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Ever wrestled with a question that felt too big to answer—something that Google couldn't quite help with, and the Bible app just gave a list of verses that didn't really land? We live in a world of instant answers, but spiritual wisdom takes more than a search bar. So, how do we actually find answers to hard questions using God's Word first, not last? Today's episode is called “Bible First: Finding Real Answers to Questions”, and we're talking about how to study, search, and investigate hard topics using Scripture, not just shortcuts. And the episode is less about specific questions and more about methods to use when searching for answers. When you have a question, where do you usually start? Why do you take this approach? Be honest! Here are more questions to consider: Why is our default to Google or search in the Bible app? And is that always bad? What does it look like to actually investigate using Scripture alone? What types of resources can we use when searching for answers? What makes this kind of study so hard for most of us? What fruit comes from doing it “the hard way”—the Bible-first way? What do we really need when we're studying? TIME and PATIENCE! I hope our listeners know that that Google is not our enemy, but we should still question the root, and the effect, of getting quick answers that we seldom meditate upon. How do you need to slow down, read, reread, and ponder God's word? This is a challenge for me, as well. We don't learn everything all at once; growth takes time. We are always learning! We encourage you to keep reading, praying, and talking with the Lord about your questions. Then, speak with mature Christians who have navigated similar questions and know their Bibles well. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! UNEDITED TRANSCRIPTION: 00:00:00 Patricia: Have you ever wrestled with a question that felt too big to answer? Something that Google couldn’t quite help you with? And the Bible app just gave a list of verses that didn’t really land. We live in a world of instant answers, but gaining spiritual wisdom takes more than just searching in a search bar. So today’s podcast is about using the Bible first finding real answers to our questions. Welcome to our Patterns of Truth podcast. I’m Patricia, your host, and today we are talking about how to study, search and investigate hard topics using the scriptures and not just shortcuts. Shortcuts are not a bad thing. We’ll talk about that. Um, but we want to kind of reexamine the practices that we engage in when we’re searching for answers. So this episode is about is not really about specific questions, specific hard questions that we seek to answer, but more about the methods that we can use when searching for those answers. So hello to everyone on the podcast today. Hello, Peter. Hello, Roy. Hello, Bethel. How are you all doing today? 00:01:05 Peter: Hello, hello. 00:01:07 Roy: Hey, great. Rainy and cold in Oregon. Oh it’s raining. Yeah. Rainy. 00:01:15 Bethel: Not humid here. 00:01:17 Patricia: Yeah. 00:01:17 Peter: Whereas here Bethel. 00:01:19 Bethel: Right now it’s Jersey. 00:01:21 Patricia: Yeah. 00:01:22 Bethel: It’s not Philly. It’s Jersey today. 00:01:24 Patricia: Jersey. Welcome back. All right. So um I’ll start with a panel question for all of us. So when any of us have a question, something popped into your mind. Somebody talks about something. Where do you usually start to find the answer? It can be any resource. It could be Google, it could be another. Right. So where do you start and why do you take this approach? 00:01:52 Bethel: I’m a Googler. 00:01:54 Patricia: All right. Yeah. 00:01:55 Bethel: Everybody and everybody makes fun of me that I even use Google because everybody just uses AI. Like everybody’s just like, just ask ChatGPT. Just ask ChatGPT. Um, so even googling is like outdated at this point, but depending on how deep I might text my dad. 00:02:11 Patricia: Oh, nice. All right. Cool. Roy? Peter. 00:02:17 Roy: Um, I asked my wife. 00:02:19 Patricia: Okay. 00:02:21 Roy: Um, good place to start. That’s good intuition. Um, my daughter, um, who also has very good insight. Um, and then it depends on what kind of a question. And I appreciate the Google answer. Um, in fact, I did, I used Google just the other day when I wanted to know the initial, um, area that was assigned to the tribe of Dan and I got a pretty good answer. So if the question is specific enough, um, then I think, um, Google is fine or I don’t know about chat, I haven’t used chat GP so I don’t know how that works, but I know Google uses AI underneath. So Google basically a, a front end to an AI program. Yeah. But it has to be specific. It depends on the type of question. 00:03:18 Patricia: Yeah, I like that you mentioned that because sometimes you could do like a broad question and then who knows what you’re going to get just just how Google works. Right. Sorry, Peter. 00:03:28 Peter: Yeah. I, I would say I try to find the shortest article I find, usually from kind of the same circle of church community. Amen. Um, um, and uh, definitely Google. Like sometimes it’s like a specific website that I go to other than, uh, I find got questions sometimes is a website that would help a lot in like general questions. Uh, if it’s something specific, more doctrine, I go back to the like some brief, uh, article and then control F to find. Yeah, the article. So, uh, yeah, I do that. 00:04:12 Patricia: Yeah. All right. That’s practical, I like it. I tend to start with the Bible app for some reason, right? There’s just, I don’t know, it’s, uh, it’s easy and I don’t know, there’s something I like Google, but I feel like So I really slow down and I think about like, what I feel when I Google something, I usually feel fear because I think that there are questions that I may have that when I Google it, there are harmful or anti-God, anti-Christian things that seem to pop up at the top. And I honestly just don’t want to see that when I’m searching out something. I don’t know what it is, but it just really disturbs me. Um, I know some people can see it and just discard it, but for me, it just, it really unsettles me. So I tend to like not want to go to Google for some reason. So maybe the Bible app, I’m trying to protect myself in some way. I’m not sure. But, um, our first question really is about like, why do we think that, um, a more popular default for searching for any question will be Google or a search in the Bible app? Why is that something that we tend to do these days? And is that always a bad thing? 00:05:21 Peter: Well, convenience. 00:05:24 Patricia: Um. 00:05:25 Roy: It depends a lot on the question. 00:05:28 Patricia: Do you ever feel like. Or maybe I should ask it this way? Is there a scenario where you find something on Google or a different tool, and it makes you immediately stop searching? Like you don’t go back to your Bible? Or does the opposite happen? You find what you need and then you say, oh, I want to go deeper. What does that look like? 00:05:50 Roy: Really depends upon the subject matter and the question. Okay. Um, I think, you know. 00:05:56 Peter: Yeah. I mean, for, for Patricia’s point, um, that’s a good point because I think when I Google things, it does stop me from digging more into scripture because I found the solution or at least part of an answer, and then I’m satisfied with it. Um, so that’s a, that’s a good point. I mean, we’re definitely not against technology. We should use technology. Um, if it’s your favorite AI search, LLM or Google, uh, it can be useful. Um, but, um, I think studying scripture as we can talk soon about is and, uh, like changing your heart through studying scripture is more just knowledge. Um, and I think you reach just knowledge if you like, get the answer quickly. 00:06:55 Roy: Yes. That’s very important point. Uh, and I want to emphasize that we are talking about having a specific question or a question about something. We get an answer, but that should lead us to dig deeper. And that should even that even specific studies should not keep us from regular Bible reading. Um, and that’s where we gain a general knowledge of God’s character. Um, you know, there’s a, a rule, there’s apps and whatnot that lead you through the Bible? Genesis to revelation in a year? Well, you may or may not want to use one of those apps, but the point is you have to be generally familiar with your Bible. I found questions that are, quite surprisingly in books like Ecclesiastes or Proverbs or Chronicles, and that seem to have nothing to do with the subject matter, but they. But they’re put in a way that for trigger thinking about things in a different way. So general Bible reading needs to always be done on a regular basis. 00:08:03 Patricia: Yeah. So leading into that, um, or coming out of that point, I should say, uh, if we had no technology, right. I couldn’t use my phone. Google’s down. It does happen from time to time, right? We can’t get to the website that we want. Um, I’m thinking about that AWS blackout from a few weeks ago where people were panicking. They couldn’t find anything. So if we only had our Bible in front of us, the actual physical volume, what does it look like to investigate using Scripture alone? Where does it start? 00:08:38 Roy: Need to know the books of the Bible and where they are. 00:08:41 Patricia: Mhm. Mhm. 00:08:44 Speaker 6: And I think maybe a general gist of what’s happening in each one. 00:08:48 Patricia: Yeah. 00:08:49 Roy: Definitely the difference between the Old and New Testament. Mhm. Um, and it also helps to have a, a mental map like Bethel was saying of what generally goes together. And this is fairly obvious, and I think a lot of people, uh, talk about it. So maybe we don’t need to belabor the point, but there are prophetic books, there are poetry books, there are history books, and there’s the Pentateuch and there’s New Testament. That’s a general classification. But we should know generally how how the different books relate to one another. Like among the Gospels, Matthew presents the Lord Jesus as the King. And I’m not saying anything that is particularly remarkable. I mean, we I think we all know this quote. 