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It's not every day that you can hear a great conversation with the Head of Product of Excel. Brian Jones sits down with us and talks about the past, present, and very promising future of Excel. Rob and Brian go way back, and the stories and laughs abound!   Check out this cool World Orca Day Excel template for kids!   Episode Timeline: 4:00 - Brian's lofty title is Head of Product at Excel, The importance and magic of Excel, and people's a-ha moments with Excel 20:25 - The difficulty of not seeing your projects' impact on the world and how the heck does Bluetooth fit into the story?!, Rob and Brian reminisce with some funny conference stories 32:00 - The XML file format and some very neat XML tricks that everyone should know about 51:25 - The birth of the Excel Web App and Rob can't believe some of the things that Brian's team has done with Excel 1:05:00 - How to onboard the Excel, VLOOKUP, and Pivot crowd into data modeling and Power BI, and the future of Excel most certainly includes the Lambda function (maybe!) Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest, Brian Jones, head of product for this thing you might've heard of called Microsoft Excel. Brian and I go back a long way. We were both youngsters at Microsoft at the same time, and we both worked on some early features of Office apps, and we're friends. Really, really have sincerely warm feelings about this guy, as you often do with people that you essentially grew up with. And that's what we did. When Brian and I first worked together, he was working on Word and I was working on Excel. But even though Brian was on Word at the time, he was already working on what we would today call citizen developer type of functionality in the Word application. So even though we were essentially on different sides of the aisle within the Office organization, we were already finding ourselves able to connect over this affinity for the citizen developer. Rob Collie (00:00:55): Now we have some laughs during this conversation about how in hindsight, the things he and I were working on at the time didn't turn out to be as significant as we thought they were in the moment. But those experiences were very valuable in shaping both of us for the initiatives that came later. Rob Collie (00:01:11): Like almost everyone at Microsoft, Brian has moved around a bit. He's worked on file formats for the entire Office suite, which ended up enabling Power Pivot version one to actually function the way that it should. He's worked on Office-wide extensibility and programmability, back to that citizen developer thing again. And in that light, it's only natural that Excel's gravity reeled him in. And in that light, it's only natural that someone like that, someone like Brian, found his way to Excel, and it really is a match made in heaven. And if you permit me the Excel joke, that turned out to be a great match. Rob Collie (00:01:50): We took the obligatory and entertaining, I hope, walk down memory lane. We spent a lot more time than I expected talking about file format. And the reason why is that file formats are actually a fascinating topic when you really get into it. Lot of history there, a lot of very interesting history and challenges we walked through. And of course, we do get around to talking about Excel, its current state, where it's headed, and also the amazing revelation for me that monthly releases actually mean a longer attention span for a product and how we ended up getting functionality now as a result of the monthly release cycle that would have never fit into the old multi-year release cycle. We were super grateful to have him on the show. And as usual, we learned things. I learned things. I have a different view of the world after having this conversation than I did before it, which is a huge gift. And I hope that you get the same sort of thing out of it. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:03:03): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:26): Welcome to the show. Brian Jones, how are you, sir? Brian Jones (00:03:30): I am fantastic. Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm excited. Rob Collie (00:03:33): So let's start here today. Well, you and I go way back, but today, what's your job title and what are your responsibilities? Brian Jones (00:03:42): So today, my job is I'm the head of product for the Excel team. So I lead the team of product managers that are tasked with or given the honor of deciding the future of Excel, where we go with Excel, what are the set of things that we go and build Rob Collie (00:03:59): Head of product. That's a title that we didn't have back when I was still at Microsoft. We did at one point have something called a product unit manager. Is it similar to that? How does that relate? Brian Jones (00:04:11): That's a good question. So we're continuing to evolve the way that we use titles internally. So internally, we have titles that still for most folks externally don't make any sense, like program manager, group program manager, program manager manager, director of program manager. And so for externally, whenever I'm on LinkedIn or if I do PR interviews, things like that, I use the term head of product. Internally, we don't have the term head of product. Rob Collie (00:04:37): Okay. All right. So that's a translation for us. Brian Jones (00:04:40): Yes, exactly. Trying to translate the Microsoft internal org chart to something that makes more sense to folks. Rob Collie (00:04:49): Yeah. So things like, if we use the word orthogonal, what we're really saying is that's not relevant. Brian Jones (00:04:53): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:04:54): That kind of decoder ring. Brian Jones (00:04:57): I didn't realize orthogonal [inaudible 00:04:59] until you said it and I'm like, " Oh yeah, no. Of course, that is completely a ridiculous term to use." Rob Collie (00:05:03): Or I don't know if they still do this, but an old joke that Dave [Gayner 00:05:07] and I used to have, it was all his joke at the time. It was big bet. Do we still talk about big bet? We're going to place a big bet. Brian Jones (00:05:14): Yep. Big bet or big rocks. Big rocks. You know the- Rob Collie (00:05:17): Big rocks. Whoa. Brian Jones (00:05:18): Yeah. It's kind of an analogy. You've got a jar and you want to fill it with the big rocks first, and then you let the sand fill in the rest of the space. So what are the big rocks? Rob Collie (00:05:26): Okay. Yeah. But big bet was one that we used to always make fun of. Brian Jones (00:05:31): Especially when there'd be, "Here are the big bets," and there's 20 of them. Rob Collie (00:05:34): Yeah. The joke I think we used to make was we would call something a big bet when we really didn't have any good reason for doing what we were doing. Anyway, all right. So you're head of product for Excel. That is a pretty heady job. That's pretty awesome. Brian Jones (00:05:52): It's a pretty fun job. Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:05:54): I mean, you're not lacking for eyeballs in that business, are you? We're all friends here. We're all on the same side of this story. I mean, it is the lingua franca of business, Excel. It is the business programming tool. People don't necessarily think of it as programming, but formulas are a programming language. To be head of product for the platform, you could call it an application, but really it's probably more accurate to call it a platform that is, I think, is the single most critical platform to business in the world. That's pretty amazing. Brian Jones (00:06:30): Absolutely. And that's usually the way that we talk about it internally. It depends on who your audience is externally when you're talking about it. But yeah, Excel is a programming language. I remember even before, back when I was on the Word team, but I would go and meet with PJ, who ran program manager for Office all up. And he'd always referred to Excel more as an IDE. And that didn't totally resonate with me at the time because to me, Excel was just a list app, an app for just tracking things. I didn't totally understand what he meant by that, but I'd nod cause he was super important and smart. And it wasn't really until I started working on the team that I was like, "Oh, I totally understand all these things that PJ used to reference." Rob Collie (00:07:06): This one of the things I had been dying to ask you is when you and I first met, I was working on the Excel team, but still had... Gosh, this was year 2000 maybe, maybe 2001. And even though I was nominally part of the Excel team at that point, I still didn't really know Excel, and you were working on Word. So the thing we both had in common at that point is that we didn't know Excel. So I wanted to get your perspective. I know that you've done some things other than Word, but we were already sort of teasing this. So let's just get into it. What's it like to come from "outside" Excel and how's that transition? How do you view Excel differently today versus what you did before? We already started talking about that. The list keeper. That's very common way for people to view it. Brian Jones (00:07:53): When I first started, yeah, I was on Word, although I was working on more kind of end user developer type of pieces of Word. That's how you and I first interacted because we were talking about XML. The first feature I owned was a feature called easy data binding to Excel. And the whole idea was when you could easily bring content from Excel into Word, but then create a link back so that the content in Word would stay live. And a lot of this stuff that I did while I was on Word was all about trying to make Word a little bit more of a structured tool so that people could actually program against it because Word is completely unstructured. It's just free-flowing text. So trying to write a solution against that is almost impossible because you can't predict anything. So we did a lot of work to add structure, whereas Excel out of the gate has all that structure. So it's just much easier to go and program. Brian Jones (00:08:39): If I had gone straight from Word to Excel, it would have been a little bit more of a shock, but I actually had about eight years in between where I was running our extensibility team. So a lot of the work we would do was revving the add-in model and extensibility for Excel. So I got some exposure there. When we did all of the file format stuff and the whole file format campaign, That was a couple of years where I was working really closely with a bunch of folks in Excel, like Dan [Badigan 00:09:06] and folks like that. So I had a bit of exposure, but I'll tell you when I first joined, I had a similar job, but it was for the Access team and we were building up some new tech. Brian Jones (00:09:17): Some of it still is there today. Office Forms came out of some of the investments that we were doing in Access. But when I showed up into Excel, I was very much in that mode of, "Why don't the Excel folks, get it? Everything should be a table with column headings." And like, "That's the model. And why do they stick with this grid? Clearly word of it is eventually going to go away from the printed page as the key medium. Excel's got to go away from the grid. And they've got to understand that this should just be all tables that can be related." And thankfully, I was responsible when I joined and didn't try and act like I knew everything. So I took some time to go and learn. Brian Jones (00:09:52): And it didn't take me long. We have some crazy financial modeling experts on the team and stuff like that, where I'd say it was maybe six months in that it clicked for me where I understood those two key pieces. The grid and formulas are really the soul and the IP of Excel. The fact that you can lay out information really easily on a grid, you have formulas that are your logic, and you can do this step-by-step set of processes where each cell is almost like another little debug point for you. [Cal captain sub 00:10:20] second, and it's the easiest way to go and learn logic and how to build logic. Brian Jones (00:10:25): I didn't get any of that at that time, but you pick it up pretty quickly when you start to look at all the solutions that people are building. And now, obviously, I've been on the team now for five years, so I'm super sold around it. But I'd say it took me a little while and I'm still learning. It takes a while to learn the whole thing. Rob Collie (00:10:41): Yeah. It's funny. Like you said, Word's completely unstructured. You're looking in from the outside and you're like, "Well, Excel is completely structured." Then you get close to it. You're like, "Oh no. And it's not, really." Brian Jones (00:10:52): No. Not at all. Rob Collie (00:10:53): I mean, it's got the cells. Rows and columns. You can't avoid those. But within that landscape, is it kind of deliberately wild west? You can do whatever you need to. You're right. Okay. So tables, yes. Tables are still very important. But you've got these parameters and assumptions and inputs. And what do you do with those? I mean, they're not make a table for those. Brian Jones (00:11:19): Yep. Absolutely. I think that the thing that I started to get really quickly was the beauty of that. Like you said, it's unstructured. You have nice reference points. So if you're trying to build logic, formulas, you can reference things. But there's no rule about whether or not things go horizontally, vertically, diagonally, whatever. You can take whatever's in your mind that you're trying to make a decision around and use that flexible grid to lay it out. It's like a mind map. If you think about the beauty, the flexibility of a mind map, that's what the grid is. You can go and lay out all the information however it makes the most sense to you. Brian Jones (00:11:53): Really, that's what makes Excel still so relevant today. If you think about the way business is evolving, people are getting more and more data, change is just more constant, business processes are changing all the time. So there are certain processes where people can say, "This thing is always going to work the same way." And so you can go and get a vertical railed solution. That's why we use the term rail. That's kind of like if I always know I'm going to take this cargo from LA to San Francisco, I can go and build some rails, and I got a train, it'll always go there and do the same thing. But if business is constantly changing, those rails are quickly going to break and you're going to have to go off the rails. Excel is more like a car than a train. You can go anywhere with it. And so as the business processes change, the people who are using Excel are the same people who are the ones changing those business processes. Those are the business folks. And so they can go and evolve and adapt it and they don't have to go and find another ISV to go and build them another solution based on that new process that's probably going to change again in six months. Thomas Larock (00:12:52): So Brian's been in charge for five years of Excel, and he's sitting there telling us how there's still more to learn. And two weeks ago, we all got renewed as MVPs. And so I was on the MVP website, and I'm going through all the DLs I can join because that's all a manual process these days. I'm like, "Oh, there's the Excel MVP DL. I don't know why I haven't joined this yet." So I click. I'm immediately flooded with 100 emails a day. 100 emails a day. Now, I don't believe I am a novice when it comes to Excel. I don't. I know I'm not on you all's level at all when it comes to it. You build and work and live the product. But I know my way around enough that I can explain things to others when they say, "I'm trying to do this thing." "Oh, I think it's possible." Thomas Larock (00:13:40): But I read these passionate MVPs that you have and the stuff that they highlight, and it's not complex stuff. It's like, "Hey, this title bar seems to be wider in this." And I'm like, I might not even notice this stuff. And I see these features that aren't a complex feature, but I'm like, "I didn't even know that was there. I didn't even know you could do that. Oh, you can do that too." There's so much. And like you said, it's a programming language. It's an IDE. It's all these things. As [Sinopski 00:14:10] said, "It's the killer app for Windows." To have the head of product say that, there's just so much. He really means it. There is a lot to it. And it is something that is malleable and usable by hundreds of millions of people a day. Brian Jones (00:14:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:14:26): My old joke is, if you want to know how good someone is at Excel, just ask them, "How good are you at Excel?" And then take their answer and invert it. Brian Jones (00:14:37): That's absolutely true. Rob Collie (00:14:38): If someone says, "Yeah, I'm really good at it," You know they don't have any clue because they haven't glimpsed the depth of that particular mine shaft. And once someone has been to the show, they know better than to oversell their knowledge because they know they can't know everything. Rob Collie (00:14:54): You say you're good at Excel. And then the very next question is one that you're not going to be able to answer. So you got to be careful. [inaudible 00:15:00] person views Excel as Word with a grid. And that's not obviously what it is, but that's the oversimplification for... I don't know... maybe 80% of humanity. Brian Jones (00:15:10): Yeah. And the thing is, there's a lot more that we're doing in the app now to try and make it, one, more approachable, because there's a set of folks that just find it really intimidating, for sure. You open it up and it's this huge, dense grid. Like, "Hey, where do I start? What should I go and do? I've never even heard of this thing before." In the past, a lot of stuff that we would do, we never really thought about those first steps of using the app because we were always like, "Well, everybody knows our app. We're going to go and do the things for everybody that knows our app." And I think we're doing a better job now trying to think, "Well, there's a bunch of people who don't know about our app. Let's go and figure out what the experience should be like for them." Brian Jones (00:15:43): But we've done a lot with AI where we're trying to get a little bit better about... We look at your data. Recommend things to you. So we'll say, "If you've got a table of data, hey, here's a pivot table." You may not have even heard of the pivot table before. So really more like, "Hey, here's a summary of your data." You want to go and insert that. Brian Jones (00:16:00): In fact, those tests are always fun