this a lot, and sometimes it gets big reactions, but like, we have to learn to not always trust our minds. Like, our minds are not always helpful. Sometimes, like- PATRICK CASALE: Totally. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, our minds love attention. And so sometimes it'll spew the most mean, negative, alarming things at us to get our attention. And this is one area where I think learning to not trust our minds becomes really important, realizing, okay, I am prone to have like a rejection goggles on or rejection lens on, which means I'm going to see it when, like, maybe my partner isn't actually trying to reject me, or maybe my boss is genuinely giving me… like, is intending good for me in this constructive feedback. So, I think one really getting clarity on that lens so that we can identify when that's on so that we can unhook from it a little bit more. I would say that's the first step. Other steps like emotion regulation strategies. So, again, if we put this back into the perspective of a threat response, our nervous system, our stress state, our fight, flight, freeze, fawn wherever we go in our nervous system is going to be activated when we're perceiving rejection. So, I'm a big fan of like nervous system mapping, which I think that comes from polyvagal theory. I don't love all of polyvagal theory, but I like this idea of nervous system mapping of like, let me map where I am in my stress response, and then figure out what tools you need. So, if you're someone who goes, like hyperarousal, you would need downregulation strategies to kind of help cool the body off. So, emotion regulation strategies. And then, also, things like knowing your rejection triggers, knowing your, like, what I call raw, but what I didn't come up with the term, but raw spots. Like, what are those raw spots or those areas in our life where maybe we have some attachment wounds, or some relational wounds so when they get bumped they pull a big reaction from us, getting a lot of clarity about, like, what are your rough spots? Why? What's the history of those? What happens to you when those get activated? So, also, like a ton of insight, right? Insight into your relational patterns, into your psyche. I'll stop there, that was a bit. There's, I'm sure more. PATRICK CASALE: Those are good to start out with so that people can implement this stuff and start, you know, doing their own research or incorporating these into their day-to-day because I think it's important to be proactive, too, because I think you're mentioning so many important tips right now and the raw spot suggestion, great suggestion, right? Because if you know what creates these triggers for you, then you can work on, you know, preventing, or at least putting into practice something that will help regulate when you're going into events like that or moments like that. I actually don't like at all, and I just want to be clear about this, CBT but REBT, rational emotive behavioral therapy, when you do like the ABCDE model of like activating event, behavioral challenge, challenging belief disputation, because what we're talking about is like, my wife's not picking up the phone, she must not love me anymore. And we're jumping to these conclusions, we're catastrophizing a lot, and I like that you said, don't always trust your brain because there are always, and I don't want to use blanket statements either, there are often alternative explanations for behavior. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah. Wait, so are you saying you don't typically like CBT but you do like that CBT exercise? PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, I like that exercise because it allows you to say like, what's the activating event? Okay, she doesn't pick up the phone. My immediate reaction is she doesn't love me anymore, right? Like, and then you've kind of processed it through that lens of like, but what are the other scenarios here for not picking up the phone? MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, I'm glad you say that because I'm with you. And that, like, I tend to not default to CBT, especially, for neurodivergent or anyone who's had a marginalized experience in the world because I think it can be really invalidating. But then there's these tools from CBT that I really like. And I'm like, well, if you put it in context, this can actually be really helpful. And I don't want us to, like, throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, I'll talk about that too, like putting your thoughts through a reality filter. And there's certain questions you can ask to be like, okay, is this thought helpful to me right now? Is it like, yeah, are there cognitive distortions that are, like, influencing this? Kind of that detective work of like, let me become a detective of my own mind, and my own experience, and my own thoughts, which even just the act of stepping outside of the experience into that observing detective, ideally, non-evaluative, non-judgmental mode is therapeutic, no matter where you land on the reality filter of the thought. PATRICK CASALE: Absolutely, yeah. And I'll just piggyback on my statement of saying I'm not a fan of CBT. I know how harmful it is for marginalized communities and for neurodivergent folks in… oh, we could have a whole episode on therapeutic modalities that don't work well for neurodivergent human beings. But if you put it through that lens, and I like that you use that word, you can start becoming that detective, you can start, like, taking that step back because it's really helpful when it feels like almost everything is creating this intensification of experiences that leaves you feeling like you're not able to participate in your life because you just feel like you can't put yourself out there or you can't, you know, speak your mind, or you feel like you just can't show up the way you want to show up. And I think that's really challenging for a lot of ND folks, too, is like, if I can't show up authentically, that really feels uncomfortable and that feels really painful, too. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, I mean, that then ties into like masking and RSD which that can be its own, like complex conversation. But yeah, if masking helps reduce RSD you could see how like, okay, I'm going to say this, but then I'm going to unpack it, masking becomes a form of self-care. And I don't mean that masking is actually self-care, but like, in that option of like, I'm either going to, like, spiral, like, the fear of I'm going to spiral with RSD because I'm going to show up authentically and you know, the fear, it's not going to be perceived, or I'm going to mask, I could see how for someone masking feels like the less energy cost of the two. And again, that's assuming that masking is like a choice, which it often is not. But it's just that is an interesting, like, yeah, the masking RSD dynamic. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think we could take this in a variety of ways. And I think we could talk about, like, partnership and RSD, I think we could talk about so many different avenues. I also don't know how your energy is and I want to check on that. MEGAN NEFF: No, I actually feel like I've talked a lot about like content creation in RSD, which is not going to be, like, the majority of people listening to this. So, I'd love to spend some energy to generalize it more to, yeah, relationships, workplace, things like that. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah. MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely. PATRICK CASALE: So, let's talk relationships. Whether it's, you know, different neurotypes, same neurotype, one person is experiencing RSD, one person's not, that can be really challenging because conflict can arise in relationships, and often does. And it can feel really, really painful to feel like you are being critiqued, or you feel really vulnerable, or you're, you know, feeling like you're spiraling often in conversations with your partner. And I imagine then the other partner would then feel that challenge too of like, I don't even know what I can say. MEGAN NEFF: Yes, yeah. I mean, I think it's painful for both people involved, right? Because if one person feels like they're walking on eggshells, right? That's kind of the famous metaphor, that is not healthy for a relationship if there's not the capacity to talk openly about what is happening, and if hard conversations spiral into, like, emotion dysregulation and conflict. So, that is a really painful scenario for both partners involved. Yeah, absolutely. With relationships, I'd be curious to kind of like overlay attachment style and RSD. And attachment theory is one that like it gets critiqued for being oversimplified, but I find it a really helpful lens, even with it being, if people know like, okay, this is probably an oversimplification, I still find it really helpful and to someone who has RSD and also, anxiously attached, like, there's going to be some big emotions when they perceive like an attachment injury or where they perceive they're being criticized. And again, kind of, I'm mapping, I guess, is my word today, but mapping out what are the attachment styles. There's a really great exercise from EFT therapy. It's infinity loop. I have a link on my website, I could link it in our show notes. But it's essentially you map out, like, what happens in the aftermath of an attachment injury. Like, what story does each partner start telling? What did they start doing, right? So, some partners will retreat, some will go to work because it's like, we have to fix this. But then that activates another story, like a secondary story. So, you can map out like, okay, what happens to us in an attachment injury. I think exercises like that become really helpful because then you can understand and name the chaos without a map of like, what is happening here? It's really confusing. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned that because I think recognizing the attachment style and the pattern and then being able to, again, step back when you're not activated and look at it, and say, okay, now I get a sense of like, what's happening in these moments because what you don't want to do, like you said, it's not a healthy partnership if you're walking on eggshells if you feel like you can't have communication, and it's very different experiences on either side, so each partner is experiencing this painfully but very differently, too. MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Like, I think ideally the RSD could almost be externalized and be talked about as like a thing in the relationship, right? Like, okay, we just hit an RSD wall, or like, we just triggered the RSD. I love externalizing both and like individual techniques, I do it all the time. Like with, oh, my mind is doing this thing, right. That's it. I'm externalizing it. I'm making it less connected to me. I'm saving the relationships when we can externalize it and it's like, let's collaboratively solve the struggle we're experiencing around this RSD trigger versus you versus me. That really changes the conversation. PATRICK CASALE: It feels much more like teamwork at that point in time. And going back to your detective analogy before, like, you're both putting on that detective hat of like, how can we solve this together? Instead of you're injuring me versus I'm experiencing our relationship this way. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that makes such a big difference when partners can do that, like stand side by side, look at the dynamic together versus… I see that a lot, so much like accusations, and kind of like, I mean, our narcissism episode just came out. Like, you are a narcissist, or you're gaslighting me. Like these huge words get thrown out, or can get thrown out when we're looking at the other person as the problem versus looking at the dynamic, or the issue, or the like the process, content versus process. Like, that's a communication thing of when we're locked in the content, which we typically are during in RSD trigger. That means we're locked in like, the thing we're talking about. Process is kind of like bird's eye view, like what is actually happening here relationally? You can get unhooked from the content enough to have some process conversation, some process reflection, that is so helpful in relationships. PATRICK CASALE: Absolutely, 100%. And I think that's also a good transition point into professional relationships. Like, because those things happen in the workplace, too. And it can happen with your co-workers, it can happen from a employee/employer standpoint, and the implications can be pretty huge, like you said, not trying to go for that promotion that you wanted, not talking out in staff meetings because you're going to feel rejected for how you come across. There are so many ways that this can show up in the workplace, too. MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it's going to depend like, so I talked about, well, Dotson talks about three ways people can respond to RSD, I've added a fourth one. And I have like a little matrix up of like the different ways people can typically respond to RSD. So, workplace stress is going to depend on like, what is your kind of default response? So, like, perfectionism is a really common response to RSD. Like, if I just never make a mistake, then I'm fine. No one's ever going to perceive any of this, right? It's totally illogical, except it's not because we're going to make mistakes. People pleasing, so kind of, like, I put that in under the fawn mode. Like, perpetual people pleasing, like reading, like, what does this person want from me? And a lot of people that are RSD become really good at like, kind of taking in a person, figuring out exactly who they want the person to be. I think that ties back into masking and other things. And then avoidance. So, just like, I'm going to avoid putting myself out there. I think that's the one we've talked about the most in this episode. And then the one I added is the like projector or someone who gets like fight mode when they're perceiving rejection. So, yeah, workplace, if you're a perfectionist people pleaser, with RSD in the workplace, you're going to burn out really fast. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, yeah. It's going to look like workaholism, right? And you're going to be potentially putting in extra hours that are unnecessary, you're going to be taking on additional tasks that you don't really have the capacity for or don't want to do. And you're going to be one of those employees potentially that goes above and beyond for everything. And then ultimately, it's like, fuck, I can't do this job anymore. This is not manageable for me. This is not sustainable. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah. And like I think you and I were probably both in that category. And I think that then resentment can come in. So, I would say it's like a more low-simmer chronic RSD response, right? Because there's this illusion of I can, yeah, evade rejection if I just work harder. But then the resentment that builds up, the burnout that that builds up. Absolutely, yeah. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, absolutely. And then it leads to either termination or leads to quitting a job that you may have been able to navigate or find some accommodation for and it can be really challenging. I think that if we're looking at the whole person, this is so impactful interpersonally, in relationships, in employment places, employment places, places of employment, [INDISCERNIBLE 00:39:39] but it's so impactful. So, knowing the triggers, like you said, implementing some of these soothing strategies for your nervous system, being able to have these conversations, being able to externalize. I think there are a lot of good strategies that you're naming and mentioning right now. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah. And then also for the avoiders, right? Like getting out of the avoidance loop, which essentially, a lot of anxiety-based treatments are all about targeting avoidance because avoidance feeds anxiety. So, I would add that tool for the avoiders, and especially, with the workplace. Like, avoiders are probably going to be underemployed, they're not going to be going up for that promotion, they're not going to be putting themselves out there. And so really targeting avoidance, using exposure. Gosh, it's going to be a whole other episode. Actually, I feel some guilt about this because I think I used to be one of the voices that said this, and I'm now seeing it on social media a lot. Like, exposure therapy doesn't work for autistic people. Exposure therapy doesn't work for sensory habituation. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work for PTSD triggers, for anxiety. So, we have to get out of this, I think it's a dangerous mindset to say exposure therapy doesn't work for autistic people. When you're in an anxious-driven avoidance loop, you absolutely have to do exposure. Like, it can be natural, it should be led by you. So, for that person exposure and addressing the anxiety would be a really important part of the toolkit. PATRICK CASALE: Glad you name that. I think that's a really good tip and also good framework for the recognition that in some instances certain techniques and strategies are useful, like we said before, despite not being useful as like a blanket statement or across the board. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, I'm starting to become more gentle in my language use. Like, I think I used to be like, "This kind of therapy is bad." Like, I used to say, like, "CBT is bad for autistic people." I'm now more around like things need to be adapted, right? So, you need to adapt exposure therapy when you do it for an autistic person, 1,000%. If you're using CBT, you should adapt it and consider the marginalized experiences. So, I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm changing my narrative a little bit and how I talk about it. I'm softening it to talk more about adapting and less about what's good and what's bad. PATRICK CASALE: I think it's also important to like, differentiate between taking one simple tool, or technique, or strategy from something, opposed to saying like, okay, CBT as a whole, we don't like it. But this one technique really is useful if we adapt it in a neurodivergent affirmative way. And I think that you could do that with a lot of different therapeutic interventions and modalities. MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PATRICK CASALE: Usually, three yeahs in a row from you is like, all right, let's transition out. So, is that where we're at? MEGAN NEFF: I mean, I don't know how long we've been recording. You're right. Like, you said this before we started recording because we were both feeling really lousy. And I was like, "I don't know if this will be a good episode." You were like, "Usually when we start talking it like works." I feel like I could talk longer. But I also feel like I could be done. I don't know, what do you feel? PATRICK CASALE: I feel the same way. I think we've been recording now for about 45 minutes so- MEGAN NEFF: Okay, good length. PATRICK CASALE: Good length of time. And I think it's a good foundational episode to then build off of for different perspectives. I think we can also have people on here to talk about their own RSD experiences, and how it shows up, and how they work through it, or try to manage, and support themselves. So, I think we can go a lot of directions with this. MEGAN NEFF: Yeah. And I mean, I love, we should definitely do a like answer questions follow up because I think people have a lot of questions around this topic. And so we could do that. PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, will say I didn't think about even asking for questions for the episode until like 10 minutes before we started recording. We got like six questions immediately. So, I think that with another day or two, we could compile all that and we can address that the next time we record. MEGAN NEFF: Let's do that. PATRICK CASALE: Cool. Well, for those of you who don't know, Megan, and I haven't recorded in like three and a half weeks because I've been gone and I just appreciate being able to fall back into this even though we feel crappy, like connected in that way. So, just want to thank you for that. What was I going to say? MEGAN NEFF: I think episodes are out every Friday on all major platforms, Spotify, Apple… PATRICK CASALE: What Megan just said, new episodes are out every single Friday. If you have topic requests, if you have questions you want answered, please email our Gmail address that's attached to our Instagram, which is divergentconversationspodcast@gmail.com. We do read those. We don't always respond because we just don't always have the capacity or the spoons to do so. And new episodes are out every single Friday on all major platforms and YouTube. And Megan has a 170-page workbook on RSD that you can purchase from her website at neurodivergentinsights.com. And that will be linked in the show notes as well. Cool. All right, goodbye.
Jay Jay is an international speaker and personal brand expert with over 15 years of experience in the entertainment business. He has millions of followers worldwide and helps people grow their personal brand and become the go-to person in their industry. In this episode, Mr. Biz talks with Jay Jay, a personal brand expert, about the importance of building a personal brand. They discuss how building a personal brand can help business owners stand out and attract opportunities. Jay Jay shares his entrepreneurial journey, from being a magician to becoming a speaker and starting his own PR agency. He emphasizes the power of leveraging platforms like YouTube to gain visibility and credibility. Jay Jay also provides practical tips for building a personal brand, including Googling yourself to see what comes up and overcoming the fear of rejection and judgment. - Building a personal brand is essential for attracting opportunities and standing out in your industry. - Leveraging platforms like YouTube can help you gain visibility and credibility. - Googling yourself is a simple way to assess your online presence and reputation. - Overcoming the fear of rejection and judgment is crucial for putting yourself out there and building a personal brand. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mrbiz/support
This week, Fred and Luke are taking advantage of Liam being away for his wedding and are going head-to-head in a construction trivia showdown. With Liam out of the picture, there will definitely be no cheating or Googling for answers! Who will come out on top...?Later in the episode, we cover:Sydney's Quay Quarter Tower named 2023's best skyscraper = https://www.instagram.com/p/CzDv3TzsuF-/Seoul's 200-metre new skyscraper = https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy8AhKhMB8x/?img_index=1Hangzhou's vast new district = https://www.instagram.com/p/CzR11BHMtzW/?img_index=1This episode was sponsored by Trimble Construction! Learn more about Viewpoint Field View here - https://bit.ly/466O58LWe end the show with some messages we've received on Spotify!Get in touch! Podcast@TheB1M.comwww.TheB1M.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This movie is all about the inner turmoil of Louis Wain. You may not recognize his name, but you'll recognize his art (it's worth Googling). If you have a pet cat, it's because of Louis Wain. Communicating a character's inner thoughts or mental state is a tricky thing for film to do. It can be tricky for novelists too because it often leads to long passages of exposition. But externalizing the internal can (and must) be done. Do you know how? If not, this episode will show you how.For access to writing templates and worksheets, and more than 70 hours of training (all for free), subscribe to Valerie's Inner Circle: www.valeriefrancis.ca/innercircleFor information about Valerie's upcoming webinars, visit: www.valeriefrancis.ca/webinarsTo learn to read like a writer, visit Melanie's website: www.melaniehill.com.auFollow Valerie on Instagram, Threads and X (Twitter) @valerie_francisFollow Melanie on Instagram, X (Twitter) and Facebook @MelanieHillAuthor
My guest today, Leslie Thornton began her entrepreneurial journey after Googling “inner peace.” She was weight-conscious and eventually became fascinated with the power of the unconscious mind. Today, she offers hypnosis as a permanent weight loss solution that guarantees her clients mental and emotional freedom around body and weight challenges. In this episode, Leslie encourages you to find the confidence within yourself to take the action that works for you. “All permanent changes happen in the unconscious mind.” - Leslie Thornton. Learn more about this episode of She's Got Moxie at findingjoyeveryday.com/185
This is the story of a giant squid, 150 years ago, that got its photo taken. It's a strange photo, with an even stranger history to match. The CBC's Mike Rossiter follows the giant squid's mystery from St. John's, to Yale University, to deep below the sea. And if you want to see the picture at the heart of it all, we recommend Googling "Moses Harvey giant squid."
Today's poem is Googling Ourselves by Philip Schultz. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “It's become common now to check our digital footprint, to seek evidence of ourselves in cyberspace, a place where we might also encounter our namesakes. Today's poem delves into the psychological roots of this self-searching.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Have you ever wondered what it was like to travel with The Gals? Well, now is your chance!Ride along with the Two Alpha Gals as they venture out on roadtrip to the FARE Summit in Orlando, Florida. Hear the gals chat about some of the steps they took prior to leaving, the planning they did along the way, and their observations on how far they've come since diagnosis. Tune in for a little education, a lot of laughs, and a few details on their secret Googling.