00:09:44 Bethel: And maybe instead of just looking up, oh, what does the Bible say about this? Fill in the blank. We could use Google as a resource to say, hey, how is the Bible split up? What is the Old Testament about? What are the parts of the Old Testament? What makes it different from the New Testament? What makes the Gospels different from each other? And you can use the internet as that type of resource to dig deeper in that way. 00:10:10 Patricia: Yeah. I think also if someone is a new believer, I mean, it’s, it might feel like kind of steep, right? Like, oh, before you start, you got to memorize all these things. I think while you’re doing it, I think I’m looking at the front of my Bible. There’s a table of contents, right? So if you’re a new Christian, or maybe it’s been a little while, if you if you need the pages with the numbers, right, start with it, like where each book of the Bible is. And what’s great is like most Bibles, like mine is organized, it tells you what’s in the Old Testament, what’s in the New Testament, and that can help you with organizing. Um, we’re looking at the Bible like how it’s, how it’s organized. And I think that’s a good place to begin. Um, I. 00:10:52 Peter: Think it’s high yield to Patricia. Like knowing the books of the Bible can be very helpful and knowing like the sections that, like Roy was saying, and I can argue also like some of them maybe can, they’re not inspired the chapters, but knowing how many chapters, like, you know, like, oh, you know, for example, Ephesians and Galatians are six chapters. Colossians and Philippians are four chapters. Um, so help you kind of. you know, contain or have a hold of of the book and how, how long it is. 00:11:29 Patricia: Yeah, that’s really good. And I think too, it’s, um, it’s good to think of how while we learned about what the book of the Bible’s are and how the Bible’s organized, that we can still start reading it. I think sometimes it can feel like levels like, oh, I can’t, I can’t do this until I do that. But it’s like, no, start reading while you’re memorizing where the books of the Bible are. So we talked about, I guess, operationally speaking, knowing how the Bible’s organized, but is there another way that we can begin that helps us when we’re just looking at the scripture alone and trying to find an answer? 00:12:08 Peter: We need help from Roy on this one. 00:12:14 Roy: Well, it’s been a long time since I was, uh, first, uh, I was pretty much know where everything is right now, and I hope this is going to be cut out of the. That’s the final deal. Um, well, again, I have to go back to the kind of question, I guess, because questions about the church, for example, if I have a question about that, I’m going to have to look in the New Testament. And I have to start with acts because that’s where the church began. And then Paul’s epistles in particular. So having a knowledge of where things are talked about and explained in Scripture is almost essential. Um, if you need comfort, let me give a couple of examples. We often look to the Psalms for comfort and encouragement, but in doing that, you need to realize that it’s a Jewish book. And so there are things in the Psalms which do not apply to us. Um, the Imprecatory Psalms in particular, which are Psalms which call down judgment upon our enemies. Well, if you’re new to the Bible, you might get confused by some of that. If you haven’t read and absorbed Romans, for example, toward the end where it says, vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. And if you haven’t really digested that. So I guess I’d have to say that we need to start looking through the New Testament to get a feel for the kinds of things that are particularly appropriate for the Christian. I’m thinking of a new believer now. Sometimes we say, okay, start reading John’s gospel. Well, that’s a good one. Um, if I say start reading Matthew, Then I may run across the kingdom of God, where servants are failed, and throw in thrown into outer darkness. And that kind of verses have led to the idea of we can lose our salvation if you don’t really understand what the kingdom of God is. So there is some basic knowledge that’s required. You know, if you keep reading, then you’ll get to John’s Gospel. And there you find out that if you’re in the hand of the Lord, no one can pluck you out. And so there’s the answer. But some of this can be confusing to a new person. So the only solution is, I think, to ask somebody that you can trust, give you a general feeling for what the different books talk about. And then you have to have your general knowledge to have scripture reading it through to, to come up with stuff. And I gotta say this right here too. There are several verses that emphasize that God is compassionate and he preserves the simple. And I think if actually, in my experience, the biggest hindrance is pride. So if we come to the Bible with the proper attitude that this is God’s word, then I think God can lead us. The Holy Spirit leads us to apply things in the right way. Um, striking verses in um, um, Psalm one hundred and sixteen six is perhaps just a good one. Um, and also in Proverbs there’s some. So God and God will guide us if we’re humble enough to learn from him. 00:16:15 Peter: Yeah. Just to add to what Roy was saying is when you’re studying the scripture, uh, it’s good to, uh, uh, look at the context of. 00:16:25 Roy: Right. 00:16:26 Peter: Uh, I think that’s what Roy’s saying also of the whole scripture and the book and the context of the chapter. What does it talk about? 00:16:36 Patricia: So then, okay, so we have the word of God, um, itself, and we have the Holy Spirit who will teach us and reveal things to us that we cannot learn just intellectually on our own. So when we’re Christians, we have that. We have him as a resource. But what about some other resources that we can use when searching for answers? I’m talking about things that other very mature Christians who have studied the Bible have put together. Um, and I’m thinking of a concordance. I’m thinking of biblical commentaries. Um, can we have some commentary on that? What type of resources can we use when searching for answers and how do we use them? 00:17:19 Roy: Concordance is really helpful. I use a concordance frequently. Usually there’s a concordance at the back of most Bibles that is tuned to the particular, um, um, uh, version that you’re using, uh, translation, but you can always do a cross-reference. You know, the standard concordance is ah, Strong’s and Young’s someone that says strongest for the weak and young is for the old. But be that as it may, um, they’re both both good, although they’re different. Um, um, and if you’re not using King James, both of those are based on King James. Maybe they’ve been upgraded, I don’t know, or changed. But anyway, you can always, um, if you have a particular verse in NIV, for example, look it up at the same verse, uh, in, uh, in the King James. Um, and figure out what verse, what word you want to look up and then go to the concordance with that. Now, I use Young’s a lot because it gives the Greek and Hebrew and, um, that can be helpful if you have a good, um, uh, uh, dictionary, uh, specific, you know, the, the, the old Testament, uh, dictionary I use is um, theological wordbook of the old Testament, which is good, good Hebrew, uh, analysis. I don’t know a word of Hebrew. So I just have to depend in that, uh, in Greek, uh, in Hebrew. 00:18:56 Speaker 7: Let me ask you, Roy. 00:18:57 Peter: Um, I, I don’t remember the last time I used the concordance. Bethel. Have you you. 00:19:05 Bethel: Really just just the one in the back of my Bible. 00:19:09 Peter: Uh, are we missing out a lot because we’re not using the concordance or when do you use it? Do you. When is the deep study verse by verse? 00:19:19 Patricia: Wait, so maybe I should define it and it will help to answer the question. Right? I’m thinking that the concordance is actually what the search bar is now in the Bible app. But all right, so the definition of concordance, it’s an alphabetical index of all the words in the Bible or any text. And it lists where each word appears. So it’s an alphabetical index of all the words in a text and lists where each word appears. 00:19:48 Roy: Now the problem is, and this is why I use Young’s analytical concordance, is that there are only about four thousand words in the Hebrew biblical Hebrew. Now, modern Hebrew is totally different, but we’re dealing with an Old Testament text. And if you think about the number of words that we have in the English language, It’s up in the. Millions and more are being added every year. So to have four thousand words in a language means that each word is going to have to do multiple jobs. And so context is really important. And you can get that information. You can look that information up, uh, in the, um, in the back of the Young’s concordance and figure out how the different words are being used in the context in which they’re being used. So you can kind of parse that out. So it is definitely for a deeper study of, of the words. But the basic idea is that it gives you a list of verses where the word is used. 00:20:56 Patricia: Mhm. 00:20:56 Roy: And so you can go and compare where the word is used or how the word is being used in these different verses. And in the back of Young’s Concordance, you also have a reverse cross reference so that you can look up the Hebrew word, for example, and see the different version, the different ways the translators have translated it. So you get a sense of how specific the word is and, um, and what the translators were thinking of when they translated it. You can sort of figure that out. So, um, those kinds of things have to do with puzzling verses that you run across and they just, why? What does that mean? And so if you’re trying to figure out what that means or what a particular verse means, then, uh, a concordance is really helpful. Okay. 00:22:00 Patricia: So on the most basic level, for example, if I have a question about world peace, does the Bible ever talk about world peace? I can look up the word peace in a physical concordance. And I know Strong’s is like big and blue. Maybe they updated it, but the one I grew up seeing was like baby blue. Um, and you could look up the word peace. And when you look it up, it’s got a list of every single place that the word peace is mentioned. And you have to go through each verse to decipher what the definition of peace, I guess you could say is being, or I should say like the part of speech is being used, right? Is it the peace that’s between that passes all understanding for Christians? Is it the peace between God and humans? Now, because of the Lord Jesus? Is it peace that God will establish in the future? So you have to really do some legwork to find out if what you’re looking for is the definition of the word that you found. I guess you would say, is that like how you start at the most basic level? 00:23:04 Roy: Yes. 00:23:05 Patricia: Okay. All right. But if you’re advanced, you’d be like, going towards more nuanced definitions of the word. Um, maybe if they’re in Greek or in Hebrew, there are different words for different types of peace, which I know, like for people who are bilingual, they understand that a lot better than I do. Like being monolingual. I only speak English, but I know there are multiple words. Say, for example, love. So you can’t just look up love. You can. But there’s so much variety in what you’ll find. So it takes effort, right? That’s what it sounds like. Effort. 00:23:42 Roy: Yeah, yeah. You have to do some study. Okay. Probably a real example would be, um, the word corruption in the New Testament. Okay. That has a certain, uh, mental image brought up. But the problem is that in Greek, which is what the base language that the New Testament was translated from, the Greek word uses the same word, same Greek word for two different kinds of corruption. Now we distinguish, for example, corruption from decay. Decay is what results from the law of physics. The entropy. You throw a pile of grass out in the in the backyard and after a while it decays. Um, on the other hand, um, immorality is also corruption. So this, this requires that you kind of look at the verse and try and figure out what is being meant by the word decay. But and some translators will translate them differently. Sometimes they won’t. Okay. 00:24:53 Patricia: So then I guess it’s good to just have a dictionary. Yes. Do I know what the words mean that I’m searching up? Right. That I think that would probably be useful. Like even in your own language, like, you know, the way we use certain words are not necessarily how they’re always used in other contexts? It would be good to have a dictionary as well. Okay. All right. So we got the concordance. So what about biblical commentaries? What are they? When should be the when should they be used and does the publication date matter? 