because then we get to work with people who've really haven't ever used a pivot table. So it's always fun to hear the words that they use to describe what a pivot table is. It's like, "Oh wow, you grouped my data for me." Or stuff like that like, "Wow. That's a nice name for it too." So we're trying to do more of that to expose people to really those higher-end things. But those things where for those of us that use it, once you discover that stuff, you're even more hooked on the product. You're like, man, that first experience of somebody built a pivot table for you and you realize, "Oh my God, I didn't know I could do this with my data. Look how much easier it is for me to see what's going on," and trying to get more people to experience that kind of magical moment. Thomas Larock (00:16:39): Now imagine being me and only knowing pivot through T-SQL and that magical day when you meet Rob and he's like, "You just pivot table [inaudible 00:16:49]." And you're like, "How many hours have I wasted? Why didn't someone tell me?" Brian Jones (00:16:56): Yeah. We get that a lot when we'll go and show stuff. Oftentimes, the reaction is more frustration. "I can't believe I didn't know about this for the past five years." Rob Collie (00:17:05): We get that all the time now with Power Pivot and Power Query and Power BI in general. The target audience for that stuff hasn't been really effectively addressed by Microsoft marketing. But even back, just regular pivot tables, such a powerful tool, and so poorly named. You weren't around on the Excel team, Brian, when I waged a six-month campaign to try to rename pivot table to summary table. Brian Jones (00:17:31): Oh really? Rob Collie (00:17:31): Yeah. Brian Jones (00:17:31): How long ago was that? Rob Collie (00:17:33): Oh, well, it was a long time ago. I mean [crosstalk 00:17:35]- Brian Jones (00:17:36): Pivot tables had already been out for quite a while. Rob Collie (00:17:37): Oh God. Yeah. I mean, they were long established. They were in the product. I didn't even know what they did. Believe it or not, I worked on the Excel team for probably about a year before I actually figured what pivot tables could do. People would just throw it around all the time on the team like, "Well, once you have the data, then you can chart it. You can pivot it," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I would fit in- Brian Jones (00:17:58): You would nod? Rob Collie (00:17:59): I would fit in... I would also author sentences like that, that had the word pivot in it. It was a pretty safe thing to do. There was no downside to it. But believe it or not, the time that I discovered what pivot tables are for... you'll love this... I was trying to figure out how to skill balance the four different fantasy football leagues that I had organized within the Excel and Access team. I wanted to spread it out. Levels of experience. I've got this table of data with the person's name and their level of experience and my tentative league assignment. And just this light bulb went on. I'm like, "Oh my God, I bet this is what pivot tables are for." Total expertise by league. Like, "Oh, look at that. It's totally it." That was a big change for me. That was during the release, Brian, where you and I were working together. Brian Jones (00:18:54): I think I played on one of those fantasy football leagues. Rob Collie (00:18:56): You might have. Brian Jones (00:18:57): I was one of the people with zero experience. I remember going into the draft not knowing... I knew football, but I didn't know anything about fantasy football. Rob Collie (00:19:03): That's right. We did loop you in. So let's do that way back machine for a moment. That release when you and I met was the first release on Excel. I was the lead at that point. It was my first time being a lead. It was the first time I was in charge of a feature set, and it was really my baby, this XML thing we were doing. And the reason for that was because no one was paying any attention. That was this weird release. For a whole release, Office went and tried to do cloud services without having any idea what that really was going to mean. And so we stripped all of the applications down to skeleton crews. And this is really the only reason why on the Excel side, some youngster like me was allowed to be a lead and come up with a feature, because no one cared. No one was paying any attention. There was no one minding the store. Rob Collie (00:19:48): I remember being so wild-eyed enthusiastic about how much this was going to change the world, this XML import export future. And I mean, you might as well just take it out. I can't imagine it's being used hardly at all today. I bet Power View is used more often than the XML import export feature. You all have done a pretty good job of hiding it. So kudos. But it was a good thing to cut my teeth on. I learned a lot of valuable lessons on that release. Rob Collie (00:20:24): How do you feel about the XML structure document work that you were doing in Word at the time? Do you kind of have the same feeling looking back at it that I do? Brian Jones (00:20:33): It was a similar thing. In fact, we did rip it out a couple of years later. I think that when you and I would talk about it, we would talk about these scenarios that were super righteous and great. And then we just start geeking out on tech. And then we would get way too excited about the tech and we kind of forget about those initial scenarios. We wouldn't stop and think, "Wait a minute. These users we're talking about, are they actually going to go and create XML files?" Because you need one of those to start with before any of this stuff makes sense. And no, of course, they're not. But for me, a lot of it started from that. Like I said, one of my first features was that easy data binding to Excel feature. And we thought, "Hey, maybe XML would be a good tech for us to use as a way of having Word and Excel talk to each other," because clearly they have different views on what formatting is and how to present information, but the underlying semantic information, that could be shared. Brian Jones (00:21:20): And so I could have a set of products show up in Excel as a table. And when they come into Word, they look more like a catalog of products. That totally makes sense. And we just did a lot of assumptions that people would make, do all the glue that was really necessary. And of course, they didn't. So I had the exact same experience. The other big thing that was different back then for us was we would plan something, meet with customers for six months, but then it'd take three years to go and build it. We had no way of validating that stuff with customers because we couldn't get them any of the builds. And then even after we shipped it, they weren't actually going to deploy it for another three-plus years. And so the reality is from when you had the idea to where you actually can see that it's actually not working and people aren't using it is probably about six years. So you've probably moved on to something else by then. Brian Jones (00:22:04): The only way you really as a PM got validation that your feature was great was whether or not leadership and maybe press got excited about your thing, but you didn't get a whole lot of signal from actual customers whether or not the thing was working, which is obviously completely different now, thank goodness. Rob Collie (00:22:18): Yeah. That Is true. It took some of the fun out of being done too, now looking back at it, like the day of the ship party, when we were done with the three-year release. "Okay, fine." We'd dunk each other in fountains and there'd be hijinks and stuff. But the world did not experience us being done. That was purely just us feeling done. And then it was like you take a week off maybe, and then the next week, you're right back to the grind at the very beginning. You never got the payoff. Even if you built something really good, by the time the world discovered it and it was actually really helping people at any significant scale, you're no longer even working on that product. Brian Jones (00:22:57): Yeah. You're doing something completely different. Rob Collie (00:22:59): You might be in a different division, both finding out the things in real time that Rob Collie (00:23:03): [inaudible 00:23:00] Both finding out the things, sort of in real time, that aren't working. That's the obvious advantage, right? But there's also this other emotional thing. Like you never got the satisfaction when you actually did succeed. Brian Jones (00:23:11): Right. You didn't see it actually get picked up, adopted. Millions and millions of people using it, which is what the team gets now. We no longer pick a project and say, "Okay, how many people and how long is this going to take?" You really just try and figure out what's critical mass for that project. And then you just let them run. And you'd be really clear around what are the goals and outcomes they're trying to drive. And they just keep going until they actually achieve that. Or we realized that we were wrong, right? And we say, "Hey, we thought people are going to be excited about this. It's not even an implementation thing. We were just wrong. We misread what people really were trying to do. Let's stop. Let's kind of figure out a way of moving off of that and go and figure out what the next thing is we should go and do." Rob Collie (00:23:50): That era that we're talking about right now. The 2003 release of Office. I was still very much a computer science graduate and amateur human. That's exactly backwards, it turns out, if you're trying to design a tool that's going to be used by humanity. Brian Jones (00:24:08): Well, it's what leads you to get really Excited about XML? Rob Collie (00:24:12): That's right. Yeah. That's right. Tech used to have such a power in my life. I'm exactly the opposite now. Every time I hear about some new tech, I'm like, "Yeah, prove it." I am not going to believe in this new radical thing until it actually changes the world around me. I'm not going to be trying to catch that wave. But XML did that to me. It was almost a threat. If we don't take this seriously, we're going to get outflanked. It got really egregious. Rob Collie (00:24:42): I had a coworker one time in that same release in the middle of one of my presentations asked me. This guy wasn't particularly, in the final analysis, looking back, not one of the stronger members of the team, but he had a lot of sibling rivalry essentially in his DNA. And he'd asked me in front of his crowded room, "Well, what are you going to do about Bluetooth?" And, we didn't know what Bluetooth was yet, right? It was like, unless I had an answer for what we were going to do about Bluetooth and Excel, right? Then I was not up on things. You know, the thing that we use to connect our headphones. At the time, Bluetooth was one of those things that might just disrupt everything. Brian Jones (00:25:29): It was funny. It was at that same time, I was asked to give a presentation to the Word team about Bluetooth. We were all assigned things to go and research as part of planning and that was one of the ones I was asked. And I gave a presentation that was just very factual. Here's what it is. And I was given really bad feedback that like, "Hey, I wasn't actually talking about it strategically and how it was going to affect Word. I was just being very factual." And I was like, "I don't understand. I don't understand what success looks like in this task." Right. Rob Collie (00:25:59): I remember going, a couple of years later, going into an offsite, those offsite big, I don't know if you all still do those things, big offsite, blue sky brainstorming sessions. There was this really senior development lead that was there with me. And he and I were kind of buddies. At one point, halfway through the day, he just leans over to me and says, "Hey, I'm going to the restroom and I'm not coming back." And I looked at him in horror, almost like "Thou dost dishonor the offsite!?" And he's like, "Yeah, you know, I've never really believed that much in this particular phase of the product cycle. It's never really meant anything to me. It's all just BS." It was just devastating. I just knew it was right. He was... Brian Jones (00:26:46): But you didn't want to, you didn't want to believe that. Rob Collie (00:26:52): I mean, I felt so special. I was invited to the offsite, the big wigs and everything. Brian Jones (00:26:57): They have nice catering too, Rob Collie (00:26:59): Yeah and he was totally right to leave. Brian Jones (00:27:04): I always remember getting super nervous to present stuff for those. Once it was actually, it was one of our XML ones where I was trying to convince, it was my attempt to get us to create an XML file format, which actually ended up, obviously, happening. But I got an engineer to go to work with and we had Word through an add-in, start to write to XML. And it was just a basic XML format. And then I built all of these... it was like asp.net tools that would go and then create an HTML version of the Word doc that was editable. And it also even created, I think it was called WHAP, I don't remember, like a tech for phones. It was back when you didn't have the rich feature phones, but these basic ones. Brian Jones (00:27:41): And so I created this thing that was almost like a SharePoint site. So you could take all your Word docs, go through this add-in, and then you could actually get an HTML view of them to edit it and a phone view of them to go and edit it. Brian Jones (00:27:51): I think it was probably 2002 or 2001, but I was so excited to go and show that at the offsite because I was like, "Okay, this is where I make it, man. Everybody's going to be so excited about me." But I don't know. I think everybody was excited about Bluetooth at that point or something. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:28:05): Oh yeah Bluetooth, WHAP was so 15 minutes ago. So there's a few, irresistibly funny or interesting things I want to zero in on from that era before we come back to present, and we're definitely going to come back to present, for sure. Rob Collie (00:28:21): First of all, we went to a conference like some W3C sponsor. I don't think it was necessarily W3C affiliated, but it was the XML conference. Brian Jones (00:28:31): The one in Baltimore? Rob Collie (00:28:32): Yes. Rob Collie (00:28:33): Okay. Now two very, very, very memorable things happened at that conference. I bet you already know one of them. But the other one was, and we're just going to make this all this anonymous person's fault. Okay. We're not going to abdicate any responsibility. And we're just going to talk about our one coworker from Eastern Europe who brought his wife and they had vodka in their hotel fridge, or freezer, or something like that. And every day I would wake up and say, "I am not going to get suckered into that again." Rob Collie (00:29:12): And then the next day I would wake up and say the same thing. That was a tough trip. Brian Jones (00:29:16): I definitely remember that. Rob Collie (00:29:18): Even on my young, relatively young, body at the time that... Trying to keep up with that, that was difficult. But the single most outstanding memory from that conference, and we will also leave this person anonymous. But there was an executive at Microsoft who was hotter on XML than either you or I, which is hard to believe, right. And we ended up with the sponsored after hours session at this conference. You remember this? You see... Brian Jones (00:29:45): I do. Rob Collie (00:29:46): You know where we're going. Okay. So this was a 30 minute sponsored by Dell or something. Right. It was a 30 minute session, at 5:00 PM, at the end of a conference day where everyone's trying to go back and get to the bars or whatever, right.? But, it's a Microsoft executive, it's Dell sponsored, we'll show up. And the plan was at the end of this 30 minute talk given by this executive, he was going to bring all of us up on the stage to show everyone the team that had done all of this, right? Great plan. Except it was the worst presentation in history. I remember it running for two hours. It was so bad that we started off with 200 people in the room and at the end of it, and I'm just like an agony the whole time cause like I'm associated with this, right? Rob Collie (00:30:31): At the end of these two hours, or what felt like two hours anyway, it was easily 90 minutes. There's five people left in this room of 200 and it's not like the presentation is adapted to the fact that it's a smaller audience. It's just continued to drone on exactly as if everyone was there, right? And I'm sitting here thinking, "Okay, he's not going to call us all up on this stage. There's been more people on the stage than in the audience. If he does this, he's clearly not going to do that." And then he did and we all had to parade up there and stand there like the biggest dodos. I've never been more professionally embarrassed I don't think, than that moment. Rob Collie (00:31:14): And we're all looking at each other as we get up out of our seats like, "Oh my god." Brian Jones (00:31:19): I definitely remember this. Rob Collie (00:31:22): I don't see how you could have forgotten. Brian Jones (00:31:23): Well, yeah. And the person that we're talking about is actually one of my favorite people on the planet. I totally... I love this guy. I view him as like a mentor and everything, but... Which makes me remember it even more. Brian Jones (00:31:34): I think it was just, there was so much excitement. There'd been so much build up to this and this was like a kind of crescendo right? Of bringing this stuff. We probably should have had it a little bit shorter. Rob Collie (00:31:46): I mean when it reaches the point where clueless, mid twenties, Rob Collie is going, "Oh no, this is not the emotional, this not the move." You don't do it. Brian Jones (00:31:58): I'm no longer excited about being called up. Rob Collie (00:32:04): So from my perspective, you kind of parlayed that experience of the XML and all that kind of stuff. I think you did a really fantastic job of everything you guys did on that product. Again, it was the relevance that ultimately fell flat for both of us right. I guess in the end, the excitement with XML wasn't really all that appreciably different from the excitement about Bluetooth. I mean, it's everywhere, right? XML is everywhere. Bluetooth is everywhere and neither one of them really changed things in terms of what Excel or Word should be doing. It seemed like you played that into this file format second act. And I think very, very, very effectively, actually there was a little bit of controversy. Rob Collie (00:32:43): Let's set the stage for people. This was the 2007 release of Office where all the file formats got radically overhauled. This is when the extra X appeared on the end of all the file names, right? Brian Jones (00:32:58): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:32:58): There was a controversy internally. Kind of starting with Bill actually. That we shouldn't make well-documented transparent file format specs, right. There was this belief that the opaque file formats of the previous decades was in some sense, some big moat against competition. And of course, a lot of our competitors agreed. Tailor out in the public saying, "Yes, this is a barrier to competition. It's a monopolistic, blah, blah, blah." We, Microsoft had just gotten its ass kicked in the Anna Truss case. So it was really interesting. I credit Brian, your crew, with really advocating this very effectively. That's a difficult ship to turn. First of all, you got all these teams to buy into all this extra work, which no one wants to do. But when it's not even clear whether you have top level executive support, in fact, you might actually have C-suite antagonism towards an idea. To get it done. That's a career making achievement. I'm sure you remember all of that. Right. But what are your reactions to that controversy? Do you remember being in the midst of that? Brian Jones (00:34:12): I do. It was definitely a long running project. It evolved over quite a number of years. The beginning of it was, in that previous release, the XML stuff you and I were talking about was more about what we called "Custom XML". Right? So people would go and create for themselves. But in that same release, we had Word, we outputted an XML format that was our definition, which we called "Word ML" and Excel did a similar thing. Words' we try to make full fidelity. So you could save any word document in the XML format. Excel's was kind of a tailored down, it was less about formatting, it was more, "Hey, here's like..." It's almost like, "Here's a better version of CSV, right. But we're going to do it as XML." And so we already had a little bit of that. Brian Jones (00:34:53): And the whole reason we were looking at that was, on the Word side, for instance, a lot of the customer issues that we'd get where people would have corrupt files, they were corrupt because they there'd be some add-in that they had running or some third party app that was reading and writing word files. The files were fairly brittle and complex. The binary format... The binary format was written back in the days of floppy disks, right? So the top priority was how quickly can you write to a floppy disk and read from a floppy disc, right? It wasn't about, how easy is this for other people to go and read and write? Not because it was on purpose, make it hard. It was just the primary bid is let's get this thing so it's really easy to read and write from floppy, right? Brian Jones (00:35:31): And so in Word, we were like, "Wow, I think that there's a bigger opportunity here for an ecosystem around Word if we make it easy for people to read and write Word docs and build solutions around them." And so then the next release, the Excel team was looking at doing some big changes around a lot of the limitations, like how many rows you could have in columns, right. Lengths of like formulas and things like that. Right. And so there was this thing where the Excel team was like, "We are going to need to create a new file format." And on the word side, we thought this XML thing was great. We want to move to that as our new format. Brian Jones (00:36:01): And so everything kind of came together and it was clear. Hey, this is going to be the release that we are going to go and rev our file format, which we hadn't done in a while. This is also the release of the ribbon. So there were two really big major changes in that product, right? It was the new file format and the ribbon. It's funny. I still refer to it as the new file format, even though it's 15 years old. Rob Collie (00:36:23): Yeah. It's the new file format it's still new, yeah. Brian Jones (00:36:25): I still call it that, which is kind of nuts. But I think that the controversies you were talking about was really more of a... Boy, this is a really big deal for the product. We had changed file formats before in the past and not necessarily gotten it right. And there were a lot of challenges around compatibility and stuff. And so there was just a lot of worry of let's make sure you all have your stuff together here, right? Like let's make sure that this doesn't in any way break, stop people from wanting to upgrade to the new version. But it went really well. The whole goal of it was let's get something that we think third parties can go and read and write, and this is going to help build an ecosystem. And a new ecosystem run Office. Office already had big ecosystem with VBA and COMM add-ons and stuff like that, right.? But we won't have this new ecosystem around our file formats as a thing. That's why we chose... There's a packaging layer, which is all zip based. So if people haven't played around with it that XLSX, you can just put a .zip at the end and double click it. And it's just a zip file. And you can see a whole bunch of stuff inside of it. Right? Rob Collie (00:37:23): Yeah. If you're listening, you haven't done that go right now, run don't walk, grab an Excel file or a Word file, whatever. Go and rename the XLSX or BPTX, go ahead and rename it so that it ends in .zip and then open it up and you'll be blown away. Thomas Larock (00:37:38): PowerPoint is my favorite when I have to find some unknown setting that I need and I can just search through the whole thing. Yep. Rob Collie (00:37:45): Or all the images. You want to get all the images out of the PowerPoint file. It's just a zip file that has a bunch of images in it. Right. Brian Jones (00:37:50): So I also did this for backpack. It's the same thing. You can crack open the backpack by renaming a zip file... Thomas Larock (00:37:58): An actual physical backpack? What are we... what are we talking about here? Brian Jones (00:38:03): Ah yeah. Rob Collie (00:38:03): This is the digital acetate that is over the top of the entire physical world that you aren't aware of. Thomas Larock (00:38:08): Digital acetate, that's it? That's it. That's where the podcast peaks. Right? Those two words. We're all going home now. Brian Jones (00:38:19): Yeah. No. A SQL server, there's DAC pack, which is just the, say database schema. Then there's a backpack which has the data and the schema combined. But you can, if you rename them . zip, you can crack them open to see the XML that makes up those forms. So it's not just office products. Rob Collie (00:38:37): We ended up standardizing the entire thing, but that packaging format, it was called OPC, Open Packaging Convention, or something like that. It was something that we did in partnership with a Windows team. It's part of the final ISO standard for our file format. And then there were a lot of other folks that went and used that exact same standard. Because it's a really easy way of you have a zip package. You can have a whole bunch of pieces inside of it, which are XML. And then there's this convention for how you can do relationships between the different pieces. So I can have a slide. That's an XML and it can declare relationships to all the images that it uses. And that way it's really quick, easy to know, okay, here's all the content I need to grab if I want to move pieces of it outside of the file. Rob Collie (00:39:16): So the single coolest thing I've ever done with, we'll just call it your file format Brian. We'll just pretend that it was only you working on that. Brian Jones (00:39:23): Just me yeah, I was pretty busy, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:39:27): So the very, very first version of Power Pivot, first of all, your file format, the new file format made Power Pivot possible. We needed to go and add this gigantic binary stream of compressed data and everything, everything about Power Pivot needed to be saved in the file. At the beginning of the project, everyone was saying, "Oh, no, we're going to save it as two separate files." And I'm like, "Are you guys kidding?" The Pivot cache, for instance, is saved in the same file. You can't throw a multi file solution at people and expect it to... This was actually like Manhattan project, just to get that stream saved into the same file. It was pretty crazy. However, when it was done, there was something really awesome I wasn't aware of until the very end, which was, first of all, you could open up a zip file and just tunnel down and you would find a file in there called item one.data. Rob Collie (00:40:21): Okay. That was the Power Pivot blob. That was everything about the Power Pivot thing. And it was by far the biggest thing in the file, like it was like 99% of the file size was what was there. However, as this backup, someone had decided, I had nothing to do with this, to save all of the instructions. I think it's called XML for analysis XMLA. All of the instructions that would be required to rebuild exactly that file, but without any of the actual binary data in it. So it was a very, very small amount of XML. Okay. So here's what we would do because there were no good automation, no interfaces, no APIs. If we needed to add like 500 formulas to a Power Pivot file, you could go through the UI and write those 500 formulas, type, click, type, click, type, click. Rob Collie (00:41:08): Okay. So what we would do, and my first job outside of Microsoft, is we would go in there and we would edit that XML backup and add all the formulas we wanted in it. And by the way, I would use Excel to write these formulas. I would use string concatenation and all of that kind of stuff to write these things. It was very, very, very sensitive, one character out of place in the whole thing fails. So you make those changes. You save the file, reopen it, nothing happens because it's just the backup. Okay. So then you've got to go and you've got to create a zero byte item one.data file on your desktop and you copy it into the zip file and overwrite the real item one.data, therefore deliberately corrupting the primary copy. So when you reopen the file it triggers the backup process and it rehydrates with all of your stuff, it was awesome. Rob Collie (00:41:57): And then a couple of releases of Power Pivot later, suddenly that didn't work anymore and I was really pissed. But it just really shows you, it opens up so many opportunities that you never would have expected. And even a hack like that, that's not the kind that you'd be really looking for, but the fact that something like that even happens as a result of this is really indicative of what a success it was. Brian Jones (00:42:19): Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of those things where, I love building platforms, like that's my favorite part of the job. It's all those things that you see people do that you never would have predicted. Right? That's just so exciting. PowerPoint had this huge group of folks that would go and build things like doc assembly stuff, right. Where they go and automatically build PowerPoint decks on demand, right? Based on who you're going to go and present to cause they've just shredded the thing. In fact, when we did the ISO standardization, it was a 6,000 page doc that we had to go. And we built and reviewed with a standards body and we did it over about a year. Which sounds nuts, a 6,000 page doc in about a year. And the way that we were able to do that is there was never really a 6,000 page doc. There's a database where there's a row for every single element and attribute in this, in the whole schema, that would then have the column which is the description, which would just be the word XML. Brian Jones (00:43:09): And so we could, on demand, at any point, generate whatever view or part of the doc we wanted. So we'd say, "Hey, we're going to go in now, review everything that has to do with formatting across Word, Excel and PowerPoint." And so we just click a couple buttons and the database would spit out a Word doc that was just that part. Everybody could go and edit it cause we were using the structured elements we'd added to Word, which is called content controls, which was the next version of that XML stuff that we had to deprecate. And then the process, as soon as you'd finish editing that Word doc, we just submit it back. The process would go back and shred that Word doc again and put it all back in the database. And so we really used the file format to bootstrap documenting the file format. Rob Collie (00:43:48): And then when you dump a 6,000 page document on someone, they have no choice. But to just say, yep, it looks good to us. Brian Jones (00:43:55): Well, there was a pretty, incredibly thorough review still. It was just pretty impressive. The final vote that we had in Geneva, the process leading up to that, the amount of feedback that we got. Cause basically the ISO, you can kind of think of it like the UN, you go and show up and every country has a seat, right? I mean, not everybody participates, but anybody that wants to can. And so yeah, we had to respond to thousands of comments around different pieces, things that people wanted to see changed. Rob Collie (00:44:22): Yeah. I can imagine, right. Think about it. You just said at the final vote in Geneva. That's a heavy moment man. Thomas Larock (00:44:29): Yeah. That threw me off for a second. I thought, for sure, you were talking Switzerland, but now thinking that was just a code name. Rob Collie (00:44:38): No, I think, I think he was actually in Switzerland. Brian Jones (00:44:40): In Switzerland. Rob Collie (00:44:41): Have you seen the chamber where they do these votes? It looks just like the Senate from episode one of Star Wars. It's just like that. It's pretty heavy. Brian Jones (00:44:51): The little levitating... Rob Collie (00:44:53): The floating lift. Yeah. I think they call that digital acetate. I think that's what they call that. By the way on the Excel team, the way I came to look at the new file format and the open architecture of it, again, this this will show you how quickly I had turned into the more cynic side of things. Well, okay. We're going to be changing file formats. And we're doing that for our benefit because we didn't have enough bits allocated in the 1980s version of the file format that was saved to floppy disc, as you pointed out, right. Who could ever imagine having more than 64,000 rows, it's just inconceivable or 250 columns or whatever, right.? Because we hadn't allocated that. We'd made an engineering mistake, essentially, we hadn't future-proofed. So we need to make a file format change for our benefit, right. To undo one of our mistakes. And the way I looked at it was, "Ooh, all this open file format stuff, that'll be like the 'Look, squirrel!'" To distract people and to sort of justify, while we went and did this other thing, which, ultimately it actually went pretty well. The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad, because we actually Took it seriously. Rob Collie (00:46:03): The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad because we actually took it seriously. We didn't cut any corners. We did all the right things. Brian Jones (00:46:07): Well, there were several benefits too. We were talking about all the kind of ecosystem development benefits, but the fact that the file was zipped and compressed right, it meant that the thing was smaller. And that was all of a sudden, it was no longer about floppy discs. People are sharing files on networks. And so actually being able to go and have a file that's easier to share, send over network because it's smaller was a thing. Brian Jones (00:46:26): There were a couple of things that we were able to go and highlight. There's also a pretty nice thing where it was actually more robust because it was XML, and we split it into multiple pieces of XML. It meant that even if you had bit rot, you would only lose one little piece of the file, whereas with old the binary format, you had some bit rot and the whole thing is impossible to open up.There are a couple of things that were in user benefits too, which helped. Rob Collie (00:46:50): And ultimately, on the Excel side, the user got a million row spreadsheet format and the ability to use a hell of a lot more than like 14 colors that could be used in a single spreadsheet or something. It was .like a power of two minus two, so many bizarre things. Like Excel had more colors than that, but you couldn't use more than a certain subset in a- Brian Jones (00:47:10): At a time, yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:10): -In a single file. So yeah, there were a lot of benefits. They just weren't- Brian Jones (00:47:15): It's not like it's an explicit choice. It's just that at the time somebody is implementing something, you're right in a way, assuming, "Oh, this is fine. This is enough. I'll never have to worry with this issue." Rob Collie (00:47:25): Why waste the whole byte on that? When you can cram four different settings into a single byte. If you read the old stories about Gates and Allen programming up at Harvard, they had these vicious head-to-head competitions to see who could write the compiler or the section of basic in the fewest bytes possible. This was still very much hanging over Microsoft, even the vestiges of it were still kind of hanging over us even when I arrived. But certainly in the '80s when the Excel file format was being designed for that rev, it was still very much like, "Why waste all those bits in a byte?" "Let's cap it at four bits". Thomas Larock (00:48:05): In that blog series from Sinofsky, he talks a lot about that at the early start. And I'm at a point now where he's talking a lot about the code reuse because the Excel team, the Word team, I guess PowerPoint, but all these other teams, were all dealing with, say, text. And they were all doing their own code for how that text would be displayed and shown. And Bill would be the one being like, " This is ridiculous". "We should be able to reuse the code between these products". And to me, that would just be common sense. But these groups, Microsoft just grew so rapidly so quickly, they were off on their own, and they have to ship. I ain't got time to wait around for this, for somebody to build an API, things like that. I'll just write it myself. Brian Jones (00:48:50): It's a general thing that you get as you get larger where the person in charge that can oversee everything is like, "Well, these are all my resources", and, "Wow, I don't want three groups all building the same thing". But