Over and over again we've learned that internet access inside the church media booth can lead to disaster. This time is no different. Join Sam, Sha and Isaiah as they discover what someone on the VBS production team was Googling when they thought no one was watching... All this and more today on Youth Group Chronicles.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the feature film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by two writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel and Jimmie Tramel to discuss the film Killers of the Flower Moon as well as the film and the Reign of Terror's places in pop culture. More coverage Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here. All episodes from this series can be found here. Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who's taking some well-deserved time off. If you haven't listened to the first three episodes and our latest series about the Osage reign of terror, please go back and listen to those before starting this one. So far, we've talked about the history of the Osage tribe and how they ended up in what became the state of Oklahoma, their oil rich land, and how those rights to that land led to the horrible series of suspicious deaths. Kidnapings and the general environment of fear that made up the reign of terror. We've talked about the blue eyes, investigation and eventual conviction of those who are found guilty of the crimes. In this episode, we talk about the place in history and in pop culture that the reign of terror holds. This episode was recorded prior to the release of the film The Killers of the Flower Moon. Those age reign of terror may not have a prominent spot in the United States history curriculum, but it has established its place in popular culture with multiple books, plays, radio shows, films and more created about the events that went on during the 1920s. Most recently, the film Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a book by David Grann, was released on October 20th, 2023. Martin Scorsese directed and Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone star in the film. The Tulsa World's pop culture reporter Jimmy Trammell and I talked about the place the reign of terror holds in pop culture, and a little more about the film. Why should people go see the movie, especially our true crime fans? I can't think of a reason that they should not go to see the movie. It's one of the. From a true crime standpoint, it's one of the biggest crimes in our nation's history that really has not been expounded on. It's crazy. This happened 100 years ago. And as far as us knowing about it, as far as the story being fleshed out, that it never really came to light nationally at all until David Grann's fantastic book became a bestseller. And then and then Scorsese's movie is going to take it to the next level. And I should tell you that initially the movie was going to be, here comes the FBI to solve these murders. And then Scorsese. DiCaprio I think that huddled and decided to pivot. And now this movie is not going to be strictly about FBI coming in. It's going to be. It's going to be wrapped around the marriage of DiCaprio's character and Lily Gladstone's character. It's going to focus on this very personal story. And by the way, we're going to wrap it in to the Osage reign of terror, which I think is a fantastic way of going about it in a personal story is always going to resonate more than a story of another kind. Completely agree that everyone is giving Martin Scorsese, the director, props 100% because he didn't just come in and say, I have adopted this book. We're going to make a movie at every step along the way. He has incorporated and involved and consulted the Osage people were I mean, it's their story. They were impacted. They should have a say in this. And so their language, their costumes, everything about their way of life is portrayed authentically in this film. It's not an outsider coming in and saying, to heck with that. We'll do it my way. You're going to see it portrayed legitimately. You did profile Julie O'Keefe, who was a wardrobe consultant on the film. Can you tell us a little bit about her, her background and why she was important to the portrayal of the Osage as in the movie? Julie O'Keefe, who has had some costume shops, but her resumé is far more extensive than having a costume shop. She was enlisted to be a costume designer, an Osage costume consultant on the film. And so they used pictures from back in the day. Other reference to really make sure the people you see in the film dressed in the way they were, you know, in the 1920s, 100 years ago. And that's another example of Martin Scorsese and his team just taking every measure possible to make sure the Osage, what you see on the screen, is authentic. I mean, he Martin Scorsese, he even said, well, I'm sorry. I was standing there with the Osage who said at the premiere in France that some of the actors on the screen are speaking Osage as well as some of the Osage Nation members. I love that we've come so far from having Italian actors playing natives to respecting the history, the people and the living history that's going on. And yeah, Chief Strongbow, the Native American wrestler, was an Italian word. So what you're talking about. Exactly. I mean, I can turn on any Western on TV in the next room and see Mr. Spock playing a Native American. I love Leonard Nimoy, but he's not a Native American. So we we love. Yes. That people of a certain ethnicity are playing those people in pop culture. No better example of this than Reservation Dogs, the television series that wrapped up a three year run and was shot in Oklahoma as well. I grew up in small town Oklahoma and primarily a Cherokee community, and the people I see, the people I saw in reservation dogs. I look at them and think, I grew up exactly with these people. Especially with everything else going on in the world. It's just great to see the respect to culture being given. Well, typically, how the Native Americans have been portrayed and in movie and TV is John Wayne is shooting at them and that's it. I mean, I I've had I have many native friends, but I had one native friend tell me like, hey, when I was young, I would watch Cowboy and Indian movies and root for the Cowboys. How crazy is that? And he's native because, you know, that's the story being told and and you buy in. But I mean, it's so important now that we can see the Native American not as a stereotype, but just as as a human being, as someone who you don't have to tell a native story per se. You can tell a human being story. And by the way, they happen to be native. I know you talked about it a little bit, but what kind of reactions have you heard or seen from Julie and the other Osages. They had an Osage Nation premiere in Tulsa for only the Osage and people who took part in the film And kind of a takeaway was very powerful, very emotional. Glad to see this story being brought to light. But also it's a lot to wrap your head around because if you were in the movie and that premiere in Tulsa, you're probably sitting with people whose grandmother grandfather died as a result of these murders. So it's a lot to process, a lot to wrap your head around. Did anybody express any discomfort about participating in the movie? I mean, you mentioned that some of the people who were there, they might have had grandparents who were, you know, their lives were taken because of all of this. Were there people who might have been reticent at first to participate? Well, because of history, you couldn't blame anyone for being a little tread cautiously. But I think Martin Scorsese, he got rid of all that wariness early on because he met with the Osage. Is right away before they started filming and made it clear that the Osage people would be treated respectfully. I think this movie is going to create a lot of opportunity for the Osage, and as other films go out forward, we've seen, you know, Native Representation and the Great Prey Predator movie last year. Many of the people who were extras or worked on Killers of the Flower Moon now have an opportunity to go on and work on some other things. Oklahoma has a pretty rich film history, you know, you wouldn't think. But they do. Like The Outsiders was filmed here in 82 that launched the careers of Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe. Tom Cruise, he told me, Tell Ralph, Marty, Mojo, all those guys. And in fact, the exact county where killers of the Flower Moon was filmed was where August Osage County was filmed ten years ago. But by far, this figures to be the biggest blockbuster film ever shot on Oklahoma soil. And I think everyone is just happy that instead of going to California and on some down soundstage, Martin Scorsese brought those actors to where everything occurred. So it could be as true to life as possible. We have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. And of course, I caught up with Randy Krehbiel about the film, why people should see it, and how the reign of terror had something in common with another major criminal event that took place in the same area and at the same time period, as I understand it, Martin Scorsese, he shot the film in Osage County. I think the majority of it was shot there. A little bit of it was shot here in Tulsa. In fact, catty corner from our office at the federal courthouse. And I think they shot some in Guthrie, which is a town over north of Oklahoma City and maybe a few other places. But most of it was shot there. And from everything we've heard from the Osage, is he really made an effort? Leonardo DiCaprio made an effort to be very authentic with it in terms of the the people, the language. My understanding is, is that the actors, the main actors all learned some Osage so they could deliver lines in Osage. So my understanding is, is that, you know, it's about betrayal. The movie the movie is about betrayal. And I think betrayal is asked is almost always support a crime. You're betraying someone in some way. And and it's about how, you know, it focuses I think a lot on this one couple and and in in the birchard he's played by Leonardo DiCaprio his struggle with you know apparently he really did care for his wife but he was also he also was kind of under the influence of this uncle who only cared about money and had been taught, you know, to think only about money. And also that, you know, Indian people were not really they didn't really count. Right. Right. And that and I think, you know, and that also often plays into crime. But I think there's a lot psychologically that people who are interested in crime would would find insightful. I think it's a good way for us to start exploring the history that we aren't all taught. Sure, it might be Leo's face up there, but I know there are tons of times where I've gone to see movies that are based on true stories. And then I start Googling and I start reading. And, you know, you kind of fall down that rabbit hole. Well, you hope so. And, you know, it's. I mean, history is almost always more complicated than you can sit. And this is is a very long movie. Apparently, it's I'm told it's three and a half hours long that. Scorsese. But even in with that, you know, yeah, there are things that are left out but but hope that hopefully it takes people's attention interest and as you mentioned there is just an awful lot of history that gets. Swept under the rug neglected over. Yeah well, you know, I've told this a lot. I've said this a lot of times, but I think it's true is that you know, history, the teaching of history serves to almost oppositional purposes. One is one is to try and create this sort of legend about the place we live and who we are. And it's all, you know, we're all the good guys and they're all the bad guys. And that sort of thing. And it's all positive. It's more about image and building community and and patriotism and all that stuff. And then there's sort of and then there's the grittier history that requires some critical thinking and and shows you that, you know, what the the rules tend to favor the people who make the rules. And you mentioned that you had done a lot of writing about the Tulsa race massacre, which was, what, 1921, I believe? Yep. Yep. Was there overlap? I mean, obviously timing. Yes. But I a little bit. And one of the stories that talks about that a little bit so and Brian was found about I think it was ten days before the Tulsa race massacre. so so, you know, so that was very close in time. And there are some people who show up in both stories. One of them is a guy named John Gustafson, who was the police chief of Tulsa and was removed from office. He was basically impeached and removed from office after the massacre for dereliction of duty. Well, he was also a private detective. And so at the same time, he was the chief of police and being removed from office in Tulsa. He'd been hired by Inner Brown's family to find out who killed her. And so he spent a lot of time traipsing around Osage County and according to the FBI and that what they concluded was that he was trying to play both sides. He'd come up with information and then he'd try and chop it and see who he could get the most money for. So from. And so there is that. And then there's another guy that is semi important, a a couple more. One is a guy named John Goldsberry who at the time of the race massacre was the assistant county attorney in Tulsa. And he was the guy who was in who was part of the prosecution of John Gustafson and was also kind of involved in telling the people who I don't know how much of the Tulsa story, you know, but there was this group of people that were trying to take over the Greenwood area and they and they failed. And he was kind of in the group that was telling them, you can't do that. That's a bad idea. So then eight years later, in 1929, he was the U.S. attorney in Tulsa and he was involved in the final prosecution. Bill Hale and in John Ramsey. And then finally, I'd mentioned, well, I guess there's a team or so also there is an attorney again named Prince Freeling. And Prince Freeling was the attorney general at the time of the Tulsa race massacre. And he came in and blow in and go in and he ran the grand jury and all that stuff. By the time that the Ramsey and Hale were on trial, he was out of office and he was part of their defense team. And then and so then I know these guys are all lawyers. It's amazing how many lawyers there are involved in this. But anyway, there's a lawyer named TJ Leahy who is from Pawhuska, and he was guest Gaston's attorney in the in his impeachment trial. But then he was hired by the Osage people to look out for their interests in these prosecutions. And he was involved in the prosecution of every one of these people who went to trial, whether it was in state trial or state court or federal court. He was there as part of the prosecution and and was the guy that Burkhart went to during a state trial in Pawhuska and said, I'm tired of lying. I just want to tell the truth. And he turned on his turned on his uncle. So there are people that I've never seen like a direct, you know, like the people who burned down and were stealing money from people. And I haven't seen that. But there are there are some familiar names. Gotcha. I would say there is this connection, which is that in both cases you see where the lives of, you know, minorities, of people of color and especially women just didn't matter very much. You know, in Tulsa when they decided they were going to do something different with, with the Greenwood area, They didn't ask the black people who lived there. They just tried to do it. Yeah. All right. Well, if you owned the property. By the way, for the most. Part, so they formed this community. Well, so in, you know, in in the Osage, it was like, in fact, there's a quote in one of the FBI reports from there was a notorious outlaw, who was approached about killing a bill and ready to smear who's there, the folks who were blown up in the movie. And he said he wouldn't do it, that he had never he had never stoop so low that he would kill a woman even if she was an Indian. That's something that, you know, that that says it right. These these folks, they just you know, it it wasn't so much in my observation, it wasn't so much that they hated them. It was that they just didn't care anyway. Yeah. They were. They weren't worth anything. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that is the connection. Very. I hate to say it's interesting because it's such a horrific things happened, but it's impossible to teach comprehensive history, you know, especially at junior high, high school, you know, elementary level. I just wish that it was a little more comprehensive, I guess I should say. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the hard things about teaching school, whatever it is, is deciding what's important in what you know, what's what are the priorities as far as teach. Well, So you do have to learn the fundamentals of history. But somewhere in there, you know, I think there's also room to learn about, you know, not everything was done, you know, virtuously. And it and you do have to question, motivations and things like why do people do the things they do? I think that's just a useful life. You know, I think one of the things that's really hard when you're writing about things like this, whether it's Tulsa or or we're talking about it or the Osage deal is how you talk about a singular event that's particularly horrific and then put it in a larger context without appearing to or actually diminishing that one event. And so, you know, the only thing I'd say is that what happened in Osage County was a singular, ah, event and particularly distressing. But things like that happened all over the and Oklahoma had some of the during the during the oil booms of the early 20th century, some pretty, pretty bad places. And they say something about, you know, human greed and and just sort of the human condition that we should be aware of and like what we were talking about earlier, where we had a I hope we've passed it. But, you know, I'm not always convinced we are that, you know, people who are different than us just don't matter. Are people who are in the in our way don't matter. You know, as a reporter, always trying to look at what is singular about this event, but also how does it fit into sort of the universe of things and how do you tell that story without how do you balance it, you know, and how do how do you not diminish, you know, this one group or one individual's story and yet presented in the full context. And that's where we're wrapping things up with the reign of terror. For more details about the crimes life in the area in the 1920s, the film Killers of the Flower Moon and the Hostages, please visit the Tulsa World's website. There are links in the show notes to all of the content. The reporters and editors at the paper created. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming up next. And you can go back in and check out any of our past episodes that you may have missed. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
With tickets on sale at pooglive.com, brands scramble to outfit the hags for their tour. An all-orange halloween party. Discount animatronics in fresh costumes. Not another recipe about how spaghetti squash is pasta. Popsicle stick snowflakes, frozen vodka in a milk carton, paper bags luminescent lanterns. This is a house of artists: nothing is gated. Reusable bamboo rounds in a jar of essence. Googling with a hand behind the back. A tag is a flag. A text from Jar. Mentioned: body serum and lotion from iota Body, the runsie from Free People, the underwear from ODDOBODY Mate the Label, LYMA Skincare, Pat McGrath, Retrouvé Luxury Skincare, Jolie Skin Co, LMNT, Aromatech, Tom Bihn and Away Edited and mixed by Allie Graham.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Googling Halloween Costumes (10/17/23) by 96.5 WKLH
Quite often, I see podcasters sharing their podcast episodes and they've titled something like: Episode 12: Jim RodgersWould you click on this if you came across it on social media? Probably not. This doesn't tell you anything about what you'll learn in the episode. Even worse, this does nothing for SEO...most people aren't randomly Googling episode numbers.Stop putting the episode number in your title. Your episodes should be treated as any other searchable content. That means a title that entices people to click through and listen. Get your free Podcast Process Templates at https://podcastworkflows.com/templates ★ Support this podcast ★
10 - 17 - 23 TOP COSTUME GOOGLING FOR PUMPKIN BALL TICKETS by Maine's Coast 93.1
Today's episode of the Savvy Scribe podcast focuses on an interesting discussion about freelance scams and how to avoid them.Key Points in this Episode:How to Identify and Avoid Freelance ScamsThe LinkedIn Connection:An optimized LinkedIn profile attracts a potential client.Caution with Unsolicited Offers:I highlight the need for caution when a client reaches out to you, especially if you're new to freelancing.Initial interest doesn't guarantee legitimacy.Verifying the Client:Research the company by Googling it to ensure its authenticity.Real Person Check:Schedule a video call, like Zoom, to confirm the client's identity.Beware of Gmail Addresses:Be cautious when clients use personal email addresses (e.g., Gmail) instead of a company domain.Legitimate businesses usually have professional email addresses.Profile Photo:I also discussed the importance of checking for a profile picture on the client's LinkedIn profile.Prioritize Contracts:Stress the necessity of having a contract in place before starting any project.Contract Signatory Verification:Ensure that the person signing the contract is a legitimate representative of the company.Payment Terms and Security:Clarify payment terms and secure methods for sharing sensitive information, such as banking details.Red Flags:Stay vigilant and recognize red flags in client interactions, as scammers often prey on freelancers' eagerness.Rates Too Good to Be True:Be cautious against rates that seem too low or too high, as they may indicate potential freelance scams.Be diligent when dealing with clients, regardless of their field. Remember that freelance scams can happen to anyone, and awareness is key to protection.Welcome to the Savvy Scribe Podcast, I'm so glad you're here! Before we start the show, if you're interested, we have a free Facebook group called "Savvy Nurse Writer Community"I appreciate you following me and listening today. I would LOVE for you to subscribe: ITUNESAnd if you love it, can I ask for a
Jeff Geerling, Owner of Midwestern Mac, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the importance of storytelling, problem-solving, and community in the world of cloud. Jeff shares how and why he creates content that can appeal to anybody, rather than focusing solely on the technical qualifications of his audience, and how that strategy has paid off for him. Corey and Jeff also discuss the impact of leading with storytelling as opposed to features in product launches, and what's been going on in the Raspberry Pi space recently. Jeff also expresses the impact that community has on open-source companies, and reveals his take on the latest moves from Red Hat and Hashicorp. About JeffJeff is a father, author, developer, and maker. He is sometimes called "an inflammatory enigma".Links Referenced:Personal webpage: https://jeffgeerling.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A bit off the beaten path of the usual cloud-focused content on this show, today I'm speaking with Jeff Geerling, YouTuber, author, content creator, enigma, and oh, so much more. Jeff, thanks for joining me.Jeff: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: So, it's hard to figure out where you start versus where you stop, but I do know that as I've been exploring a lot of building up my own home lab stuff, suddenly you are right at the top of every Google search that I wind up conducting. I was building my own Kubernete on top of a Turing Pi 2, and sure enough, your teardown was the first thing that I found that, to be direct, was well-documented, and made it understandable. And that's not the first time this year that that's happened to me. What do you do exactly?Jeff: I mean, I do everything. And I started off doing web design and then I figured that design is very, I don't know, once it started transitioning to everything being JavaScript, that was not my cup of tea. So, I got into back-end work, databases, and then I realized to make that stuff work well, you got to know the infrastructure. So, I got into that stuff. And then I realized, like, my home lab is a great place to experiment on this, so I got into Raspberry Pis, low-power computing efficiency, building your own home lab, all that kind of stuff.So, all along the way, with everything I do, I always, like, document everything like crazy. That's something my dad taught me. He's an engineer in radio. And he actually hired me for my first job, he had me write an IT operations manual for the Radio Group in St. Louis. And from that point forward, that's—I always start with documentation. So, I think that was probably what really triggered that whole series. It happens to me too; I search for something, I find my old articles or my own old projects on GitHub or blog posts because I just put everything out there.Corey: I was about to ask, years ago, I was advised by Scott Hanselman to—the third time I find myself explaining something, write a blog post about it because it's easier to refer people back to that thing than it is for me to try and reconstruct it on the fly, and I'll drop things here and there. And the trick is, of course, making sure it doesn't sound dismissive and like, “Oh, I wrote a thing. Go read.” Instead of having a conversation with people. But as a result, I'll be Googling how to do things from time to time and come up with my own content as a result.It's at least a half-step up from looking at forums and the rest, where I realized halfway through that I was the one asking the question. Like, “Oh, well, at least this is useful for someone.” And I, for better or worse, at least have a pattern of going back and answering how I solved a thing after I get there, just because otherwise, it's someone asked the question ten years ago and never returns, like, how did you solve it? What did you do? It's good to close that loop.Jeff: Yeah, and I think over 50% of what I do, I've done before. When you're setting up a Kubernetes cluster, there's certain parts of it that you're going to do every time. So, whatever's not automated or the tricky bits, I always document those things. Anything that is not in the readme, is not in the first few steps, because that will help me and will help others. I think that sometimes that's the best success I've found on YouTube is also just sharing an experience.And I think that's what separates some of the content that really drives growth on a YouTube channel or whatever, or for an organization doing it because you bring the experience, like, I'm a new person to this Home Assistant, for instance, which I use to automate things at my house. I had problems with it and I just shared those problems in my video, and that video has, you know, hundreds of thousands of views. Whereas these other people who know way more than I could ever know about Home Assistant, they're pulling in fewer views because they just get into a tutorial and don't have that perspective of a beginner or somebody that runs into an issue and how do you solve that issue.So, like I said, I mean, I just always share that stuff. Every time that I have an issue with anything technological, I put it on GitHub somewhere. And then eventually, if it's something that I can really formulate into an outline of what I did, I put a blog post up on my blog. I still, even though I write I don't know how many words per week that goes into my YouTube