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Bloomberg Washington Correspondents Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz deliver insight and analysis on the latest headlines from the White House and Capitol Hill, including conversations with influential lawmakers and key figures in politics and policy. On this edition, Joe and Kailey speak with: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, about the ongoing conflict in Israel. Bloomberg Politics Contributors Rick Davis and Jeanne Sheehan Zaino about what's next for Congress now that a new Speaker of the House has been elected. Palm Beach Country State Attorney Dave Aronberg about the legal challenges former President Donald Trump is facing. Wall Street Journal's Paul Beckett about the continued to efforts to secure the release of Evan Gershkovich from Russian prison.     Full Transcript:     You're listening to the Bloomberg Sound On podcast. Catch us live weekdays at one Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcast. The Democratic Leader in the House calls on the new speaker to take shutdown off the table, and Israel conducts raids in Gaza to prepare for the next phase. Welcome to the fastest show in politics with twin leads this day in Washington. After the new Speaker was installed and Hamas now claims Israeli raids have killed almost fifty hostages. We'll talk about the next steps in Israel and the threat posed by Iran. Coming up with retired Army General Wesley Clark, a former Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, with analysis today from our signature panel. They're both back with us. Bloomberg Politics contributors Rick Davis and Gdi Shanzano will be with us for the hour to distill a lot of information from the past twenty five four hours here in Washington. A bit later this hour, a special conversation with the Secretary of the Treasury Jennet Yellen, is with us today in our offices at Bloomberg in Washington. Our bureau chief Peggy Collins will be conducting an interview across the platforms here, the radio, the satellite, and YouTube coming up in just about a half hour's time. So you want to stay with us for an important conversation ahead as we begin on Capitol Hill now, and welcome General Wesley Clark to the conversation. It's good to see you, General, I know you're on Capitol Hill as you join us today from the Russell Rotunda to talk with Senators about threats posed by Iran and our policy towards Iran. I'd like to start by asking you though about the urgency around a supplemental budget request that now there is a new speaker, there's going to be some action on this. In your thoughts on how quickly and what is needed for Israel now, Well, we need the full request that the administration's made, We need it passed as rapperly as possible. And let's not forget it's not just Israel, it's also Ukraine. The two are linked. Russia and Iran are strategic partners, and you can be sure that Vladimir Putin is really happy to see what's going on in Israel. How much he had to do with it, Maybe we won't know for a while, but we know Iran had a lot to do with it. We have to understand that this Both actions are threats to democracy, it's the international order, the rule of law in the world today, and of course obviously to our business community internationally. So we have to keep both in mind when need to get that those appropriations passed immediately. Well, there does seem to be an appetite for supporting Israel in this case general. But there is an argument overfunding for Ukraine, and I know that the Republican Conference in the House is looking to bring an Israel only bill to the floor. What do you make of this argument? Sixty billion dollars for Ukraine with some members saying not another dollar. But the president, as you just put it, is trying to link the two together as a matter of national security. You see continuity between these two requests. They are linked together. Vladimir Putin is working with Iran, Iran's working with Putin. Yes, they're linked, but also understand this, that's sixty billion dollars for Ukraine. Most of that money doesn't go to Ukraine. That money goes to the United States. That's keeping and building up our industrial base to face the challenges of the Middle East, to face future challenges in NATO, and of course to face the challenge of China. We've let our industrial base, our military industrial base, deteriorate over the last thirty years since the end of the Cold War. We allowed a wholesale consolidation of defense industries. We reduced the rates of supply that we need of everything. Is this sort of half step, We've got to put that money into our own base. The appropriations we've already given to Ukraine. That money went to American firms. We just gave them a bunch of old equipment, old ammunition. We need to keep that system alive and strengthen it for the challenges ahead. That's why putting Ukraine in that appropriations bill is so important. Well, there's so much to talk about here general. We talk about the DIB here on the program, the defense industrial base that you're referring to. This goes for Israel as well, And I think that's your point, right. If we're going to be making missiles to replenish the Iron Dome, for instance, we do not have a manufacturing chain, according to companies like Raytheon to make them fast enough. How do we accelerate that process? Does this supplemental request? Do it supply and demand put the money into it. The companies will respond, but without that funding, No, if they can't hire the people, invest in the capital goods that are necessary create the supply chaange. No, they have to have contracts, and these are multi year contracts procurement contracts by the Defense Department, and that requires a funding. So it's very simple, and it's if you don't do it now, who knows what's going to happen in twenty four, twenty five, twenty twenty six, twenty seven with Taiwan. So all of this is linked. You can't artificially separate it. Well, are you hearing that message received on Capitol Hill today? I trust you're talking with members of both parties. I know you're briefing senators today on our Iran policy. What do they say to you about this matter, the supplemental request and the need for a more streamlined and enhanced manufacturing chain. Well, I think they're all generally in support of this. In the United States Senate, the question is the House, and there's a lot of let's say, misunderstanding in the House about what the funding for Ukraine actually does and why it's needed. And hopefully this can become something that can be corrected by information and not just sort of a partisan tagline. But the big thing up here today is Iran and what we're going to do about Iran. You know, we've tried for forty years to work with this government in Iran. We've pulled on it, pushed on it, we've appeased it, we've patted it on the back, we've sanctioned it, we've threatened it. Nothing changes the direction of this Iranian government. They use terror and murder at home and abroad. They want regional dominance. They've destroyed the state of Lebanon. They've built a huge military complex and they've forward positioned it through his Bilah ready to attack Israel. Look, this crisis in Hamas brings this to a head. Can't appease this government in Iran. It's time to let the Iranian people have a government that represents them. And that means we, the United States, stage and our allies need to delegitimize the Iyatolas, get rid of them in international organizations, cut off their access to funding, sanction individually, get after their families, stop this government from having control over its people. Doesn't take a war, don't want an invasion. But if we keep going the way we're going, Iran is going to provoke a war in the region. And that's the day. Well, I'd like to ask you more about that. Let me first ask you about the Biden administration's repeated message that there is no actual evidence that Iran was directly involved in or helped plan or fund the Hamas terror attack. Do you need to see that evidence or is that kind of missing the point in this conversation. You're pointing to a long history that the administration is also acknowledged, but without that evidence to put the two together, the presidents seems to be a bit tied up on this. Do you think, well, I think it's I think it's what the administration's appetite is for acting in many different directions at once, and what the capacity is Washington typically is a one crisis at a time town. And you know, we've got a crisis right now. We're worried about what Israel will do in Gaza, will they have the support they need? What about his law and what I'm suggesting is you've got to go to the source, and the source is Iran. Now is it the immediate source? Did the Iranians tell the Hamas people on this specific day, I want you to go out this specific gate, come in with these paragliders, kill these people. No, probably not, But we do know have evidence that they trained a bunch of Palestinian fighters as late as September. We know there are meetings that have been held. Do we know what's said in those meetings? Well, not at the unclassified level, and maybe we don't even know at the most secret level. It's a question of how the administration sees its way through the crisis. And what I'm suggesting is that you have to be able to do more than one thing at a time. You've got Ukraine, that's a critical at a critical state right now. They need sustainment and they're facing a really tough Russian attack. In the northeast, You've got Israel and Gaza, and then you've got the region, and so in the region you have to understand the source of these tensions. It is Iran. And there's nothing like a crisis to bring on a path to a resolution. And in this case the resolution is to delegitimate that government in Tehran. There's talk about a second or third front opening. I know that's a great fear of the administration and the Pentagon general, But when you look around, we've already seen incursions repeatedly to the north. We've seen attacks against US military installations in Iraq and Syria. We've seen an American warship intercept cruise missiles from Yemen. Are the second and third fronts already hot? Is this already happening? Well, let's put it this way. They're warming it up. But I don't think the decision has been made by the Ayatolas to really open up the northern front yet. It's it's nuisances right now. Yeah, they're killing people, they're firing, but they haven't really committed. They want to wait and see what Israel is able to do in Gaza, whether it's so deeply enmeasure in Gaza that it can't defend itself from the north, whether the whole world turns against it because of the need to bring heavy firepower in an urban area to dislodge Hamas, if they can bring world opinion totally against it, isolate the United States and Israel. If they think the Israelis can't protect themselves from all three directions at once, then maybe they will unleash his blow. And they haven't made that decision yet, as we can tell publicly. General, while you're with us, I want to ask you about the matter of military readiness in the blockade on military promotions in the Senate. You might have even spoken with Tommy Tubberville today, but there's a new effort that Democrats are making to send a resolution to the Rules Committee that would allow three hundred plus promotions that have been held up to all go to the floor at one time. Would you support that movement? Is it set a bad precedent? Oh? I think it's essential at this point. Look, Senator TULLVERRLL has made his point. Everybody understands where he stands, what he stands for, that he's a man who's willing to fight for what he believes in. Okay, enough is enough. Let's get on with getting these military leaders and their families and their right positions and preparing for the challenges that are on our doorstep right now. There's no time to waste on this. Is it impacting our readiness? There's no doubt about it. Have you talked to Tommy Tubberville to let him know your thoughts. Well, I haven't talked to him on this. No, I'm one of many in the retired general officer ranks who's watching this very anxiously. I'd be delighted if he would call me and ask me for some his assistance or advice on it. He's got to back his way out, and he hasn't been willing to do that. But you know, he's a senator. He's do his respect, and he has the right to put a hold on nominations. But enough's enough. Let's get on with the business of the United States government. You've been generous with your time today. General. I wonder lastly, as you're speaking with senators, are you also talking to the administration about policy toward Iran, next step, sanctions, whatever you think the next step should be. Well, I talk to anybody who will listen on this. This is a looming crisis that we've seen coming for some time. And you know, there's an odd thing about Iran. When things are quiet and they're not attacking our troops and there's diplomacy going on, people say, well, don't worry, so much about it. Us don't shake the tree, and then when there's a crisis, people say, oh, this is a crisis. This is no time to reach in to change the policy. And so we never seem to want to move past what's been forty years of fruitless efforts one way or another to engage with this Iranian regime. It is time to recognize that this is an illegitimate regime and get it out of international legitimacy. General Wesley Clark, we appreciate the time and the insights today on Bloomberg. Thank you for joining us. This is Bloomberg Sound On. I'm Joe, Matthew and Washington. As we assemble our panel here the day after we got a speaker. Rick Davis and Genie Shanzino are with us now, Bloomberg Politics Contributor's great to have you both here. Genie, what's your thought about what we just heard? Because the General sounded a lot like Rick Davis, to be honest with regard to Iran. This is, of course a man who ran for president as a Democrat. Is there a daylight between what he's saying and what we're hearing from Joe Biden? Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating conversation because I do think there is a divide in the Democratic Party on this, and there has been for some time. You know, we can go back to Barack Obama's approach to Iran, but you can go back even further, and I think he is echoing what is a sort of in the momentum continuing to gain hold, which is that efforts to what some people describe as a peace or some people describe as contain I mean, there's a lot of different adjectives you can use. Iran simply have not worked, and what has happened since October seventh, but even earlier is proved positive of that. But the problem is there is very little agreement on where to go forward and how to go forward. I mean, shared Brown's view on what the Banking Committee alone should do on Iran is fascinating and shows this divide. So there's a necessary conversation, and you were just having a really key part of it with somebody with very strong views on this. Yeah, what do you think, Rick, what should the next move be for the Biden administration? The generals on Capitol Hill to sound the alarm today? Do they need to move past the idea of finding evidence that links Iran. I mean, the general's talking about shutting this down, even going after their families. Yeah, I think it's parsing that's actually just going to make them look weak in the eyes of the American public. You know. Look, I mean, Ran has been a horrible influence in the region around the world for as long as the Iatola has been running it, and we've allowed that to sustain itself. We're afraid of the development of their nuclear weapons. We don't want to get in a scrape with them in the Middle East, and yet they dictate all the terms that occur there. I mean, the reason that this is all happening is because through US efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, they put a kebash to it, and and so like, who's not surprised by all this? And and this naivete within the Biden administration that they can somehow do business with Iran but let them be a pure and interest in the region is absolutely insane. They've got to rationalize this to us in their relationship with Iran in a way that is absolutely clear to the American public, which is Iran's the enemy. They've always been the enemy. They're always going to be the enemy. They don't have the same views around the world, values that we all hold dear on human life. And just look at what they've been able to accomplish in the region, you know, supporting Hamas, supporting Husbala, supporting Syrian Islamis. I mean, it's it's there's nothing positive about their conduct whatsoever. So let's quit saying, oh, well, there's no direct evidence that they pulled the triggers. It's a little bit late for that. We'll have a lot more with our panel, Rick Davis and Genie Shanzano. We haven't even gotten to the matter of the speaker race. The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson making waves already today in Washington and meeting with Biden administration officials about avoiding a shutdown. We're going to get to that next with Rick and Jeannie on the Fastest Show in Politics. I'm Joe, Matthew and Washington. Thanks for being with us on the radio, on the satellite, and on YouTube. Search Bloomberg Global News to find us. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Sound on podcast. Catch the program live weekdays at one Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty Live from Washington with breaking news on the new Speaker of the House. It's the first full day on the job for Speaker Johnson. Meeting with Biden administration's administration officials. Easy for me to say on the big funding request we were just talking about with the general here, bipartisan briefing with congressional leadership. This is the first time the Speaker is interfacing with the Biden administration as the man who holds the gavel. And it's coming less than twenty four hours after the big celebration on the steps of the House after he made the grade. He was joined by all the members of the Republican Conference and it was a LoveFest. We're going to act consistently. We're going to exhibit two things here, trust and teamwork, and this group will deliver for the American people. I said it in the Chamber and I will say it here. We're going to govern well, We're going to govern well endorsed by everyone else who wanted to get the job, including Steve Scalise. You know, if you think about what's happened these last three weeks, while a lot of people outside of Washington and talk about dysfunction, this great group of men and women behind me have been talking about how to fix what's broken in Washington, and so this was really good for everybody. Ask Tom Emmer, this is like the best time he ever had. I guess remember you had the nomination for I think four hours. From an outside point of view, these last few weeks probably looked like total chaos, confusion. Oh, I don't no end in sight. But from my perspective, this is one of the greatest experiences in recent history, in the recent history of our republic. We couldn't have planned it better. Let's reassemble the panel. Rick Davis and Genie Shanzey no Bloomberg Politics contributors. Haven't heard from either of you yet. Can't wait, Rick, what do you think of our new Speaker of the House? Well, I'm holding my breath. Is he a member of the Vote No Hope, Yes Caucus? He voted against Ukraine funding when all three of those people McCarthy, Emmer and Scleeves voted yes. What kind of leadership is he going to give if he's opposing those kinds of things? I don't know. I'm very nervous that we've got a deadlock house of representatives. It's only going to make bad look worse. Wow. Joe Biden was asked about him yesterday, Genie. He was in the Rose Garden with the Prime Minister of Australia. The question pretty obvious for this president, knowing that this is not only an election denier, but someone who actually wrote the amicus brief in the Texas case to bring this to the Supreme Court. Here's how it went to the White House. If you win reelection in twenty twenty four, are you worried that a Speaker Johnson would again attempt to overturn the election? No? Why not? Because he can't? Look just like I was not worried that the last time I'd be able to overturn the election. They have not sixty lawsuits and all the way to the the Supreme Court, and every time they lost. I understand the constitution. Do you share his Confidenie? Well, I applaud Joe Biden, Unlike Mike Johnson for answering the question, because of course, yesterday when Mike Johnson was asked the question he was it was Virginia Fox. I think who said shut up, shut up to the report. So you know, he's a constitutional lawyer described as a constitutional scholar, but he does not want to get up there and answer questions. So thank you to the President for answering. The President seems confident. I'm gonna go with Rick and say I'm holding my breath on this aspect of it, you know, Mike Johnson, and I'm so glad you raised that amicus cure I brief. It's one of the most confounding things that he would write the brief to help the disgraced Ken Paxton try to say that Texas can overturn the votes of four other states, something that even the hardliners on the Supreme Court found so baffling constitutionally that they didn't even take the case. And that is Mike Johnson. We don't know how he's going to behave and as speaker, he may turn out to be a great speaker. We simply don't know. But the reality is we know what he's done before, and that is lead the effort to vote to overturn the twenty election, defend Donald Trump, and also support Ken Paxton in the ridiculousness of Texas overturning other states votes for the presidency. Rick, we only have a couple of minutes before our sit down conversation with the Treasury Secretary. How concerned are you that every member of the Republican Conference voted for an election? Denier? Yeah, look, I think it's a it's a bad form. I'm shocked that Emmer didn't press the point of actually having a floor vote for his own Speakership candidacy. Frankly, I suspect a bunch of Democrats would have voted for him, because in retrospect you look at that and say, gee, we could have had Emmer. Democrats are going to really pay a price for for not having the opportunity to put a reasonable Republican in the seat who actually believed the elections weren't flawed. So this has been a horrible three week period for the Republican Party. I think the onus is going to be on Speaker Johnson to try and write that ship. Nothing in his background indicates that he has the ability to do that. So this is a real test by Fire. You're listening to the Bloomberg Sound on podcast. Catch us live weekdays at one Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts. Then there's the former president, who, in these wild times we've really only been talking about through the guise of the speaker race. But this is Donald Trump, who's been in court every day lately to talk about the value of his company or face off with Michael Cohen or whatever might be happening. Ye did you see he took the stand yesterday? I did. This is incredible. Now we keep seeing him in the lobby and people are asking questions about yesterday, violating the gag order in this case New York curious where with respect to what very no any other questions, any other questions. They're trying to figure out who was he talking about? Who was he disparaging because he goes in there and he just you know, he lobs, spitballs at everybody and talks negatively about the judge, about the prosecutor in this case, though the judge issued a ten thousand dollars fine for what is Donald Trump's second violation of a gag order in the civil fraud trial against him New York State and called him to the stand, asking him to talk about what he meant with these remarks. Immediately told him he was not credible. Sit down. Here's a ten thousand dollars fine. Yeah, and as you said, this is the second fine, because last week he was fined five thousand dollars for violating disorder. This is incredible. We kind of knew Joe right that this is the former president we are talking about. We know how open he usually is with his commentary. And when all of these either restricted gag orders or you know, different judges doing different things, it was a question, how are you actually going to enforce that? And I guess we're seeing it enforced in this case. But there's many others to consider as well. Well. There are a lot of others. And that's why I can't believe we have Dave Ehrenberg in Washington and at the table with us. You've heard him, you've seen him on zoom and the Palm Beach County State Attorney is with us in person. What a treat. It's great to see you. Welcome to the Capitol. It is great to be with you. Both guys are too good looking to be on radio. Well that's why they're on YouTube now too. My god, Yes, we're doing everything with you today. It's great and thanks for coming. My gosh, your thoughts on the gag order? Here? Will this be kind of a weekly Obviously ten thousand dollars is not a matter for Donald Trump, but to be kind of spanked publicly by the judge like that is remarkable. He got up and left. He walked out before the session was over. I think he gets under Trump's skin like this case, whether it's a gag order from a judge he does not like, or for the valuation of mar Lago at between eighteen and twenty eight million, which is really way below market value. It cuts him to the core to have to see what's going on there. Even though this is not a criminal case. He will not be sent to jail for this case, but this one is personal for him and as far as what the future punishments will be for him if he continues to violate the gag order, I think the judge will continue to find him increasing amounts of money. It's ten thousand dollars this time, maybe the next time he will be fifty and then on. But I do not expect this judge to sentence him to jail for contempt because after all, it's a civil case, not a criminal one. Well, and it is a civil case, so are we just going to see him stop showing up. He's not mandated to be there in the room, right correct, Unlike a criminal case, he does not have to be there for this civil trial. But he has his own reasons. He wanted to glower and Michael Cohen. He really hates his former lawyer. He wants the optics of looking like he's the aggrieved individual here. He wants people and his party to believe that somehow he's entitled to a jury trial and the court wouldn't give it to him, when it's really his own lawyer, Alena Haba, who forgot to check the right box. So he only has his own lawyers to blame. But nothing fuels Maga like grievance and martyrdom. That's why he's showing up and just having a blast talking to cameras every day. But to be called to the stand like that, it was like, you know, the troubled student called at the front of the class to be scolded. How often are we going to see that type of thing. The idea of Donald Trump ending up on the stand might suggest it's not always wise to show up when you don't have that's right. You know, he can end up in a perjury trap himself, and so it's not always a great idea. But look, lawyers can't control their own defendants, especially defendants their clients like Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants to be there, he will be there, and he has other motivations. It's about the optics. He's the leading candidate for president, and he wants people to believe that I am aggrieved. I could be in Iowa right now, but I have to be here, when in reality he was missing a golf match by being in court. Excellent, But it's all about show. Yeah, well, we definitely know that for sure that the former president does have a reputation for being quite a showman every day. This is how he operates. And as we were just alluding to, this is just one case that he is facing, and it's a civil case. He's facing a multitude of criminal cases as well. And the one I think that has been the most interesting over the course of the last several weeks is Georgia the racketeering case. There's now been what four plea deals, some high profile including Jenna Ellis, Mark Sidney Powell, Mark Meadows, Scott Hall. Do you think this is just dominoes that are going to fall one by one? How do you think this is going to play out? I think there'll be more defendants copying the plea. They're going to get FOMO. These other defendants, I fear a missing out. And there's what fourteen others here that we are considering. Look at this. If you're on YouTube, you can see all the mugshots that got them in two different columns. Now, yeah, see, I'm guilty, all not guilty. All those folks in the right, they all have FOMO. They are worrying that the longer they weigh, the worst the deal will get. Right now, the folks on the left, if you're on YouTube, you can see the four of them, they got plea deals with no jail time. They were facing years in prison. But first one in is the first to win. That's something defense law is like to say. If you get in first the prosecutor's door, you get the best deal. But that door is closing soon and I anticipate that future plea deals. Maybe not yet, but pretty soon they'll start including incarceration. Wow, what do you make of the Meadows deal? Specifically, as compelled as I am to talk about Sidney Powell at any turn, the idea here, and we've heard a lot of people suggest this, including Chris Christy yesterday, of course, a former prosecutor. You don't just cut a deal with the chief of staff who was clearly involved in this and may well deserve to be punished for his role that he played unless he's really got some important Was that the deal that closes the walls in on Donald Trump? Well, we don't know. Joe Weather Mark Meadows cut a deal with prosecutors other than receiving immunity to test why before the grand jury. So apparently he spoke to Jacksmith's team three separate times this year and test why before the grand jury. You cannot force someone to self incriminate unless you give them immunity at the grand jury. That's what happens. So they call him before the grand jury, they say we're going to give you immunity, and then he testifies truthfully. But as far as weather he entered into a non prosecution deal where I will be a cooperating witness in return for your not prosecuting me. That's not clear. It's be up to ultimately Jack Smith and Mark Meadows whether it goes that far. But right now I'm just thinking he just tests by before the grand jury got immunity for his testimony, and I can't extrapolate beyond that. That's really something we should clarify. That is the January sixth case here in Washington, And I'm actually curious the Sydney and the others you mentioned in Georgia, Kayley, are they also talking to Jack Smith at the same time. There's no indication that Sidney Powell is talking to Jack Smith, but it looks like Mark Meadows people wanted us to know that he was talking to the grand jury to Jack Smith for whatever reason. Now what's interesting is how does Fannie Willis take this. Fannie Wills has got to be concerned that she really should not try to use the information that Mark Meadows gave to Jack Smith under immunity against him in the state case, because then there are some complex issues of whether state proscuers can feed off of the information where he was grand immunity. There was an Oliver North case, you remember that guy. He was ultimately cleared or at least found the case was thrown out against him because of those types of issues. So proscuers are very careful. So I think what's going to happen is she's going to continue to go after Mark Meadows, who is an indicted individual in Fulton County, based on the evidence she accumulates, not on the evidence that Jack Smith gives her. But overall Marcmetto's aside with the other plea deals that have now been entered, her job is getting easier, not harder, generally, right, It is definitely getting easier when you have a number of your co defendants flip because nineteen co defendants, that's very difficult, and in a reco case that takes months to try. What was going to happen is you had two people, cheesebro and Sidney Powell, who requested speedy trial. They were going to be tried first. They were going to give Donald Trump a dress rehearsal. They were going to expose the state's arguments. It was to Donald Trump's benefit. But now they're out of the way. So not only does Donald Trump not get to see an advanced copy of the prosecution. He also could be tried before the election. Had the others been tried first, it would have pushed his case beyond the election. But now there's no one to wait for. That's incredible and something that we have to remember with, you know, as we juggled for indictments. With all of that said, you consider his life over the next year as he's running for president. Made the point, Hey, I wish I could be in Iowa, but I'm here in court on some days. That might actually be true. And his campaign will need him to be in certain places. How much flexibility will he have to actually run for president while he's managing all these That's a really good question because we don't know the schedule yet. I do believe the case that will happen before the election is the case in DC that we've been discussing Judge Chuck, and she's not fooling around, and that case from Jack Smith is built for speed. There are no other co defendants. There are unindicted ones, but not indicted ones. There are only four counts against Trump. Because Jack Smith wants that to happen before the election, and I think it will so can he campaign fully while being put on trial? I don't know, but I don't think. I'm not certain that the other cases will happen before the election. I think because of the plea deals now, it's a better chance the Fulton County one happens before the election. But I think the strongest case against Trump is the one in my neck of the woods good Documents case. They got them dead to rights there. But you got Judge Cannon, who's not quite Judge Chuckan. She's new, and she is slow walking this thing. And I think that case is going to get pushed beyond the election. And if we're saying then beyond the election, he very well could be president at that time, right, So how would that? Does that mean that this case just never gets tried? To feel like that's where we get into really murky waters? Are you now having a sitting president of the United States on trial? Oh? I don't think it's a murky firm at all. I think that's his only defense, that he has no defense to the document's case they got him. His only defense is become president and then order his Department of Justice to drop the case. That's what he'll do, and the case goes bye bye. The Trigckier one is what happens if he's convicted in Atlanta or in New York, which also could happen for the election itself. In the state case, he can't pardon himself. You know what will happen? So if becomes president and he's convicted or they keep trying to prosecute him, he'll say, Okay, New York, Okay, Georgia, I'm surrounded by my secret service here in the Oval Office. Come and get me. Yeah, who will be a constution crisis to say that the reality continues? Is it wrong? I'm admiring the lapel pin, the badge. I don't know if people can see that, probably not on YouTube. Is it wrong that I want one of those? Does that make me a herschel walker? Is that? Is that like a state attorney's How do you get that? You can't get this in a costume store. You've got to get elected state attorney at one of these days. That's so cool. Now here's the here's the insider tip there. We exchange them with each other. So this is actually someone else's tell me it's funny, Willis's. This is Tim Cruz from Massachusetts looking at it. Hey, my friend, no kidding, Republican to Massachusetts. I love that. Dave Ehrenberg, what a treat to have you in Washington. Get home safe, good luck here in the Capitol. I'm Joe Matthew with Kayley Lines. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Sound on podcast. Catch the program live weekdays at one Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, Tune in alf Bloomberg dot Com, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty. As we head for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, we want to bring you an important conversation with Paul Beckett. You might have heard him a couple of months ago. Join us on Bloomberg as the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal here in Washington, DC, and Kayley. As I said earlier, it's not too often that you see Bloomberg and the WSJ making news together here. But it's important because he's not actually the bureau chief, at least not at the moment in Washington. He's become assistant editor of the journal dedicated the efforts to secure Evan Gershkovic's release. And it's Evan's birthday, ye thirty two years old, his two hundred and eleventh day of incarceration, as I read on the Wall Street Journal. And it's always an honor to bring Paul back on the air. It's good to see you, and thanks for coming across town to say hello to us. If you're with us on YouTube, see Paul's pin that says free Evan that I suspect you're wearing everywhere right now. And I just wonder if you could give us an update on his situation, what you're hearing from him when the last time he spoke, thank you so much. He is in decent shape, but in decent shape in a Russian prison where he's been for two hundred and eleven days. As you mentioned, he spends a great deal of that time in isolation. He's given one hour in the prison yard each day. He's working very hard to keep himself in shape, both mentally and physically. But we really just see this stretching on far too long, and we hope everything can be done to bring him home. Yeah, what's his degree of optimism and your degree of optimism? That his incarceration there is going to end anytime soon. This will end with the negotiation between the US government and the Russian government, So we would just like to see more action taken. At the moment, his pre trial attention will last until November thirtieth. They have twelve months to keep extending that detention, so that would put it into the spring of next year. But it's so opate. We don't even really know when you'll go to trial and what happens after that, so it's very murky, and that's the dispariting part. So is this a diplomatic solution, a prisoner swap, or is it actually infect a legal resolution that you're hoping for. One of the ways it will happen, and probably the most likely, given what's happened in the past, is through a prisoner swap. He has been accused of very serious espionized charges, which we of course will say to the end of the earth are completely false, but he will probably go into the Russian statement. So far, I have to go through that trial before the meaningful negotiations can take place. We hope to circuit that process, but in the mists ahead, that's about all we can see so you suggested you would like to see the US doing more here to push this What kind of conversations are you having with the Biden administration with those in government who may be able to help push this case. How committed do they seem to Evans? Cause? President Biden met with Evans family at the Whites correspond Association dinner and made a promise there to bring Evan home. So that's something that they have been relying on that we have been relying on for action. We can't see everything obviously that the government is doing. The public statements have been encouraging that this is a top priority, but we just want to make sure that it remains there. Boy, can you describe the conditions that he's in there? We spoke last time about the facility that he was staying and is he still there? Is he around other people or is he isolated? He's in the the forte of a prison Maxicmum Security Security Services prison in Moscow. We think he's in okay shape. We have lawyers that go in to see him once a week. He's had a few visits from the US ambassador to Moscow. So from what we can tell, it is he's reading he's meditating, he's exercising when he can, but it's a lot of work in the circumstances are awful. I'm sure is there anything that the journal is doing as well? For those journalists who are not currently incarcerated in Russia but still have to do the kind of work that Evan was doing and that he is now being essentially punished for. What do you do to make sure that others don't end up in the position he is currently in. Well, we are actually trying to be helpful in a position of another reporter who is in a similar circumstance. Alsu Kumasheva from Free Europe Radio Liberty was detained in Russia recently. So the extent that we can our experience can be helpful to them, then of course I'm more than happy to engage on that. I think overall, what you're seeing is a real stifling of what little free press or independent press there was in Russia. So so many reporters now have to cover Russia from outside, from Warsaw, from Berlin, from Dubai, from wherever they can, and it's just not the same. We're spending time with Paul Beckett from the Wall Street journal who is working to secure Evan Gershkovich's release as people consider what he's going through right now, and more broadly, what journalists are facing on a daily basis. Here we've got journalists in very dangerous places and it could get a lot more dangerous, for instance, in the Middle East. Does it change policies at the journal and the way that you look at deploying reporters around the world. We've always, as I'm shore Bloomberg, has put the safety of our reporters first absolutely. In spite of having very strict protocols, bad things will happen, and to some degree is the nature of the business. You do see a increase in violence towards harassment of and targeting of journalists around the world. We've seen it recently in the Middle East with sim Abdallah, the writers Yes reporter in Lebanon who is monitoring a live feed and he was killed and several other reporters were injured when that location was hit by a missile. So it is very dangerous days for reporters out there, and I think sometimes press can be an easy punching bag. I think it's a moment to reflect on how many people do extraordinary things to bring us. A news producer, Matt reminds us Kayley thirty four journalists killed in a line of duty this year. So far this calendar year, five hundred and ten journalists are detained as we speak, and Evan, of course, is one of them. Obviously, I know communication reaching him in a communicative way is probably immensely difficult. But if you had one message for him on what is again his thirty second birthday, could you share that for us. We're doing everything we can to make sure he doesn't spend his thirty third birthday in jail. How often, if at all, does the journal does his employer get to speak with him or is it through his lawyers on that weekly basis that you referenced, that's the chief point of contact. We have letters going in now. His family write some letters, his colleagues write him letters, and in those letters they try and fill him in on what he's missing the world. I think that's the messages that he wants to hear. He is a huge arsenal FC fan. He wants to hear they're doing. His sister sends him celebrity gossip to keep him up to speed. Anything that will boy, his spirits during such difficult time and his strength there is an inspiration to all of us doing well. I want you to know how much we respect the role that you've taken on there. You were the Washington Bureau chief, which is a very proud position, and the fact that you're doing this full time to secure his release is honorable and we thank you for what you're doing. There's not a lot that we can do here, I think, Kaylee. Other thing keep talking about this and keep reporting on it, and Paul, that's the pledge that we'll make to you, So stay in touch with us. Greatly appreciate, great, Thank you by so much. Thank you for the all Beckett from the Wall Street Journal with us here on an important conversation on the thirty second birthday of Evan Gershkovich, Joe Matthew and Washington along with Kaylee Lines. Thank you so much for spending time with us on the radio, on the satellite, and on YouTube. We certainly learn a lot today, as always, Kaylee, and we'll be back with one more of these. Tell me it's real. Tomorrow is Friday home stretch check on a working weekend. Right, We've got a speaker. We got some things worked well, don't Chinxit now? Fuh fair enough with Kaylee, I'm joke. Thanks for listening to the sound on podcast. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't already, at Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts, and you can find us live every weekday from Washington, DC at one pm Eastern Time at Bloomberg dot com 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After Dark with Hosts Rob & Andrew – Archer said Hunter would be on business calls with potential partners from Ukraine, Russia, and China, and Joe would join in. Who knew Joe was an expert in weather? Other than trying to force Americans to stop using coal and gas because of climate change and killing our energy independence. But what does that all have to do with Hunter's business partners?

After Dark with Hosts Rob & Andrew – Archer said Hunter would be on business calls with potential partners from Ukraine, Russia, and China, and Joe would join in. Who knew Joe was an expert in weather? Other than trying to force Americans to stop using coal and gas because of climate change and killing our energy independence. But what does that all have to do with Hunter's business partners?

Two pedestrians collide fatefully.by maxicue. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Joe slid through the crowd on the street, not in a hurry, just enjoying it, like it was some kind of game, call it Body Avoidance, a challenge of finding the gaps just large enough to pass through untouched while the bodies continued moving in somewhat predictable ways, though the unpredictable could always happen, adding to the challenge and the fun, that quick burst bypassing the unexpected shift. He loved this game ever since moving to New York, at first when he worked at a copy place in Grand Central Station (nearby where he happened to be sliding through at the moment), especially busy streets around there, especially at rush hours and lunch, and further challenged when he carried heavy packages of copies destined for publishing houses, often pocketing the cab money given to him to walk even farther through more busy streets carrying those burdens. And then when he became busboy and then waiter at the restaurant at Max's Kansas City, a punk club with the music upstairs and the restaurant where he worked downstairs, sliding through crowds of kids his age on weekend nights. It felt like a kind of dance, especially at the club, even with his own special tempo.This time though, for the first time ever as far as he could recall, he collided with someone who seemed to appear out of nowhere, his height of six and a half feet always helping his vision and his traversing perhaps missing her much smaller frame, at least a foot shorter, probably closer to a foot and a half, but more it seemed like she stepped into the narrow passage he'd found as if on purpose, finding the perfect moment for collision. But of course that would have been impossible, her knowing when to get in his way, when he'd happen to be sliding through at that very moment, unless fate could be considered purposeful.“Asshole,” the young woman growled from the concrete in which his impact sent her, landing on her ass and a hand that prevented something worse like concussion and scraping it for the trouble. With him stopped standing over her, the crowd flowed around the sudden impediment like cattle somehow avoiding stampeding, though less animal and more human since the flow went both ways.He looked down at a blonde waif, skinny and frail, her t shirt and jeans too big for her and looking well past new, the t shirt white with a band logo he was unfamiliar with showing every stain, and there were many, the jeans showing a small right kneecap where the cloth had frayed. The navy peacoat, too warm for the balmy, almost summerlike weather unusual this early in the year, splayed open.“I'm so sorry,” Joe exclaimed, and when his stretched out hand was avoided by her, he insisted, “Let me help you up.” She finally allowed his large hand to take hold of her small slim one aiding her to standing. “I didn't see you,” he added.“Obviously,” she smirked, adjusting her stuffed and scuffed red backpack on her shoulders.“Hungry?” he asked.“I could eat,” she half smiled.He guided her across the street and to the end of the block where one of the last of the Horn and Hardarts automats existed and put coins into the slots for her tuna sandwich and chips and for his egg salad. He bought her a Coke and he got coffee. She used the toilet there to clean her scrape amongst other things since she took a while, which worried him, thinking she might have run off, but of course she didn't, having food waiting for her.“I'm Joe,” he told her.“Jenny,” she replied before filling her mouth with a bite of sandwich.They said nothing for a while since she devoured her food, obviously needing it.“Anything else?” he asked.“Maybe a pie? The lemon meringue looked tempting.”“Okay if we share?” he asked.“That's fine.”“Uhm, are you going to stay?” He looked at her, saw her eyes pooling and she sniffled. “Please?”Her smile nearly broke his heart when she replied, “Nowhere better to be.”“Good. After we eat, let's get that scrape taken care of.”“Okay.”They stayed, talking over the small empty plate.“Where are you from?” he asked.“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis.”“No shit! Me too!”“No shit!”“No shit. Where?”“Robbinsdale.”“Golden Valley.”“No shit?”“No shit.”The two suburbs were neighbors, Robbinsdale more middle class than Golden Valley, which tended to be more upper middle class, a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers and professors, his dad being of the latter type.Fate.“You work around here?” she asked, since Joe had dressed up in a jacket and tie, the tie loose around his neck.“I used to,” he told her. “I'm actually applying for jobs presently.”“Presently,” she giggled.“Sorry. I tend to talk like I have a stick up my butt.”“No, it's cute.”“Glad you think so,” he chuckled.“How's the job search going?” she asked.“Not great unfortunately. My uncle's an executive at the William Morris Agency, and I hoped that might help, but I guess he's against nepotism. It's possible I'll get a job in their mail room. I applied at other offices, but I'm making a career change, or hoping to, and have got little experience.”“From what?” she asked.“I used to be a waiter at Max's Kansas City.”“No shit!”“No shit.”“Why not stay there?”“I needed a change,” he murmured, unconsciously stroking his arm.Jenny sensing Joe's discomfort regarding the subject wisely ended that line of inquiry. “What's the William Morris Agency?” she asked instead.“It's one of the largest talent agencies in America,” he told her.“Cool.”“Yeah. It's had its perks. Getting turned on to Bowie early because my uncle wrote the contract that signed him. Meeting cool stars at a party at his house upstate. Going to openings like the movie Hair and Apocalypse Now, the last a brand new print and sitting close.”“Is that cool?” she asked.“Pretty cool,” he chuckled.When they left the automat, he told her, “Let's get you some anti-bacteria for your scrape and Band-Aids. I know a drugstore nearby.”“You don't have anything at home?” she asked, surprising him.“Um…you sure?”“I'm sure,” she smiled, and he could see those pretty blue eyes pool again.“I can get something on the way,” he decided.“Great!”Since the drugstore was close by, he went there anyway, and while getting the first aid stuff, she waited for him near the counter. “Need any of these?” she blushed, pointing to the rack of condoms.His cock stiffened in his pants while he grabbed a sixpack of lubricated Trojans. She stayed his hand and grabbed a twelve pack instead. “Holy shit,” he thought.Both were blushing while he made the purchase.They walked over to Grand Central and took the subway south to Fourteenth Street close to where he lived. They entered a door between a couple non-descript store fronts and climbed the stairs three floors, Joe unlocking a door on the left at the top. Fortunately none of his roommates were around in the shared area, probably sleeping since they tended to keep vampire hours, and Joe guided Jenny down a hallway, taking a sharp right and, pushing aside a beaded curtain, gestured her through. He had by far the largest bedroom in the three bedroom apartment, a couple large windows unfortunately facing the wall of another building. Unfortunate not for the view, but for the easy access from the roof to the room, the probable path taken when someone broke in and stole his record collection and his typewriter not long before. Or they could have just walked in, because he knew the probable culprit, since he'd seen the junkie just off St. Marks selling his records, a regular at Max's.“Sorry for the mess,” he apologized, and Joe was a definite slob.“No problem,” she responded. “Beggars can't be choosers.”“Jenny?”“Mind if I take a shower?” she sniffled.“Not at all. Just a second.” He knelt in front of a small cabinet and grabbed a towel for her. “The red door on the right,” he told her.For some reason they'd painted the bathroom a deep red, including the door, the rest of the apartment with white walls.He cleaned up his place while she showered, neatening the books and papers on the coffee table, the table on which he used to type before losing his typewriter, and tossing clothes into a gunny sack he used to tote down to go to the nearest laundromat a block or so away.She returned carrying her clothes and her bag, wearing the towel with it tucked between her cleavage, more of it than he expected, and when she unceremoniously dropped the towel, she sported perky b cup breasts, all the more substantial looking on her petite frame. She was skinny but fortunately not completely starved, no bones jutting out, her belly youthfully firm with just a hint of convexity, and her full bush, being blonde, seemed less substantial than if it were dark. Her waist curved subtly, neither what some would call child bearing hips, but not boyish either. This was definitely a woman.“Like what you see?” she smiled, turning, and showing him a perfect firm round ass. He also noticed muscled thighs and her arms even had some definition.“Wow,” he said. “You're definitely in shape.”“Dreams of being a prima ballerina,” she sniffled.He sat on the bed and patted his lap. “Come here.”“You have way too many clothes on,” she sniffled and giggled.“Come here, Jenny,” he said more forcefully.She sat on his lap sideways. He reluctantly kept his hands off her.“Tell me,” he said.“You don't want to fuck me?”“Of course I do. Tell me.”She sobbed. Only then did he embrace her across her middle, her face ending up against his chest. He could feel the tears wet his shirt. “Tell me,” he repeated.“I…had to,” she choked out.“Had to?”“Your shirt,” she murmured, pulling her head away.“It's okay,” he insisted, gently pulling her head back.“I auditioned over the years to get into ballet school here, but no takers,” she managed to say. “I wanted to be a ballerina but I guess I'm not good enough.”“Best to know I guess,” Joe tried.“It's not that. Oh, okay that kind of sucked, but mostly I wanted to get away.”“From?”“Everything!”“Including?”“My mother's cruel disappointment. She'd been a ballerina until she had me. My boyfriend turning out to be gay. Another boy practically raping me instead making sure I was ready. My father…”“Did he…?”“No, but he was working up to it. Probably looked at me like I was my mom when I was her age or younger I guess. He'd be affectionate, too affectionate as it turned out. He touched me where he shouldn't, not directly but close, you know. I guess I didn't believe it, but it turned out he was actually being shy, and eventually brought my hand to his crotch which got me off him immediately. The last straw…I woke up with him in my bed. I screamed and punched like in his diaphragm which took his wind. Maybe I should have punched lower, but I wanted to be nowhere near that, and when I raced out the room, my mother plods over and my dad says some bullshit about me seducing him, and since it was all about jealousy, him being more affectionate to me, and disappointment, she fucking believed him.“I'm of course freaking out, everything…and then this…but I managed to take some breaths, calming down, and told my mom if she wanted rid of me I needed money. They only had a couple hundred around but my mom takes me to her bank, gets me another five hundred, drives me to the bus station, buys me a ticket to New York, my demand, with her credit card. She actually offered one to me, but I told her she'd probably close it and have me arrested or something, and the bitch shrugged. And I'm like, ‘You're a fucking cunt.' And she's saying I'm a useless slut.”“Sorry,” Joe apologized.“I'm the sorry one,” Jenny actually chuckled.“But…it doesn't sound like sex…”Jenny shifted around so that she faced him, straddling his lap. “I got hit on by fucking pimps, Joe, as soon as I got off the fucking bus at Penn station. I'm not as naïve as I look.”“But you don't know me.”“Like you're a psycho? You don't seem the type and in a way I don't fucking care. A rapist probably wouldn't have brought me home. The hotel I stayed at this creepy guy kept staring at me in the lobby and ended up following me to my fucking floor, so I like got out quick out of there, practically running. And I didn't even dare shower there since the shower room was fucking shared and fucking groady. I was actually headed to Grand Central when we collided, thinking I'd try taking a train down to twenty-third, staying at the Chelsea or something, just to do something cool while I was here and still alive. So Joe, I guess you're the best choice I've had so far.” She kissed him, pulling off the jacket he still wore and unbuttoning his shirt.He broke the kiss when he tossed aside the tie, then lifted her and set her on her back on the bed. He finished the unbuttoning and tossed aside his shirt.“Nice,” she smiled, stroking his chest. Joe didn't work out, but being young, just twenty-one, and working hard at his job as a waiter, kept him slim and slimly muscled.He kept his pants on when he made love to her lying beside her on his side. Kisses continued for a while, both enjoying it especially when tongues were involved, her breath tasting of toothpaste and his presumably not offensive, while his hand began exploring the rest of her. The hand took the weight of her breasts, teasingly moving on before a direct attack on her small nipples to linger on her taut belly and moving teasing across her pudendum, through her soft patch of blond hair, before feeling the smoothness of her thighs and the firmness of muscles, and then under her, lifting her slightly by her firm ass, followed by sliding along her back, across her shoulder and returning to her breasts, fingers moving in on her nipples, caressing and tugging gently at each one, making her gasp into his mouth.Only then did he end the kiss, bringing his mouth to the exploration, finding thrills for her at her ear and neck before moving to her breasts and nipples. Once each one had been appreciated for a while, the second sending his hand down slowly, eventually fingers discovering the dampness of her labia, rimming the edges, his mouth followed the same trail as his hand, and when it reached where she wanted it, he shifted his body between her widened legs and his tongue lapped across her clit, the first touch of it, and she lifted her middle and moaned.Both fingers and mouth remained there, working her gradually to her first climax via a man, especially intense when he stroked her g spot, his other hand tugging at her nipples, measuring the squeeze and building on it since she seemed to handle ever more pressure there.“Joe,” she murmured once she recovered, and smiled when he got up and got naked for her. “Oh my,” she commented at his length, on the thicker side, and definitely longer than the two she'd seen by at least a couple inches.“I'll be gentle,” he promised, opening a condom and rolling it on and moving between her thighs. He brought her hand to his cock to guide him, and she brought it where she wanted it and he slowly pushed in.“Oh fuck!” she moaned.“Too much?” he asked reluctantly.“Don't you fucking stop!” she declared.He pushed into one of the tightest sheathes he'd ever felt and realized he wouldn't last and told her.“Just fuck me,” she insisted, her legs wrapping his thighs as emphasis.Going slow probably helped delay the inevitable, seeming to open her up with each deeper stroke. In the end, he nudged at her cervix, thankfully with his cock completely inside her. He'd known girls her size, even taller, where he had to be careful about the impact there, usually no more than an inch to spare, but enough to cause pain. Not this time. Touching it made her growl, but in a good way.He decided to exploit that, grinding into her, pubic bone against pubic bone which affected her clit too, and just pulling out a couple inches before thrusting in. She seemed fine with that, even enjoying it, so he kept it up while his hands drew in to work fingers and thumbs on her nipples.She began meeting his thrusts with lifts, and her hands grabbed his ass cheeks, and she began pulling on his flesh there, wanting longer strokes it seemed, but he waited until she grabbed hard, closing on being painful, her nails thankfully short, he'd learn later she tended to nibble on them when nervous, and he'd actually seen a little of that in the automat, and she pressed against him one more time before announcing her climax with, “Oh my fucking God!” rather loudly at a high growl. And when she loosened her grip, only then did he abandon himself to fully fucking her, long, ever faster strokes for only seconds before he pressed deep, pushing against her cervix, and cumming.“Joe,” she murmured, her hands pushing his chest.“Sorry,” he responded, hugging her to him and turning them over. He'd reached the last of his ejaculations, every one intense, and reached down to hold the condom to his penis while shifting her higher with his legs.“Mmm,” she responded when it slid out. She shivered a little too as if feeling a last echo of her orgasm.“It'll be better next time,” he promised.She chuckled weakly.“What?” he asked.She shifted forward. Since both of their bodies had fairly equal proportions of legs to torsos, she had to scoot up a bit, her legs straddling his abdomen, her damp pussy pressing into it, for her to look eye to eye with him. Her hands pressed his shoulders to put her face above his.“That was several magnitudes better than the last and only fuck I've had,” she explained.“I thought it was making love,” he argued.“Don't be pedantic, Joe,” she smirked, surprising him.“Pedantic?”“You know what I mean.”“Of course, but…”“I'm smarter than I look.”“I don't believe in the dumb blonde myth.”“I've met several, and not all blondes.”“School?”“And fellow dancers, although most were dedicated enough to be smart too I suppose. Learning to put the time in to do the best you can both in dancing and studying.”“Makes sense. So school…?”“I would have graduated this spring if I hadn't had to run away.”“GED?” he asked.“Probably. I don't imagine going to school for one quarter. You?”“School?”“Yeah.”“I went to Bard in upstate New York for a couple years, but quit because it was ridiculous having parents spend that much money for me to study to be a poet.”“You're a poet?”“Not much recently. I thought New York would be inspiring, but mostly it's been distracting. I'm also interested in filmmaking, like the experimental kind, so no more lucrative. I still have a Bolex sixteen millimeter camera which fortunately the thieves never found.”“Thieves?”“The problem with living amongst junkies. Let me show you something.”He lifted his left arm and she caressed a line of marks near his inner elbow area.“Are those…?”“Tracks. Only one is fairly fresh. It's why I quit Max's: too much temptation. Living here too, but right now I can't afford to move. A friend of mine OD'd and died, and another almost did and I ended up keeping him alive. It was the last straw, and I realized that'd be me, or it'd just be a spiral of inertia, all about the next fix and nothing else, so I quit. Luckily I wasn't too strung out and basically hung with my folks for a week when my dad had his sabbatical in DC this past winter. I drank a bit there, but my parents seemed none the wiser. Anyway, when I came back to work planning to keep my tips instead of spending them all, I did okay until I didn't one day, succumbing to temptation, and quit after that.”“When was that?”“A week ago. I've been job hunting ever since.”“Lucky for me,” she grinned and shifted around, pulling off the used condom and handing it to him carefully and he managed to toss it atop his underpants while she enveloped his penis in her mouth. He worried about her lack of experience, mostly worried about her teeth, but she proved quite capable. He nudged her to straddle his face and had to bend his back a little, supported by his arms so fingers weren't available, and mostly kept her pleasure at a quiet purr, not distracting her from her surprisingly effective endeavors.Once she'd got him hard, she bounced off the bed, found a condom and rolled it on with some study and climbed on and guided him back inside her, carefully, stroke by stroke, sending him deep. Once there, she began her ride, this time having the full effect of his entire cock, to the point she needed to bring it back to her slit when it slipped out a couple times, but seemed to get the length of him soon enough and began riding him at a medium fast clip.He watched the roll and bounce of her perky tits before stilling them with his hands, one letting go to guide her hand to her clit. From that she worked herself into a frenzy, finally shifting down and rolling atop him to achieve her orgasm. Fortunately it always took longer for Joe to cum when a woman took the cowgirl position.After, she somehow turned around while he remained inside and moved her body down, and he realized what she wanted, moving from beneath her, clutching her hips, and pulling her into him in a doggy style position. He shifted, letting go of the hips and bringing one hand to her hanging tits and the other to her clit, practically holding her up with the latter hand, and like he had before, let himself go fucking her hard and fast until he came, happily not long after she did.“Fuck Joe,” she commented softly after.“Yeah,” Joe agreed.She did the securing of the condom to his penis and they soon took the same position as they had before, her head resting on his chest.“Can I stay?” she asked quietly and shyly.“As long as you want.”“Thanks.”by maxicue for Literotica.This is the first chapter of a novel. The rest of the published chapters are found at the maxicue library of Literotica.Fate's Embrace: 6 Part Series