then when you get down, there's also a reality of we're just going to have a very different view on text and text layout than Excel. And Excel is not going to say, "I want all of that code that Word uses to lay out all of their content to be running for every single cell". Right? That's just suboptimal. And so it's always this fun conversation back and forth around where do you have shared code and reuse and where do you say it's okay for this specific app to have this more optimized thing that might look the same, but in reality, it's not really the same. Rob Collie (00:49:33): Brian, do you remember the ... I'm sure you do, but I don't remember what company they were from. But at one point in this file format effort, these really high priced consultants showed up and went around and interviewed us a couple of times. Do you remember that phase? It was like- Brian Jones (00:49:51): Was that towards the end? There was a couple summary stories that were pulled together just to talk about the overall processes. It was actually after the standardization. Rob Collie (00:49:58): I remember this being at the point in time where it was still kind of a question. whether we should do it. Brian Jones (00:50:02): I don't remember that. Rob Collie (00:50:04): The thing I remember really vividly is a statement that Chris Pratley would make over and over again, this encapsulated it for me. I came around to seeing it his way, which was the file format isn't the thing. That's not the moat. The thing that makes Office unique is the behaviors of the application. It's not the noun of the file format. It's the verb of what happens in the app. It's instructed to think that even if you took exactly the Excel team today, every single person that's already worked on it, and said, "Hey, you have to go rebuild Excel exactly". There's no way that version of Excel would be compatible with the one we have now. It would drift so much. Rob Collie (00:50:43): You could even have access to all the same specs. We would even cheat and say, "Look, you can have access to every single spec ever written". So? It was clearly someone had thought it was time to bring in like a McKinsey. They were all well dressed. They were all attractive. They were all a little too young to be the ones sort of making these decisions. It was just really weird to have them show up, three people in your office. Like, "Okay, I'll tell you what's going on". Brian Jones (00:51:11): I can totally imagine. It's funny I don't remember that. There were several rounds of analysis on how we were doing it, what we're doing and making sure we were doing it the right way. But yeah, Chris is spot on. I mean, your point about rebuilding it, that's essentially what we've been going through for the past five plus years around our web app. It's a lot of work. Unfortunately, we can't let it drift. The expectation from everybody is, "Hey, I learned the Wind 32 version. When I go to the web, I want it to feel the same. I don't want to feel like I'm now using some different app." Rob Collie (00:51:44): What an amazing, again, like a Manhattan project type of thing, this notion of rewriting Excel to run on the web and be compatible. Brian Jones (00:51:55): Yeah, with 30 years of innovation. Rob Collie (00:51:56): Yeah. That started in the 2007 release. Excel services, the first release of Excel services was 2007. And this whole thing about shared code, like what features, what functions of Excel, what pieces of it were going to be rewritten to be quote unquote "shared code"? And shared code meant it was actually server safe, which none of regular desktop Excel written in the early '80s, still carrying around assembly in certain places, assembly code of all things, right? Excel was not server safe. It was about as far from server safe as you could get. And so to rewrite this so ambitious without breaking anything. Oh my God. What a massive ... This dates back, gosh, more than 15 years. Brian Jones (00:52:45): Yeah. I'd say like the first goals around it were a bit different, right? It wasn't a web version of Excel. It was like BI scenarios and how can we have dashboards and Excel playing a role in dashboards. But yeah, I'd say since I joined, it was probably maybe a half a year or a year into when I joined, we just made the decision to shift a huge chunk of our funding to the web app. It was just clear that we need to make even more rapid progress. If you go, we have a site where you can go and see all the features that are rolling out there. It's incredible. And it's just because of the depth of the product. "Wow that's so many features you've done. You must be almost done". But then you look at everything else that's still isn't done yet. Brian Jones (00:53:23): Now thankfully, we're getting to the point where we can look at telemetry and say, "Hey, we've got most people covered." Most users, when we look at what they do in Windows, they could use the web app and shouldn't notice a difference. But there still is a set of things that we're going to keep churning through. So that'll continue to be a huge, huge investment for us. But yeah, the shared code strategy, we have an iPhone version, an iPad version an Android version. We've got Excel across all platforms. And because of the shared code, when we add new features, the feature crew that's working on that, they need to have a plan for how they're going to roll out across all those platforms, clearly levered shared code. But they also need to think through user experience and stuff like that too. Clearly a feature on a phone is going to behave differently than it's going to behave on a desktop. Rob Collie (00:54:05): Part of me, just like, kind of wants to just say, "I don't even believe that you've pulled that off, there's no way". It's kind of like, I've never looked at the Android version, and until I look at the Android version, I'm just going to assume it's not real. This is why it's one of the hardest things imaginable to have a single code base with all these different user experience, just fundamental paradigms of difference between these platforms. Like really? Come on. Brian Jones (00:54:34): It was a massively ambitious project. Mac shifted over maybe three years ago. And that's when, all of a sudden, in addition to a bunch of just features that people have been asking for that we'd never been able to get to, the massive one there was we were able to roll out the co-authoring multiplayer mode for Excel. Rob Collie (00:54:50): Multiplayer. Brian Jones (00:54:52): That's the term I like for co-authoring. It's more fun. Rob Collie (00:54:55): Yeah. It's like MMO for spreadsheets. Brian Jones (00:54:57): Yes. We were able to get that for the Mac. I mean, all of our platforms. One of us can be on an iPad, an iPhone, the web app, and we'll all see what we're doing in real time, making edits and all of that stuff. That alone, if you want to talk about massive projects, 30 years of features and innovation, basically that means we had to go and teach Excel how to communicate to another version of Excel and be very specific about, "This is what I did." "Here's the action I took." And that is massive. There are thousands and thousands of things you can do in the product. So getting it so that all of those versions are in sync the entire time, and so we're all seeing the exact same results of calc and all of that. That itself was a huge, massive project. Rob Collie (00:55:37): Take this as the highest form of praise when I say I don't buy it. I can't believe it. Brian Jones (00:55:44): I hope everybody's okay that we just talked for like an hour on just like listening to somebody at a high school reunion, I think, or something. Is this like me talking about how great I played in that one game? And you're like, "Yeah, that was a great basket". Rob Collie (00:55:54): Yeah. "Man, my jumper was on". the thing that's hard to appreciate, I think, is that you got to come back to the fact that we're talking about the tools that everyone in the world uses every day, that we rely on. And I think being gone from Microsoft for the last 12 years, I'm able to better appreciate that sense of wonder. This isn't just you and I catching up, I don't think. People enjoy, for good reason I think, hearing the stories of how these things came to be. People don't know by default how hard it was to get to a million rows in the file format. If you're like a robot, you're like, "I don't care how I got here. I just care what it is", then you're not listening to this show. We call it data with a human element. Robots can exit stage left. I think you should feel zero guilt. This isn't just self-indulgence. Brian Jones (00:56:55): Well, on the off chance everybody else ... I've listened to a lot of Rob's other podcasts, and they're awesome. So if you're bored with this one, it's okay. Go check out some of the other ones. They'r

Today, Rob dives into two topics that require consideration when upgrading your machines. What do you want? What do you need? How much is it going to cost?Items for consideration:Laptop vs DesktopMac vs PCNew vs RefurbishedQuestions to ask yourself:How do you use a computer?Should you build a computer?What do you need to do so?A message from the IT company contracted by the day job:Hey Rob,I like to use https://pcpartpicker.com/ to select parts for my home builds. If you make a mistake (CPU chip you selected doesn’t fix the motherboard you selected) it warns you and gives you a lot of useful info on the parts, manufacturers, warranties, power consumption and just about anything you’d want to know. They have completed builds to reference as examples and even tutorials. I’ve used their build guides for liquid cooled systems and I’m glad I did, saved me a lot of potential heartache.The system I have at home for Gaming/3D printing/Model Rendering I built using the website above and it runs all my games/Rendering software on highest settings with no lag or slow frames.Hope that helps!How did I put together a parts list?Want a Better PC? Try Building Your Ownhttps://www.wired.com/story/how-to-build-a-pc/Article contains a few example builds you can tweak to your liking if you want.Parts List:MotherboardProcessorGraphics CardStorageMemoryPower SupplyCaseOperating SystemAlso a recent email from Hotep Jesus regarding his new computer set up for streaming:Anyway, I bought a gaming PC dedicated to streaming because my Macbook simply couldn't handle the CPU requirements that streaming demands.Cross referenced Hotep Jesus' computer with the suggestions in the article.Also ran my potential computer build set up past my brother who has built computers.He's given me some feedback on the machine I constructed which will be about $1000As far as I can tell it will run far better than any machine you can buy for the money.Patreon Subscribers will receive my computer building spreadsheet and cost list.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/allaroundgrowth)

Keith is the founder of SegMetrics, helping founders understand their true lead value using a data backed approach. On Air, Keith and Rob discuss why your KPI's might be setting up blinders as your create a marketing strategy for your businesses, how outliers can create a new train of thought in your marketing plan, and how to identifying strategies that can truly move the needle in testing conversions. Keith Perhac has delivered a few talks at MicroConf, from his first Attendee Talk back in 2015 to his keynote presentation at MicroConf Starter in 2017. You can check out his talks here: https://microconf.com/speakers/keith-perhac MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Basecamphttps://basecamp.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Basecamp TRANSCRIPT Rob Walling: [00:00:00] And we are live. Welcome to MicroConf On Air. Every Wednesday we livestream for about 30 minutes and we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups. These are startups that don't need to work 80 hour work weeks, raise millions in venture capital, or drive us to the brink of burnout. In this show, we seek freedom, purpose, and relationships, and we want to maintain those values while building interesting companies that can have an impact on the world, or maybe just our little corner of it. So thank you so much for joining me again this week, whether you're joining us live and maybe you're in MicroConf Connect, and you're going to be asking some questions of our guest today, or even if you're listening asynchronously on the podcast feed that's microconfpodcast.com or search for MicroConf On Air in any podcatcher that you use. Today I have the pleasure of, uh, bringing a Keith Perhac on the show. You may know Keith, as the founder of SegMetrics. Yeah. And he is , hailing from the Portland area. So it's a little smoky outside his house right now. But Segmetrics.io If you want to check it out. They're a team of about 10 people in the growth stage. I was talking to him beforehand about how can we give people a sense of, of where the company is? , and he said, "Look, we have product market fit and we're in the growth stages. We're starting to grow quickly. " If you go to SegMetrics.io, you can see their H1. In essence, SegMetrics is a tool that helps you get 100% clarity on where your leads come from, how they behave and how much your marketing is really worth. It allows you to get a handle on the KPIs that matter most for your marketing funnels is built by marketers for marketers. And today, Keith and I are going to be talking about how KPIs can be misleading when optimizing your marketing. So Keith Perhac. Welcome to MicroConf On Air. Keith Perhac, Segmetrics: [00:01:43] Hey, Hey Rob. Thanks for having me. Rob Walling: [00:01:46] Absolutely, man, um, that sky's look kind of clear from what I can see reflecting in your window as the air quality improved up there. Keith Perhac, Segmetrics:

Make your health an act of rebellion and join the community here. Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS This episode of The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by Vital Farms. Eating clean? Vital Farms Pasture-Raised Ghee is lactose-, casein- and gluten-free. Equipping you with the taste of butter and the functionality of a high heat cooking oil—perfect for sautéing your veggies. Visit vitalfarms.com/ghee for a chance to win a year supply of Vital Farms ghee for FREE.   Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF) Show Notes: News topic du jour: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/arizona-coronavirus-chloroquine-death/index.html 1. Dealing with fear at this time. [10:46] Kristine... Hi Robb. I just wanted to ask you if you are scared right now of this virus for yourself, or Nikki, or the girls? I have never been so terrified and I am physically making myself ill from it. Seems like nobody (except for kids, maybe) is guaranteed to be in danger. I keep thinking me and my husband are going to get sick/hospitalized and there will nobody to take care of our two young daughters. Can you offer me some advice? I have looked to you for years and I don't know how to get my head right. Thanks 2. Peppers [23:52] Sergio says: Hey Rob, maybe im talking to a computer or nobody, but in case it reaches you. Have people considered the power of red hot chili peppers? Or peppers in general? The effects largely boosts many defenses as well as giving you notable temperature rise. Could that help to combat Covid? Also Spirulina. Don't wanna make this very long. Cheers and thanks for your help 3. Low carb/carnivore danger of mucin deficiency [25:58] Kat says: Hi Robb and Nicki, I love your new podcast. I've followed your work for a while and I really appreciate how you remain so open minded and non-dogmatic. Can you please address the issue of some people developing dry eyes and mouths on low carb. I developed Sjogrens Syndrome (when I was still eating plenty of carbs) and it is doing a number on my eyes, mouth (and other mucous membranes), my digestive system and joints. Eating mostly meat is the only thing that controls the stomach pain from my longstanding IBS and more recent Sjogrens. Paul Jaminet cautions against low carb due to what happened to him on it (dry eyes and mouth) and so I am worried I will make my issues even worse if I continue carnivore diet style eating. It's hard to tell if it is causing any dryness since I am already so dry. Thanks, Kat 4. Timing of meals and BJJ training [31:35] Kris says: Hi Rob and Nicki, I'm 46 years old health conscious dad, husband and lawyer. I started BJJ about 10 months ago with my 8 year old son. I've got two stripes and am loving the training, very mental. I come from an endurance background, Ironman triathlons, marathons (Boston 3 x) and I ran 24 hours around a track last year for charity to celebrate my 45th birthday. BJJ is a whole new challenge with the mental game. My question, I eat low carb consistently and have been meat focused for the past few months with some vegetables. I intermittent fast most days for 16-18 hours typically skipping breakfast. My BJJ training is usually in the evening from 6:15 until 7:45 pm. For overall health, would you recommend having my last meal at around 4 pm before BJJ training and fasting until the next morning. Or would you recommend having a big breakfast around 11 am, a small snack before BJJ training and an evening meal after training? I love your yearly recap and am an avid listener of your podcast. I hope to one day earn my purple belt in BJJ. I am actually similar to your build, short around 5'6" but muscular with big legs. I weigh around 160 lbs with 8-10% bodyfat. Loving your podcast and website material. All the best, Kris 5. Acne [35:22] Erica says: Hey Robb, I’m not sure if you’ve covered the subject of acne because I am a fairly new listener to your podcast, which I love by the way. I’ve learned so much already. But getting to the point, I am a 17 year old female that has had acne since age 10. I’ve done almost every type of treatment: oral and topical antibiotics, birth control, benzoyl peroxide, retinoids, you name it. Nothing ever seems to help, and if it does, my acne eventually comes back. I don’t want to take antibiotics or birth control because that just screws up your gut microbiome. I am a fairly clean eater (I eat paleo but I have the occasional dessert or junk food), I exercise a lot (I play volleyball and weightlift three days a week), and I get a decent amount of sleep (7-8 hours per night). My acne has thankfully become pretty mild but either way, acne isn’t NORMAL. In your opinion, what are the biggest causes of acne? I’ve heard diet, stress, dehydration, mineral deficiencies, and I’m honestly just so confused. Any advice or insight would be appreciated.  