00:25:27 Peter: I thought the use the commentary. 00:25:29 Bethel: Honestly, I’m big on commentaries. I am an enduring word person. Um, I don’t know how the saints feel about that, but I like it. Um, no, I just think it’s very helpful that like sometimes, honestly, I’ll sit and read a passage and I’m like, wow. Um, my reading comprehension is not with us today. I have no idea what I just read. And so sometimes enduring word does a good job of setting the scene of where are we in the chapter? What’s going on? Um, and it breaks it down like couple verses at a time. And then it’ll provide like texts of what certain authors have said about said portion. Um, so it’s very helpful to get a well-rounded picture. Of course, like anything else, we are trying to emphasize that using things as a resource is good. Using things as the source is not good. And so referring back to the Word of God and just kind of, you know, I think we said this, but to, to pray and ask the Lord for wisdom and help. Um, because that’s, that’s the main reason that we can understand any of this because of the help of the Holy Spirit and, um, to kind of be able to have a better understanding of the word of God, but using scriptures in itself to understand you look at a couple commentaries. I mean, like that’s, I really thought about like, how did I learn anything when I was applying for college? How did I learn how any of that process worked? I read a million articles and I read a million Reddit posts, and I read a million everything. And I gathered information on what is what are people saying? And so you can go about it like that, but ultimately approaching it prayerfully and using things, like we said, as a resource, not as the source. 00:27:16 Roy: Yes, that’s that’s a very important principle because no resource I haven’t I’ve been through lots of different translations, for example, and I don’t find any single one that’s perfect or that I, you know, isn’t without some complaint that I can come up with. Uh, and that’s doubly true of commentaries. We have to look at several. And it changes over the years. The commentaries that I looked at when I was, uh, twenty or thirty are quite different than the ones I look at today. But we have to look at different ones and think about what they’re saying in context. And we have to talk to different people to. MM. 00:27:58 Patricia: Oh, one thing I forgot to do was like, define what a commentary is. I know the word comment is in commentary, but there are some people who don’t use a commentary at all. Or maybe they’re nervous about it because it seems like, is it about the Bible? How am I supposed to know? So just by way of defining things, a biblical commentary is a written aid that provides explanations and sometimes interpretations of scriptures to help readers better understand a biblical text. So there are lots of different types. There are some that are about certain topics that are discussing certain topics. And then there are others that are, um, devotional, um, there are some that are historical, cultural. So Bethel, probably the one that you’re talking about. And I’ve seen some in some study Bibles where they give the context of the cultural Sauk, um, backdrop of a particular book of the Bible or a particular passage. And that’s really helpful to help to assist in how we can understand. But like I said, there’s lots of different types of commentaries that we. 00:29:06 Bethel: I think. 00:29:06 Patricia: It is. 00:29:06 Bethel: Helpful along the lines of what you’re saying. I took a class and it’s silly that I had to take a class about this in college to understand it. But always, always, always, no matter what you are looking up, know what the source is and knowing what the point of the source is like. For example, if I’m reading a commentary that is meant for daily encouragement, it’s always going to be not twisted, but the point pulled out of that portion will be to encourage me. And so maybe that’s not exactly what this portion is, or that’s not the point of this portion, or that’s not the context that this portion originally was in. So being able to read a resource and take a step back and put it back in the big picture, is this what the what the scripture is saying? Is this what our context is? Does this fit into what we’re understanding here? AM I getting this right? Always, always, always looking back at what is the source? 00:30:01 Roy: Yes, that’s extremely important. Um, if you pick up something from Legionnaire, for example, which is a reformed, uh, outlet, um, you’re going to have reformed theology woven in and some of what they said is going to be quite wrong. Uh, from my point of view, um, but a lot of it is going to be spot on. You know, I was once riding in a car. This really struck me because I was riding in, in the car listening to some religious program of some kind. It was just a general program. No, it was a Catholic priest, and it was one of the best explanations of a particular subject in Scripture that I had heard. I haven’t heard anything better since, but that was a Catholic priest, but it just happened to be a subject that was so universal that, uh, any denomination basically would, um, would agree to what he said. Uh, but it was, it was very sound and very well put. But if I’m going to listen to him about the remembrance meeting, as we call it, or can, um, confession or something like that, that’s not going to be reliable. So having the source, knowing the source is extremely important. 00:31:15 Patricia: What should people do if they, if the answer they are seeking, the support they’re seeking can be found in a commentary that was written a long time ago, but it just doesn’t make sense to you because we understand things a little bit differently now. What should they do? 00:31:33 Roy: That’s a really tough one. And the best advice that I can say is to talk to somebody about it. Um, an older person, uh, it’s really unfortunate. Uh, you know, it’s, it’s terrible because I, I see exactly what you’re, what you’re talking about. Um, some of these, some of these texts should be rewritten. Um, but who’s going to do that? We just don’t have the energy and the time anymore. Um, if you, if you really want to get into some of the best commentaries I remember, I tell you a funny story. I was in a Bible study at work for a while, and as a miscellaneous group of people there from all kinds of denominations. And, um, we were talking everything and I said, well, I don’t think anything useful has been written about the Bible in the last hundred years. 00:32:27 Patricia: Mhm. 00:32:29 Roy: Well, that was a good talking point. We got off on a real discussion about commentaries. Right. But the problem is it’s it’s almost true. And it’s sad. Um, if you really want to learn about these, then get a dictionary. Sit down and just work at it. MM. That’s all I can say. You know, it’s like if you want, if you want to be really good at something, If you want to be a great basketball player and always be able to sink that shot from beyond the third three shot line, three point line. That’s going to take concentration. It’s going to take work. It’s going to take effort. It’s going to take time. Yeah. So I’m I’m sorry. There’s just no other way. 00:33:18 Patricia: Yeah. No I don’t think you have to be sorry. I do think that there’s something there’s something in the effort that comes forth. And just on the literacy side, like I’ve always got two suggestions. Um, one is using technology and one is just reading out loud. So at times reading out loud, right, can help bring a certain clarity that the voice in your head may not be able to, um, and reading something repeatedly out loud in a conversational voice can be very helpful. Um, in terms of helping you to hear what the author is saying. My second suggestion is that particular sentences or passages you don’t understand, honestly, you can feed it into AI and ask AI, can you please change the level which is literacy? You could change the lexile level. That is what it’s called, or just the reading level of the passage. And you can put it down to like a ninth grade or tenth grade level. If you’re in nine states and it’s going to help you a lot. Just know that it may take away some of the original author’s voice and their particular writing style. Um, but that could be really helpful for you to get the gist of what they’re trying to say. But do be careful because those commentaries are commenting on the Bible, which is God’s Word and AI, and Google those resources. When they summarize, they can lose the original nuances of the words that the Lord intends. So always just know that the technology is not perfect either. Um, and it can also just be a way to just lose the true core meaning of a passage. So just be careful. Thank you, Peter Boy and Bethel for this important conversation about how to answer any question using the Bible. Of course, I’ll go back to the beginning. Knowing the books of the Bible and where they are is always a really great challenge to put upon yourself. Memorize them. We used to have competitions about this when we were younger. There’s some there are there are songs. Right? Exactly. But that’s a really good place to start. Um, I hope that our listeners know that Google is not our enemy. The internet is not our enemy. We love technology, but we should always question the root. The effect of getting quick answers. Um, when we seldom meditate on those answers. So let’s think about how we need to slow down, read, reread, and ponder God’s Word. It’s a challenge for me as well. And just know that we don’t need to learn everything all at once. Growth takes time as well. So we encourage you to keep reading, praying, and talking to the Lord about your questions. And then also, as has been mentioned so many times, talk to mature Christians who have navigated similar questions and they know their Bibles well. They can probably give you some really great supports as to how they have been helped too. For more on this topic, you can check out Patterns of Truth dot org and we will see you next time for another conversation about living this Christian life. 00:36:15 Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Patterns of Truth podcast. We invite you to join us for our next episode. And we also encourage you to check out Patterns of truth dot org, where we post articles every week for the encouragement and growth of Christ followers. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to submit them on our website. I’m Peter. Until next time. The post Using God's Word to Answer Hard Questions appeared first on Patterns of Truth.

APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. Tonight, host Isabel Li speaks with actresses Amielynn Abellera and Kristin Villanueva, who respectively play Nurse Perlah and Nurse Princess on the HBO Max medical drama, The Pitt. Abellera and Villanueva talk about their Filipino heritage and backgrounds and how they represent Filipina healthcare professionals on the show. See also: Filipinos on the Frontline Amielynn Abellera: Instagram Kristin Villanueva: Instagram Transcript [00:00:00] Opening: Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It's time to get on board the Apex Express.  00:00:52 Isabel Li  Thank you for tuning in to Apex Express. Last Thursday, season 2 of the HBO Max medical drama The Pitt released its season 2 finale, including a hectic season following medical professionals in the emergency room and giving a realistic depiction of real-world issues in hospitals. I'm Isabel Li, one of the hosts here on APEX Express, and I'm so honored to be joined by two members of that cast tonight who play the two Filipina nurses on The Pitt. They were recently awarded the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.  00:01:28 Isabel Li  First, let's hear from actress Amielynn Abellera, who plays Nurse Perla, a Muslim Filipina nurse on the show.  00:01:36 Isabel Li  Hi Amielynn, what an honor it is to be speaking to you today. Welcome to Apex Express.  00:01:41 Amielynn Abellera  Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be speaking with you, too.  00:01:45 Isabel Li  So many of our listeners might know you from the HBO Max show, The Pitt, which I have so very much enjoyed. This is actually the first medical show that I have watched, and I really, really admire, like, all of the ensemble casts and, you know, everything coming to life. And you play the Muslim Filipina nurse, Perlah Alawi. We'll talk more about your performance and your character in a little bit, but first, this is a question that I ask all my guests: Can you tell us, how do you identify? And is there a story that you think really encapsulates your identity?  00:02:17 Amielynn Abellera  Gosh, I identify as Amielynn Dumac Abellera. She, her, hers. I'm a Filipino American, daughter of two immigrants. And I'm so thrilled and happy to be talking to you and to sharing my experience of my life.  00:02:42 Isabel Li  Absolutely. Of course, The Pitt is a medical show. And is it true that you come from a medical background yourself? Like I heard that you were a psychobiology major in undergrad.  00:02:51 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, I was pursuing medicine for a long time. I studied pre-med in undergrad at Santa Clara University, majoring in psychobiology, which is psychology with basically a minor in biology. I really wanted to get into neuroscience and or be an oncologist. And I was pursuing that all the way till I graduated and applying to medical school and getting interviews. But ever since I was a kid, for as long as I can remember, I was really also passionate about acting and theater and film and television and being on stage. But it was really just seen as a hobby in my mind and in sort of my environment's mind. I never really prioritized it as a career, and it was never seen as a possible career. Um, so I just had it on the back burner. And, you know, I was getting, getting closer and closer to medical school and getting more and more anxious that I would regret not pursuing acting. And so sort of after waffling for many years, I decided to audition for a master's in fine arts and acting. And that was because I didn't really have any formal training in acting. I didn't study it in undergrad or, you know, in my younger years. It was just all through life experience and being in plays and art and everything like that. And so I thought if I get into one of these programs, maybe that means I have something to offer. And I was going to take that as the sign that I needed to give myself a chance. And so I got into two programs, and I was thrilled. And I moved to LA to attend the University of Southern California's MFA program. And the rest is history. Here I am.  00:04:47 Isabel Li  Wow. How does being a former pre-med influence your current role as a nurse on the show? Do you remember any like terms from science classes that you're like, oh, wow, I remember that in those lines.  00:05:00 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, yeah, totally. And you know, I spent a lot of time in hospitals and clinics and my dad is a former family practitioner. He had his own medical practice and my mom is a nurse practitioner and she worked in the CCU in the hospital for many years. So I was really familiar with how nurses interacted with patients and hearing the terminology and the medical language a lot.  So it is a cool throwback and always a really, I love how it's so familiar to me 'cause it's, I still have to work at it quite a bit when, you know, when it's all coming at me and I have to have it down for when we're filming, but I'm not as, as intimidated by it as I probably would be if I didn't have a background.  00:05:50 Isabel Li  And out of curiosity, when you got the audition for the pit, did you have to sort of immerse yourself back into that realm of science and that medical background in order to bring out that character when you were  first being introduced to Nurse Perlah?  00:06:04 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, a little bit. And I feel that with any role, you kind of, before you go in for the audition or even when you're now filming or you have a part, you just have to kind of get into that world, obviously and really put yourself in the actual experience of what this person's going through. And it did help me to be able to use my imagination so vividly from my previous experience of being in an OR and being in a hospital.  I remember when I was doing an internship when I was sort of in the break between graduating undergrad and pursuing medical school, I remember watching a C-section. And I remember — I remember the doctors talking, the surgeons talking, the anesthetic going in, the blood everywhere, the scalpels, the blood pressures, the oxymeter dropping. So, it really — I think back to the real-life fear that I had in all of those those procedures and I just, you know, bring it to Nurse Perlah.  00:07:16 Isabel Li  It's incredible. I want to start off by talking about, for Nurse Perlah specifically, that Perlah's identity is a Filipina and a Muslim nurse.  What did you do to prepare for a role that is so specific in terms of these cultural representations?  00:07:33 Amielynn Abellera  Sure. Thank you for asking that. I am thrilled that Perlah is on television. She is a Filipino American Muslim woman nurse. And I have never seen that. And it's just rarely ever seen on mainstream media. So, in preparing for it, I mean, truly, I had two weeks before we started filming by the time I got the role. And it was go time already. So I didn't have a ton of time, but I did my best to sort of deep dive into learning about the Muslim faith, trying to reach out to different Filipino American Muslims in my community to kind of just hear their experience. And, you know, I quickly learned that it would be impossible for me to sort of understand the full experience completely. And so I just kind of, I realized that the only question that I needed to answer for myself going into filming as Perlah was, is there anything about the Muslim way of life that would influence or adjust or be a part of their nursing or would it shift it at all? And or how would it affect their job?  And, you know, after talking to several Filipino American Muslim nurses, there, there wasn't anything that it would do to either to shift or do anything to get in the way of their patient care. They are, it's still their priority just to care relentlessly for this patient and have as much empathy as possible. And to be honest, I'm still learning as I go along with playing Perlah and as scripts come in and I still ask a lot of questions of how would Perlah specifically understand this procedure or understand this text or understand what she's doing and just keep asking questions.  00:09:30 Isabel Li  And the majority of The Pitt itself takes place on a hospital set. I'm wondering if you had a vision of what Perlah does outside of the hospital?  00:09:39 Amielynn Abellera  Well, I think Perlah is, she's been at this hospital, PTMC, pretty much, this was her first job, she really wanted to work there in this urban setting.  And she's been there probably for over eight years or something, like through COVID. I think she is a single mom and she has two children who are both under the age of 10. So I think she's exhausted, but she loves nursing. She loves her kids. And she is just, she knows how to compartmentalize and work hard and like protect herself. She knows how to leave, at least she thinks she knows how to leave the job at the door in order to go home and be with her children.  00:10:24 Isabel Li  Uh-huh. And is this something, also, I'm just curious, like, is this something that you had to imagine yourself or did some of the writers sort of drop some hints during production?  00:10:35 Amielynn Abellera  I mean, a little bit of both, I think. There are only some hints in the script in the pilot and the first season where it's dropping like, oh, she has some kids and she's exhausted and kind of eye-rolling — Yeah, and pets — And sort of eye-rolling exhausted by what's happening at home. And it's, I am a mother of a five and a half year old. She's almost six right now. So I sort of understand that exhaustion, but like deep love for my child. But it's like, I'm happy to go to work and have them at school, but I'm also missing them. It's just this like journey of a mother. So it was a bit of me sort of creating that backstory, but also just from the hints of the writers.  00:11:23 Isabel Li  Definitely. I think something that's so special about The Pitt as a medical show is its accuracy in depicting the very hectic lives of healthcare professionals, especially in an emergency room setting. So Nurse Perlah is often mediating like some sort of communication and really emphasizing medical jargon or reading off data. What was it like memorizing all of these different lines and delivering it in a way that felt authentic to the way that healthcare professionals might?  00:11:50 Amielynn Abellera  Sure. Oh my gosh. It's really challenging. I think as soon as I get the scripts, and again, thank goodness I have a sort of familiarity with having a little bit of a medical background, but you know, that was years ago. So anytime I get a script, I immediately go to the hard stuff and get that in my brain as soon as possible. And a trick that I do is, as soon as I have it memorized, I'm just saying it all day and doing things with my hands. Like I do it when I'm folding laundry. I do it when I'm washing dishes. I do it when I'm cooking. I'm doing it when I'm driving, just because as soon as it's second nature, and that's the thing about healthcare professionals, they're constantly, like they're not thinking about what they're saying. They're, it's so awesomely competent in their brain, that is not difficult. That's actually like them just having a conversation.  