Two pedestrians collide fatefully.by maxicue. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Joe slid through the crowd on the street, not in a hurry, just enjoying it, like it was some kind of game, call it Body Avoidance, a challenge of finding the gaps just large enough to pass through untouched while the bodies continued moving in somewhat predictable ways, though the unpredictable could always happen, adding to the challenge and the fun, that quick burst bypassing the unexpected shift. He loved this game ever since moving to New York, at first when he worked at a copy place in Grand Central Station (nearby where he happened to be sliding through at the moment), especially busy streets around there, especially at rush hours and lunch, and further challenged when he carried heavy packages of copies destined for publishing houses, often pocketing the cab money given to him to walk even farther through more busy streets carrying those burdens. And then when he became busboy and then waiter at the restaurant at Max's Kansas City, a punk club with the music upstairs and the restaurant where he worked downstairs, sliding through crowds of kids his age on weekend nights. It felt like a kind of dance, especially at the club, even with his own special tempo.This time though, for the first time ever as far as he could recall, he collided with someone who seemed to appear out of nowhere, his height of six and a half feet always helping his vision and his traversing perhaps missing her much smaller frame, at least a foot shorter, probably closer to a foot and a half, but more it seemed like she stepped into the narrow passage he'd found as if on purpose, finding the perfect moment for collision. But of course that would have been impossible, her knowing when to get in his way, when he'd happen to be sliding through at that very moment, unless fate could be considered purposeful.“Asshole,” the young woman growled from the concrete in which his impact sent her, landing on her ass and a hand that prevented something worse like concussion and scraping it for the trouble. With him stopped standing over her, the crowd flowed around the sudden impediment like cattle somehow avoiding stampeding, though less animal and more human since the flow went both ways.He looked down at a blonde waif, skinny and frail, her t shirt and jeans too big for her and looking well past new, the t shirt white with a band logo he was unfamiliar with showing every stain, and there were many, the jeans showing a small right kneecap where the cloth had frayed. The navy peacoat, too warm for the balmy, almost summerlike weather unusual this early in the year, splayed open.“I'm so sorry,” Joe exclaimed, and when his stretched out hand was avoided by her, he insisted, “Let me help you up.” She finally allowed his large hand to take hold of her small slim one aiding her to standing. “I didn't see you,” he added.“Obviously,” she smirked, adjusting her stuffed and scuffed red backpack on her shoulders.“Hungry?” he asked.“I could eat,” she half smiled.He guided her across the street and to the end of the block where one of the last of the Horn and Hardarts automats existed and put coins into the slots for her tuna sandwich and chips and for his egg salad. He bought her a Coke and he got coffee. She used the toilet there to clean her scrape amongst other things since she took a while, which worried him, thinking she might have run off, but of course she didn't, having food waiting for her.“I'm Joe,” he told her.“Jenny,” she replied before filling her mouth with a bite of sandwich.They said nothing for a while since she devoured her food, obviously needing it.“Anything else?” he asked.“Maybe a pie? The lemon meringue looked tempting.”“Okay if we share?” he asked.“That's fine.”“Uhm, are you going to stay?” He looked at her, saw her eyes pooling and she sniffled. “Please?”Her smile nearly broke his heart when she replied, “Nowhere better to be.”“Good. After we eat, let's get that scrape taken care of.”“Okay.”They stayed, talking over the small empty plate.“Where are you from?” he asked.“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis.”“No shit! Me too!”“No shit!”“No shit. Where?”“Robbinsdale.”“Golden Valley.”“No shit?”“No shit.”The two suburbs were neighbors, Robbinsdale more middle class than Golden Valley, which tended to be more upper middle class, a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers and professors, his dad being of the latter type.Fate.“You work around here?” she asked, since Joe had dressed up in a jacket and tie, the tie loose around his neck.“I used to,” he told her. “I'm actually applying for jobs presently.”“Presently,” she giggled.“Sorry. I tend to talk like I have a stick up my butt.”“No, it's cute.”“Glad you think so,” he chuckled.“How's the job search going?” she asked.“Not great unfortunately. My uncle's an executive at the William Morris Agency, and I hoped that might help, but I guess he's against nepotism. It's possible I'll get a job in their mail room. I applied at other offices, but I'm making a career change, or hoping to, and have got little experience.”“From what?” she asked.“I used to be a waiter at Max's Kansas City.”“No shit!”“No shit.”“Why not stay there?”“I needed a change,” he murmured, unconsciously stroking his arm.Jenny sensing Joe's discomfort regarding the subject wisely ended that line of inquiry. “What's the William Morris Agency?” she asked instead.“It's one of the largest talent agencies in America,” he told her.“Cool.”“Yeah. It's had its perks. Getting turned on to Bowie early because my uncle wrote the contract that signed him. Meeting cool stars at a party at his house upstate. Going to openings like the movie Hair and Apocalypse Now, the last a brand new print and sitting close.”“Is that cool?” she asked.“Pretty cool,” he chuckled.When they left the automat, he told her, “Let's get you some anti-bacteria for your scrape and Band-Aids. I know a drugstore nearby.”“You don't have anything at home?” she asked, surprising him.“Um…you sure?”“I'm sure,” she smiled, and he could see those pretty blue eyes pool again.“I can get something on the way,” he decided.“Great!”Since the drugstore was close by, he went there anyway, and while getting the first aid stuff, she waited for him near the counter. “Need any of these?” she blushed, pointing to the rack of condoms.His cock stiffened in his pants while he grabbed a sixpack of lubricated Trojans. She stayed his hand and grabbed a twelve pack instead. “Holy shit,” he thought.Both were blushing while he made the purchase.They walked over to Grand Central and took the subway south to Fourteenth Street close to where he lived. They entered a door between a couple non-descript store fronts and climbed the stairs three floors, Joe unlocking a door on the left at the top. Fortunately none of his roommates were around in the shared area, probably sleeping since they tended to keep vampire hours, and Joe guided Jenny down a hallway, taking a sharp right and, pushing aside a beaded curtain, gestured her through. He had by far the largest bedroom in the three bedroom apartment, a couple large windows unfortunately facing the wall of another building. Unfortunate not for the view, but for the easy access from the roof to the room, the probable path taken when someone broke in and stole his record collection and his typewriter not long before. Or they could have just walked in, because he knew the probable culprit, since he'd seen the junkie just off St. Marks selling his records, a regular at Max's.“Sorry for the mess,” he apologized, and Joe was a definite slob.“No problem,” she responded. “Beggars can't be choosers.”“Jenny?”“Mind if I take a shower?” she sniffled.“Not at all. Just a second.” He knelt in front of a small cabinet and grabbed a towel for her. “The red door on the right,” he told her.For some reason they'd painted the bathroom a deep red, including the door, the rest of the apartment with white walls.He cleaned up his place while she showered, neatening the books and papers on the coffee table, the table on which he used to type before losing his typewriter, and tossing clothes into a gunny sack he used to tote down to go to the nearest laundromat a block or so away.She returned carrying her clothes and her bag, wearing the towel with it tucked between her cleavage, more of it than he expected, and when she unceremoniously dropped the towel, she sported perky b cup breasts, all the more substantial looking on her petite frame. She was skinny but fortunately not completely starved, no bones jutting out, her belly youthfully firm with just a hint of convexity, and her full bush, being blonde, seemed less substantial than if it were dark. Her waist curved subtly, neither what some would call child bearing hips, but not boyish either. This was definitely a woman.“Like what you see?” she smiled, turning, and showing him a perfect firm round ass. He also noticed muscled thighs and her arms even had some definition.“Wow,” he said. “You're definitely in shape.”“Dreams of being a prima ballerina,” she sniffled.He sat on the bed and patted his lap. “Come here.”“You have way too many clothes on,” she sniffled and giggled.“Come here, Jenny,” he said more forcefully.She sat on his lap sideways. He reluctantly kept his hands off her.“Tell me,” he said.“You don't want to fuck me?”“Of course I do. Tell me.”She sobbed. Only then did he embrace her across her middle, her face ending up against his chest. He could feel the tears wet his shirt. “Tell me,” he repeated.“I…had to,” she choked out.“Had to?”“Your shirt,” she murmured, pulling her head away.“It's okay,” he insisted, gently pulling her head back.“I auditioned over the years to get into ballet school here, but no takers,” she managed to say. “I wanted to be a ballerina but I guess I'm not good enough.”“Best to know I guess,” Joe tried.“It's not that. Oh, okay that kind of sucked, but mostly I wanted to get away.”“From?”“Everything!”“Including?”“My mother's cruel disappointment. She'd been a ballerina until she had me. My boyfriend turning out to be gay. Another boy practically raping me instead making sure I was ready. My father…”“Did he…?”“No, but he was working up to it. Probably looked at me like I was my mom when I was her age or younger I guess. He'd be affectionate, too affectionate as it turned out. He touched me where he shouldn't, not directly but close, you know. I guess I didn't believe it, but it turned out he was actually being shy, and eventually brought my hand to his crotch which got me off him immediately. The last straw…I woke up with him in my bed. I screamed and punched like in his diaphragm which took his wind. Maybe I should have punched lower, but I wanted to be nowhere near that, and when I raced out the room, my mother plods over and my dad says some bullshit about me seducing him, and since it was all about jealousy, him being more affectionate to me, and disappointment, she fucking believed him.“I'm of course freaking out, everything…and then this…but I managed to take some breaths, calming down, and told my mom if she wanted rid of me I needed money. They only had a couple hundred around but my mom takes me to her bank, gets me another five hundred, drives me to the bus station, buys me a ticket to New York, my demand, with her credit card. She actually offered one to me, but I told her she'd probably close it and have me arrested or something, and the bitch shrugged. And I'm like, ‘You're a fucking cunt.' And she's saying I'm a useless slut.”“Sorry,” Joe apologized.“I'm the sorry one,” Jenny actually chuckled.“But…it doesn't sound like sex…”Jenny shifted around so that she faced him, straddling his lap. “I got hit on by fucking pimps, Joe, as soon as I got off the fucking bus at Penn station. I'm not as naïve as I look.”“But you don't know me.”“Like you're a psycho? You don't seem the type and in a way I don't fucking care. A rapist probably wouldn't have brought me home. The hotel I stayed at this creepy guy kept staring at me in the lobby and ended up following me to my fucking floor, so I like got out quick out of there, practically running. And I didn't even dare shower there since the shower room was fucking shared and fucking groady. I was actually headed to Grand Central when we collided, thinking I'd try taking a train down to twenty-third, staying at the Chelsea or something, just to do something cool while I was here and still alive. So Joe, I guess you're the best choice I've had so far.” She kissed him, pulling off the jacket he still wore and unbuttoning his shirt.He broke the kiss when he tossed aside the tie, then lifted her and set her on her back on the bed. He finished the unbuttoning and tossed aside his shirt.“Nice,” she smiled, stroking his chest. Joe didn't work out, but being young, just twenty-one, and working hard at his job as a waiter, kept him slim and slimly muscled.He kept his pants on when he made love to her lying beside her on his side. Kisses continued for a while, both enjoying it especially when tongues were involved, her breath tasting of toothpaste and his presumably not offensive, while his hand began exploring the rest of her. The hand took the weight of her breasts, teasingly moving on before a direct attack on her small nipples to linger on her taut belly and moving teasing across her pudendum, through her soft patch of blond hair, before feeling the smoothness of her thighs and the firmness of muscles, and then under her, lifting her slightly by her firm ass, followed by sliding along her back, across her shoulder and returning to her breasts, fingers moving in on her nipples, caressing and tugging gently at each one, making her gasp into his mouth.Only then did he end the kiss, bringing his mouth to the exploration, finding thrills for her at her ear and neck before moving to her breasts and nipples. Once each one had been appreciated for a while, the second sending his hand down slowly, eventually fingers discovering the dampness of her labia, rimming the edges, his mouth followed the same trail as his hand, and when it reached where she wanted it, he shifted his body between her widened legs and his tongue lapped across her clit, the first touch of it, and she lifted her middle and moaned.Both fingers and mouth remained there, working her gradually to her first climax via a man, especially intense when he stroked her g spot, his other hand tugging at her nipples, measuring the squeeze and building on it since she seemed to handle ever more pressure there.“Joe,” she murmured once she recovered, and smiled when he got up and got naked for her. “Oh my,” she commented at his length, on the thicker side, and definitely longer than the two she'd seen by at least a couple inches.“I'll be gentle,” he promised, opening a condom and rolling it on and moving between her thighs. He brought her hand to his cock to guide him, and she brought it where she wanted it and he slowly pushed in.“Oh fuck!” she moaned.“Too much?” he asked reluctantly.“Don't you fucking stop!” she declared.He pushed into one of the tightest sheathes he'd ever felt and realized he wouldn't last and told her.“Just fuck me,” she insisted, her legs wrapping his thighs as emphasis.Going slow probably helped delay the inevitable, seeming to open her up with each deeper stroke. In the end, he nudged at her cervix, thankfully with his cock completely inside her. He'd known girls her size, even taller, where he had to be careful about the impact there, usually no more than an inch to spare, but enough to cause pain. Not this time. Touching it made her growl, but in a good way.He decided to exploit that, grinding into her, pubic bone against pubic bone which affected her clit too, and just pulling out a couple inches before thrusting in. She seemed fine with that, even enjoying it, so he kept it up while his hands drew in to work fingers and thumbs on her nipples.She began meeting his thrusts with lifts, and her hands grabbed his ass cheeks, and she began pulling on his flesh there, wanting longer strokes it seemed, but he waited until she grabbed hard, closing on being painful, her nails thankfully short, he'd learn later she tended to nibble on them when nervous, and he'd actually seen a little of that in the automat, and she pressed against him one more time before announcing her climax with, “Oh my fucking God!” rather loudly at a high growl. And when she loosened her grip, only then did he abandon himself to fully fucking her, long, ever faster strokes for only seconds before he pressed deep, pushing against her cervix, and cumming.“Joe,” she murmured, her hands pushing his chest.“Sorry,” he responded, hugging her to him and turning them over. He'd reached the last of his ejaculations, every one intense, and reached down to hold the condom to his penis while shifting her higher with his legs.“Mmm,” she responded when it slid out. She shivered a little too as if feeling a last echo of her orgasm.“It'll be better next time,” he promised.She chuckled weakly.“What?” he asked.She shifted forward. Since both of their bodies had fairly equal proportions of legs to torsos, she had to scoot up a bit, her legs straddling his abdomen, her damp pussy pressing into it, for her to look eye to eye with him. Her hands pressed his shoulders to put her face above his.“That was several magnitudes better than the last and only fuck I've had,” she explained.“I thought it was making love,” he argued.“Don't be pedantic, Joe,” she smirked, surprising him.“Pedantic?”“You know what I mean.”“Of course, but…”“I'm smarter than I look.”“I don't believe in the dumb blonde myth.”“I've met several, and not all blondes.”“School?”“And fellow dancers, although most were dedicated enough to be smart too I suppose. Learning to put the time in to do the best you can both in dancing and studying.”“Makes sense. So school…?”“I would have graduated this spring if I hadn't had to run away.”“GED?” he asked.“Probably. I don't imagine going to school for one quarter. You?”“School?”“Yeah.”“I went to Bard in upstate New York for a couple years, but quit because it was ridiculous having parents spend that much money for me to study to be a poet.”“You're a poet?”“Not much recently. I thought New York would be inspiring, but mostly it's been distracting. I'm also interested in filmmaking, like the experimental kind, so no more lucrative. I still have a Bolex sixteen millimeter camera which fortunately the thieves never found.”“Thieves?”“The problem with living amongst junkies. Let me show you something.”He lifted his left arm and she caressed a line of marks near his inner elbow area.“Are those…?”“Tracks. Only one is fairly fresh. It's why I quit Max's: too much temptation. Living here too, but right now I can't afford to move. A friend of mine OD'd and died, and another almost did and I ended up keeping him alive. It was the last straw, and I realized that'd be me, or it'd just be a spiral of inertia, all about the next fix and nothing else, so I quit. Luckily I wasn't too strung out and basically hung with my folks for a week when my dad had his sabbatical in DC this past winter. I drank a bit there, but my parents seemed none the wiser. Anyway, when I came back to work planning to keep my tips instead of spending them all, I did okay until I didn't one day, succumbing to temptation, and quit after that.”“When was that?”“A week ago. I've been job hunting ever since.”“Lucky for me,” she grinned and shifted around, pulling off the used condom and handing it to him carefully and he managed to toss it atop his underpants while she enveloped his penis in her mouth. He worried about her lack of experience, mostly worried about her teeth, but she proved quite capable. He nudged her to straddle his face and had to bend his back a little, supported by his arms so fingers weren't available, and mostly kept her pleasure at a quiet purr, not distracting her from her surprisingly effective endeavors.Once she'd got him hard, she bounced off the bed, found a condom and rolled it on with some study and climbed on and guided him back inside her, carefully, stroke by stroke, sending him deep. Once there, she began her ride, this time having the full effect of his entire cock, to the point she needed to bring it back to her slit when it slipped out a couple times, but seemed to get the length of him soon enough and began riding him at a medium fast clip.He watched the roll and bounce of her perky tits before stilling them with his hands, one letting go to guide her hand to her clit. From that she worked herself into a frenzy, finally shifting down and rolling atop him to achieve her orgasm. Fortunately it always took longer for Joe to cum when a woman took the cowgirl position.After, she somehow turned around while he remained inside and moved her body down, and he realized what she wanted, moving from beneath her, clutching her hips, and pulling her into him in a doggy style position. He shifted, letting go of the hips and bringing one hand to her hanging tits and the other to her clit, practically holding her up with the latter hand, and like he had before, let himself go fucking her hard and fast until he came, happily not long after she did.“Fuck Joe,” she commented softly after.“Yeah,” Joe agreed.She did the securing of the condom to his penis and they soon took the same position as they had before, her head resting on his chest.“Can I stay?” she asked quietly and shyly.“As long as you want.”“Thanks.”by maxicue for Literotica.This is the first chapter of a novel. The rest of the published chapters are found at the maxicue library of Literotica.Fate's Embrace: 6 Part Series

The Wee county had a big visitor yesterday as US President Joe Biden landed in Carlingford and Dundalk. Andrea was joined by Bobby Wain, from McAteers The Food House in Dundalk and Donal McGeough, Owner of the Windsor Bar in Dundalk to discuss meeting President Biden…

We've been told off-record that Joe Biden might be Irish. Obviously, unattributable. So keep it under your hat. He's the latest in a long line of US Presidents who feels the pull of the Emerald Isle very strongly and traces his ancestry back there by 180 years. But he begins the day in Belfast - reflecting on the Good Friday peace accord 25 years ago. But can he get power-sharing back on track? Or is he too scared to even mention it? And we look at the delights and dangers of a world exclusive interview. Who has the power when Elon Musk is in the seat?You can watch our episodes in full at https://global-player.onelink.me/Br0x/VideosThe News Agents is a Global Player Original and a Persephonica Production.

Hi there! I'm Joe. And my parents left me in the streets when I was born.But I was picked up by a mafia boss and now, they regret their decision!Please Kindly share this podcast on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and so on by clicking the share button ........ thank you for your support ❤️..Thinking of engaging with Q&A Click this link

Jack's Tale written by OleGeorge Part 1 Walking through the woods is often relaxing and most enjoyable for me. The rolling hills of the country near me give me much to appreciate. The wind blows softly, creating echoing sounds as it pushes through the large trees and bushes. Part 2 … she said to me: “Let's get better acquainted. I'm KiKi”. “I'm Joe”, I replied. Part 3 KiKi was getting more and more turned on. She urged me to keep thrusting, and I tried to keep going, despite being exhausted from my recent orgasm. I had lost a little, but still was obviously still hitting the spot effectively.

Hi there, I'm Joe the host of ‘Performer Trauma'On this first episode the tables are turned and my dear friend and RADA alum, actress Sarah Twomey will interview me! We will talk about my funniest auditions, the worst advice I've ever been given, why I had a breakdown in the Capezio stockroom and how I ended up flyering a play in a wrestling singlet during pride…unpaid !  Strap in 

The antidote of addiction 

Two pedestrians collide fatefully.by  maxicue. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Joe slid through the crowd on the street, not in a hurry, just enjoying it, like it was some kind of game, call it Body Avoidance, a challenge of finding the gaps just large enough to pass through untouched while the bodies continued moving in somewhat predictable ways, though the unpredictable could always happen, adding to the challenge and the fun, that quick burst bypassing the unexpected shift. He loved this game ever since moving to New York, at first when he worked at a copy place in Grand Central Station (nearby where he happened to be sliding through at the moment), especially busy streets around there, especially at rush hours and lunch, and further challenged when he carried heavy packages of copies destined for publishing houses, often pocketing the cab money given to him to walk even farther through more busy streets carrying those burdens. And then when he became busboy and then waiter at the restaurant at Max's Kansas City, a punk club with the music upstairs and the restaurant where he worked downstairs, sliding through crowds of kids his age on weekend nights. It felt like a kind of dance, especially at the club, even with his own special tempo.This time though, for the first time ever as far as he could recall, he collided with someone who seemed to appear out of nowhere, his height of six and a half feet always helping his vision and his traversing perhaps missing her much smaller frame, at least a foot shorter, probably closer to a foot and a half, but more it seemed like she stepped into the narrow passage he'd found as if on purpose, finding the perfect moment for collision. But of course that would have been impossible, her knowing when to get in his way, when he'd happen to be sliding through at that very moment, unless fate could be considered purposeful.“Asshole,” the young woman growled from the concrete in which his impact sent her, landing on her ass and a hand that prevented something worse like concussion and scraping it for the trouble. With him stopped standing over her, the crowd flowed around the sudden impediment like cattle somehow avoiding stampeding, though less animal and more human since the flow went both ways.He looked down at a blonde waif, skinny and frail, her t shirt and jeans too big for her and looking well past new, the t shirt white with a band logo he was unfamiliar with showing every stain, and there were many, the jeans showing a small right kneecap where the cloth had frayed. The navy peacoat, too warm for the balmy, almost summerlike weather unusual this early in the year, splayed open.“I'm so sorry,” Joe exclaimed, and when his stretched out hand was avoided by her, he insisted, “Let me help you up.” She finally allowed his large hand to take hold of her small slim one aiding her to standing. “I didn't see you,” he added.“Obviously,” she smirked, adjusting her stuffed and scuffed red backpack on her shoulders.“Hungry?” he asked.“I could eat,” she half smiled.He guided her across the street and to the end of the block where one of the last of the Horn and Hardarts automats existed and put coins into the slots for her tuna sandwich and chips and for his egg salad. He bought her a Coke and he got coffee. She used the toilet there to clean her scrape amongst other things since she took a while, which worried him, thinking she might have run off, but of course she didn't, having food waiting for her.“I'm Joe,” he told her.“Jenny,” she replied before filling her mouth with a bite of sandwich.They said nothing for a while since she devoured her food, obviously needing it.“Anything else?” he asked.“Maybe a pie? The lemon meringue looked tempting.”“Okay if we share?” he asked.“That's fine.”“Uhm, are you going to stay?” He looked at her, saw her eyes pooling and she sniffled. “Please?”Her smile nearly broke his heart when she replied, “Nowhere better to be.”“Good. After we eat, let's get that scrape taken care of.”“Okay.”They stayed, talking over the small empty plate.“Where are you from?” he asked.“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis.”“No shit! Me too!”“No shit!”“No shit. Where?”“Robbinsdale.”“Golden Valley.”“No shit?”“No shit.”The two suburbs were neighbors, Robbinsdale more middle class than Golden Valley, which tended to be more upper middle class, a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers and professors, his dad being of the latter type.Fate.“You work around here?” she asked, since Joe had dressed up in a jacket and tie, the tie loose around his neck.“I used to,” he told her. “I'm actually applying for jobs presently.”“Presently,” she giggled.“Sorry. I tend to talk like I have a stick up my butt.”“No, it's cute.”“Glad you think so,” he chuckled.“How's the job search going?” she asked.“Not great unfortunately. My uncle's an executive at the William Morris Agency, and I hoped that might help, but I guess he's against nepotism. It's possible I'll get a job in their mail room. I applied at other offices, but I'm making a career change, or hoping to, and have got little experience.”“From what?” she asked.“I used to be a waiter at Max's Kansas City.”“No shit!”“No shit.”“Why not stay there?”“I needed a change,” he murmured, unconsciously stroking his arm.Jenny sensing Joe's discomfort regarding the subject wisely ended that line of inquiry. “What's the William Morris Agency?” she asked instead.“It's one of the largest talent agencies in America,” he told her.“Cool.”“Yeah. It's had its perks. Getting turned on to Bowie early because my uncle wrote the contract that signed him. Meeting cool stars at a party at his house upstate. Going to openings like the movie Hair and Apocalypse Now, the last a brand new print and sitting close.”“Is that cool?” she asked.“Pretty cool,” he chuckled.When they left the automat, he told her, “Let's get you some anti-bacteria for your scrape and Band-Aids. I know a drugstore nearby.”“You don't have anything at home?” she asked, surprising him.“Um…you sure?”“I'm sure,” she smiled, and he could see those pretty blue eyes pool again.“I can get something on the way,” he decided.“Great!”Since the drugstore was close by, he went there anyway, and while getting the first aid stuff, she waited for him near the counter. “Need any of these?” she blushed, pointing to the rack of condoms.His cock stiffened in his pants while he grabbed a sixpack of lubricated Trojans. She stayed his hand and grabbed a twelve pack instead. “Holy shit,” he thought.Both were blushing while he made the purchase.They walked over to Grand Central and took the subway south to Fourteenth Street close to where he lived. They entered a door between a couple non-descript store fronts and climbed the stairs three floors, Joe unlocking a door on the left at the top. Fortunately none of his roommates were around in the shared area, probably sleeping since they tended to keep vampire hours, and Joe guided Jenny down a hallway, taking a sharp right and, pushing aside a beaded curtain, gestured her through. He had by far the largest bedroom in the three bedroom apartment, a couple large windows unfortunately facing the wall of another building. Unfortunate not for the view, but for the easy access from the roof to the room, the probable path taken when someone broke in and stole his record collection and his typewriter not long before. Or they could have just walked in, because he knew the probable culprit, since he'd seen the junkie just off St. Marks selling his records, a regular at Max's.“Sorry for the mess,” he apologized, and Joe was a definite slob.“No problem,” she responded. “Beggars can't be choosers.”“Jenny?”“Mind if I take a shower?” she sniffled.“Not at all. Just a second.” He knelt in front of a small cabinet and grabbed a towel for her. “The red door on the right,” he told her.For some reason they'd painted the bathroom a deep red, including the door, the rest of the apartment with white walls.He cleaned up his place while she showered, neatening the books and papers on the coffee table, the table on which he used to type before losing his typewriter, and tossing clothes into a gunny sack he used to tote down to go to the nearest laundromat a block or so away.She returned carrying her clothes and her bag, wearing the towel with it tucked between her cleavage, more of it than he expected, and when she unceremoniously dropped the towel, she sported perky b cup breasts, all the more substantial looking on her petite frame. She was skinny but fortunately not completely starved, no bones jutting out, her belly youthfully firm with just a hint of convexity, and her full bush, being blonde, seemed less substantial than if it were dark. Her waist curved subtly, neither what some would call child bearing hips, but not boyish either. This was definitely a woman.“Like what you see?” she smiled, turning, and showing him a perfect firm round ass. He also noticed muscled thighs and her arms even had some definition.“Wow,” he said. “You're definitely in shape.”“Dreams of being a prima ballerina,” she sniffled.He sat on the bed and patted his lap. “Come here.”“You have way too many clothes on,” she sniffled and giggled.“Come here, Jenny,” he said more forcefully.She sat on his lap sideways. He reluctantly kept his hands off her.“Tell me,” he said.“You don't want to fuck me?”“Of course I do. Tell me.”She sobbed. Only then did he embrace her across her middle, her face ending up against his chest. He could feel the tears wet his shirt. “Tell me,” he repeated.“I…had to,” she choked out.“Had to?”“Your shirt,” she murmured, pulling her head away.“It's okay,” he insisted, gently pulling her head back.“I auditioned over the years to get into ballet school here, but no takers,” she managed to say. “I wanted to be a ballerina but I guess I'm not good enough.”“Best to know I guess,” Joe tried.“It's not that. Oh, okay that kind of sucked, but mostly I wanted to get away.”“From?”“Everything!”“Including?”“My mother's cruel disappointment. She'd been a ballerina until she had me. My boyfriend turning out to be gay. Another boy practically raping me instead making sure I was ready. My father…”“Did he…?”“No, but he was working up to it. Probably looked at me like I was my mom when I was her age or younger I guess. He'd be affectionate, too affectionate as it turned out. He touched me where he shouldn't, not directly but close, you know. I guess I didn't believe it, but it turned out he was actually being shy, and eventually brought my hand to his crotch which got me off him immediately. The last straw…I woke up with him in my bed. I screamed and punched like in his diaphragm which took his wind. Maybe I should have punched lower, but I wanted to be nowhere near that, and when I raced out the room, my mother plods over and my dad says some bullshit about me seducing him, and since it was all about jealousy, him being more affectionate to me, and disappointment, she fucking believed him.“I'm of course freaking out, everything…and then this…but I managed to take some breaths, calming down, and told my mom if she wanted rid of me I needed money. They only had a couple hundred around but my mom takes me to her bank, gets me another five hundred, drives me to the bus station, buys me a ticket to New York, my demand, with her credit card. She actually offered one to me, but I told her she'd probably close it and have me arrested or something, and the bitch shrugged. And I'm like, ‘You're a fucking cunt.' And she's saying I'm a useless slut.”“Sorry,” Joe apologized.“I'm the sorry one,” Jenny actually chuckled.“But…it doesn't sound like sex…”Jenny shifted around so that she faced him, straddling his lap. “I got hit on by fucking pimps, Joe, as soon as I got off the fucking bus at Penn station. I'm not as naïve as I look.”“But you don't know me.”“Like you're a psycho? You don't seem the type and in a way I don't fucking care. A rapist probably wouldn't have brought me home. The hotel I stayed at this creepy guy kept staring at me in the lobby and ended up following me to my fucking floor, so I like got out quick out of there, practically running. And I didn't even dare shower there since the shower room was fucking shared and fucking groady. I was actually headed to Grand Central when we collided, thinking I'd try taking a train down to twenty-third, staying at the Chelsea or something, just to do something cool while I was here and still alive. So Joe, I guess you're the best choice I've had so far.” She kissed him, pulling off the jacket he still wore and unbuttoning his shirt.He broke the kiss when he tossed aside the tie, then lifted her and set her on her back on the bed. He finished the unbuttoning and tossed aside his shirt.“Nice,” she smiled, stroking his chest. Joe didn't work out, but being young, just twenty-one, and working hard at his job as a waiter, kept him slim and slimly muscled.He kept his pants on when he made love to her lying beside her on his side. Kisses continued for a while, both enjoying it especially when tongues were involved, her breath tasting of toothpaste and his presumably not offensive, while his hand began exploring the rest of her. The hand took the weight of her breasts, teasingly moving on before a direct attack on her small nipples to linger on her taut belly and moving teasing across her pudendum, through her soft patch of blond hair, before feeling the smoothness of her thighs and the firmness of muscles, and then under her, lifting her slightly by her firm ass, followed by sliding along her back, across her shoulder and returning to her breasts, fingers moving in on her nipples, caressing and tugging gently at each one, making her gasp into his mouth.Only then did he end the kiss, bringing his mouth to the exploration, finding thrills for her at her ear and neck before moving to her breasts and nipples. Once each one had been appreciated for a while, the second sending his hand down slowly, eventually fingers discovering the dampness of her labia, rimming the edges, his mouth followed the same trail as his hand, and when it reached where she wanted it, he shifted his body between her widened legs and his tongue lapped across her clit, the first touch of it, and she lifted her middle and moaned.Both fingers and mouth remained there, working her gradually to her first climax via a man, especially intense when he stroked her g spot, his other hand tugging at her nipples, measuring the squeeze and building on it since she seemed to handle ever more pressure there.“Joe,” she murmured once she recovered, and smiled when he got up and got naked for her. “Oh my,” she commented at his length, on the thicker side, and definitely longer than the two she'd seen by at least a couple inches.“I'll be gentle,” he promised, opening a condom and rolling it on and moving between her thighs. He brought her hand to his cock to guide him, and she brought it where she wanted it and he slowly pushed in.“Oh fuck!” she moaned.“Too much?” he asked reluctantly.“Don't you fucking stop!” she declared.He pushed into one of the tightest sheathes he'd ever felt and realized he wouldn't last and told her.“Just fuck me,” she insisted, her legs wrapping his thighs as emphasis.Going slow probably helped delay the inevitable, seeming to open her up with each deeper stroke. In the end, he nudged at her cervix, thankfully with his cock completely inside her. He'd known girls her size, even taller, where he had to be careful about the impact there, usually no more than an inch to spare, but enough to cause pain. Not this time. Touching it made her growl, but in a good way.He decided to exploit that, grinding into her, pubic bone against pubic bone which affected her clit too, and just pulling out a couple inches before thrusting in. She seemed fine with that, even enjoying it, so he kept it up while his hands drew in to work fingers and thumbs on her nipples.She began meeting his thrusts with lifts, and her hands grabbed his ass cheeks, and she began pulling on his flesh there, wanting longer strokes it seemed, but he waited until she grabbed hard, closing on being painful, her nails thankfully short, he'd learn later she tended to nibble on them when nervous, and he'd actually seen a little of that in the automat, and she pressed against him one more time before announcing her climax with, “Oh my fucking God!” rather loudly at a high growl. And when she loosened her grip, only then did he abandon himself to fully fucking her, long, ever faster strokes for only seconds before he pressed deep, pushing against her cervix, and cumming.“Joe,” she murmured, her hands pushing his chest.“Sorry,” he responded, hugging her to him and turning them over. He'd reached the last of his ejaculations, every one intense, and reached down to hold the condom to his penis while shifting her higher with his legs.“Mmm,” she responded when it slid out. She shivered a little too as if feeling a last echo of her orgasm.“It'll be better next time,” he promised.She chuckled weakly.“What?” he asked.She shifted forward. Since both of their bodies had fairly equal proportions of legs to torsos, she had to scoot up a bit, her legs straddling his abdomen, her damp pussy pressing into it, for her to look eye to eye with him. Her hands pressed his shoulders to put her face above his.“That was several magnitudes better than the last and only fuck I've had,” she explained.“I thought it was making love,” he argued.“Don't be pedantic, Joe,” she smirked, surprising him.“Pedantic?”“You know what I mean.”“Of course, but…”“I'm smarter than I look.”“I don't believe in the dumb blonde myth.”“I've met several, and not all blondes.”“School?”“And fellow dancers, although most were dedicated enough to be smart too I suppose. Learning to put the time in to do the best you can both in dancing and studying.”“Makes sense. So school…?”“I would have graduated this spring if I hadn't had to run away.”“GED?” he asked.“Probably. I don't imagine going to school for one quarter. You?”“School?”“Yeah.”“I went to Bard in upstate New York for a couple years, but quit because it was ridiculous having parents spend that much money for me to study to be a poet.”“You're a poet?”“Not much recently. I thought New York would be inspiring, but mostly it's been distracting. I'm also interested in filmmaking, like the experimental kind, so no more lucrative. I still have a Bolex sixteen millimeter camera which fortunately the thieves never found.”“Thieves?”“The problem with living amongst junkies. Let me show you something.”He lifted his left arm and she caressed a line of marks near his inner elbow area.“Are those…?”“Tracks. Only one is fairly fresh. It's why I quit Max's: too much temptation. Living here too, but right now I can't afford to move. A friend of mine OD'd and died, and another almost did and I ended up keeping him alive. It was the last straw, and I realized that'd be me, or it'd just be a spiral of inertia, all about the next fix and nothing else, so I quit. Luckily I wasn't too strung out and basically hung with my folks for a week when my dad had his sabbatical in DC this past winter. I drank a bit there, but my parents seemed none the wiser. Anyway, when I came back to work planning to keep my tips instead of spending them all, I did okay until I didn't one day, succumbing to temptation, and quit after that.”“When was that?”“A week ago. I've been job hunting ever since.”“Lucky for me,” she grinned and shifted around, pulling off the used condom and handing it to him carefully and he managed to toss it atop his underpants while she enveloped his penis in her mouth. He worried about her lack of experience, mostly worried about her teeth, but she proved quite capable. He nudged her to straddle his face and had to bend his back a little, supported by his arms so fingers weren't available, and mostly kept her pleasure at a quiet purr, not distracting her from her surprisingly effective endeavors.Once she'd got him hard, she bounced off the bed, found a condom and rolled it on with some study and climbed on and guided him back inside her, carefully, stroke by stroke, sending him deep. Once there, she began her ride, this time having the full effect of his entire cock, to the point she needed to bring it back to her slit when it slipped out a couple times, but seemed to get the length of him soon enough and began riding him at a medium fast clip.He watched the roll and bounce of her perky tits before stilling them with his hands, one letting go to guide her hand to her clit. From that she worked herself into a frenzy, finally shifting down and rolling atop him to achieve her orgasm. Fortunately it always took longer for Joe to cum when a woman took the cowgirl position.After, she somehow turned around while he remained inside and moved her body down, and he realized what she wanted, moving from beneath her, clutching her hips, and pulling her into him in a doggy style position. He shifted, letting go of the hips and bringing one hand to her hanging tits and the other to her clit, practically holding her up with the latter hand, and like he had before, let himself go fucking her hard and fast until he came, happily not long after she did.“Fuck Joe,” she commented softly after.“Yeah,” Joe agreed.She did the securing of the condom to his penis and they soon took the same position as they had before, her head resting on his chest.“Can I stay?” she asked quietly and shyly.“As long as you want.”“Thanks.”by  maxicue for Literotica.This is the first chapter of a novel. The rest of the published chapters are found  at the  maxicue library of Literotica.Fate's Embrace: 6 Part Series.