In today’s episode, I’m talking to Rob Sperry, author of the book, ‘The Game of Networking’ and voted as the Top Network Marketing Business Coach in 2017. We're going to talk about why network marketing. On this episode we discuss why it's so important for you to show up consistently with your message, why it's important to have integrity, and we're going to have you walk away with some very, very, very clear steps, if you're wanting to grow in the next 30 days. Keynotes discussed: This is a big tip. I went back and I looked at not just my post but my ‘likes’ and I an assessment. (06:45)My ability to learn went through the roof because now there was even a more compelling reason. (08:17)You have certain routines in your day that gave you that perseverance, that strength. (08:56)I started focusing more on the income producing activities. (11:50)I think the biggest mistake is, people misinterpret duplication and they confuse principles and techniques. (22:40) Learn More About The Content Discussed... Rob Sperry: http://robsperry.comRob’s Podcast: Network Marketing BreakthroughThe Top Summit The Top Summit EventThe Game of Network Marketing: http://thegameofnetworking.comThe Camp Elevate Facebook Group: hereBeth's Instagram: @bethholdengravesBeth's website: https://www.bethholdengraves.comProfit HER Way Course: https://www.bethholdengraves.com/profit Be sure to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with a friend that would get some value!Beth's website: https://www.bethholdengraves.comCamp Elevate: https://www.bethholdengraves.com/camp-elevate Episode Transcript... Beth:We’re going to talk about why network marketing, why it’s so important for you to show up consistently with your message, why it’s important to have integrity, and we’re going to have you walk away with some very, very, very clear steps, if you’re wanting to grow in the next 30 days. Welcome to ‘You’re Not The Boss Of Me’. If you are determined to break glass ceilings and build it your way, this show is for you. I’m your host Beth Graves and I am obsessed with helping you to not just dream it, but make the plan, connect the dots and create what you crave. Are you ready? Let’s get started. Hey everyone. Welcome back episode number 10 we are in double digits and today I have one of my favorite humans on earth, a mentor, he has been a friend. I have the ever so famous Rob Sperry with me today. Hello Rob. Rob:I am so mad at you. I just got back from Maui and I’m wearing a coat right now indoors because I’m freezing, because it’s snowing in Utah, and you’re just bragging about how you’re in the Florida weather. So I know, I know I got to come around. I’m going to come around, but we’re going to have some fun, and yes, I don’t even know when we first started chatting. I just remember opening up chat and I have like five awesome voice messages from this gal named Beth who’s absolutely crushing it, and now has become one of my closest friends in network marketing. We’ve talked about anything and everything and I’m sure that’s what we’re going to do today and have a lot of fun. Beth:So I want to talk to you about, I was going to do this formal intro with Rob and I think what my mind always goes to is, how does someone start doing what Rob is doing? And so let’s back up. We’re going to talk about why network marketing, why it’s so important for you to show up consistently with your message, why it’s important to have integrity and we’re going to have you walk away with some very, very, very clear steps if you’re wanting to grow in the next 30 days. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Rob, remind me of that list. That was just off the top of my head. So I became intrigued. All of you listening know that my entry into saying ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me’ was finding Network Marketing, realizing that if I did a few things, a lot of things every single day, made more connections, gave people the opportunity to take a look at what it was I was doing. And I developed a team that had community along with my leadership, I was going to be able to replace my first goal, which was only to replace what I would be making as a teacher. And so I started hounding free content and I kept coming across this dude in his car doing these Facebook lives and I was, I kinda did the back research. He’d made millions of dollars in Network Marketing. He’s now a mentor, I didn’t even know that they existed when I first started. So Rob, share about your journey and then I want to share a little bit about how I missed that mastermind. And you kept sending me pictures of yourself, like and with my friends. I have this FOMO, I want to talk about some of the things that Rob does, but I, obsessively consumed his free content and I didn’t just consume, I consumed and took action and shared, because it’s free. He still does a ton for free, but talk about that. You started showing up in your car on Facebook live and now you’re a published author, a bestselling author, you run a mastermind. He was speaking all over stages. You can’t even really get a time with you and it started with you and your car. Rob:It started with the car and always starts before that, right? I mean, I’ve been in the profession of Network Marketing, or industry. Is it profession or industry? I’d still go back and forth on that. I don’t know. Beth:It’s a, and yeah, let’s call it, let’s find a name for it and then start that. If you guys, if you’re listening and you have the, do you think it’s a profession or an industry? Screenshot this, find us on Instagram and we’ll have a conversation with you about what that word’s going to be because we’ll just start a thing, that’s how things get started. Rob:We’ll create it. So prior to Network Marketing, I was a tennis guy. I played, and that’s where Beth and I get to have fun tennis conversations. She loves tennis, I love tennis. But I played semi professional tennis. I was playing college tennis as well. And then after that I ran a tennis club for four years. Met a lot of very successful people, transitioned to the Network Marketing profession. Thought it was the last thing I would ever do. I thought I was the worst style or personality because I got called into the tennis club for being so bad at selling tennis memberships. I increased revenue threefold because I was a networker. But as far as selling memberships, I didn’t want to convince anyone, as either they saw it or they didn’t. So I thought it was against my style, Personality. Long story short, I got involved. I became the number one recruiter out of a million distributors. And it’s not because I was anything special. I had great mentors, I was crazy coachable and I outworked everybody. So that was the short version on and on and on. Different things. A lot of highs, a lot of successes. Way more failures though. Way more learning lessons. Way more is this thing gonna happen. Like I thought, right, going back and forth, all the good stuff. But then yeah, I transitioned into coaching and Beth, most people don’t know this, this was not a goal of mine. I made fun of coaches. They said, if you can’t build, coach. So be careful of who you make fun of. I’m like, yeah, these are the people that can’t build. That’s why they’re absolutely coaching. So I just started doing Facebook lives more so cause I felt like I had made really good money, but I was bad. I was a bad public speaker for the amount that I had made. I was not very good at all. I was not very comfortable. I didn’t feel like I was myself. So I just said, this is a great way for me to get better at speaking at communicating and providing value for my teams to be able to consistently watch. So I slowly started doing it. And then I sold my position and got completely out of building and Network Marketing, and all these companies say, Hey, can you do a little coaching for our team? Can you do consulting? So I’m like, okay, so then I started committing to doing three plus videos every single week, and I’m just doing random places, right? And she said, I do it in my car a lot of times because you know, the kids were really, really loud or I was at random places. I’m like, yeah, just do it in the car, do it in my office, do it wherever I’m at. And I go back and I look at some of those and they had, I mean this is after Beth, I built a business in 40 plus countries. And I tell all of this to give you hope of, we all have our weaknesses. I had on some of my Facebook lives, three comments. Beth:Oh my gosh I had built a business in 40 countries. You would’ve thought that those people would’ve just been nice and give me courtesy likes and comments right Beth?. You would of. Beth:I would’ve, I would’ve given you some emojis. Thumbs up, right? Rob:I mean something. That’s what I would’ve thought of. But guess what I found is after I started doing them, I got a little bit better. I got better at telling stories. I got better at communicating the information. I found, you know, where you can have your pauses and where you have your energy. Right? I got better. I started building an audience. As I started doing them consistently, I just started learning. I started self-assessing. This is a big tip. I went back and I looked at not just my post but my lives and I looked at the last 30 and I did an assessment on the three that people liked the most topics and the topics that I didn’t get much engagement. It wasn’t a different version of me. They were all me. What did my audience resonate with? And so I would do a self audit. And as I started doing that audit, it helped me just to keep getting better and better and better and better. And so I just put a ton of free content. You know, we hear all the time, it’s what you put out into the world. It’s the value provided. It comes back full circle. I think sometimes we hear that we roll our eyes, but honestly if you study the greats and you look at how much free value they put out, right? And content. And how it does come back background. I was estimating that I had done, before I sold my first course, it was something like 300 plus, either lives or videos. I mean that’s an insane amount. I’m not telling you that you have to do that, I’m just giving perspective on it. So that’s a lot, now when I go back and think about it. But it helped me so much, not just for building my brand and audience but also for me becoming obsessive on freaking out. Cause I didn’t know what I was going to talk about next. So I started deliberately listening more, and reading books. I was already reading and listening to a ton of books, but now I had more of a purpose, right? And it started paying attention more to all trainings in advance, and other Facebook lives. So my ability to learn went through the roof because now there was even a more compelling reason because I was freaking out. I was thinking, Oh no, I’m supposed to do another live or video tomorrow. The next thing, I have no idea. If people have heard me so much, what am I going to say? How am I going to say something different? What am I going to do? So it’s been quite the journey. And the more I learned, the more I learn. I’ve got a ton more to learn. Beth:Well that mindset of, I mean many people with three comments would have quit. But you have, because I’ve learned from you, you have certain routines in your day that gave you that perseverance, that strength. So what I love on this podcast is I always ask my guests, what are the things that you do daily that allow you to have that perseverance, to have that strong mind, to have the discipline to keep going when it doesn’t feel like we want to keep going? Rob:Yeah. So everything begins and ends with purpose. If the purpose and vision isn’t big enough, you’ll just quit. So if you’re going to the gym and you’re like, yeah, I’m gonna, I’m going to get shredded or I’m going to have that great body for this vacation. If the purpose is big enough, you’ll keep going. But if it’s like, yeah, I just want to go cause it would be nice because I’m supposed to, you’ll quit. So it always starts with that purpose and the reason why you’re doing something. And then after that, I’ve got a whole success formula. But in short for me, I’m a firm believer of show me your minimums and I’ll show you your future. And I believe that willpower is a muscle that needs to be exercised that can help you out with everything. And I know when I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it because it’s a muscle that I continually exercise. So for me, yes, I haven't missed a week working out in the last decade, an entire week, and I travel a lot, I've been to 15 plus countries in the last 18 months. I never miss date night when I'm in town, and do something with my kids every single week when I'm in town. I have missed some sort of spiritual reading like the Bible, only one time in the last 11 years. I haven't missed reading personal development, even one day in 10 years, I haven't missed not one day in 10 plus years. Now it's 11 years. But for me, those are small things. But those things helped me to practice that discipline and willpower. And they also helped to give myself confidence. Look, if you say you're going to wake up at 6:00 AM and you never wake up 6:00 AM, you just took out a withdrawal of trust in yourself. So I'm constantly looking for small victories. I'm constantly looking to create minimum goals, cause I know we all have those B Habs, they carry audacious goals where it comes from the book of degree. Well there's huge goals. We're dreamers. That's great. You still should have this, but what are the minimum goals than non-negotiables that you're gonna set yourself up, right. For success. And so I'm constantly doing that and that's all I did in my business, when I went through the times where you know this, I made less than $400 in my fifth month in network marketing and I didn't know if I was supposed to laugh at that check or just cry when I saw the check because I had quit my job. So I was working 80 hours a week in network marketing and I made that little and I'm just thinking, what have I gotten myself into? Then I started focusing more and more on what are the income producing activities. How do I stay in those? How do I focus on just doing my best? If I need to go back and get a job, I can, but don’t be grudged network marketing because network marketing for most people when you start, it’s actually dessert. Dinner is your job. And eventually maybe you’re making enough that you can make that choice depending on what your goals are and how things happen. So I wasn’t going to be grudged dessert because I quit way too soon in my job and I just started focusing on gratitude and income producing activities and things got better and better and better. Trust me though, I still had those huge doubts, downtimes, right? Where we all go through those plateaus. But, it was a learning lesson. It was definitely was a process. And last thing I’ll say, Beth, I know you would say the same thing is I’ll take tough over good any day. Tough can handle a bad day, bad week, bad month, bad quarter, good without toughness, has bad day, bad week, bad month, bad quarter, and their egos just can’t handle it. So they create all the excuses on why this isn’t going to work and they panic in the moment. So it’s important that you have long term vision balanced with short term urgency. Did you hear that? Long term vision, short time vision, short term urgency. Beth:So I want to piggyback on that because I find that, and I know that you see this too, that we have so much that we hear about mindset and affirmations and set those big audacious goals and people aren’t producing because they’re not involved with income producing activities. So for someone that’s in marketing, we have people listening, mostly network marketers because they’re going to see our names, but many that are building online businesses are like, I have humans that aren’t even in marketing, but it’s consistency of those income producing activities. If you are going to say to someone, if you were starting in a network marketing business today, what would be your income producing activities, your non negotiables. I’m doing these every single day. Rob:Working in this business is talking to brand new people. If you aren’t talking to brand new people, you weren’t working in this business. Too many people make the plan for the plan or the plan and they come back to Beth. They’re like Beth. I watched six Facebook lives today. I watched two zoom trainings. I did two hours of personal development and bests, like, that’s incredible. How many people do you talk to? Well, my friend Julie, I dropped the hint that these products are so good. So it was an indirect approach and there’s this other friend named Joe who I’m thinking about reaching out to. So yeah, I’m, you know, I’m all over this. I’m crushing it in too many times. We’re working in our minds because we’re used to trading time for money and in a job you work X amount, you get paid X amount. And so people come in and they want to find a way to fill up their time where they’re busy and they’re working because that’s their association from most of their lives. And this business compensates you based on what you do. And for those of you that have online businesses that are listening, that are entrepreneurs, it’s the same exact same thing for network marketing or non-network marketing, right? You figure out what those income producing activities are. So working in this business is talking to people. That’s number one. Number two would be doing some sort of third party validation. Whether that’s messenger chat, you know that you create, whether it’s a three way call a zoom, even if it’s an offline meeting, they just need to hear another voice. I’ve found that people that don’t have success almost always it’s, they aren’t talking to enough new people in. They aren’t doing enough third party validations. It’s one or the other or both. That’s it. Now the rest of the stuff can go along with it. It can be, you know, you gotta add to your lead list. You talking with team members. But again, too many of us get caught up where we’re reaching out to our team members because, and I’ll make fun of myself because this was me when I started because I was the super supportive applied. And so it’s, Hey Becky, how can I help you? I’m here for you. Anything you need girl. Now if I said that as a guy, anything you need girls, she’d slap me. But anything you need, I’m here for you. I got you. I got your back, right. I’m here for you. Oh, let me send you another YouTube video to watch. Here’s another Facebook live. Ooh, did you study the comp plan? Ok, most of you have systems inside of your companies that work in this business talking to people, they’re putting in front of new people, still love on them. I’m not telling you to abandon them at all, but the best way to lead them is to lead by example. You can tell them every single day how much momentum you’re in and how excited you are, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, what you do speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you say. Speed of the leader, speed of the pack, and it’s absolutely true. So you’ve got to get back to that and then I would track it. How many new people did you actually talk to? How many third party validations did you actually do? I would have an accountability partner buddy that you’re reaching out to and you’re just texting every night and what you did or didn’t do in a positive way. You can say, today I got my butt kicked, or today didn't do anything, but tomorrow I plan on reaching out to three brand new people, X, Y, Z as you go and fill that out. But it's really just getting people focused. And I think about this, Beth, all the podcasts, right? Your podcast, my podcast, Facebook live trainings, free content, team trainings, everything, conventions...all of that is there for what? To build, belief, to give you enough vision and confidence in the companies, the products and profession/industries/whatever else new you all create for Beth and I to call it, right? And all of that is just to get you to reach out to new people. Think about it, look how simple and crazy that is. That's what it's for. Right? So that's what my response would be. And most people, they don't even track their numbers, which is crazy. You’re running a real business, right? Where right. All business, they don’t track it crazy. Beth:Well and I just spoke to a leader that I respect greatly and even me at this level. I said to her, okay, she just hit this incredible bonus and I said, well, tell me what are you doing? I was, of course it’s like for me, what diet? How did you lose that weight? How did you build that? And she just said, do you want to know what I did? I reached out to 201 people a day to see if they were open to watching a video about what it is that I did and she said, I went back to the basics and I know that some people are saying, well that feels spammy, but if you’re putting out valuable content that is pulling people toward you, I was not warmed up. I was not given like, Hey girl, what’s going on? I see your son’s killing it on the ice and hockey. I was sent a text from my friend flare that said, I want you to take a look at this opportunity and at this product the product is working for me. I have studied, I want you on