So I love trying to get to that point and showing how Perlah is just so competent in all of that stuff and doesn't even have to think about it while putting in an IV.  00:13:00 Isabel Li  Absolutely. Oh my gosh. And I think like a lot of our listeners, maybe if they watch The Pitt and a lot of audience members really enjoy the lighthearted moments that you share with Princess, also another Filipina nurse played by Kristin Villanueva, especially that Nurse Perlah code-switches with her using Tagalog as a language.  Can you tell our listeners what that code-switching feels like to you and how you relate to Tagalog as a language?  00:13:25 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, totally. Thank you for asking. I, as Amielynn Abellera, the actor, I grew up, I was born and raised in Stockton, California, and my parents spoke Tagalog and Ilocano at home all the time. And unfortunately, they didn't teach me. So I'm actually not fluent in Tagalog at home.  I'm that Filipino American who later in life got voracious about wanting to embrace her heritage and learn it like in her adult life. And I think that translates with Perlah. I do, I think that Perlah is also, was also born and raised in the United States to two Filipinos who came from Mindanao. And even though she had the ear for it, I think that she's learning it later in life. And I think she absolutely is so happy to have, Princess as her buddy because she can practice.  Um, because I think like the only way to learn is to constantly be talking every day. And I think Perlah does that. I think she finds any opportunity to celebrate joyfully her heritage by speaking the language with Princess. I think they both do. So it's really close to, to my own personal experience with Tagalog because right now I am learning Tagalog on my own, taking lessons and things like that in order to teach my daughter as well, just to have it in our life more. But I think that is also what Perlah is doing.  00:14:58 Isabel Li  Yeah. And for you specifically, how and when did you start learning Tagalog?  00:15:03 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, I think it really is. Like I said, my parents came in the '70s to Stockton, California, as a doctor and a nurse. And, you know, that generation, at that time, their priority was assimilation, so they didn't really teach me. And our Filipino-ness was a little bit second place, in terms of, not in a negative way, but it just was, it took a little bit of second priority as opposed to assimilating to our environment in Stockton, California. And so, however, whatever seeds were planted in there to not really pursue Tagalog or pursue, to learn and be curious about my Filipino heritage, that was sort of the majority of my childhood and into my college years. And it wasn't until, I think, college and beyond when I started to Honestly, I think it was when I was exposed to Filipino cultural night in university, at Santa Clara University, where, all of a sudden, I was with all these other Filipino-Americans who had such a voracious sort of celebration and wanting to learn like the dances, the language, the style, the textiles, the clothing, the music, and they would study it and we would, they would just be so passionate about it.  And that really was an experience for me of, oh my gosh, I didn't, it wasn't like I was neglecting it on purpose. It's just, that wasn't in my life. So when that was happening for me, I slowly, slowly really wanted to start learning the language and started taking lessons probably in my twenties. And then, you know, but again, it's a lifelong process to learn another language. It's challenging. Um, and I wish, I wish I was, I wish I was at the level of Perlah where she has a buddy all the time to practice, practice, practice. But I don't have that in my home or in my workplace right now, except with Princess at the hospital.  00:17:28 Isabel Li  Gotcha, gotcha. And currently, at the time of this interview, season two of The Pitt is in progress, and you had some really emotionally nuanced moments in the 12 o'clock episode. I'm not going to spoil it too much, but when Perlah reacts to losing a long-term patient, I'm wondering for you, as an actress, can you tell us about how you're able to switch from some, you know, more lighthearted scenes to moments that really emphasize the darker, heavier aspects of being in medicine, like death and disease.  How do you portray and balance that?  00:18:02 Amielynn Abellera  Sure. Yeah. Thank you for asking. I think nurses are amazing in that way where I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse to be able to compartmentalize such extremes of feeling and experiences of loss of patients on the hour, every hour, and being able to move on to sort of uplift and help other patients on the hour, every hour. But I think Perlah, as such an experienced, competent nurse, has learned how to switch it on, switch it off, but I do feel that something that episode 206 was trying to shine a light on is what of that armor has cracks or what of that armor isn't as strong for certain patients or she or what of that armor is, uh, what if that punch… I'm not able to recover as easily as I usually am? So, um, and I think that must happen all the time with healthcare professionals of what they have to do. I think they have to experience losing loved ones and patients and friends who are patients all the time. And how is it that they get back up to be there for the next one?  So I was– it was ultimately challenging, but I'm so glad that that episode showed that dynamic.  00:19:34 Isabel Li  Speaking of a hospital setting, I imagine it's quite a unique set to be one, and The Pitt definitely emphasizes the realism of being in a hospital. Like, we see lots of different types of medical equipment, hand sanitizer, very relevant, pressing things that make us feel like we're almost, like, engaging with the show in a sense. How do you describe that set?  00:19:56 Amielynn Abellera  To me, I really feel like it's a real hospital. Everything pretty much works almost like the real thing, but it doesn't, right? So like the water fountain looks, smells, feels like a real water fountain and it is until it just doesn't shoot out water, right? Like everything is so amazing.  And I think that's what Nina Ruscio, our set designer wanted to build and working with all the executives was they wanted to build this entire whole hospital to really immerse us in the reality of it. And there, a lot of times there are real needles that we have to close up on, but then when we do something actually, we switch it out for a dull needle. So it is, it's really very, this balance and like a real scalpel that needs to look so sharp, but then as soon as it's, actually near the skin, it is a dull scalpel, and then that's also a prosthetic. So sometimes I can't tell what's real and not real. I just kind of…I just have to jump in and kind of engage with it. And then if it's the real thing, not be freaked out. So yeah, but it's, it's, it's a part of the…It's so, it's so incredibly fun.   I'm so fascinated by this hospital that I basically go to work to like a real nurse at 5:00 in the morning every day for a 12-hour shift. And I put on the scrubs, and then I take off the scrubs. So I kind of feel like so much like a real nurse, but also not.  00:21:42 Isabel Li  How do you think The Pitt has influenced you as an actress? After being on this show, have your goals as an actress changed? What do you see yourself doing in the future?  00:21:52 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, So, I mean, I am really in a dream right now. It feels…like I probably had this dream of, you know, really being invited on a show from its initial season, initial episode, and being a part of a team from the very beginning, originating a role that is representing so many different cultural dimensions, like across the board. And also the show being so successful and having an impact globally, not only for healthcare workers, but, you know, the diversity that is the reality of the world.  So it's hard to think ahead. I kind of just want this to last as long as possible for Nurse Perlah and for Amielynn. And, you know, I've learned to be in my acting career just putting one foot in front of the other and trusting that where it's going will lead to the next piece in my universe. And I– the moment I try to plan something or want something to happen, it will not happen. I think I just have to trust the journey and how the universe will put what's meant to be in front of me.  00:23:17 Isabel Li  And as an actress, what are you the most passionate about doing in any role that you play?  00:23:23 Amielynn Abellera  Well, I love the human experience. I love what that did to me as a young artist and as a young kid and what that ignited in me watching like an actor go through it and it'd be so real and me be so moved. And I love being that vehicle for other audience members. And as the actor, I can feel if I'm hitting a stride with it. And it's a really exhilarating process. And it just reignites why I love being an actor.  00:24:06 Isabel Li  For all the listeners who have watched The Pitt, or for those of our listeners who have yet to watch The Pitt, and they definitely will after hearing this episode — what do you want the listeners or the audience members to take away from watching The Pitt, from seeing you as Nurse Perlah in it?  00:24:23 Amielynn Abellera  Yeah, well, first off, I hope you go home and turn on your HBO Max and watch The Pitt to all of you who haven't seen it yet. And I hope you enjoy it. And I just hope that you watch it and are entertained, but also you walk away with learning something about humanity and our healthcare workers and also laughing and crying and being fascinated as much as we are behind the scenes. We're really having such an excellent time creating this show. And we're so thrilled that audience members love it as much as we love making it.  So I hope you have that same exhilaration and elation as we all do here.  00:25:10 Isabel Li  I'll put a link to your social media on kpfa.org so our listeners can follow you there. And thank you so much, Amielynn, for joining me on Apex Express today.  00:25:20 Amielynn Abellera  Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk to you and to share my story. And thank you for listening.  00:25:27 Isabel Li  That was actress Amielynn Abellera, who plays Nurse Perlah, one of the Filipina nurses on The Pitt. And we're about to hear from one more actress from the show. But before that, here's a music break with 7000 Miles by Ruby Ibarra.  00:25:59 [MUSIC: 7000 Miles by Ruby Ibarra]  00:30:07 Isabel Li  And that was the song 7,000 Miles by Ruby Avara here on KPFA.  00:30:11 Isabel Li  Thanks for tuning in to Apex Express tonight, where our next guest is the actress Kristin Villanueva, who plays Nurse Princess De La Cruz, another Filipina nurse on the HBO Max medical show, The Pitt. Hi Kristin, welcome to APEX Express.  00:30:29 Kristin Villanueva  Hi Isabel, thanks for having me.  00:30:32 Isabel Li  Absolutely. My first question for you is, how do you identify and what's your story?  