Just like Ron Burgundy from "Anchorman," Joe Biden will read anything they put on the teleprompter. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris can't confirm Joe Biden is running again in 2024. Sri Lankan protestors storm the presidential palace and swim in the palatial pool. The World Games are in full swing here in Birmingham, Alabama. NASA prepares to unveil brand new images from space. A 17-year-old that started puberty blockers at age 13 talks about her regret and permanent changes to her body as she tries to de-transition. And lastly, we help come up with some team names for the Women's Football Alliance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a fiction author. The germ for a story idea would jump into my head, through some observation, and then would multiply and merge with other broodings and books I'd been reading. Hopefully, you are trying to go to sleep right now, as perhaps this episode will take you there, as it's going to be a long one. I'm going to summarize a story idea that I never wrote. The germ of this story popped into my head at the grocery store when I observed an elderly woman and a young businesswoman approach a fully stocked banana stand at the same time. That was it. Here's the short version of a story called The Fountain of Youth.A young businesswoman is rushing about to collect the items on her grocery list, while at the same time, in the same store, a thin, old woman, hunched over and unattractive, rides in a mobile cart. They both shop the produce aisle, and the elderly woman is slowly driving her cart toward a table that holds the bananas. Only a single bunch of green bananas remains. The young woman is swinging her basket, grabbing peppers and lettuce, while chatting on her phone. Before the old woman reaches the table, the young woman swoops over to the banana table and grabs the last bunch of bananas, unaware that the old woman is reaching for it. The old woman says, “Excuse me, but could I have a few of those bananas?” The young woman at first ignores her due to her phone conversation, but the old woman keeps talking. Annoyed, the young woman pauses her phone call to interact with the old woman, and upon hearing her request for the bananas, the young woman considers her strict diet of smoothies, her intermittent fasting plan, and her rigid exercise schedule and says, “No, I'm sorry.” The old woman pleads, “I can only get a ride to the store twice a week and I'm out of bananas, and my doctor recommends them for my heart health.” Then she coughs and wipes her mouth with a flannel shirt sleeve, which causes the young woman to recoil. The young woman cannot find the charity to give the old woman any of the green bananas and tells her, “Sorry, I got here first. Better luck next time.” She puts the phone back to her ear and attempts to resume the conversation with her friend, but she hears a response from the old woman. The young woman puts the phone down again. She can sense the old woman has said something rude. She asks, “I'm sorry, but what did you say? I didn't hear you.”The old woman says, “I said, may you age with those bananas.” The young woman is stunned at first, but then laughs out loud, and with condescension says to the poor woman, “You are adorable. Pathetic, but adorable.” And with that the two women part ways. The young woman drives home in her BMW 3-Series and doesn't think about the comment any further. She hits the gym, engages in some hot sex with her manscaped boyfriend who lives with her, and ends the day watching a TV show while perfecting her presentation for work. Over the next few days, she eats a few of the bananas, which have now turned golden yellow. Everything in her life is perfect. But five days after the interaction at the grocery store, she is in the bathroom and notices a spot on her hand that she has never seen before, a small brown spot, slightly irregular in shape, and she makes a mental note of it but rushes off to work. The following day she goes for a run in the hot sun with her hairless boyfriend, and they talk about family and kids briefly but veer off into social issues and political problems that face the future of the world. When she arrives home, her boyfriend says to her, “Wow, look at those freckles! It's like they just appeared on your nose and cheeks.” She has never had freckles, and doesn't believe him until she goes to shower and looks in the mirror. Her face now has freckles. Very normal freckles, but unexpected freckles that were unplanned and unwanted. Then she suddenly remembers the little spot on her hand, and notices that it has grown ever so slightly. In a scoff, she remembers the bananas. She remembers the comment from the old woman, but laughs nervously, and while showering she walks out of the bathroom dripping in her towel to inspect the bananas on the counter. One of the bananas has begun to show spots. The next day the spot on her hand has grown splotchy, and she is no longer laughing but considering the possibility that the old woman has somehow cursed her. She begins to find ways to preserve the bananas, first trying to keep them at an exact temperature, but eventually finding so many spots forming that she has to freeze them, and her skin becomes more blotted. She attempts to find the old woman at the grocery store, returning at the same time each day but never meets her. A doctor's visit diagnoses her with “Bronzing,” and she begins seeing a dermatologist and two separate skin specialists. Her obsession with preserving her youth becomes maniacal, as she feels her destiny is now somehow linked to the bananas. After a year, a succession of maddening events causes her to unravel. Her boyfriend's mother asks innocently about potential grandchildren. Feeling badgered, the young woman admits she does not want children due to the effect on a woman's body and alludes to a “miscarriage” in her past that creates a rift with her boyfriend. He breaks up with her, and soon her friends drift away into family life. She has a horrible scare when her mother housesits for her while she is away on a business trip. From the airplane, after landing, she calls her mother and amid the obnoxious sounds of screaming infant on the plane, her mother tells her that she is “making banana bread with two of the frozen bananas,” leading to a frantic freakout on the airplane that nearly gets her arrested. She drives home in a panic, unloading her anger and long held resentments against her mother, while fanning the banana bread and wrapping it in plastic. A falling out between mother and daughter happens that is never again healed. The years begin to pass by and she maintains a youthful look, managing the skin condition with great care and vigilance. She spends large amounts of her earnings on skin-care and aging products. As she enters her fifties, she is still spending most of her time with twenty to thirty year olds. Her career soars and by the age of fifty-five she moves into the role of Vice President of People Operations. Fast forward: she is sitting alone in a one bedroom apartment at age seventy-five, her lips and face full of botox, with bottles of prescriptions and hormones spread out on a coffee table. She is mutilated by plastic surgeries, wearing excess makeup, and living on shakes, powders, and supplements. Childless and friendless, with few family connections remaining, in her living room chair she scrolls on her phone, researching therapeutic cloning techniques. She sets down her phone and gets out of the chair, to sit on the floor to do her daily meditation and mindful breathing. In the silence, an electric hum from the corner of the room permeates the air, but somehow this sound comforts her. The soft buzzing comes from a special freezer, with a backup battery. In the corner of the room is a mini-freezer that holds the last remaining moldy and cursed banana, frozen and sealed in extreme cold. She smiles in her meditation, proud that she has proved the old woman wrong, and has preserved her youth. The end.I never wrote the full story. I thought about the story for days until I could see the story unfold to where it wanted to take me, or where I wanted to take it. Sometimes I'm not sure how the flow happens. This is the strange thing that happens once you start writing. If the urge to “be a writer” bites you, then you will start writing stories and you will spend a lot of time thinking about stories you want to write. The urge came to me in 1999 when I started typing out poems and short stories. I remember reading books and feeling disappointed in the plot or characters and decided that perhaps I could write better than those authors. In 2000, I went for a run one day and decided halfway through that I needed to return home to my house and begin writing, and I ran home with urgency and did just that. Thus began an obsession around writing. Then I began to realize that writing stories is more difficult than I thought, but the urge to produce and create consumed my days and nights. This continued for about fifteen years.Thinking of stories is one thing. Writing them in a compelling way is far more difficult. The idea for a story is the simple part, because many people have ideas for stories and novels floating around in their heads. Consider how many people have great business ideas or inventions in their mind, but cannot or have not put them into physical form. With stories, it's the same. To flesh out and write the story is difficult because it moves from being a dream into a grueling task, like when you go from thinking about getting in shape to actually joining a gym or counting calories. It's much easier to imagine a result than to work for it, because the work is neither glamorous nor easy. A significant amount of time is needed to write the actual stories. Writing requires dedication and resolve, but when I was writing and doing the work, I felt compelled to get the story out, to the point that I needed to get it out of my brain and onto paper or computer screen. This same notion began anew once I found the urge to do marathons and triathlons. I needed to get out and run or bike. The need felt unstoppable because of the desire for the goal of completing the upcoming race to the best of my ability. Both writing and racing brought about this mania. The story just had to be written, making it almost like a lust, or a sickness. This baby had to be born. Creative desires can be like any other addiction. Watch what happens to someone who is clearly addicted to their phone if he or she cannot find it. The phone-addict will begin to get antsy and squirm, and start looking, searching, until they get irritated and cannot live in their skin until the phone is found. Or think of a regular marijauna user or daily drinker you know who is “not addicted” but turns into a completely different person if their drug is taken away. They assure you that they can quit any time that they want to, but for some reason never do, because they actually cannot. The sickness demands the underlying need to be fulfilled. While nowhere as dramatic, this urge to write and “get the story out of my head” reminded me of a story about Caravaggio, the great Italian painter, while he was working on the Raising of Lazarus. Whether or not true, the tale reports that Caravaggio had a dead body exhumed for the painting, and told two of his models to hold the dead body so he could paint it. When they objected, he pulled out his knife and told them to stand still or he would make them just like the corpse they were holding. Clearly, this level of obsession shows that he had to get this painting out of his system, since he was willing to kill (and dig up bodies) in order to get the picture out of his head and onto the canvas.What's interesting is the urge to write can become an addiction, but as a creative pursuit never seemed like a problem. Oddly enough, when I talked to hunters, they would describe a similar “sickness” - a need to get into the woods, to be in nature in pursuit of a deer or a turkey or other small game. This description was strangely like the need to write or drink or smoke. There's a common thread in all of them. Initially, in those conversations I could not relate to hunters at all, but when I considered my own need to find a silent library to flesh out story ideas or to immerse myself in reading, I think my need for that refuge was not different from a fisherman seeking a quiet trout stream or a hunter hiking into a valley floor. Although hunting is shunned by much of modern society, the hunter feels and connects to something deep and visceral in our nature. The hunter is seeking what the artist or drunkard is seeking. What are we all after? We are searching for paradise. We are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful, but with different ideas about what that means and how to obtain it. Everyone is after those things, but some are unaware of why and if the “sickness” is not driven by the right motives, the pursuit becomes ugly. Some hunters are just out for blood. Some artists just want fame. Drunks (that are not like ordinary, calm drinkers) are seeking a direct escape to heaven, without the work of creating or capturing. Drunks and drug users want to take the elevator, not the stairs. At the root of our pursuits is the desire to reach something higher, because those three nouns - the good, the true, and the beautiful - are the only things that will ultimately satisfy us. But in our pursuit of these three things we can easily mashup temptations, distractions, and pride with that purity. The real reason hunters are hunting at all is to find meaning in their life, to experience fellowship with other men, to get approval from a group, to connect to their ancient instincts, and to stand in awe of nature and creation. I am not a hunter, but what I see in hunting is a kind of sacrifice and thanksgiving. While writing a story is creative, and hunting is for killing, there are curious parallels to the passion guiding both pursuits. To some degree, the published book is not unlike the trophy deer. In the end the book sits on the shelf, and the stuffed animal is displayed on the wall. The same happens with diplomas and exotic photos from vacations or medals from military service or even private memories of sexual conquests. We are chasing a desire that is difficult to describe, but we want to display it and let it be seen, to make a name for ourselves, to feel worthy, to amass a list of accolades that will in the end be mere phrases in our obituary as the world continues to turn without us. (I have to resist the urge to dive into the Tower of Babel story, but it's so relevant to this.) The banana story is about clinging to something, to a dream or idea, to a concept or want, and expecting that dream or fantasy to bring fulfillment. For the woman in the story, it's youth. For me, it was writing and being considered smart or creative. This idea of sacrificing your time, money, and energy to save your most beloved thing, is not a new story. I recall choosing to give up friendships and social gatherings in order to read or write, believing that the creation I was working on would bring fulfillment. I felt that for anyone to succeed or reach a goal that everything must be sacrificed. Marriage, children, socializing, weekends, nights, television, dining out, running errands, folding laundry - those things were for others, for those without a “noble” pursuit that I had. Full of myself, I was like Leona Helmsley when she said that “Only the little people pay taxes.” My inflated self wanted to believe in my invented mission. When pride of self takes over the mind, everyone else and everything else become “little” compared to the dream. Whenever it felt like the goal of writing the great novel was getting further away I would isolate with books or a laptop. “Wherever your treasure lies there will your heart be.” Thus I was willing to forego friendship and fellowship to be alone with the imaginary treasure. Unfortunately, it took years to realize that the treasure was actually just a warning light. The young woman in the story clinging to her youth is just a metaphor for my own obsession from age twenty to thirty to be “a writer.” What I didn't know is that crossroads would find me at three places in my life: marriage, children, and addiction. The avoidance to commitment to anything beyond my goals had to be shattered. But it didn't happen all at once. I still clung to the dream and goal of writing even after marriage and kids, which means my treasure was still in the wrong place. I was keeping things together, but when you have one foot in the fantasy world, the commitment to real relationships cracks. I could publicly declare myself as committed, but privately hedge my bets. But thankfully there was a day I recall sitting in a cubicle and realizing my future, where I could have a wife and family and dog, or I could remain alone and possibly get a book or two published. This realization changed my life, and I don't know how else to describe it except that there was a kind of guidance happening on that day, as I recall the cubical and the lighting and the place of business where it happened. Whether it was a guardian angel or good orderly direction or just plain sense clocking in for duty, I am grateful for that startling jolt, because it meant the first step away from my “self.” The goal of a quiet house with two or three books on a shelf suddenly seemed selfish and even foolish. At the same time I relished the idea of being like one of those lonely scholars or curmudgeonly writers who pursue their craft with such a rage to master it that they let their obsession rule their days. I worried that time would pass and that the creative years were short. I knew that the high energy of my early twenties would fade, as I saw my co-workers in their forties and fifties who had dreams of pontoons, cabins, and retirement. The evidence of creative atrophy was all around me in programmers whose white-hot urge to invent had burned down to the wick. Discussions of 401K and TV shows replaced the intensity of youth. I was judging them all, yes, but I was most often judging them for what aging and family life had seemed to strain out of them. They seemed like decaf coffee beans, washed out, with very few milligrams of caffeine left in them (which explains why so many of us drink so much coffee as we get older). I felt that two years in my twenties had to be worth twenty years of the old, tired, expired later years. What I failed to see is that my reckless living in my twenties was less fulfilling than what these middle-aged mothers and fathers felt about their own lives. They had raised families and done the long work of putting food on the table and doing late-night math homework and attending numerous music or sports activities and essentially giving up their goals to bring another to successful adulthood in the world. These fuddyduddies, who I thought had done so little, had done more than my imagined solitary writer would ever accomplish. That was the temptation that I yearned after: youth and fame. This was stoked by reading biographies of writers, which I treated like hagiographies. But the writers I admired were not like the saints, not at all. A misguided admiration of Hemingway and London and Fitzgerald only helped me justify alcohol abuse as if it were a virtue, and made it a sacrificial offering to creativity. If I was destroying myself, it was for the creative act. If madness was the price for creative grace, I was willing to sign my life for that loan. In fact, I sought out writers that were known drunkards, thinking that those authors had more depth, when in reality many of them wrote completely forgettable books. This is the temptation I accepted, as drinking and writing seemed like fitting accomplices. The urge to create is the germ, but piggybacking very closely on that positive goal is the fungus of desire for fame and approval. Sometimes I wonder what comes first - the desire to create, or the desire to be noticed, like a chicken-and-egg scenario. I think the “desire to be noticed” came first, because the desire to be noticed is really a desire to be loved. Thus in some cases the desire to create is a fig leaf we wear to mask the desire for love. We want to be noticed, because we think it will make us loved and respected. So what I really wanted was a stamp of approval for my behavior, but way underneath that was a desire for appreciation, stacked under layers of other manure and dirt. The manifestation of the need for love became visible in the pursuit of writing, but the inability to stop drinking once I started was the cry for help from underneath the pile of garbage. I wasn't interested in tattoos or piercings or coloring my hair or weird sex. We have different cries for help, and mine was just drinking. I convinced myself that heavy drinking was a righteous burden of all writers. See the trick? Did you catch it? A swap happened. The need for approval and love gets transplanted with some strange idea like this. I felt that drinking hard was the cross that writers must bear, and even something to be proud of. Perhaps this desire to drink guided me toward writing in the first place so that I could justify drinking, since writers and artists get a free pass for their madness. Writers who were not alcoholics, I felt, lacked the “gift.” Oddly enough, drinking is a cross to bear, not a gift, but when dealt with it ends up becoming a gift. What shocked me in the end is that these crosses can become a gift. This is why so many recovering addicts and alcoholics introduce themselves at recovery meetings saying, “I'm Jane, a grateful addict,” or “I'm Joe, a grateful alcoholic.” They realized when they turned back to God that the cross they took up was the greatest gift they ever received because it is the exact thing that forced them to change. How upside down we are once we re-name the vice as a virtue. This can be observed in our world all the time. We “flip the script,” to quote the TV show Cobra Kai, and make our fig leaf the identity of our life. I don't want to dive into the character of Hawk from Cobra Kai, but his “flipping the script” is his journey into his vice, which kills his virtue, until he returns to his true self and flips things back to right-side-up. The very thing that we are using to cover our nakedness, our fear, our feeling of inadequacy is what we need to remove in order to be healed. The wound hides beneath the vice and until it is exposed, there can be no healing. How can a physician heal something that cannot be seen? Cue up the Jesus words! (you knew it was coming):The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:11-12)The whole solution is right in those two verses. We want to turn our “sacrifice” into a virtue. Jesus says, “No, I don't want sacrifices, especially not bad sacrifices. No, I want your whole life. Now show me the wound!” He's practically shouting it like Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. “Show me the wound, Jerry!” These verses from Matthew make Jesus the undefeated and defending champion of both religion and psychiatry for two thousand years. I remember taking a class called “The Psychology of Adjustment” in college and not once did that textbook mention faith as a possible solution to problems “adjusting” to change. What a shame, since it could have been a short class. I can see the need to avoid mentioning this, since it might put a large amount of psychology majors out of work, which is already an issue for a field that provides most of our nation's baristas. Jesus is a bigger threat to the therapy industry than self-driving trucks is to the logistics industry. Who needs truckers if can trucks drive themselves? Who needs expensive therapy when you can read Matthew and talk about it with others for free? Yes, I'm simplifying and generalizing to make an editorial. I also empathize with psychology majors as I pursued computer science and English majors, and only one of those fields is sought after for employment. But it cannot be denied that faith has been shoved into a corner by medicine, by our schools, by government, and most of all by our media, yet the open secret is that faith can be, without a doubt, a proper and effective cure for many mental issues. The head-scratchers in the media wonder why suicide rates have increased and depression is at an all-time high, while church attendance and affiliation plummet. The cry goes out daily to do more for mental health, while we ostracize people of faith like lepers to the fringe of society. The gift of faith heals, but it is exactly that: it is a gift. This odd thing called faith can be more effective than a lifetime of depression pills or affirming therapy, and it costs nothing. But, it's not so simple. It cannot be prescribed or ingested or bought or sold. There is no insurance needed for it. Unfortunately, people can walk the corridors of modern pharma and therapy for years and not once hear that there is another way, but honestly even if they are told, they may not “hear” it because the time has not arrived for the hearer's ears to be open yet. The timing varies for each person. So I understand why it's not talked about, but it's a shame because many people would benefit. Therapy is a modern version of “faith-healing,” but the faith must be in the techniques and drugs, not in God. The faith must be in the science and the credentials on the wall. The efficacy of the therapy is measured and studied to find improvements. All of this is great. But there's something fundamentally missing from this equation. Science was never intended to replace faith or morality, because those are not parts of the observable and testable universe. You can see the sacred being replaced with science, but it's not the right tool. The trend today is moving toward a merger of science and morality, which will ruin science. Just like religion merging with state power ruins religion, the same will happen to science. For those not paying attention, the Soviet Union and China have already done this experiment and it doesn't end well. Papers and research must conform to party doctrine, making it a leap of faith, not a study of nature. Worse, if you put morality and faith into the halls of state power, brace yourself for bad weather. We're all talking about mental health today, constantly, as if mental problems just started happening in recent history. The only cure offered comes in the form of pharmaceuticals and paid therapy. The healings that Jesus does in the Gospels are mostly related to mental health. Yes, there are the skin healings of the many lepers and the withered hand and the woman who bled for many years and re-attaching the Roman's ear (ok, so there are a lot of physical healings), but the majority of his healings are the same soul-wracking mental problems that we have today. When it says he “healed many people that day,” those are just the ordinary everyday miracles that he did, while the bigger miracles get a full telling, like raising Lazarus from the dead or restoring the paralyzed man's legs or healing blindness. These ordinary “healings” don't only happen in the pages of the Gospels. You can witness them happening today in recovery meetings, for all kinds of mental health issues, and these are attributed to a Higher Power, to God. This isn't like the TV evangelist pulling some audience plant on-stage so that he can heal a man so that you wire him a check. This is happening in back-rooms of office buildings and churches and government centers, where no one is watching, where the smell of burnt coffee acts as the incense, and the liturgy consists of the Serenity Prayer and the Lord's Prayer with real, open honesty in between. This can be witnessed right now in a meeting in your own town. The wildest thing about the healings that Jesus performs is that I have seen these very things occur in people, in real-time, in the 21st century. Even for myself, for all the times I tried to quit drinking, through willpower or using science or techniques, none of those things worked. Nothing changed until I asked for God's help and started to pray. Full stop. Other people I have known, they have seemed so far gone that there was no hope for restoration, much like the Gospel stories of the Gerasene demoniac or the boy with an unclean spirit. Yet they get clear and clean, and a year passes and they are still clean. Then another year, and another, and they are bright-eyed and flourishing. There are Mary Magdalenes among us. There are former demoniacs walking around in our midst. These souls are everywhere, rubbing shoulders with you, interacting with you, but you don't see them because they are healed and restored.As I've said before, I discarded pills when I turned back to God and I am extremely doubtful that I ever needed them in the first place. Had I followed the steps prescribed by the physician in Matthew 9:11-12 and from the doctor named Luke, I might have learned this sooner. People that don't believe in miracles scoff at tales of healing unless a double-blind study was used, and peer-reviewed papers support the evidence. But you can meet people who have restored their mind, body, and soul through friendship with Jesus. As for the re-attachment of the Roman's ear, I understand the difficulty for some to believe in stories like that, but given the incredible real-life healings I have seen, I'm willing to say, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Nothing is impossible for God, and if Jesus could multiply bread and fish, I doubt that surgery presented much of a challenge for him.So in living in my world of the flipped script, I felt that alcohol made for authenticity. “In wine, there is truth”; In vino, veritas. Truth had to be conjured, raised up from within by being uninhibited, so that I could speak like a jester before a king. Liquor was the secret potion to unlock the hidden “truth” within. The wild and awful alcoholic lives of the writers I admired seemed to be the required gate fee for entry into greatness, as the wise fools, I thought, were the ones that must hold up the mirror to society. Oh, the lies we can tell ourselves. This is not the sound of one hand clapping, this is the sound of one hand slapping its own face. In reality most of the writers I admired lived terrible lives. They burned bridges constantly. They had multiple marriages that fell apart in dramatic fashion. They ended their lives in suicide or slow death by addiction. But they reached their goal. Yes, they got what they wanted. They had their treasure, a skinny volume or two on their bookshelf with their name printed on the spine. Did that make them happy in the end? Did it fulfill them? I doubt it made any of them happy or content. It probably fed their pride, making the dragon even bigger. This is why my woman and her cursed bananas had to be a caricature in the end. I thought a woman character would work best for the story because I could juxtapose her youth, beauty, and vigor against a twisted gargoylish solitude in the final scene. I wanted to display the inside, unseen, gnarled experience of misguided pursuit on her character. A male character would have required a different path, but I could have done the same story with a male bodybuilder or womanizer who has his trophies gathering dust on a shelf, and the notches in his headboard being reminders of many broken relationships. In the closing scene, he could have been a freakish, wrinkled body sitting hulking and damaged in a recliner, and for added effect I would have him spray tanning his orange arms while he sipped from a cocktail of branch chain amino acids and collagen peptides. Anyone who has felt a sense of transcendence, or the temporary “greatness” we all get to feel on occasion, yearns to recreate the moment. If you can't experience it again, then you may feel like a “one hit wonder” or “a flash in the pan” or “a fluke” or “an intellectual lightweight” or whatever else the outer doubters and inner critic can hurl at you. Ex-athletes have a rough adjustment to the world because they peak so young. Likewise, an inventor whose idea catches on must try to invent again to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. An artist who catches the eye of a patron must continue producing desirable work. These blessings of success can become a curse, unless you surrender the ego. As life teaches us all, the two great tests we will face are success and failure, and success is sometimes the more difficult test. To give up a dream may seem like defeat. But to surrender, which took years and stages to happen for me, led me to the greatest elevation I could have hoped for or ever imagined. Every phase where I had to make a choice to chop away at the false god of writing and imagined glory led to the ultimate death of that idol. It's like St. Boniface cutting down the oak tree that the pagans worshiped. If you can chop down a god, then that's a false god. I always thought it was incredibly rude of Boniface to cut the tree down, but in reality, what was he doing? He showed them the absurdity of a tree as a god. He exposed the false treasure. To have a false treasure revealed as fool's gold is the greatest gift to give someone, even if it initially enrages them. People only get mad at the death of false gods because they are still in denial about its value. If a man is never told or shown that what he worships is phony, he will find out in the worst way of all when he tries to cash it in at the end. Like Narcissus, he will keep gazing into that illusion right until his death. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.whydidpetersink.com

Jake's back and it only took two takes for him to not say anything totally off color. We never really talk about anything topical in this episode, but what else would you come to expect from your favorite zany podcasters? My actual golf pick is Jordan Spieth for no reason whatsoever, and Phil to tweet or like something outrageous by week's end.

Have you been struggling to lose weight and keep it off? If you're a woman in her 40s or 50s, you're not alone. In fact, many women experience what's known as "midlife weight loss resistance."   But the good news is that there are steps you can take to overcome this resistance and finally achieve your weight loss goals.   On this episode of The Hormone Prescription Podcast, we're joined by Stu Schaefer, a 20-year award-winning celebrity weight-loss coach. He specializes in helping people put their bodies into The Thermogenic State, so they burn fat 24/7… and lose weight as they did in their 20s. He's here to share his insights on how to overcome midlife weight loss resistance.   You'll learn: The benefits of thermogenic foods How to eat for your hormones The real reason why it's so hard to lose weight as you get older The simple tweak to your diet that can make all the difference How to boost your metabolism and burn fat around the clock Foods  to avoid if you want to lose weight Type of diet that will help you lose weight And more! If you're ready to finally overcome your weight loss resistance and get back on track, this episode is for you. Tune in now and start losing weight today!   [01:44]  So Stu Schaefer is a 20 year award-winning celebrity weight loss coach. And he specializes in helping people put their body into the thermogenic state. So they burn fat 24 7 and lose weight like they did in their twenties. Who wants that everyone stew struggled with anorexia and his teens. And when he overcame his eating disorder, he realized that he wanted to help people create their perfect body in a healthy, sustainable way. Since then St has helped thousands of people transform their body and empower themselves to create massive success in their life. Welcome Stu. So happy to be here. This is gonna be great. It's gonna be awesome. It's always fun to talk to you because you have such clarity around the issues that my people wanna know about, which is weight loss resistance at midlife. How do I get rid of this belly? How do I get my butt to shrink my thigh? All the things. Not necessarily because of a vanity issue, but because they know it's related to health problems and they know cuz they've been hearing me say that fat, excess fat is not just decoration. It's metabolically active. And it's like, you have this extra endocrine organ that's then messing with your hormone. So, so many problems with excess APAC tea. So how did you become interested and an expert in this field? Why don't we start with that too? [03:19] That's a great question. And you mentioned something really quick that I want to touch on before I forget you just mentioned something that's gold. And you said when women have this excess body fat, it reeks havoc with their hormones and will get to this. Remind me about this because most of the women who see me think their hormones are off and that's the cause of their weight gain, but actually their hormones being off is a symptom. Okay. And so when they hit, they, every woman that I've ever talked to says, well, I hit my fifties and my hormones changed and that's why I gained weight. And that's not usually the truth. The truth is something's off that reeked havoc with your hormones and caused you to gain weight.   [04:07] Well, you mentioned in the intro that I was anorexic and I was in, um, my first year of high school when I was 13, between eighth and ninth grade, I ended up breaking into a house in my neighborhood with two friends. I thought they were my friends and uh, I ended up getting arrested. Now when you're 13, every little thing is the end of the world. Anyway, and this was like the end of the end of the world. And because of that, it just, I had this self hatred. You also mentioned the self love idea in the intro and I was just despised myself. And as a result, thank goodness that when I was younger suicide wasn't as gratified as it is now. There no one was committing suicide, but I possibly could have cutting. Wasn't a thing I possibly could have. What I turned to was anorexia as a way of self punishment.   [04:59] And so for about a year and a half, I battled with that and it was very real. And what got me out of it quite honestly, was I had a nervous breakdown. It was ninth grade. I had a full load of classwork that I wasn't used to between that and not eating and not being able to function. Everything just came to a head and I just broke down and was crying. And that was the turning point. And out of that, ironically, what got me out of that mess was I decided to do a program. Now this doesn't work for many people who have an eating disorder, but for me it was something I could focus on. And I had anxiety for 30 days straight because every day I was eating four or five times a day and every time I ate, I thought I was gonna get fat.   [05:44] So I was an, I had anxiety all day. Now at the end of 30 days, this was the critical moment in my life. This shaped everything because it broke off that false belief system. I could see that I hadn't gained the weight. In fact, I looked better. I felt better. I wasn't as emotional I could function. And I had this clear vision and experience of what it's like on both sides. And I said, oh my gosh, I want to be a health coach because I can see the difference that this kind of change and transformation can make in a person's life. And I understand, and very compassionate when someone is feeling overwhelmed, anxious, doesn't know what to do. There's so much information. They don't like their body. And it just, there are some days I just wanted to hide under the covers and just wish that everything would go away. And that was the defining moment for me,   [06:47] Grew up really fast and out of that came this passion for helping people. What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about losing weight?   [06:58] This is a good question. And I'll tell you flat out is it's still perpetuated. In fact, if you were to line up a hundred experts, including doctors and you ask them, how do you lose weight? 99 out of a hundred are gonna tell you that the only way to lose weight is to go into a calorie deficit. They won't even say that that's one way. They'll say it's the only way. That's how I was trained. When I became certified health coach and trainer, you know, it works for some people, usually when you're younger, but it's only temporary. I mean, I was doing that.    [07:43] The door was open and she said, Hey, I said, uh, I'm like cleaning up. I'm like, okay, well, how can I help you? And she's still sweating. She's breathing heavy. She goes, look, I wanna lose between 30 and 50 pounds. And I've tried everything and nothing works well. I'm in my twenties at this time. And I am embarrassed to admit this, but I'm kind of arrogant. And in my mind I was thinking, yeah, right. You know, you're just eating too much. You' not working out enough. Like, that's just what we're taught. It's like, oh, it's simple. So I said, I assured her that I could help her. She decided to work with me and we tried for five weeks and she did not lose a pound. Now her background. She said that typically, if she did a diet, she might lose three to five, but then she'd hit a plateau, gain it right back and then gain seven to 10 pounds over the next year.   [08:30] All right. Well now I'm thinking, oh my gosh, we tried everything. Well, the 200 ounces of water, grapefruits Adkins was hot at the time. She tried that south beach, the zone diet, you know, you have to remember, this was back in 2009. These were all the trending diets. And she was eating less than 1200 calories a day, borderline a thousand. She was working out two hours a day. She's sitting across the desk crying, saying, I told you, I told you, I told you, I'm thinking I blew it.    [09:17] I could tell how emotional she was about it. So I went on this deep dive research quest. I was bound and determined to figure out what is going on here? Why is the normal stuff not working? And after about two weeks, I figured it out. It's something called repress metabolic syndrome or RMS. And what happens essentially is when you diet too much or you don't eat enough or you exercise too much or a combination of those things, it essentially causes your metabolism to shut down. And it puts your body in this state called the catabolic state where your body's actually storing fat and burning muscle.    [10:10] And this is called putting your body into the thermogenic state and the way you do it essentially is you eat more and exercise less totally counterintuitive. So I go back to Ashley, I'm all excited. And I kind of explained to her what I just explained to you. And I said, we gotta, I need you to start eating more and exercising less. Well, you can imagine she's looking at me like, what are you nuts? She's like, there's no way I'm gonna do that. I can't even lose a pound. I'm barely eating anything. I'm exercising two hours a day. This is gonna make me gain weight. And I said, look, let's give me a week, give it a week. Let's do this.    [10:52] Well, the first week she lost two pounds. I'm thin I'm sitting there going like, yes, we've got, this is working. She's not convinced. Cuz remember she had lose three to five and gain it back. So she's like, oh right. This is what my body normally does. But she was willing to give it a shot. Okay. We didn't go the opposite direction. The next week she lost two and a half pounds every single week for 12 weeks in a row, she lost between two and two and a half pounds. And she ended up losing a total of 37 pounds of body fat while simultaneously increasing her lean body mass slightly, which is very important for metabolic reasons. And she looked at me and she goes, I don't understand how this was possible. How did this work? And I was telling her, look, this is because we put your body in the thermogenic state.   [11:39] When you work with your body, magical things happen. You can eat more. Your body revs up, you start burning fat all the time. So Kirin I'm thinking, oh my gosh, if it worked with someone like Ashley, who was like so challenged, how would it work for all my other clients who are already losing weight, doing the normal calorie deficit. So I go to 'em and I say, tell 'em what happened? Are you willing to try this? Yeah, let's try it. Not only did they start losing weight faster, working out half the time and also eating more. But their energy went through the roof, their cravings vanished. They were never hungry. And their hormones started normalizing because they weren't restricting or cutting out any types of foods. Then I was like, oh my gosh, there's something to this. This is incredible. That's how I figured this out.   [12:30] Awesome. so you, you mentioned, you know, there are hormones normalized. So one thing you mentioned earlier is that women say my hormones went out of balance and I gain. So we might have to agree to disagree there because you know, we, women do have this menopausal thing that is associated with weight gain where we go through per menopause and menopause. So which came first, the chicken or the egg. How do you help women address weight, hormone balance for midlife women?    [13:00] Is to lose this question, Uhhuh. Yeah. This is a good question. What happens is this? I'm not saying that the hormones changes. Aren't real. Mm-hmm I'm saying that that's not necessarily the cause of everything. Normally there's something else that causes the hormones to go outta whack to begin with mm-hmm okay. So, and this is typically how it works. When we get older, as we age everyone, you, me, everyone. We get more sensitive. Now this is obvious. If you were to compare a 20 year old woman and a 90 year old woman, you'd be obvious. Oh yeah. If the 90 year old tried to do what the 20 year old did, you know, she could probably die just your, your bodies get more sensitive, right? Where we're more resilient when we're younger. So what happens is this, maybe that I'm the only one that had this experience.   [13:49] But when I was in college, I would see the girls guys too. But I'm talking about girls here. I'd see the girls go on a binger Friday night and a binger Saturday night and pull an all night or Sunday night for the exam. They had Monday. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they'd work out two hours a day to undo all the damage they did and get ready for the next weekend. Okay. Well they looked fantastic, but guess what? That's not good for your body. Okay. It was never good for the body, but it worked for them at the time. So what happens is people develop bad habits that ha that allow them to lose weight when they're younger. And they keep those bad habits that actually prevent them from losing weight. As they hit a certain age, it's not because the hormones change per se.   [14:35] It's because our bodies get so much more sensitive. And those bad habits oftentimes are the culprits that make the hormones change. This is what I'm talking about. This is that kind of dichotomy. Now when you eat correctly and when talk about that, there's four components of eating. I call it the food quadrant. There's not only what you eat and how much you eat, but there's when you eat certain foods, the timing and how you combine foods together at each meal. And that's when the magic happens. When you do that and you put your body in this thermogenic state, one of the side effects is that your hormones balance, they normalize. Now I'll tell you the order. They do it in the first thing that normalize is right away within days is your insulin and blood sugar. The second one that balances cortisol. And you know, we've talked about that.   [15:24] Karen on Instagram a couple times, that's like the mama hormone right there. Right? I think you call it the queen hormone or something like that. Yeah. And then the third that balances or normalizes a bit is thyroid. Now, obviously if you have an autoimmune like Hashimotos or hypothyroid, it may not balance all the way, but many of my clients, they have reduced significantly. Any thyroid medication they've been on and I have a client right now, as a matter of fact, her name is Holly. She has no thyroid. She was convinced she wouldn't be able to lose weight and she's losing weight just fine. When those big three hormones balance the insulin, the cortisol and the thyroid that opens the gates for your other sex hormones to start normalizing naturally, these are the progesterone testosterone, estrogen.   [16:44] Yeah. I totally agree with you about these bad habits that we pick up that affect our other hormones. Like our insulin, our cortisol, this feast or famine workout crazy. Don't work out. We develop these habits and we have Unbound hormones. And then we, women get to midlife. We blame it all on our sex hormones. And then we chase that, that train, but that train never gets to the station because you don't know about all these other things. So thank you for highlighting that.   [17:26] Food. You know, this is a great, uh, point because I had a, a client not too long ago and she was 52, her name's Brenda. And she said, I can't eat carbs. If I do, I blow up like a balloon. Every time I try to get carbs back into my nutrition, that's what always happens. So she was going low carb. Well, the problem with going low carb or no carb is that can cause diet induced hypothyroidism. Okay? Since the nineties, this is a medical term. Since the nineties, we've known that two things can cause diet induced, hypothyroidism, eating a diet that's too low in carbohydrates or too high in fats, even good fats. Now I happen to have seen more women in the last three years with diet induced hypothyroidism than I had in the 17 years before that combined much of the reason I believe is because of the ketogenic diet is so low carbon.   [18:19] So high fat, it's kind of hitting that thyroid from both sides. So this particular woman Brenda had done this. Okay? So not only was her thyroid outta whack, her sex hormones were outta whack. I, the first thing I said is, look, we're gonna have to add carbs. You have to eat carbs. Carbs are actually really good. And I'll explain why in just a second. But she was very frightened by it. In fact, she said, look, I'm not gonna weigh myself because if the scale goes up, I'm just, I'm gonna die. I said, fine. Don't weigh yourself, but I need you to take progress photos and waste measurements. So we have some form of tracking here other than the scale. And she said, okay, deal.   [19:09] I said, how was your weekend? It was a Monday morning. I said, how was your week? She said, oh my gosh, first time that I can remember two days in a row. I woke up to my alarm clock. I haven't slept this good in years. Now this is a good indicator that your hormones are balancing. Okay? When you start sleeping. And she said she wasn't moody anymore. This is because she was eating enough of the right foods to allow her body to get into this nice thermogenic state.    [19:56] Now there's a catch to this, right? All of us have a limit just like vitamins. It's like, oh, vitamin C is good. Well, if you take too much, it's useless. The body does. It only absorbs what it can. And you pee out the rest. Well with food you only have a, a certain amount. You can absorb you don't pee out the excess. Okay. What ends up happening is you store it as fat. Now carbs have the second highest thermogenic effect. This is what nobody talks about. They have a 20% thermogenic effect. Fat has almost zero. It has between a zero and 3% thermogenic effect. So it really doesn't cause you to burn fat.  [20:42] Now you need fats for hormone, balancing and skin and, and other things like this, right? But they make you full. So if you're eating too many fats and you get full, then you won't have an appetite to eat some of the other foods that would actually force your body to burn fat. I see this so often now, and I, you know, wasn't long ago I had a client named Mary 52. She had done keto for eight years now. She started doing it because she wanted to get rid of seizures and it can do that. And it did it for her. However, over eight years, it totally depleted her body. Put her into the repress metabolic syndrome.    [21:35] Now for the fir, I'm gonna tell you how this can affect your body for the first four weeks, four and a half weeks, she only lost two pounds. And she said, I'm really discouraged. I said, Mary, I get ya. I said, but look, how's your sleep. She goes, amazing. I go, how's your energy. She goes, well, that's kind of the only reason I'm still optimistic. I haven't had this much energy in years. I go, how are your exercise sessions going? She goes, great. I'm getting stronger. I said, aha. I said, stay the course. I can see what you're doing.   [22:18] She lost two pounds that week, the next week, two pounds, the next week, two pounds, 10 weeks in a row. And she lost 26 pounds. And she goes, oh my gosh. She goes, I would've given up after that first four and a half weeks, I would've said, oh, this isn't working. It took four weeks for her body to undo that damage that she had done by depleting it so much. And then once we started fueling it correctly, bam, she was ready. Now the problem was she was eating tons of nuts and avocados and seeds because that's what everyone says to do.    [23:10] That's not true. The truth is this. And you know, this Karen, every different food you put in your body has a different chemical reaction in your body. Period. It affects your hormones differently. Doctors will tell you this in the same breath, as they tell you that all you need to do is go into a calorie deficit. So the key is getting the right foods in the right combination to create the chemical reaction you want in your body. Most people want to create a chemical reaction that does two things causes 'em to burn fat and increases their energy. So they feel amazing. And as a side effect, they optimize their health and hormones.    [24:03] Well, here's the downside. We know saturated fats are generally not that great in, in high quantities. And we know trans fats are definitely not good, but people go, well, the omegas are great. Kind of that's only half the story. There is a specific omega three fatty acid. That's really good. And that's the one that's found in fish. Okay. Salmon, macro sardines, these types of things. Cardine okay. This type, this type of omega three fatty acid. Now there's omega three fatty acids found in other foods, but not this type. This is the type that will encourage some fat burning in the body that helps with your hormones and endocrine system. And that can help fight chronic diseases.    [25:13] Okay. And so again, you get half the story out there and then everyone runs with it, but they don't explain the subtle differences and these subtle differences, they make all the difference. And that's why when I clients have told, I have told me, I've tried everything. I've tried this, I've tried that. And when we make these subtle tweaks and then they finally get the results, it's like a breath of fresh air. It's like this huge weight has lifted off their shoulders. And this is the difference, right?    [25:50] I love talking with you Stu because you know, it's so true that everyone is like, oh, what's the latest diet. And, and when I was coming along, it was the grapefruit diet, the cottage cheese diet, south beach, the zone, those were the things. And it's like, everyone's like, yay. The zone diet, you know, the cottage cheese diet. Oh the grapefru, it's just like, everybody's, omega3s are the answer. Omega six is, are the answer. And it's like, oh my gosh, let's just go to science. And you go to the science and you're like, y'all, this is how it works.   [26:27] Is P are D you just gotta go back to the basic science that hasn't changed in a long, long time. I do wanna touch on this topic because we were we're limited in time. Uh, I know we're doing finishing up with a masterclass, everybody listening to the podcast, we got a bunch of lucky women here who get to pick STUs brain. When we get off the podcast who are members of my program. And that's one of the benefits you get of being in my program. You get a front row seat masterclass with a lot of these experts. A lot of what I talk about is not only hormone balance, but how women have to detoxify that. That's part of their weight gain and mitochondrial function or dysfunction is part of their weight gain. How do you work with those things? And what do you recommend for women at midlife to help with those aspects of wake eight?   [27:21] This isn't actually, it's a really good question. So there are two things that I do. So one of the things is that over the last 20 years that I've done this, I happened to just always work with women over 40 and over 50, it was wherever I grew up. I, I grew up in a town where that was the predominant demographic. So since I was a young trainer, I've always worked with women who were in their forties, fifties and beyond. And I just learned, and I thought that this was normal. And I never realized that this is actually quite difficult. And it's a very special thing.    [28:07] Okay. And these, then someone might have a gut issue. Okay. KDA, leaky, gut. CIBO something like this same thing. I'd work with them. And we'd find these high risk foods that a lot of times would agitate them, cause them to gain weight and same with thyroid issues. Okay. Well, what I noticed was over these things, these high risk foods were all the same. Now, these aren't just the typical high risk foods that you hear about like dairy and gluten. Okay. Those are two of the highest risk foods in peanuts and sugar, but these were other things like kale, broccoli, in some cases, sometimes bell peppers or tomatoes.   [29:01] So something's off, they have a undiagnosed food sensitivity that may not show up on a test, to be honest with you or a gut issue undiagnosed perhaps, or an autoimmune that they don't know about, or they do know about it, doesn't matter whether you know it about it or not. And so I'll say, look, let's pull some of these foods. And they'll say, really, I eat a, a broccoli cauliflower, you know, brussel sprout some of these healthy foods. And when we pull 'em, they start losing the weight. And then when we put 'em back in, they'll gain the weight and it goes totally against everything that you would ever hear. But some vegetables require a specifically, very balanced gut biome to be able to properly digest those. And if your gut is off, it, ain't gonna work and it's gonna cause inflammation and weight gain.   [29:49] And so you have to go through a period of pulling out some of these high risk culprits so that your body can actually adapt and adjust and normalize. And then you can integrate these back. In. In fact, I have a client right now. She's still working with me, her name's Kathy, she's 53. Now she lives in New York and she is a nurse she's on her feet all day. And she said for 15 years too, I've tried everything. You can imagine. She rattled off everything. You just did. Kirin Adkins, south beach zone, you name it.   [30:34] And no one would ever notice. Okay? So we cut out some of these high risk foods. And in the first three weeks she lost nine pounds. And she said, holy smokes. I feel amazing. She had no energy after work. Now, after work, she had so much energy. She could do her full workout. We found out it was, there were two foods. Now we've since found there, there are a few more. And recently she said, gosh, I need to go to my rheumatologist. I said, what are you talking about? She goes, my joints feel like they're swelling. I go, well, you've added in all these foods without talking to me, pull 'em out really quick.   [31:18] The more you eat a food, they'll higher. The likelihood that she'll develop antibodies to it. So sure enough, she cut it out. She was able to lose. If I remember correctly, 24 pounds, she's since been able to keep it off. She's jet, set it over to Switzerland and Paris and all these different vacations and is able to splurge and eat normally and not worry about dieting. And she's fine. She's able to maintain. But again, we're now kind of looking at what are these foods she's not eating any unhealthy foods, nothing that would be obvious like gluten or dairy, which one of these veggies is your body rejecting.   [32:11] That's actually causing an antibody inflammatory response. That's causing your knuckles to feel swollen. This is what happens now. Only someone who's I'm sorry, but only someone who's worked this out on the street. Who's failed miserably. Many times is gonna know and understand what to look for because this isn't in any of the textbooks. It's not, it's not okay. And this is the key. So what happens is I've met more women and remember there was a kale craze. We've got some women here. I bet all of you remember the kale craze, everyone was putting kale in their shakes, making CAEs.   [32:48] And that caused more women to gain weight and develop weird issues than anything I had seen in my career. And this was just awesome. Okay. Someone's asking. Right. Well how, how do you test it? Well, I don't test because I just know what the foods are, cuz I've done this for 20 years, but if you were gonna try to test it on your own, where would you start? I mean, it's hard and I don't recommend doing this with any of my clients, but you could do a basic elimination diet, which is very difficult and it's not realistic to maintain, but essentially you'd have to wipe out all foods except for maybe like fiber or so, and then start systematically adding them back in this takes a long time and it's can be hard and arduous. I honestly don't have a test.    [33:49] I would just wanna add that this is definitely a part of my story too. You know, I was reacting to cauliflower, supposed to be healthy. Right? Mm-hmm almonds, peaches, blueberries who knew mm-hmm so definitely a part of my story   [34:03] Tell, you know, and I had a client named Locklin who was actually on my podcast and she was doing great with her weight loss. And we went from two hours a day, no joke, two hours a day to 30 minutes, a day of exercise and increased her caloric intake by 50%. And she lost 18 pounds. But then she hit a plateau and I said, Locklin, what have you changed? She goes nothing. I said, okay, I'm I'm gonna study. I'm gonna go through a fine tooth comb with what you've been eating. She added one thing at night almonds because she was hungry and she wanted a healthy fat, but she said, oh my gosh, I got these weird hormonal symptoms.    [34:50] You asked about the gut health stuff. That's number one. I said there were two things. Number two is I always take a very specific type of silver. This is not colloidal silver. It's a special ized, structured silver where they bond it to a water molecule, which is an antimicrobial it's only strong enough to kill the bad bacteria in your body. It is not strong enough to kill the good bacteria and it also kills fungus and mold and yeast. So this will wipe out candida it'll help with leaky gut it'll wipe out CIBO. This is my magic bullet that I use. And it's easy to take no risk of uh, no side effects and no risk of overdosing in any way, shape or form.   [35:36] Awesome. Thank you for addressing those things. I know we still haven't talked about self love and weight loss, which we've got to talk about. So I'm almost wondering if we need to cut it into two episodes, but let's go there and we'll figure out how to do the logistics later. But you do have an amazing training that you're gonna share with everyone. We're gonna give you the link in the show notes when Stu is done, but we've gotta talk about this issue because so many of us, particularly women, gosh, we have a lot of self hate around our bodies and lack of self acceptance. Some people say I don't hate myself, but if you don't wanna stand there naked in front of a mirror and you can't love all parts of your body, that's a lack of self-acceptance mm-hmm , which is kind of like hate.    [36:39] So I'm not gonna hold anything back here because people here listening are in the right place to hear this message at the right time. Our mind, not our brain, our mind has a profound, physiological impact that not many people are aware of. Okay. In fact, if you go to again, if you took a thousand coaches, health coaches, weight loss coaches, maybe one, two or three out of a thousand would understand how to incorporate mindset in a way that would actually cause physiological changes in your body.    [37:34] Let's say you have a man with two personalities. We'll call him Frank and Joe. Okay. I talk to all my clients about this, cuz it's amazing. The researchers or doctors or nurses or whoever will be observing this person and he'll say, hi, I'm Frank. Oh, Hey Frank. Well, we're gonna do a physical on you. Okay, great. And they'll do a physical, the blood work, the hearing the vision, the whole deal. And Frank has perfect health. 10 minutes later, he goes, Hey, I'm Joe. Oh, Hey Joe, we're gonna do a physical. And Joe has diabetes and requires glasses. Okay. Same body, same physical vessel, two different personalities, 10 minutes apart, completely different physiological characteristics. Now in the eighties they went, okay, something's wrong with our instrumentation something. This can't be. But over the last 40 years, they are like seeing this not uncommon by the way.   [38:27] And they're realizing how much our mind impacts our body. Now I'll give everyone here. A simple example that I always talk to my clients about to iterate this point. Most of us have had this experience. We're asleep in our own bed, in our own room. It's quiet, it's comfortable. It's warm, it's peaceful. And all of a sudden we wake up. Our heart's pounding. Our adrenaline is up. Our cortisol is up. Our blood pressure is up. Our respiratory rate is up and we're sweating and nothing happened there. Wasn't a bang. The bed didn't shake. We had a nightmare. Okay. Well a nightmare is nothing more than an unconscious visualization. That is it.   [39:30] This is why some people will go through the right actions and still not get results because their mindset is so off. And I'll give you a practical example in just a second. Their mindset is so off that they are causing their body to be in a state of. And I always get these backwards, the parasympathetic or sympathetic, you know, when your cortisol's up, they're causing their body to be all in this weird, stressed out state that they can't lose weight. They can't get the results.    [40:21] One week she did her way away in and checked everything. And she weighed 147.8 pounds. At the end of the week, she did her next checkin. We wanted to see how everything was working and she weighed 147.0 pounds and she said, oh, that's familiar. And she says, oh my gosh, do something's wrong? I didn't lose any weight. And I go, what are you talking about? You almost, you lost a pound. She goes, no, look, I'm still 1 47. I go, you went from 1 47 0.8 to 1 47. I go, it, everything is right on track, calm down.    [41:17] They have a lot of evidence from their past and they have a lot of doubt and fear and anxiety about losing weight and food. And, and, oh, I go, I'm probably gonna have to cut carbs and I can't eat this. And they have all these, these negative experiences is locked up in their, uh, proof and, and, and in their subconscious conditioning. And so all these things rear their head and these are real things that have a real physiological impact. You have to, how do you know, how do you know if you're, if you're using your mindset against you, I'll tell you the easiest way.   [42:16] Takes a couple minutes, twice a day. That's it? It's no different than working out. You do the reps period, but most people don't understand this. They don't grasp it. And even when they set goals, they set a goal that anytime they think of the goal, it makes 'em feel nervous and upset and anxious and doubtful. And they're using their own goals against them too. And so it backfires. And then they wonder why they're not getting the results. And it's because they're putting themselves in this chronic state of negative mindset versus positive. Ultimately the best attitude you could possibly be in. And the one we call self love is when you truly and totally accept yourself for how you are right now, 100%.    [43:24] That was so worth it. That was, we had to, you had to go there. So thank you for going in deep on that. I really appreciate it. I love this. This is my favorite quote that you said , if you have any negative emotion, you are using your mindset against your body. I think that's a big hunk of truth that everybody needs to really take in. Thank you so much, Stu. I love talking to you. You explain things so clearly and concretely that I think people really understand. You really are always with weight loss resistance.    [44:22] So I wanna really give everyone, I always just want to add value and, and give people clarity so they can really have some direction okay. And say, oh my gosh, I know what's been going on. So there's a masterclass. You can watch that I've recorded. That goes over this material in more depth, there's a fat loss blueprint and then a thermogenic quiz where you can take it and kind of see how well or how close you are to be putting your body in that thermogenic state.   [44:50] Awesome. Thank you so much for those amazing resources. We'll put them with both part, one of the podcasts and part two. I don't know how, or maybe we'll just have one really long one cause we just might have to do that. And we'll have a link in the show notes where you can check that out. You definitely wanna hear what Stu has to say. If you've, if you're a woman at midlife and you've got a weight problem because he knows the answers. So I definitely recommend that. Thank you so much, Stu for joining us today, we're gonna jump into the masterclass and thank you all for joining us for another episode of the hormone prescription podcast with Dr. Kirin.   The 4 Biggest Mistakes Preventing You From Losing Weight... And The 3 Simple Shifts That Will Turn Your Body Into A Fat Burning Furnace! Register now for Stu Schaefer's FREE training and learn the exact process his clients are using to lose weight fast, gain confidence, and create their dream body. You will also get the following bonus: Bonus 1: The Metabolism Quiz Are You Causing Your Body To Store Fat And Burn Muscle? You'll Find Out Once You Take The Quiz! Bonus 2: The Thermogenic Weight-Loss BLUEPRINT Discover The Proven System That I Use... And All My Clients Use... Because It Flat Out Works! You'll Learn How Easy It Can Be To Lose 5 Pounds In The Next 14 Days! CLICK HERE to register: http://stuschaefer.com/drkyrin    Join The Hormone Bliss Challenge  FEEL ENERGIZED, SEXY & CONFIDENT IN YOUR BODY AGAIN... IN JUST 5 DAYS. Discover How To Balance Your Hormones & Jumpstart Your Metabolism So That You Can Lose Weight & Regain Energy! CLICK HERE: https://bit.ly/hormonebalancebliss    