board. When can we talk? That was how I was recruited in. I had third party validation from four people that day and I was challenged to get my first customer in using the tools. I had never put the product in my body. I was using the tools, being honest, saying, Hey, I’m getting started with this. I’m on a health journey and let me introduce you to my friend Elise. Let me introduce you to my friend Sheila, and it is so basic because even, and I’m a little old school meets new school, I love content. I love the pull method, but at the end of the day, if you want someone to sit with you at lunch, you’ve got to ask my husband. Finally, this is a great story. I love this because we won’t go into are two truths and a lie. You guys, if you have never gone to a mastermind with Rob Sperry, literally I laughed until my stomach hurt and I walked away with so much value. We’re going to give you how to get those pieces, but I went to Utah, I missed Mexico. We’re not even going how I had such FOMO and the friendships still. I still get texts from Cynthia almost every week. The check-ins, the accountability, the laughter, and then the value that we had. So I’m putting that, that’s just another tangent to go on. But if you were to, this is my husband, he wanted to go out with me and he kept being kind of elusive. He’d be like, Hey, let’s grab some dinner. And we were all riding horses in the same barn. We had this competitive show circuit. It’s like tennis. It’s like anything. And I would invite like five people to come cause you know me Rob, I don’t do anything alone. And I’d invite five people to come. And finally after he paid for like six barn dinners, I’m like, Hey, John’s paying for everybody for dinner. Let’s go. I was in my twenties I mean I didn’t really process that much. And finally he called me, he said, listen, I want to go out with you alone. Will you go to lunch with me tomorrow at the moose preserve? And I was like, Oh yes, that’s a yes. He finally didn’t beat around the Bush. And that’s the piece of it. Let’s talk about this because this is on everybody’s mind. We have a lot of people out there. We care about attraction marketing. We don’t tell people what we do. We pull them toward us with comments and I do all of that. But on the backside I am straight forward. Here’s what I do, what problem am I solving for them? And I get right to the point. And that’s sometimes not a popular way to do it. It’s worked for me and I won’t change that because success leaves clues. What are your feelings when you have someone that’s, Oh no, I would never like I feel that maybe prospecting is a dirty word for some people. Rob: So it’s interesting. This has been a really big insight for me. I think the way you just phrased it was perfect in the sense that anyone that tells you that you have to message someone right away. And that’s the only way to do it is wrong. Anyone that tells you that you have to wait is wrong. So they’re both wrong and they’re both right. But where people are wrong is when they think that it’s a one size fits all. You’ll talk to a lot of leaders that say, if I would have been approached directly right away, first message, I would have never said yes. You talked to other leaders, right? Where if I would not have been approached directly, I would have said no. So now people are trying to figure out what, and the biggest I think mistake is, is people misinterpret duplication and they confuse principles and techniques. So now they start teaching techniques like their set principles of everyone has to do with this way and they take the duplication to the extreme, where now they’re trying to turn everybody into robots and they stifle their creativity and their authenticity. And so what I tell people is to be the bold version of themselves. Now I know that the bold, authentic version of yourself, I know that can be an overused cliche statement, but let me tell you what I mean by that. Do what’s gonna make you feel the most comfortable but still both. And what do I mean by that? If you’re someone Beth, that’s where you’ve had success, where maybe if she knows you, it’s always going to be the first message. Maybe if she doesn’t know you, it’s going to be the first conversation and not first message. Right. I’m giving you examples. If that to her is that bold version of her. That’s what she should do. If you’re someone that says, Oh, I would never do that. Great, and then maybe it’s your second or third conversation. All I’ll say is this. If you don’t know someone and you’re just sending them a link, you’re spamming them. And if you’re feeling like you need to have five or six conversations, I personally believe you’re, you’re overdoing it. So it’s always somewhere in the middle is the principal. And of course it sounds really nice and cute to say, well, let’s approach them how they want to be approached. How do you know you don’t? So it doesn’t work. It sounds good, but it doesn’t work. So approach people on how you would want to be approached. Beth:Wait, that’s golden. Say it again. Rob: Approach people on how you would want to be approached. That’s how you’re going to feel that that’s how you’re going to be able to be more bold. Because if you’re someone that doesn’t want approach someone until the second or third conversation and your leaders are telling you have to approach in the first message, you’re, you’re not going to feel like authentic version of you. And if it’s the opposite of you’re someone that says, Hey, I want to get straight to the point, am I applying, is telling me and my leaders are telling me that I have to wait until a third conversation. You’re getting, you’re going to be like, this just doesn’t feel right. So that’s, that’s what I suggest. Beth:Well, and, and we can go into all of the different styles of people that you’re talking to. We did a lot of that training at your mastermind of really understanding, if I was an animal, I wouldn’t be a shark. You know, what is Beth like to do? She likes to have fun. She wants to be at the mastermind, but I also have a little bit of that shark in me, but I don’t care about the details. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it and there’s just, we were talking about tennis before we got on. I played today with a woman that has a total untraditional style. She switches hands, she LOBs the ball, she hits these angles where Rob would never play tennis that way because he’s going to drill this top spin forehand to the deep in the corner. So you pop the ball up and you can win the next point coming in. I’m just guessing that’s your style, but it’s the same with network marketing, but at the end of the day, are you winning? What are your results? Do you need to train to get better? Yes. I always say learn and earn on the same day, listen to a training over in Tgon nation and then go put it to work and it’s not always going to feel like perfect the first time, but also be intuitive. Ask more questions. Right? I get messages all the time, like 15 sentences a link and I wish they would have started with, Hey, I noticed that you’re in network marketing. Can I share something with you? Are you open to a new product or just like a conversation before a copy and paste. And I always turn around and the other thing is, is I don’t want people to get pissed off at network marketers. So many people are like, Oh, not those people. I just look at it as not being educated. So I always turn back around and say, I lead a team of 11,000 I’ve become really good at this. Can I give you some advice? Because I love this industry and I want you to have success. And thinking about that now, that human that just sent me that message, if she’s looking for some coaching, if Rob was giving her that advice, I’m sure you get pitched all the time and you have kindness and compassion and you’re there to serve and help. They’re going to turn to you when they need something. It’s, it’s just, it’s the law of reciprocation. It’s being a good human. And, and I also think that if your mindset is, Oh, should I send the message? Oh, should I not? If you are confident and you have belief in what you’re doing and what you’re sending of what you’re sharing, it’s genuine. Like when you asked me to come to the mastermind, you had such confidence and what you could do, the guests you were bringing, the community that I would meet, you weren’t like, Oh, should I ask her? Should I worry if that’s too much money for her to spend? You told me what was going to happen at the mastermind. You were excited. You couldn’t wait to share the guests and to share the list of other speakers. And that’s what I think happens is we worry so much. It’s like if you have belief, just be you, right? Rob:I think a lot of it though for people with exactly what you’re saying is the fact that the fact that they make commissions on other PayPal, which sounds so crazy and weird, they struggle because they feel like even though they know they’re givers, they are worried about the perception of coming off as takers. Oh, well you just want me because of this. So I think that’s a big thing for people is trying to figure out how they can convey that they’re givers and truly feel like that. Because yeah, I mean, how many time we’re selling everything. There’s a great movie coming out and you’re selling go see it. Or even if you haven’t seen it or you’re selling after you saw it or a great restaurant and you’re helping out and you’re actually selling on people to go buy things all the time on things that you absolutely love. If you got the, the new iPhone and you love it, you’re selling people by telling them how incredible the photos are and it’s so worth it, but you make nothing off of it. So you’re a true giver. You’re okay making these big huge corporations money. But then when it comes to helping you achieve your dreams as well as your teams achieve your dreams, we, we just felt like, ah, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. Which is just crazy to me and I understand it cause I Island through it as well. Right? So it just takes time to overcome those limiting beliefs and truly understand and realize what you have and also get at communicating. And guess what? Some will understand someone, no matter how good you get at communicating, and that’s part of your role is if you want to stop playing small and you want to start to achieving even more of your dreams, you got to get over what other people think. That is one of the hardest things for everybody is just to get over what others think. The fear of judgment is the mother of all fears. Think about it. If you’re an entrepreneur, network marketer, list all your fears, fear, success, feeling, fear, failure, fear of inadequacy, fear of public speaking, fear of rejection. List them all. Now remove the fear of judgment and none of those exists. Think about that. That’s the mother of all fears. So everyone’s just being more descriptive on their specific fear of judgment, but that’s really what they’re talking about. So you’ve got to understand that and hit that head on and say, you know what? There’s Darren Hardy says, the greatest determining factor of who shows up at your burial is the weather. Why do we have so much fear of judgment? They’re going to judge you no matter what. They’re going to judge you because you’re too skinny. They’re going to judge you cause you’re too fat. They’re going to judge you because you never work out. They’re going to judge you because you work out too much. They’re going to judge you because you’re super ultra successful. They’re going to judge you because you’re not. They’re going to judge you because you do too many Facebook lives. People are going to judge you no matter what. So don’t let them dictate your future and stop playing small because God didn’t put you on this earth to play small. Didn’t say, Oh well I’m going to send Beth down to this earth and she’s just going to be a below average human being. Sounds pretty funny, right? Thinking that way, but that’s how we act. Many of us. Beth:So, have good news because you can head over to Rob’s podcast and we’re going to continue this conversation and we’re going to talk about how you can connect with Rob. I want to end with this and then the conversation continues cause there’s a back to back podcast recording because we knew you wanted more of us. I mean come on. This is like the, I don't know, what’s your favorite talk show? You don’t watch TV back in the day. Did your parents watch like a talk show or a Johnny Carson? Rob:Everything on all the news. They can tell you everything that’s going on in the world. That’s where I get my updates. I just ask him on Sundays every other week. I know what’s going on in the world in 20 minutes. Beth:My mom does the same thing. Okay. If you had to share one book right now that’s on your mind besides your own cause, we’re going to and I want you to tell us how we can grab your book and you have all different ways to connect. I want a shout out to that. If you want to meet Rob and me, we’re both sharing a stage at the top summit in Naples, Florida in February. We’ll put a link below for you to grab tickets for that event. But what is the one book right now? Someone’s like, okay, I need to overcome this judgment, this fear, I need to make this happen. What book would you think should be in their ear buds? In their hands? The Bible, but the, the next piece of it? Rob:Yeah, if we’re talking fears, there’s different ones. I think probably the best person that’s talking about it in her way, which I love, is Brene Brown and she talks a lot about vulnerability. There’s dare to lead. There’s braving the wilderness. I mean, she’s got five or six really good books and she’ll talk about the power in vulnerability and no one’s ever become great without the vulnerability and the necessary tasks that come along with it. So I love that. I can’t remember which one, but one of the books they recorded is actually her speaking life for the audience. I loved that because you got to hear it a little bit more of a sense of humor and different things. And so that would be a really, really good book. You got it right there right now. Beth:And I didn’t tag you as like a Brene Brown fan, because I consume, I love, I love, love, love her. Now Rob Sperry, how can people tell us there’s a million ways you offer a ton for free. How do people connect with you? How do they get some trading from you and get into your world? Besides me, who was like scroll, scroll, scroll stock. Like and you just showed up in my Facebook feed one day and that was because your consistency of showing up and, and then I asked you, I now know what it was. I asked you a tennis question about something to do with tennis. I wanted to find some common ground. I should’ve just said, Hey Rob, I think you’re super cool. And I just wanted to indirect approach with to me, yes, I was talking to a celebrity. Oh that’s how we get connected with you. And we’ll add all of that down in the show notes. Rob:Oh, I’ll go, well first off you guys gotta continue on with the podcast. So go follow me on network marketing for breakthroughs with Rob Sperry, whichever podcast you prefer the most, you can search it as you know it’s really, really easy to find. It’s it’s everywhere and that’s the first thing. So you can consume a ton of free content, lots and lots of in depth trainings as well as interviews first place. The next place is if you follow me either on social media, I’m consistent there. Or if you go to RobSperry.com and is he going to RobSperry.com there’s things like a free ebook help you on never running out of leads and recruiting. So that’ll pop up there that you’d be able to do to see. I’ve got free info graphics to help you out with social media and building your business that I give out there. I’ve got courses in there. And then the last one would just be, I won’t talk about the mastermind cause the mastermind we’ve talked about and you’ll see it on RobSperry.com I have both the six and seven figure earner mastermind, which we ended up with 26 at the one in Maui, just this last week top earners, which was incredible. And then I have a six figure breakthrough. So if you haven’t made six figures yet and you want the blueprint for that, we don’t do fluff from these masterminds. These, it’s not me talking at you, it’s answering your question, strategizing with all you in sharing my strategies on how you can go to tgonnation.com and that’s my ongoing monthly subscription, only $27 a month. And that’s where you’ll get motivational Monday. There’s 60 plus trainings from six and seven figure earners you get access to, you get social media tips, lots and lots of good stuff. So those are all the places that you can go and hopefully learn. Find one thing right? You can take and implement and learn in your business. I’m excited just to continue this podcast with you Beth. Honored and privileged to be on with you. Because sometimes you’re on with people you don’t really know at all, right? It’s a lot easier for us sometimes like a little awkward, especially for an introvert like me who’s, who’s found a way to be extroverted in certain situations. But Oh, last thing I gotta give props to Beth. Remember how we talked about in the last mastermind on creating a sweatshirt with sunglasses? Beth:Oh yes. Because Rob is an introvert and he travels with a hood up, sunglasses on probably your headphones. Rob:I gave those out there and I started out the training there as this is the most important training of the entire mastermind. So people are really like, Oh my goodness, this is going to be serious. So this is for all of you. The most important part of the podcast is what I gave out to all these top earners. You said the top eight introvert hacks to avoid talking to the person next to you on the plane. These are the top eight max. We’ll go through fast. Number one, headphones on. Do not make the mistake of putting your headphones on late. If you wait to put your headphones on after the introvert. Next you sits down. You are a great risk of having a conversation. Where are you are from and you may be forced to fake laugh. This has been known to cause introvert nightmares for about three weeks. That’s tip number one. I mean this is, this is some new stuff. Number two, Huddy time. Put that hoodie on ASAP. Do you meal feel like a complete weirdo, which is exactly the point. Number three sunglasses. This may be a little extreme, but we all know that sometimes we have to go above and beyond to solidify our position. What are you willing to do to have introvert success? This is my insurance policy. Strategy number four, do not make eye contact with the person next to you. If an extrovert makes eye contact with you, it is all over. The battle is lost and you will need to learn from this awful failure. Number five, wear a surgical mask. Yes, this may be the craziest to them all, but really is a win when you avoid germs and people. Number six, window seats are proven to create 32.3465 63% less conversations. Number seven, wear an eye mask. And number eight, this is the kicker, this is the last one. Fake it. You got to fake it. A percent of the time. It works every time. And then I finished with this. Be aware of extroverts telling you how much talking to new people or talking to people on airplanes. It’s helped their business. It’s a trap to convert you to the other side. So I mean this is, I mean this is some in debt, you know, it took me some time to create this. So that’s what I will finish with for everybody. Just to make sure that you know that you introverts, I got your back, you extroverts. Now you know all our secret sauce tips on how to convert us. Beth:Yeah. And I’m the one on the airplane that’s making eye contact with you. No. Where do you live, Rob? Rob:I know. That’s why I had to create all these tips that I can. Beth:Yeah, now I know. Now I know. All right, so we’re going to end this podcast. We’re heading on over to where Rob, say it again. Maybe your podcast marketing breakthroughs with Rob Sperry. Yes, so meet us over there. Yeah, and as always, both of us would love a five star review. Let us know, leave it for us over on iTunes that shows us that you’re loving the content. It keeps us going and keeps us up in the ratings so that you can find us like I did at Rob with a Facebook scroll, which completely transformed my business. Not only the numbers, but also the energy and gratitude that I had going forward. So we’ll catch you guys over on Rob’s podcast. Thanks, Rob. We’ll see y’all soon. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and You’re Not the Boss of Me. I’m hoping that you’ve found one thing that you will do today that will allow you to move forward to that big, audacious goal. And I have a favor to ask of you, and that is leading me a five star review over in iTunes every single week. I read your reviews. I love hearing what you have to say, and it allows me to bring you more to get more people to interview that are doing the thing, breaking the glass ceilings, creating what they crave, and helping you with your game plan. So leave me a five star review, and when you do, I enter you to win the, you’re not the boss of me swag, so make sure you leave it and we’ll reach out to you if you’re the winner. Thanks so much for hanging in with me today and we’ll chat with you soon.  