00:30:37 Kristin Villanueva  I am Filipino American. I was born and raised in Manila, Philippines, and I moved to the Washington DC area when I was 15.  00:30:47 Isabel Li  How did you get into becoming an actress?  00:30:50 Kristin Villanueva  Kind of by accident. When I moved to the States and I was at my new high school. I joined the drama program just because we didn't have that in my school in the Philippines and that was something I've always been interested in. So yeah, I auditioned and I didn't know that the drama teacher was a very serious one. Like, you either join the drama club or you play softball, you can't have both. So yeah, that's how I got introduced.  00:31:27 Isabel Li  And at a young age, what kinds of films or movies really inspired you to pursue drama?  00:31:33 Kristin Villanueva  I don't think it inspired me to pursue drama, but my choice of movies, my favorite movies when I was younger is, I would say, is a little bit peculiar for an eight-year-old, for a 10-year-old. But I remember watching Kramer vs. Kramer with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep and it having such an effect in my little eight-year-old self. I was so moved by it. And also Legends of the Fall with Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt.  And like, what does a 10-year-old Filipino girl have anything in common with these turn of the century, 19th century, you know, Montana cowboys? You know, it's just so random, but for some reason I just fell in love with it. Maybe I just fell in love with Brad Pitt, but, yeah, those heavy dramas had an impact in me, even though I didn't know exactly what it was.  00:32:35 Isabel Li  So you play Nurse Princess on the HBO Max medical show The Pitt, and which, at the time of this interview, we're, you know, getting towards the finale of season two very, very quickly. I've really been enjoying season two. And first of all, congratulations on winning Outstanding Performance by an ensemble in a drama series. That's so incredible.  00:32:54 Kristin Villanueva  Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a wild ride.  00:32:57 Isabel Li  Yeah. Can I just say, Princess is such an energetic and confident character, and it's really fun watching you play a healthcare professional in such a hectic setting of an emergency room. What do you do to get in character of Princess?  00:33:11 Kristin Villanueva  Ooh, that's a great question. She has such a vibrant energy when she's at the ED, and I don't need a lot to prep myself to get to that level because I'm just excited to be at the Warner Brothers lot, and being on set and being with very kind people. So it doesn't take a lot to get in that mindset. Maybe if it's a 5.30am call, maybe I need a little bit more coffee to get there. But in terms of my emotion and excitement and energy, I don't need to do that much because, yeah, it kind of, it's parallel in my real life and in Princess's life of just doing what they both want to do. But in terms of, I would say, the difference is, I wish I had Princess's confidence in my life more. You know, she's very confident in everything that she does. You know, she knows she's good, and she isn't shy to show it. Because I think when she shows it, it's not to show. It's just to do, you know? Um, so I wish I have more and more of that in my life.  00:34:35 Isabel Li  For you, what's the most challenging part of playing Princess?  00:34:39 Kristin Villanueva  I would say, well, first, the lines, the medical jargon and the technicality of things. So, thankfully, we have amazing med techs that are always right next to us, correcting us, you know, making us feel more confident, guiding us, answering all our questions. So, yeah, making sure that I look like I know what I'm doing. So that would be, I would say, the hardest part.  00:35:08 Isabel Li  Yeah, and on that note, like in many of her moments, Princess is so often mediating communication for medical information in so many different ways. How do you prepare for a role like that where you have to, I mean, you mentioned some things about needing to like look and act the part and you have some people helping you, but what are some other things that you do to really have you, you know, help practice sounding like a healthcare professional?  00:35:35 Kristin Villanueva  First, I Google everything. And then I make sure I'm able to explain it in my own words, so whatever the procedure is. Don't ask me anything now, because once I'm done filming, it leaves my brain. So yes, I research everything. And then when it comes to memorization, if it's, the nurses have a lot of numbers. We may not have a lot of the long words, Latin words, medicine words that the doctors do, but we have to say a lot of different numbers, you know, BP 160 over 20 and all of that. So what I do is I would record the other people's lines, make leave a space for my lines and just play it all day, every day. When I'm walking the dog, when I'm doing dishes, when I'm folding laundry. So I can get it in my body while I'm doing different things. Because I notice that if I'm just sitting down and memorizing my lines, and then I get to set the next day, and all of a sudden, you know, I'm given all these choreography and I'm moving, or they change the choreography in the middle, that gets really tricky. So doing my lines while moving helps a lot. And then of course, the things that I can Google as much as I can, but then I take advantage of having, like I said, the med techs on set. Then I ask them about their emotional experiences behind procedures. So things I start with, okay, is this procedure an everyday thing? How often do you see it? How often do you deal with it? And then from there, I ask if it's something interesting that it's like they've only heard of but never actually seen in practice. What would you do? They say, if you're not busy, you run to that room and watch it, that kind of thing. And if it's an emotional scene, then I ask them, how do you deal with these things? Then I get to hear their experiences and how they cope with it after the shift.  00:37:53 Isabel Li  Did you know anything about medicine or the emergency room before this role?  00:37:59 Kristin Villanueva  No, I think I'm one of those very rare Filipinos that don't really have a lot of healthcare professionals in their families. I do have a cousin who's a radiologist and my husband's side of family. There are a lot of nurses and that's my mother-in-law included, but no, I have zero.  00:38:20 Isabel Li  Oh, wow. So I watched some of your other interviews and I found it really interesting that you had talked about like telling your agent not to submit you to roles on nurses, on projects, unless it was specifically featured.  Can you tell us more about that and how you navigate like the Filipino representation in medical shows, especially in The Pitt as an actress yourself?  00:38:41 Kristin Villanueva  Sure. I was getting a lot of, I wouldn't say a lot, but I would often get auditions for nurses in medical shows or non-medical shows. And I've played them before and I've been very grateful for those experiences. One of them was a movie opposite Susan Sarandon.  So Susan Sarandon was also playing a nurse. So all of my scenes was with her. So those are very cool experiences. But because I've played them a number of times, then I told my agents at one point, hey, unless, like you said, the nurse part is more featured or has more lines other than yes, doctor, then sure, I would audition because I've done it.  And I also didn't want to perpetuate that sad practice of, you know, okay, let's have one Filipino or one Asian nurse and check that box off.  Because it does feel that way. And it's just not the real world. So when The Pitt came and I saw the breakdown, it's a heftier breakdown for the part of Nurse Princess. I mean, and just looking at her name, Princess de la Cruz, I was like, somebody did the research. I'm like, all right, okay, I'll put myself on tape for this.  00:39:59 Isabel Li  Yeah, and I love how Princess as a character is written to be such a crucial part of the team. Very competent, very quick on her feet. Are there any ways where you, yourself, got to influence how Princess was portrayed, maybe beyond the scripts or, you know, in any ways that you could add to that character?  00:40:19 Kristin Villanueva  I think so? I'm not sure, but I have noticed that in season two, on the scripts, Princess's, looks, eye rolls, stares were now written. Whereas before, I was just doing it. So yes, I think so. Because I didn't have a lot of lines. I still don't have a lot of lines, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have an opinion. And yeah, I was just being truthful in all those moments. So if I feel like something's off or, you know, I don't think Princess has a good poker face. So that made its way into the script recently.  00:41:05 Isabel Li  Oh, I see. Well, the show primarily takes place in a hospital setting. But for you, when you're playing Princess, do you imagine what she does, like, outside of the hospital? Like, who is she outside of work?  00:41:16 Kristin Villanueva  I think when there is an after party or somebody's birthday, someone's baptism, or, I think she's the same. I think she's a work hard, party harder kind of girl. But I can also see her turning everything off and having a lot of deep, quiet solo time that she doesn't talk about much often.  00:41:44 Isabel Li  Yeah, something so cool about Princess is the fact that she can apparently speak six languages. But I wanted to talk about the fact that you, as Princess, code-switched to Tagalog in many scenes, especially with Amielynn Abellera, who plays Nurse Perlah. For you, can you tell our listeners how it feels for you switching from English to Tagalog?  00:42:05 Kristin Villanueva  Well, first off, the first word that comes to mind is it's fun. You know, you get to use that skill or use that — used to be a very familiar part of myself again. But I also feel extremely vulnerable because I don't get to do that often. I don't think I've, maybe I've acted once in Tagalog, but I can't remember any other significant roles where I was able to do that. So to do that on The Pitt is, yeah, it's pretty vulnerable just in terms of sharing that part of myself that I haven't shared really acting-wise.  But it's also fun. Because it comes naturally. And I get to there's so many nuances that I would think only Filipinos would get, but it's also so gratifying to hear from from other folks who are not Filipinos that get it. You know, even though they don't understand, um, the Filipino jokes, but they have their own — they have their own version in their own culture. So it's — it's really fun to hear that.  00:43:18 Isabel Li  Just out of curiosity for you, how do you relate to Tagalog as a language? Do you speak it often?  00:43:24 Kristin Villanueva  I don't speak it often, unfortunately. I do still speak it with my family, and we Zoom once, twice a week. But other than that, no, I don't speak it often.  