In the 11 a.m. hour of the K&C Masterpiece, 10 bold predictions for the NFL offseason, Bet QL insider Quinton Mayo gives insight on the newest Mavs and cordial Joe Burrow in Gridiron Gravy

Returning from Europe, running into a celebrity on the plane, visiting Pompei, mom dressing you embarrassingly, and using Tinder overseas. We are the Lightweights podcast, I'm Joe and I'm Ilya, follow us on Instagram @lightweightspod --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lightweights/support

PHP Internals News: Episode 91: is_literal London, UK Thursday, July 15th 2021, 09:19 BST In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Craig Francis (Twitter, GitHub, Website), and Joe Watkins (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the "is_literal" RFC. The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript Derick Rethans 0:14 Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 91. Today I'm talking with Craig Francis and Joe Watkins, talking about the is_literal RFC that they have been proposing. Craig, would you please introduce yourself? Craig Francis 0:34 Hi, I'm Craig Francis. I've been a PHP developer for about 20 years, doing code auditing, pentesting, training. And I'm also the co-lead for the Bristol chapter of OWASP, which is the open web application security project. Derick Rethans 0:48 Very well. And Joe, will you introduce yourself as well, please? Joe Watkins 0:51 Hi, everyone. I'm Joe, the same Joe from last time. Derick Rethans 0:56 Well, it's good to have you back, Joe, and welcome to the podcast Craig. Let's dive straight in. What is the problem that this proposal's trying to resolve? Craig Francis 1:05 So we try to address the problem where injection vulnerabilities are being introduced by developers. When they use libraries incorrectly, we will have people using the libraries, but they still introduce injection vulnerabilities because they use it incorrectly. Derick Rethans 1:17 What is this RFC proposing? Craig Francis 1:19 We're providing a function for libraries to easily check that certain strings have been written by the developer. It's an idea developed by Christoph Kern in 2016. There is a link in the video, and the Google using this to prevent injection vulnerabilities in their Java and Go libraries. It works because libraries know how to handle these data safely, typically using parameterised queries, or escaping where appropriate, but they still require certain values to be written by the developer. So for example, when using a query a database, the developer might need to write a complex WHERE clause or maybe they're using functions like datediff, round, if null, although obviously, this function could be used by developers themselves if they want to, but the primary purpose is for the library to check these values. Derick Rethans 2:05 That is a method of doing it. What is this RFC adding to PHP itself? Craig Francis 2:09 It just simply provides a function which just returns true or false if the variable is a literal, and that's basically a string that was written by the developer. It's a bit like if you did is_int or is_string, it's just a different way of just sort of saying, has this variable been written by the developer? Derick Rethans 2:28 Is that basically it? Craig Francis 2:30 That's it? Yeah. Joe Watkins 2:32 It would also return true for variables that are the result of concatenation of other variables that would pass the is literal check. Now, this differs from Google, because they introduced that at the language level, but not only at the language level, at the idiom level. So that when you open a file that's got queries in PHP, commonly, if they're long, basic concatenation is used to build the query and format it in the file so that it's readable. So that it wouldn't really be very useful if those queries that you see everywhere in stuff like PHPMyAdmin, and WordPress, and Drupal and just normal code weren't considered literal, just because they're spread over several lines with the concatenation operator. It's strictly not just stuff that's written by the programmer, but also stuff that was written by the programmer or concatenated, with other stuff that was written by the programmer. Derick Rethans 3:33 Now in the past, we have seen something about adding taint supports to PHP, right? How is this different, or perhaps similar, to taint checking? Craig Francis 3:44 At the moment today, there is a taint extension, which is something you need to go out your way to install, and actually learn about and how to use. But the main difference is that taint checking goes on the basis of say, this variable is safe or unsafe. And the problem is that it considers anything that had been through an escaping function like html_entities as safe. But of course, the problem is that escaping is difficult. And it's very easy to make mistakes with that. A classic example is if you take a value from a user, an SSH SSH, their homepage URL, if you use HTML encoding, and then put it into the href attribute of a link, that can also result in HTML injection vulnerability, because the escaping is not aware of the context which is used. Because if the evil user put in a JavaScript URL, that is in inline JavaScript, that has created a problem because taint checking would assume that because you use HTML encoding it is safe, and all I'm saying is that is it creates a false sense of security. And by stripping out all that support for escaping, it means that you can focus on libraries doing that work because they know the context, they understand the domain, and we can just keep it a much simpler, and much safer approach. Derick Rethans 5:02 Would you say that the is_literal feature is mostly aimed at library authors and not individual developers? Craig Francis 5:09 Yeah, exactly. Because the library authors know what they're doing. They're using well tested code, many eyes over it. The problem libraries have at the moment is that they trust the developer to write things themselves. And unfortunately, developers introduce a lot of injection vulnerabilities with those strings before they even get into the library. Derick Rethans 5:30 How would a library deal with with strings that aren't literal then? Craig Francis 5:35 So it really depends on each individual example. And the RFC does include quite a lot of examples of how each one will be dealt with. The classic one is, let's say you're sorting by a column in a database, because if we're dealing with SQL, the field name might come from the user. But that is also quite a risky thing to do if you start including whatever field name the user wrote. So in the RFC, I've created a very simple example where the developer would create an array of fields that you can sort by, and then whatever the user provides, you search through that array, and you pull out the one that you that matches and is fine. And therefore you are pulling out a literal and including into the SQL. To be fair, these ones are quite unique. And each one needs to be dealt with in its own way. But I've yet to find an example where you can't do it with a literal. Having said that, I think Larry Garfield actually gave an example where a content management system changed its database structure. And the way that would work is the library would have to deal with it, they would receive the value for a field, and then that field would be escaped and treated as a field, it understands it as a field, and it will process it as such, then it can include into the SQL, knowing full well that everything else in that SQL is a literal, and then it can just build up SQL in its own way internally. Derick Rethans 6:58 Okay, talking a little bit about the implementation here. Since PHP seven, we have this concept of interned strings, or maybe even before that actually, I don't quite remember. Which is pretty much a flag on each string and PHP that says, this's been created by the engine, or by coconut. Why would strings have to have an extra flag here to remember that it is created by the programmer? Joe Watkins 7:21 Well, interned does not mean literal. It's an optimization in the engine, should we use strings. We're free to do whatever we want with that. At the moment, it by happenstance, most interned strings are those written by the programmer. If you think about the sort of strings that are written by the programmer, like a class name, when those things are declared internally, by an extension, or by core code, those things are interned as if they were written by the programmer. They don't mean literal, we're free to use interned strings for whatever we want. For example, a while ago, someone suggested that we should intern keys while JSON decoding or unserializing. It didn't happen, but it could happen. And then we'd have the problem of, well, how do we separate out all this other input. There is another optimization attached to interned strings, which is one character strings, where if you type only one character, or you call a Class A or B, or whatever, the permanent interned string will be used. That results in when the chr function is called, that results in the return of that function always being marked as interned. So it would show as literal, which is not a very nice side effect. And that's just a side effect that we can see today. We don't want to reuse the string really, it does need to be distinct. Also, if you're going to concatenate, whether you do it with the VM or a specific function, obviously, you need to be able to distinguish between an interned string and a literal string, which interned means it has a specific life cycle and specific value. And we can't break that. Derick Rethans 9:00 So there are really two different concepts, is what you're saying, and hence, they need to have a special flag for that? Joe Watkins 9:06 Yeah, they're very, two very separate concepts. And we don't we don't want to restrict the future of what interned strings may be used for. We don't want to muddy the concept of a literal. Derick Rethans 9:16 Of course, any sort of mechanism that languages built into solve or prevent injections in any sort of form, there's always ways around it. Theoretically, how would you go around the is_literal checks to still get a user inputted value into something that passes the is_literal check? Craig Francis 9:36 Generally speaking, you would never need it because the library should know how to deal with every scenario anyway. And it's not that difficult. We're only talking about things like in the database world, you'll be taking value from field names and therefore it should receive field names or table names. And, you know, we are providing a guardrail as a safety net. And what should happen is that the default way in which programmers work should guide them, to do it the right way. We're not saying that you can't do weird things to intentionally work around this. A really ugly version, which you should never do, but use eval and var_export together, it's horrible. But if you are so desperate, you need to get around this. That's what we're doing it. But in reality, we can't find any examples where you'd actually need to do this. Joe Watkins 10:22 I would say that, hey, there's this idea that most people writing PHP are using libraries, and they're using frameworks. I don't actually find that to be true. I've been working in PHP for a long time. And most of the big projects I've worked on for a long time did not start out using frameworks. And they did not start out using libraries. They look a bit like that today, but their core, they are custom. There may be a framework buried in there. But there is so much code that the framework is a component and is not the main deal. Most code, we actually do write ourselves, because that's what we're paid to do. I think we don't decide how people are going to use it, and we don't decide where they're going to use it. The fact is, like Craig said, it's a guardrail that you can work around easily. And if you find a use case for doing that, then we shouldn't prejudge, and say, well, that's the wrong thing to do. It might not be the wrong thing to do. For example, an earlier version of the idea included support for integers. We considered integers safe, regardless of their source. If you wanted to do that, in your application, you could do that very easily and still retain the integrity of the guardrail is not compromised. I wouldn't focus on this is for libraries, and this is for frameworks, because these things become so small in the scheme of things that they're meaningless. I mean, most of the code we work on is code that we wrote, it is not frameworks. Derick Rethans 11:48 That also nicely answers my next question, which is what's happened to integers, which have now nicely covered. The RFC talks about that as hard to educate people to do the right thing. And that is_literal is more focused, so to say, on libraries, and perhaps query building frameworks as the RFC alludes to. But I would say that most of these query building tools or libraries already deal with escaping from input value. So why would it make sense for them to start using is_literal if you're handling most of these cases already anyway? Craig Francis 12:24 If you look at the intro of the RFC, there's a link to show examples of how libraries currently receive the strings. And you're right about the Query Builder approach is a risky thing, I would still argue it's an important part. That's why libraries still provide them. Doctrine has a nice example of DQL. The doctrine query language is an abstraction that they've created, which is also vulnerable to injection vulnerabilities. And it gives the developer a lot more control over a very basic API. I still think people should try and use the higher level API's because they do provide a nice safe default, but that depends on which library use, they're not always safe by default. So for example, when you're sort of saying: I want to find all records where field parameter one, is equal to value two, a lot of the libraries assumed that the first parameter there is safe and written by the developer. They can't just necessarily simply escape it as though it's a field because that value might be something like date, bracket, field, bracket, and it's sort of relying on the developer to write that correctly, and not make any mistakes. And that hasn't proven to be the case, you know, they do include user values in there. Derick Rethans 13:43 Just going back a little bit about some of the feedback, because feedback to the RFC has happened for quite some time now. And there were lots of different approaches first tried as well, and suggested to add additional functions and stuff like that. So what's been the major pushback to this latest iteration of the RFC? Joe Watkins 14:01 So I think the most pushback has come from an earlier suggestion that we could allow integers to be concatenated and considered literal. We experimented with that, and it is possible, but in order to make it possible, you have to disable an optimization in the engine, that would not be an acceptable implementation detail for Dmitri. It turns out we didn't actually, we don't need to track their source technically, but it made people extremely uncomfortable when we said that, and even when we got an independent security expert to comment on the RFC, and he tried to explain that it was no problem, but it was just not accepted by the general public. I'm not sure why. Derick Rethans 14:45 All right. Do you have anything to add Craig? Craig Francis 14:48 The explanation given by people is they liked the simpler definition of what that was as if it's a string written by the developer. Once you start introducing integers from any source, while it is safe, it made people feel, yeah, what is this. And that's where we also had the slight issue because we had to find a new name for it. And I did the silly thing of sort of asking for suggestions, and then bringing up a vote. And then we had, I think it's 18 to three people saying that it should be called is_trusted, and you have that sinking moment of going, Oh, this is going to cause problems, but hey, democracy. It creates that illusion that it's something more. So that's why we sort of went actually, while I like Scott's idea of having the idea of maybe calling it is_noble. It is a vague concept, which people have to understand. And it's a bit strange. Whereas going back to the simpler, original example, they've all seem to grasp grasp of that one. And we could just keep with the original name of is_literal, which I've not heard any real complaints about. Derick Rethans 15:53 I think some people were equivalenting is_trusted with something that we've had before in PHP called Safe mode, which was anything but of course. Craig Francis 16:02 Yes, no, definitely. Derick Rethans 16:03 We're sort of coming to the end of what to chat about here. Does the introduction of is literal introduce any BC breaks? Craig Francis 16:11 Only if the user land version of is_literal, which I'm fairly sure is going to be unlikely. So on dividing their own function called that. Derick Rethans 16:18 Did you check for it? Craig Francis 16:20 Yes. Derick Rethans 16:21 So if you haven't found it, then it's unlikely to to exist. Craig Francis 16:24 There are still private repositories, we can't shop through all their show, check through all their code. But yeah. Derick Rethans 16:29 Did I miss anything? Craig Francis 16:31 We covered future scope, which is the potential for a first class type, which I think would be useful for IDs and static analysers. But this is very much a secondary discussion, because that could build on things like intersection types, but we still need to focus on what the flag does. And there's also possibility of using this with the native functions themselves, but we do have to be careful with that one, because, you know, we got things like PHPMyAdmin. We have to be able to make the output from libraries as trusted because they're unlikely to still be providing a literal string at the end of it. So that's a discussion for the future. And the only other thing is that, you know, the vote ends on the 19th of July. Derick Rethans 17:08 Which is the upcoming Monday. How is the vote going? Are you confident that it will pass? Craig Francis 17:13 Not at the moment, we're sort of trying to talk to the people who voted against it. And we've not actually had any complaints as such. The only person who sort of mentioned anything was saying that we should rely on documentation and the documentation is already there. And it's not working. I think a lot of people just voted no, because they just sort of going well, that's the safe default. I don't think it's necessary. Or, you know, I'd like the status quo. And we still are trying to sell the idea and say: Look, it's really simple. It's not really having a performance impact. And it can really help libraries solve a problem, which is actually happening. Derick Rethans 17:46 Is this something that came out of the people that write PHP libraries or something that you came up with? Craig Francis 17:52 So I've come gone to the library authors and suggested you know, this is how Google do it. Would you like something similar? And we've certainly had red bean and Propel ORM saw show positive support for that. And I've also talked to Matthew Brown, who works on the Psalm static checking analysis. He's very positive about it, so much so that Psalm now also includes this as well. Obviously, static analysis is not going to be used by everyone. So we would like to bring this back to PHP so that libraries can use it without relying on all developers using static analysis. Derick Rethans 18:25 Thank you very much. Glad that you were both here to explain what this is_literal RFC is about. Craig Francis 18:31 Thank you very much, Derick. Joe Watkins 18:33 Thanks for having us. Derick Rethans 18:37 Thank you for listening to this installment of PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. I maintain a Patreon account for supporters of this podcast as well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time. Show Notes RFC: is_literal Credits Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Episode 88 Our exploration of medical issues along the span of our lives has reached the middle age. That strange period of time whose goalposts are constantly shifting because the people on the lower end don't want to admit it's beginning and those on the other end, don't want to admit it's over. This period is marked by an awareness of our body's limitations and our stubborn refusal to get that weird new ache checked out by a doctor. It can be a time of self-realization, honest introspection, and spiritual awakening or it could also mean a new sportscar and expensive vices. People do funny things when they start to discover hairs in places they're not supposed to be!    Support this podcast on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/DowntheWormholepodcast   More information at https://www.downthewormhole.com/   produced by Zack Jackson music by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis    Transcript  This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.   Rachael Jackson  00:05 You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion. This week our hosts are Ian Binns  00:17 Ian Binns Associate Professor of elementary science education at UNC Charlotte. And if I were to pursue a midlife crisis, the first thing that hit my head was is I would get tattoos. My name is Adam Pryor, Adam Pryor  00:29 I work at Bethany college. If I were to live out one of my midlife crisis fantasies, it would be to send all of my children to boarding school and buy myself a convertible. Kendra Holt-Moore  00:48 Kendra Holt-Moore, PhD candidate at Boston University, and my midlife crisis would either be get an eyebrow piercing, or get really involved in local theater, and just audition for all the main characters and try to achieve small town fame. Rachael Jackson  01:08 Hi, this is Rachael Jackson, Rabbi at Agoudas, Israel congregation Hendersonville, North Carolina. And if there were a midlife crisis that I would fulfill, I think it would be going off the grid entirely, and just becoming a hermit with my cross stitch stuff, and just sitting there and stabbing fabric for hours on end. Adam Pryor  01:36 So, as the as the question has been to indicate today, we are talking about health care, and particularly the issues of middle age, which is sort of the least exciting period of healthcare is what I've decided, right? No, no violent birth or death, just the long stetic period where everything is supposed to be humming along like normal, and yet you feel worse about yourself every day. Rachael Jackson  02:05 This is totally a year episode. Exactly. Adam Pryor  02:11 does feel like I was built for this. So but it's interesting, right click, because it's hard to find a lot of information about issues in the middle of life, because ideally, things are sort of going along pretty normally. And so there are a couple of things that I found that I thought were really interesting. So most of the material that you find talking about healthy aging, particularly during this period, relates to mental health more than it does physical health. The second thing that I found that I thought was interesting was that folks who tend to be in middle age seem not to go to doctors. They're maybe even worse than their own children who don't want to go to the doctor, but you make them go. But then when you hit this long middle period, you suddenly stop going as regularly. So I have another confessional question for you. I'm just curious when the last time you went to a doctor was Rachael Jackson  03:07 I went to my GP in December. Adam Pryor  03:11 recognize my stats here? Ian Binns  03:14 Yeah, I went 10 to 10 days ago. Sorry. Adam Pryor  03:20 You guys are by representative sample in any way, shape, or form? Not Ian Binns  03:24 at all, because the moment you told us before we started recording that that's what the data tells us. I knew immediately. I'm throwing that out. Yeah. Because I've always been the if I got some wrong and call the doctor. Adam Pryor  03:36 Do you really? Rachael Jackson  03:38 Yeah, I'm the opposite of that. No, I'm the I only got a baseline kind of person. So that's why I went because I I was turning 40 this year. And because health insurance is stupid. It worked out better that I went in December of last year rather than wait until I officially turned 40 this March. So I went last December so I could get a baseline of Okay, this is what I am at 40. Plus it was a pandemic year. So I was super stressed. So what was what did I look like in a super stressed 40 year olds is kind of what why I went I won't be going this year. Kendra Holt-Moore  04:20 I don't have a GP. But I have been a graduate student with my health insurance through Boston University. So I would just go to Student Health Services, and then they might tell me to go somewhere else. So I guess that kind of counts as a GP services, Rachael Jackson  04:41 but you're also technically just just throwing that one out there. You're not also technically middle aged, Adam Pryor  04:45 correct? Yes, correct. Right. Kendra Holt-Moore  04:48 Throw in my throw in my experience there. I do try to avoid the doctor until something urgent happened. See, so and I have been in the last year Ian Binns  05:00 I have had some unusual medical things happen to me over the last 10 to 15 years, that that's another reason why I'm like, you know what something's going on. And I'm kind of like, I'm not really sure about this out. Now what I do is I send them a message to the online system and say, Hey, this is happening. thoughts. And if they want me to come in, I come in, just because, you know, but the running joke when I had that weird infection in my hand that hospitalized me for two days and led to two surgeries, you know, and would have killed me if I had not gone in all the guys I work out with said, Hey, man, it's really good euro was because if it happened, any of us we would have been dead. I was like, exactly. Explaining, you have no idea how much my finger hurt, and they just like did just know, your finger. Does not matter. So yeah, because I went in is a reason why I didn't have to have anything amputated and or end up dying. So you know. Adam Pryor  06:07 So worth the check. So it was worth the check. Absolutely. Ian Binns  06:14 And I've had kidney stones several times. So yeah, when stuff happens, I'm just like, yeah, that's what they're there for. I also I'm under that, I think, mindset because growing up on a military facility in Germany, and even though my parents were divorce, I was still under my dad's medical insurance as a retiree. And so there was never a costs associated with going, you know, our my insurance was, I was fully covered with everything. And when you have something wrong, you just went in, I remember the first time I had to go to the doctor, I was in college, and they asked me about the copay, I just kind of looked at what was he talking about. And it was actually I didn't even know where to go first. Because there was no urgent care. For the most part, it was if he had something wrong, you know, on the military facilities, at least at the time, it was more of like, here's the ER, here's this kind of stuff. And that's where you went. And I remember kind of suggesting that someone and they're just like, what do you know, you don't go to the RFA, you go to urgent care. I didn't know what it was. So yeah, it was big, you know, wake up call. And as Rachel said, insurance is ridiculous. Adam Pryor  07:27 Yeah, I feel like the insurance piece is the like, largest factor of health care and middle age. Like, I, cuz I don't know about you. But anyway, it will everywhere. But but in particular in middle age, because I feel like you're you're kind of healthy enough to sort of roll along, if you so choose. But also, you start to get aware that like, probably somebody should, you know, take a look under the hood and make sure everything's okay. It's like when your car hits 100,000 miles, right, there are just some things you probably shouldn't do. And you also go, I really don't want to, because I know how much this will cost. Maybe not everybody feels that way. I certainly feel that way. Every time my wife looks at me and says you should go to doctor. And I say no, because I'm just too cheap. Rachael Jackson  08:20 Right? No, I think I think you're absolutely right. That it's it's partly our system. So it'd be interesting to see, because you were you were our anecdotal evidence or our anecdotal stories kind of disproved your scholarship article that you were saying that, you know, people have this general age Don't. Don't go. So I'm wondering if if it is a health insurance thing? What about countries that have universal health care if they experienced the same sort of dip in activity at this particular age range? Adam Pryor  08:56 Yeah, importantly, they don't. This is a distinctly and Rachael Jackson  09:00 they know that. Great. Adam Pryor  09:02 Yes. The World Health Organization has looked at that significantly, right. In terms of talking about what, what happens when you provide universal access to health care. Right. And I think it's interesting, right, because like, in some ways, all three of us, I'm going to explode you Kendrick cuz you're not middle aged yet. But the three of us who want Rachael Jackson  09:25 to be associated with you, people. Adam Pryor  09:26 That's right. Hey, now, don't worry. You're gonna feel good about talking about houses soon? Yeah. No, like, there's this, this element that I do kind of wonder like, are we not necessarily good representative samples across the board? One because of education, but to because of access to probably I would assume reasonable health insurance, even if not great health insurance? Rachael Jackson  09:55 If reasonable means that it costs the same as my mortgage then yes, yes. I have actually Access to reasonable health insurance. I, Ian Binns  10:05 we realized and I this was interesting to me, and this is not saying anything bad about where I used to work, but the health coverage in Louisiana was better than it is here in North Carolina, now that the services Yeah, there's no I'm not worried about anything. But when it came to the insurance part, like the premiums that we had to pay every month were lower than, you know, for me and and on it than it would have been for here and I. But then, if we they had a really interesting system there. It was called LSU. First, it was like a three tiered system. And the first year was LSU. First and if provider or hospital was part of the LSU, first, you paid nothing. Like that was part of their system. There was no copay, nothing. It was amazing. And then you had like, then the next tier was is that you had, they were in network, and then you had your deductible, right, and your copay. And then you had out of network deductible copay, which is obviously a whole lot more. But it was just, I remember seeing that when we got down there. And I just like, Whoa, that's amazing. So even when the twins are born, the hospital we did it in was one that was under the LSU first system. So it was considerably cheaper than it would have been if we gone to the other hospital. Which I find fascinating. But I think one of the things that really helped me was all about middle aged stuff, and insurance and all those things that when I did have that issue, that infection in my finger, they weren't sure what was going on. And we were sitting in the earth or the hand surgeon's office, and they were trying to look at it. Like, we don't know what this is. But we know we have to do an immersion surgery tonight. And this was at three o'clock in the afternoon telling us this. I do remember and then having to call the hospitals to make sure they took my medical insurance. Now I'm on the state health plan. So ended up not being a problem. But I do recall also to either the PA or the doctor or somebody suggesting to and make sure the hospital that we're going to take your insurance. Right. And I be I was always shocked. I'm still shocked by that, that. That's just unbelievable, right. And by the second surgery, which was in April of that year, I had reached my out of pocket maximum. So I paid nothing else the year when I would go the doctor, even for PT because of the hand. They In fact, even the physician's assistant at the time was like, well, we probably want to get you an occupational therapy. I'm not sure what your insurance looks like. And I said, Well, I've meet I've met the out of pocket maximum. He's like, Oh, well, we're just gonna write you for a whole bunch of them then. But it was just that mindset of that's what's so wrong with our system. So we'll get there, Kendra, you'll get there. Kendra Holt-Moore  13:05 Hi. Yeah, I've got some stories to share already. My husband almost went deaf a couple years ago. And so the doctor's bills of trying to like get that all sorted out. It's pretty insane. Rachael Jackson  13:21 Yep. I wanted to tackle one of your other points there, Adam. We were saying that. No, why not? Right, is it that we're just kind of status quo. And then at this, at this particular point in life, people focus on mental health, as opposed to strictly physical health of those, the two are often quite related. So that but the one of the other pieces that I was really thinking about is also at this point of life. And let's let's clarify. So I just asked two and a half questions. So let me ask a third actual question and start there. How are we defining middle life? Adam Pryor  14:08 How do you want to define middle middle life or middle age? Rachael Jackson  14:14 Yeah, I think that's a crucial question. Adam Pryor  14:19 Right? We were talking a little bit before, like things started right like that it keeps getting pushed older. I'm going to blame the baby boomers, because I blame them for everything. And I'm assuming that they just don't want to be old. So they want middle age to go further and further and further, right. Like, now middle ages to 65. And I'm like, No, no, no, you're old. You're not middle aged anymore. You're your past middle aged. I like to use 40. That's the number that I think of. And like plus or minus 40. Right. But like it there's something about that like statistically I am closer to death than I am closer to both Right, and that impending move that I go, that's to me where the like the middle life piece hits, which I know is not necessarily a popular answer. And there are different ways to do it. But it feels very 15:15 straightforward to me. Kendra Holt-Moore  15:38 makes sense to me like I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't say that, like 65 should be the new like middle aged mark. But 40 does feel young ish to me. Like, again, I'm speaking as the non middle aged person in the virtual room. But I think that, like technological advancements, people are living longer and will continue to live longer than we had previously. And so it does, it makes sense to me to have middle age, scoot a little bit further back then the 40. Mark, because I just, yeah, just like, a lot of older people I know who are like grandparents or great grandparents, or I know a lot of people who live well into their 90s. And, you know, not saying that, that's like the norm for everyone, but it's becoming more the norm. And so, yeah, I would scooch it back. Adam Pryor  16:34 It could be that I'm still fully anticipating to die by 80. Yeah, possibly seven. Kendra Holt-Moore  16:38 Middle Age, right. Rachael Jackson  16:40 But so when I was looking, and there's a it depends where you look, when does it start, I've seen the start of middle age be 3540 or 45. And the end of middle age be either 60 or 65. I haven't seen middle age end later than 65. The average life expectancy for the United States for men is 80. And for women 84. So I think you're not wrong, Adam to say that you don't expect to live past 80. That's the average life expectancy of men, your personal genetics, your family, genetics, your lifestyle. All of that, of course, has an issue, but 40 is straight up minute like you've literally lived half your life. Right? Like from a mathematical standpoint, none of us actually know when we're going to die. But given statistics, half is done. Right. And I think and then from a female standpoint, right, our physiol our physiology, right? If if we're only seen of as birthing machines, then then the question might be, when does half of your birthing abilities end? Right? So if we, if we look at what menstruation starts and say 13, rounding small nut rate 13. And when does it end? 5055. Right, depending on depending, again, dependent. So if we say 55. So it's 20 years, or excuse me, 40 years, half of that is 35. Right? So from a female biological standpoint, 35 would be the start of middle aged half of your birthing your reproductive life is over. So in that way, and and that's a medical place. So I think 35 is also not an not an air. When we look at jobs, people aren't necessarily retiring at 60 or 62, or even 65. Right? Some people are working until 7075. So to say, Well, I'm How long is my work history. So if my work history is 50 years, and I start when I'm 22, middle age isn't going to start until I'm 45. Right? So I I think there's value and understanding when we're talking these ages that there's a lot of different lenses that we can use. And from a from a psychological and an emotional standpoint. I see middle aged also and not necessarily in this generation because people are living so much longer. really starting to kick in. And the end of middle age. Where middle age ends is when your next when the generation before you has died. When you know if we're if we're looking at the natural order of things and saying Okay, my parents, my aunts and uncles, all of them, they've died. I'm next. And to me, that's one of those places that indicates the end of middle age. That's how, from an emotional standpoint, which is also why like, why should I go to the doctor, I don't want them to find things. I don't want I don't want That reality, Ian Binns  20:01 so helps you realize that you're not or that you are mortal. Rachael Jackson  20:06 Right? Right. I mean, teenagers and adolescence that's a better term adolescence go through an invincible stage. I think in middle age, we go through an immortal stage. I know, I know, I can get hurt, but I'm gonna live forever. Adam Pryor  20:27 reckoning with mortality. Rachael Jackson  20:29 Yes. Yeah. And it's hard. Adam Pryor  20:35 does kind of suck any other way to put it. Ian Binns  20:42 So I started looking at, like signs that you have reached middle age, Rachael Jackson  20:45 or what people think and know when those were written. So if you're looking at, you know, like huffington post things, make sure when they're ready. Yeah, Ian Binns  20:54 that one's funny. The Huffington Post one that was update in 2017. There's some pretty funny ones on here. Rachael Jackson  21:02 Are you gonna Why are you just gonna leave it like that? No, hold Ian Binns  21:04 on, a hair starts appearing everywhere. When your nose face ears. Hair Reading on your? Yeah, Reading on your phone becomes difficult because the font is suddenly too tiny and blurry. The shed or basement becomes your favorite place. you've Adam Pryor  21:21 dug a little too, too close to home. Ian Binns  21:24 That's why I read that one. Oh. You begin thinking policemen, teachers and doctors look really young. Yeah. Yeah. You are obsessed with your health. You begin looking over the top of your glasses. You start enjoying naps more than ever. Rachael Jackson  21:50 No. naps are for everything. Except for as punishment for children. Right? Because they think it's a punishment. But Adam Pryor  21:58 yeah, forever. Ian Binns  22:00 You find yourself saying what and huh? All the time. You find a lot harder to lose weight a whole lot harder. You don't know any of the songs played on the radio. Gardening becomes an obsession. You develop? You develop little leaks. This is a good one. Yeah. You grow and every time you bend over, Rachael Jackson  22:28 that could have happened to anybody at different times, depending on what their birthing was like. Ian Binns  22:34 Yeah. Anyway, those are some some. Yeah. Adam Pryor  22:40 I hadn't hadn't thought about defining middle aged by how leaky you are. Kind of like that. Mm hmm. So I can't wait. Kendra Holt-Moore  22:55 Some of those already apply though, actually. Yeah. Ian Binns  22:57 See, I told you, you're on your way. Yeah, that's fine. Rachael Jackson  23:02 It's the alternative. Adam Pryor  23:07 what's the alternative? Rachael Jackson  23:09 data? Adam Pryor  23:11 Ah, I like that, that no one's used forever. Nobody. Nobody went with like the transhumanist answer there. That's good. That's good. Rachael Jackson  23:21 We covered that. That's, that's not what we want. That we want. We want death. Ian Binns  23:26 So I wish dear listener Tune in next time when Kendra takes us on a conversation about death. Oh, yeah, it's gonna be great. Adam Pryor  23:35 In preparation for that conversation about death is as we reach this sort of, like, middle aged piece, right, we talked a little bit about this, this idea that like, mental health becomes a big piece of how people think about it. And there's this in a lot of the in a lot of research, there's this this sort of description of a longing for youth, right, a sort of almost like a nostalgia for things that you used to be able to do. But now, perhaps that was no longer a good idea is my way of describing it. So I ran into this the other day, when I was throwing Linus up in the air. And I went, did that was a it was a poor decision in relationship to when I did this with Henry. And I didn't even like think about it. And Henry was a heavier child, and that made me more depressed. I've known what that experience was Rachael Jackson  24:33 like, but just to clarify, the two of them are what, nine years apart Adam Pryor  24:36 nine years apart? Yeah. Were you stronger than I am immortal, more physically? Ian Binns  24:45 were you doing more physical things and like physically fit the new aren't new and Adam Pryor  24:49 now I feel as though I feel like I can say that for like, a 37 year old. I am like, relatively fit. I went out and biked 105 months. Last weekend, like I feel thing, I feel relatively fit. I've been cycling a lot like, you know, I don't feel undue in that regard, but also, like, not like when I was in my, you know, mid 20s and could swing my child around without abandon no matter what. Ian Binns  25:21 Well, all the reason why I'm asking this because like, for example, because of, you know, when I joined f3, and started doing boot camp style workouts, when I was a kid, and stuff and a runner, I never had upper body strength. So I can never do pull ups or anything like that. Now, I can't go out right now and knock knock many pull ups out because I'm not because of the pandemic as I've I've never really worked on physical strength, like I had before. But when I was training for those Spartan races, yeah, I can knock out pull ups, and that was 39 4041. So I was definitely more physically stronger than than I was maybe when the kids were born. Was that's why I was asking like, Is it just because in middle age now there are aches and pains that I have now that didn't especially back pains, back and neck pains that you're just like, oh, that was one of the ones I did not read off. Back in, like back in that pains. And then it also made me think to one of the things I saw on another list was purchasing your decor for your house. That if you're more excited about that, then other things, toys or whatever, that's obviously a big difference, Rachael Jackson  26:30 like going out on Saturday night. A fun date on Saturday night is like Home Depot, Target, and Sam's. Yeah. You know, yeah, free samples. Adam Pryor  26:40 Or then even like the type of good free samples are back, I just want to Rachael Jackson  26:44 do that for you. They're not back for us. They Adam Pryor  26:46 are they're coming back for us. And it is going to drive my grocery bill down. Yeah, because I get to eat me some free samples. Ian Binns  26:57 That's a middle aged thing. I would say cuz you're sitting there wouldn't I mean, can you say what you said it to drive my grocery bill down? Adam Pryor  27:05 That's right. That's what I'm worried about. Kendra Holt-Moore  27:06 I don't know if that's a middle aged. Rachael Jackson  27:09 shoe. That's a cheap thing. Ian Binns  27:11 That's a cheap item. Okay. You're right. That's that's just cheap. Adam. That's true. Rachael Jackson  27:17 That's true. Okay, in typical Rachael fashion. Can we talk about the positives, though? Adam Pryor  27:26 There are positives. There are parts. Are you sure? Because I bet I can split all your positives into negatives. Okay, Rachael Jackson  27:34 you were just saying you're not as strong as you were before. Ian Binns  27:36 I need my popcorn. Well played on that one, Rachel, thank you. I'm ready. I'm ready. Remember, she lifts weights. Flip it. Rachael Jackson  27:48 One of the things that I think really happens to people in this category of middle age, however a person chooses to identify when it starts and when's it ends, is a really knowing oneself. And this is where I think the midlife crisis concept comes in, where a person finally realizes that they are mortal. And that time is the most precious thing that we have. And because of that, we don't want to waste it. And so there's a reevaluation of life a reevaluation of priorities of reevaluation of self. And that transformation, that metamorphosis, I think, is absolutely beautiful. And there's a sort of understanding of not really caring as much what others think that a particular age you know, that turns into curmudgeonly old men usually, but it's, it develops in a nice way early. So that that that for me is one of the biggest positives that I see in this category of middle age. Adam Pryor  29:25 But I'm gonna just turn that on its head a little bit, right, like, cuz that might go really poorly. And what was well, right, so I think part of what goes on with that midlife crisis is exactly this sort of like self awareness that you're describing, right? But what happens when you're aware that the self you've become is drastically, drastically not what you want to be, Rachael Jackson  29:48 then you change Adam Pryor  29:52 or you buy a convertible Rachael Jackson  29:54 or get a tattoo you find really poor coping mechanisms. Correct. Given that that's at every stage Well, yes, I'm in the hence the poor weight loss issues. Yeah. Right then. But I mean, I think of an unhealthy coping mechanism that our society has made a joke of, but I don't Adam Pryor  30:15 I think part of this is that like the, the discovery of self is not inherently positive. Right? It's a sort of neutral item, I think, Oh, Rachael Jackson  30:27 really? Ian Binns  30:29 When that'd be based on perspective, load the discovery of like, yeah, I, I'm with you, Rachel, you say, say that, again, Adam Pryor  30:38 the discovery of self is not inherently positive. I think it's neutral. Kendra Holt-Moore  30:43 Oh, yeah. I agree with that. Rachael Jackson  30:45 Same Oh, Kendra. Kendra Holt-Moore  30:49 I just, I mean, it's such a personal like process. But I think what I hear when Adam says that is that people over the course of their lives, and not just in middle age, although I'm sure it can, like, Look, a particular way, because that's when we talk about things like midlife crisis, and all of that, but people have different like practices and hobbies, and you know, life circumstances change you and you just become more self aware over the course of your life, or not everyone does become more self aware, actually. And it just, yeah, I think, what, what Adam just said, is that, like, you can wake up one day and realize that you're not who you hoped you would be, and might also find it really hard to change into who you hope to be. And I don't know, like, there's just a million factors that play into, like, what constitutes the self? And I guess that's maybe the bigger, more daunting question is, like, what do we what are we discovering when we discover the self, but I just think that, yeah, like to be satisfied with the self, that you discover, probably has a lot to do with things like, healthy support system, and financial stability, and, you know, like, meaning making processes that are, you know, accessible to you. And, and that, I mean, those things aren't like, what we typically consider to be an inherent part of the self, but they, I think, make life a lot easier for us to become our best selves. And, and so yeah, it's just, it feels like a really, like, life is complicated. discovering who we are, or creating ourselves. The way that we want to be is just, yeah, it's a real mixed bag for people. And so it feels really intuitive to me that that, that does, that it is a neutral process, because it can be it can look very good for some people and very bad for others. And it's wrapped up in all of these like social factors, too. And some people just don't have a lot of control over those things and what they do have control over? Well, yeah, I guess that's still, that's still brings us to a conversation about like, you know, it's it's not what it's not about, like what you can't control, but it's about like, the attitude you have towards the things you can't control, like little quotes like that about, you know, who you are, who you're not, and, yeah, so anyway, I just find that a really intuitive way to talk about like self discovery. What does that not feel? I'm curious about what, what you guys are thinking Rachel and he and, Dan, Ian Binns  33:52 I think the way you said it was a lot nicer. I'm just gonna say it. So Adam Pryor  33:59 the way Kendra said it? Ian Binns  34:01 I do. I do. Because I feel like it still gets the way I was thinking of it was a perspective thing, right? It's how you approach it. And and I think that shifts, depending on what stage of life you're in, and also can just depend on the day, you know, or the moment that you're experiencing something. And so I guess, over time, it could average out as neutral feeling that way. But go ahead. Well, so one of the things that, you know, that I This helped a lot with, like all of the mindfulness meditation I've done is to really focus on which I just hit one year, 34:44 daily. Ian Binns  34:45 Last Friday, I was very excited with that 10% happier group. But is that right? And then I still also we're still working progress, obviously but recognizing what I can and cannot control and to learn it. let that go is tough. Right? So I think by the fact that I'm getting better at that than I used to be, that would make it I think things more positive, because I'm recognizing what I have control over. But if I'm in a foul mood, or struggling on that day, it doesn't matter. This Yeah. It will be a negative perspective. So, Kendra Holt-Moore  35:27 yeah, yeah. And I just wanted to add that, like, what I just said, I could see how maybe it sounds like a little bit deterministic of like, oh, what, what's around you makes you who you are. And I do think that's true to an extent, but also, like, what you're saying, in the personal practices, we have to try to, you know, like, create ourselves or however you want to phrase that. It's, it's a matter of practice and like determination to some extent that. Yeah, you might not feel the same every day. And that's okay. I don't think that really like, changes your, like, fundamental being, it's just that, like, we, I think humans, we have practices for ourselves, we participate in rituals, we have community and support systems, because that those things do create a boundedness around who we perceive ourselves to be. And we, we each have many different roles in our families, and friends and communities. And that those are all ways that we, that we do, like, derive a sense of who we are. And some of that's like aspirational, you know, like, if you strip that all away, like, what, how would that make you different than who you are? In your role as like, teacher, pastor, Mother, you know, all of these things? So it's just like a really, it's a really difficult question, I think, to, to answer without thinking about the things we do to practice being ourselves in the forms of, you know, practices like meditation or attending that, like, a Bible study group every Sunday, or showing up to class to teach every week, you know, things like that. So just wanted to add that Rachel has a very quizzical look on her face. Yeah, Rachael Jackson  37:25 I I hear what you're saying. totals, parent medical tangential aside, I think everyone needs to go through active listening and assertive speaking. training. So I hear what you're saying. I think I'm coming at it from a very different place. from a place of I think, Adam, you said status quo. Right? That's, that's one of the characteristics of this time of life is status quo. And when I compare that to other phases of life, say, if we look at, right post middle age, what happens after middle age? What, like, what happens? What how are we? How are we calling that old? elderly? Right? I, it depends. And then there's medical terminology of elderly or older, or frail, all of those different fragile, right, these are all medical terms that can be used in those ways. But if we say, elderly, right or old, right, you have middle age, and you go to old, and you go to elderly, old and elderly, are in our society, because that's someone that we can really speak to, are categorized, often by the decline of the body, and the re evaluation of the self outside of a profession. Whether that profession was raising children, or having a career or whatever it was with that there's there's a shift in our culture of Oh, now you're retired. And that's, that's a very big shift in our human doing our productivity, our you have to, so that our society is very surrounded around that. So I think older and elderly are really looking at redefining the self outside of a profession. And in terms of the body, right, the body itself starts to really decline in those points. Youth, adolescence, is categorized and for me looked at as finding yourself within society, like pushing the boundaries, where is authority? How do I fit in? How do I fit there, like I am knowing mostly who I am, but it's an age of exploration. This status quo is a I've established what my career is more Less, I've established more or less, at least a partnership or not a partnership, a child like rearing children or not rearing children that there's a, these things are not necessarily fully brand new at this point, right? Most people don't say at 50. Now I want children when I didn't want them for the last 30 years. It could be a Oh, shucks. Now we have another right there. I mean, it's not saying that it doesn't happen, but that it rarely at that stage of life, is it a, yes, this is what I want. And I've never given it any thought. But that it's a status quo, which allows us to then in a slow, methodical, or not even methodical, but in a in a status quo sort of way to say, is this who I am. And I think and I will, I will very much saying I really appreciate you pointing out Kendra, that this is coming from a point of privilege. This is most definitely coming from a place of privilege that I didn't earn. Some of it, I did most of it, I didn't. And that there are people who don't have the privilege to have that conversation of self, which is one of the the markers of modernity, as opposed to pre modern era, right, they didn't have this luxury work for 15 hours a day, six days a week is. So having said all of that I come from a place of this is our time to just sort of slow down and figure out what what not what we're trying to reclaim, which is what I think you were trying to look at Adam, but how to re hone who we are. And even if it's a even if it's a 180 from who we are, it's a I can now confidently say at 40. I am an introvert. I am not shy. But I'm definitely an introvert I am a low energy person. I am a particular food eater. not picky. But I like what I like. And I'm gonna change that a whole lot. And it's okay that I like blue box mac and cheese. And I'm not going to apologize for that. And I'm not going to feel bad about it. I'm not going to feel bad about who I am or my choices and feel like someone's judging me. Anything that's that's the recognition of self that has nothing to do with my role as a clergy person, as a spouse as a parent. It's a Who am I What do I like to do? What are the things that make me happy? Not my mood. And if you'll if you'll allow me the ability to make one more analogy. One of the things I hear you saying Ian is really like weather. Today's weather. How do I feel today? Right? And that's weather. Right today? Like it was 105 degrees in Billings, Montana yesterday, that is absurd. And it snowed in Texas. And that is absurd. Right? The weather is the daily changes, but the climate. That's what we're looking at now. And I'm saying at this point in our life, this is when we can recognize the climate is changing. Can we change it? Do we want it to change? if so how? Right? cooler Texas sounds great, hotter, Montana, not great. Warmer oceans, bad idea. Poor little sharks, heard a whole story on sharks and being in mermaid purses and stuff like that, and how warm oceans are making them die. Like that. That would be the negative. But I think inherently it is good, I think inherently. And that's why I'm saying it's not inherently neutral. I think it's inherently good to look at oneself in the mirror and say this is who I am. And I'm good with that. So that that for me is the positive. Because we're not focusing on developing the career rearing the young worrying about our bodies. Again, speaking from a place of privilege. Adam Pryor  44:30 Okay with that, if you're good with it. It's the person who looks at it and says, I'm not, and there's no mechanism to change that I look at and go, that's a that's a different sort of notion of what self discovery is. Rachael Jackson  44:49 Why is there not a mechanism to change that's what I don't understand. Adam Pryor  44:54 privilege. Rachael Jackson  44:57 Can you say more? Yeah. You're like me, I'm dead body? Adam Pryor  45:01 No. So I do it this way. I'm Joe trucker. And Joe trucker has woken up at 45. And gone, I spent 20 years of my life driving truck. And I'm not sure that I believe that I've actually done anything good in the world. And I would like to do something good in the world. And I have no savings by which to change the structure of the day to day grind that I find myself in. That is not a moment of self discovery that I would say is inherently good. Rachael Jackson  45:33 disagree. Adam Pryor  45:35 But I think that's because you assume the structure of knowing the truth is good. Rachael Jackson  45:41 I do assume that, Adam Pryor  45:43 and I do. Ian Binns  45:44 But you are also Adam. I feel like with the example you just gave, you're still not fully in that person's perspective. No, no, no, no, you've not you've not lived that perspective. So you do not know. So that's the the, the To me, it sounds like. And so I want to push back a little bit on that, like I see your point, Adam, with that example, based on my perspective, I would I would potentially see that the same way. But based on the person who's lived that entire life in their perspective, I don't, I don't, I can't say how I would say, Adam Pryor  46:19 if you can't say how you would see it, I also don't think you can say self discovery is inherently good. Rachael Jackson  46:24 But I see what the problem that I have with your analogy, is that you're basing that on a person's profession, that person could then say, Yep, I am a trucker. And I feel like I haven't done anything good in the world. Now, let me go be a trucker for a company that I feel does good in the world. Or now let me take this time that I have, because I might truck 60 hours a week, but I have two hours that I could give. And I'd rather do that because this is a lack that I feel and I can do something about that. So so the profession might not change the situation of having savings might not change. But that self discovery can be a very positive change. Adam Pryor  47:05 But But I think cannon is are two different things. It can be a positive change, Rachael Jackson  47:13 there is no try only do Adam Pryor  47:15 like, but will it be is is is also a is part of what I would press back on there. And why I would call it neutral. Okay. Kendra Holt-Moore  47:26 Yeah, I was gonna also reflect that I think that Adams hypothetical, it's not that the hypothetical is always the case that like Joe trucker is going to reflect on his his himself as, you know, being like in a negative or positive position. It's just that both of those possibilities can happen. And because of the potential for that to go that either way, that that's where the neutrality lies. Adam Pryor  48:01 I mean, I work in higher ed, I I'm generally in favor of self discovery, as like something that's important. Rachael Jackson  48:07 Yeah. You sway me towards neutrality. I can, I can see that. But But you're right, Adam, I do I do believe that, you know, the more truth we know. That is inherently good. That I do. That is more my my perspective, my worldview. I do not believe of ignorance is bliss, kind of Ian Binns  48:32 reverse. I agree with that worldview. Of course, there are things that we can learn. That is true that we may not like when you put it all together. I still feel like yeah, it's better to know when you put it all together, again. Now, you can come with example right now that would be like, Oh, I'm betting he wouldn't like this. And then you tell me and I'd get mad. But then after that, I'll do Adam Pryor  49:05 that alone. I'll let you do in your optimism for a while. That's fun. Thank you Rachael Jackson  49:10 do in optimism. That means that it's going to concentrate more and I'm going to be even more optimistic then. Adam Pryor  49:17 That does seem to be how it works for people. Rachael Jackson  49:20 It is I'm sorry, you don't understand it. Okay, well, optimistic me. Cuz that's who I am. And I'm not gonna apologize for it. But that's okay. Um, is there anything else? Good? Adam Pryor  49:46 I don't know You were the one who said you could come up with good things about about middle age. Rachael Jackson  49:50 Yeah, Adam Pryor  49:51 I mean, I was I was just here to turn them over and make them bad. Yeah. So Rachael Jackson  49:58 I think the take no crap attitude. is a good thing. Ian Binns  50:01 All right, I wouldn't say that necessarily comes with it. Kendra Holt-Moore  50:06 And also, I could turn you potentially like just to get, I feel like I'm really with Adam in this crap attitude is something that I am, I also am like starting to feel the older I get, I was actually just talking about this with my sister who is in her mid 20s. And how we like, are definitely starting to care a lot less about what other people say, the older we get, and how that can be a great thing. But it can also make you a Karen well, so you know, good and bad. I say this for myself, too. Because I, I don't want to I don't want to be a caring. But sometimes it's it's hard not started to manager. Adam Pryor  51:00 I think what starts to like put itself out there, right? Are these there's a mixed bag of what this process of reaching middle age both in terms of like bodily health, mental health, the process of self evaluation, like dope. It can take us in different directions, much like other stages of life, right. So like, even if we talk about Middle Ages, this status quo, right between because I liked your like Rachel, like the like, curve up in the curve down. Right the like, there's development and growth. And this is exciting, but also, like I would never ever want to be a teenager again. middle aged feels much better than being a teenager. I'm watching my child reach into teenage them and going I hate you go back to being a child or skip right into being 20. But this this mid No, no, nobody likes you right now. I say that to the cat, also, but that's fine. So like, there's that element, right? And then I think you can say the same thing on the other side, right like that. Like I like your distinction between old and elderly. Right? Like there's this element of I remember speaking with a very good scholar at a conference, and she sort of halfway joked about I just can't think as fast as I used to. And sort of stopped and paused and then said, No, but I really mean it like this, this body that I am now is not who I am. Right? There's this element of like being betrayed by one's physical sensations, which in middle age, I feel like hasn't happened yet. Like you can be slightly dissatisfied or there's hair where there wasn't here before. There might be a grown. There's a grown from lifting things up and throwing children around. But right. But like in general, there's there's not that sense of like bodily betrayal that can come later. But I think there is this element. Right. And this is what I think is curious about the whole middle aged conversation where it intersects with health is this this element of like, an awareness of that status of old and elder of that eventual bodily betrayal suddenly being around the corner which can feel impending in a positive or negative way. I mean, the way I phrased it does not make it sound great. But I understand it could be phrased positively. Ian Binns  53:39 But it comes back to the mortality conversation we were having earlier. Adam Pryor  53:42 Yeah, right. I feel like like Middle Ages, this like element of like, mortality, contemplation, and depending on how positive or negative you are, right, like waiting for the other shoe to drop of being old and elderly or of having old and elderly cut short. Right. So I, my my thinking about this has like changed since I said that I would start to do it right, because we had this local pastor who died very suddenly. You know, truck came across the highway hit ambu. So Harley, and his 10 year old daughter died almost instantly. 13 year old survived, which is miraculously Ian Binns  54:28 weird. longer. That happened a Adam Pryor  54:31 week two weeks ago. Okay. So it's this, right? And I'm a fairly well educated, I did all the pastoral training stuff I can identify when I'm parallel processing. And yet it doesn't stop that process of parallel processing right like it continues to occur. And, you know, my my wife and I mccobb Lee joked while also sort of doing the process of grieving that as part of that to say You know, she she halfway of that when I said like, I'm, you know, I'm going on right and 100 miles like, also she's like, and then you'll never come back. That's what I think about every time you walk out the door with your bicycle, and you get run over, or you're going to flip over the handlebars. And it's not fun, right? In the same way that like, there's this like element that creeps in that like, you know, every time I send my pre adolescent teen who I hope will soon be 20 out on his bicycle to like ride to school, I'm like, someone's going to run you over, then you'll just be dead. And I feel like that is a hallmark of middle age that there is this, like awareness that creeps into the way in which you treat all of these other health related concerns. Rachael Jackson  55:52 Yeah, I think so. I mean, to share something sort of personal. They're one of I've always been with people who are night owls. And so my husband now like, stays out until two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, sometimes even later. That's just his personality, and it's fine for us. But I it's fine for our relationship. But I as a person and emotionally go, oh my god, he's not coming home. Oh my God. He said he'd be home at two and it's 230. And what is going on? And just last night, like I'm asleep, and it's almost two o'clock. It's like 145 in the morning, and I see this bright light in my eyes. Like what is going on is like, I need you to get up the cars in a ditch. And my heart just like skipped a beat. I was just like, but you're in the house. So you're okay. Like, okay, so the cars in a ditch, like that was one of my big that was that was a big fear. And oh, yeah, I'm like trying to figure he's okay. But he's great. But he like he was the one that shined the flashlight in my face. He's like, you need to wake up. But having confronting it in those ways, saying, This is exactly my fear. And so every time you leave the house, this is what I feel like. Adam Pryor  57:07 But I think it's that element to that. It's like, it's not just your own mortality, that's part of this, right? Like, it's this recognition of is literally everyone else's mortality, and how that sort of works for you. Right? Rachael Jackson  57:19 Everyone's going to die. Adam Pryor  57:21 Right? Like, every time Rachel's, like every time you walk out the door with your bicycle, I'm afraid you're gonna die. I'm like, Well, every time you gave birth, I was pretty sure that I was going to be parenting by myself. So, you know, live with it. But also, like, Rachael Jackson  57:36 but it is this sort of shillington that three times you do this every week, just like Adam Pryor  57:41 my level of intense fear was justified, because that's a horrible process birthing. I mean, it's beautiful, but also, like, try Holy smokes Ian Binns  57:50 on that we. So while we were going through the classes when I was pregnant with the twins, and there were classes specific for multiples, right. And so they were talking about, it'll have to be a C section. Sometimes it could be emergency c sections. And sometimes there could be complications, but and so they were trying to tell the dads that, you know, there's a chance that if you're in a surgery, there's a complication that may have to whisk you out of the room, but everything's gonna be okay. So they were telling us, and I just raised my hand and said, yeah, that doesn't work for me. And they just said, What do you mean doesn't work for you? I said, So you're telling me that there could be a potential that for like an hour, I would have no idea what's going on with my wife who just gave birth these two babies. And you want me to be like, Oh, cool. And I just I kept pushing back. And finally, but and helped me change your perspective, saying that? Well, honey, if that did happen, it would help me knowing that you are with our children. Making sure they're okay. Right. And so the perspective had to shift for me, but I see your point on that one. I mean, it was like, You can't just say that and then be like, but it's all good, you're fine. And it made while waiting for them to give her the epidural because it was a C section. And so I had to wait outside of the operating room for them to do that process. And I would see because we had two teams of doctors, nurses and stuff for the babies. And then of course, the doctor and the nurses for and that they're all walking in and out and I'm just sitting there staring down going in and out. And I did that that was tough. I was those exciting moment. But for those few moments, it was terrifying. I Adam Pryor  59:31 mean, I think the intensity of those sorts of moments that you have, like earlier in your life are now spread at a low level across every day. Zack is never gonna let me lead an episode ever again. Ian Binns  59:47 I can't wait till we start with like the beginning of what we do with stories and you get to tell a story and then Okay, everyone. What Rachael Jackson  59:52 do you guys have no idea how to pull us out of this ditch. Kendra Holt-Moore  59:57 We will knock on the door of death. Ian Binns  1:00:04 We're right now we're approaching the door next time we're just Adam Pryor  1:00:07 going right up to it. Yeah, Rachael Jackson  1:00:10 that was my Zach that's it. I Adam Pryor  1:00:12 got an attack that clearly the Rachael Jackson  1:00:14 death's door Yeah. Not gonna happen next time next time knocking on Adam Pryor  1:00:19 door knocking on death's door. This time, just hairs in places where they're not supposed to be.