So I'm waking up to the sound of singing birds. Birdsong. It's nice really. I hear them outside the open window, it's not quite dawn. There's barely any purple in the sky at this time of morning. The birds are awake and they are singing. Always singing. It's reassuring to hear them sing. Let's you know that all is right in the world. At least for awhile. At least for now. But what is it exactly that they are singing about? Are they singing a song of joy and happiness? Are they singing for their upcoming meal? Are they telling me, "Hey Rob! Wake up buddy! Rise and shine! It's going to be a beautiful day!" Maybe. I'd like to think that that is what they are singing to me. As if they were actually singing to me. But they aren't. No, as a matter of fact, I know what they are singing about.... Support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/RobSays__ https://streamlabs.com/robsays/

Thinking about joining a membership community for copywriters? This episode may help you make the decision to jump. For the 140th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk about The Copywriter Underground—what it includes and what you can expect when you join. And so it just isn’t us talking about a thing we made, we asked six members to join us and share their experience. The result is an episode that is a bit longer than what we usually share, but it was interesting to hear some of the things Underground members shared about their experience. Here’s what we covered: •  what has surprised us the most since launching The Underground •  what The Copywriter Underground includes (there’s a lot) •  how The Underground is going to change this July 1st—important if you’ve been thinking of trying it out •  how The Underground has helped members like Amy Jones, Derek Hambrick, Mladden Stojanović, Renae Rockwell, Emily Zoscak, and Natalie Smithson Like we said, this one is different. It's not a full-on sales pitch, but it is all about this community that we love. To hear more about it, click the play button below, or download the episode to your podcast player. Or to read the transcript, simply scroll down.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: David Garfinkel Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership, designed for you, to help you attract more clients and hit 10k a month, consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. Kira:   Hey Rob. Rob:   Hey Kira, how's it going? Kira:   It's great. It's great. Rob:   We do not have an intro prepared for this episode, because we don't have a guest today. Well, we actually have six guests today, but not, this is a different kind of episode. We've never really done this before, and I think we were talking the other day about The Underground and we thought, you know, a lot of people ask us about what's going on in The Underground or what it is and they have questions. And so we thought, let's just go really deep on what's in The Underground, what we do there, and ask some of our members of The Underground what their experience is like, just so that people have a really good idea of what it is and how it can help somebody in their copywriting journey. Kira:   Yeah. So this is fun, because you'll actually hear the voices of the members. And we lovingly call them our moles. I don't know who started that, we think it was Justin Blackman, who coined the term. But our members seem to be very happy being called moles. So we will hear their voices as they talk through their experience in The Underground, which we haven't really shared before. And then Rob and I will just talk through what we've learned from running The Underground since September, right? Is that when we launched it? Rob:   Yeah, we launched it in September and it's been going now for seven or eight months. It's grown to almost 200 people. And we're actually going to close the doors to new members here in the near future, we've got a few weeks before that happens. But we'll talk a little bit about that as well, and the change behind that. So Kira, you know, let's, what's your experience been in The Underground so far? Like what has surprised you, what were you expecting and how has it turned out maybe differently or even better than what you expected? Kira:   Yeah. So I think so far what has surprised me the most is that the community aspect is more important than anything else. Then the trainings we create, live trainings in there, there's a ton of great templates and resources and scripts. Especially like, we add stuff from our own businesses that we use, and that's all been great, and the members use that.

Hey Folks! We're back with another Q&A episode! If you have a question for a future episode, especially questions for Tyler and Luis of KetoGains on the next Q&A, submit them here https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/   Show Notes: (2:49) 23 and Me Kristin says: Robb and Nicki! Loved the first q&a back! I wanted to ask an expansion on the FTO gene Polymorphism question. I my self also ran my 23andme data through FoundMYFitness as a Rhonda Patrick follower and I have the similar FTO well several FTO genes came up but also the PPAR alpha gene came up that I know is a big part of ketosis. My question is can I attempt and Keto diet and Ketosis with using mainly PUFA and MUFA and still achieve ketosis with this polymorphism or am I better off to not focus on achieving ketosis?Thank you for all that you put in the world I just received you Wired to Eat book and started reading it! Love it so far!Kristin NOTES: FTO: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/142/5/824/4630756 Fat Mass and Obesity–Associated Gene Evolutionary Advantage-STRONG tendency toward obesity. Powerful adaptation in ancestral environment. Evolutionary advantage not specific to Thrifty gene hypothesis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4031802/pdf/yjbm_87_2_99.pdf Susceptibility to obesity (and inflammation) https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:406173/FULLTEXT01.pdf Drivers towards energy efficiency...back side of this is constrained Energy Hypothesis: https://journals.lww.com/acsm-essr/Fulltext/2015/07000/Constrained_Total_Energy_Expenditure_and_the.3.aspx Game theory and energy balance: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1550147717720792 PPAR Alpha: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1528-1167.2008.01840.x Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha is a drug/fatty acid-activated transcription factor involved in the starvation response, Other SNP’s like CPT-1   (16:45) Ketone IVs / Ketone Ringer Stijn says: Dear Robb, Dear Robb Wolf team,For years I've wondered about using ketone bodies in IVs at intensive care, in the same way that glucose solutions are used. I imagine there being less inflammation versus the glucose, and thus better recovery. Though the effect might be minimal in a non-keto-adapted person. Then I am skipping over the entire blue light issue from all the fluorescents at a hospital. I recently watched your talk at Paleo FX, "Ketogenic Diets for Traumatic Brain Injury Keeping the Baby with the Bathwater". In brief you mention ketone ringers in an acute setting, traumatic brain injury and research in Japan. Why not use ketone bodies at intensive care, or even other settings? Have you seen research on this? Here's how I thought about it: my dad was at the ICU after cardiac arrest, and I saw the glucose syringes. Then I thought about inflammation and ketones. And I remembered reading that heart muscle likes ketones. Maybe we can save more people with ketone IVs...Please share your thoughts. I'm also interested in the Japanese research on ketone ringers, if you can link that.Thank you very much.Be well, Stijn De Puydt   NOTES: Ketone ringer solution- https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/152165401753311780 MCT Keto diet: https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/152165401753311780 High glucose load negated benefits!!   (20:54) Monkfruit G says: Hi. Can you briefly give me the straight dope on Monkfruit? I heard it doesn't spike your blood glucose levels making it a good alternative to sugar. I'm also guessing it still triggers pleasure centers in your brain which can lead to craving sweets. My girl wanted to know how does Monkfruit Maple Syrup differ from 100% Pure Maple Syrup? Thank you for your time, g Notes: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2016225 Generally not a huge effect: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2016225   (24:07) Alternatives to the classic Norcal Marg Colin says: Hey Rob, I like that you are back to doing some Q&A's and Nicki did a good job being your cohost. Do miss the ever large and in charge Greg Everett's humor though, "how does gravel burn," classic. Anyways, what are your thoughts on a Bone Broth Bullshot in lieu of your Norcal Marg? Potential pro/cons? On a second note, what if you were to add some glycine to that Norcal M? Give just a little sweetness and I would think there are some potentially extra benefits to that addition.. After listening to Chris Masterjohn's panel discussion on glycine, that crossed my mind.  Curious on your take. Thanks for everything you are doing (Paleo, health, keto, sustainability, controversial truths, etc.). While you are winding the clock back a little, you should get the Kraken on and let him destroy some questions.   (27:44) Exercise induced HypoglycemiaGreg says: Robb, hoping to get your insight into a problem I am experiencing. Non-diagnosed Diabetic. 6'1", 200 pounds, athletic build. Blood sugar drops into 60-69 mg/dL during moderate-intense exercise with moderate hypoglycemia symptoms. Measuring glucose (morning fasting 105-120 mg/dL, 2 hr post-meal 120-130 mg/dL). Chewing gum during exercise helps modulate glucose levels but still seems like there should be a better solution. Grain consumption 1-3/week. Limited sugar intake. Water and coffee w/heavy cream primary liquid consumption. Adrenal labs (normal DHEA, high normal cortisol). Worried Keto diet may further exacerbate during exercise. Any insight is greatly appreciated.   (31:46) Adaptogens and Gut Microbiome adaption Eric says: Digging the return of your podcast and the new format!  I have a couple of question submissions…. We interviewed folks live for the Meatcast at Expo West, and the most consistent “trend” everyone noted from the show was “adaptogens” – what are your thoughts on adaptogens?  Flash in the pan fad or the unicorn cure to cancer?  Surely it can’t be anything in between Does our gut microbiome have the ability to adapt/evolve as we age, or is it “locked in” at a certain age?  We hear often that our exposure to good bacteria as a child impacts our autoimmunity later in life.  Whats so critical about those childhood years?  Is it simply our ability to adapt declining as we age?   (38:53) Good workout regimen for novice? Joe says: Hi Robb & Nicki,Can you recommend a good resource for a workout regimen? Right now I do weight training circuits Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Cardio Tuesday and Thursday, usually one cardio session is an interval (3x 30 second all-out exertion on an elliptical and the rest of the 20 minutes at moderate pace). I do a circuit for 6 weeks, then just do cardio for a week then start a different circuit for the next 6 weeks. Etc.I'm currently doing alternate daily fasting on my circuit days. Good sleep, good energy. I'm just wondering about new/more efficient ways to mix up my workouts as I'm still following what I did circa the early 2000s.Thanks, Joe   Twitter: @RobbWolf Instagram: @dasRobbWolf Facebook: @RobbWolfOnline

HEY NERDS!!! WHERES THE FIST! this week we Dive head first into the season 4 premiere of GOTHAM and talk about its WONDERFUL moments!  then we get into the MEAT of the Episode  NETFLIX MARVEL'S  The Defenders!   ALL EIGHT EPISODES  so if you havent Watched it SPOILERS!!! Shout outs to The Remote Control Podcast -  HEY ROB!!!!

Copy Chief Kevin Rogers is in the club for a special inbetween-isode. This is a rare, second episode this week and it’s a good one. Kevin shares his journey from high school drop out with ambitions of stocking shelves at the grocery store to highly paid copywriter, then chief of his own community for copywriters and other business owners. Here’s a sample of what we covered: •  How Kevin landed his first job (and had to create writing samples first) •  His “go with your gut” principle for writing good copy •  How relationships propelled his career forward and the “mentee mindset” •  His four-part joke formula for creating stellar sales hooks •  The three rules Kevin follows when he gives a speech (and the results) •  What it takes to be an expert in something (and why most writers should have a “bat signal” talent) •  John Carlton’s Pro Code, and •  What really makes Kevin angry Plus we got the details on Kevin’s upcoming event in St. Petersburg called Copy Chief Live. It sounds like an amazing event that anyone who writes copy that gets conversions might want to check out. One more thing: it looks like Kevin may have set a new record for links on his show notes page. And it’s easily the funniest list we’ve ever published (at least until we get to Carrot Top. That guy’s not funny). Check them all out. And don’t forget to click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Most of the people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory George Carlin Rodney Dangerfield Jerry Seinfeld Sam Kinison Bill Hicks Jim Breuer Billy Gardell Star Search Ed McMahon Carrot Top John Carlton Gary Halbert Gary Bencivenga CA Magazine Nothing in Common Vin Montelo Copy Chief Clayton Makepeace Daniel Levis Carline Anglade Cole Rachel Rofé Ryan Lee Dean Jackson Nicole Piper Todd Brown Ryan Levesque James Schramko Ben Johnson Ross O’Lochlainn Jody Raynsford Wardee Harmon Parris Lampropolous Joe Schriefer Marcella Allison Henry Bingaman Copy Chief Live PI4MM.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for this special in-between-i-sode as we chat with copywriter and copy chief, Kevin Rogers, about his journey from standup comedian to highly sought after copywriter. The joke formula that became his secret for writing great hooks, mentoring other copywriters, and a special event he is putting together this Fall. Kira: Hey Kevin. Hey Rob. How’s it going? Rob: Hey guys. Kevin: Hey. Rob: Kevin, it’s great to have you here. Kevin: Man, it’s great to be here with you guys. Appreciate you having me. This will be a lot of fun. Rob: Yeah, we’ve actually had you on our list for a while, Kevin. Wanted to talk to you. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but let’s jump in maybe and start with your story, where you came from and how you got into copywriting? Kevin: It felt like a miracle when I found copywriting. It was like lightning striking twice in the best way in your life because I spent 10 years as a standup comedian and that was such a miracle thing to experience. A high school dropout, just had no direction. I was restless and I really hated, at one point, showing up to school every day. It just felt stupid. I don’t know what ... This isn’t for me. I wasn’t going to pursue college, and I just thought it was so much cooler to work at my job stocking shelves at grocery...