videos or into my books or anything, I still write two or three blog posts a week that are often pretty heavy into technical detail.Corey: One of the challenges I've always had is figuring out who exactly I'm storytelling for when I'm putting something out there. Because there's a plethora, at least in cloud, of beginner content of, here's how to think about cloud, here's what the service does, here's why you should use it et cetera, et cetera. And that's all well and good, but often the things that I'm focusing on presuppose a certain baseline level of knowledge that you should have going into this. If you're trying to figure out the best way to get some service configured, I probably shouldn't have to spend the first half of the article talking about what AWS is, as a for instance. And I think that inherently limits the size of the potential audience that would be interested in the content, but it's also the kind of stuff that I wish was out there.Jeff: Yeah. There's two sides to that, too. One is, you can make content that appeals to anybody, even if they have no clue what you're talking about, or you can make content that appeals to the narrow audience that knows the base level of understanding you need. So, a lot of times with—especially on my YouTube channel, I'll put things in that is just irrelevant to 99% of the population, but I get so many comments, like, “I have no clue what you said or what you're doing, but this looks really cool.” Like, “This is fun or interesting.” Just because, again, it's bringing that story into it.Because really, I think on a base level, a lot of programmers especially don't understand—and infrastructure engineers are off the deep end on this—they don't understand the interpersonal nature of what makes something good or not, what makes something relatable. And trying to bring that into technical documentation a lot of times is what differentiates a project. So, one of the products I love and use and recommend everywhere and have a book on—a best-selling book—is Ansible. And one of the things that brought me into it and has brought so many people is the documentation started—it's gotten a little bit more complex over the years—but it started out as, “Here's some problems. Here's how you solve them.”Here's, you know, things that we all run into, like how do you connect to 12 servers at the same time? How do you have groups of servers? Like, it showed you all these little examples. And then if you wanted to go deeper, there was more documentation linked out of that. But it was giving you real-world scenarios and doing it in a simple way. And it used some little easter eggs and fun things that made it more interesting, but I think that that's missing from a lot of technical discussion and a lot of technical documentation out there is that playfulness, that human side, the get from Point A to Point B and here's why and here's how, but here's a little interesting way to do it instead of just here's how it's done.Corey: In that same era, I was one of the very early developers behind SaltStack, and I think one of the reasons that Ansible won in the market was that when you started looking into SaltStack, it got wrapped around its own axle talking about how it uses ZeroMQ for a full mesh between all of the systems there, as long—sorry [unintelligible 00:07:39] mesh network that all routes—not really a mesh network at all—it talks through a single controller that then talks to all of its subordinate nodes. Great. That's awesome. How do I use this to install a web server, is the question that people had. And it was so in love with its own cleverness in some ways. Ansible was always much more approachable in that respect and I can't understate just how valuable that was for someone who just wants to get the problem solved.Jeff: Yeah. I also looked at something like NixOS. It's kind of like the arch of distributions of—Corey: You must be at least this smart to use it in some respects—Jeff: Yeah, it's—Corey: —has been the every documentation I've had with that.Jeff: [laugh]. There's, like, this level of pride in what it does, that doesn't get to ‘and it solves this problem.' You can get there, but you have to work through the barrier of, like, we're so much better, or—I don't know what—it's not that. Like, it's just it doesn't feel like, “You're new to this and here's how you can solve a problem today, right now.” It's more like, “We have this golden architecture and we want you to come up to it.” And it's like, well, but I'm not ready for that. I'm just this random developer trying to solve the problem.Corey: Right. Like, they should have someone hanging out in their IRC channel and just watch for a week of who comes in and what questions do they have when they're just getting started and address those. Oh, you want to wind up just building a Nix box EC2 for development? Great, here's how you do that, and here's how to think about your workflow as you go. Instead, I found that I had to piece it together from a bunch of different blog posts and the rest and each one supposed that I had different knowledge coming into it than the others. And I felt like I was getting tangled up very easily.Jeff: Yeah, and I think it's telling that a lot of people pick up new technology through blog posts and Substack and Medium and whatever [Tedium 00:09:19], all these different platforms because it's somebody that's solving a problem and relating that problem, and then you have the same problem. A lot of times in the documentation, they don't take that approach. They're more like, here's all our features and here's how to use each feature, but they don't take a problem-based approach. And again, I'm harping on Ansible here with how good the documentation was, but it took that approach is you have a bunch of servers, you want to manage them, you want to install stuff on them, and all the examples flowed from that. And then you could get deeper into the direct documentation of how things worked.As a polar opposite of that, in a community that I'm very much involved in still—well, not as much as I used to be—is Drupal. Their documentation was great for developers but not so great for beginners and that was always—it still is a difficulty in that community. And I think it's a difficulty in many, especially open-source communities where you're trying to build the community, get more people interested because that's where the great stuff comes from. It doesn't come from one corporation that controls it, it comes from the community of users who are passionate about it. And it's also tough because for something like Drupal, it gets more complex over time and the complexity kind of kills off the initial ability to think, like, wow, this is a great little thing and I can get into it and start using it.And a similar thing is happening with Ansible, I think. We were at when I got started, there were a couple hundred modules. Now there's, like, 4000 modules, or I don't know how many modules, and there's all these collections, and there's namespaces now, all these things that feel like Java overhead type things leaking into it. And that diminishes that ability for me to see, like, oh, this is my simple tool that solving these problems.Corey: I think that that is a lost art in the storytelling side of even cloud marketing, where they're so wrapped around how they do what they do that they forget, customers don't care. Customers care very much about their problem that they're trying to solve. If you have an answer for solving that problem, they're very interested. Otherwise, they do not care. That seems to be a missing gap.Jeff: I think, like, especially for AWS, Google, Azure cloud platforms, when they build their new services, sometimes you're, like, “And that's for who?” For some things, it's so specialized, like, Snowmobile from Amazon, like, there's only a couple customers on the planet in a given year that needs something like that. But it's a cool story, so it's great to put that into your presentation. But some other things, like, especially nowadays with AI, seems like everybody's throwing tons of AI stuff—spaghetti—at the wall, seeing what will stick and then that's how they're doing it. But that really muddies up everything.If you have a clear vision, like with Apple, they just had their presentation on the new iPhone and the new neural engine and stuff, they talk about, “We see your heart patterns and we tell you when your heart is having problems.” They don't talk about their AI features or anything. I think that leading with that story and saying, like, here's how we use this, here's how customers can build off of it, those stories are the ones that are impactful and make people remember, like, oh Apple is the company that saves people's lives by making watches that track their heart. People don't think that about Google, even though they might have the same feature. Google says we have all these 75 sensors in our thing and we have this great platform and Android and all that. But they don't lead with the story.And that's something where I think corporate Apple is better than some of the other organizations, no matter what the technology is. But I get that feeling a lot when I'm watching launches from Amazon and Google and all their big presentations. It seems like they're tech-heavy and they're driven by, like, “What could we do with this? What could you do with this new platform that we're building,” but not, “And this is what we did with this other platform,” kind of building up through that route.Corey: Something I've been meaning to ask someone who knows for a while, and you are very clearly one of those people, I spend a lot of time focusing on controlling cloud costs and I used to think that Managed NAT Gateways were very expensive. And then I saw the current going rates for Raspberries Pi. And that has been a whole new level of wild. I mean, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you use Home Assistant. I do too.But I was contrasting the price between a late model, Raspberry Pi 4—late model; it's three years old if this point of memory serves, maybe four—versus a used small form factor PC from HP, and the second was less expensive and far more capable. Yeah it drags a bit more power and it's a little bit larger on the shelf, but it was basically no contest. What has been going on in that space?Jeff: I think one of the big things is we're at a generational improvement with those small form-factor little, like, tiny-size almost [nook-sized 00:13:59] PCs that were used all over the place in corporate environments. I still—like every doctor's office you go to, every hospital, they have, like, a thousand of these things. So, every two or three or four years, however long it is on their contract, they just pop all those out the door and then you get an E-waste company that picks up a thousand of these boxes and they got to offload them. So, the nice thing is that it seems like a year or two ago, that really started accelerating to the point where the price was driven down below 100 bucks for a fully built-out little x86 Mini PC. Sure, it's, you know, like you said, a few generations old and it pulls a little bit more power, usually six to eight watts at least, versus a Raspberry Pi at two to three watts, but especially for those of us in the US, electricity is not that expensive so adding two or three watts to your budget for a home lab computer is not that bad.The other part of that is, for the past two-and-a-half years because of the global chip shortages and because of the decisions that Raspberry Pi made, there were so few Raspberry Pis available that their prices shot up through the roof if you wanted to get one in any timely fashion. So, that finally is clearing up, although I went to the Micro Center near me yesterday, and they said that they have not had stock of Raspberry Pi 4s for, like, two months now. So, they're coming, but they're not distributed evenly everywhere. And still, the best answer, especially if you're going to run a lot of things on it, is probably to buy one of those little mini PCs if you're starting out a home lab.Or there's some other content creators who build little Kubernetes clusters with multiple mini PCs. Three of those stack up pretty nicely and they're still super quiet. I think they're great for home labs. I have two of them over on my shelf that I'm using for testing and one of them is actually in my rack. And I have another one on my desk here that I'm trying to set up for a five gigabit home router since I finally got fiber internet after years with cable and I'm still stuck on my old gigabit router.Corey: Yeah, I wound up switching to a Protectli, I think is what it's called for—it's one of those things I've installed pfSense on. Which, I'm an old FreeBSD hand and I haven't kept up with it, but that's okay. It feels like going back in time ten years, in some respects—Jeff: [laugh].Corey: —so all right. And I have a few others here and there for various things that I want locally. But invariably, I've had the WiFi controller; I've migrated that off. That lives on an EC2 box in Ohio now. And I do wind up embracing cloud services when I don't want it to go down and be consistently available, but for small stuff locally, I mean, I have an antenna on the roof doing an ADS-B receiver dance that's plugged into a Pi Zero.I have some backlogged stuff on this, but they've gotten expensive as alternatives have dropped in price significantly. But what I'm finding as I'm getting more into 3D printing and a lot of hobbyist maker tools out there, everything is built with the Raspberry Pi in mind; it has the mindshare. And yeah, I can get something with similar specs that are equivalent, but then I've got to do a whole bunch of other stuff as soon as it gets into controlling hardware via GPIO pins or whatnot. And I have to think about it very differently.Jeff: Yeah, and that's the tough thing. And that's the reason why Raspberry Pis, even though they're three years old, even though they're hard to get, they still are fetching—on the used market—way more than the original MSRP. It's just crazy. But the reason for that is the Raspberry Pi organization. And there's two: there's the Raspberry Pi Foundation that's goals are to increase educational computing and accessibility for computers for kids and learning and all that, then there's the Raspberry Pi trading company that makes the Raspberry Pis.The Trading Company has engineers who sit there 24/7 working on the software, working on the kernel drivers, working on hardware bugs, listening to people on the forums and in GitHub and everywhere, and they're all English-speaking people there—they're over in the UK—and they manufacture their own boards. So, there's a lot of things on top of that, even though they're using some silicons of Broadcom chips that are a little bit locked down and not completely open-source like some other chips might be, they're a phone number you could call if you need the support or there's a forum that has activity that you can get help in and their software that's supported. And there's a newer Linux kernel and the kernel is updated all the time. So, all those advantages mean you get a little package that will work, it'll sip two watts of power, sitting 24/7. It's reliable hardware.There's so many people that use it that it's so well tested that almost any problem you could ever run into, someone else has and there's a blog post or a forum post talking about it. And even though the hardware is not super powerful—it's three years old—you can add on a Coral TPU and do face recognition and object recognition. And throw in Frigate for Home Assistant to get notifications on your phone when your mom walks up to the door. There's so many things you can do with them and they're so flexible that they're still so valuable. I think that they really knocked it out of the park with that model, the Raspberry Pi 4, and the compute module 4, which is still impossible to get. I have not been able to buy one for two years now. Luckily, I bought 12 two-and-a-half years ago [laugh] otherwise I would be running out for all my projects that I do.Corey: Yeah. I got two at the moment and two empty slots in the Turing Pi 2, which I'll care more about if I can actually get the thing up and booted. But it presupposes you have a Windows computer or otherwise, ehh, watch this space; more coming. Great. Like, do I build a virtual machine on top of something else? It leads down the path super quickly of places I thought I'd escaped from.Jeff: Yeah, you know, outside of the Pi realm, that's the state of the communities. It's a lot of, like, figuring out your own things. I did a project—I don't know if you've heard of Mr. Beast—but we did a project for him that involves a hundred single-board computers. We couldn't find Raspberry Pi's so we had to use a different single-board computer that was available.And so, I bought an older one thinking, oh, this is, like, three or four years old—it's older than the Pi 4—and there must be enough support now. But still, there's, like, little rough edges everywhere I went and we ended up making them work, but it took us probably an extra 30 to 40 hours of development work to get those things running the same way as a Raspberry Pi. And that's just the way of things. There's so much opportunity.If one of these Chinese manufacturers that makes most of these things, if one of them decided, you know what? We're going to throw tons of money into building support for these things, get some English-speaking members of these forums to build up the community, all that stuff, I think that they could have a shot at Raspberry Pi's giant portion of the market. But so far, I haven't really seen that happen. So far, they're spamming hardware. And it's like, the hardware is awesome. These chips are great if you know how to deal with them and how to get the software running and how to deal with Linux issues, but if you don't, then they're not great because you might not even get the thing to boot.Corey: I want to harken back to something you said a minute ago, where there's value in having a community around something, where you can see everyone else has already encountered a problem like this. I think that folks who weren't around for the rise of cloud have no real insight into how difficult it used to be just getting servers into racks and everything up, and okay, they're identical, and seven of them are working, but that eighth one isn't for some strange reason. And you spend four hours troubleshooting what turns out to be a bad cable or something not seated properly and it's awful. Cloud got away from a lot of that nonsense. But it's important—at least to me—to not be Captain Edgecase, where if you pick some new cloud provider and Google for how to set up a load balancer and no one's done it before you, that's not great. Whereas if I'm googling now in the AWS realm and no one has done, the thing I'm trying to do, that should be something of a cautionary flag of maybe this isn't how most people go about approaching production. Really think twice about this.Jeff: Yep. Yeah, we ran into that on a project I was working on was using Magento—which I don't know if anybody listening uses Magento, but it's not fun—and we ran into some things where it's like, “We're doing this, and it says that they do this on their official supported platform, but I don't know how they are because the code just doesn't exist here.” So, we ran into some weird edge cases on AWS with some massive infrastructure for the databases, and I ran into scaling issues. But even there, there were forum posts in AWS here and there that had little nuggets that helped us to figure out a way to get around it. And like you say, that is a massive advantage for AWS.And we ran into an issue with, we were one of the first customers trying out the new Lambda functions for RDS—or I don't remember exactly what it was called initially—but we ended up not using that. But we ran into some of these issues and figured out we were the first customer running into this weird scaling thing when we had a certain size of database trying to use it with these Lambda calls. And eventually, they got those things solved, but with AWS, they've seen so many things and some other cloud providers haven't seen these things. So, when you have certain types of applications that need to scale in certain ways, that is so valuable and the community of users, the ability to pull from that community when you need to hire somebody in an emergency, like, we need somebody to help us get this project done and we're having this issue, you can find somebody that is, like, okay, I know how to get you from Point A to Point B and get this project out the door. You can't do that on certain platforms.And open-source projects, too. We've always had that problem in Drupal. The amount of developers who are deep into Drupal to help with the hard problems is not vast, so the ones who can do that stuff, they're all hired off and paid a handsome sum. And if you have those kinds of problems you realize, I either going to need to pay a ton of money or we're just going to have to not do that thing that we wanted to do. And that's tough.Corey: What I've found, sort of across the board, has been that there's a lot of, I guess, open-source community ethos that has bled into a lot of this space and I wanted to make sure that we have time to talk about this because I was incensed a while back when Red Hat decided, “Oh, you know that whole ten-year commitment on CentOS? That project that we acquired and are now basically stabbing in the face?”—disclosure. I used to be part of the CentOS project years ago when I was on network staff for the Freenode IRC network—then it was, “Oh yeah, we're just going to basically undermine our commitments to you and now you can pay us if you want to get that support there.” And that really set me off. Was nice to see you were right there as well in almost lockstep with me, pointing out that this is terrible, just as far as breaking promises you've made to customers. Has your anger cooled any? Because mine hasn't.Jeff: It has not. My temper has cooled. My anger has not. I don't think that they get it. After all the backlash that they got after that, I don't think that the VP-level folks at Red Hat understand that this is already impacting them and will impact them much more in the future because people like me and you, people who help other people build infrastructure and people who recommend operating systems and people who recommend patterns and things, we're just going to drop off using CentOS because it doesn't exist. It does exist and some other people are saying, “Oh, it's actually better to use this new CentOS, you know, Stream. Stream is amazing.” It's not. It's not the same thing. It's different. And—Corey: I used to work at a bank. That was not an option. I mean, granted at the bank for the production systems it was always [REL 00:25:18], but being able to spin up a pre-production environment without having to pay license fees on every VM. Yeah.Jeff: Yeah. And not only that, they did this announcement and framed it a certain way, and the community immediately saw. You know, I think that they're just angry about something, and whether it was a NASA contract with Rocky Linux, or whether it was something Oracle did, who knows, but it seems petty in retrospect, especially in comparison to the amount of backlash that came out of it. And I really don't think that they understand the thing that they had with that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not a massive growth opportunity for Red Hat. It's, in some ways, a dying product in terms of compared to using cloud stuff, it doesn't matter.You could use CoreOS, you could use NixOS, and you could use anything, it doesn't really matter. For people like you and me, we just want to deploy our software. And if it's containers, it really doesn't matter. It's just the people in government or in certain organizations that have these roles that you have to use whatever FIPS and all that kind of stuff. So, it's not like it's a hyper-growth opportunity for them.CentOS was, like, the only reason why all the software, especially on the open-source side, was compatible with Red Hat because we could use CentOS and it was easy and simple. They took that—well, they tried to take that away and everybody's like, “That's—what are you doing?” Like, I posted my blog post and I think that sparked off quite a bit of consternation, to the point where there was a lot of personal stuff going on. I basically said, “I'm not supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux for any of my work anymore.” Like, “From this point forward, it's not supported.”I'll support OpenELA, I'll support Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux or whatever because I can get free versions that I don't have to sign into a portal and get a license and download the license and integrate it with my CI work. I'm an open-source developer. I'm not going to pay for stuff or use 16 free licenses. Or I was reached out to and they said, “We'll give you more licenses. We'll give you extra.” And it's like, that's not how this works. Like, I don't have to call Debian and Ubuntu and [laugh] I don't even have to call Oracle to get licenses. I can just download their software and run it.So, you know, I don't think they understood the fact that they had that. And the bigger problem for me was the two-layer approach to destroying all the trust that the community had. First was in, I think it was 2019 when they said—we're in the middle of CentOS 8's release cycle—they said, “We're dropping CentOS 8. It's going to be Stream now.” And everybody was up in arms.And then Rocky Linux and [unintelligible 00:27:52] climbed in and gave us what we wanted: basically, CentOS. So, we're all happy and we had a status quo, and Rocky Linux 9 and [unintelligible 00:28:00] Linux nine came out after Red Hat 9, and the world was a happy place. And then they just dumped this thing on us and it's like, two major release cycles in a row, they did it again. Like, I don't know what this guy's thinking, but in one of the interviews, one of the Red Hat representatives said, “Well, we wanted to do this early in Red Hat 9's release cycle because people haven't started migrating.” It's like, well, I already did all my automation upgrades for CI to get all my stuff working in Rocky Linux 9 which was compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Am I not one of the people that's important to you?Like, who's important to you? Is it only the people who pay you money or is it also the people that empower your operating system to be a premier Enterprise Linux operating system? So, I don't know. You can tell. My anger has not died down. The amount of temper that I have about it has definitely diminished because I realize I'm talking at a wall a lot of times, when I'm having conversations on Twitter, private conversations and email, things like that.Corey: People come to argue; they don't come to actually have a discussion.Jeff: Yeah. I think that they just, they don't see the community aspect of it. They just see the business aspect. And the business aspect, if they want to figure out ways that they can get more people to pay them for their software, then maybe they should provide more value and not just cut off value streams. It doesn't make sense to me from a long-term business perspective.From a short term, maybe there were some clients who said, “Oh, shoot. We need this thing stable. We're going to pay for some more licenses.” But the engineers that those places are going to start making plans of, like, how do we make this not happen again. And the way to not make that happen, again is to use, maybe Ubuntu or maybe [unintelligible 00:29:38] or something. Who knows? But it's not going to be increasing our spend with Red Hat.Corey: That's what I think a lot of companies are missing when it comes to community as well, where it's not just a place to go to get support for whatever