Who's up for another John Candy movie? These gals are! It's “Summer Rental”, a ridiculous 1985 comedy set in Florida that the sisters loved as children. Is it any good? Is there a reason few people have heard of it? Join us this week and find out!

This week Pauline chooses an obscure 1980's comedy with a beloved lead and a ridiculous plot. Think you can figure it out before Lisa does? Here's a hint: the lead actor has been in a film the sisters previously reviewed.

PHP Internals News: Episode 89: Partial Function Applications London, UK Thursday, June 17th 2021, 09:17 BST In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Larry Garfield (Twitter) and Joe Watkins (Twitter, GitHub, Blog about the "Partial Function Applications" RFC. The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript Derick Rethans 0:14 Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 89. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield and Joe Watkins about a partial function application RFC that they're proposing with Paul Crevela and Levi Morrison. Larry, would you please introduce yourself? Larry Garfield 0:36 Hello World. I'm Larry Garfield or Crell on most social medias. I'm a staff engineer for Typo3 the CMS. And I've been getting more involved in internals these days, mostly as a general nudge and project manager. Derick Rethans 0:52 And hello, Joe, would you please introduce yourself as well? Joe Watkins 0:55 Hi, I'm Joe, or Krakjoe, I do various PHP stuff. That's all there is to say about that really. Derick Rethans 1:02 I think you do quite a bit more than just a little bit. In any case, I think for this RFC, you, you wrote the implementation of it, whereas Larry, as he said, did some of the project management, I'm sure there's more to it than I've just paraphrased in a single sentence. But can one of you explain in one sentence, or if you must, maybe two or three, what partial function applications, or I hope for short, partials are? Larry Garfield 1:27 Partial function application, in the broadest sense, is taking a function that has some number of parameters, and making a new function that pre fills some of those parameters. So if you have a function that takes four parameters, or four arguments, you can produce a new function that takes two arguments. And those other two you've already provided a value for in advance. Derick Rethans 1:54 Okay, I feel we'll get into the details in a moment. But what are its main benefits of doing this? What would you use this for? Larry Garfield 2:01 Oh, there's a couple of places that you can use partial application. It is what got me interested. It's very common in functional programming. But it's also really helpful when you want to, you have a function that like, let's say, string replace takes three arguments, two of which are instructions for what to replace, and one of which is the thing in which you want to replace. If you want to reuse that a bunch of times, you could build an object and pass in constructor values and save those and then call a function. Or you can just partially apply string replace with the things to search for, and the things to replace with and get back a function that takes one argument and will do that replacement on it. And you can then reuse that over and over again. There are a lot of cases like that, usually use in combination with functions that wants a callback. And that callback takes one argument. So array map or array filter are cases where very often you want to give it a function that takes one argument, you have a function that takes three arguments, you want to fill in those first ones first, and then pass the result that only takes one argument to array map or a filter, or whatever. So that's the one of the common use cases for it. Derick Rethans 3:15 That's the benefits and some of its background comes from functional programming, as you've just mentioned. What is the syntax that you're proposing and some of the semantics? Larry Garfield 3:26 The syntax that we've developed, are two placeholders that you can use in a function call. So if you're calling a function as you normally would, but for one of the arguments, you pass a question mark, or at the tail end, you have an ellipsis (dot dot dot), then that tells the engine: This is not a function call. This is a partial application. And what it will do is return not the result of the function but return a closure object that has the the arguments that correspond to those question marks. And then when called with those arguments, we'll pass those along with the original function. Probably easier to explain, if I use a concrete example, using the string replace example we talked about before, you would call it with str_replace, the example from the RFC, hello, hi, question mark. What that gives you is a callable, a closure that has one argument, which will take its type and name from str_replace. So the third argument to str_replace essentially gets copied into that closure. And what closure does internally when you call it with that one argument is it just calls string replace with hello, hi, and whatever argument you gave it and returns that value. It is conceptually very, very similar to just writing a short lambda or an arrow function that takes one arguments and calls string replace hello, hi, and that argument. In most cases, it ends up functioning almost exactly like that. There's a few subtle differences in a few places. But most of the time, you can think of it working essentially like that. The question mark means one required argument only. The dot dot dot means zero or more arguments, if you want to, say provide the first argument to a function, and then dot dot dot would mean: And then all of the other arguments, however many there are, even if it's that zero, those are what's left, which languages other languages that have partial application as a first class feature, usually end up doing it that way where you can only pre fill from the left. PHP, because the placeholder lets us do it in any order. So we can skip over arguments if we want to, which is quite nice. But it means that you can take a function and reduce it to, I want to prefill just these two arguments and leave these three arguments for the new function, or I want to prefill these arguments from the left, and then everything else, whatever it is, is left. It also lets you do cute things like if you provide all of the arguments to a function, and then just tack on a dot dot dot the end of it, then you get back a closure that takes essentially zero arguments. But when called, will call that other function. So it's lets lets you really easily build a delayed function as you need to. Derick Rethans 6:15 When do the arguments to the function get evaluated then? Larry Garfield 6:18 Arguments are evaluated in advance. So this is the subtle difference between partial application and the short lambda syntax. In a short lambda, what happens is, essentially, that entire expression on the right hand side gets wrapped up into a closure. And so any arguments that are compound like they have a function call that is inside one of the placeholders, or one of the arguments, that'll get evaluated later. With partial application, the function that is in a parameter position gets evaluated first and reduced to a value. And that value gets partially applied to the function. 90% of the time, that's not going to be an issue. There are a few cases where doing it one way or the other may be subtly different, but you'll spot those fairly easily. Derick Rethans 7:02 So the RFC talks about things that you can do, but also a few things that you cannot do or don't want to do yet. What are these things that partials won't support, or run support yet, at least? Larry Garfield 7:13 The main thing that it doesn't support is named placeholders. You can pre fill a value or an argument with a named named argument. But not a named placeholder. Those have to be positional. Named placeholders are complicated to implement, and run into a question of, if you provide those in a different order, does that also change the order of the arguments in the partially applied function that you get back in that closure? And there's a good argument to be made that either way is logical. And so we're like, no, does not deal with it, too complicated. We'll just positional only. And you cannot specify an optional arguments either. It's just again, too complicated. Things get too weird. If you have those advanced cases, use our short lambda, that works just fine. If you want to just make a new function that defers to a new function, and change its API in the process, short lambda works fine. And it's still quite short. Derick Rethans 8:13 I know the RFC talks a little bit about references, but I don't like talking about references. So let's skip that part. In my opinion, they should be removed from the language. But I know we can't. Larry Garfield 8:22 There's occasionally used for them. But very occasionally. Derick Rethans 8:25 There's a bunch of technical things that I also want to chat about. And hopefully, Joe, if you want to fill in, I'd be more than welcome to hear your opinions on these things. But the first one is that PHP has this thing called func_get_args. How does that work with these partials? How does that tie in together? Joe Watkins 8:42 It should mostly behave as if you've invoked the function directly. We don't want there to be a huge discrepancy between. The callee know whether they've been called through partial application or complete application. It should be the same. Derick Rethans 8:58 That is good to know. I mean, I always like it how things work as people expect them to work, right? Joe Watkins 9:03 Yeah. Derick Rethans 9:04 We already have used the dot dot dot operator for variadics. But you're reusing the dot dot dot, or ellipses, as you more eloquently call it earlier. Here again, as well, is that not going to cause issues? Or does that tie in well together? Joe Watkins 9:18 Well, there's quite a lot of debate about what's the right symbol to use. I think it's dot dot dot, and I think Larry agrees with me. But there's some people who want to stick an extra question mark on the end, which to me looks like it reads zero to one. And to Larry, it looks like an extra character that's just not needed. Other people say it makes sense for them. But if you can type three characters and not four, I mean, you need a really good argument. The arguments that have been put forward so far don't really make very much sense for me. Maybe we should ask that question and it doesn't really matter. In the end, what the syntax is, is if it's a difference between it getting in and not getting in, then we'll just put the extra question mark on there. I don't really have a really good argument to change it like to be like that. Derick Rethans 10:05 To be honest, to me, it looks like you then have two placeholders. Joe Watkins 10:09 Yeah. Derick Rethans 10:10 I don't feel the need for it. Joe Watkins 10:11 That's also another argument because we've introduced this one symbol, and then this other symbol, and then you put them together. And that's two things. I mean, you can't have one and one equals one. Derick Rethans 10:20 Fair enough. The RFC does touch on another quite interesting thing, I think, which is constructors, which it also be able to partially apply. But of course, you've mentioned that, that arguments get applied immediately when you do the substitution, when you do the partial application. But of course, the constructor is a bit weird because a constructor runs immediately after an object has been constructed. So how does that work together with partials? Joe Watkins 10:47 So at first, we made it so like if you invoke a constructor with reflection, and you just invoke it over and over again, it'll invoke it on the same object, you won't get back a new object. It's not the constructor that returns the object, it's the new operator. So first, we had a bit dumb. And we did just like what reflection does. And if you applied to a constructor, you'd get back a closure that just repeatedly invokes the constructor, which is, as Larry called it, quite naive. So we went back and revisited that. And so now it acts like a factory. Every time you invoke the closure return from an application, you get a brand new object, which is more in line with what people expect. And it's also quite cool. It's one of my favourite bits, actually as it turns out. Derick Rethans 11:31 In my opinion, it also makes more sense than then having an apply to the same object over and over again. Whether I'd like it or not, I don't know yet. Joe Watkins 11:39 Oh, the other option is traditional constructors to avoid the surprising behaviour. But that would be just a strange. Larry Garfield 11:45 There are a lot of use cases where you want to take a bunch of values, convert them to objects using an array map, supporting constructors for that makes total sense to me. Derick Rethans 11:54 And I would probably say, though, that I would prefer not allowing it over it applying over the same object over again. You've touched a little bit on some common cases where you want to use this, do you perhaps have some other ideas where this might be really useful? Larry Garfield 12:10 So there's three use cases that we think are probably going to be the lion's share. One is to just use the dot dot dot operator. So you have some function or method call, call it with dot dot dot, and that's it. You prefill nothing, which gives you back a closure that is identical in signature to the function or the method that you're applying it to. Everything we've said about functions applies the methods here as well. Which means we now effectively have a new way to refer to a function or a method and make a callable out of it, that doesn't involve just sticking it into a string. You just say, hey, function called dot dot dot, or an arrow bar, parentheses, dot dot dot, parentheses. And now you can turn any function or method into a callable and pass that around. And it's still, it's not wrapped up into the silly array format, it's still accessible to static analysers and refactoring tools. Hopefully, with this, you will never need to refer to a function name using a string ever again, never refer to a method call as an array of object and method. So that that just is not needed any more in the vast majority of cases. Derick Rethans 13:20 That alone is probably worth having them, maybe. Larry Garfield 13:23 And Nikita had an RFC that was doing just that, and nothing else. It's kind of a junior version of this. I don't think that's necessary, the full full scope here works, and gives us that. The second use case that I think is going to be common are unary functions. That's functions that take a single argument. More to the point, as I mentioned before, a lot of functions take a callback. And that callback needs a single argument, array map, array filter, some validation routines, a lot of other things like that. So it's now stupidly easy to take any arbitrary function or method and turn it into a single parameter function, which you can then pass as a callback to array map, array filter, all these other tools, and it just becomes really easy to pre fill things that way. The third is the other one I mentioned earlier, if you pre fill all the arguments, and then just put a dot dot dot at the very end, which means zero or more, you now have a function that takes no arguments, but calls the original function you specified with all the arguments you specified. This often the case for default values, where I want to have a default value available, but don't want to take the time to compute it in advance because it might be expensive. Whatever function it is that will determine that default value, I just partially apply that and give it all the arguments and I get back a callable. That creating a callable is dirt cheap, but when I actually need that value, I can then call it at that time, but it won't actually get called unless I need it. That's another use case that we expect to be common. There are no doubt others that we haven't thought of, or that will be less common, but still useful. I think this will probably replace a large chunk of the use cases for short lambdas. Not because short lambdas are bad, they're wonderful. But so many of them convert a function to a simpler function. And this gives us an even more compact, more readable syntax for that, with even less extra symbols and flotsam around it. Derick Rethans 15:24 I saw, hopefully as a joke, saying that, instead of using the question mark, we should use dollar sign dollar sign, and then we should call the token name T_BLING. Larry Garfield 15:36 This RFC actually has a storied history. Several years ago, Sara Golemon had proposed porting the pipe operator from Hack to PHP. The pipe operator is an operator available in a lot of different languages that lets you string together a series of functions. So you pass a function, pass an argument into one function, its results you pass to the next function, its results, you pass the next function and so on, which is a good case for unary functions. In Hack's syntax, they don't use a function on the right hand side, they use an arbitrary expression, and then dollar dollar as a placeholder for where to put the value from the left hand side from the previous step. It's the only language that does that. Derick Rethans 16:20 The other language that does it is bison. Larry Garfield 16:23 Or Bison also does that style of? Derick Rethans 16:25 It does something weird like that, yeah. Have a look at the grammar file. Larry Garfield 16:29 I've looked in there. It's scary. So at the time, she didn't actually put an implementation in for it. But there was some discussion about it. I joked that if she wanted to do that, she should call it T_BLING. And she thought it was hilarious, but never went anywhere. A year ago, I started working on a pipe operator RFC that did just the pipe part, but used a callable on the right hand side, instead of an expression, more like F#, and Haskell, and other languages that have a pipe operator. And their main response to that was, we'd like this, this is cool, except that just using short lambdas on the right all the time to make unaries is too ugly. We want partial application first. So I spent a while trying to bribe someone with more experience and knowledge than me to work on partial application. I tried bribing Ilya Tovolo, to do so by working with him on enumerations. And we got enumerations in, but he doesn't have the time to work on partial application. Levi and Paul had already written an RFC for partial application that had no implementation. It's just a skunkworks, essentially. Then a few weeks ago, Joe pops up and starts working on an implementation for partials. And I, to this day, don't know what interested him in it. But I'm very happy about this fact. So as we updated the RFC, I knew that people want a bike shed about syntax. So I threw that in as a joke. I don't think we're actually going to do that. It's just a little inside reference that is now no longer inside. Derick Rethans 17:56 Joe what made you work on partials, then? Joe Watkins 17:58 It's interesting to write. I've had my fun whether it gets in or not. Derick Rethans 18:02 Sometimes that's the case, right? So just working on this is all the fun. Larry Garfield 18:06 Sometimes it's fun to just run down rabbit holes for the heck of it. And sometimes really cool things can come out of that sometimes. Derick Rethans 18:12 At some point, I might have to implement support for partials like I have for closures in Xdebug as well. Because at some point, people might want to debug these things. So I'm a little bit interested in how do these the closures that it generates? Where does it store the already applied arguments? Joe Watkins 18:29 So partials have the same binary struct up to this point or of the closure, and then after that there's some extra fields. Derick Rethans 18:36 Would they still have the names? Joe Watkins 18:39 No, because named arguments aren't actually named, that information is lost. By the time we've got them, we don't have any name information. We've only got their correct position, according to the call that was made. Derick Rethans 18:50 And every argument that hasn't been filled and doesn't have a special placeholder in there, or does it keep track of which ones have been filled in? Joe Watkins 18:56 We've got two special placeholders internally, you won't see as undef or null or anything. Derick Rethans 19:02 Okay, that's good to know. What has the reaction been so far? Larry Garfield 19:05 Slightly positive. There were a lot of discussions early on about do we support argument reordering? And should it use a single placeholder or two separate placeholders? Originally, we had one and realized after a while, that doesn't actually work. There're use cases where that will be confusing. Overall, the feedback has been quite positive, and I fully expect that to pass. Really the only question people are still debating about at this point is ellipsis versus ellipses question mark. Joe Watkins 19:34 Yeah, I think the first version of the RFC was quite well received. Someone said we could document it as to make a partial sprinkle or question mark over it and hope for the best. Derick Rethans 19:44 Oh, that's good to hear. With feature freeze coming not pretty soon now. When do you think you're putting this up for a vote? Larry Garfield 19:51 Probably in the next couple of days. The only question I think is whether we include a second question for which variadic placeholder to use, which syntax/ Or if we just say it's dot dot dot, go away. Other than that it should go to a vote probably before this episode airs. Derick Rethans 20:06 Thank you very much, both of you for taking the time to me today to talk about partials. Larry Garfield 20:11 Thank you again Derick, hopefully see you once more on this season. Joe Watkins 20:15 Thanks Derick, see you soon. Derick Rethans 20:21 Thank you for listening to this installment of PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. I maintain a Patreon account for supporters of this podcast as well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time. Show Notes RFC: Partial Function Applications Credits Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

On this week's episode of the Get the F*ck Off Podcast, I had the true pleasure of having a conversation with Joe Conley, host of the Brutally Sober podcast, and the Alcoholics Anonymous Deprogramming Podcast on YouTube.Joe and I clicked right away. Maybe it's just because we're both no-bullshit East Coasters, or maybe it's because we have a lot of similarities in our relationships with alcohol.This conversation was very raw and real and explored many topics such as Joe's experience in rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, the science of drinking, our personal struggles with alcohol both past and present, sobriety during COVID, spirituality, enlightenment, identity, and being a fucking curmudgeon.I absolutely loved talking with Joe and hearing about his life and experiences. You can find Joe Conley on Instagram and Twitter.Episode Notes:4:30We begin the episode by hearing about Joe's earliest experiences with AA, back when he was drinking in his 20's. He remembers not feeling like he didn't quite fit. 9:00As Joe had been religiously going to meetings, when COVID hit, that made things more difficult. He continued to read the Big Book and other literature, but he then discovered the recovery community on Instagram, which, at any time, he could go to and find someone experiencing a similar struggle to his own.From there, he started the Brutally Sober podcast.As he says, with recovery, as long as you “have your foot in the door with something,” and are not stagnant, you can do it.He found himself constantly in the recovery mindset.11:30We talked about how Joe knew he was “over it.”He talked about his 20-year experience with drinking, and how the time between his binges got closer and closer together. 15:00Joe talks about the experience that finally solidified his needing to get help. With his wife away on a vacation, he used the time to get drunk to oblivion. He had not previously wanted to stop drinking, and his former attempts to stop were for his wife, but not so much for him.Finding him drunk and passed out one afternoon, his father (who is also sober,) suggested he go to a detox center. While in Detox, he was told by many others that he could not go home, but rather should attend Rehab.At that moment, he had to be able to come to terms with the fact that it was something he must do to get sober.He was fortunate that his job was able to provide paid leave for him to attend treatment, which served as a major incentive.17:00In Rehab, about a week in, Joe realized that he could not return to his life as a “normal drinker.”He learned the science of the brain and how alcohol affects the individual.What was really powerful, though, was his willingness to embrace a shift in his identity. He knew he had to fully embrace recovery to have a chance of success.23:30Joe talks more about the realization that he must come out of Rehab as a different person.Previously, he associated drinking with his entire identity, which was centered around toughness, masculinity, hard work, and manual labor.He realized he had to renegotiate a lot of that, and be able to have his identity as it was without the alcohol weaving through it.As he described it:“OK. I'm Joe in Rehab. I'm not Drinking Joe. I'm not the guy who goes to work and pays the bills so he can drink as much as he wants when he gets home.”25:30“Rehab was awesome.”Joe's spiritual awakening was simply that- he committed to fully embracing his new life.28:30 We talked about the process of re-understanding identity. It took Joe a few months to be able to fully be comfortable with himself without the undercurrent of drinking. He talked about his days of drinking and the associated productivity.He says: “I had to be productive when I drank so I could say ‘I can't be that bad of an alcoholic because look at all of the things I do.'”31:30We talked about the peaceful feeling of one-ness that we felt and associated with being drunk like everything was right with the world and everything was connected and beautiful.Joe believed alcohol was bringing him to a spiritual place.However, he never practiced it sober, and no matter what, it was impossible to carry the feeling into the next day.36:00We talked about Alcoholics Anonymous and the belief in a higher power, and how to embrace that step even if you're not particularly spiritual.Joe said that at first, AA itself was his higher power. Two people are stronger than one.43:00Joe talks about the idea that even if AA isn't necessarily for you, he recommends going anyway. The community aspect is powerful.He said even if one out of ten times you hear something that you can relate to, it's worth it. However, he says hearing something you relate to happens far more often than one out of ten meetings.47:00Joe and I talk about process goals versus long-term goals, the difference, and moving forward with small action daily.49:00On sitting still-When you stop drinking, it's often very hard to just sit still and be with yourself. Both Joe and I experienced a great deal of discomfort with this, as when you stop drinking, you have to deal with yourself!53:00Joe offers his advice for newly sober people and learning to sit.56:00I share some of my own experiences with drinking and not wanting to feel. I talk about recognizing the emotion I was feeling at the time.For example:“Boredom.”“Why am I bored?" If I'm bored I can find something to do or, I can simply be happy in the fact that I can rest.”1:00:00We talk more about alcohol not necessarily being “the problem,” but rather the result of the problem. Joe talks about his drinking triggers and the process of acknowledging those and recognizing what's happening in the present.I talk a bit about the fact that you always have control of your inner state.1:08:00“Chasing the High”When you're drinking, you don't really enjoy it most of the time. 90% of the time you're chasing about 10% of the experiences. We talk about the times we romanticize and miss our drinking days, and the importance to return to the concept that life truly is better without alcohol.Nothing was great when we were drinking.Not the inability to sleep, the taste in your mouth, vomiting in the morning, bloodshot eyes, and the hopeless feeling that you can't get through the day. As good as we like to think it was, it was never that good, ever.1:13:00Joe talks about how now, he never dreads a single day. There were so many days he never knew how he'd get through. Joe Conley is the host of the Brutally Sober podcast on Spotify and Anchor FM, and the Alcoholics Anonymous Deprogramming Podcast on YouTube.You can find Joe Conley on Instagram and Twitter.