And it's kind of sad, because I feel like some words are leaving my memory. But yeah.  00:43:45 Isabel Li  Yeah, wow. So when they're written in the script, do you translate, or are they already words in Tagalog that you already know?  00:43:54 Kristin Villanueva  When they're written in the script, they're written in English. And season one, I used to translate it for myself. And then season two, we have a coach who gave us a lot more options. But what's wonderful about working with the writers is they're not precious with their own phrases.  They defer to us to translate it as close to the gist of, let's say it's a joke, but if I were to translate it in Tagalog, word per word, it's not going to land the same way as it would in American, in English. Do you know what I mean? So they much rather have us say it in whatever's parallel in Tagalog. So yeah. And I applaud the writers for doing that, 'cause that's one of my pet peeves sometimes when I'm, you know, watching other shows, translation of, it's not quite that, you know, or it's too literal. If it's too literal, then it's, that's not how we talk.  00:44:59 Isabel Li  Right. And putting that in the context of Princess as a character, who is a polyglot, there are some moments where she speaks French and does sign language.  00:45:08 Isabel Li  How did you navigate these multilingual exchanges communicating in different languages, essentially. Oh, I look forward to it. I look forward to them so badly. It's one of the things I got really excited about auditioning for the part, 'cause it was written in her breakdown that she speaks six languages. Um, I personally don't, but I am so enamored by polyglots. Like if I were to meet someone who can speak three languages plus, I'm just, I follow them like a puppy. I don't know, I just find it so sexy and intriguing. And it's like something that I aspire to be, but just haven't had the time to do it. So yes, I look forward to them.  00:45:52 Isabel Li  Yeah, and how do you practice? Like, did you have to practice some French and some ASL?  00:45:57 Kristin Villanueva  Oh, um, for the French, since there's only one line, we didn't hire a coach, but we did hire, um, coaches for ASL. Oh, yeah, I just practiced the hell out of them. Um, but there's also that nuance of, um, how fluent or how good is your pronunciation for someone who doesn't speak it all the time, you know? You got to, like, factor that in as well. But, yes, I just practice it all the time.  00:46:24 Isabel Li  Gotcha. And speaking of that, I love how Princess and Perlah add some lighthearted humor and back and forths and gossip throughout the series. How do you switch from humorous moments to more serious ones?  00:46:36 Kristin Villanueva  I mean, you don't really think about it in life, right? Like one minute you're crying and then something happens and then you find it hilarious. You just go with the flow on set. You don't really ever plan, okay, this beat is a funny beat, and this one is a dramatic beat. You don't. As long as you keep it honest, those colors would come out naturally.  00:47:02 Isabel Li  The Pitt is very current. Like there are so many current events and everyday sort of issues mirrored in the series. What is your experience working with a set and a story that feels like it is very much set in the everyday?  00:47:21 Kristin Villanueva  It hasn't been an issue. It's never– if anything, sometimes it's tougher because you can't escape the real world, right? It's not like when I get to do a Shakespeare comedy, there's a reprieve from, you know, the sad current events that are happening. So yeah, that's– I would say that's the only downside, but there's a lot more upside to that, which is you get to present and work through real life situations. You know, that I'm happy that a TV show like The Pitt, you know, something that's made for entertainment can actually dive into these really serious topics. And what I love about The Pitt is that I don't think it's preachy. I don't think it tackles headlines of the day in a way that it makes you want to turn the TV off. If anything, it shows how, it shows the repercussions on the everyday people. And hopefully audiences that don't have anything to do, like I'll give you an example, like for nurses strikes, right? If you see that on the headline and you don't work, you're not a healthcare worker, you'll probably just, you know, skip that video or not read that article because you think it doesn't affect you.  But hopefully by watching The Pitt, you'll see, oh no, it will affect me if God forbid I have to go to the hospital, if my loved one has to go to the hospital and you don't get seen for 10 hours, or there were mistakes in, the medicine, or it's just not top care that you think you deserve. It's not because the nurses or the doctors or the staff are bad. They're understaffed, period. Right? They haven't had a day off in 12 days. So no, it's a privilege to be able to do a show, have a job that actually reflects what's happening in real life.  00:49:40 Isabel Li  Yeah, thank you for sharing about that. And finally, I want to touch upon your work in general. As an actress, would you say there's something that you're most passionate about doing?  00:49:50 Kristin Villanueva  Ooh. Are we talking about material or medium? Because I would say everything. I do miss doing plays. I haven't done a play since, my gosh, I think pre-COVID. So it's been a while. So I really love doing plays. I have more experience in theater than TV and film combined. A really good material is so inspiring to do, whether it be a classic like Chekhov or any new contemporary plays. You know, there's so many playwrights, those plays I want to do so badly. There's something electric about working on a brand new play when the playwright is in the room. But also, it's also really amazing to work on juicy Shakespearean tragedies. You know, when I get to play Shakespeare ingenues, in those three hours, you've lived a lifetime. You know, usually in a Shakespearean comedy, you meet the ingenue before they fall in love. And then they fall in love, and then they get their hearts broken. And then by the end, they're kind of this new person who's a little bit more learned, but not the same 16-year-old that you met three hours ago. So getting to do those parts are a complete joy.  00:51:29 Isabel Li  I'm wondering, do you have a dream role that you'd like to play in the future? Like either in theater or in film? Who would it be and who would you like to work with?  00:51:37 Kristin Villanueva  I love this question. My imagination just starts going everywhere. Yes. My dream role for the theater would be Martha from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I got to do that play a few years ago, but as Honey, as one of the other characters. But I would love to play Martha someday. Another theater role would be Arkadina from The Seagull or Nina, but I think I've aged out of Nina. And in terms for like TV, gosh, I'm obsessed with Narcos, obsessed. And I've always, I've written a part from, if Narcos was ever to do a season about the Philippines, I have a role that I wrote for myself. Cause I don't, you know, you look at my face, like, my face is too round and I'm too short and I smile too much for a show like Narcos or The Wire, which are, like, one of my top, top favorite TV shows.  And I don't have a part for them 'cause I don't look the part, but I found a way to write myself in Narcos season, I don't know, season five Philippines.  00:53:09 Isabel Li  One last question for you. These are such incredible answers. Thank you so much for sharing. One last question for you. Out of your entire acting career right now, what has been the most rewarding moment for you?  00:53:22 Kristin Villanueva  I mean, besides The Pitt, mainly because of the reach and mainly because a lot of Filipino nurses have become so happy just to be seen and represented. And that means so, so much, another role that I am most proud of is this play — I wouldn't even say play — it's more of a performance art piece called The Courtroom. The theater company called Waterwell produced it in New York. And The Courtroom is about a Filipino immigrant to the US who accidentally voted when she was still only on a green card. So she wasn't supposed to vote, but she did not do it maliciously. So the play is about her filing appeal after appeal to stay in the U.S. and not be deported. So I was pretty proud of that. We used, the lines were straight out of the court transcripts. And yeah, I wish we could do it again, especially with, you know, the current climate.  00:54:38 Isabel Li  Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much, Kristin, for sharing her story and all of your various experiences. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?  00:54:47 Kristin Villanueva  Oh, just thank you so much for watching The Pitt and, you know, for all the nice words about the show. And I hope you keep watching.  00:55:00 Isabel Li  And that was Kristin Villanueva, who plays Nurse Princess De La Cruz on The Pitt, which just released its season 2 finale last week at this time.  Please check out our website, kpfa.org/program/apexexpress to find out more about our show and our two guests tonight, Kristin and Amielynn. We thank all of you listeners out there. Keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating, and sharing your visions with the world. Your voices are important.  00:55:31 Isabel Li  Apex Express is produced by Ayame Keane-Lee, Anuj Vaidya, Cheryl Truong, Jalena Keane-Lee, Miko Lee, Miata Tan, Preeti Mangala-Shekar and Swati Rayasam. Tonight's show is produced and edited by me, Isabel Li. Have a great evening and thanks so much for listening.  The post APEX Express – 4.23.26 – Nurses of The Pitt appeared first on KPFA.

The Zero Moment of Truth (And Why Your Online Presence Actually Matters) If you run a small business, this one is for you. What I Do Before I Meet a Client Before I ever sit down with a client, I do two simple things. First, I Google them. I look at their website. I see how they present themselves. I get a feel for how they do business. Second, I look at their wider online presence. Reviews. Mentions. What other people say about them. This is not clever. It is exactly what your customers do. Your Customers Are Already Checking Before someone works with you, they look you up. They want reassurance. They want confirmation. They want to know they are making the right choice. If your website does not explain how you work and why you work that way, you are missing a trick. If your social media says nothing useful, you are missing another one. The Zero Moment of Truth Google used to call this the Zero Moment of Truth. It happens when someone gets a quote from you. Then they open Google. They search your name. Your business. Your reviews. They are not being difficult. They are being sensible. You need to show up at that moment. Reviews Are Not Enough on Their Own Star ratings matter. But they are not the whole story. People also look for supporting signals. A website that feels real A YouTube channel A TikTok or Facebook presence Evidence that you exist beyond a logo These channels are free to use. But only if you actually use them. This Also Applies to Your Suppliers This is not just about customers. It applies to the people you work with. Your kitchen supplier. Your accountant. Your solicitor. Your software provider. You should be leaving feedback for them too. Why? Because it shows you are a serious business. It shows who you choose to work with. It shows the quality of your supply chain. And you can talk about that publicly. Symbiosis in Business There is a biological term for this. It is called symbiosis. Two organisms working together. Both benefit. Neither survives as well alone. Trees and ivy. Humans and gut bacteria. Business works the same way. When you support your suppliers publicly, they support you. When you link to each other, visibility increases. Algorithms like connectivity. So do humans. What This Looks Like in Practice Reviews for customers Reviews for suppliers Mentions on your website Social posts showing how you work Clear signals that you are real and trusted This builds confidence before anyone ever calls you. The Core Message People are checking you out anyway. You can either control the story. Or leave it to chance. The Zero Moment of Truth is happening whether you like it or not. You might as well turn up for it. Need a Way Forward? If you are stuck with any of this and want a clear plan, you know what to do. You can find out more about me at: https://www.therichardsmith.com If you need hands-on help for your small business, visit: https://smallbusinessninja.co.uk Get In Touch Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *Email *Subject *Comment or Message *EmailSend Message