it is you're doing and it's not a place [where 00:29:57] these companies view prospective customers. There's more to it than that. There has to be a social undercurrent on this. I look at the communities I spend time in and in some of them dating back long enough, I've made lifelong significant friendships out of those places, just through talking about our lives, in addition to whatever the community is built around. You have to make space for that, and companies don't seem to fully understand that.Jeff: Yeah, I think that there's this thing that a community has to provide value and monetizable value, but I don't think that you get open-source if you think that that's what it is. I think some people in corporate open-source think that corporate open-source is a value stream opportunity. It's a funnel, it's something that is going to bring you more customers—like you say—but they don't realize that it's a community. It's like a group of people. It's friends, it's people who want to make the world a better place, it's people who want to support your company by wearing your t-shirt to conferences, people want to put on your red fedora because it's cool. Like, it's all of that. And when you lose some of that, you lose what makes your product differentiated from all the other ones on the market.Corey: That's what gets missed. I think that there's a goodwill aspect of it. People who have used the technology and understand its pitfalls are likelier to adopt it. I mean, if you tell me to get a website up and running, I am going to build an architecture that resembles what I've run before on providers that I've run on before because I know what the failure modes look like; I know how to get things up and running. If I'm in a hurry, trying to get something out the door, I'm going to choose the devil that I know, on some level.Don't piss me off as a community member and incentivize me to change that estimation the next time I've got something to build. Well, that doesn't show up on this quarter's numbers. Well, we have so little visibility into how decisions get made many companies that you'll never know that you have a detractor who's still salty about something you did five years ago and that's the reason the bank decided not to because that person called in their political favors to torpedo that deal and have a sweetheart offer from your competitor, et cetera and so on and so forth. It's hard to calculate the actual cost of alienating goodwill. But—Jeff: Yeah.Corey: I wish companies had a longer memory for these things.Jeff: Yeah. I mean, and thinking about that, like, there was also the HashiCorp incident where they kind of torpedoed all developer goodwill with their Terraform and other—Terraform especially, but also other products. Like, I probably, through my book and through my blog posts and my GitHub examples have brought in a lot of people into the HashiCorp ecosystem through Vagrant use, and through Packer and things like that. At this point, because of the way that they treated the open-source community with the license change, a guy like me is not going to be enthusiastic about it anymore and I'm going to—I already had started looking at alternatives for Vagrant because it doesn't mesh with modern infrastructure practices for local development as much, but now it's like that enthusiasm is completely gone. Like I had that goodwill, like you said earlier, and now I don't have that goodwill and I'm not going to spread that, I'm not going to advocate for them, I'm not going to wear their t-shirt [laugh], you know when I go out and about because it just doesn't feel as clean and cool and awesome to me as it did a month ago.And I don't know what the deal is. It's partly the economy, money's drying up, things like that, but I don't understand how the people at the top can't see these things. Maybe it's just their organization isn't set up to show the benefits from the engineers underneath, who I know some of these engineers are, like, “Yeah, I'm sorry. This was dumb. I still work here because I get a paycheck, but you know, I can't say anything on social media, but thank you for saying what you did on Twitter.” Or X.Corey: Yeah. It's nice being independent where you don't really have to fear the, well if I say this thing online, people might get mad at me and stop doing business with me or fire me. It's well, yeah, I mean, I would have to say something pretty controversial to drive away every client and every sponsor I've got at this point. And I don't generally have that type of failure mode when I get it wrong. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Jeff: Old school, my personal website, jeffgeerling.com. I link to everything from there, I have an About page with a link to every profile I've ever had, so check that out. It links to my books, my YouTube, all that kind of stuff.Corey: There's something to be said for picking a place to contact you that will last the rest of your career as opposed to, back in the olden days, my first email address was the one that my ISP gave me 25 years ago. I don't use that one anymore.Jeff: Yep.Corey: And having to tell everyone I corresponded with that it was changing was a pain in the butt. We'll definitely put a link to that one in the [show notes 00:34:44]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Jeff: Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me.Corey: Jeff Geerling, YouTuber, author, content creator, and oh so very much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that we will, of course, read [in action 00:35:13], just as soon as your payment of compute modules for Raspberries Pi show up in a small unmarked bag.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
I'm reading a book by Stanley Fish called How to Write a Sentence. I found this book by Googling that exact question because I wanted to find anything that might be a fit for what I'm podcasting about this season. How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish The Tools and Materials of Writing Write While True Episode 28: Complex Sentences Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Sponsor: Prompted Morning Page Journals Transcript
Is there such a thing as a perfect youth meeting? Yes and no. I describe what I thing the perfect youth meeting looks like and I share the "letter" I wrote to a pastor who seemed to have his own ideas of perfection. If you are tired of Googling what to do to build a successful youth ministry and you'd like coaching from someone whose built a few, check out my coaching program and get $100 in resources and 20% off for Pastors Appreciation Month. Just use the code COACHME when you check out. https://youthminresources.gumroad.com/l/Zvak
In this episode of the Humane Marketing podcast, we venture into the 'P' of People as part of our ongoing exploration of the 7Ps of the Humane Marketing Mandala. Join me in a conversation with Cara Steinmann, the visionary founder of the Ravel Collective and host of the Ravel Radio podcast. Together, we delve into the art of authentic networking, emphasizing the importance of core values, unconventional approaches on LinkedIn, and the profound impact of empathy on your business relationships. Discover new insights that could transform the way you approach human connections and meaningful networking. In this episode, Cara and I discuss: Her experience with traditional networking and how she redefined it How to bring our core values to our networking How Cara uses LinkedIn to create connections, but not with a lead-generation mindset Networking for introverts How to be intentional when networking The importance of quality over quantity And so much more Ep 174 [00:00:00] Sarah: Hi, Cara. So nice to meet. Hi, you. [00:00:04] Cara: Good to see you, Sarah. How's it going? I'm good, thank you. [00:00:08] Sarah: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I really look forward to this conversation with you. I was on your podcast recently and we really [00:00:15] Cara: we're [00:00:16] Sarah: aligned, so I'm glad we have you on the humane part, marketing podcast, and talking about networking. [00:00:23] Right? So that's kind of your. Specialty and, uh, yeah, I want to just go dive right in. So tell me how did you come to make networking part of your specialty? And how did you build a community around networking? Why is networking so important to [00:00:45] Cara: you? It was kind of an accident because I don't really think of myself as a networking person and I think a lot of people probably feel that way because there's this connotation around networking that it's sort of like very businessy and very like you imagine yourself in a [00:01:00] room with very professional people and you're handing out business cards and you're talking about things that are very business related, but I think in my life, uh, in my career, I've sort of acted more as just a connector. [00:01:12] I think of it as connecting with people and building relationships. And that's usually not on a grand scale. It's one person at a time, usually in a one to one conversation. And it doesn't feel like what you would imagine networking to be. So I think maybe a little shift in the way we think about networking can help a lot of us who don't like that whole, you know, big corporate business vibe and really care more about. [00:01:36] One to one relationships and what goes on beyond the business. Yeah. [00:01:40] Sarah: That's already such a, a shift when you say relationship building versus networking. Mm-hmm. has that term work in it. Right. And so it feels like I'm the one going into this crowd and I have to work my way through it. Like, and, and yeah. [00:01:58] Collect the business cards [00:02:00] and you know, it's kind of like, yeah. [00:02:01] Cara: That, and I think. Be I think expanding our understanding of network be working beyond or even relationship building beyond thinking of who we are going to build relationships with to thinking about who we can connect so they can build relationships, because then you expand your network exponentially because then they also. [00:02:23] They also consider you part of their and both of you're part of both of their network. And then they're connecting. And then when they meet new people, they want to introduce you. So it's kind of kind of like weaving a web of connection with people that you genuinely want to talk to and spend time with and respect. [00:02:37] Sarah: It's funny you guys use that term weaving because in our community, uh, we have. One of the calls that is kind of like a networking call, um, but we actually call it net weaving. So I love that it's this idea of, yeah, we're together and we're getting to know one another, but we're weaving, uh, these [00:03:00] relationships. [00:03:00] Cara: And yeah, I love that. Yeah, we unravel. We have connection calls that are just to talk about whatever we want to talk about and connect. We had one yesterday and a bunch of us were on there just talking about what vacations we're taking and a little bit about business and what we're looking at challenges right now. [00:03:14] And then we have a small, small business mastermind where we all break off and then we have a happy hour once a month. And otherwise we're just hanging out in the community, getting to know each other and asking business related questions and personal questions. And, you know, it's about, I think it's a little bit deeper than just. [00:03:30] What do you do and who do you do it for? Like the pitch does, the elevator pitch doesn't matter so much when you know somebody. Yeah. [00:03:38] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. You really addressed something there. It's this superficiality that I always hated at networking events that I felt like people were only listening to themselves talk and preparing what they're going to say next. [00:03:55] Listening to me and, you know, really having a conversation. And then [00:04:00] of course you add, you know, this was prior to COVID you add kind of like, you know, surrounding noise to it and you don't really hear one another and it was just [00:04:10] like [00:04:10] Cara: a nightmare. It is. It's a nightmare prior to COVID. I, I always loathed. [00:04:17] In person networking events, conferences and things like that, because it just, I knew I was going to end up in situations talking to people who really weren't necessarily a very strategic fit for like a strategic partner or referral partner, and that they would, like you said, just be waiting for their opportunity to say what they needed to say about their business and having a lot of surface level conversations because I think a lot of business culture requires you to leave the personal at home. [00:04:41] And I don't want to do that. I think we bring ourselves to our work and to our business, our core values, the way we operate. And I would rather, like we were talking about introverts before we hit record. Right. And I don't really consider myself an introvert, but when it comes to those kinds of things, I really act like one, because I would much rather have an [00:05:00] intimate conversation about things that matter than talk about, you know, What you do, what you do for people, because that's gonna, if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to find that out. [00:05:08] Anyway, we can't help but talk about that. Right. [00:05:10] Sarah: Yeah, yeah, no, it's so true. It's these deeper, meaningful connections and conversations and actually. Also pre COVID, um, there was this, uh, movement on, on LinkedIn, uh, called the LinkedIn local events. Yeah. And so me who always hated networking all of the sudden, I was like, well, these events kind of had a different tone because they, they came with topics and they were really open to this idea of. [00:05:40] Bring yourself to the conversation, bring the human side to the conversation. And so I actually put my hand up together with, um, another, uh, local friend here. And we started creating these LinkedIn local networking events. And, and we created themes, you know, where people would pick [00:06:00] cards and have really deep conversations and people loved it, people were like, Oh, this. [00:06:05] So different. Right. And then every now and then the person would walk in and you could tell, you know, they were like business suit and they probably had their stack of business cards and they're like, what is this? Why [00:06:17] Cara: are people doing here? It's funny. Cause I had, I used to host a speed networking event in Ravel and, um. [00:06:24] I actually, I learned this from a coaching program that I was in and they would do a lot of like more personal questions. And so I love that we only did it once a month and I was like, we need to do this more often. And so the challenge was calling it speed networking because what we actually do when you get there is break up into small little breakout rooms. [00:06:40] And I would. I would offer questions or topic starters, like what's the weirdest thing in your fridge right now? Like things that don't have anything to do with business, but you end up deciding kind of who you really mesh with and who you want to take that relationship further with and really get to know about them and their business and how you can support one another. [00:06:57] Cause you don't really want to support people you don't [00:07:00] care about. Right. So that's kind of the first step, I think, is deciding who you want to care about. Right. [00:07:05] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Before you also addressed core values. So, so huge. What do you think are the, you know, the core, or I guess there's two questions. What are the core values that we should bring to networking and why do they [00:07:21] Cara: matter so much? [00:07:23] I think we should bring our own core values to networking because the truth is we are all I like to think of them as core drivers because I think corporate culture has kind of ruined the term core values for us. We think of the little poster on the wall that doesn't really mean anything. But if you really get into your core drivers, what it means is it's what motivates you. [00:07:40] It's what drives your behavior. So my core values are freedom, authenticity and connection. And I notice when I'm in a funk or when I'm out of sorts, it's because something is going against my core values. So if you're going to network, I think you should network with people ideally who share your core values. [00:07:58] And then you'll [00:08:00] naturally network in a very comfortable way. Like when I started Ravel, I very intentionally invited, I seeded the community with women who I knew shared at least one of my core values, knowing that birds of a feather flock together. And so it worked really well because now we're up around a hundred women and anyone who's referred someone has always been an amazing fit. [00:08:18] I have to do very little background on the applicants now because if I know Maggie int introduced someone else to the group, I know Maggie and I know she's not going to introduce somebody to the group who's not a good fit because her core values align really well with mine. Yeah. So I think that makes it just so much easier to predict how someone's going to behave and what you can expect from them. [00:08:40] Sarah: Yeah, and it really defines the community, [00:08:42] Cara: right? Yeah, it makes it easier to hold that community in a shape, like my goal when I started Ravel was to create a community, just create a space and hold it in a shape, such that people would feel comfortable and vulnerable enough to connect with one another and really get to know each other. [00:08:58] And by inviting the. [00:09:00] Types of people who would be strategically aligned to be most likely to refer one another, like complimentary service providers. They're all B2B service entrepreneurs and they're women. So they have a lot in common and, you know, financial professionals who serve agencies can network with coaches who serve agencies. [00:09:17] And because they share core values, they're going to probably get along pretty well. And it makes it easy to build that kind of rapport that they need to. Want to connect with one another and see what's up in their business and say, Hey, you should talk to so and so. So it's like kind of building relationships with like the happy by product that you get referrals in business works really well. [00:09:36] Yeah. [00:09:37] Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. Usually we hear this this idea of quality over quantity. Um, you just mentioned your communities about 100 people. Um, so, so what do you think about quality over quantity in terms of the networking? Is it a, is it a numbers game or is [00:10:00] it a quality game or is it something [00:10:01] Cara: in between? [00:10:02] I think it's quality over quantity, 100%. And I think it's evolving, honestly, constantly, right? Like, so if you're, cause your business evolves, maybe you shift who you serve or how you serve that person. Um, and so maybe you have a handful of really great referral partners and. you shift your business a little bit. [00:10:21] You might have to, some of those referral partners, it might not be as strategically aligned anymore. And maybe they stay, you stay friends, but you might start looking around for different strategic partners who might be more well aligned, but it's not like you have to shift your whole network. You just start networking with a few different people and start figuring out who, who fits with you. [00:10:38] Um, and I think like a hundred is a lot of women. Like, I don't, I don't intimately know every member of the community anymore. When it was like 20 women, it was like, It was really easy. And, but what we've done is we've separated into smaller groups too. So we have a Slack channel where we have different topics. [00:10:55] We have rabble travel, and we have ADHD all day and moms. And [00:11:00] so we have these different things that we care about. And the women who gravitate to those channels tend to get to know each other well enough that. Even if they're not strategically aligned to refer one another as well as some others would be, they kind of cross pollinate between the community, the micro communities within the chant, within the community. [00:11:17] And then they say, Oh, you know who you should get to know. So there's a lot of paying it forward, introducing people to other people. That is such a, an underrated gift that you can give someone is to say, I think I know somebody who you need to know. Who would, you'd benefit from knowing each other. I mean, making a connection between two people who you think would get along is such a gift. [00:11:38] Yeah. [00:11:39] Sarah: Yeah. So true. Um, you mentioned a few times this word strategic, and I guess it's for you, it's like, well, there's a strategy to networking because again, as an introvert, This idea of networking can sometimes feel so overwhelming because we think, well, does that mean I have to network with [00:12:00] just anybody, you know, so it's like, Oh my God, I don't have the time to network with just anybody. [00:12:07] So, so what, what is a good strategy, um, that feels, you know, empathic and yet very strategic. Um, and I guess time conscious as well. [00:12:20] Cara: Yeah. Yeah. I think. Um, that's probably how most people think of it is just like, it's very overwhelming. You have to make a lot of people think there's a list you have to make and you have to contact X number of people a day. [00:12:31] And that feels very impersonal and kind of, um, like required, which doesn't feel good for a lot of people. Um, I've approached it differently. Like I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. Um, just for networking, though, I don't spend a lot of time scrolling on LinkedIn, but if I find somebody offline, say I'm listening to a podcast or reading a book or find somebody's website online while I'm Googling or going down a rabbit hole of some kind, and I feel like they are strategically aligned with my business, meaning either they're, uh, [00:13:00] Complimentary service provider. [00:13:00] So we serve the same client, but we do different things, or we are a shoulder niche peer, meaning that we do different things or do we do the same sort of thing, but for different clients. So maybe I serve, um, the financial industry and they serve, um, like agencies or something like that. And so we can refer one another because we don't really serve the same ideal client, and this requires knowing what you want and what you're good at. [00:13:24] I don't think we are all suited to do, you know, the same thing. We're, we're all so different. I think it also, I think it's a successful networking in this way requires that you don't believe in competition. We're all so different. There's so much, so many factors that we can own as, you know, authentic to who we are that maybe somebody else doesn't want to own. [00:13:45] And if we know ourselves really well, we can understand what we do best and who we are best suited to serve. And then there's just no way that somebody else is going to bring exactly the same thing to the table that we are. So. We have to kind of get rid of that idea first. And then we're free to [00:14:00] network with people who look like they do something similar to what we do, but probably don't do exactly what we do or for the same person. [00:14:07] Um, and then you can also look for people who are, um, centers of influence coaches for, if you serve entrepreneurs, maybe you're wanting to network with coaches who serve entrepreneurs, and maybe you're a done for you service provider or something like that. So they're in a position to refer you there. [00:14:24] The people you're looking for to network with are the ones who are most likely to be in a position to refer you. So not somebody who's working in a totally different industry with clients that aren't even related to you. Um, but I don't, I don't think you have to go like search for them. I think you can listen to podcasts that are interesting to you and just start taking note of. [00:14:47] Someone who's interesting to you, who you think you might like and say, is that person in a position to refer me perhaps, and then you can just reach out to that person individually. I usually on LinkedIn because it's the easiest place to get [00:15:00] really connected with somebody. Yeah, [00:15:03] Sarah: so the idea is really to find referral partners. [00:15:07] and connect with them. [00:15:09] Cara: Yeah. And to be open about it and say, Hey, I think we have a lot in common. I think we might benefit from knowing each other. Um, I like you. I like what you're doing. Let's connect and just say hi. Mm-hmm. . [00:15:20] Sarah: Yeah. Do you then stop at the, you know, first conversation or how do you. Because it, you know, we always say in networking, you have to stay top of mind. [00:15:31] So how do you stay top of mind with this [00:15:33] Cara: person then? I don't think everyone is going to stay top of mind all the time, right? Like, you're gonna, you're gonna meet a few people who you really click with. And a few people who you don't really click with. One of the reasons that I started Ravel was because it is hard to stay top of mind when we're all busy and we're all running around doing all our stuff all day long. [00:15:52] And I don't, I'm not the kind of person, let's do, we have to do what works for us, right? If you're an organized person and you like lists and you use a [00:16:00] CRM, maybe you can stay top of mind with people in your own strategic way. I can't do that. So I put everybody in a container that I like so that I can stay connected with them in a container. [00:16:12] We, we naturally stay connected because we're having calls or somebody is asking a question and we're learning more about their business that way. And we're commenting and sharing our expertise. And so I think it's about proximity. And then if you're connected with them on LinkedIn and you're following them, you might see them. [00:16:26] It's like, The top of mind thing I think is more about the mere exposure effect than, than the top, than staying top of mind. It's just staying in front of someone who you want to, to stay connected with. And you can do that in a lot of different ways just by commenting on their stuff on LinkedIn. They see you, you learn a little bit more maybe about what they do and it don't think it has to take a long time. [00:16:46] It can take five, 10 minutes to, to go on. And in the case of LinkedIn, I would say like a lot of people suggest. That you'd be connected to a ton of people and follow a ton of people. But I find that really overwhelming. So [00:17:00] I only follow and want to be connected with the people that I really want to stay connected with because then my feed isn't really overwhelming and I can just, I can see the people that I want to stay in touch with and I can comment and like, and stay. [00:17:12] In front of them. And then they remember me. [00:17:15] Sarah: Yeah. So, so, so does that mean that you actually, you know, hide some of the updates of people who you don't want to see anymore, just so not, not to. [00:17:26] Cara: I just unfollow them or disconnect. I am a little bit ruthless that way because it's, we only have so much time and I don't really want to be connected with people that don't align with me really, really well. [00:17:36] So, you know, when I. I've been on LinkedIn for a long, long time, but my, my career has evolved. You know, if the past 15 years I'm doing very different things than I was in the very beginning. And so I, when I decided to reinvest in LinkedIn as a way to connect with people, I went in and I, I had, you know, thousands of connections and I got rid of all but 400 and some odd. [00:17:57] Because it was like, if I don't want to have coffee with this [00:18:00] person, I don't need to be on LinkedIn with them. And perhaps that's different if you're not an entrepreneur