On episode 87 of the Shoot the messenger podcast our host break down the break up of the Joe Budden Podcast and the recent harassment allegations against Joe Budden. We also review the latest project from J Cole and the return of Nicki Minaj. This episode also includes NBA playoff picks, Kwame Brown firing back, and much more ! #STM

Description: Welcome to Hot Takes and Cold Beers With Chris and Joe! Just a couple longtime buddies from Canton Ohio doing what we do best, drinking beer and talking about sports! Each episode, we'll have a special guest along for the ride as we discuss and debate the ongoings in the sports world, along with anything else that we can imagine from movie reviews to our favorite music, and of course, cold beers.. Cheers! Website: anchor.fm/hot-takes-and-cold-beers-with-chris-and-joe Opinion: Your audio sounds like you're sharing one mic. There is a TON iof mic handling noise. Your audio has a fair amount of reverb. I have no idea what is coming, and your introduction assumes we've listened before. After listening to two minutes, I learned more about Skyler's name than sports. You need a domain. See www.coolerwebsites.com they are less than $20 a year. An easy way to start the show is to say welcome to the Hot Takes and Cold Beers With Chris and Joe show. I'm Chris. I'm Joe, and I'm Skyler. You need to designate someone as the host who drives the show and the other person is color commentary. Do some show prep, and make sure everyone knows where you are going and what points will be made (not a script, but bullet points). You have a ton of intro music. Once you are introduced, give two beats and get on the mic. I would have everyone get their own microphone and get a recorder. You are up against ESPN so you have to bring a bit more professionalism. You probably have a lot of inside jokes that nobody in your audience is going to get. See this free webinar on gear. The good news is this is all fixable. Find out more at https://podcast-rodeo.pinecast.co

BGBS 062: Dr. Sarabeth Berk | More Than My Title | What Do You Do??Dr. Sarabeth Berk is the leading expert in hybrid professional identity, and a hybrid professional herself. She was featured in Forbes and is a TEDx speaker, author, and recipient of a Colorado Inno on Fire award for her innovative work. Through a decade of research and coaching, Sarabeth developed a one-of-a-kind approach that takes personal branding to a whole new level. Her hybrid title is Creative Disruptor because she blends her artist/researcher/educator/designer identities together to lead and create innovative strategies that radically connect resources and people in new ways. Sarabeth obtained her PhD from the University of Denver, and has degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rhode Island School of Design. Her background includes directing major initiatives in K-12, higher education, startups, and nonprofits. In this episode, you'll learn…Reflective tips and tricks to start identifying your uniqueness/hybridity How to answer the daunting question of “What do you do?” The benefits of finding your professional hybrid identity to pinpoint who you are at the intersection of your many strengths ResourcesInstagram: @morethanmytitle Facebook: More Than My Title LinkedIn: Sarabeth Berk Website: morethanmytitle.com Quotes[16:03] My entire background has been about interdisciplinarity, and crossing things that are unrelated together, and finding new things at the intersection. So this has always been a heartbeat. And it comes from my creative background. It comes from experimenting with making meaning. I think that's really who I am. [22:48] Your hybridity is your special blend of spices that is unique to you. No one else has combined identities that way and that's what makes you unique and strong in whatever you're doing for work. [26:50] The reason hybridity matters is because when you know the different parts that are important and you know why they fit together, then you know your uniqueness, you know why you're different than all the other “roses” and “fish” and “dogs” because we're all using these generic labels to try and just fit into boxes. Have a Brand Problem? We can help.Book your no-obligation, Wildstory Brand Clarity Call now. Learn about our Brand Audit and Strategy process Identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh Determine if your business has a branding problem See examples of our work and get relevant case studies See if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level Book Your Brand Clarity Call TODAY Podcast TranscriptSarabeth Berk 0:02 And the zone of genius is a place where you're in flow, you're at your best, you're most energized, alive, things are effortless. And in those moments, people were actually explaining without knowing they were saying it, how their parts, their different identities were being activated, if at the same time. So this one teacher was like, you know, I'm being an empath by hearing the problems with my students and giving them guidance and counseling, but I'm also sharing knowledge and also bringing in creativity. And I'm also this and also this. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, that's the intersection. Like, is this really how it works that when we feel our best, and our work, we're in the intersection of our of our work. And I started knowing I was onto something like that was the beginning of a hunch. So I kept checking it out testing it, right. Like I was trying to understand do more people have this too, and sure enough, they do. Marc Gutman 0:58 Podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the Baby Got Back story Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big Back stories, and I cannot lie. I am your host Marc Gutman. And on today's episode of Baby Got Back story, I want to know, what do you do? Really? What do you do? If this question gives you pause? Or if you've ever felt anxious at a party or event? When someone asks you, what do you do? And there's no real great way to say it? Not really, then stay tuned, because this episode is for you. And before we get into the show, here's a reminder, if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at Apple podcasts or Spotify, Apple and Spotify use these ratings they really do as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on their charts. And we like ratings. So please go ahead and give us a review. If you like the show. Today's guest is Dr. Sarabeth Berk. In that question. What do you do? was a tough one for her to answer. She did many different things from design to research to innovation. And she never had a good answer to that. That question. I don't know about you. But when I don't have a good answer, I Google for it. Then I maybe read a blog. But Sarabeth, she went full researcher on the question, discovered that work professionals have many different identities and where those identities intersect. Well, that's where the magic happens. Today, Dr. Sarabeth Berk is the leading expert in hybrid professional identity, and a hybrid professional herself. She has been featured in Forbes and is a TEDx speaker, author and the recipient of a Colorado inno on fire Award for her innovative work. Sarabeth's hybrid title is Creative Disruptor because she blends her artist, researcher, educator designer identities together to lead and create innovation strategies that radically Connect resources and people in new ways. Sarabeth obtained her PhD from the University of Denver, and has degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Rhode Island School of Design, so she knows what she's talking about. Her background includes directing major initiatives in K through 12, higher education, startups and nonprofits. And this is her hybrid story. I'm here with Sara Berk, the Creative Disruptor at More Than My Title, Sara, thanks for coming on the show. And let's get right into it. What is a Creative Disruptor? Sarabeth Berk 4:10 Hey, Marc, thanks for having me. Ah, the Creative Disruptor question. Well, essentially, I didn't know what to call myself. I was more than my job title. And I did all this work, which we can talk about reflecting on like, Who am I really like, what do I want to be called? And I noticed I'm a person that challenges and pushes and changes information because I see it differently. And that was like that disrupter inside of me. But then also, I'm super creative. I come from an art background. And I'm always like visually, orienting things and making sense of like pictures and images. And I was like, I'm not just a disrupter. I'm like really creative and how I do it because I am like playing with tools and using design. And that's me in a nutshell, like that term is my identity in my work. And that's why I call myself a Creative Disruptor. I'm changing things for the good. Marc Gutman 5:10 Yeah, so thank you. And I neglected when I introduced you to, I forgot that you are Dr. Sarabeth Berk. And then I think that's relevant. That's important. We'll talk about that. Because you're a researcher, and an academic. And a lot of what we're talking about is rooted in that research and that background. But you, you started that with saying, I didn't know what to call myself, like, why did that even matter? What why was that coming up as a problem for you like what was happening in your life where not knowing what to call yourself was an issue? Sarabeth Berk 5:42 Marc, I don't know how many parties you've been to, or networking events. But ultimately, everyone says, Hey, what do you do? Hey, nice to meet you. What do you do? And this, what do you do? Question plagued me, it really became the bane of my existence. Because I got super anxious. I was in a space in my life, where I wasn't really secure in what my career was and what I was doing for work. I was finding myself and going through, like a job search career transition process. So I didn't have an answer to that question. Like something solid, where I was like, yeah, I'm Sarabeth. I'm the blah, blah, blah. So when I was struggling with how to answer that question, I finally realized I was having an identity crisis, I have like, literally didn't know who I was. And that, to me launched this whole series of events where I got really curious on Who am I like, I'm not what people are calling me. I'm not just a teacher or designer. Like, there's something else here. And I really wanted to figure that out. Marc Gutman 6:40 This idea and the word that you just used in that story about identity? And has that's been something you've always been interested in, like when you were growing up, were you, you might not have used those words, you might not have framed it as identity. But Was that something that that always either perplexed, confused or interested you? Sarabeth Berk 7:01 I, I would say no, like, this isn't something that was on my mind for years and years, it's something that I realized was the root problem. I was circling around, but I never had a name for it. Like when I was trying to figure out what I was doing after college and how to build my career. The advice I often got from people as well figure out what you're passionate about, like, let's let's talk about what your strengths, let's figure out, you know, what you love to do and make your work fit that. So it was always about the what do you do and why? And how are you going to do it? No one ever stopped and asked me about who are you like, Who do you think you are? Like, what do you call yourself? That's a different question. So this notion of identity came to me much later, because I realized, we were talking about something we weren't really talking about, like there's another piece of the puzzle that was missing. Marc Gutman 7:56 And so that's interesting. Let's talk about that. So when you were growing up, what was your identity? Like? What did you think? Your let me rephrase? Who were you at the time? And then where would you think you're gonna end up doing? What were you hoping to do? Sarabeth Berk 8:07 Yeah, I mean, I was this perfect student, I was the straight a girl. I loved academics and art, that was really what I was up to. And so my identity for you know, the first 20 some years of my life was student, you know, like, you are a student. That's what people tell you. And then you graduate high school or college or wherever you finish your degree, and you lose that identity. And literally, that's when I dropped into my first identity crisis. But people told me Oh, you're just burned out? Or, oh, you know, you're just going through like a quarterlife crisis or something. No one ever said, you are having this identity moment. And so that first transition of going from student to Well, what am I now Who am I now? And then trying to figure out like, okay, who's gonna hire me? Like, I don't even know how to take my degree and turn it into a job. I was a ski instructor after I graduated. Because I literally was like, where do I start. And then I eventually went back to grad school got a degree in art and design, when it's a classroom worked for some nonprofits, and boom, then I felt a little more secure. Because what we usually do in society is you define yourself by your job. So when you're in a job, you have security around your identity, you're like, Oh, I'm Joe, the marketing manager, and I'm Sally, the coder and like you just have this sense of who you are based on what you do, because we spend the majority of our lives in our jobs. And literally research says that when you lose a loved one, go through divorce or lose a job. Those are the three biggest moments where you lose a sense of yourself. And I until you go through that you don't realize how powerful you associate yourself with the thing you're doing. So that was a little bit of how I started noticing I was having an identity crisis is when I lost it. Marc Gutman 9:55 Yeah. And what I heard there is that like this idea of our identity and our identity changing and even being between identities. It's, it's not something like that happens just once it doesn't just happen, you know, between our 20, you know, matriculating from through college to the working world, it can happen a lot of different times. And I think that, you know, at least my self, you know, I think about, like, how I approach it. Like, I feel guilty about that, or I feel like I'm doing something wrong, or and you and I have talked about this, I feel like shame that like, I don't know how to identify, identify myself. Did you experience that at all? While while you were going through that transition? Sarabeth Berk 10:35 100%? Yes. I mean, there's so much wrapped up, I felt like a failure, I thought, vulnerable, full of guilt, my self worth my self confidence. We're just all in the pits. I really was just like, I felt lost and confused. It's a dissociative moment is what like psychology would say, and you just feel disconnected because you don't know. Like, like your roots anymore. Your your foundation got taken from you. And so it's a process of rebuilding and reinventing and finding yourself again. And I think it's part of growth. I think life, like you just mentioned, puts us through these tests at different times. It's not just once, I'm actually going through my fourth identity crisis right now. Like I've mapped them, and I'm on four right now. So they keep coming. Marc Gutman 11:24 Yeah. And the Pro, the the leading expert, I hybridity and identity crisis is going through an identity crisis, which is great. You know, it's like, it's this isn't like exclusively to other people. And so it's something that we all go through. And so were you originally from Colorado? No, I was born on the east coast and Pennsylvania. And my family wanted to be in the West. They love the mountains. So I moved out to Colorado when I was in elementary school. Right. And then I want to go back to that moment when you were a ski instructor. So you wanted to be a ski instructor. Like, tell me about that? Like, what what was that? Like? Sarabeth Berk 12:01 You know, I saw I graduated from undergrad I was in Chicago at the time I came back home to be with my parents. Everything just fell off kilter. And I became a barista at a coffee shop. And that was like the fall season. And I had done some summer camp, teaching with like people that were ski instructors, because I grew up in the Roaring Fork Valley by Aspen and Snowmass. So I had some contacts in the ski industry. And sure enough, I called them up and said, what does it take to be a Scottish doctor and they said, Come on down, apply, we're hiring. And I made it as a rookie that year. So it was really just kind of going with the flow of life. But it was really good for me, because I, as I mentioned, I was so academic, when your ski instructor, it's really about safety of the kids First, we always said the order is safety, fun, and then learning. And a lot of it was just letting go of structure and homework and research and like deep thinking it was like, go just be like have a job. That's so much about enjoying life and meeting people and going skiing with kids all day. It was great. Marc Gutman 13:12 Yeah. And so this is so interesting to me. So you and I've met recently, and certainly, the identity I know about you is, you know, an expert on hybridity and this topic of being, you know, trying to find, you know, how do I talk about myself, but like, when I look at your bio, this is kind of funny to me, because you and I did an event together. And I was super impressed with how like, you're cranking out these these beautiful design assets and all this stuff. I was like, Wow, that's really good. This, I didn't realize that and I feel silly, because you always refer to yourself as an academic and you talk a lot about academics and, and research. And that's, that's how I categorize you. That's how I see you and your identity. But you have this crazy background where you went to the Art Institute of Chicago and risk D, the Rhode Island School of Design, like, talk to me a little bit about that because just even that like you, you started saying like I was really into academics, academics, but you're also really you were like a very serious like art student like how, like, talk me through that a little bit. Sarabeth Berk 14:18 Yeah, I mean, I was a wallflower in high school, I need to go back to that moment. But my my creative outlet was art class, I always needed to take art every semester and I fell in love with my high school art teacher just because she was such an inspiration and just opened my eyes to like mediums and ideas I never seen. Like she didn't let me get into senior studio, which is like the pinnacle of the high school experience because that was only for the most talented students. So I had this sense that I actually wasn't good enough. So I tried to like focus on something more academic in college but eventually noticed. I love graphic design. I love interior design. I love drawing In painting, and I actually loved book art, I thought I wanted to be a book artists like paper making and bookbinding. And I said, screw it. I had started at one university, and I transferred and went to art school because that was such a deep desire that kept calling me. So I picked a major in my undergrad that was actually 50/50 art and critical thinking, like I took any studio major I wanted, I didn't have to focus on one, screen printing, puppetry fashion design, letterpress printing, I was all over the map. And then I was going into these classes, one was called trans modalities. And the professor Joseph Greg Lee, he's actually deaf. And so he would talk to us about, he could speak but he had a translator about things like, how do you know the taste of a cigar, or the taste of wine when it's written down on these cards, and my brain was going crazy with like making sense of translating information from one modality to another. And yet I'm doing these art forms where I'm doing mixed media practice. So my entire background has been about interdisciplinarity, and crossing things that are unrelated together, and finding new things at the intersection. So this has always been a heartbeat. And it comes from my creative background. It comes from experimenting with making meaning I think that's really who I am. Marc Gutman 16:23 That's great. And thank you so much for sharing that. And so, you know, you went to the arts to Chicago, you went to RisD like it, what point did you then start to think, Hey, I'm gonna like research this whole question of who am I and how do I talk about myself? Because I, you know, it's one thing to be like, oh, I've got this problem. And I don't like going to cocktail parties. And people say, what do you do? And I don't, you know, and maybe you'd read some books. But you went a little further like, like, why? Like, why, like, what, how did that all transpire? And what drove you to really dive deep into the subject? Sarabeth Berk 16:59 I think I started to feel like I was compartmentalizing myself. So I was in the classroom teaching art. And I got her crossroads, I knew I was ready to do more. I wanted to have leadership, I wanted to transform education, like I'm a person that wants to blow shit up and create new school systems. And like, you know, universities, k 12. None of it's working. Let's start over. I'm an innovator that goes back to the disrupter too. And in order to do that, I needed people to see me as more than an art teacher like that was how people saw me serve if you teach art, and I was like I do. But I'm also actually on the side creating websites. And over here I'm making and selling art on Etsy. And, oh, I'm starting to learn about research because I was taking grad school on the side. And in order to leave the classroom, I started applying to jobs that weren't teaching jobs. And in my cover letter, I noticed I started writing, I'm Sarabeth, and I'm an artist slash educator slash designer, I started using slashes. Because I needed people to see I have different sides to myself, because the teacher part was so strong and dominant. And by putting slashes, I was like, well, it's not a comma. It's not an and I'm like, I'm all of this mashed together. I don't know how else to grammatically write it for people to see, like what I'm trying to explain. So that was me, like, I don't know if you've heard of the slash movement. But that's like a thing people use. There's also like the multi hyphen, people that put dashes. So I was already feeling that in myself, I just didn't know, other people did this, too. And then I got to grad school, I decided to work on my doctorate full time, and I was working in an entrepreneurship creativity program on the side. And it was in my doctoral program where I really felt like, I just don't know who I am anymore. Like, I'm not just a teacher. And yet, what am I? And then I learned from honestly, the race, class and gender studies class, about intersectionality, that you actually are the sum of the intersection of all your different identities. And it was like, that's interesting. Yeah, of course, I'm white, middle class woman, and blah, blah, blah, like all these identities, but what about my professional identity? Like I had this moment where I said, Can I ask that question? Just in the professional side of my life? Like, are there intersections between being an artist, designer, teacher, researcher, that became my research question. So because I was in a doctoral program where we're learning to think and act this way, and we're doing quantifiable research, I needed to pick a research topic. So it all kind of dived in that moment of like, my personal pain, the work I was learning to do, and then this curiosity that formed and then so as you as you got interested in this, like, what did you find? Yeah, it was like, where do we start with this? I couldn't go around and ask people like, what are your intersections? Like, how do you see intersectionality Marc in your work because this was like two weird of a question that even i had never been asked before i didn't know how to answer it. so i started a case study of like five different individuals that i followed and observed and interviewed about their work because i thought am i just experiencing this or other people and how do i have a study around that and so i went and started talking to individuals about okay your title is blank you know this thing but what do you really do in that job and very quickly i started hearing people explain the different parts of themselves and then the theme that i started getting across all these interviews and observations was moments when people are just in their zone of genius you and i've talked about that before i love this this discussion and the zone of genius is a place where you're in flow you're at your best you're most energized alive things are effortless and in those moments people were actually explaining without knowing they were saying it how their parts their different identities were being activated if at the same time so this one teacher was like you know i'm being an empath by hearing the problems of my students and giving them guidance and counseling but i'm also sharing knowledge and i'm also bringing in creativity and i'm also this one also this and i was like oh my gosh that's the intersection like is this really how it works that when we feel our best and our work we're in the intersection of our of our work and i started knowing i was on to something like that was the beginning of the hunch so i kept checking it out testing it right like i was trying to understand do more people have this too and sure enough they do. Marc Gutman 21:37 so this is really interesting to me and something that i don't think we've really talked about so i didn't realize that effectively and correct me because i'm going to i'm going to kind of make a statement here that hybridity or that the spirit of it is really looking for that intersection and when you're at your best at work do i have that right so that that's really what we're talking about here? Sarabeth Berk 21:59 Yeah so my focus that i described today currently is hybrid professional identity that as humans we are already hybrid we're a combination of all kinds of identities social personal political everything but i just examine the vein of your professional life and what you do for your work and when people say i do marketing oh but i also do sales and i also do events oh and i'm good at design i'm good at this suddenly you start to hear all the elements all the parts of them and what i've learned is that there's a hybrid space in the professional side of people's life that they don't know how to articulate the best way i heard this explained yesterday with someone i was talking to you she says it's your special blend like when you have all those spices and you combine your spice drawer to make something your hybridity is your special blend of spices that is unique to you no one else has combined identities that way and that's what makes you unique and strong in whatever you're doing for work Marc Gutman 23:03 a common question i get all the time is Marc, can you help me with our brand? yes we help companies solve branding problems and the first step would be to schedule a no obligation brand clarity call we'll link to that in the show notes or head over to wildstory.com and send us an email we'll get you booked right away so whether you're just getting started with a new business or whether you've done some work and need a refresh or whether you're a brand that's high performing and wants to stay there we can help after you book your brand clarity call you'll learn about our brand audit and strategy process will identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh will determine if your business has a branding problem and you'll see examples of our work and get relevant case studies we'll also see if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level so what are you waiting for build the brand you've always dreamed of again we'll link to that in the show notes or head over to wildstory.com and send us an email now back to the show. So when you— that's really interesting to me like that you have all these special ingredients that become your your hybridity like like i get that like we want to activate what makes us special but like why is it so important that we're focused on this like like why why does it matter? Sarabeth Berk 24:41 totally yeah. i'm gonna reflect it back to you for a second and say Marc, when you tell people you do branding or your you have a brand agency Wildstory like don't a lot of people do that like why do they come to you? Marc Gutman 24:56 They do and you know i'm really this is really a question because i've struggled with this most people come to us because of our background in storytelling and things like that but i spent a lot of years talking about that like i'm a storyteller i you know this and that we're storytelling agency and it wasn't exactly leaning into the the idea of hybridity and what you do but what i did find is really confusing to a lot of people you know and they you know and so they didn't get they didn't get that and they meant different things to different people and so you know from a linguistic standpoint i've really gone back and forth on this topic and i've really thought about like do you use words that are already a schema that people understand to like have them understand what you do and then kind of talk about this idea of why or what makes us special or do you lead with that? And so you know again i'd love to know like why so i guess what you're saying and when you when you put it back on me is it matters because it helps you stand out and it helps you to differentiate but i mean have you experienced any of that yourself? Like where it becomes like a little bit like do you do you follow the norms and say i'm a marketer or do you say or you know do you say i'm a you know something else? Sarabeth Berk 26:16 This is exactly what i've been looking at i've been doing it more on a personal like human level and i think you do it more for businesses and organizations i think the dilemma is pretty much the same essentially yes as humans our brains want to make sense of things we categorize things we label them so that we have that schema of understanding like this is a rose and that's a dog that's a horse but you know shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell a sweet right like we just gave it that name to give it a name. So essentially, the reason hybridity matters is because when you know the different parts that are important like those special ingredients and you know why they fit together then you know your your uniqueness you know why you're different than all the other roses and fish and dogs because we're all using these generic labels to try and just fit into boxes like you do marketing and you do branding and i do research but then the question is what kind like what kind of branding do you really do and who do you do for and how are you different and what makes you unique? So the hybridity is articulating in a clear way that isn't confusing this is it. This is why we stand out and you can point to it now i still think the notion of hybridity is that it defies language like that is literally one of the things i found in the research when you're in the intersection of multiple things so my primary identities are being an artist, researcher designer, and educator that i put into a venn diagram and then i go okay who am i at the middle of that venn diagram there is no one right or wrong way to name that it's up to me but once i do i sort of give myself a new label and then the way that i help people understand sir about the Creative Disruptor because that's my hybrid title is i say i work at the intersection of being an artist researcher designer and educator which then enables me to radically create innovation strategies and systems for organization and people. and that like three part That's my intro essentially is a give a hybrid title which is my unique label i break it down into the parts because that's what's familiar people know what those parts are but then i describe the relationship of how those parts fit together which is the meaning like why i do it how i'm being an artist educator designer what's the point of that in the world so by giving an explanation of that degree it really actually changes the way people see me they're like they hear my name they see my parts and then they see this is her definition of herself and that's different than all the other artists and educators and researchers we've ever met it's a unique combination i think businesses need that too right like what are the parts and services of what they do and why do they do those things together what what is the relationship between the things and then you start to find those hybrid spaces Marc Gutman 29:23 absolutely and i love that explanation that definition thanks for clarifying that because that to me that makes a lot more sense that you know a bit of the process is to to do the internal workings for you you know it's not necessarily external at first and then it's about it's about helping create that definition and that translation for the external world of like hey this is what my title means and so yeah that makes total sense i love it and and i think that's great and so as you're going through all this research and you were like aha like all right there's this intersectionality like we don't define language like, that's all cool. But like, are you then like, like, what do you do with it? You're like, Okay, I've got this thing. Like, like, now what? Sarabeth Berk 30:10 It's like you're reading my mind. Marc Gutman 30:11 Yeah, this great discovery like you've discovered something amazing! Now what? Sarabeth Berk 30:17 I mean, at the time, I didn't really know if I had discovered anything amazing to me. I thought it was like the best thing I'd ever found. But I didn't know if anybody else cared, right? It's sort of when you invent something, and then you're like, but now what? So essentially, that became my dissertation. So it became this huge document that, you know, maybe 100 people on the world have read. And then it went dormant. Because what was happening was, I was getting more comfortable with being a hybrid, like, I had to own it, and walk into it and live it right? you, you can talk about it, but then it's another thing to be it. And I didn't have the confidence yet. I was like, people are gonna think I'm crazy. If I say I'm Sarabeth, I'm a hybrid. And they'd be like, What are you talking about? So it took me a few years, and I needed that time to socialize and do more observation with more people. Like, I started just networking for my own work, because I was doing innovation strategy with K 12 schools at the time, I'd have coffee meeting, and I was meeting people in the community. And I'd learned about them, and what do they do? And slowly but surely, again, and again, I was noticing people are more than their job titles, they have all these different parts. And they're not good at identifying which parts are the most important to them, nor are they good at explaining how those parts fit together. So I kept seeing the same issues and other people I met. And I would throw it out there and say, you know, have you ever thought you might be a hybrid? And people would be like, what, like, What are you talking about? And then I'll explain a little, and then go, Wow, that's that is me. That's, that makes a lot of sense. So I was validating, it's like any entrepreneur, when you have a new product, like do people want this, does it mean anything to them. And so after a couple of years of that I knew in my heart, I wanted to write a book someday about this. And then getting these stories and more, you know, understanding of how this looked in the world, it helps me find my voice. And it helped me start to see the shape of how do I need to explain this to the mainstream public because I wasn't in the university land anymore. And so that's what I did, I decided to write a book. And honestly, I didn't have a vision. After that, I was like, I'll write the book, and then see what happens. And literally, I published the book came out April 2020. The title of the book is More Than My Title, the power of hybrid professionals, and a workforce of experts in generalists. And the fact that I'd use the term hybrid professional. At the same year, the world was going through a pandemic, and everything was becoming hybridize, work and learning and the events and like all sectors, it was really a moment of just serendipity that I was already thinking about this, and the world started talking about it. So that it's led to a number of interesting conversations. Because Another thing I want to bring up, I didn't know that you can tell me how much you know about it is category creation. Category creation, from what I've learned is when you invent a whole new type of product that the market didn't know they need it. So they're not searching for it yet, like athleisure. That's my favorite example. like nobody knew they needed athletic apparel that could be worn outside and exercised in but now it's everywhere. Yeah. And so hybrid professionals, and hybrid professional identity is a new category of workers, and a new way of thinking about the workforce. And so people aren't searching for this. So the adjacent ways people are still talking about it, is personal branding, and career development. And then the academics that identity research piece. So I'm living in a zone of joining conversations in those other circles, showing them and getting them to think about, don't you mean, hybridity? Aren't we talking about identity here? Like? How does that factor into your career development and the way you brand yourself like that, to me is now how I'm bringing this idea into the world. Yeah, and I think that like, even this idea of personal branding, I mean, for me, like it was kind of an icky word couple years ago, it's like who? personal branding. But it's almost like now to be a modern professional, you have to brand yourself personally, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're an executive, I mean, you have this identity, to your point, outside of your title. And people are looking to that to be like, well, what else are you talking about? What else are you thinking about? How are you putting your own interesting perspective on the world? And so that that's also just this other kind of thing that's intersecting with this, this time that you're in right now and why hybridity is so Marc Gutman 35:00 So relevant and so cool. And so you wrote a book, like, what was that? Like? I mean, did you it's not an easy process. And you're in, you know, you've just written a huge dissertation, not just but you've written a huge dissertation. So you've already spent some time in the sort of the ooey, gooey middle of this topic. And then you decide to write a book. I mean, did you have doubts as you're writing that book that anyone was even going to be interested or care about this topic? Sarabeth Berk 35:29 Oh, my gosh, the journey to the book was really interesting. Because I, if you hadn't noticed, I'm the high achiever overachiever. Like I set a goal for myself, and I go for it. And I literally just accomplish it. I don't just talk about things I do. Um, and so I gave myself a year after finishing grad school, to take a break. And then I was like, I'm gonna start writing the book. And I didn't know what I was doing. And every Sunday I was forcing myself to sit down and log hours. And it was painful. Because what I didn't see at the time, I just, I didn't know it yet. Like, I didn't know what I was trying to write and say, Yeah, I hadn't found it. So after a few months of just putting myself through the ropes, I stopped and laid it down. I think I also got distracted by work projects. And my other goal at that point was, I need a book agent, right? Like, I need a literary agent to be a serious author. I'm not going to self publish. So I took a little bit of time trying to send proposals and get an agent and I got some bites. But I learned quickly, it's about the size of your audience. They're like, how many followers do you have? How big is your email list, your Instagram, all of that. And I didn't have a presence yet. And they said, come back to us when you have x 1000. It was like 10 or 20,000, it was pretty high. So I was feeling defeated. And I kept talking to more authors. How did you do it? What did you do, and it's just a really crazy journey. It's one of the most opaque industries on how you publish books. And everyone's story was different. Essentially, you either self publish, or you get a giant house like Penguin Random House. And somewhere in the middle is independent publishing, which is actually called hybrid publishing. So long story short, I found a woman who is in the independent publishing world, she became a book coach for me. By the time I found her, I had validated and had a lot more confidence, I'd done a TEDx. I gotten asked to do some big speaking. In those speaking engagements, I was talking about this idea to audiences that I had no touch points with right there were cold. So I was starting from scratch with them. And by the end, they were just blown away, like the comment I get the most is, my mind is blown right now. And to me, that meant Wow, this was a really impactful idea that I'm sharing, then. So the questions they started asking me things like, Well, how do you figure this out? How do I do this myself? What are the Venn diagrams? How do I look at the intersections that started giving me the fuel of these are the questions I need to write about in the book, this is what people want to know. And this is how they want to know it, I just need to find the best way to share it. So suddenly, I had a lot more inspiration, I knew my audience, I had this book coach, the writing the book, honestly, Marc, I did it in four to five months, like I started around Thanksgiving of 2019. I have the manuscript, final draft by like February, because I was aiming to polish by April. So it was like, that's what happened. Marc Gutman 38:26 That's a good experience and once you're aligned, that it all happened. And so when you think about this topic, and you think about people who are struggling with this idea, are intrigued by this idea, or their minds are just they're listening to this for the first time, and their minds are blown, as you say, what, like, what's the first step they can take? Like? What's the like? What's something someone can do to start to explore this further? Sarabeth Berk 38:51 Yeah, no, great question. Because I do have a whole process, right? Um, the first thing is really to start with where you are right now, current state, what do you call yourself? What do other people call you? What are your kids call you, your friends, like notice all these different ways you're being labeled, and the names you're using? Then you start to brainstorm a list of all those different identities. And it's really important to know that identities and actions are different. So when you ask someone, what do you do, they start telling you actions like I do some marketing and branding, I help people I mentor, a coach on the side. Those are all actions. So convert that back to an identity. Who are you when you do that thing? Just because people are doing marketing or helping with branding? Do they call themselves a marketer? Are they a brander? And sometimes it's one to one they're like, yes, of course, when I do marketing, I am a marketer. And other times are like, actually, when I'm doing this branding thing, I'm I'm more of an i via navigator, or I'm a wayfinder or I'm I'm crystallizing, I'm a catalyst. So you realize there's other identities you are that you're not showing or talking about if that makes sense so it's really the first step is taking an inventory and doing a really big brainstorm on all the identities you're showing up with and that you're using and then the next big step is to narrow down you go through and you see which identities i call them are your primary and which are your non primary or like really like your secondary tertiary and the biggest difference between primary and non primary is your primary ones are the ones you use most frequently like every day because they bring you joy you feel alive they're the expertise you want to be known for. For me it's the artist researcher educator designer like that is my core foundation of course i'm still doing like graphic design and event planning and these other things but i don't use those every day and that's not my best identity so you look at your brainstorm list and then narrow it to your primary ones and you have to have at least two to be a hybrid right like two identities combined will make one intersection three identities is sort of the sweet spot i think three is what most people are usually in for is the upper limit if you have more than four primary identities you've got to keep narrowing because there's just too many intersections so that is the beginning of this work the second part i call investigating the intersections that is where things get really hard like time and again that's where people struggle because it is literally a space if that's unconscious and you've never thought of who am i in my intersections like that's a whole different conversation we need to have. Marc Gutman 41:41 love it thank you i feel like that's that's so actionable and you know you talk about struggle i mean like what's hard about it you know like what were what is hard for everyone to wrap their minds around like what don't we know about this this whole hybridity thing? Sarabeth Berk 41:59 Yeah well let me play with that with you for a second if i walked up to you and said hey Marc, tell me how you're unique how are you unique in your work ready go like what would you say? Marc Gutman 42:09 Well i would say there's a whole list of things so i think that'd be my first challenge you know there'd be like it but then there's also this thing i don't like talking about myself you know and i don't like in that way you know and saying these are the things and i don't know if you encountered that a lot but like these are the things i'm good at like it's it's truly hard for me to to say that and i encounter a lot of people that also struggle with it but that's me personally. i don't know if that holds up in your experience as well. Sarabeth Berk 42:38 i would just say like rule of thumb the majority of people if they were confronted and asked in this moment to explain how they're unique and different in whatever they do they would either a kind of like draw a blank like be caught off guard i don't know i need a moment b they would be unsure they'd be like i it's hard to describe or like i know i am unique but like how do i put it into words or the the other one is just your uniqueness is it's just it's like the wrong way to approach this because like you need tools to see yourself and to be able to read oh i know what i was gonna say the third one is they get to general they'll say something like i'm really good at problem solving like my superpower is asking really great questions and it's like what does that even mean right? Like these are really broad things like everyone says they're good at problem solving i'll be honest i hear that a lot so the trick that i use and this is another strategy i have it's called your first best or only. and so instead of approaching it with where are you unique which is ultimately what we're trying to suss out in finding your intersections and your hybridity. If you look at yourself and go okay where have i been the first on something like the first project i did the first client i landed the first it started a new process it could be on a team or in a company or the best like you were the top in your group the top in a region and the only you were one of a kind no one else has even done this thing yet right pull out those stories try and get like one per category and that will start to reveal this is you in a moment of uniqueness so i was like the first to launch and lead this innovation ecosystem around early childhood wow okay so let me break that down what was i doing who was i in that moment to do that thing what identities were showing up when i was in that first moment if you so going into my research hat for a moment there's a notion of triangulation what triangulation means is when you're collecting data if you only have one data point you don't know what that means, if it's good or bad and if you have two data points then one might be good one might be bad so you don't know which it is but if you have a third it's the tiebreaker right it's like okay two of them are good or two are bad so you know you're leaning more this direction. that's how it goes, I think in learning about your hybridity. So if you can think of three stories that represent your first best or only, then you can start to say which identity showed up in story number one, which identities are number two, which are number three, and you start to look for identities that are consistent across these moments to figure out, Oh, those are the identities that are really true to me, like these are the ones I'm using the most. And they're important. And that is just one way to start to find your uniqueness. There's a lot of tools and tricks I use in this work, because this is a very deeply reflective process. I did a crash course this weekend with individuals and one of the participants that if the best he said, Sarabeth, this work, is like feeling muscles you didn't know you had after a really hard workout. Like I start asking people questions they have literally never been asked before. And that's why their minds are blown. They're like, Oh, my head hurts. And I have to give them a break. Like we can't do the whole thing in a day or in an hour. It's kind of broken into segments. And this is why, I'm literally making you step out of yourself. Like it's metacognition like watching what you're doing, and who you are, when you're doing it, to start to see patterns and start to truly notice what specifically you're doing that other people don't do, which then creates that recipe back to the ingredients of who you are in your hybridity. Marc Gutman 46:28 I don't think I'm supposed to ask you this. Because probably like, children, you're not supposed to say your favorite hybrid titles. But could you share a couple of your favorites that you've either helped to bring out of people or they just have have come your way? Like, what are some of your favorite titles that we can leave the audience with? Sarabeth Berk 46:51 Yeah, no, totally. It's a great, great, great question. And I think examples are really important. So I'm so glad you asked. So yeah, it's not a bad question. One gentleman I got to work with. He was describing himself as a project manager, essentially. And he was unhappy with with his work and just felt like not all the parts of him were being used. So we went through this journey and unpacked and by the end of it, he realized he was really the tension methodologist. He was balancing energy and projects or resources, and he was managing tension, but he had a methodology to it. And he's like, That is me the tension methodologist. Someone else I worked with, she is the methodical Weaver of wonder. She's really good at pulling visions out and weaving them together. And she again, has a really special way she does it. this other guy, he's the human hitmaker, someone else call themselves a serial adju agitator. He was merging two words education and agitator together. And another one is the spiritual sparkplug. Those are a few off the top my head. Marc Gutman 47:57 I love it. I love it. Well, where can our listeners learn more about you and dive deeper on this topic? We'll make sure to link to everything in the show notes. But why don't you go ahead and let people know where they can learn more about how to how to like, kind of dive deeper on this topic. Sarabeth Berk 48:12 Yeah, I would love that. So I'm on clubhouse a lot. So I hope to see you in rooms there if you are. But MoreThanMyTitle.com is my website, all kinds of goodies and freebies, a lot of tools, like the word list is up there and Venn diagrams. And then I'm on Instagram at @MoreThanMyTitle as well. And I just started doing some LinkedIn live so people can see me, I'm really talking to people about their stories of being hybrid. So I'm a little bit of everywhere, like you. Marc Gutman 48:39 Awesome. And as we come to a close here, Sarabeth, I want you to think back to that, as you described it the the wallflower version of you in high school. And you know that that version of you that was told that you weren't good enough to get into that art program. And, you know, if she were able to see you today, what do you think she'd say? Sarabeth Berk 48:59 I mean, my first reaction is all like just really a lot of surprise and shock. Because this, this is something I would have never ever ever envisioned on myself. There's no way. I don't know where it came from still like, I think I've surprised myself a lot. Yeah, great question. Marc Gutman 49:23 And that is Dr. Sarabeth Berk, Creative Disruptor at More Than My Title. I've often struggled with fitting in and how to describe myself. That, in Sarabeth's words, there was no language for the intersections of my identities. Hearing Sarabeth's insights and methodologies has allowed me to see myself in a different light, and I hope it's helped you as well. I also loved your actionable teaching, especially the first best only exercise. I'll be working on that one this weekend over a journal and some coffee. A big thank you to Dr. Sarabeth Berk and the More Than My Title team. We will link to all things Sarabeth and More Than My Title in the show notes. If you know of a guest who should appear on our show, please drop me a line at podcast at wildstory.com. Our best guests like Sarabeth come from referrals from past guests and our listeners. Well that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode a lot big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny Transcribed by https://otter.ai ‍

and just like that, we're jacking into another episode of this here buffy fancast. this week we achieve the holy trinity! that's right, baby. a start question, a fart question, and an art question. that's like... kind of a thing we're saying now so please get used to it. anyway, a dear young listener writes in looking for a senior quote, we read a question from a new listener who almost soiled themselves laughing at the show, and then give some genuine advice on how to explain the importance of the internet for modern artists to someone who's a little out of touch. enjoy!