All right, welcome to our "Becoming Your Best" podcast listeners. My name is Rob Shallenberger and welcome wherever you are. I'm looking out the window right now in Utah at some beautiful snow-capped mountains on a crisp beautiful spring day with a nice blue sky. It's just amazing. Well hey, this is gonna be a short podcast yet, I hope very impactful in your life. I've been thinking about some people recently who have reached out to becoming your best and have been calling us and the common theme amongst their lives and their stories are that they feel like they've been on fire. In other words, their lives have just totally transformed in the last few months and it's been interesting. I'm gonna have one of those people, a friend on the West Coast who has just had some amazing experiences. I'm gonna share her story in a couple of months and maybe potentially have her on the podcast. The common theme amongst these people as they start to apply the 12 principles and catch on fire, is that they feel this shift from being transactional in nature to being and living and thinking transformationally, and there's a huge shift in that. And one of those ladies who's become a good friend, she said that she wrote down in a seminar that at some point along the seminar I told her and the group, "If you apply the 12 principles and start to focus on them and master them, your entire life will start to change. You're going to start to think transformationally, and a fire will start to grow within you and it's going to impact every area of your life professionally, personally, your home life, across the board." And indeed that's exactly what happens when someone starts to pattern their lives around the 12 principles of highly successful leaders. Great leaders get great results because they do the same things that other great leaders have done, and those are the 12 principles. Let me share with you a story that some of you might have heard on a video that I did recently of what that transformation looks like and the impact that it can have. So we flew into San Diego a few months ago for a ball game, a football game. We landed, we walked out to the rental car shuttle, we got on the bus and people were just packing into the bus, so it's full of people. If you can imagine yourself being on the bus, what do most people do on a rental car shuttle bus? Most people immediately go heads down and start looking at their phones. Right? Well, this was different. We all got on the bus and the driver said, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to San Diego. For the next 10 minutes I'm gonna be your personal tour guide." And then he asked us to look off our right shoulders out the right side of the bus and there in 1874 Don Pedro, and he went on telling this fun story and I was fully raptured. He had my complete attention and I started looking around at the people and their responses and sure enough they started putting away their cell phones. They started listening. They started laughing. They started engaging. Now here's someone that could be arguably doing an ordinary job in an extraordinary way. Now why do I say arguably? What would most other drivers do in his situation? You could say that, "You know what, a lot of them may complain about their job." They're driving 10 minutes back and forth the same route every single day and they're making whatever they're making an hour $12 to $15 an hour and you could say that could be a very mundane routine potentially boring job. Yet here is someone who's not complaining, rather he's thinking and living transformationally. And what's the impact? Well, I'll show you the impact. So now he's got my full attention here. I can see that he's transformational, he's different than 99% of other rental car shuttle drivers. And so he has everyone's attention, it turns into a great ride, people are laughing. And when he pulls up to the rental car facility, people file off the bus and whereas before they were in a hurry, I watched a line form to say thank you to him. So people would shake his hand, they'd pat him on the shoulder. They'd just thank him for making their day, and then suddenly people are handing him these $5 and $10 tips. Along with us we did the same thing and I just suddenly was in the background watching. He probably made around $100 on that 10-minute drive. So imagine the impact of that throughout the day. How much more money do you think he's making than all the rest of the drivers out there? Do you think he enjoys his job? My guess is that he loves coming to work every day, that it's not just a boring, mundane, routine job. He's taken something ordinary and he's doing it in an extraordinary way, and that is the perfect example of what it means to be transformational rather than transactional. And think about how that impacts every area of his life. He's making way more than the other drivers, no doubt about it. In addition though he's happier. He has more joy in his life. He comes to work and he feels great about his job. He's gonna be there potentially for years doing that and he sees it as an opportunity to impact people's lives. Well, that's the difference and I wanna use that as the base, the foundation for this podcast is how do you start to think more transformationally about your life in any role, in any capacity? So certainly, whatever your professional job is, how can you be transformational and take whatever is ordinary there and do it in an extraordinary way? That's the shift that starts to happen. Now, it's difficult to do that. It's difficult to be transformational if a person is always in reaction mode, running from fire to fire to fire. And the same thing can happen at home. If you're a stay-at-home parent, how do you be transformational with your children, with your spouse if you're always running from fire to fire to fire? And I'll ask people during a seminar, "How often do you feel more like a firefighter? In other words, you're just running from fire to fire to fire putting out these fires," and almost everyone's hands go up when I ask that question. So let's see if in this podcast we can identify something that can really make a difference in your life in that shift from transactional to transformational. It's not uncommon for people to ask me, "Hey Rob, what's the biggest piece of advice you could give? What...what's something you could share that would really have an impact?" And as anybody knows who's been to a "Becoming Your Best" seminar who are listening to these podcasts, there's not a single silver bullet of leadership or success. It's a combination of things that create excellence. However, there is one thing that always stands out amongst these others that is a huge deal, and that is pre-week planning. In other words, it's prioritizing your time to focus on what matters most. So if I only have two or three minutes with someone and they ask that question, that's what I share almost every time. Now how much more impactful and how much more powerful is it in your life if you tie pre-week planning into having a clear vision for yourself? You have specific goals and milestones that you're achieving this year that you're working on. You're on this journey and pre-week planning becomes extra powerful when it's tied into these other principles. So let's just look at this maybe through a different lens. I know some of you have heard this term, you've practiced it, yet it's probably 80% to 90% mindset and only 10% to 20% skill set. A lot of people who started this incredible habit say, "Yeah, it changed their life." They had this amazing experience using it, yet somewhere along the way they lost the habit. And so what are some things that can help you and why is it important? Sometimes that's the value of a podcast. It's just a quick little refresher. It's a quick little get-me-up and that motivator that sometimes you need to just reengage in a habit that you knew had a big impact. So, I just wanna address it from that angle. Now, we've talked about pre-week planning in the past being one of the single greatest habits you can use to transform your life. Why? Let's look at this from both lenses. In your personal or home life, you may have heard this before, how do kids spell love? T-I-M-E. It's the time. It's the time that you give to them, and there's two aspects to that. It's quality time and it's quantity time. Both are important. I mean, if you're seeing your kids once every three months and it's high quality, I can't imagine the scenario where that's gonna be transformational. So it's about having quantity and quality time with your kids. That's how you show your love, is being present with them. Well that's part of being transformational in the home and not transactional is figuring out how and when you're going to be present. What are you going to do as a parent, as a spouse? You wanna bring excitement back into your marriage? We can't just leave a marriage on cruise control and hope that things are gonna work out. It's just like a business. You've got to put time and energy and effort into it. Love is a verb in that case. You gotta take action in your marriage to make it great. It's not a unilateral...it's not a one-person thing. It takes two people both focusing on that. Now let's look at this through the professional lens, from the business side of things. Being transformational requires a focus from you on what matters most. Transformational actions. Those type of things don't happen on accident in the workplace and this is how you create loyal customers. This is how you create employees who want to serve you, who want to work with you and side by side with you so that you're firing on all cylinders of the team. Now, what's the most common excuse for this? And I'm just gonna give you a simple invitation. Count how many times in a day you hear someone say the word, busy. How many times do you hear people say, "I'm just so busy," or "I'm too busy to do that." Many times what we're doing when we say those words is we're excusing our behavior, we're excusing not focusing on the priorities, the things that matter most because we're so busy. Now, is it okay to be busy if we're focused on the things that matter most? Of course it is. It's a matter of staying focused on those priorities though rather than getting to the transactional things, the day-to-day fires both at home and at work. So, let me put this in a different way. This is interesting. I was talking with my dad maybe a week or two ago, and in Greek and Latin and in that area there's a different terminology for this, chronos and Kairos. They look at time and how they schedule things through those two lenses. Chronos is the time aspect. What are you gonna do at eight o'clock in the morning, at two o'clock in the afternoon? Kairos, is a different way to look at your schedule on your day and that is the leadership aspect of your life. Kairos are your priorities. So what are you gonna do in your priorities today? And that's what great leaders do and those who really have the balance of success stories across all areas of their lives is they both think on the chronos side of it and the kairos side and how to combine the two, leading your own life and then figuring out when you're gonna do that. So here's some brief steps that you can use as a refresher for those who have been to our seminar, for those who have used pre-week planning and have a "Becoming Your Best" planner. Let's just walk through the simple steps that you can use to think both chronos and kairos and schedule your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule. So typically this is done pre-week planning on Saturday or Sunday. For most people if you wait until Monday morning, you're in the thick of the fire at that point. And for most people that wait, it tends not to get done if you wait until Monday morning. So my suggestion, recommendation based on doing this with a lot of people is that Saturday or Sunday tends to be the most effective time. And you probably wanna allocate 20 to 45 minutes to really have a solid pre-week planning. So what do you do in that 20 to 45 minutes? Well number one, sit down and review your personal vision. What's your why? What's your purpose? If you're looking at that every week, man you're so different than everyone else out there in the world. You have that figured out and you're constantly keeping it in front of you. Second, review your yearly or annual goals and ask yourself, "What can you do this week to move towards a goal?" If you have a goal of running a half marathon by September 1st which happens to be exactly one of my goals, what can I do this week? Well, I better start setting some running milestones this week. When, kairos-chronos and why is it important? I know it's attached to the goals, so I've got the kairos part of it. That's my physical health. So that's the priority, and then I need figure out when this week I'm gonna do it. And so you look at your goals, when are you gonna do some of those things, this week will help you move towards your goals. You're setting some weekly milestones if you will. Second is, now we're gonna focus purely on the kairos, the priority side of your life. This is where you want to identify your roles that matter most to you. So maybe it's a mother or a father, maybe it's a manager, maybe it's a sales rep, a friend, a caretaker. Never forget personal. Personal is yourself. That's an important role. Steven Covey would call that sharpening the saw, and so you wanna take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. So you have these different roles. And then last, if you ask yourself, what actions can you do in each of those roles this week that would be transformational? Think kairos. What matters most in that role? So let me just share maybe a couple of examples and you'll have some ideas as I'm sharing these examples of things that apply to your life. So maybe in the role of father, I have four children from 15 years down to six years old. Maybe this week it's as simple as reading with each daughter, play basketball with my son, write a special note to each of my kids. That's the kairos part of it, and then I need to attach the chronos part. So once I have some actions that really matter most in each role, when will I do those? So now you start to think about that. What are some actions that would really be transformational or matter most to you in some of your different roles? That's the kairos side of it. Then move over to, "When will you do them," and attach a time to it. Move it down into your calendar so that you have a specific time when you'll do it. So maybe CEO. Here's some things I could put in my role as CEO. Take an employee to lunch. Maybe send five texts to key clients just wishing them a great week. Do an external environment analysis for our company because otherwise we just tend to get what? Too busy, and I can't lose track as the CEO, of the threats and the opportunities that are happening around us, yet if I don't plan time for it, it's probably not going to get done. If you're a manager or a leader, when was last time you looked at the threats or the opportunities that exist around you in whatever capacity you're in? This is one of the things that goes back to scheduling your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule, is that you're looking at the things that matter most that most other leaders wouldn't think about because they're in reaction mode day to day to day, and this is fire to fire, and you just cannot be transformational if that's how a person is living their life. So here's one last example. If you have the role of friend, maybe it could be this simple. Call John and Chris, set up a lunch with Aaron, send a group email to start the planning for a reunion. Those would be specific actions this week -- kairos, and then I would ask, "Well, when will I do them? -- Chronos, and putting a time to the priorities. Can you get a sense and a feel for how powerful that would be in your life as you're trying to lead your own life and then lead a family and then potentially leading a team or other groups of people? That's why when you both bring kairos in chronos together it can have a huge impact on your life and the end objective is to help you accomplish your vision. To be transformational rather than so many in the world who are stuck in this transactional world of day-to-day excusing their lack of focus on priorities because they're so busy. We cannot do that. You think about this in your life. Your time is precious. One of the things I love to do and it may sound a little strange to some, I love to go through a cemetery. And one of the reasons why is because I'll look at different headstones and it's interesting. You're looking at someone's life there. And every headstone is a little bit different, but there are some commonalities. You'll see a birth date, the date they passed away and then what do you see in the middle? Usually you see a dash, right? And it always intrigues me. What was that person's dash? What did they do? I mean, here's this little line, this little dash, yet that was their life within that dash. And each week you are writing your dash, and at some point each one of us is gonna run out of time. Our legacy is gonna be cemented in our dash and the ripple effects from your life, the things that you've done, the actions that you've lived and done, whatever that may look like, begin to spread, and for good or for bad you can't stop that spread. That's the ripple effect and that's the power of pre-week planning is you're sending the ripple. You're writing your dash on a week-to-week basis. Focus on both kairos and chronos to help you be transformational. And just like I started this podcast, when you do that coupled with the other principles, there's a fire that starts to grow within you. It's a different way of thinking. Your life changes. You come alive and become sometimes hard to watch when you don't see that fire in others. But you're experiencing it, you end up having an incredible transformation happen within you. And really one of the linchpin, the keys, the foundations that hold that all together is pre-week planning and staying focused on your priorities every week. Well hopefully this was a quick little boost, pick-me-up and reminder of the importance to do pre-week planning. So what I would ask you to do and invite you to do is commit to do this for four weeks. So whether you started at one point and it slipped out your habits, whether you've been consistent in it, whether you've never done this before, and I won't say the word try, I almost said try. The invitation is to do this for four weeks. Not try but to do and see what impact it has on you through that month. And consistently, people who say, "Yeah you know what, I've been doing it for two months, it's been awesome and men, then I missed a month and that, or excuse me a week, and that week was stressful, it was chaotic" and that's exactly what happens once people make this a habit. So we're gonna wrap up this podcast and just two final thoughts. For those that do not have a "Becoming Your Best" planner yet, I used to think that the tool was not that important, it was just a process because you can really do this on a blank piece of paper. Whether you use electronic calendar such as Google, Yahoo Outlook, it doesn't matter, I thought, "You know, you don't really need the tool." My thinking on that has changed. What I've found and our experience has been that the people who have the planner, the tool are the ones that are far more likely to be able to adopt this as a habit in their lives and continue to do it and think transformationally in the long term -- short term and long term. So if you don't already have a "Becoming Your Best" planner, I invite you to go to the store at becomingyourbest.com. You can use the discount code, if I can say that word, VIP discount and that should give you 30% off the planner. That's our special gift to you for being a loyal podcast listener and see what impact it has on you. Maybe you can get some planners for your team. Get some for your family, for your children. Help them learn the process. And for those that would like to really get the two day in-depth version... I mean this has just been one principle on this podcast. For those that would really like to come have a two-day transformational experience, the Breakthrough Leadership Conference is an unforgettable event. You can bring your spouse, you can bring partners, employees, you can even bring a teenage son or daughter. So those are usually done in the spring and the fall. If you go to the website, becomingyourbest.com you can see when the next event is and register for that event. We would love to see you there. You're gonna network with some incredible people and really get deep into some of these principles that can light that fire within you. So hey, wishing you a great week. Hopefully this was a good pick-me-up and let's go out there and not only try pre-week planning but think about what you can do to be transformational this week. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode I talk about what I've been up to... again! I also bring you a few UFO related material that is pretty fresh. I test my skills at adding music on this one!!! lol... I hope it all works out. MUSIC - THANK YOU IODALLIANCE.COM! Camelia Download "Camellia" (mp3) from "Lovely"by Joachim JStranamente Music Buy at iTunes Music Store More On This Album hypnosis Download "Hypnosis" (mp3) from "House.it Vol.3"by SAR LaeraStranamente Music More On This Album --- LINKS NOTE! I FORGOT TO MENTION A FAVORITE WEBSITE OF MINE, AND I APOLOGIZE!!! www.paranormalcafe.podomatic.com HEY CHARLIE... HEY ROB! UFO News Sightings http://www.cosmicparadigm.com/ufonews/ Flying Saucer for sale? http://www.ufocasebook.com/prius.html Iowa Minister John Click interviewed by Linda Moulton Howe about a Crab/Scorpion he saw on top of a cow. www.earthfiles.com Jeff Woolwine www.petroglyphsinthesky.com/ www.mysteriousuniverse.org www.the13skulls.podomatic.com www.paranormalcafe.podomatic.com www.eerieradio.com www.theparacast.com www.earthfiles.com www.theilluminationproject.com www.iodalliance.com IODALLIANCE.COM IODALLIANCE.COM IODALLIANCE.COM