and you're trying to get a job. I don't know about that, but for my situation where I want to spend time connecting and networking with people who care about the same things I care about. [00:18:18] That means there's a lot of people I don't need to connect with. And I don't want to waste my time looking at their stuff. if I don't care about it. Right. And they don't know, so it's not mean or anything. [00:18:33] Sarah: Um, yeah, it's really interesting to, to see how, you know, usually we always hear, Oh, use LinkedIn for lead generation, right? [00:18:43] Yeah, that's not how you're looking at it. You're like, well, I, Only want the people I care about. And so they, yes, they might be potential clients or they're, you know, some other level of connection or [00:18:59] [00:19:00] network. [00:19:00] Cara: That's how you. I think that's a giant, you're speaking to something that's really important that I think a lot of people miss. [00:19:05] It's a giant mistake to go into like a community or a networking container and think you're going to sell to the people in that container. You're the benefit of being in a container with a hundred women. Is the connection to the 150 other people they know that they might be able to connect you with. [00:19:24] And yes, we buy from each other. I've purchased products and services from tons of the women inside Ravel and we buy stuff. We hire each other all the time, but it's not because we're sharing our offers and trying to convince each other to buy from us. It's because we happen to know each other really well, and we have a problem and we know that person can solve it. [00:19:42] But most of the time we're introducing someone. To another person, like I'll run. I talked to a friend of mine, or I go to an event or something, and I hear somebody has a problem. And I will say, I know somebody you should talk to. Let me connect you with so and so because I know what she does. And I like her and I know she'll do a good job. [00:19:59] Right. [00:20:00] So we're, we're building the relationships. We're not selling to people and LinkedIn is You know, a breeding ground for people doing lead gen on LinkedIn. We should be doing strategic networking. [00:20:11] Sarah: Yeah, I think that that's really the, the, the difference is not thinking of everybody who is somehow looking like a client just because they, you know, have a human body that, that you think of them as your ideal client. [00:20:29] And especially if you then think of a community where Uh, you know, the minute you bring that kind of energy into a community, the community is basically, yeah, it's destined to [00:20:41] Cara: fail. I've seen it happen in Ravel a couple of times where a couple, where a couple of people have, you know, crossed that line between, Hey guys, here's what I'm doing. [00:20:49] Check it out. Cause we want to share, we want to share what we're doing and we have a space for that, you know, but, um, a couple of people have, you know, gotten a little bit salesy with it. And it's not that they [00:21:00] get slapped down or anything. It's just that nobody responds. Right. It's just not something people are looking for in a community where we're trying to build relationships. [00:21:10] But what we do is we have calls and we connect with one another and we learn what's going on. And then we will often share on another person's behalf. One of our, one of our members, Cara, Cara Hoosier, she's getting ready to publish a book and it's really exciting because she's been through an incredible journey to get where she is. [00:21:25] It's called burnt out to lit up. And it's about. preventing yourself from burning out and what to do when you get there. And she's getting ready to launch this. She's looking for people to help her, you know, do reviews and read her book. And I was super excited for her. So instead of her getting on there and she's saying, Hey guys, look at what I did. [00:21:43] I said, can I share this with the community? Because it's really awesome. And she was like, sure. And so I said, you guys look at this, our member, our fellow friend here. is publishing a book. This is so exciting. Who wants to help her? I know that anybody else in here who is publishing a book would want the community to help them too. [00:21:59] [00:22:00] And so it's a very different message when you lift up another woman, as opposed to saying, look at me. It look at her sounds a lot different than look at me. Sure. So we help each other that way. Yeah. [00:22:12] Sarah: At the same time you as the host. What would you do? And this is not to do with networking, but just as a, you know, fellow community host, what would you do with a member, you know, several times trespasses that kind of unspoken rule that we're not selling in this community? [00:22:34] What would you do? [00:22:36] Cara: We had one instance in two years. In the last two years, we've had one instance where someone really kind of did cross the line. And I wasn't online that morning, but I got a bunch of messages from other community members who were like, Hey, we don't like this. Like we got to do something about this. [00:22:52] Um, and they were upset for me because she was trying to poach a bunch of members into a different community, which I think is fine actually, because [00:23:00] it's, I mean, I don't think poaching is fine, but I think women should have more than one community. They serve different purposes. I. intentionally keep Ravel at a very reasonable price because I want to belong to many communities, and I know that other women do too. [00:23:13] Um, but the way she went about it was really kind of gross. And so I had to respond to that because the community was saying, this feels gross and we don't want to be around this. And so I did ask, I said, we're going to go ahead and Remove you because this is not how we operate in here. I wish you know, but bless and release This might just not be the right place for you Which is important to remember because there are people have different core values people believe different things They operate different ways and just because she doesn't operate the way that we want to operate doesn't mean there's not a place Where that's totally fine for people to do, bless and release. [00:23:46] Um, so it's really more of like the community managing itself. I don't moderate and I don't tell them what they can and can't do. [00:23:54] Sarah: So, yeah, but in a way it's beautiful to have them, you know, kind of [00:24:00] show up and say, Hey, this is not how, this is not how we run here. [00:24:05] Cara: And yeah. And yeah. And that's my whole goal with the community is I don't, I'm not a coach. [00:24:10] I don't. Sell them anything other than the place inside the community, like the space. And so that's what, how I view it is. And I mean, we're kind of getting away from networking into community at this point, but I view it as myself just holding space in a particular shape. And that's my job is to make sure this play, this space is safe and a good place for people to be vulnerable and build relationships. [00:24:31] And if they can't do that, I'm not doing my job. So it has to be a safe space online. Yeah, yeah, [00:24:39] Sarah: that's beautiful. Yeah, we kind of meshed community with networking, but that's what [00:24:45] Cara: you're, that's what it is, right? Yeah, it, if when you're networking, you're building community. It just may not have a specific container it lives in. [00:24:54] Sarah: Yeah. And I also think. If we're changing that [00:25:00] term of networking into net weaving, then that's what we're really doing in a community is weaving a web together because the whole definition of a community is people being connected with each other. Not just to you as the host, right? [00:25:17] Cara: Totally. Yeah. And, and I, and this is why I use Slack, but I pay for the analytics. [00:25:23] I could use it for free, but I want to see what's happening behind the scenes, which is valuable because more than 50 percent of the conversations that are happening inside the community are in the DMs. And I know I'm not having that many conversations. There are thousands of conversations happening during the month. [00:25:36] And I know I'm not having that many. So there are a lot of private conversations happening and partnerships. Um, I introduced a couple of gals recently who are now partnering in business and, and they're super excited and doing some really amazing things. And I know that has nothing to do with me, but we're weaving. [00:25:54] These connections, not just for us, but for other people as well. And I think not, you don't even have [00:26:00] to, like, we can think of containers as smaller things, even text threads between two people or three people. Like if I have several people I want to connect with, because we all live locally, we're on a text thread together and the three of us send funny memes to one another. [00:26:12] And it doesn't have to do with business all the time. Yeah, [00:26:16] Sarah: I agree with that. It can also be more fun, right? It [00:26:18] Cara: should be more fun. Don't you think we should have more fun? I need more fun. [00:26:25] Sarah: Um, Yeah, maybe, maybe that's a good way to close with the, with the fun networking. Um, but maybe just also for people who right now, you know, there's so many communities out there yet, yet they're like, well, I don't either, I don't have the funds or I just can't decide which one to join. [00:26:45] So how can you start networking with that community as, or with that community notion without being in a community? What kind of advice would [00:26:55] Cara: you give? Um, I would say, I would say just [00:27:00] start connecting with people you enjoy. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I reach out to people who I think are excellent, either hosts or, um, interviewees, guests. [00:27:10] And I just tell them, I really, I like just start, start connecting directly with people that you admire, or you think have something interesting to say that you align with. Um, because like, there's that thing homophily, we're attracted to things that are similar to what we love or, or who we are. And so we're, they're going to be attracted to you. [00:27:28] If you share something either, I mean, location's really obvious, but beyond that, like core values or a mission or a purpose or something like that, like, I think you and I initially got connected on LinkedIn long, long ago, because I heard your podcast. And I was like, I, you're doing awesome things. We need to be connected. [00:27:45] And like, it didn't go anywhere for a long time. We had a little back and forth on, on LinkedIn, but eventually here we are trading podcast interviews. And so I think being in it for the long game and having conversations in the DMs, not expecting every [00:28:00] conversation to go somewhere, but being open to it going somewhere. [00:28:04] Yeah. [00:28:04] Sarah: And probably also not coming with this expectation that. Everyone you reach out to is gonna open your, their calendar [00:28:13] Cara: to you, you know, like, yeah, like when we connected initially, I was not expecting a one to one call. I, we live across the country, across the world from one another and we're both busy and eventually maybe we connect, but I genuinely just wanted to tell you that I really like what you're doing. [00:28:30] And I think that's people want to hear that it's people are open to hearing that you agree with them and that you like what they're doing. And if that's all it is, you've put some good energy out in the world and you can leave it at that. Right, [00:28:41] Sarah: exactly. It doesn't doesn't have to become a lead generation. [00:28:45] Cara: Yeah, it doesn't have to even become like a really intense networking like relationship there. We're going to have this whole gamut of closeness in our network, right? And we don't have the capacity to be really close. With a bunch of bunch of people like [00:29:00] 510 people, we're going to be really close with. [00:29:02] Um, and if we're all running in roughly the same circles, there's going to be opportunities for collaboration and referrals and those things. So it's a little bit of a leap of faith, but you got to just trust that if you're doing good work and you're helping people and people know you do it, that they're going to tell somebody exactly [00:29:20] Sarah: plant those seeds. [00:29:21] Yes, that's wonderful. Well, do you tell us a bit more about rattle and your community [00:29:28] Cara: and where people can find it? Yeah. The website is ravelcollective. com and it's for women B2B service entrepreneurs. So financial professionals, lots of marketers, content writers, stuff like that. Consultants. We've got some coaches, some, um, coaches for women entrepreneurs, and it's just a networking community, a really casual networking community where we Get to know each other. [00:29:50] A bunch of us are going to Mexico in a month together. I haven't met three of them, but I, and it's not an official event. I just said, Hey, I'm going to go to Mexico for a week and [00:30:00] do some like 2024 business planning. If anybody wants to join me, I've rented this house. And so it's not, you know, we probably won't talk business all the time, but. [00:30:09] It'll be fun. So we're kind of trying to put some of the fun and like person to person relationship back into business so that we can rely on, I don't know, our, our relationships to sustain us instead of, you know, just relying on ourselves. So yeah, it's 39 a month and it's month to month and it's just a space that I'm holding for women who want to build more professional relationships. [00:30:34] Sarah: We'll make sure to link to it. I always have one last question, uh, Cara, and that's, what are you grateful for today or this week, this month? [00:30:45] Cara: Oh my goodness. I think I'm most grateful for my family this week. It's there's a lot of, there's a lot of lonely people out there and I have a wonderful husband and a, an amazing son and I'm really [00:31:00] grateful for them. [00:31:02] Wonderful. [00:31:03] Thank you for having me.
This week, Spencer is joined by Hope Schwing to unpack an age-old question: why are men so unhinged at dating? They talk about what they're looking for in relationships right now, Googling how to get over your ex while dating someone new, guys flirting for followers, falling down a flight of stairs, taking shots with Ross Lynch, the story of Post Malone thowing a beer at Hope, and so much more! Spencewuah: IG / TikTok Hope: IG / TikTok MERCH: https://past-your-bedtime.myshopify.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imscreaming/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imscreaming/support
We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp.org, which helps people learn to code for free by creating thousands of videos, articles, and interactive coding lessons–all freely available to the public. Quincy shares his journey from transitioning from teaching into software development, how freeCodeCamp was born out of his desire to make educational systems more efficient through coding, and discusses the early challenges of bootstrapping the platform, and how it has now grown into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Quincy and hosts Victoria and Will, discuss the platform's technical architecture, especially their global server distribution and decision to rely on volunteer-led translation efforts rather than machines to ensure both the quality and human touch of their educational content. He also talks about the state of free and low-cost degree programs, the student loan crisis, and the ongoing debate between traditional computer science degrees and coding bootcamps. Free Code Campi (https://www.freecodecamp.org/) Follow Free Code Camp on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/school/free-code-camp/) or X (https://twitter.com/freeCodeCamp). Follow Quincy Larson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/quincylarson/) or X (https://twitter.com/ossia). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robot Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Quincy Larson, Host of the freeCodeCamp Podcast, Teacher, and Founder of freecodecamp.org, a community of people around the world who are learning to code together. Quincy, thank you for joining us. QUINCY: Yeah, thanks for having me, Will and Victoria. VICTORIA: Yeah, thank you for being here. So, I understand that you made a big shift personally for yourself from California to Texas. How has that been for your family and for, you know, as a founder who is running a nonprofit? QUINCY: Yeah, things are going great. It was a big move. We had some kids, and it was difficult to find, like, a good place to live in California that didn't cost, like, millions of dollars [laughter]. And so, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were living in East Bay. I grew up here in Texas and Oklahoma. And I was like, well, maybe we could go back to the southwest, and so we did that. And we were able to come back and comfortably purchase a home here in Plano, Texas. We were able to find one that was, like, really close to a really good public school system. And so, every morning, I'm able to walk my kids to school. And I'd say that Texas has been a great change from California, where I lived for seven or eight years over there. And I love California. Texas has a lot of great things about it, too. It is a little bit hotter than California. It doesn't quite have California's Mediterranean climate, but it's been great here. I like it. And I would say if people are thinking about moving to Texas from California, there are definitely some really good spots of Texas that I think they'll feel really comfortable in. WILL: That's awesome, yeah. I'm originally from Louisiana. So, you're bringing back, like, memories of me growing up, always going to Texas and stuff. And I know exactly where Plano is, so that's amazing. How has it been with your kids? Because we were talking, and you said your kid recently started school. How's that been? QUINCY: Yeah, so my daughter started school a couple of years ago, and she just turned eight. And my son he's turning six this weekend. He just started kindergarten. We were having him take classes at the YMCA some pre-school. And he went from doing that for the first few hours of the day, and then we'd pick him up and bring him home and eat lunch with him and everything. And now he's got to go to school from, like, 7:00 a.m. to, like, 3:00 p.m. And he's been freaking out, like, "Why is school so long? Oh my goodness, I'm so tired all the time," [laughs]. So, he didn't realize that school would be as involved a process. He was all excited. But now he's complaining about, like, just the sheer length of school. But meanwhile, my wife and I we're just, like, celebrating because we actually have some time around the house where we can get work done without having kids running around causing chaos [laughs]. So yeah, I think he's adapting. He's making friends. We're doing playdates and stuff, and he's having fun. It's just a transition, you know. But it is nice because before, I would walk my daughter to school, and that was a very quick, 10-minute round trip, and then I'd walk my son to school. And that was, like, an hour round trip because we walked all the way to the YMCA. And I would do that to kind of toughen him up and get him walking a lot. It was a huge chunk of time. And now I can just grab both, one [inaudible 4:04] hand in each hand, and walk them to school, and drop them off, and be done with it and get back to work. So, it's definitely nice having both at the same school. VICTORIA: I love the work-life balance and that you were able to find and live somewhere that's affordable and has enough space for your family. And I wonder if we can draw a connection there between achieving that kind of lifestyle and learning to code, and what the mission of freeCodeCamp is for you, and what that means to people and changing careers. QUINCY: Absolutely. So, my background is in teaching. And I was a teacher and a school director at schools here in the U.S. and over in China. And that involved me being on campus, like working directly with my admin staff, with my instructional staff, and working directly with students. So, working remotely was kind of, like, a foreign concept way back in, like, 2010 or so 2011 when I started my transition into working as a software developer. But being able to work remotely has been a real game changer for me. And also, you can imagine, like, being a developer, you can command much larger compensation, and you have a lot more career options than being a teacher or a school director. So, it's given me a lot of agency in what I wanted to do. Even before, you know, starting freeCodeCamp, when I was working as a software developer and doing freelance work and stuff, I was able to do everything remotely. And that just gave me a ton of flexibility. So, the way that I learned to code personally was I wanted to help our school be more efficient. A lot of our teachers, a lot of our admin they were spending all day kind of chained to their desk entering information into computers for compliance reasons, to be able to produce great reports, to be able to produce attendance reports, immigration documents, all those things. And I just thought, like, is there a way that maybe I could automate some of this? And I didn't know anything about programming. I was about 31 years old. I was just sitting at my desk, and I just started kind of, like, Googling around and learning some very basic programming. And with that, over the course of a few months, I was really able to transform how the school ran. And we, like, won an award. And, like, a whole bunch of the students were, like, having a great time because they were spending so much more time with their teachers. And they were like, "Hey..." like, telling all their friends and family to transfer into the school. So, it was a massive success. And I thought, wow, if one person who doesn't even really know that much about programming can effect such a change with just a little bit of programming skills, imagine what I could do if I actually learned to code properly, so [chuckles] I did that. I spent about nine months going to hackathons every weekend, and reading a lot of books, and using a lot of open courses online, like from MIT, from Stanford, and I kind of taught myself to code for free. And then, I was able to get a job as a developer at a mid-size tech startup in California. And from there, I just learned more and more, and it was amazing. And it was an amazing transformation for me personally. And I thought, well, I want to help other people be able to do this because I know so many people out there would like to be working in a field where they have more conversation, a higher degree of control. They get to do creative work instead of, you know, tedious work. As a developer, you're constantly doing new stuff because code is infinitely reproducible. So, you could always just go back to code you've previously written if you needed to solve the same problem again. So, you're always in this kind of learning mindset. You're always in this problem-solving mindset. And it's really thrilling. It's just great, impactful work. So, I wanted to help more people be able to do that, hence starting a bunch of different projects that people didn't care about and then eventually starting a project that people did care about, which is freeCodeCamp. And since then, just kind of leading this project in trying to help as many people as possible learn to code. WILL: So, I was looking at your website. And I didn't even realize this until I was doing more research for the podcast, but you have over 10,000 tutorials, and they're in different categories. I saw you just recently released one on finance, which I actually bookmarked it because I'm going to go through it and look at it. You help more than a million people every day. So, how was it when you first started out? Like, how was, I guess, you could say, the grind? How was it in those early days? QUINCY: I'm a big advocate of, you know, for work-life balance, but, like, I kind of, like, exclude founders from that. I really do think that if you're trying to get something started, you're going to have to work really hard and probably way beyond what would be reasonable for a person who's getting a salary or working at an existing company if you're trying to get things started. So, I mean, it was, like, 100-hour weeks, maybe 120 some weeks [laughs]. I would sleep and just wake up and get to my desk and try to, like, put out fires, fix the server, improve the codebase, respond to learners in the community who had feedback, deal with support issues. Like, I was basically doing everything myself. And gradually, we were able to, like, build out the team over a long period of time. But really, the first few years was me self-financing everything with just my teacher savings. I spent, like, $150,000 of my own money just trying to keep freeCodeCamp going. For the first couple of years, we got tax-exempt status from the IRS. When that finally happened, I was like, great, like, let's go out and see if we can get some people to donate. So, we started asking people who were using freeCodeCamp if they'd be willing to donate $3 a month and eventually $5 a month, and we were able to support the organization through that. Really, it's just like a grassroots donor-supported effort. And then, we've been able to get some grants from Linux Foundation, and From Google, from Microsoft, from a whole lot of other big tech companies, and from some other nonprofits in the space. But mostly, it's just been, like, individual donors donating $5. And if you get enough people doing that, you get, like, a budget where you can actually pay for, you know, we have more than 100 servers around the world serving freeCodeCamp in, like, six different languages. We have, you know, all these other, like, initiatives. Like, we've got Code Radio, where you can go listen to Lo-fi while you're coding. And there are servers all over the world. And you can change the bit rate to suit whatever data you have and everything. Like, we wanted to just offer a whole lot of different services. We have mobile apps now. We've got an iOS and an Android app for freeCodeCamp. And then, of course, we've got the podcasts. We've got four podcasts: one in English, which I host, and then we've got one in Spanish, one in Portuguese, and one in Chinese. VICTORIA: Yeah, I absolutely want to ask you more about your podcasts. But first, I wanted to hear–can you tell me a little more about the decision to be 501(c)(3) or a nonprofit status? And were you always firm in that decision? Do people question it? And what was the real reasoning and commitment to that formation? QUINCY: I guess I would consider myself an idealist. Like, I genuinely believe that most educational endeavors should be, you know, nonprofit. They should be driven by either governments or by charities. I'm always kind of skeptical when there's, like, some late-night TV commercial, like, "Viewer, we'll help you get our degree," and it's from, like, a private for-profit university, something like that. So, I was like, in education...and I don't think everything in society needs to be that way, but I do think, like, education and, to an extent, healthcare these should be led by charities. Like, you know, the Red Cross, or, like, Doctors Without Borders, or churches, you know, own many of the universities, many of the hospital systems in the United States. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a very good thing that it's not just, you know, private profit-maximizing, market incentive-bound organizations that are doing all the stuff in education and in healthcare. I wanted to try to create something that, like, a lot of other people would see and say, "Oh wow, this charity can actually survive. It can sustain itself without raising a bunch of VC, without going public," or any of those things that a for-profit entity would do. And, again, I just want to emphasize, like, I don't think that iPhones should be made [chuckles] by nonprofits or anything like that. I'm just saying, like, for the purpose of actually educating people, the incentives are not necessarily aligned when you're trying to get money from...especially when you're talking about people that 60% of people on earth live off less than $10 a day. Those people should be spending their money on food. They should be spending their money on shelter. They should be spending their money on family. They should not be spending money on online courses, in my humble opinion. Like, online courses should be freely available to those people. So, to some extent, freeCodeCamp, we want to make sure that everybody everywhere in the world has access to first-rate learning resources on math, programming, computer science, regardless of their ability to pay. So, that's kind of, like, the ideal logical [inaudible 12:19], I guess, of freeCodeCamp. We kind of live that. Like, we're really serious. We will never pay, well, anything on freeCodeCamp. We won't account email gate anything. We are, I guess, absolutist in the sense that we want all of freeCodeCamp's learning resources to be free for everyone. Because of that, it made sense to like, incorporate as a 501 (c)(3) public charity. And so, we're tax-exempt. And people who donate to freeCodeCamp they can, you know, deduct it from their U.S. taxes. If a large company or even a small startup...we've had lots of startups like New Relic, like Retool, we've had Postman, Hostinger, a whole lot of different startups and mid-sized tech companies, Pulumi, Appsmith, they've all given us these grants that we can use to develop courses. So, we can often develop courses incorporating those resources. But that's tax-exempt, right? They can deduct that from their U.S. taxes. So, it's a big incentive for other people to partner with us and for people to donate funds to us. And it allows us to have the interests aligned in the sense that only people who have, you know, free cash flow or who have disposable income those are the people that are supporting freeCodeCamp. For the people that are, you know, single parents or that are taking care of their aging relatives, or are already working two jobs, or are completely unemployed and don't have any funds to speak of that are using the public library computer to access freeCodeCamp, right? Or using freeCodeCamp on a $50 prepaid phone from Walmart or something like that, right? Like those people can still use freeCodeCamp, and we can have the people who do have resources subsidize everyone else. WILL: Wow. I absolutely love that because...and I wish freeCodeCamp was around whenever I was in, like, high school and, you know, the early 2000s because we just didn't have the resources because I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. And this could have been so beneficial to that community because, like you said, we didn't have the resources–someone to teach coding there. There was no developers around that town that I was in. So, I really appreciate that you're doing this for everyone. And I know for me even...so, when I reached out to you, I did it because I was excited because I've used freeCodeCamp so many times, so many times to learn just in my journey to become a senior developer. Like, freeCodeCamp was one of the resources that I used because, one, it was free. But it wasn't...I think sometimes you can get free resources, and it's not great quality almost. Like, it's almost like you're more confused than before. But with freeCodeCamp, it was very, very amazing quality. And it was very clear on what I was learning. Honestly, thank you for helping me grow as a developer, just, honestly, thank you for that. QUINCY: Absolutely, Will. I feel honored to have helped you. And, yes, we want to help all the kids who are growing up in rural Louisiana or...I'm from, you know, Oklahoma City, not, like, the biggest, most prosperous city in the United States. Like, I want to help all of my friends who growing up who were eating meals provided by the state school system or my older friends who are on disability. Like, I want to make sure that they have resources, too. And in the process of doing that, it's a privilege to also serve all the working software engineers like you out there who just need, like, a reference resource or, like, oh, I've heard about Bun JS or Tailwind CSS. Or something like, I'm going to watch this three-hour course where I'm going to learn how to do Flutter. Like, freeCodeCamp has a 37-hour Flutter course. So, we've got, like, all these courses on using OpenAI APIs and things like that, too, right? So, it's not just for beginners, but we definitely want to, like, first and foremost, we want to serve people who we're kind of, like, the resource of last resort for, if you want to think of it that way. Like, only freeCodeCamp can help these people. Sure, they can probably use some other free courses on YouTube. And there are lots of other blogs that publish good tutorials and stuff. But freeCodeCamp is like an organized effort, specifically to help those people in need. And just kind of a side benefit of it is that you know, more established, experienced devs like you also get kind of, like, some benefit out of it as well. WILL: Whenever you were a developer, and you decided to start freeCodeCamp, how many years of experience did you have? And how did you overcome impostor syndrome, not only as a developer but as a founder? Because I feel like just overcoming it as a developer is hard, but you were also, you know, like you said, you know, handling everything for freeCodeCamp. So, how did you do that? And kind of tell us about that experience. QUINCY: Yeah. So, I didn't really know what I was doing. I think most founders probably don't know what they're doing. And I think that's totally fine because you can learn while you're doing. And we live in the United States, which is a country that kind of rewards experimentation and does not punish failure as much as a lot of other cultures does. Even if you try really hard, you're going to learn a tremendous amount, and you're going to try your next project. And that's what I did. I tried...I launched several educational, like, open learning resource-type projects, and none of them made any dent at all [laughs] in the proverbial universe. Like, nobody cared. Like, I would go and, like, I'd be talking to people. And I'd be explaining, like, "Oh, this solves this problem that you have." And you could kind of tell, like, people would sign in one time just to be polite, but then they'd never sign in again. So, it was very tricky to get traction. And I read a bunch of books. And I went to a lot of founder-focused meetups in San Francisco Bay Area. I had, like, moved out to San Francisco, specifically to try to, like, kind of make up for my deficit, the fact that I didn't know anybody because I was from Oklahoma City. I didn't know anybody in tech. And I didn't have, like, a fancy, you know, pedigree from, like, Harvard, or Wharton, or something like that, right? Like, I went to, like, a state university, and I studied English, right? And [chuckles] so, I didn't even have, like, a CS degree or anything like that. So, I definitely felt like an impostor. I just had to kind of, like, power through that and be okay with that. And it's something a little bit easier for me to do because, you know, I'm a White guy with glasses and a beard. And, like, nobody's walking up saying, "Are you sure you're a developer?" Or like, "Are you in marketing?" You know, like, the typical kind of, like, slight that they may say to somebody who doesn't necessarily look like me. And so I didn't have to deal with any of that nonsense, but there was still a lot of just self-doubt that I had to power through. And I think that was a big advantage for me. It was just, like, I was kind of, like, at war with myself and my own confidence. In fact, I found the software development community, and especially the open-source community, to be incredibly uplifting and empowering. And, like, they want to see you win. They want you to sit down and build a really cool project over the weekend and in the hackathon and present it. And, you know, they want you to learn. They know that you know, everybody is going to learn at a different rate and that a lot of people are going to get discouraged and leave tech and just go back to working in whatever field they were working in before. And that's totally cool. But I do feel that they're there to support you and to encourage you. And there are lots of different events. There are lots of different communities. I recently listened to the founder of Women Who Code, who was on this very podcast [laughs], Giant Robots Smashing Into Giant Robots, the greatest podcast name of all time. And, you know, there are people out there that are working very hard to make it easier for folks to get into tech. I think that that has been a huge part. Even before freeCodeCamp, you know, there were Harvard professors–Stanford professors putting their entire coursework for free online. You could go to, like, different tech events around California, for example, where I was when I was learning to code. And there'd just be tons of people that were eager to, like, learn more about you and to welcome you. And there would be, you know, recruiters that would talk to you and say, "Well, you may not be ready yet, but, like, let's talk in six months," right? And so, there was kind of, like, that spirit of you're going to get there. It's just going to take a lot of time. Nobody was telling me, "Oh, learning to code is easy," [chuckles] because it's not easy. There were lots of people that were, like, "Learning to code is hard. But you've got this. Just stick with it. If I could be of help, let me know," people who would pair program with me to help me, like, improve my chops, people who would volunteer to, like, look at my projects and give design feedback, all those kinds of things. And I think you're going to find all those things on the web. You're going to find those things in the open-source community. freeCodeCamp has a forum where people volunteer their time and energy to help build one another up and help one another get unstuck on whatever projects they're working on, give feedback on projects. And so, I think, to a large extent, the very giving nature, I almost want to say, like, selfless nature, of the global software developer community that is what saved me. And that's what enabled me to transition into this field, even as a teacher in his 30s. VICTORIA: It's interesting you say that. Because I feel as someone who hires engineers and developers, I love people who have teaching backgrounds because it means they're five-star communicators [laughs]. And I think that you know, in your job, when you're pairing with other developers, or you're talking to clients, in our case, that communicating what you're working on and how you're thinking about something is, like, 50% of the job [laughs]. For freeCodeCamp, I saw you have 40,000 people have found jobs after completing courses on there. I hope you feel like you've really, like, established some success here already. But what's on the horizon? What are you looking forward to in the next six months or six years with freeCodeCamp? QUINCY: Yeah, I'll be happy to answer that. But I want to emphasize what you just said: communication is, like, half the job. That's something that thoughtbot has gotten really early on. And I'll tell you that thoughtbot Playbook was incredibly helpful for me as a software developer and also early on for freeCodeCamp's team. And I think a lot of teams make use of that open resource. So, thank you for continuing to maintain that and kind of drive home that communication really is...like, meetings are essential [chuckles]. And it's not always just, like, leave me alone and let me go back to my cubicle and code. You know, I like to quote the old joke that, you know, weeks of coding can save you hours of meetings because I really do believe that communication is core. So, to answer your question about where freeCodeCamp is headed in terms of what kind of impact we'd like to have, I feel like we're just getting started. I feel like pretty much every Fortune 500 company wants to become a tech company in some way or another. Everybody is pushing things to the software layer because software is infinitely reproducible. It's so much easier to maintain software or fix things in production. Like, you realize, oh, there's a big problem. Like, we don't have to recall all the cars back to the dealerships to go and open up the hood and fix this, you know, mechanical defect. If we're controlling all these things at the software layer, right? We can potentially just deploy a fix and tell people like, "Hey, version update [chuckles], you know, download this security patch," or whatever, right? So, there are so many different things that you can do with software. I feel like the potential growth of the field of software and the number of software developers that the world will ultimately need...currently, we've got maybe 30 or 40 million developers on earth that are professional paid-to-code people. But I think that number is going to increase dramatically over the next 50 years or so. And I'll go ahead and address the elephant in the room [laughs] because pretty much everybody asks me this question like, "Don't you think that, like, tools like large language models like GPT-4 and things are going to obviate the need for so many developers?" And I think they're going to make individual developers more productive. But if you think about what code is, it's really extremely explicit directions for how to do something, whether you're using, you know, machine code, or you're using a scripting language like Python, or you're using English, and you're talking directly to the computer like you would on Star Trek. Essentially, you have to have a really deep understanding of the problem. And you need to know exactly what needs to be done in exactly what sequence. You may not need to manipulate bytecode like you would back in the '70s. But you are going to need to understand the fundamental problems, and you're going to need to be able to address it. So, I'm optimistic that the number of developers is going to continue to grow. The developers are going to continue to command more and more, I guess, respect in society. And they're going to continue to have more and more agency in what they want to do with their careers and have more and more options and, ultimately, be able to command higher compensation, be able to work remotely if they'd like. Developers will continue to be able to ascend through corporate hierarchies and become, you know, vice presidents or even executives like the CEO, right? If you look at a lot of the big tech companies, the CEO is a developer. And I think that that will continue. And the computer science degrees will continue to be extremely valuable. So, what is freeCodeCamp working on now that we think will further help people? Well, we're working on a free four-year computer science degree, a Bachelor in computer science, and there's also an associate in mathematics that we're developing. And those are going to be a progression of 40 university-level courses that have labs and have a substantial block of lectures that you'll watch. And then, we'll also have final examinations and everything. And we're developing that curriculum. We've got one of the courses live, and we're developing the second one, and eventually, we'll have all 40. It'll take till the 2030s. But we're going to have those. And then, once we have some longitudinal data about graduates and their success rates and everything, we are going to apply for the accreditation process, and we're going to get accredited as a university, right? Like, you can go through that process. Not a lot of organizations do that; not a lot of new universities are coming about in the 2020s. But it is something that can be done. And we've done a great deal of research, talked to a bunch of accreditors, talked to a bunch of university admins who go through the accreditation process. We think we can do it. So, again, very long-term goal. But when you're a 501(c)(3) public charity, you don't have to worry about freeCodeCamp getting acquired or all the things that would traditionally happen with, like, a for-profit company. You have a lot more leeway to plan really far. And you've got, like, this really broad mandate in terms of what you want to accomplish. And even if, you know, creating a university degree program in the 2030s would not be a profitable endeavor that, like, a rational shareholder value-maximizing corporation would embark upon, it is the sort of project that, you know, a charity like freeCodeCamp could do. So, we're going to do it. MID-ROLL AD: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: I think that's great. And, actually, you know, I got my master's in information technology and project management online way back when. So, I really like the availability of modern computer science bachelor's and master's being available at that low price point. And you're able to pursue that with the business structure you put in place. I'm curious to kind of go back to something you said earlier on how widely available it is and how you spread out across all these multiple countries. Were there any technical architecture decisions that you had to make along the way? And how did those decisions end up turning out? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, one of the things we did was we located servers all around the world. We're multi-cloud, and we've got servers in different data centers in, like, Singapore, Europe, Latin America, and we're trying to reduce latency for everybody. Another thing that we've done is, you know, we don't use, like, Google Translate to just translate all our different pages into however many languages are currently available on Google Translate; I think it's, like, more than 100. We actually have a big localization effort that's led primarily by volunteers. We have some staff that oversee some of the translation. And essentially, we have a whole bunch of people working at translate.freecodecamp.org and translating the curriculum, translating the tutorials into major world languages. Most prominently would be Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Ukrainian. Like, all these different world languages, there's, like, a freeCodeCamp version for those, and you can go into the menu, and you can choose it. And it's actually, like, hand-translated by native speakers of that language who are developers. So, that's been another extremely, you know, time-intensive effort by the community. But we believe that, you know, the quality of the translations is really important. And we want that kind of human touch. We don't want kind of weird artifacts and typos that would be associated with machine translation. And we want to make sure that each of the challenges...because they're extremely tersely worded, again, communication is so important. If you go through the freeCodeCamp curriculum, we try to use as few words as absolutely necessary to effectively communicate what the task the learner needs to accomplish is, and we try to, just in time, teach them concepts. We don't want to present them with a big wall of text. Read this 20-page PDF to understand how, you know, CSS, you know, borders work or something like that. No, we're teaching, like, kind of, like, just in time, like, okay, let's write this line of code. Okay, great, the test passed. Let's go to this next one. This test isn't passing. Here is some contextual-specific hints as to why your code is not passing, why you're not able to advance, right? And we do projects [inaudible 30:30] to learn where we break everything down into steps. So, that's a lot of instructions that need to be very carefully translated into these different world languages to truly make freeCodeCamp accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they happen to be fortunate enough to grow up speaking English at a native level, right? I would say that's our main consideration is, like, the localization effort but also just having servers everywhere and doing everything we can to comply with, like, all the different data rules and privacy rules and everything of all these different countries. It's a lot of work, but in my humble opinion, it's worth it. WILL: I had, like, a two-part question because I wanted to loop back around. When you're talking about the free bachelor's program, one, does anything like that exist where you can get a bachelor-level program, and it's free? And then the second part is, how many countries are you in? QUINCY: Yeah, so currently, lots of governments in Europe, for example, will offer free degrees that are kind of subsidized by the state. There may be some other kind of degree equivalent programs that are offered that are subsidized by corporations. For example, if you work at Starbucks, I think you can get a degree from Arizona State University. And that's a great benefit that Starbucks offers to people. Arizona State University, of course, being one of the biggest public universities in the United States in terms of enrollment. As far as free degrees, though, in the United States, there's nothing like that where, like, literally anyone can just go and get a degree for free without needing to enroll, without needing to pay any sort of fees. There are tuition-free programs, but they still charge you fees for, like, taking exams and things like that. What I like to call ultra-low-cost degree providers–there's Western Governors University, and there's University of the People. And both of these are accredited institutions that you can go, and you can get a degree for, you know, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. And it's a full-blown four-year degree. Now, that is amazing. I applaud those efforts. I've enjoyed talking to the folks at those different schools. I think the next step is to go truly free. There's nothing blocking you at all. You don't have to be banked. You don't have to have a credit card. You don't have to have any money. You can still get this degree. That's what we're chasing. And I think we'll get there, but it's just a lot of work. WILL: So, it's blowing my mind. It's just blowing me away because, like, you know, we talk about the student loan crisis, I would say. The impact if...when—I'm not going to say if—when you do this, the impact that can have on there, have you thought about that? And kind of, if you have, what has been your thoughts around that? QUINCY: Yeah, so there are $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans in the United States. That's money that individual people, most of whom don't make a ton of money, right? Like, many of those people didn't actually finish the degree that they incurred the debt to pursue. Many of them had to drop out for a variety of different reasons or defer. Maybe they'll eventually finish those degrees. But as you can see from, like, the macroeconomic, educational, like, labor market data, like, having a partial degree doesn't make a big difference in terms of your earning power. You really need to finish the degree to be able to realize the benefits of having spent all that time studying, and a lot of people haven't. So, yes, there are, like, a lot of people out there that went to medical school, for example, and they're working as physicians. And they are going to eventually be able to pay that off because they're doctors, and they're commanding a great compensation, right? And they've got tons of career options. But if you studied English like I did and you incurred a whole lot of student debt, it could take a very long time for you to make enough money as a teacher, or as, like, a grant writer, or working at a newspaper, or something like that. Like, it can take you years to pay it off. And, in the meantime, it's just continuing to accumulate interest in your, you know, you might be a very diligent person who pays their student loan bill every single month, and yet, you could see that amount, the total amount that you owe continuing to grow despite this. That's just the nature of the time value of money and the nature of debt. And I thank my lucky stars that I went to school back in, like, 2000. Like, my tuition was $1,000 a semester, right? I mean, it's incredible. But that was, like, at a state school, like, a public university in the middle of Oklahoma. And it's not, like, a university you've heard of. It's basically, like, the cheapest possible option. I think community colleges can make a huge dent. I always implore people to think more about community colleges. I've talked with so many people on the freeCodeCamp podcast who were able to leverage community colleges and then transition into a, you know, research university, like a state school, and finish up their degree there. But they saved, like, basically half their money because they were paying almost nothing to attend the community college. And in California especially, the community colleges are just ridiculously worth it. Like, you're paying a few hundred dollars a course. I mean, it's just incredible value. So, I think the community college system is going to play a big role. But my hope is that, you know, freeCodeCamp can thrive. And it'll take us years for people to realize because if you go on, like, Google Ads and you try to run a Google Ad for, like, any sort of educational-related topic, anything related to higher education, it's, like, hundreds of dollars per click because there are all these for-profit universities that make a tremendous amount of money from getting people who just came back from serving in the military and getting, like, huge chunks of their GI Bill, or getting, like, all these federal subsidies, any number of things. Or basically just tricking families into paying huge amounts of money when they could have attended a much more sensible public university, you know, a private nonprofit university that doesn't charge an arm and a leg. So, I think that we are going to have an impact. I just want to say that I don't think that this is a panacea. It's going to take many years for freeCodeCamp to be adopted by a whole lot of people. It will take a long time for employers to look at the freeCodeCamp degree and say, "Oh, this is comparable to a computer science degree from..." say, Ohio State, or UT Austin, or something like that, right? Like, it's going to be a long time before we can get that level of buy-in. I don't want anybody listening to say, "Oh, I'd love to get a computer science degree. I'm just going to hold out and get the degree from freeCodeCamp." Like, my humble advice would be: go to a community college, then go to a state school. Get that four-year computer science degree. It is worth its weight in gold. But you don't want to accumulate a lot of debt. Just try to like, minimize your debt in the meantime. And, hopefully, over time, you know, the free model will prove out, and it'll just be a whole bunch of alumni supporting freeCodeCamp. And that's the dream is that, like, you know, Michael Bloomberg gave a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins University, a billion dollars. Like, Johns Hopkins never needs to charge tuition again with a billion dollars. They can just basically operate their institution off the interest from that, right? And lots of institutions...like, Harvard has, I don't know, like, 60-plus billion dollars in their endowment, right? So, the idea would be freeCodeCamp continues to get this, you know, huge alumni network of people who are doing great and who went to freeCodeCamp and who basically donate back in. And then, we can essentially have the deep pockets subsidizing everybody