All right, it is now time for episode number 35. We are here at the Gut Check Project. I'm Eric Rieger with your host Dr. Ken Brown. We've got someone special here today right between us.Well, we are in some place special. We are.We're not in our home base.We aren't in the home base.We are in a basement in Austin. We are.Because we heard that this special guy, Ron Klabunde, the founder of Replenish Foundation and Generosity Feeds which you and I are huge fans. Definitely.You took your family to go do that. We went and did that. And what he's doing is amazing. And we decided to do a mobile show here. We had the opportunity to track him down. He's busy. He's an important person.Ron. Obviously we're going to introduce you-the founder as Replenish Foundation as well as Generosity Feeds but we came down here specifically for an event that you're hosting. Without further ado, Ron, just kick it off and then we're going to after you tell us what we're doing here today, we're going to back it up on how you even got here.Sounds good. So tonight, we are bringing the who's who of Austin together highly curated group of 100 people. And basically we're going to party on purpose we call it POP Austin "party on purpose." Too many parties happen it's just a party, right? What if we bring some meaning to that because all of us are looking for more meaning in life. So we've got the top people in Austin coming together to party on purpose. Obviously we know when the right people are in the room magic happens.Definitely. Happens from a business standpoint happens interpersonally. And then there's the purpose side. So tonight, now what you guys don't even know is that you're showing up and everyone there is going to have a chance to create about 2,500 meals for local kids struggling with hunger. And then flow in the middle of the party. Oh, that's awesome.That's awesome. And then on top of that, we're working to raise $60,000 tonight to help to help feed 50,000 children across America who are struggling with hunger and empower 64,000 volunteers that we're already working with, as an ongoing force for good. So there's our purpose side: party on...Say that one more time. So tonight, this party that we're all gonna have fun at, everybody's...Live band...everything.It's gonna be entrepreneurs coming together, talking, sharing ideas, but you're going to feed how many people you're going to raise how much money and this is a party on purpose. I love that. Yeah, yeah. So there will be about 2,500 meals created tonight throughout the course of the night. And then, and then we're raising money to help feed 50,000 children in 29 states across America, and then empower our 64,000 volunteers is an ongoing force for good.So we can't emphasize this enough here. So Ron and...Ken and I met Ron around a year ago through the Baby Bathwater network. And not long after we ran into each other you invited Ken and I to participate in the Dallas Generosity Feeds and we looked at it and we thought, have no idea what this is. And just like Ken said, I was able to get my family-his was actually out of town playing tennis. But loaded the kids up, met Ken. My wife and I we got together and we packed 11,000 meals in about an hour and 20 minutes.That's dead on.And it goes to it went to all those kiddos who simply correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't get meals on the weekend. They happen to be on a free lunch Monday through Friday right? But they don't have anywhere to turn for the food so kind of tell us a little bit about Generosity Feed.So, Generosity Feeds is kind of our...it is our premier initiative. It's what gave us influence and credibility across the country. It's It's why we have 64,000 volunteers today and we've helped feed over 170,000 children across America. I mean, it's crazy what's happened in...with this deal. And I can certainly give you the backstory on how that even started at some point here but but yeah, you came to our event in Dallas, by the way, our first event in Dallas.Oh, nice. Oh, was it?Yeah, our first event our first event there with you. And 11,000 meals created in less than two hours. You probably had about 300 people at that one event alone.That was...we were packed.So that was the thing that I was super impressed. I showed up. Everybody there showed up kind of deer in the headlights like, what do we do? And you just you have one thing in common? We're all here to help. So people are like, Hi, I'm Joe. Hi. I'm so and so. These are my kids. This is my wife. He's like, yeah, we're here to help feed some people. Everybody had the same mission. It was so cool. Because suddenly you have a purpose.Yeah, a shared purpose. A shared purpose. Yeah.Yeah. Well, and the beauty of this is it's these 300 people are coming from all aspects of the city. This is the business sector coming together with the nonprofit sector coming together with the local schools. And you probably even had some, some some politicians standing in the room. It but it goes further than that. Then you have people of all ages. You have kids with you-kids as young as three, sometimes moms or dads carrying the child on their chest, right as they're creating meals. And then we've had we had a lady up in Washington State 97 years old, helping start so it's crazy, right? But then it's beyond age, then it's it's the social economic difference. Because Ken you very likely were standing next to a single mom, whose child three weeks later was going to receive the meals that you were creating. Really? Yeah. And you didn't know it.Did not know I talked, everybody that was standing next to me. We formed now the beauty is Generosity Feeds does a great job of the logistics of getting the food that's there. This is how we're going to pack this how we're going to do it. It's a well run business. Absolutely. It's a very well run business and we're going to get into this because to have a good nonprofit...You better have a good business. You better have a good business. Well and I'll even add that it's good business for businesses to be a part of and I think I've shared this with you in the past and Ken you knew it but when we went to go and be a part of Generosity Feeds and of course I'm gonna say this several times because if you're ever interested and Generosity Feeds is appearing in your neck of the woods. Gather your friends and your family and go be a part of it. You'll spend two hours helping out tons and tons of kiddos who just simply need a meal.Having fun. Music. Yeah, music. Dancing. Dancing.It was fun! But, I had never been to a Mod Pizza and mod pizza happens to be one of the sponsors, title sponsors of everything Generosity Feeds does. Because of their involvement and the the fun and the giveback opportunity we had, I've been to Mod Pizza now probably eight or ten times in the last year and I'd never been there before. So I connect with the the business aspect of wanting to be a part of something good. And suddenly I found a good and worthy business that actually has gluten free pizza that my wife can eat. Because so it's, there's there's lots of reciprocity, if you want to be a part of an organization that gives back so if you're, if you're a company, pay attention, Ron's who you need to hook up with if you're interested.That's why that's why we're here. Atrantil KBS research as a company, we're here to support you. Because we are trying to heal people's guts. Yeah. And you are trying to feed people.And keep them full.And keep them full. And we want to be involved with a company like you. And I'm very honored that we're sitting here. I'm very honored that we have the ability to be in Austin, that we're going to be part of this. Thank you for inviting us. But I'm also honored that we work for a company that decided to do this together. So shout out to Chuck and Mike and Brandy and everybody and Anthony, everybody else on our team that said yes, go down to Austin. We're going to support thatThat's right. Absolutely. So, we've talked a little bit about generosity feeds and I believe you said it's a subsidiary of the Replenish Foundation. Correct. But there was a Ron Klabunde long before Replenished Foundation and Generosity Feed. So, where are you from? How did you get to...? Where my rear end is. Yes, yes, yes. That's where I'm from.Oh, yeah. So Ron is hilarious with with lots of cheap jokes where his rear end is where he's from. And, but Where, where, where do you originate from? How did you get to where you are now I know that you have a history of being a pastor, etc.So so yes, I was a pastor for 21 years. And in my own journey, as I've shared with you, I just became a little disillusioned with how local churches were talking about loving God and loving other people, and yet really weren't partnering with businesses to make a difference or really, I mean truly partnering with church, schools to make a difference or even other nonprofits they they tended to want to keep doing ministry on their terms. And I'm looking at this and I'm going, this isn't about what a church should be doing to for in a community. It's what a church should be doing with a community, based on what a community needs. Why are churches inviting people to come to them to meet their needs on the church's terms, instead of doing what I saw Jesus doing, which was going out and meeting people on their terms?Could you say that again, you said to what a church shouldn't be doing too.So a church church is so focused so much on doing ministry to a community in a community or for a community, that the moment we use those words, right, it's all about what it's about me and what I want to do to give, it's not about the other person. This is about with that, that it's what we get to do together. Right. That here's the principle behind it. Thanksgiving and Christmas, right? Your families you might be thinking, well, this Thanksgiving, Who should we who should we go serve? Sure.Or what nonprofit should we go serve with as a family? Right? Many families in America do this. That's a good question to start with, who are we going to serve? It's not the best question to start with. Because and here's why. That's an addition question. We are going to go serve them. That's one plus one. The better question is, who am I going to serve with?Say that again? Who am I going to serve with.With because, because if I want to if I want to make a difference in someone's life, then I need to be inviting you because now I get this relationship and my desire to do good begins to rub off on you. You come with me, and we together, go serve and something ignites in your heart. And now you're changed. And then you're like, you know, that just felt good. That was right. I want to live a more meaningful life, more purposeful life. We all want to do that. And so what do you turn around and do you go find another friend and you're like hey, you need to come do this with me. And so the power of the power of generosity is not found in what we do. It's found in who we do it with. It's about the relationship.You lead by example. Yes. You lead by example. You're not telling people to go do things. You say, follow me. I'm going to show you we're going to do this together, and we're going to make each other better.What he, what he's saying is not even just a theory, and I didn't get a chance to tell you this yesterday. So Ken had to leave the procedure facility yesterday earlier than I did because he had a he had an interview, and I stayed a little bit longer. We have a new center director, his name's Chris. So big shout out here to Chris. I told him while we were coming down here for the weekend, he thought it was it was an incredible opportunity. I said, Well, we'll have another Generosity Feeds event in Dallas. You may want to see it, the rest of the endo center would like to come be a part of it. He immediately said, what a great team building exercise for all of us to go down and give back to the community I mean, it bled from you encouraging us to meet your team. I just happened to mention it without any prompting from you. And now...Because it was just lift. Yeah, I think the center's gonna have next timeThat's a great idea a company like Digestive Health Associates of Texas and AMSURG these companies that we're affiliated with. Yep. We've got KBS doing it now we can just keep working our way up to the bigger and bigger companies that we have access to.Yeah.To help out.That's right that's it's pretty powerful message to to be able to go and serve with versus you're just going to go and serve.Yeah, well even take it take it to the business level now. Sure. Think about what's happened in business over the last number of years. We had Tom's come up with what the one for one model right. And it's it's all about a transaction you buy this we'll give this and that's as far as it ever goes with the customer. And then you have the companies that as you just said, this is a great team building opportunity. Let's bring our employees in Salesforce rocks it out with empowering their employees to go serve in the local community and the things that they're passionate about. But where's the where's the model? Where now as a company, you can invite your customers to come serve with you. And you're not just there, they already love your product right there. They're buying from you because they love your product. But what if you're inviting them now into your value system? And you build a relationship with them around your value system of giving back of doing good as a company becoming a force for good. The moment you do that, you turn customers into raving fans of your brand. Sure. That's the power of this. It's the power of with.Yeah. The power of with.And the interesting thing about that is that it cannot be faked. No, no. You, you either live it you say look, we're gonna we would love our customers. I would love everybody who's ever bought Atrantil to be part of something like this. But I want you to do it because you just want to do it. I don't want to do it for that you're not going to gain anything other than you're going to be part of a community you're going to serve, you're going to find purpose, where we want to be one of those companies that actually helps with something like that. You can't fake it.No, but you're inspiring something in people that's beyond a product. Definitely.We were talking earlier that there was a study when you stole the car earlier. We're...a study came out that millennials prefer to purchase from a company that they feel is doing good for the for their community for the world, whatever, because it's a very jaded society now we realize that there's just a lot of for profit things we're going to get into this because a nonprofit for profit the only way you're going to be successful is actually making a profit one way or the other. Was it Hollis or somebody else at Baby Bathwater that one time was talking about the best way for someone to have a good good experience with you and may I can't remember if it was Hollis or not but they essentially said your customers are always looking for the community net positive. Now I can't remember exactly who wasn't said that at the last meeting but they were talking about if I make this purchase then I know I'm getting this product. But what if I'm supporting a company that's also either helping the environment or helping my fellow man they're looking for the net positive with their interaction with the company because if I buy a pencil over here from let's say a name of a store but it's all about the transaction well it's it's only as cold as the money went here and I got...walked away with a pencil but maybe if I spent I don't know two or three cents more over here and they encouraged me to do one more thing in my community that brought somebody else in or made a piece of plastic.Man, I love where you're going with this it never even occurred to me that part of our follow up post purchase email should be something charitable like this. Yes, we should sit there and say not not now that you purchase this get on cuz you know it's business. It's post purchase email hope you enjoyed it we want to turn you into that promoter.You want to subscribe?Yeah do you want but but everybody's doing that. I want to do this and we're going to do this with KBMD and KBS yeah say thank you for purchasing this hey we teamed up with Ron Klabunde who has opened this thing if you are so inclined go look at it one time one email no more follow up though if then funnels this. No, just check it out. I like it you should check it out.So this concept of wanting to do things with lead you to basically change the way that you handled your approach to being a pastor. Correct. And then so when it when are you getting to the point where Replenish Foundation and Generosity Feeds and the other companies that are enveloped within begin to form on the horizon? How did that all come about?So I'll bring us back to the beginning. Okay. My wife and I were living in northern Virginia and this is pertinent to the story and that we were living in the wealthiest county in America. Okay.OkayIs this outside of DC? This is outside of Washington DC, okay. And so we wanted we we realized that people in Washington DC wanted to serve. They wanted to teach even their children the values of generosity and service, and all comes back to this. No one wants their kids growing up being an asshole. No one. And so we figured, but here's the problem. The problem is, it takes time to find a good nonprofit. It's even harder to find a good nonprofit that will let children serve because of insurance liabilities. So that's a huge thing. Never thought about that.Barrier entry point for families serving together. So what we did is we decided, well, let's create something that has a low entry level. Let's partner with the local school because the local school already has more influence than any other organization in the community. Sure. So This school is promoting it, people are going to come. So now I don't have any marketing overhead. Yay. And so then we go that we went to local businesses and we said listen, the local school we're doing this event with them. And in the wealthiest county in America catch this. There were 12,500 children struggling with hunger, the wealthiest county in America. 12,500 children struggling but the hunger back in the day. So we looked at this and we went, business leaders listen, why don't you come with us on this but also bring your employees with you as a team building opportunity. Let's just do this as a community wide and collaborative. It's a school it's the businesses, nonprofit sector, a church here or there.Can I slow you down?Please. Because I love and we've we've talked about this. I love how people end up where they get there. And clearly you saw the need.Right.I want to know even before that when you're sitting with your wife and you guys had the AHA moment you went, hey, maybe we should consider doing something like this. Because it makes total sense that you know that all these kids need to eat. It's it's those, it's those moments that build that can change the trajectory of a life.And did mine. Absolutely. We were we were, we were innovating ways to create easy entry levels for people to serve. So we tried a number of things before we got to Generosity Feeds. And we were sending kids we were doing food collection before and sending kids that who weren't going to eat over the weekend. We were sending them home with 20 pound backpacks of food. Now imagine imagine a six year old trying to get a 20 pound backpack it doesn't work right so we made some horrible mistakes in the journey, horrible mistakes. And eventually we innovated to this to this idea and and we mobilize 600 people. Event one. Wow. Wow. 600 people showed up to create 40,000 meals in less than two hours.You and your wife plan this. Yes.That is so cool. The logistics of that is so cool.Just the supply alone. Yeah.To have that. Yeah. That's pretty incredible.Now you see the community now is coming around this idea because it's an easy entry point who can't show up for two hours at the local high school to help create food for kids in that school and that school district.Yeah.Who would go hungry otherwise on the weekend?Now your experience in the church did did you kind of already know or at least somewhat predict that because it going through the Generosity Feeds event, and just like Kim described it, it was lots of instant team building with the people that were there. Yes.Did you kind of already know looking for your range in this? Yes. And I know there's there's wisdom in there yea.There's wisdom that I gleaned sure the years and there's there's a reason that every packaging station which you were both at is between 12 to 15 people There's a reason for that because we're seeking to create community. You can't create community with 600 people in one room. But if I take 600 people and I break them down into teams of 12 to 15 they're going to naturally build relationships with each other and that's what I want. I want everyone leaving with a new friend that shares the value of generosity and service.And the other thing which I thought was really cool at least when we did it was this fun competition. Yes. Yes.They're like yeah, this tables crushing it here I'm like, Come on guys, we're not gonna let them win, we have to do this. It's it's it's the human nature. That's right.Everybody was really excited as each one we would pack the boxes I can't remember how many food packs went into each box but regard...25 Okay, so you get to 25 and then basically your your tables excited because we'll we've we've sealed another one. But of course it's it's a victory for the kiddos who are gonna end up getting it in the end.So as a gastroenterologist the other thing that I was really pleased with...Yes.You guys chose a sustainable food source you had a good protein fat carbohydrate ratio. So you're not like putting Fritos in a bag and saying go home. No! Um. Here's where that came from. Um, in our family we eat as all natural and holistic and organic as we can. Nice. And part of that is my wife has autoimmune issues. I don't I don't think I've shared that before. And so she's also gluten intolerant and thyroid issues and before I give the whole medical thing that's going on with her, right? Well, here's what my wife said to me early on. She said there is no way that we are feeding millions of children in America what we're not willing to feed are own children.Good for her. So cool. That is so cool.That's the standard. And so everything we did was go out and find the healthiest we created the product but create the healthiest product we could that was lightweight. Sure. That could that a six year old kid carry home you know? Yeah, that was lightweight that could be created by the masses that could be a mobile manufacturing plant that would create community bring all the aspects of community together and could be a dance party when we wanted it to be.That's an absolute brilliant idea. Yeah, I mean, talk about a win win win. You around very clearly are not only a very generous person, very altruistic person, but pretty damn smart. Yeah. Because that is cool. You're a good businessman.Yeah. You could take you could take the letters, PDS sense PDGs already been taken.Yeah, yeah.That's right.Well, it was also it's not just infectious for the the event that we went to in Dallas We're in coronavirus season, we don't use the word infectious. Oh, sorry. Let me let me shed some light no shedding disease. No but I think two weeks before we did our event Lavich and Hollis had participate in the one was in Colorado and a very similar experience so y'all are obviously replicating all of the good parts building upon and improving. Absolutely.I'm looking forward to the to the next event we'll obviously be there but I don't want to steal the thunder we'll get to that in a moment to Generosity Feeds how people can look it up but so now you've you've gotten to the point of my wife and I have decided that we want to do something different like she's thrown down a great edict: we want to feed kids the same things that we would eat your piece it together. The first event had 600 volunteers you had 40,000 meals made. Now what?Within two weeks, I started getting phone calls from community leaders around the country going we heard what you're doing in northern Virginia. We need your help, will you come? Wow. And so theysame state?I mean, oh, no. Across the country, were calling meOh, across the country. Sorry. They were...How did they find out about it?I'm well networked. Okay, so because of just because of my background I used to...You're an Instagram model.You just got my mouth to close!So not that kind of networking, okay.No, um I used to and now I'm back at doing keynotes around the countries I teach leadership development around the country and so because of my earlier years of doing keynotes I'm just I'm well networked into the business sector and into the even into the kind of the faith sector of our culture. So people know...people are watching what I'm doing. They they saw, they knew and so within one year of that event, we were coast to coast.Holy. That's great.And that was the ah-ha moment-going back to your previous question. When was that kind of that that wake up moment? Yeah. When we were When we did our first event in Eugene, Oregon, as far as you can get away from DC. And it flew with all the same outcomes as we had in Washington, DC, my wife and I looked at each other and went, holy shit. We just started a national nonprofit that can go to any community in America. Yeah. And then it was just a matter of leading that to growth. Sure.Because growth doesn't just happen, you have to invest in grwoth, and so we began investing in the growth of the company. The other moment that was really big for us, is obviously it takes capital. It doesn't matter what we're starting in life, for profit, for purpose, nonprofit, it takes capital. I remember walking in my living room. And I looked at my wife and I said, listen, I need to write a $15,000 check to the foundation, so that this thing has a chance at living. Can I write the check? And I said, by the way, I think I'll have it I think we can pay ourselves back in eight weeks again. Keep in mind, I was a pastor. I was getting paid almost nothing. So 15,000 for me, you're going to know in a moment how close that was to my end. Wow. She says, yes. 10 weeks later, I walk back in the living room and I go, honey, I haven't been able to pay us back on that $15,000. I need to write the last $15,000 we have to our name. Can I do it? And my wife goes, "write the check."Holy cow. So just to clarify. Nonprofit, you took all your savings.Dumped it. Dumped it in there. Yeah. With the mission of saying we know we're onto something. Yes. But we're losing money right now. Yes. That's guts.Well, it was. Holy cow.It was this vision. It was the it this is a painful point to to be honest with you is that I had the we had the vision for feeding millions of kids who across America struggling with hunger but I was writing the last check not knowing if I'd feed my own. Oh.Goodness gracious. Oh my goodness. That's the level of commitment.That's the line.Dude. That is coolest thing I think I've ever heard. Yeah.I'm willing to take food out of my kids' mouths knowing that if I do this right, I can feed millions. Yes.And your kids did you sit and tell them that?Oh, they know all this. They're in the game with us.That's so cool. So cool. They knew. I know that you and I have a son, sons that are the same age. So my my youngest is 16 and I think yours is  1616, yeah.And then how many other kiddos you got?18 year old girl.Oh, that's what I have also.And a 15 year old girl.Okay, nice. I've got 18 year old son 16 year old son. You are 15...15 and 13. A 15 year old boy and a 13 year old girl.Nice. They they eat a lot. Both of them. If I sat with them and said I'm not gonna feed you for a week because I'm going to try and feed a million kids...actually I take this back, actually my kids, both Lucas and Carla are amazing kids, they will probably look at me and be like, you need to feed a million kids. Sure. We'll go forage. There's and that's that's, that says a ton about you that you went out on that kind of limb. And man, I'm so glad that you did. Because we saw the effect. Right.That you're you're doing and we only saw it on the local level. You see it all these other places we're going to, we're going to explode it tonight at this Party on Purpose. Gonna be amazing tonight.So how long ago was Eugene, Oregon's first event?That was eight and a half years ago. Wow.So now you hit Eugene, Oregon, you say to your wife, we are definitely in something that we can replicate in city to city. Yes. You're going to take this nonprofit worldwide. It's going to grow we talked about you need capital.Right. Where does Replenish Foundation Generosity Feeds began to take shape?So, we had some very wise councillors, advisors on the front end. So when we were even looking at this first event with 600 people, they said you need to start a nonprofit that is a um umbrella organization so that you can create an ecosystem of nonprofits underneath it. Because I don't want to lead six initiatives that all have their own 501C3, that's six different boards. It's too much management. It's not efficient. So far better off creating one nonprofit that can house various initiatives. So Generosity Feeds is a DBA of the Replenish Foundation. And that allows us now to be creating additional initiatives that all play off of each other.Sure.And are now working collectively to establish generosity as the new gold standard in America. That's what we're after. I know that Generosity Feeds is one of your biggest DBAs under the Replenish Foundation. What what DBAs do you have?Yea, the other one is Generosity Serves. So as of today, we have 64,000 volunteers across America. Remarkable number. Here's what's happening at events now. Oh, and we also partner with other nonprofits. Oh. So, so when we go into a community and all these meals are made, we don't do distribution. We bring in other nonprofits, we promote them at our event. Nice. And then we give them the food. So here's what's happening. These nonprofits are now coming to us going, you got 400 people from our community to show up at your event and we can't get 40. Okay. Would you be willing to mobilize your local volunteers to serve with our organization? Well, of course, I am.Sure This is about doing good. This is about becoming a force for good. This isn't about competition in the nonprofit sector. This is about helping these other nonprofits soar.Right.So Generosity Serves is a platform now where with our nonprofit partners across the country we can go into our database and begin to mobilize these people to serve with these other nonprofits in the rhythm that works for their family. Oh, wow. You haven't...you haven't you have built an army of generous people.Yes. That's where we're that's why we're seeing that we're seeking to change culture. Because we know if we can change the dial of generosity in America, even just three notches, three degrees from our present trajectory. Together, we can begin to solve every social issue that exists. I believe the timing is perfect. Also, I think I think the pendulum is swinging back away from that social media obsession and people are going I am done. I am unplugging. I want to be with somebody I want to talk I want and I think it's an incredible timing. I think that people are seeking this which is why they, you've been able to do this. Well, you've been able to do it because you're very organized and you did it the proper way. And you're very charismatic and there's a lot of reasons why your particular thing, but that's the platform that other people can go with. You know, we're doing KBMD is sponsoring Linda's Nebraska ataxia for the for the fourth year in a row. And I was just thinking the whole time when you said we team up with other nonprofits, she does, she is my med school roommate, been friends with her forever and she developed a type of ataxia. And meaning that she, it's, it's, it's like Lou Gehrig's disease, but she has the resources and she found a physical therapist that analyzed her and was able to put a vest on her with weights. And it actually allows her to walk without the vest. She can't walk. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so then so she decided on her own dime to do a Nebraska Ataxia foundation and all they do is buy them and given to people and there's just video of video of people in wheelchairs and they show up and give them a vest because that technology exists. Yeah, it's like this. There's kids not eating on the weekend. You can feed them and you can eat them good food and they're gonna they're gonna become great members of society. It's just that easy. It isn't like you're going and given some weird obscure drug. It's like oh my gosh and so like I'm just we need to get you and Linda hooked up with that or she needs that you have any events in Omaha Nebraska?Not right now. We'll set that on the through her but she's got a big network and we can we can do that.That's right. We did. I don't know what podcast that was but he came on our podcast and he taught Eric and I about toxic charity, how you can cause more damage, trying to do good by throwing...You know, it's so cool as we've had a handful of different charitable folks drop in on the gut check project and one of them that always comes to mind right off the top is another BBW guy and that's Robo Hendrickson with a I mean, he truly is...in but the way that he describes the passion behind why he does what he does transforming communities is very similar to what you're talking about. But even more to the point the way that it's not what you would consider what Robo termed was toxic charity.Throwing money...the fact that you y'all have yet another subsidiary, just simply called Generosity Serves shows that you're, you're enabling a community to feel comfortable and more community by serving together find and you even said it yourself finding ways to make it fit your schedule. And you're doing it without competition between people who are trying to do well, it's like, let's lift each other together. In my own small town. I told this to Ken we there's a man by the name of Ricky and he works through a church but he invites the entire community at least one Saturday a month to simply come and staff tables where we hand out food. That's all that we do. A lot of the different food producers in the North Texas, they donate it, they know there's going to be a big line. People come from all over. But regardless, they get shopping carts. They come out there in the parking lot. We load them up, and then they've got plenty of food for a couple of weeks. It's great. And it's giving and it's things like what you're talking about all we've ever needed as volunteers to help make it happen.So, side note, but this is a shout out and mad props to every single parent out there. Dad or mom Loy and Lucas spent two weeks in Mexico touring doing tennis. I had to try and figure out what to do with my daughter. Like pick her up from school, get her to her events, cook dinner for her. I want to say it was the two most stressful weeks I've had in my entire life because I'm trying to work. Now. I'm the boss. I started thinking, Wait a minute, I'm the boss and I do okay, financially. What happens and I started looking around my office I'm like, I have a lot of single moms working for me. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, I have a lot of single moms that are going to get fired when they show up late again. And there's, and they're they and I just I had this. Am I that big of a jerk that I have not until I lived it...Yeah. That's frickin hard. Yeah. And then when you don't have enough money to give your kid food on the weekend, the only food they're eating is at school. So then it's insult to injury where you're you're trying your best. Yes, they are. You want to give your kid food. And then something like this, where they just come home with a backpack and the food's already there. No questions asked. Nothing being said and it's healthy.You know what makes that story even better, is when that kid was at that school event, help create the meal and three weeks later, they open their backpack and it's sitting there and they kept their dignity because they helped make it Oh, yeah. Take it to the next level.Yeah, that's cool. Then that's that's the epitome of not a toxic charity. Because what Robo talked about is it doesn't do me any good to go to a community because just like you he's serving with them. He's teaching them how to take care of their animals, go get an education, give back to the people learn how to grow the food mill, it's very much the same thing you've removed the stigma of someone just gave me this to I created this for me and for some other people who are in similar situations. That is a pretty incredible full circle, give back. I didn't even think about that to the people that we were building these.That's where that's where I said, you very likely had no idea you're standing next to a single mom. You'd have no idea because the moment we unite ourselves around shared values, nothing else matters. You're right. Your wealth doesn't matter when you're united around shared value.This is...we do this, Eric puts my patients to sleep. I stick a camera in people's butts, the one thing that we see over and you may be a super rich guy, you may be this buff person, you may be old. We all have the same inner workings. We're all the same. That's what we totally forget. We're all the same. And I see that because I stick cameras and I'm like, your stomach looks like it looks like his stomach. We're all the same. That's right. And when we sit there and realize that if my kid was hungry, thank God, they have never had to experience that. But if we had something that I could, I mean, to be able to go and be a participant say, honey, we're going to go and we're going to pack some food and you're gonna have food for this week, but we're going to earn it. That's so cool. Non toxic charity.That's right. So we started off in northern Virginia. Yes. And then we've we've gotten to the point now where Replenish Foundation functions is a large company with a handful of charitable subsidiaries. Yes. Now today, you're in 29 different states with events correct? That's correct. So what what is Generosity Feeds is doing now? How can people that are tuning into Gut Check Project figure out where they fit in to learn how they can begin to serve with? Yes. In, in and around their communities with their neighbors at? What What can people do?So let me hit the business side of this first. Sure. So we work we work with over 600 businesses across the country. And you it's very possible that your that our listeners today have heard of something called corporate social responsibility.Corporate social responsibility.It's called CSR. And this is often used by the larger companies. Now, here's the problem with CSR. It's this. Its responsibility. No one wants to do a responsibility, something responsibility is something you have to do. Right. And yet these larger companies, most companies are looking for CSR. What's our corporate social responsibility going to be? No, we're throwing Corporate Social Responsibility out the window and we're saying listen, don't do a CSR. Do CSO, corporate social opportunity. Let us help you as a business, create a philanthropic strategy that engages your product, summit a piece of your profit, whatever you want your employees and your customers, and that customer pieces a huge piece. And so one of the things that we're doing now with companies is helping them develop their their CSO, corporate social opportunity, because when a company does it right, it's going to accelerate their business. I was talking with a very large business owner in Salt Lake City this last week, and they just dumped a lot of money into a nonprofit initiative. And I said, you know, you're about to open 25 restaurants around the country. And you're going to drop about a half a million dollars on every one. I'm sorry. $500 million on every restaurant. to open it said I would imagine what...500 million?500 million is what typically it takes to open these larger scale restaurants okay? Holy cow. So 500 million. When you when you open a restaurant, are you going into that with a strategy and a plan? Yeah, well, of course they are. Anyone would. I said, over the next 10 years, you're probably going to invest 200 to $300,000 in philanthropy. Do you have a strategy for that? And she's like, oh, I get your point. Why in the world would you take $200,000 of your profit and invested in, in nonprofits without a strategy? Right.Like, let me help you design a strategy with your marketing team that's wrapped with your values, so that so that you're doing your philanthropy with a with a purpose. So you can see the outcomes in a way that actually accelerates your business.I love this because what I'm hearing is that charity and giving back is not checking a box.No, this is this is about nonprofits. Yeah.And for-profits working together. And here's the here's the statement, not it. The linchpin is this, for profits that have the heart of a nonprofit, need to find great nonprofits that have the mind of a business. Say that one more time.Okay for profits, businesses, businesses that have the the heart of a nonprofit...Love that. Need to find great nonprofits who have the mind of a business.And you're allowing this so I'm like the fact that you said that this is a corporate social opportunity. You are figuring out how to do it well. You can come to a company like KBS and say you are leaving your customers in a position where they don't know that they can give back. And we all win.Yes. And I can coach you through I can guide...and here's the beauty of this, this isn't about the foundation. Because at the end of the day, I want your company doing what you're passionate about. Not what I'm passionate about, this is about your value system. And so if these companies choose to work with us, that's great. I mean, that's going to help accelerate what we're doing. That's not the point to this. The point is, if you're aligning your profits and your values and your employees and your customers with a great nonprofit that aligns with all of that, then guess what? You're doing good. You're becoming a force for good and that's all I want. That's all I want. Yeah. And so that's the end game. Like, why because we're seeking to establish generosity as the new gold standard. That's not about me. That's about you.You wrote your last $15,000 check, told your kids we're out of money. And you went from there to I'm now going to teach large corporations how to do it better. And it all revolves around generosity and you lead by example that day when you wrote that check.Yes.So cool. That is so so cool. I'm excited. We are leaving we are completely because we now we know everybody at KBS we're there. We all do charitable things, your donate money I do the thing that you're saying, which is you know, I, whatever, you know, I try to donate, like, even like Linda's foundation and stuff like that every year I sponsor, I'm not taking advantage of the fact that I need to spread that message because all it does is help everyone get in their lane and oh, this is where I need to drive. That's that's basically what you're telling people to doIt's the power of with.Yes, power of with.Now, that's a pretty powerful message all the way around. It just seems like that lots of corporate responsibility did turn into the checking of a box. We should be doing this. So let's be sure that we do it. And Carol, you're over there. Did we do that thing? Did we send the check did but there's there's no personality behind that there's no touch in there, you're really not seeing it.Well let's take it one step further as a pastor tithing. I grew up Catholic, right 10% Where does it go? Who cares? I don't know. I'm just giving it. It's right. Right. It's what they said we had to do.That's the world I was in too.Now, and it...suddenly just enters a world of obligation. What what was probably born as a as a good purpose. It's lost. Its lost touch. It's lost feel. There's no texture to it. It's just this this, this money is spoken for, and it's gone. So now I'm super intrigued as a business owner. I come to you, Ron. And I say I have a I have a business. We're growing. I want to get my company in this corporate social opportunity. What would be the first thing that you would do? What would what would you do with me?So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to send you an assessment. I'm going to have you assess your own company as to where you're at. And that's going to do two things. Number one, that's going to help you understand wait a minute, we're not all bad. That's the first thing it's gonna do.I talked to I talked to Tim and Patrick about this that like we're doing the whole we've all read the book Traction. Yes. And so you know, you do like that, you know, you start that you start thinking everybody's bad. You're like, this is your this is your score. Eric, you're a two this week. You are a two.No, so you're gonna get some good news, right? Yeah, but you're also going to evaluate where you want to be when it comes to CSO corporate social opportunity. And then I'm going to walk you through a process of blueprint of helping you close that gap. It's that simple, and in a company your size. Four hours, you will walk away with a blueprint of going, oh my God, is it really that easy? And it is. And so if this is not rocket science, I don't need to consult your company for three months. Let's just sit down, I'll put you through the assessment. We're going to walk you them through our blueprint that aligns your social, your social good with your value system, your product and some of your profit, and boom, you walk out the door going, oh my god, here's who we can partner with. and here's how we can tie our business and our customers into it and everyone wins.We have when we launched our product, we know consistently because our research when we did the clinical trials, we know that four out of five people are going to get better, like really get better. Sure. And we when we launched we either had one star on Amazon or we had five which is not a placebo. Either we worked or we didn't. Yes. And fortunately we are four stars and close to 1000 reviews. Every single one of those people that we helped, we can say if we made you feel better, I'm going to ask a favor of you now. And then we do your process. Yes. Because you have somebody that Yeah, I do feel better. You changed my life I want you to pay it forward and be with and we can make a difference and grow this network. That's so cool. Corporate Social opportunity. Did you coin that term? Yes. That's awesome. Only because CSO doesn't it doesn't work. It's it again. It's a check a box. It's it's not the heart.Right.And we're we're seeking to pull out of people, the values that are in them, the values in there. It's just letting them come to the surface and begin living.Isn't that so interesting? Because you can see how many people want to have that pulled out of them. Because we think that everybody's own superficial stuff, but the reality is, when we went and when we did Generosity Feeds, that was an enthusiastic, it's not like...From the moment we walked in.Oh my gosh, everybody the energy was amazing. Yeah, people want to get off of this superficial thing. They want to be part of something. And if they know that they can, it just comes to them. I mean, I'm the same way. I mean, I was so excited. I only found out about it because Eric said, hey, one of our Baby Bathwater people does this. I'm like, Okay, what are we doing? I was on call that weekend and everything. And I was like, Okay, I had no idea. Yeah, loved it had fun. And I'm somebody that is perfectly willing to give back and try and help out wherever but it doesn't. Since it's not being fed to me. I'm busy. I forget. Now, if we can sit there and develop some sort of process where and we can get other companies, like some of the other companies that we work with,You know, it's kind of interesting is it KBMD Health, but also just in the direct patient contact that we have. We talk about diet, we talk about exercise, we talk about different things that people do to improve their own health. And since I was a kid, I've heard that many times just simply giving of yourself will reward you even more than than whatever, but you hear it. You don't always get a blueprint on how do I effectively give back and it sounds to me like probably what you're really doing is, it may sound elementary, but you're just helping people rediscover the new way to find their purpose and then suddenly you begin to feel better. Suddenly depression issues aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. Because if you think about a gym, do you think gyms existed back in the 1800s? Could you imagine in the 1800s telling someone, we're going to have this building, and there's going to be metal bars, and we're going to put weight on them. And we're going to lift them, and we're going to put things over our heads. And we're going to do some stuff like this, and we're going to do some stuff like this. You're gonna look great, you're gonna feel good, and some cowboy would have shot you between the eyes and go that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Have you ever heard that whole Jim Gaffigan set where he's just like, what in the world? How do people develop a Stairmaster? Hey, I got an idea. You know, people love walking up stairs. Let's make one that's never ending.But, but people, they they've gone to do that because that level of exercise for whatever it is, is keeping them in shape and helping them feel better. It just seems like what you you're doing is reintroducing people back to what they've become this...they became disconnected from your core. It's why people do yoga. It's why people do meditation it's to return to who they are. This is not that different.I have an idea for you. I think you should make the food much heavier like 20 pounds. Put it on the kids Yeah, give him a little workout. And then let 'em do squats.Do Memorial Day Murph For Memorial Day you go to Generosity Feeds get your 20 pound pack. Go do some air squats.Oh my goodness.That That is so cool. I'm just I'm I'm loving the idea that we could sit there and send a post purchase email sequence that just says hey, it's time to give back time to give back if you got better great if you didn't get your money back because we have 100% money back guarantee. Yeah, you didn't get better. Here's your money back if you got better now you need to pay for it. But not you go give back. Give back with us.With us. relationship. Everything's relationship.Let us know how you're giving back also, I mean, justWhatever it takes. But it's not you know, I mean, what I like what you're doing is you go, I'm a company your size, I need four hours, I've got the process, you very clearly are a very detail oriented person. You think through all these things, you've got 64,000 soldiers, that got your back right now. That's what we would need. I mean I want you to come to me and be like, here's what you're gonna do. That's what I love about traction. It's and you can do this, this, this and this. Now for your charity, you're going to do this, this, this and this, not write one check every Sunday.Yeah. And walk or interplays with what you are doing from the book Traction. Because again, when we talk about our, our body and our health, it we're holistic beings, everything in our place, right? Same thing in it, same thing in business. What you do in the philanthropic side of your business needs to completely interplay with what you do in the profit side of your business. Let them intertwined they're not two different silos, and that's what we're bringing together.Yeah, man I love what you're doing I absolutely love what you're doing and I just I like hearing the story how I built this because people look at this they're like oh yeah he's charismatic guy, he's a coach whatever know you wrote a check with the last money in your bank and you went...It hurts.Yeah, just just to reiterate, in case you're joining us late in the podcast and you're just joining in because somebody else...If you're joining us late just rewind and start over cuz it's all really good.Generosity Feeds does not handout, cheap meals and sweet tarts. This is legitimate food for kiddos that don't have an opportunity to eat and don't have an opportunity to get a good meal on the weekends and you've stepped in and you've allowed people into your vision to serve in a serving with you, which I think is awesome.You know what I really like also having kids our age, Eric made it a point to make sure that it was a family involvement. Gage brought his girlfriend. Yeah, it was it was we're going to do this. I'm going to lead by example. I'm gonna put the hairnet on. I'm gonna put the gloves on. Yeah, you're gonna see your dad do it first. And then follow my lead. So it's the same thing you lead by example. You teach others to do that they teach others to do that now we're all with it. And the car ride home was was filled with smiles. It was rainy that day. Yeah. It was rained hard that day. But I mean, everybody was like, man, it felt great.Yeah. And then is the conversations as a parent, reinforcing the experience. Sure.That's the power. Definitely no curriculum needed. How do people find you Ron? How do people help out?Easy. Email me at ron@replenishfoundation.org that easy, different ways to help out. Look for an event in your area. That's one If we're not there yet, that's fine. How do they find that? Is that on Generosity Feeds?Go to generosityfeeds.org.org, o.r.g.Yep, generosityfeeds.org go to locations, you'll see what's coming in the next usually four months. And in we're already booking 18 months from now. Whoa, it's crazy. So that's but that leads to part two. If you're if you lead a business that is wanting to do good, or you're a community leader, have it, call us we'll come to an event with you, like will coach you on how to mobilize your entire community and work with you and support you in this because it's all about the width. So break. Let's do this in your community. Let's do this together. So that's the other pieces go to generosityfeeds.org and just contact us and we'll, we'll help get this going in your community.Do you hear that Linda? Nebraska Ataxia, hit him up. Omaha is gonna be the next place to do a Generosity Feeds spot. And then we're going to team up two charities that I support.29 states covered right now, which means there's 21 left just in the US alone. So knowing that if I were a corporate person who wanted to be a corporate partner, and I know that we said that you don't just want to write a check, but you do need supplies.We do well, and we have national level funders, that are helping advance the mission. So you have we have local people who support the local events. And then we have the national partners, which you guys are, that are helping mobilize us into new communities across America that are helping us empower 64,000 volunteers, because the idea needs to be needs to spread.I just thought about something here. So if I'm a I'm not a I don't know how to say this in the right way. But if I'm a a family, yes, that is a tight on budget, right. And it's just easier to spend $8 at McDonald's to feed the family, is there I just don't know how to say this. But I would almost like to tell my patients for instance. Because I hear this from my patients all the time. It's very hard for me to shop at Whole Foods or whatever, or it's just easier that I can get McDonalds and you know, and I try and get them off of that. Is there a price point? Can anybody be part of this? Can anybody use eat it? I mean, basically, I would I would tell my I would tell my patients, go to Generosity Feeds, pack your own bag, make sure you eat this on the weekends and don't eat that crap that you find cheap.At our events when people come to at the end of all of our events. Here's what we say if you are here today, and you need food, just come see us privately. Because you're going to walk away with food. So it's that simple. Yes. Is the food already designated to the nonprofits that are going to distribute it? Yes. That doesn't matter. Someone when someone comes to an event needs food. Just come talk to one of our team members. We're going to hand you the food that you just created. Walk away with it.So DHAT my company. We need to do something with this also as a gastroenterology as the gastroenterologists for all ages that are the premier gastroenterology group in the country, we need to lead by example, we need to do stuff like this. Definitely. I think everybody be on board too. This is another one of those things where you just delivering laser focus to a lot of people who want to serve, they just don't know how to do it, or how to do it together.Well, sometimes it's the conventions, like Mod Pizza, as you said, is a title partner with us-national partner with us. So they do a leadership summit with all their general managers every year, guess what we do? We go in and catch this. This year they're creating 50,000 meals, they'll do it in less than one hour with 2,000 people. Like so. So we can come into these conferences and conventions and and we do this. We're working with Microsoft right now. Like, the coolest thing ever. Who are they? Yeah, I don't know. I think an up and coming company to buy some stock. So again, it's In those are private events where it's just that Corporation but it's like you so cool. You got this group around the country, the doctors come together. You put them on. So many companies talk about doing good. Let's just do it will bring it to youDon't talk about doing good.Well, just and I'm sitting there thinking we've got my company, I'm just thinking how many of these single moms that work for us that probably would be relieved that they could go home with some food. Because I found myself running out of time not cooking for Carla for those two weeks and ordering food and we ate like, well, we'd like crap per our standards chair. Um, it's, it's relative, right? I mean, it's, you know, read a lot of Thai food and whatever, you know, which I like. But um, but I wasn't cooking whole food. I wasn't doing the stuff that we normally would do.No, I agree with that, and probably the epitome of a lot of the people that want to give back, who aren't always in the best position to give back happened to be those same people. I would never know who actually truly struggles, it is walking amongst us until sometimes they kind of hit a wall and they just like, for the last number of weeks, I've been dealing with this I'll look and I'll say I had no idea. But that same person, whomever that would happen to be, I'm certain would jump at the opportunity to help a neighbor or friend. And then of course they would have the opportunity to benefit and take something back to their kids. That would be kind of incredible.Wow, I want to thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Ron. I want to thank you for you lead by example. You're certainly gonna make a difference with us. We're gonna we're going to jump on board with KBS KBMD DHAT. We're remembering we're going to have the corporate social opportunity be our new motto.Yeah. If you're only watching us on the YouTube you may have missed we are down here in Austin, Texas for what they call the Austin POP the Party on Purpose yes event where we have a handful of corporate entrepreneurs who've come down here to Austin basically to help Generosity Feeds and Replenish Foundation mobilize to more areas throughout our country feeding kiddos that just needs some good meals. So Ron, I can't thank you enough for just bringing to life an incredible vision for a lot of people who just needed it. So it's, yeah it's awesome.I appreciate it great being on with you guys this is honestly just been a lot of fun. Oh, good, good. And I'm sure it has been for everyone else too.I hope so!Well, hopefully this will kind of spread and this is a great example of leading by example living by example. Corporate social opportunity Generosity Feeds Generosity Serves everything you have said is just makes me feel like I'm kind of a bad person and I need to do more.That's probably going to do it for Episode Number 35 Ron Klabunde here from Replenish Foundation and  Generosity Fees and Generosity Serves look him up everything in show notes of course, check us out, like and share Gut Check Project KBMDhealth.com. Dr. Brown, anything else?Yeah, I'm going to task everybody with a personal social opportunity. Definitely like and share this particular episode, because it goes way beyond the Gut Check Project,Send it to your boss.That's a great. Send it to your boss, find something that where you work or with your team. If you haven't been an entrepreneur, how can we begin to work together? This is your team building exercise. It costs you nothing, and it gives everything.Here we go. I'm going to I'm going to share this with Loida right now, my boss, my wife.Thank you! Tune in to Gut Check Project. We'll see you next week, don't forget we have a giveaway Dr. Brown's signature package Episode 36.Find a “Feeds” event near you https://generosityfeeds.orgOrganization Info on the Replenish Foundation https://generosityfeedsportal.org/uploads/images/prospectusreplenishfoundation_email.pdf

Joe: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Joe from NIU's Center of Black Studies, and I'm here with Gaylen.