else who's just at the beginning of their careers who don't have a lot of earning power. You know, when I was a teenager, when I was in my 20s, I worked at convenience stores. I worked at Taco Bell. I did all kinds of, like, literally showing up at 6:00 a.m. to mop the grocery store-type jobs, right? And that is not a path to being able to afford an education in 2023. University tuition is out of control. It's, like, ridiculously high. It's grown way faster than inflation for decades. So, what can we do to alleviate that pressure? In my humble opinion, we just need to come up with free options and support ultra-low-cost options that are already out there. VICTORIA: I was going to ask, but you might have already answered this question somewhat. But I get this question a lot for people who are interested in getting into tech, whether they should get a computer science degree or go to a bootcamp. And I think you've mentioned all the positive things about getting a degree. I'm curious if, in your degree program, you would also tailor it more to what people might expect in a modern tech market and industry in their first job. QUINCY: Yeah. So, the way that we're developing our degree program is we essentially did, like, an analysis of the top 20 computer science programs in the United States: Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, all those schools that you would think of as being, like, really good computer science programs. And we basically drew a best-fit line through all their course offerings and looked at all their textbooks and everything that they cover. And, essentially, we're teaching a composite of those top 20 programs. Now, there are some things that, surprisingly, those programs don't offer, such as a course on ethics. It's something like 13% of those degree programs require an ethics course. And I think every developer should take a developer ethics course, or at least some sort of philosophy course to, like, understand what does it mean to be a good person? [laughs] Like, what is, you know, an anti-pattern? What is Blackhat user experiences? [laughs] I'm like, when should I, like, raise my hand during a meeting to say like, "Hey, should we really be doing this?" You know. So, ethics–security courses–I was surprised that not very many of those degree programs offer a course in information security, which I believe should be required. So, I'm kind of editorializing a little bit on top of what the composite says. But I feel very strongly that, you know, our degree program needs to have those courses. But in general, it's just everything that everybody else is teaching. And yes, like, a coding bootcamp...I've written a lot about coding bootcamps. I wrote, like, a Coding Bootcamp Handbook, which you can just Google, like, "Coding bootcamp book" or something like that, probably then you can find it. But, essentially like, those programs are usually private. Even if it's at a big, public university, it's often run by a big, private for-profit bootcamp chain. I don't want to say, like, all bootcamps are a bad deal, but buyer beware [laughs]. Frankly, I don't think that you can learn everything you need to know to be a software engineer within the compressed timelines that a lot of those bootcamps are operating under. There's a reason it takes four years to get a computer science degree because: there's a tremendous amount of math, programming, computer science, engineering knowledge that you need to cultivate. And you can absolutely get a developer job without a computer science degree. I don't have a computer science degree [chuckles], and I worked as a software engineer, right? And I know plenty of people who are doing that that didn't even go to college, right? People who were truckers or people who were doing construction work who just sat down and hit the books really hard and came out the other side being able to work as a software developer. But it is going to be vastly easier for you if you do have a computer science degree. Now, if you're in your 30s, if you've got kids, if you've got a whole lot of other obligations, should you go back to school? Maybe not. And so, it's not cut and dry, like, oh, just drop whatever you're doing and go back to...The situation is going to be nuanced. If you've already got a job working as a developer, should you go back and get a CS degree? Probably not. Maybe you can get your employer to pay for you to go to, like, a CS master's program, for example. There are a lot of really good online master's degree programs. Like, Georgia Tech has a master's in computer science that is very affordable, and it's very good. Georgia Tech is one of the best computer science programs in the United States. So, definitely, like, everybody's situation is going to be different. And there's no blanket advice. I would just be very wary of, like, anybody who's talking to you who wants your money [laughs]. freeCodeCamp will never want your money for anything. Like, we would love to have your donation long after you're a successful developer. You turn around and, like, send the elevator back down by donating to freeCodeCamp. But just be skeptical and, like, do your research and don't buy into, like, the marketing speak about, like, being able to get a job immediately. "Oh, it's easy. Anybody can learn to code." Like, I do believe any sufficiently motivated person can learn to code. But I also believe that it's a process that can take years, especially if you're doing the safe thing and continuing to work your day job while you learn these skills over a much longer period of time. I don't believe learning in a compressed kind of bootcamp...like, if you think about, you know, bootcamp in the military, like, this is, like, you're getting shipped away, and you're doing nothing but, like, learning these skills and everything like that. And I don't think that that's right for programming, personally [laughs]. I think there's a reason why many of these programs have gone from 9 weeks to 12 weeks to 6 months. Some of them might be, like, an entire year now. It's because it's them kind of admitting that, like, oh, there's quite a bit to learn here, and it's going to take some time. And there's diminishing returns to learning a whole bunch of hours in a day. I think you'll make much better gains studying programming 1 hour a day for 365 days than you'll make studying, you know, 8 hours a day for, like, two months or something like that if that makes sense. I'm not sure if the math works out there. But my point is, it's totally fine, and it's actually quite optimal to just work your day job, take care of your kids, spend time with your parents, you know, do all those things, hang out with friends and have a social life, all those things in addition to just having programming be one of those things you're working on in the background with your mornings or your evenings. WILL: Tell us a little bit about your podcast. Yeah, tell us kind of what's the purpose of it and just the history of it. QUINCY: Yeah. Well, I learned from the best. So, I'm a longtime listener of this podcast, of course. My friend, Saron Yitbarek, hosts CodeNewbie, which is an excellent podcast, the Changelog, which is an open-source podcast. I've had a great time interviewing the Changelog hosts and being on their show several times. So, I basically just learned as much as I could, and then I just went out and started interviewing people. And so, I've interviewed a lot of devs. I've interviewed people that are, like, learning to code driving Uber. I've interviewed the founder of Stack Overflow [chuckles], Jeff Atwood. I'm going to interview the founder of Trello in a few weeks when I'm back out in New York City. And I do my interviews in person. I just have my mobile studio. When I'm in San Francisco–when I'm in New York, I just go around and do a bunch of interviews and kind of bank them, and then I edit them myself and publish them. And the goal is just to give people exposure to developers. What are developers thinking? What are developers talking about? What do developers care about? And I try to hit, like, a very broad range of developers, try to talk to as many women as possible and, you know, striving for, like, 50% representation or better on the podcast. And I talk to a lot of people from different countries, although that's a little harder to do when you're recording in person. I may break down and do some over Zencastr, which is a tool we used in the past. I just like the spontaneity and the fun of meeting with people in person. But yeah, it's just like, if you are looking for, like, long-form, some of these are, like, two-and-a-half-hour long discussions, where we really delve into people's backstory and, like, what inspired them to become a developer, what they're learning along the way, how they feel about different aspects of software development. Like, for example, earlier, Will, you mentioned impostor syndrome, which is something I think virtually everybody struggles with in some capacity, you know, the freeCodeCamp podcast, tune in [chuckles] and subscribe. And if you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it. I'm still learning. I'm doing my best as a podcast host. And I'm constantly learning about tech as it evolves, as new tools come out, as new practices are pioneered. There's entire new technologies, like large language models, that actually work. And, I mean, we've had those since, like, the '60s, like, language models and stuff, but, like, only recently have they become incredibly impressive, exploring these tools and exploring a lot of the people behind them. VICTORIA: Okay, great. Do you have any questions for me or Will? QUINCY: Yeah. What inspired you all to get involved in tech, in...I don't know if somebody...did somebody at thoughtbot actually approach you and say, "Hey, we want you to run this"? Or was it something where like, "I'd love to run this"? Like, because podcasting is not easy. You're putting yourself out there. You're saying things that are recorded forever [laughs]. And so, if you say something really naive or silly or something like that, that's kind of always there, right? It takes a certain amount of bravery to do this. What got you into hosting this podcast? VICTORIA: For me, I mean, if I go way back before getting into tech, my mom she got her undergraduate degree in horticulture to become a florist, and then realized she couldn't make any money off that and went back to school for computer science. And so, she taught me how to use a computer really early on. And when I was in school, I had started in architecture, and then I wanted to change into business intelligence. But I didn't want to apply to the business school, so I got a degree in economics and a job at the IT help desk. And then from there, I was able to kind of transition into tech as a teacher, which was oddly enough...my first job in tech was training a 400-person program how to do, like, version management, and peer reviews [laughs], and timekeeping. And the reason I got the job is a friend from rock climbing introduced me, and he's like, they're like, "Oh, well, you train people how to rock climb. You can train people how to, like, do this stuff." [laughs] I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds great. But anyways, I worked my way up into project management and ended up getting my masters in IT. And when I came to thoughtbot, I had just moved to California, and I wanted to rebuild my network. I had a big network in D.C., organizing meetups and DevOps D.C., Women Who Code, teaching people, and communicating. And I ran a very small podcast there with a friend. So, when I joined thoughtbot, a podcast was a great way to just meet different people, expand my network, give people something to talk to me about when I go to events [laughs] that's not just, like, let me sell you some DevOps work. For me, it's been really fun to just reach out to people that we admire in the community and hear their story, and a little bit about them, and what advice they have for themselves or for other people. And, usually, that ends up benefiting me as well. So, it's been very fun for me. QUINCY: So, your less conventional path into tech combined with your own experience doing podcasting, it sounds like you were a natural choice for hosting a podcast. VICTORIA: Right. And I think I said before we started the show I didn't realize that it was such a well-loved and long-running podcast [laughs] [inaudible 49:01]. But I think we've really come into our own a little bit with hosting, and it's been super fun to work with Will and Chad on it as well. QUINCY: Awesome. And, Will, what's your story, man? How did you get onto the coveted Giant Robots Smashing into Giant Robots podcast? WILL: I actually went to college for sports medicine, and I was on track to go to med school, but my senior year...which I wish I would have had this conversation with myself a lot earlier, didn't have to do the hard work that I did at undergraduate. But my senior year, I was like, why am I really going to med school? And, honestly, it was more for the money, for the...yeah, more for the money. I just wanted to get paid a lot of money. I was like, yeah, that's not going to sustain me. I need to just pivot. So, I pivoted–started working at some nonprofits. And I ended up losing my job and got another job at Buckle, the clothing store, which was not a great fit for me. It helped me provide, but that's just not who I am. I'm not a fashion icon [laughs]. And then I changed to a travel agency insurance company, which it paid the bills. I wasn't passionate about it at all, and it paid the bills. And I was still struggling from losing my job. It was the first time that I lost my job. And my spouse came to me one day and is like, "All right, we're going to have the serious talk." And we almost flipped roles because that's usually who I am. I'm like, "All right, let's have a real talk. Let's get down to it." But I was just in a bad place. And she was like, "All right, we have to change because we can't keep going down this path." So, she was like, "If you had a choice to do anything, what would you want to do?" And I was like, "Well, probably something with computers and coding because I never had that opportunity when I was growing up because of the small town." And she looked at me, and she's like, "Go sign up right now." And I was like, okay, I'm going to sign up. When you mentioned that you made a transition in your 30s, I was around my 30s when I made the transition into coding. And so, it was a big transition. It was a big pivot for me because I'm having to learn, almost like I'm in college again, which was eight years ago. And so, it was just tough, and it wasn't new. So, that's how I got into coding. How I got on the podcast: I think I was talking to Chad and my direct report. I was just talking to them about challenging myself, and so it was multiple things. But, like, writing blog posts that was actually very challenging to me. I still don't like to write. It's not my favorite thing. Give me math or something like that or science; that's where I feel at home. But whenever, you know, you talk about writing and stuff, I can do it, and I'm decent at it. But it's not something that I feel comfortable in. The same thing with the podcast. The reason why I got on here is because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and I wanted to grow. And I also wanted to get a chance to talk to people who's making a difference–who's impacting the world. So, like, this conversation today is like, yes, this is why I wanted to be a part of this podcast. So yeah, that's how I got started in tech and on the podcast. QUINCY: Awesome, Will. I'm thrilled that you went ahead and persevered and got into tech. It doesn't sound like it was a straight line, and it rarely is for people. But I'm always excited to meet somebody who learned to code in their 30s who stuck with it and is prospering as a result. So, congratulations to you. WILL: Thank you. VICTORIA: I'm still learning. I haven't quite got [inaudible 52:42] "Hello, worlds," multiple times [laughs]. But I don't really code every day for my job. I just kind of need to know what stuff is to be able to talk to people and in that way as a managing director. So, I appreciate Will bringing that backstory to this episode in particular. What else? Any other final takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with? QUINCY: I just want to thank you all for continuing to host this podcast, thoughtbot for operating the excellent Playbook, which, for anybody listening who is unfamiliar with, you should check it out. Again, it's just chock full of institutional wisdom accumulated over the years. And I hope everybody out there who's thinking about taking the plunge and learning coding or software development, or even, like, a semi-technical area of being in the software development process of learning visual design, learning how to do user experience research, any number of the different roles in tech, I hope you'll go for it. And I hope you will be as undaunted as you can. And just know that freeCodeCamp and the freeCodeCamp community we are in your corner. If you need to learn something, there's a very good chance that we have some tutorials written by thoughtful teachers who want people like you to come forward and like, read these resources and use it. There's a saying: like, the thing that programmers want the most is to have their code running in production somewhere. And, as a teacher, the thing you want the most is for you to have students, for you to have learning resources out there that are making a positive difference. So, again, I just count my blessings every day that I'm able to be involved in this community. I hope anyone listening who wants to transition into tech or to become even more technical gets involved in the freeCodeCamp community as well. We welcome you. WILL: Are there any opportunities? I know we talked about donations. So, for one, where can they go if they want to donate? And then also, like, you know, if developers want to get to be a part of the open-source network you have, is that possible? And how can they do that? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, if you want to donate to freeCodeCamp, just go to donate.freecodecamp.org. And you can become, like, a $5 a month donor, if you'd like. If you want to give a larger amount, I've got this article; just Google "How to Donate to freeCodeCamp." And I've written this detailed guide to, like, all the different ways like mailing checks. We had a gentleman who passed away and left a whole lot of money for freeCodeCamp in his will. So, those kinds of legacy gifts are definitely something. We've had people donate stock, like, any number of different things. I will bend over backwards to make sure that we can receive your donation, and we can give you a tax receipt so you can deduct it from your taxes as well if you'd like. And then, for contributing to freeCodeCamp, of course, we're an open-source project, and we welcome your code contributions. We have spent a great deal of time trying to make freeCodeCamp as hospitable as possible for both new developers who want to get involved and more senior developers who just want to do some, like, 20%-time type contributing to open-source projects: contribute.freecodecamp.org. So, again, donate.freecodecamp.org and contribute.freecodecamp.org. Those will take you where you need to go. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Quincy, for joining us. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Quincy Larson.
In today's video, I provide my thoughts on marriage. Read or watch below to learn more about my response to the Google search “Zachary Stockill wife”. Zachary Stockill: So I need to start today's video with a bit of an embarrassing confession. The other day, I was Googling my own name, because curiosity got the best […] The post “Zachary Stockill Wife??” My Thoughts on Marriage [VIDEO] appeared first on Overcoming Retroactive Jealousy.
Meet Jake Tucker, founder of Roav — a collection of urban and luxury retreat STRs located in the Pacific Northwest Jake began co-hosting Airbnbs while in college as a side-hustle. He had no experience in real estate or hospitality whatsoever, but after Googling "how to make a lot of money as a college kid", he stumbled upon the plethora of rental arbitrage content on YouTube and began to binge. When he graduated, all of his friends started getting real jobs and Jake felt pressured to do the same. But as he thought more and more about it, the idea of working for someone else seemed untenable to Jake… So, he decided to trust his gut and go all in on building his STR property management business. And now, just a few years later, Roav is one of the largest short-term rental hosting companies in the Inland Northwest. Tune in to hear Jake share how he got started with his first few properties, how he navigated COVID, his tips for acquiring new property owners as customers, the pros and cons of managing both traditional STRs AND unique stays, and much more. Book your stay with Roav Follow Roav on Instagram This episode is brought to you by our friends at OptimizeMyBnB I've been trying to find someone who I think understands the platform and marketing strategy better than me that I can refer you all to… And I'm happy to say that I think I've found him. Meet Daniel Rusteen — he's a former Airbnb employee, full-time digital nomad, and author of “Optimize Your BnB” which has sold over 50,000 copies by word-of-mouth alone. Daniel has lived on Airbnb for more than 2,500 nights and has helped hundreds of hosts via his consulting, his program, and his thought leadership, increase their listing's rank on Airbnb. If you're newer to the STR space, or if your listings are starting to drop in rank, I want to encourage you all to do one of two things — if not BOTH — of the following: Buy Daniel's new book, “Profitable Properties: Airbnb Insider Secrets” — you can get it on Amazon for just $10 Join Daniel's 9-week program and he'll teach you everything you need to know about optimizing your STR for Airbnb, VRBO, Google Search, and beyond. You can use the discount code BTS for 40% off the program between now and the end of the 2023 calendar year. Daniel will teach you what the top 1% of short-term rental owners and managers already know about how to fully optimize their STRs across OTAs and beyond. Have you signed up for Ping yet? Ping makes it easy for guests to be notified when their favorite Airbnbs become available — and it's the secret tool the best Airbnb hosts use to maximize bookings. Sign up today at bnbping.com About the Show Behind the Stays is brought to you twice a week by Sponstayneous — a free, biweekly newsletter that brings subscribers the best last-minute deals and upcoming steals on Airbnb. You can subscribe, for free, at www.sponstayneous.com. Behind the Stays is hosted by Zach Busekrus, co-founder of Sponstayneous, you can connect with him on Twitter at @zboozee.
We turn, finally, to the greatest pop-cultural artefact of the 2000s—77 minutes of laying out exactly why Googling “what is the greatest show of all time” will return “The Sopranos”. We go over the Sopranos' greatest features, including the internal continuity that each episode has with its small details and imagery, like Curb Your Enthusiasm's interweaving plots, but for drama. The episode is a first pass at explaining why the Sopranos is a 6 tool player at: plot, setting, characters, style, technique and themes–specifically of American decline, generational divide, toxic masculinity and class in The Sopranos.
Dangers of Googling as a father and how did the Jets get here?
Second hour! Of the Pat Walsh show! HEY! Google turns 25 Years Old today! Let's celebrate by… Googling the most searched words, phrases, and websites. Google really changed a whole lot about the world as we know it. From Encyclopedias to salesmen, to internet browsers to our mail. Who remembers HOTMAIL!?
Who farted? Do you have that one piece of media that you would like to check out, but never seem to get around to it? Like, you're scrolling through Netflix, and there's that one movie that you're interested in checking out, but not this time. Or the next time, or the time after that. It's always there, and you're interested, but not interested enough to dive in at the moment. That, my friends, is how Blue Man Group was for me until recently. I've known who the Blue Man Group was for over 20 years now. I remember there was an Intel Pentium TV commercial that they starred in, and a little Googling tells me that was in the year 2000. Sometime after that, I borrowed their album - yes, they have albums - from a friend, because I really liked the unique sound they had. And when I took my very first grownup trip to Vegas in 2002, I stayed at the Luxor, where BMG has had their Las Vegas home off and on since the year 2000. Men beat their 'bone, live on stage! I've never been one to mince words in my reviews, so I'll say up front that I liked Blue Man Group. But I'm having a hard time describing Blue Man Group. I left the theater thinking, “I don't know what the fuck I just saw, but I'm pretty sure I liked it.” Kind of like a donkey show in Tijuana, but a little more family friendly. So the Blue Man Group itself goes all the way back to 1987. Created as a sort of performance art by three friends in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the group started with street performances which gradually grew to full on stage productions. People in New York like weird artsy shit. Gradually it became a phenomenon, with worldwide tours, 3 albums, and more blue latex than any person should have access to. The Blue Man Group brand was sold to Cirque du Soliel in 2017, another Vegas mainstay. So what the hell is it? The show is kind of a techo-surreal experience. Three Blue Men guide the audience through various experiences, like making music, art, and marshmallow tossing. Without spoken words, the show manages to explore themes of science and technology, information overload, and cultural norms. The characters have a sort of naive curiosity in their behavior. It can come across as mime-like in its execution, but there's more to it than that. The characters seem like visitors from another world, and their experiments and explorations address our assumptions about the world around us. Chest-hole. Imagine colored paint leaking out of a member's chest hole onto an under-lit drum that flashes brightly when struck, showing colored drops of paint splattering through the air. If you are thinking that this seems weird as fuck, you're right, but there's a sort of mystical coolness about this when BMG does it on stage. Watch as they play wild instruments custom made from PVC pipe and create songs that are absolute bangers.They play songs that the group has created themselves, along with well-known classics like Beethoven's Fur Elise, pop songs like Bad Romance, and even tease a little Freebird. Audience Fuckery Factor: Minimal, but they do go out in the audience looking for volunteers. They look for people raising hands, so don't raise your hand if you don't want to go onstage. And just like a trip to Sea World, avoid the first several rows if you don't want to get splashed. I think they hand out plastic rain ponchos, because I saw several people with them. The show plays with light (you may be blinded by the lights during the show) and sound (I highly recommend ear plugs). This could be you! The theater is nice. It has a capacity of 830 people. There is a low slope on the house floor, so you may have people blocking your view. I recommend row AA if you don't want anyone directly in front of you, but you also don't want to be splashed or singled out. Shows are 2 - 3 times /day everyday of the week. Tickets start at $49. This is a great value show. I also think it works well as a family show, or show to take the in-laws to when they decide they want to join in Vegas because you're always going there.
Booting down; Unity, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Hudson & Bill Maher have heard you & have been listening; so much water; Tesla class action; Wayne testing robotaxis in LA; TikTok tracking employees, introduces voluntary AI content labels; Google Bard now lets you double check answers by... Googling, settles privacy lawsuit; some of Elon's Neuralink implant monkeys have, indeed, died, but looking for human volunteers, blue checks to blue chips; Good Omens; the Wheel of Time; Amazon Prime Video adding ads; Russell Brand; Secret Chef; Star Trek; Sex Education; Slow Horses; Microsoft Paint; Mahjong; Apple Watch; Star Wars; Disneyland music; Descript; the Overton Paradox; Zork & retro gaming.Sponsors:Dark Web Academy - Head over to darkwebacademy.com and use code "gogfree" for complimentary access to ANY course!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordPrivate Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.Show notes at: https://gog.show/619FOLLOW UPUnity apologizes and promises to change its controversial game install fee policyMicrosoft's $69B Activision merger on track for green lightLas Vegas Authorities Want to Know How Much Water Companies Use Before Letting Them Move InFree Covid-19 TestsIN THE NEWSTesla Detroit Derivative Action SettlementWaymo begins testing the waters for a robotaxi service in Los AngelesTikTok Employees Recoil at Return-to-Office Tracker AppTikTok introduces a way to label AI-generated contentGoogle's AI assistant can now read your emails, plan trips, “double-check” answersGoogle settles California lawsuit over its location-privacy practicesGoogle Quietly Removes ‘Written By People' From Suggestions for Website OwnersHere are the details on the grisly deaths of Elon Musk's Neuralink monkeysElon Musk's Neuralink Seeks Volunteers for Brain Chip Implant StudyAirbnb Really Is Different NowMEDIA CANDYGood Omens Season 2The Wheel of TimeAmazon Prime Video will start showing ads from early next yearKate Winslet on War Photographer Lee Miller, and the Film She Was Born to MakeYouTube Demonetizes Russell Brand After Rape AllegationsSecret ChefSex Education season 4 review: A fine, if overstuffed, sendoffSlow Horses Season 3 Release Date Confirmed For December On Apple TV+The Pigeon Tunnel — Official Trailer | Apple TV+APPS & DOODADSMicrosoft Paint finally gets support for layers and transparencyMahjong Solitaire NETFLIXAmazon Restricts Authors to Self-Publishing Three Books a Day, a Totally Human AmountTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEThe CyberWireDave BittnerHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopApple Watch Ultra 2Star Wars Jedi: SurvivorDisneyland: Music Around the ParksYesterland!Disney's Polynesian Village Resort Music 6 Hour LoopEPCOT Theme Park Music & AmbienceDescript has added a new feature (in Beta) called “Regenerate.”The Overton ParadoxPlay Zork onlineCLOSING SHOUT-OUTSBritain Is Losing Its Precious PubsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Gamers know the longtime PlayStation racing series Gran Turismo. The story of Jann Mardenborough, who turned a passion for the game into a career racing real cars was brought to theaters this summer in the film "Gran Turismo." But how closely do these films stick to reality? There's a reason why many include a disclaimer at the start that some characters and stories have been changed or dramatized. We talk about the recently completed HBO series "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty," which has been criticized by some portrayed on the show. The there is the 1989 film "Great Balls of Fire!" starring Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis. A lot of people were critical of the film, but co-host Bruce Miller interviewed Lewis and says the singer loved Quaid's performance.. What about movies like "Elvis" and the upcoming film "Priscilla," which both had the involvement of Priscilla Presley? Or the music biopic that largely led to the modern music biopics, Oliver Stone's "The Doors," which was criticized by the surviving members of the band? Even documentaries have been known to stray a little, such as the Oscar-winning "Searching for the Sugar Man" based on the life of Sixto Rodriguez. The film failed to mention the singer had modest success in Australia, so he wasn't a complete unknown. We take a deep dive into true stories that have been turned into movies and even have an interview with Mardenborough, who was involved with the film. He also talks about his involvement with actor Archie Madekwe, who played Mardenborough. Where to watch "Gran Turismo" in theaters "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" on Max Contact us! We want to hear from you! Email questions to podcasts@lee.net and we'll answer your question on a future episode! About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome everyone to another episode of Streamed & Screened an entertainment podcast about movies and TV from Lee Enterprises. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee and co-host of the program with Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. But first, an important disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are a fusion of professional critiques and passionate fandom. While Bruce's experience and my dedication to the couch may suggest an odd pairing, it's what makes this podcast a delightful mix of the expected and the unexpected. Listener discretion is advised and an important addendum to that. Bruce. No animals were harmed during the recording of this episode. Where did you get that? ChatGPT. Is this the future in the film? It wrote a lot more than that. First of all, we're out of jobs. That's what happens if everything's good, right? Man, I was thinking, you know, we were talking about this episode a week ago, and I said, you know, might be fun to have a disclaimer. And I'm sitting there like, What kind of disclaimer would we have for us? A We can say whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And not be. Can I tell you, I always I hate this when somebody gets a bad review. And what do critics know? You know, why or who are critics? Well, a critic is somebody who probably watches a lot of what you do and has an idea about what is good and what isn't good. And so listen to them. But I've always said to them, anybody who pays money for something is a critic and is entitled to an opinion. So have at it. Absolutely. And you know what? I think it's like anything else where maybe, you know, you're a critic, you're doing it professionally, but you're still you're still a human being that needs to entertain yourself and something's good or something is bad. I mean, it is what it is. And I think you do need to be a fan to be a critic. Otherwise, if you hated the medium that you were were criticizing, you wouldn't do it, right. So there is that moment. But I you know, there are those who are like, greasy. They're a little over the top with the oh, my God, it's the greatest thing ever. I how many times have you read quotes from some movie ad that says this is the best thing since Gone with the Wind or, you know, and you got really I don't think it was or truth should be this great, You know? I mean, it's like, what are you saying? Right. But those are the things that you find. And they're quotable. Yeah. That they try to a lot of those when you look at reviews that are polled or quoted, those are written to get quoted because the critic who is saying, I can't believe movies have gotten this good wants to get his name in the ad. So then it helps boost his position as a critic and helps get the name out about the publication. So this podcast. Incredible. Four stars. I think the one nice thing though about the modern criticism in in any form, whether it's music or TV or movies or whatever you're following, the Internet has opened up all new avenues, right? Because in in the old days, you know, you might pick up your your Shoe City Journal and you would just have Bruce Miller, the one telling you or if you're in Chicago, you might have Siskel and Ebert or wherever you might be, you just have that local voice. But now you can go to Rotten Tomatoes where it's picking up the aggregate and and, you know, sure, the folks in the industry might not want to hear what a critic has to say, But when you go to like a Rotten tomatoes and you've got 300 critics saying your movie's terrible, yeah, it's probably it's probably stinky. It probably is not good. Well, that's really encouraging, isn't it? Is that. But it goes the other way, too, where if you actually want your critics to love it and it's, you know, certified Fresh by Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah, right. That's great. And then you get the weird ones where, you know, the critics will love it and then the fans dog on it or vice versa. And then you just bang your head on the wall and don't know what to do. The ultimately you are your best critic. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did we offend anybody in the process of that? And did we and or whatever our disclaimer said, I don't know. All I know is no animals have been harmed in the filming of this episode. So we're good. We're good. You know, we're we're going to talk about something that I think is just very fascinating. Do you know how many years in the Academy Awards have not had an actor nominee who is based on an actual person? Well, I'm eight years out of I think it's 90 some 95 years have not. How many? I'm just going it's like three. Eight, eight. Wow. Years. And look at last year we had Elvis. We had Marilyn Monroe. The famous ones could be considered beasts or, you know, sort of. Yeah. So there are those So that's it's a sure way to an Oscar is to play somebody who actually exists. Yeah. And there were the most the most at 12 in 2018. Isn't that unbelievable. It's crazy. We're just grabbing anything. We can throw it up on the screens. It's based in fact, you know, So that's a surprise to me. But it's it is sure content. You will know that there is some story to base it on. We saw now recently with the blindside, where Michael Oher is just kind of like now, this is not this isn't what I remember. So he's trying to speak against this as the ultimate. And it's never, never, ever, ever in the history of filmmaking is a film, an absolutely accurate depiction of what happened. Right. Because it's not a document, right? It's not a documentary. Even that with documentaries, Right. You can't trust them. No. I remember I This tells you how far back we go. Okay. I did a master's thesis on the validity of critics. It's like, do critics make a difference? Is basically the thesis that I did. And we looked back and there was like, this sliver of time when actually critics would have any kind of impact on the audience. And what it was was in those days they were showing what like people were like Eskimos were like. And people had never seen Eskimos. So they believed exactly what they saw on the screen and said that is exactly the way it is, even though it may not have been so. And it was just a very sliver of time that critics could have some kind of impact on what people saw after that don't make a difference at all. People just kind of watch something and. Yeah, and you see that even now with like Netflix where movies that bomb at the box office. But all of a sudden we'll get they'll be trending on Netflix. You'll see like, you know what's that most popular and it'll be some movie from seven years ago that nobody went to see all of a sudden gets hot because it's just people for some whatever reason now algorithm and then it catches fire. Yeah, well look at Green book. Green Book won Best picture the Red critics were, like, kind of lukewarm on it as a as a movie movie. And the people who were related to the man portrayed said it isn't his life. This isn't all at all what it was like. Right. But it played well because it kind of touched those heartstrings that we were looking to touch. And so they made do something to you emotionally, but they may not do it realistically. Yeah. And, you know, you talk about these dramatization scenes, but it's even in documentaries, the storytelling can be twisted in a way to help tell a narrative and one that I wanted to bring up because the person that was featured in it just died recently. Sixto Rodriguez, who was a musician out of Detroit, he released two albums and they didn't they didn't do very well commercially, and he got dropped by his label and he kind of fell into obscurity. And he got popular in South Africa during apartheid when when the the country was basically cut off from civilized nation. There is no Internet at the time, so there's no way of researching. And this mythology was built about the sugar man and this documentary, Searching for the Sugar Man. It won an Oscar for best Documentary. But even in that case, it's failed to mention that he had like these small pockets of international fame. It wasn't you know, he never achieved some level of glory and made tons and tons of money. But in the late seventies, early eighties, Rodriguez was actually touring in Australia. And and that was before they discovered, you know, he was alive in South Africa. So even in that case where you have a story, which is it's a documentary, it's interviewing the real person, there's no actors involved. It's supposed to be reality. They kind of fudged with reality a little bit just to tell the story of, you know, here is this person that's completely obscure, even though in Australia they knew exactly who he was because he had been there a few times there. Yeah, it's well, look at the the film that's leading the way this year for best picture. Oppenheimer Right now that looks about as clean as you can get, except for some of those scenes that are kind of done in the mind, if you will. But it's it's the artistry of the director, you know, so you're not getting the story. And we've got other ones coming this year. We we had air which was about right the Michael Jordan selling of Nike Napoleon is coming up. Ferrari is coming up. Priscilla, about Elvis Presley's wife. You know, so there are the and the killers of the flower moon, what you're waiting for, right? Right. Not all these are based, in fact, for some reason. And it's a jumping off point is what it amounts to. Reality becomes a starting point, but not necessarily an end point. Right. And we saw this also in another in a series on HBO that just wrapped this past weekend, you know, winning time. Right. Which looked at the the the rise of the Lakers dynasty in Los Angeles. And a year ago, there was a lot of controversy after season one. Jerry West, who is portrayed in it was very unhappy with his portrayal in the show and you know is basically making him look like this crazed lunatic. And he's not true and he wasn't like it. And and then season two comes along and, you know, of course, they're opening it up with this disclaimer that this is a dramatization. Some of the characters have been changed. And what I found myself doing through the that every single episode that I watched, something would happen. And I was immediately on my phone. Looking, is. It is this part, you know, because one of the things near the end was this lawsuit by, you know, a wife of Dr. Jerry Buss, who's trying to take the team from him. It's like, well, you know, who is this person? And I'm I'm kind of Googling it and person's not really a real person. It's sort of a fictional ization of another person. And so it's those little things like that that they're introducing. But on the flip side, you know, you have Jerry West, who was very unhappy with it, but I read in I think it was in Vulture, they were talking to the to the folks behind the series and they said they showed the episodes to Jeanie Buss, Jerry Buss daughter, who's portrayed in it. And she loved the series and she felt a connection to her father again, who had passed away a number of years ago. So she really enjoyed watching the show because it kind of, you know, rekindled those memories of of kind of growing up in that time. So it's I guess, you know, how you're being portrayed and in what way and and whatnot. But, you know, that that was kind of an interesting one from that perspective. We have this year weird about Weird Al Yankovic, and it's so off the beam. It's not at all what his life was like. He was participating in it. So he, if you will, signed off on it right? Elvis had Priscilla as kind of their guide or through it all, all of this, and it was nominated for best Picture last year. You know, now this year, Priscilla is probably going to be nominated and Priscilla is talking. So she's rewriting the narrative of Elvis Presley just by what she'll allow or what she won't allow in the story. So that's interesting. But there are duds. There are duds that didn't really work. You know, Can you think of movies where you thought, Oh, my God, that's just terrible, that one. That one doesn't cut it. And I think one that people always mention is John Travolta as Gotti. Oh, that was a real stinker. It was so bad. Yeah. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. Yeah, not much there. Michael was his John Belushi and Wired. Well, now somebody didn't like Jerry Lee Lewis portrayed by Dennis Quaid in Great Balls of Fire. But I got to tell you, I interviewed Jerry Lee Lewis about this and he loved it. He thought he captured every bit of him. So, you know, it's all perspective. If it's my life, you know, come on, Brad Pitt, I'm telling you that right now. Right. And there's no way that I am remotely in the same ballpark as Brad Pitt, But they get a chance to kind of rewrite their own history by having control over who plays them. Yeah, you have play you would you pick and you know better. You're not going to say, oh, I'm going to take you know, I don't even want to name names, but you're going to pick. So you see, George Clooney is going to play me. Of course. It would probably be Clooney. I you're right. Right? Yeah. Either yeah. These a older. Clooney were there. You know, you mentioned Brad Pitt. He was on day of the last season, the day of portraying himself. But it was it was a fictionalized version of himself. And that was so good, right? So he was so good because you even felt the kind of like tension that he had in that situation, because I don't want to spoil it, but there's this nutty person in the house or that Brad Pitt is in the house and Dave is in the house, and you've got to be How do we get out of the house? Yeah. There was that scene to where he in it. He says, Well, you can call me and I can't remember what the name was. He's like, Well, that's that's really what my name is. And again, am I Google like, is that really his name? It's like this is he fictionalized that fictional name, which is comical. And it doesn't always work. Like I say, there are situations where you go, Mm, this really laid an egg and I think we'll see it this year or two. We're going to see, yeah, films that just might not make it at all. Last year we had blond, which was about Marilyn Monroe in there. Ana de Armas played her and got an Oscar nomination and she was good, but the movie sucked. It was awful. And I defy you to say that you watched the whole thing. People didn't watch the whole thing. They got to the nude scenes and they shot it off. After that, it was not worth watching because the story didn't make any sense. You know, you have like Freddie Mercury story, Bohemian Rhapsody, right? Liked it because it plays into the the myth that I think has been created. So who? Yeah, well, I got to talk to one of those real people who's featured in Gran Turismo, which is a film about a guy who won the right to become a race car driver by playing video games. There was a competition and they, you know, whatever. And for whatever reason it clicked. Jann Mardenborough is his name and he is portrayed in this film as that naive person getting into the race car business and what it meant. He's still a race car driver. And we got a chance to talk about that whole trajectory and what it was like for him and what he thinks of the guy, Archie Madekwe, who plays him, what he thought of his performance. So we have a tape here. If you'd like to run it. We'll listen to what he has to say about portraying real people on screen. What is it like seeing yourself on a screen? I mean, we're not how many people get this story of their life told in a film? It's like 0.0001% or something? Yeah, it's it's very it's surreal, really. Being honest. It's it's even more surreal with somebody tells people tell me that the racing driver that had movies based on their lives, they no longer around single that they passed away so soon being 31 years old and have your life attractive. Your life. You told of the Big three. An audience is rare and in my industry very rare. So I feel very blessed and honored. That can actually tell. You know what shop in my life. Did you feel a connection to the character or did you see it as somebody else. Noticed me? I yeah, it really does feel like you did you have any did you have any say then in who gets to play you? Did you say, I'm going to look at these people and just see. If it's no secret you was always on the phone by the producers. They kept me in the loop, involved in all the scripts, you know, sets as well. And I was always kept informed of who they like. I see an actor to play me. Apparently the casting will be so long, even a year before Benigni was even shot. Oh, wow, Boss, she was always been number one favorite, as far as I understand, with many different levels of casting processes. But she was the one from day one. And did you like him from day one or did you go or. I don't know. He spoke on Face Time, The lowland scene with a mouth eat it plainly and pseudovirus Because I was in labor at the time that I was like, This looks like straight away. And so that was a great start. We met in person as well. Weeks later, after that phone call, and I it gave you a confidence because I was happy with the script, but meeting the person for the first face, it gave me even more confidence in things like be great, because he was absolutely casting Steely. Obviously he knew from producers as well and all time and face time and texts that meet somebody face to face difference. And he caught it really mean okay, I can focus on being studied rather and make it to focus on the acting and because we're completely allied on this. Yeah in yes he killed it. Did he ask you a lot of questions? Absolutely. And what he. What did what surprised you that he wanted to know? A lot of I'm not repeating his emotional my support is in the while it it's sports you have to be quite clinical but he was asking questions about the relationships I've had with certain people within the industry, my friends, my family. I just kind of try to be open is we all. And it became this very good at asking those questions that was so provoking and as two things which are them? He still dealt with soul so he can work on his craft when he's allowed a chance at this and he can show that and he got on set. How good was he had driving? Well, didn't have a driver's license very recently before shooting. I think for insurance, we'd really have to pass his test. And I didn't know at the time I think it was that a make or break, because if he didn't pass the test, we could have shot with Michelle McCann. But I know everybody at the meeting. But yeah, he was on a fast track course and then I'd passed and he said it interesting. But he said the favorite brand, right? I was always so, so is mine. But there you go. Yeah. He's got good taste, wrong behavior. So yeah, I think if you were bring somebody that have been involved, it looks sort of caused the fault. So it feels very nice. But I have a lot of respect to somebody. Go to another industry and be honest. If I go dancing all through dancin or being a ballerina and let me see myself in that. So I would not risk that in the business. He'd never done this before, yet no interest because now he is a face granturismo which is just racing was and he is he, he nailed it. So yeah, I will respect that. But you know, the movie makes a big deal about can you really make the transition from being a gamer to being a driver. Is it possible? I mean, yeah, was possible with you. But in the grand scheme of things, was your dad really right? And you said, you know, this is going to lead to nothing. These are not going to be career connections for anybody. Well, I will indeed. My stepfather to that question. That was the question we were always asking ourselves, kind of be done proof. But you're one you're one person and, you know, you know, kids sit around and they're doing they're playing games all day and will it lead to something? And that's where dreams and belief comes into it, because they think that easy, everybody be able to do it but makes it easy. All that accomplishment is hard, as if all and it seems like it's not possible. Well, everything is well. I believe that you can do anything. It's a little set. You can't do everything. You can sit and do anything. He's taken line to it. I never let that like the beta racing brother go out. I didn't know how I would get from A to B, but always away very much aware from a young age or very headstrong as a person you would as a kid. That's what I want to do. And I'm not going to take no for that. So I'm not really from other people. That is the gospel of you have spoken in the past with other people about things that I'd said growing up as a teen, where I would say a BMW story, my first car as a child as that when I'm 17 years old and I had my friends because boys, boys, they would rip anything to me for years about that. And I spoke to my other friends, Solid school lives and that scene in the movie, they were a bar and they told me that they could they had a few drinks them. It must not limit the conversation. And they said to me, Look, you never said to us that you wanted to be a racing driver. And I boulevard and I was like, You're right. I never I never told anybody. I never told anybody about drink because you have to protect that. You can't walk around. I don't need you should walk out. I want to do this. I wanted that because people call you out today and also it loses the energy over Did you news that that that that you know that energy. Yeah I believe so I never spoke to anybody about it. It was always my inner drew but I believe you can do anything so anybody watching I learned via high fives in the messages for people about taking an interest in looks, but also telling me I learned to pursue my dream. It would tell me what it is, which I love you shouldn't tell me. You should tell me what it is I want to pursue my dream. You inspired me to see like me. And I love that kids want to move forward too. Why me? Yeah. The rules of life. We have to follow our actions up to this. Well, when it does happen, how do you feel? I mean, is it like. Well, now I've got to find a new dream, or, you know. While in racing, it's that is this thing as the perfect guy. So it's like and it's feel old chase So perfecting your craft and it will never be perfect. So I'm still in the trenches of how can I get better at the race? And rather that's what gives me purpose. Okay, I want to race here, but when I get there, I like to race. I want to wait. I want it to be fast. I want to recent level championships level, the championship races that lie. My drive is the constant. It's a set them and then we have living. It's up and up whether that be right and whether that can being the way out or I stop what right dress or whatever I my business lines it's always a a quality that. All right Bruce thanks for that interview. You know with the race car, movies and biopics, what was your thought on this one compared to like something like a Ford versus Ferrari? Well, this is one that actually had some kind of controversy about the way they messed with time because there's a big accident that's in this film and it has been moved from where it actually happened to a different time because it helps build tension and look at the guy who is it's his story doesn't mind, I guess I can't mind. But I think also because he's an executive producer, so there might be somebody that helped say, I don't mind. Yeah, yeah, No. I enjoy the racing movies. I enjoyed Ford versus Ferrari. I thought that was a really good story to tell. Well, this year, Ferrari, so. Yeah, exactly. Helped Ford in there. Exactly. And so you have to go into every screen biography as it ain't all true. Right? You know, it's interesting, you mentioned a lot of movies based on music, you know, with like Queen and Sugar and you had Elton John. And the one that kind of gets looked at is almost a starting point. I mean, there is there's been a few others along the way, but the one that really kind of propelled, I think the modern film was The Doors from Oliver Stone. And that's one where the three surviving members of The Doors at the time, they hated it. They were and they worked with Oliver Stone for a while on it to try to help, you know, tell the story. And when that thing came out, they were not at all happy with the way. And it hurt it because Val Kilmer should have gotten a best Actor nomination. Yeah, he was that good. And boy, they buried it. Yep. And when you look at later ones, Rami Malick, you know, when you look back on that one, you were going to say, why did he win the Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury? And it all boils down to that little number he did in front of a huge crowd because they played that thing forever before you even saw the film. And that one scene is very good, but the rest of it doesn't really back it up. And I think that's when you look at it, you'll say, you probably shouldn't have got it. You know, it wasn't it wasn't all that. The Whitney Houston one I think is awful and Rocketman is good. But then when it needs to, it'll go into these kind of fantasy sequences so that then you're not really sure what's what's shaking, what's real, what's true, what's not. You know, it's been an interesting series of films and they're not they're sort of interconnected because they're connected by almost like an individual. There's a producer. His name is Mark Girardi. He was a baseball pitcher. He actually pitched professionally. He pitched for a season with the Milwaukee Brewers. I know the story a little bit more because when I was working in New Jersey, he's actually from New Jersey. And my newspaper that I was working for at the time did a story on him when some of his movies were making out. So he finished his baseball career. He went into, I think, modeling and he started making Hollywood connections and then he started telling stories through Disney. And, you know, I'm all, you know, like Miracle about the 1980 Olympic hockey team and the rookie. And I went back and looked at, you know, I was trying to find like, you know, fact versus fiction on those. And I was having a hard time finding very much fictionalized. And I think those in general were pretty well-regarded. I was looking at a story about the Rookie with Jim Morris talking about, you know, the portrayal of him because he was the pitcher who blew out his arm and became a high school baseball coach and then all of a sudden realized he could throw 98 miles per hour again and ended up working his way back into the big leagues. And he said that the film was about 90% accurate to his real life. So it's good to see that there are some films out there, and I think I've really enjoyed those films that that they've done, like Miracle, like The Rookie, because I find them, you know, they're good, they're family friendly, they're not too over-the-top, but they seem to keep fairly close to historical facts. Yeah, it's condensing time, basically. You know, everything doesn't happen within a year. I think they're better off when they do a slice of somebody's life where it's like maybe three months of their life. And that's the movie. I think that would be the interesting kind of situation. Maestro is coming up by Leonard Bernstein. And that should be, I think, a really good one in terms of how well they track a segment of his career. But I, you know, gee, I, I would hate to be the subject of a biopic because I think that you have to kind of then live that that story instead of a real story was, you know, because that's what people think of you. They want to have things condensed and into a, you know, a neat little package that you can see in 2 hours. And we're done with you and you move on. But there there's much more beyond that. And I think when you look at those those seminal moments, maybe that's all it should be. Ken Burns is a great one to do documentaries about famous people, but what he uses are voices, other people talking about that person. So, you know, it's almost like a print news story where you hear others making some kind of assessment. And it's not just necessarily the character saying something. So those I find the most accurate in terms of believing what I'm seeing. But again, it's filtered. History is filtered by those who are telling history. I think the only thing that bothers me, I mean, I always know that there's going to be some creative license, some dramatization to these films, but it just irks me when they make weird changes for the sake of making changes that don't necessarily make sense. Because I remember somebody I've never seen the Buddy Holly story with Gary Busey. Robyn No, I haven't. I just I need to go back and watch it one of these days. But I remember a friend of mine talking about it and saying that you know, he like he liked the film, but he couldn't understand why they didn't have all the crickets. Like Buddy Holly's backing band was The Crickets. And it was like they had like three of the four members in it but not. Get their rights. Right. So it's just like, Why would you make a movie and leave out one of the band members, You know, if there is a reason for it, I guess, you know, somebody would want their story told. But if it was just more because as well, it's it gets a little unruly with four people. So we're going to just narrow it down to three. To me, those are little things that to the average person may not notice. But if you're trying to also appeal to fans of the band or the musician, these are historical pieces. It's like it's like even watching Field of Dreams, where Shoeless Joe Jackson is is batting from the wrong side of the plate. You know, it's it's you know, when you make a left in the batter right handed or vice versa, that kind of thing is like little details like that. When you're when you're a fan, you're kind of going. Like, do a fancy. Fancy get maybe that right. You know, that's that's kind of irritating. You know, now Broadway is jumping on the bandwagon and they're doing all of these musicals about musical people because they're very dramatic. They've got a built in catalog of sounds that always will work because people know them. There's a Neil Diamond one out now. There was Tina Turner, there was Cher. And you're going to see more and more of those Mamma Mia, which was just the songs with a different story. Right? But they're they're easily tapped into bowl. I always say that you can easily tap into them. Right. What I want to say, because you already know something about them, which is the music, and I think that's a shorthand that they don't have to tell other parts of the story because you just assume that's their. Yeah, though, I don't know, it's weird, but if there's a story or a moral or a caution to be added to this, it's a don't believe them. When you see a screen biography, don't believe them. They're very entertaining, but they aren't necessarily the true story. Absolutely. That's a good point to to end this episode. Thank you again, Bruce, for that interview. When Brad Pitt plays me in the movie version of the podcast, you know that it's going to have a different ending. Absolutely. Yep. And again, you know, just want to point out one last time, no animals were harmed in the recording of this podcast yet. We're all yet going to have a cat wander in here in a second. No, no, no. I know. That's all right, everyone. Thank you again. Come back again next week for another episode of Stream. The screen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.