You must unlearn what you have learned. We propose a reboot for the DC Cinematic Universe so we can finally see Batman's origin, look forward to Young Adult Yoda, and grade Nick's choices in his fantasy movie mogul draft.Show NotesRob Liefeld's take on the new BatsuitThe Rob Liefeld/Birds of Prey controversy Star Wars: Project LuminousNewcomers podcast

Joe: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Joe from the NIU Center for Black Studies.

Gaylen: Welcome to The Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Joe from NIU Center for Black Studies. Joe will accompany me today as we dive deep into history.

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Collaboration and Authenticity in Nonprofit t Leadership Transcript of the Interview with Joe Homs Hugh Ballou: Greetings. Welcome to this edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. This guest today is a connection through the co-host, Russell David Dennis. And Russell, you met this guy a few years ago, right? Russell Dennis: A few years ago, yes. They were doing an interesting project that helped you expand your mind. Since that time, he has gone light years ahead of that. Don't let that youthful appearance that you're about to see fool you. This man is loaded. He's got lots of learning, brings lots of experience to the table. He's doing things to help people be more authentic, and he is all about collaboration. That's our language. I've got a bio here that's just to brag him up, but I'll let him tell you about himself. Go for it, young Joe Homes. Joe Homes:  All right. So hi, everybody. My name is Joe. Last name is Homes. And, I'm now a partner at a company called Your Charisma Coach. And we teach people how to charismatically influence people to just kind of be a force for good in the world, to really connect and to share your own humanity with someone else and really to just again be a force for good in the world. We teach people through seminars, products, things like that. For myself, I came up a backwards way in industry, in jobs or whatever. My first job was at a venture capital firm, which most people don't start out with; they usually are successful entrepreneurs or something like that, and then they take all their money and invest there. I started there and was just the jack of all trades and worked my way up. I eventually became the entrepreneur in residence role. I got exposed to a lot of different companies, a lot of different industries, a lot of different things. Then I went to college, so I started doing that job when I was like 17. It was ridiculous. Then went to college, finished out that fund, and became a management consultant. Traveled around the world, did all kinds of stuff there. My job essentially ever since has been going into organizations, and make people act quickly, get in contact with them, know them, sometimes better than they know themselves, and help them fix problems and collaborate and do that kind of thing. I met some friends a few years ago, and we were at a seminar together. All of us are doing our own different things. These other two gentlemen are very successful in their own right. We all decided to come together and create something amazing. I just joined this company as a new partner. We are just so happy to basically connect the world because we see, at least I see the world going in a couple of different ways. One is where technology, software is eating the world. That was my old world. I have a degree in computer science. Software is doing amazing, cool technological things. The other way that the world I see is going is we are in a connection economy. We are in that place where you reach out on Facebook: Who is the best plumber in my neighborhood? You reach out to a connection that you met years ago, like I reached out to you Russell because I saw something go by on LinkedIn. I haven't spoken to him in a while; let me see how I can connect. I ended up being here on your podcast. This is great, of course, but it's just a wonderful thing where you can just go up and connect with people. We saw those two things happening, where technology and psychology are diverging. We wanted to bring them back together and give people a chance to connect with their fellow human beings and show people how to do that. Charisma is a skill. It's something you can learn. It's something you can always get better at. It's an interesting thing. I hope that suffices to say who I am and what I do. Russell: It does to a degree, but man, there is so much more there that is phenomenal. You talk about the word “charisma.” A lot of people think that charisma, they look at a figure that is out there, that everybody knows, somebody like a Les Brown or a Dave Austin or a Dan Car? That is full of energy, high profile, extroverted, but that's not who everybody is. When it comes to nonprofits or for-purpose businesses, that is what they really are, relationships are everything. I think we went through a period in our society of extreme narcissism, and now people are starting to understand that no matter what you do, relationships are at the center of that. A lot of people probably feel like they're in the dark. You either have all of this juice and charisma. You're either open or you're not. That is not necessarily the case because everybody's a little bit different. My first question is: Is there a natural tendency for people to step away from their authentic selves in order to try to make an impression on others? Joe: Absolutely. And you're correct that not everybody is Oprah. I would posit that you don't need to be. We already have Oprah. She is great at being Oprah. I personally am not Oprah. I don't want to be. My business partner is completely different from me. Russ, you're different. Hugh, you're different. We are all different. That's what makes us that much more valuable. There is definitely a natural tendency for people to step away from their own greatness. They look at those very charismatic people who are out there showing the world who they really are. The natural tendency for people to step away sadly happens to most of us in the Western world for various reasons, social circles telling us we're not good enough, the media giving us unrealistic expectations of who we should be or what life should be like. You've got to realize that most people are afraid to express who they are. That natural tendency is definitely there, but I look at people who eventually get to a point in their lives. It's usually someone who is a little older, and they realize basically no one else cares, so why should they? You look at someone who is old enough, experienced enough, and they just don't care anymore. They're truly who they are. They're themselves. They just go, “You know what? I'm just gonna be me.” Those people are the most interesting people to meet, to talk to, to work with because they're just being themselves. I'd say that yes, there is a natural tendency to step away from being their authentic selves, mostly because there is fear there. If there is, it's hard for you to be silent with another person, if it's hard for you to go out there and express yourself, if you're constantly having to say, “I'm going to fake it until I make it,” an authentic person doesn't have to fake it. They're going to say, “This is me.” Look to reducing that fear for yourself to help yourself there. Russell: I prefer “Act as if,” to “Fake it ‘til you make it” because you're not putting up a façade or trying to be something you're not. I think that throws people out of their greatness because really the further we move away from our authentic selves, the less greatness we have. You work with business leaders from Fortune 100 companies. You work with nonprofit leaders. You work with government entities, a little bit of everybody. People interact. It's all about relationships. How might the idea that people think they have to put up a certain impression, how could that hamper them in their role as a nonprofit leader or business leader or government leader? Joe: The important word there is “leader.” In business, in life, in government, in for-purpose businesses or nonprofits, however you want to call it, you're there to lead for a change. If you're going to step away from your greatness, that is going to hamper your ability to actually lead. An invisible magnet sit sin between people. It's called trust. We have huge sections of our brain that are dedicated, hard-wired to figure out congruency, trusting people. As human beings, we have to evolve over many thousands of years to learn: Is this person taking advantage? Is this person contributing to the group? We're very good at sensing any incongruence. When you have an incongruence, you don't trust that person. If you don't trust that person- Think about it. If you didn't trust someone, could you really be influenced by them? If someone is holding a gun to your head, you can't really trust them. They might influence you in that moment to get what they want done, right? But if the external threat is removed, you don't trust that person. You can't rely on their word. You can't rely on them to say what they're going to do. If I say, “I'm going to take this left turn, and I go right,” that erodes some trust. Sure, there are different things in life where you say you're going to do one thing and circumstances make you have to do another. That's fine. Again, if you're the kind of person who says, “You know what? I promised you this; this happened. Here is how I'm going to make it right,” an apology makes all the difference. We make mistakes. We all screw up somehow in our lives. It's the way we get back into trusting relationships with the people around us that really matters. If you are going to step away from being your authentic self, people will see an incongruence. They may not necessarily know what it is. They may not be able to put their finger on it, but they will say, “I don't know. I don't know about that person. I don't know if I can trust them.” So it will hamper your ability to be a leader in the world, to get the change that you're looking for in the world. If you're not going to be your authentic self, whomever that is- There are people out there who are, as far as I would be concerned, super weird. I'm not just gonna connect with that person. But they are totally authentic. And their audience is massive and exploding because the people who love them are there with them. The people who don't, mostly it's just like, “I don't care. I won't pay attention.” Being authentic creates trust. It creates relationship. If you step away from that, you're only hurting yourself and your cause. Russell: I think one of the important qualities that leaders in nonprofits recognize is this need to influence people. You have to influence people to serve on your board. You have to influence people to give to your cause. You have to influence people to use your services. Probably a lot like other businesses, this notion of influence makes people very uncomfortable. One of the troubles that I have seen leaders have in all types of organizations is this need to be a Superman or a Superwoman, where the buck stops here and they get it all done. How much of that have you run into? What are some of the problems you've seen that people have created for themselves as far as being able to build good collaborative connections that serve both parties? Joe: This is a multi-part question. In terms of people being a little bit worried about influencing and leadership, the right kind of leadership that you want is the kind where you go first, where you're the one out ahead, forging the path, doing the thing that you, creating the world that you want to see. If you're doing that the right way, people will follow you. The very definition of being a leader. If you are having to convince someone and cajole someone and force someone into a position, you're not really leading. You're forcing. And the idea of force versus influence is an important distinction. I could force lots of things to happen in my company, in my relationships, in my life. But force requires constant attention. It requires you to always be there forcing the issue. Eventually, force tends to backfire. The idea of physics: If you are pushing on something, whatever force you have, an action has an equal and opposite reaction. You want to be leading someone. You want to be pulling them along rather than pushing them along. That's first. That's what true influence and authenticity is about. You're saying, “Look, this is the world that I'm creating. Do you want to help me create it? Let's go! However you want to join is going to be up to you, of course.” The second part of: How do people go wrong? How do they get trapped in this? They will have several complexes. One is that savior complex of, “I'm the one who has to do this.” They feel that if they are not the one to do it, they somehow won't get credit. They won't feel good at the end of the day. But you look at massive organizations that tends to have to be a way—human beings, we set this up—is what business doesn't have one or two leaders at the top? Do they get all the work done in these massive organizations? Absolutely not. What they've done and their real contribution is systems, to delegate, to make this kind of thing happen. Stories that I hear where people do well by themselves in this is companies like Toyota. Massive corporations. They didn't use to be as massive as they are now ,but still pretty big. They're making cars for the American market. Long story short, any worker at Toyota could just stop the line. They had a little pull chain. You pull it like this, and this entire lane of cars, hundreds of cars in a row on the assembly line, just stops. Everyone rushes over and realizes there is a problem here that they have to fix. We have to fix it for good, not just fix it today. If someone collapses, that's obviously not good. But that is a system you have to put in place. Why did that person collapse? The idea of the five Why's comes out there. You're asking Why? five times in a row. You get to the root cause of the issue there. You can read about that kind of stuff. The other stories I remember of this guy I know is named Derek Sivers. He had a company called CD Baby for a long time. He sold it in an interesting way. He created a nonprofit that pays him while he is living. When he is gone, it is going to go toward music education. Very interesting  guy. If you ever need to look him up, I believe it's Sivers.org. Really cool guy. What he did when he realized he was the bottleneck of his company is he did the same thing. He would get a question from one of his employees. He would stop and say we would create a system that solves this problem for the company. I never want to have to deal with this again. For the first few weeks, it was hell. I don't want to have to do this. He took the initiative. He led, and then he showed his team, “This is the way that I think. This is where the idea of culture comes in. Let me show you how I think about this kind of thing. Then you guys get to go and do this.” Eventually he said, “You guys come up with your own systems and your own things.” Eventually, he was able to exit the company because he had created this massive set of systems that let the company run and become its own organization and make its own way. Russell: And that is the work that SynerVision does. We teach people- Joe: Absolutely. Russell: How to implement systems that serve them and move them forward. Through creation of systems, co-creation of systems, everything comes together. In order to make an impression on people, good leaders need charisma. We talked about charisma. Marcus on Facebook asks, “What is your favorite book on charisma?” Joe: Ooh. Marcus, it's funny, is one of my partners. He is trolling me a bit. Let's see. Russell: He wants to make sure you are not sleeping in the board meeting. Joe: One of my favorite books on charisma is a book. I'm going to have to look up the name here. Give me a second. One of my favorite books is, there is a book called The Way of the Superior Man. I like this book because it's got a few really good insights in it. For me, I read this book about once a year just because I find it so interesting. Don't let the title scare you away if you're a woman. In fact, if you're a woman, you should read this because it'll help you understand the men in your life to a greater extent than I think a lot of self-help and development stuff might show you otherwise. We talked earlier about being authentic is one of the best ways of being charismatic. Without that authenticity, people aren't going to trust you. They're going to wonder are you for real? This book at least for me broke down what it's like to be a man in modern society, what you need to know, and helped me figure out. I remember there is a chapter in the book that says, Pretend your father is gone, that he's dead, that he has no more influence on you. What are you going to do now? I had to sit with that one for a while because my dad is one of my heroes. He is an important figure in my life. We also go about life in different ways. When I read that chapter, I remember going like, “You know, I'm going to choose this path for my life rather than another one.” It's an important book, I think, that people may not consider to be a leadership and influence book, but it helps you to discover yourself a bit more, especially as a man, but also again as a woman to understand yourself, too. We also have masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. Identities that we play into. Really good book. I would recommend that one to people. Hugh: Can I punctuate that, Russ? Joe, what generation are you in? Russell and I, we're both boomers, aren't we? Russell: Yep. We are crusty. We have been around for a long time. I plan to be around for a lot longer. Hugh: Crusty. So which generation are you in, Joe? Joe: I believe it's X. And maybe on the cusp of millennial. Hugh: Russell and I are champions of transformational leadership. You're anchored in your authenticity. You model, you practice what you preach. You model what you want to see. As a musical conductor, that comes back to me instantly. Your culture is what they see in you. Authenticity is a real key. When you talk about millennials, that is a key factor. It's a key factor, I think, more than any other generation. They don't want to put up with the BS they have seen us boomers create. We are on our way out of some corporate jobs and church jobs and nonprofit jobs. They come in with a whole different sense. There is a similar set of values. When you're looking at this community of collaborative thinking, how does this authenticity-? That is a really interesting book. I am hearing you talk about reading it again. I want to probe that authenticity as far as generations, how does that affect collaborations? As you read the book, tell me if you see different things every time you look at it. Joe: I'll answer the last question first. I see different things out of it every time I read it because I am a different person every time I read it. That is not the only book I read. My viewpoints change. My life changes. My circumstances change. I had a son a few years ago. When I- before having him and after having him, my life drastically changed in terms of the things I was doing, the businesses I had, and all kinds of stuff. But some of my risk tolerances changed for instance, like I used to go skydiving and motorcycle riding. You name an extreme or dangerous sport. I was there. Kite surfing. You name it. After I had my son, I said, “You know what? I'm going to hold off on that for a while.” I know there are people who would agree with that. I know there are people who would disagree. A bunch of the people I used to do things with were like, “What? Just because you have a kid, that doesn't change.” But honestly it changed for me. What's most important to me is going to be less important perhaps to someone else. To me, some of my most important values are family and freedom. I like to spend time with my family. I like to be the man around the house that's fixing my house. I fix stuff around here all the time. My life changed, and so in reading that book again, I got the one chapter I talked about, imagine your father is dead, I imagined myself as being dead and what I would want my son to know. I wrote some stuff down in a letter. It's in a fireproof safe or whatever. If I was ever gone prematurely, my son could get hopefully some of my wisdom passed along to him in some way. The book doesn't change, but I change enough that I notice different things in the book. It makes all the difference. That's why I read it about once a year. In terms of your other question, authenticity between generations, I don't think people are less authentic or more authentic between these generations. I think that technology has made certain things a bit more magnified than they were in the past. You look at stuff like: We're on Facebook live right now. Potentially thousands of people could be seeing this at the moment, whereas right now we are talking as this is a personal conversation between us three. These kinds of things have changed the social dynamics of where we're at generationally but also just as human beings. Normally, this would just be between us, and we'd get a good impression of each other. Maybe we'd learn some things, and we'd go off to our separate activities. Now this is recorded. People can watch this over and over. Hundreds of people are watching this outside of just us three. We have a different take. Human beings, when we know we are being recorded, when we know someone else can listen to this later, we edit our speech. We do these things commonly. I have gotten to the point in my life where it's like this is me. This is who I am. I'm going to express myself in the best way that I know how. Like I said, I'm not Oprah, nor do I want to be. I'm Joe. Nice to meet you. If one of my business partners Marcus was on here, he'd be joking with you guys a bit more. He's the more funny guy of our little group, and we love him for it. Marcus exudes this charisma in his own special way. Another partner of mine, Johnny, he's the hard-charging, intense guy that if you ever want something done, ask Johnny because he will just get it done until it's done. I am more the reserved type, but it works for all of us. If there is much of a generational gap, it's just because people have different values. They have different ideas of what they think life should be like, how they should conduct themselves. If you just look at the other person and look at what they care about the most, what they value, you'll find you have a lot more in connection than you think. You guys have probably seen the movie The Breakfast Club for instance. There is the stoner kid. There is the outcast. There is the jock. There is the whatever. Ostensibly, we all went through that kind of high school experience. Many of these groups don't really come together. All of these kids had detention on the weekend. It sucks. They're there, but they're all different. What they come to realize of course is that they're all very similar. They all have the same struggles in life. They all have hard things going on. They all realize they can support each other. It's a great movie, a great metaphor for how I think different social groups and generations can come together and realize we are all human beings. We are all here to live our lives. We are all here to connect with people. We are all here to collaborate, communicate, do all those good things. When you realize that powerful things can happen. Russell: These are the types of tools I use working with people. These are the tools we use with SynerVision: try to look at how all these different pieces and parts put together. The strength comes in the variety and diversity across different areas of knowledge, different skills, different personalities. The more you have, to find that common ground is phenomenal. This is what collaboration is about. I think a lot of people are afraid to look at collaborating because they feel that there is a piece of something that they're going to lose out on if they collaborate with other people. It's a scarcity mindset. Have you found that in business in general? I know we find it in nonprofits. What are some of the things you do to help people get comfortable with that and back up and understand how the differences that people have aren't as scary as they think they are? Joe: Yeah. You're totally right. The differences that people have are actually their strengths. An example I use when I talk about collaboration is when I was running a team in Atlanta, great city if you're ever there or want to go there, it's awesome—I was working for this really large corporation. Being a management consultant, I am staying in a hotel all week and living out of a suitcase. The hotel gives these little soaps and shampoos. I don't have a lot of hair. It's not long. I only need very little. Russell: It could be worse. Joe: It could be worse, right? But hey, I don't need a lot of shampoo. I definitely don't need all the lotion they give you. It's hot and humid down there. I'm good. I would often just look at these and leave them in the room or throw them away. One day, I went, “There's got to be something I can do with these.” I set up a box. I had about 40 employees working for me at the time. I set up this box in our team room. 40 people in their hotel rooms at the end of the week would throw their extra shampoos and conditioners and the hotel stuff that the hotel was going to throw away anyway because they can't really use this stuff. They put this all in a box. I went and took this box once it was full, it was just 100 pounds of stuff, I took it down to a local shelter and said, “Hey, this is for you guys.” They're like, “Whoa, what's this?” They got very excited because people need this hygiene stuff. “It's here for you. Take it.” That could have been the end of it. But I decided to- At Your Charisma Coach, we say, “Find your edge.” I went, “You know, this isn't enough. I gotta go one step further.” What I did was I said, “I am going to come next time with another box of this. Would you mind when I do this if I called up a news producer here in Atlanta, and we'll do a little news segment on your work here? I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about you. But that will use what I'm doing as the in because it's news-worthy to do this.” They said, “Yeah, absolutely.” In the next month or so, I got enough of these bottles again and called up a news producer and said, “I am going to go down to this thing. I am donating 100 pounds of shampoo, conditioner, all that stuff. I think it would be interesting if you talked to these people, interviewed them, talked about why this was important to them, how it is going to help, and everything else.” The news producer said, “Absolutely, this is great. I'll meet you down there.” I met them down there, and I had the nonprofit do a quick interview about why this helps, what we were doing. I got on screen for a few minutes, not even a few minutes, like 30 seconds, and said, “Hi, I am a local guy doing this. I think it's important to support our local communities.” That kind of stuff. Through that news story, a ton of the hotels around have consultants there. They all started their own programs to be able to do this. It got to the point where this particular organization couldn't handle any more of the donations, so they started sending them out to other organizations in the city. The word got back to my corporate headquarters. They started doing this in every other city that they were in. This consulting company was all around the world. Around the world, people unlocked this potential. What's the key takeaway there? I looked at this as abundant thinking. I have this resource. I'm not using it. Maybe someone else can. The news media needs a story for the day. Great. I helped them create a story. That story helped influence a ton of people to say, “I could do that, too,” and they started doing that. Everyone in the community got to raise up. I couldn't have done that on my own. I couldn't be buying thousands of dollars of shampoo and donating it. Sure, I could do that. That would be where it stops. Instead of forcing myself to do that or forcing my employees to do that, I said, “Guys, I'm going to do this first If you want to join me, great. Then I will have other people get involved with their unique skills, gifts, abilities, and talents. We are all going to collaborate together.” When I look at companies and they say, “I don't know how to communicate or collaborate. They'll take my clients or my customers away,” I'd say, “Look to find someone who you can partner with. Look for someone to collaborate with who can do something you can't.” You guys together, one's chocolate, one's peanut butter, together, you're even better. Why not look at life that way where it's a positive sum game? The more that you put in and collaborate with people, the more you will get out than you would individually. Russell: Abundant thinking. That sounds like a quality that leaders should have, especially nonprofit leaders. How do you help them tap into the notion of abundant thinking? Put that into practice. Joe: Oh boy. That would take perhaps a little while longer than we have here, but I'll give the short answer. When you are collaborating with people, one of the best ways to do that is to listen to them, to find out what they actually need and want. When I want to collaborate more with people, individuals or businesses, for instance, a friend of mine was looking for a job. She has a decent one already. She just didn't like where she's at. She feels she is stagnating there; she wants to grow. I took it upon myself without her asking- A couple friends of mine are looking to hire in the same kind of role she is in. I sent them a message that said, “Hey, you need to reach out to this person because this person is great. They can do really good work. They are kind of looking for a move, but they don't know where to go yet. Can you reach out to them for 10 minutes and talk to them?” Fast forward a week later. I get this call, like, “I just got this offer from apparently a friend of yours? What did you do?” We say this at Your Charisma Coach as well. We try to put rabbits in hats. The other phrase is we put treasure in a chest. She didn't ask me to do this. I didn't have to do this. I look for opportunities to say, “How can I serve this person? How can I make it so that they'll get to shine in their own lives?” In a five-minute, ten-minute call from me to a couple of friends of mine, I got her a great job. She loves where she's at. My friends as well who had the company are ecstatic because they have someone who wasn't really even on the market. They didn't even know they were looking for her. They got a great fit. That was my gift essentially to all of them. I looked at it as like, Could I have gotten a fee for doing that? I recruited her. Sure. But the best way to collaborate with people is that you just give to them. You don't have a need to collaborate with them. I don't really want to collaborate with people. I'm not going to say, “Will you please collaborate with me?” It's more like I am out there doing cool stuff in the world. I want to make it so people are knocking down my door to collaborate with me. Do something interesting. Going back, be authentic. Be the organization, the person that you are in life, in the world, and people then kind of show up. At Your Charisma Coach, we have people emailing us, “How can I work for you? How can we intern for you? I will do unpaid work. I don't care what it is. I just want to be around you and absorb whatever it is that you have and maybe some of it will rub off on me.” We don't actually go out and look for most of these things. People show up because we are being who we are. That is so interesting to people. It's so, for lack of a better word, charismatic to people that they will want to collaborate with you. If you are having trouble collaborating with someone, look to yourself, be someone who you would want to collaborate with, and you'll find people starting to come out of the woodwork. Then all it takes is a dose of creativity. The example I gave before is, I had something that was going to waste. I guarantee you there is waste in your organization in some other way that it's something you're doing, or something like this, a conversation between high-level business people that would normally just be between them, record it, send it to an audience. Some people will like that. Other people won't. That's okay. But you will find people who resonate with those kinds of things you're doing. They will want to contribute and collaborate. There will always be people who want to compete and tear things down. I don't really pay attention to them. I look for the people who want to create more in life, to make something better in the world. I go, “You're doing that. Great.” There is a charity in the UK. It's called The Loneliness Project. We are looking to do some collaborations with them as well. We're not going to be like, “Please collaborate with us.” We are going, “Hey, we're helping people be more charismatic. Your message and our message are closely aligned. If you'd like to work with us, great. If you wouldn't, great. We will still support you anyway. We hope to send some people and some attention your way.” We're there to give. We're there to give all the time. We are not looking to force anyone into some interaction with us, but just to have fun. Hugh: Joe, speaking of drilling down on nonprofits, charities, for-purpose organizations, there is not really experience and knowledge on collaboration. We're duplicating efforts with multiple charities in the community. They are competing for donor dollars. What do you think is the bridge to help similar charities that are even local or around the country, what is the barrier that charities, leaders in nonprofits need to consider to break through to- Russell and I see collaboration as opening up a vault to a lot more success. What is the biggest barrier, and what is the antidote to that? Joe: The biggest barrier to collaboration? I'd say the biggest barrier to collaboration is value misalignment. If you value one thing and I value another, then it's gonna be difficult for us to collaborate. I would say don't partner with those kinds of people. Don't collaborate with them. You just won't have a good time. You could make it work. You could force things to happen. But again, that is force versus influence. But if you both want the same thing, if you both have the same kind of mission, then it's easy for you to say, “You know what? There is more than enough donor dollars to go around.” Believe me, there is. There is so much cash available in the world; it's just finding it and creating it in some cases that becomes the interesting challenge. Hugh: Sometimes the people who have the closest alignment, the most similar values, the most overlapping missions, see each other as competitors. Besides if they are aligned, what are some more barriers to thinking collaboratively from a leadership standpoint? Joe:  That scarcity mindset of there is so many donor dollars to go around. That is just a belief. It's not true. I haven't seen that to be true in my experience. That is one of the biggest things that stops people from collaborating. They think that they do that. I think also another example is that many people don't have examples of how to do this. They don't know. It just doesn't occur to them that it might be possible to collaborate with another organization that maybe has a very similar mission or a very different one. They just don't do it. It's like saying, “Well, I didn't consider that I could use my car to drive to the store, but I drive to work every day.” It's the same stuff. You're just going to a different kind of destination. With organizations, often I tell them, “You can look outside of the nonprofit sphere for people you can connect with and collaborate with if that is where you want to start.” One way that is really great is something that I've done in the past with nonprofits and with larger corporations. This is a model that comes from a guy named Brendan Brouchard. What he does is similar to my hotel story where if you're some kind of a business or creator or someone that has a product or service that a nonprofit would be interested in, or if you're the nonprofit and you're interested in someone's services- Let's say Tony Robbins has some special seminar that you'd love all your people to attend, but Tony Robbins' stuff is high-end, it's expensive, so maybe you don't have the money to pay for that out of donations, or maybe your donors wouldn't like that. So what can you do? Add a third party. Let's say the Red Cross. Or scale this up and down to the size of your organization and who you can access. Let's use some well-known examples. If you're the Red Cross and you say, “I want to send 10,000 people to a Tony Robbins event,” great. How do we pay for this? How do we get this done? Tony needs to make some money to put this on at the very least. We need to get people excited and invited. But let's add in a third party. Let's call up Coca-Cola who really cares about people being able to buy Coca-Cola around the world. They have millions and millions of advertising budget for instance. Bigger corporations like Coca-Cola literally have entire teams whose job it is to help put funds in the right place to nonprofits. If you don't know that, go research it. It's pretty interesting. What a nonprofit or company who wants to offer this service can do is go out to the nonprofit or vice versa and say, “Can we use your name?” If Tony Robbins said, “Can I use your name, Red Cross, to go to Coca-Cola and say, ‘I want to put on this cool event.'” I did this for a local charity in LA. We created an event where we got a bunch of local businesses around LA to bring a lot of their employees and to donate some money to an event. This event was teaching charisma, soft skills, those kinds of things to the particular people who were 18-25-year-olds. They are called the transition age youth. They have aged out of foster care. They are technically adults. After 18 and up until 25 is this age range. They are in a very vulnerable age when you come from a disadvantaged home, life. These people are looking for jobs. They are looking to get out there in the work force. They are good kids. They want to do things right. What we did is we said, “We are going to bring these kids. They are going to come for free.” These businesses around LA, we said, “Please either sponsor the event, and we will put in a small advertisement in a flyer, or pay for a ticket and have your people come. It's still useful, great information for your employees, for your leaders to get in on.” Fast forward to the event. We had what amounted to a training event. At this training event, everyone got to learn greater skills on how to communicate better, how to collaborate better, how to connect with their fellow human beings. These kids got to learn a ton of stuff they wouldn't have learned otherwise. These companies got access to young, fresh employees who are great people. They wouldn't have known about each other otherwise. We put them together in a mentoring relationship during this weekend. The more seasoned employees got to sponsor and mentor a younger kid. Everyone really loved it. It's now an event that runs every year and has continually grown. We took this spirit of collaboration. We said, “This nonprofit can ask for donors. That's great. This company can try to advertise to these people. That's great. I as a businessperson can try and get into these groups and maybe partner with them. That's great. But all three of us together can do so much more.” Once this started going, they now understand this model, so they have taken it out. I know one of their executives left the organization and is now at another one, doing the same thing in another city. These ideas, these means start to spread out into the world. If you are looking to collaborate, look beyond just your local experience. Go out into the world and say, “Who has what I want?” Your problem I guarantee you is someone else's solution. You'll be able to find someone who wants to contribute to you in a meaningful way. Hugh: Russell, this last seven minutes has been a capsule of possibilities. I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm thinking we need to get on the phone with Joe Homes and see if there is a collaboration with SynerVision that we can pop out of a bubble and put some of these things to work. Joe: I'll show you how. Hugh: Joe, I have to be the hard nose guy here. We have come up to the end of our interview. We try to keep these under an hour. It is fascinating. We could talk to you all day. Russell, thank you for inviting him here. I think we are going to try to get you to write for Nonprofit Performance Magazine. I think there's a story brewin'. What do you think, Russell? Russell: Oh yes. He's done a lot with that. We talked at some length a little while back when I bounced the idea to him about the podcast. We talked about a number of different projects and the power of collaboration. The time has come for that. It's really time for all of us to point our thinking in that direction. The business networks I'm in do that. The organizations I've been working with do the same thing. Hugh: For those listening, go to info@synervisionleadership.org. Send us an email if you are interested in having a conversation. Our new website will be up soon. SynerVisionLeadership.org is up now just as a placeholder. But we have a lot more in our community for community builders. Before Russell closes us out, Joe, what would you like to leave our listeners with? Joe: Given that we are talking about community and leadership, a lot of leaders and organizations think they have to be really impressive to make an impression out there, to get donor dollars. I would say if you are going down the impression route, you're going to run into most likely the fact that it's going to be inauthentic in some way. People are going to lose the congruence that you have. Instead, look to express yourself in the world. Don't worry about what other people think. Don't worry about how you're going to be judged. Just be you. Be that person in the senior living home that is like, “I don't even care. I am just going to show you what I've got. This is me. Take it or leave it.” Think about all the most interesting people you know from celebrities like Oprah to even just the guy next door that you think is fascinating. Every one of them does not care what you think about them. They're just out there expressing themselves. I would say if you are going to be a leader in your organization, go first. Express yourself. Be who you really are. I know that is the best worst advice ever. Just be yourself, right? The reason people say that is because you are enough. You are everything you need. Express that in the world, and look to be the most relaxed, easy person in any conversation you're in. You will be more charismatic than you think. If I can leave you guys with that, that is what I would leave you with. Russell: Great stuff. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I am looking forward to talking with you some more because I have some tools we want to provide to these nonprofit leaders out here. Thank you out there, all of you, who got out of bed this morning with the thought of how you can do something to make other people's lives better. What and why are you doing your job today? How is none of your business. Trust. Trust and move forward. Pick up the tools, and you'll have it. This is Russell Dennis signing off. Joe Homes, thanking him again. My good-looking colleague, Hugh Ballou. There was a point in time where he was jealous of my naturally curly hair. Once he got over that, he decided he'd like to have me hang out with him and be here with all of you great folks every week. Keep doing what you're doing. The world is becoming a better place every day, every day that you're out here, swinging and going out here and doing a service and being you. This is Russ Dennis signing off. We will see you right here next week.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a new feature; AFTS Joe's Road Show.  Hi, I'm Joe and I've been running Adventures From The Shed for a couple years now.  Both before and during that time, I've been part of other tabletop role playing games outside of the shed.  Over the past few months, I've brought along some portable recording gear to grab the audio of these sessions.  I've created Joe's Road Show to share some of the recordings with you, the listeners.  The episodes of Joe's Road Show will cover different games, different groups, and different stories, which can show you how RPGs run with various people and parameters.  I hope you find the episodes both informational and entertaining. We kick off the series with The Dungeoneers podcast!  Mike Robertson, one of the original AFTS cast, invited me to a recording day of his podcast, so I packed up the portable gear and sat with his crew for a fun day of role playing and laughter.  Make sure you visit them at dungeoneerspodcast.com to follow the story and characters you hear in this series.  Join Mike, Brandt, Jeffrey, Verge, and Joe at the gaming table, and enjoy this premier of Joe's Road Show! Like or Share episodes news and more on our Facebook page: Adventures from the  Shed Subscribe to AFTS and never miss an episode on iTunes Tweet AFTS on Twitter Join us on Patreon and help support the show. Check us out on YouTube at our channel.

Here's a quick recap of everything I shared during my lunch consultation today. On today's episode Russell shares some cool things he shared with some clients at a lunch consultation. Hear all that good stuff in just 7 minutes… Here are 3 cool things in this episode: How funnels on line basically replicate funnels in real life, but how it's cheaper. How Russell gets leads into his funnels. And why you need to create desire and belief to get ads to convert. So listen below to hear about Russell's seven minute lunch consultation. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals, this is actually the second Marketing In Your Car I've done today. Do you wanna know why? Because I'm in my car again and I'm driving, so because of that you get to get me again, because I had nothing else to do. I just wanted to share with you guys. I had a really cool lunch today with, there's a company called Kount K O U N T, which is a really cool fraud protection company, and the CEO is one of my close friends, he used to be the CEO of Clickbank, in fact, Clickbank and Kount are owned by the same company. Anyway, I had a chance to go eat lunch with them today, which was really fun to get to know the guys and their sales team and marketing team and stuff. I enjoyed it, and I learned some cool things, not things that I learned, but I shared some cool things with them that I think would be good for everyone so I just wanted to share some of the thoughts and ideas that came from it. Hopefully it'll give you guys some value. The first question they asked me, “Clickfunnels sounds cool, but we're selling BDB. With BDB, do funnels work, is that just a BDC type thing?” and it made me laugh because first thing I said, “Cool, how do you guys get clients in the door right now?” He actually used the word funnel, “Well the first step of our funnel is…” Then I kind of smiled and then he explained the whole thing, “We go to trade shows and we get leads, and we put the leads, and these guys call the leads, and leads forum, and then leads score guys, and if they're good they go to these guys and then sell to them.” I kind of smiled, I'm like, “Okay well that was a funnel right there. All we're trying online is replicate that. How do we make it so that instead of you having to have a guy or a gal or somebody do each of those steps, a lot of those things happen online.” I told him about how back in the day, some of you guys know my story, we had a call center that had 60 full time sales people who were outbound calling every one of our leads find people qualify them and all those kinds of things. And while that worked, it was expensive. That's a lot of people. Everybody had to dial 100 dials a day and all that jazz. It was just super inefficient, expensive and honestly, wasn't a great experience for people. People don't want to get phone calls all day long. So when we shut down the call center, we reinvented the model and kind of changed it around. We started driving traffic into a funnel, the funnel sifted and sorted and qualified people and just gave us leads and customers who were ready to sign up today. And that was the transition, that's how it kind of moved. We went from having 60 full time sales guys to now we have two.  While they don't do quite the same top line revenue, they definitely do more profit. Considering two guys versus 60 its pretty dang close to the top line, which is exciting. Anyway, I think that was cool illustration of a funnel. So the next question was, “How do you guys get leads into your funnel?” So we kind of talked about that a little bit, I was like, “We're doing a little bit of everything. We're trying a lot of things. We have a Facebook ads that run.” And theyre like, “Facebook ads don't run for us.” I' m like, “Really? Why not?” they kind of talked about their messaging on it, and their messaging was very specific li,e, “Hey you can increase your transaction value for this.” I was like, that's not what people are looking for. Your product is fraud protection you've got to create a desire in their minds. When we launched Clickfunnels initially we started selling like, here's funnel software. And nobody bought it no matter how excited I was. We had to change it. How to get people excited about funnel software. We had to explain what a funnel was and get them excited and show examples of your funnels and what's actually possible. And that's why I built the funnel hacks webinar. To show them, here's what a funnel is. Here's how it works. Here's how you funnel hack somebody else. Here's how you go to Clickfunnels and actually build it, and here's how you get traffic. I gotta create desire and belief that what I have is gonna actually help somebody.” And I showed them that the reason that your Facebook ads not working is because you're not creating desire or belief. That's another goal of funnel, it could be through a sales video, it could be through a webinar, it could be through whatever, but you gotta create desire and belief, those are the two core things you've got to create through your funnel. That's the goal, if your funnel can create desire in the thing that you sell, and belief that it will work for them. Notice that I didn't say, not that it'll work, but it'll work for them, that's how you get ads to convert. So that was the next thing. Then we talked about other ways to get leads, and all the things we were doing. I asked them, “One of the things we're doing, we're building out kind of a front end call center, who are going to call leads and start selling our programs. Have you guys ever heard of billwith.com?” they said, “Yes, we used builtwith.com but it didn't really work.” I'm like, “How did it not work?” they said, “we had guys exporting lists of hundreds of thousands of leads and they were calling them all day and getting 1800 numbers and dead calls and things like that. So if you guys know builtwith. Builtwith.com is this site where you can say, hey show me all the sites that were built with Leadpages, show me all the sites that were built Unbound, show me all the pages that were built with Infusionsoft. It shows you all the pages and then gives you full the contact info of those people. I said, “That's the problem. You've got these sales guys that are cold calling all these unqualified, cold, freezing cold leads. I don't want my sales guys talking to anybody unless they've raised their hand. There's a really cool business model that we're implementing right now that you guys should look at. It's a book called Predictable Revenue. I think I've mentioned it to you guys before in the past, but if not go to predictablerevenue.com, I believe, and go buy the book, it's like a $10 book. The books not really well written but the concept is awesome. So what they do in this book, it kind of documents the case study of how sales went from 0 to $100 million in sales and they did it basically, getting lists that they knew had builtwith.com. conceptually the same thing. You get this cold call list and instead of just having your sales dudes just call and burn sales out, you have the sales guy take 100 leads and then email 100 people and say, “Hey are the person in charge of marketing at this company?” and typically the person is like, “No I am not. So and so's in charge of marketing.” Then they introduce them to so and so. Now the person's got a warm introduction to the person who's in charge of that aspect of the business and that opens up a great call. Then you're only calling people who've raised their hands and said, “Hey, I'm Joe and I'm the marketing guy you're looking for. Let's get on a phone call and talk.”  So your sales guys are only talking to people that are warm. So that book, I think the model and I don't know exactly the numbers, each sales guy emails 100 people a day, from that they should get 11 responses and from that they should have 6 calls or whatever. And they just kind of….that's the model. Now your sales guys aren't trying to make 100 dials a day. Your sales guys are sending 100 emails and talking to 11 people who actually raised their hands. It makes for a better experience and way more profitability and less headaches and costs, and all the things that are associated with the other model. That was kind of another little tidbit and idea. There you go guys. There is the end product of our lunch consult for today, I did with the Kount guys. I hope it gives you guys some ideas for your business on the funnel process, converting ads, different places, different way outside of just Facebook to get leads. A cool conversion process to convert those leads and a bunch of other things. So there you go. Seven minutes and fifteen seconds of gold I hope I dropped on you guys. If you get some value out of that, let me know. Share this episode on Facebook or whatever that would be sweet. If you want to see any back episodes go to marketinginyourcar.com, You can find all the old episodes. Get the transcripts to the old shows and a bunch of other amazing things. Again, I appreciate you guys, Hope you enjoyed our seven minute lunch consult. Talk soon.

Thank you for reading this article, which comes to you originally from Personal Profitability.This week I am excited to introduce you to guest Joe Udo, a fellow Portland resident who followed his dream and left his full-time job before his 40th birthday. Learn how he did it in this week's episode. Resources Mentioned Retire by 40 Joe on Twitter Full Transcript Eric Rosenberg: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, […] The post PPP024: I'm Joe Udo and I Actually Retired by 40 appeared first on Personal Profitability.

Welcome back to Part 1, Session 2 of the D&D Starter set. In Session 1 we met Sir Moss, Thor, Ferrus, and Bree and joined them on their trip toward Phandalin.  We left them at the goblin trail… I'm Joe , along with Mike, Kurt, JJ, and Mickie, we see how the adventure develops as … Continue reading D&D Starter Set Part 1 Session 2 →

Welcome to Part 1 of the D&D Starter set. I'm Joe and I'll be the Dungeon Master while we learn the new D&D system.  I chose to use the D&D Starter Set to show how a group might run the new edition of the Dungeons and Dragons system.  Listening to how we play the Starter … Continue reading D&D Starter Set Part 1 Session 1 →