Dr. Len Tau, aka the Reviews Doctor, is on the podcast. With Kiera, he goes into the most critical nuts and bolts of making sure your practice stands out (or at least keeps pace with) online reviews amid AI. He explains jargon terms like ranking power and factors and velocity of reviews, whether or not you should actually be responding to reviews of your practice, and a ton more. Visit SuperchargeYourDentalPractice.com and enter the code RAVING to save $100 on registration for Dr. Tau's annual conference. About Dr. Tau Dr. Len Tau thrives on helping practices maximize their online reputation, marketing, and social media strategies. As a speaker, Len is known for his lively and engaging presentations packed with ready-to-use strategies. He regularly travels the country sharing his marketing brilliance and passion for practice growth with audiences. As a consultant, he offers practice leaders with real-world solutions tailored to fit their specific challenges and opportunities. Len loves to help doctors and their teams understand and implement successful online systems to build their practice. He currently serves as general manager of the Dental for Birdeye Reputation Marketing Software. Selected as one of Philadelphia's Top Dentists by Philadelphia Magazine, he continues to experience growth year after year in his fee-for-service practice focusing on general, cosmetic, reconstructive and implant dentistry. Following his father into the dental profession, Len graduated from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and continues to pursue ongoing continuing education opportunities. He has had the privilege of serving patients for two decades. He is an active member of numerous professional organizations including the American Dental Association, the Pennsylvania Dental Association, the Academy of General Dentistry, the Eastern Dental Society, the Northeast Philadelphia Dental Implant Study Club, and the American Academy of Clear Aligners. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Kiera Dent (00:00) Hello, Dental Team listeners. This is Kiera and today I am so excited. This is one of my dear friends. We've known each other for several years in the industry. I'm super freaking pumped. I'm going actually be at his event next year in September. Little teaser. Stay tuned. He's got an amazing event he does every year in September. I have Dr. Len Tau. He is one of my faves. He is better known ⁓ as an authority in the dental consulting world, reputation marketing, and a practice growth. He's recognized by dentistry today as a top dental consultant for eight straight years.   He is the author of Raving Patients and 100 plus tips to 105 star reviews in a hundred days. Like this man knows how to do it. He's one of my faves. We really do collaborate on so many fun things. After 20 plus years in clinical practice, he now helps dentists nationwide, increase revenue, case acceptance and visibility. He leads the dental vision at BirdEye, hosts the Raving Patients podcast and runs the Supercharger Dental Practice Conference, which is the one I was alluding to that we're gonna be at next year in September, empowering practices to thrive in today's competitive landscape.   He's truly one of my faves. And today we're gonna dig into like, how do you get online reviews? But Len, welcome. I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. How are you today?   Dr. Len Tau (01:06) I'm good, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here.   Kiera Dent (01:08) Of course. And this just came about because Len like, let's just do a little teaser. You're prepping full like steam ahead right now for your event that's coming up in September in Florida. ⁓ I love like the last time you and I were on the podcast, we talked about you in clinical dentistry. And then we reconnected after some time and you've left the chair, you're living your best life and you full blown gone into the event space. So just like, I know we're gonna get into like online reviews and how AI is changing that it's going to be just a really, really fun episode today. But tell us a little bit like   How is it going from like full blown dentist in the chair to now full blown events, like running these awesome events that we're super excited to be a part. Just kind of give me a little insight to that.   Dr. Len Tau (01:46) Well, it's been, it's been a lot of, a lot of fun. It's been very different, obviously, you know, for 23 years, I practiced dentistry, um, for about 12 of those, 13 of those who was full time. And then I went part time in 2017 until I sold and retired in 2022. Um, but one of the things I've grew up on in dentistry was going to dental events and, the big, the ones, the small ones, you know, all over the country and as a dentist first, and then as a vendor.   Kiera Dent (02:08) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (02:15) Um, since 2013 or 14, so a long time in the space. know, one of the things that really hit me was that the events are not really put on very well. They're not, um, you know, whether you, if you're a dentist, there's issues when you're a vendor, there's issues. And I said, you know what? I want to change the game. And, um, one of my goals when I retired from dentistry was to start putting on events. So in 2023, um, in, in September, we did an event in Delray had 208.   Kiera Dent (02:25) Right.   Dr. Len Tau (02:44) Dennis there, 33 sponsors. was, first day was business, second day was marketing. Excuse me. First day was marketing. Second day was business. Had a 13, 14 speakers. It went off better than I could ever imagined. I then moved to the last year in 2024 to Scottsdale. And we were at the Scott Resort and Spa, which is a beautiful hotel and the event was good. It wasn't great. Definitely moving to different coasts.   I felt there was not as much, know, engagement, excitement about the event. So I, my family and my wife and I decided, Hey, we're going to do this. Let's have people come down to me. I live in beautiful, you know, part of Florida. we're having this year's event and the next three of them at super at, ⁓ at pure 66, a brand new hotel, ⁓ in Fort Lauderdale. It's literally half hour from my house, five miles from the airport, easy to get to. So this year event is September 26th and 27th.   Kiera Dent (03:32) Bye.   you   No.   Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (03:45) We've got 14 speakers, ⁓ mixture of business and marketing. So we've got people talking about social media, about content. We have people talking about saving money on taxes. We're talking about how to become a fee-for-service practice. ⁓ So a lot of different great content and top speakers, Steve Rasner, Paul Goodman, ⁓ Jeff Buski, ⁓ Richard, Rich Maddow. So some real, real heavy hitters. And then some people who people haven't really heard of, Melanie Diesel, who's new in the dental industry.   So, but I like to do it differently and my events are very high end. You come, you're going to see things you probably have never seen before. I give a ton of time to the vendors so the vendors love me because they make sure that they get integration or interaction with the attendees. So you're going to be speaking in 2026, same weekend at September 25th and 26th in 2026, same hotel, pure 66.   Kiera Dent (04:28) Sure.   Yeah.   Dr. Len Tau (04:40) We're ramping things up right now. We're literally a month out from the events. still have people signing up. I still have people wanting to reach out as sponsors. And it's, it's, it's, is the fun time for me. Cause when I'm done, I'm, you know, I get a couple of months of break and then I start promoting 2027 again. So ⁓ it's been a good time. I really enjoy it. And I find that I've kind of ⁓ created something that's very different and the attendees really enjoy it and the vendors really enjoy it. So if I can make everybody happy,   Kiera Dent (04:45) No.   Dr. Len Tau (05:09) That's all I'm looking to do here.   Kiera Dent (05:11) ⁓ and Len, I hope the audience, if they can't see it, they can hear it. I think it's so fun because I mean, I've seen you in different spaces in your career, in your life. And there is just this like giddy, like younger version of Len that I feel is emerging of like, it's like giddy boyhood, like excitement of I'm excited to put these on. I'm excited to do these events. And it just makes me so happy for you. And what I think I'm hearing is yes, attendees are happy. Vendors are happy. But I also hear that Len is very happy and to do something   in dentistry is just very, very fun. It's very exciting. And so we're jazzed. I'm really excited. I love good events. I love great time. I love to help. love business marketing. Everybody can take that. That's not Kiera's jam. Like I, that's why I wanted to bring you on. You guys are very good at marketing. You're very good at that space. but to talk about how to help people have their best lives to grow the practices that they want to grow. I think you and I are so synergistic in that. So we're super excited and I love, I mean, I'm not going to highlight the fact that there were   a couple of sixes in that is September 26 at Pier 66. You guys hopefully like, I like the alliteration. Don't put anything weird on it guys, but I do appreciate that you made it easier. September six and nines flipped upside down are a six. Like hopefully everybody can remember September 26, Pier 66. It'll be a good time in 2026. I mean, we got four lines, so we're okay. We've at least got four sixes, not we didn't end on three, but I really hope an exciting step. We'll make sure we put some info for people.   For this year and for next year, I think it'll be a fun time. Dental A Team will be there, so come hang out with us. ⁓ Len, I'm super excited. I will not spoil secrets, but a lot of the things he told me for the events, I will say he does put his heart and soul into it. So Len, excited about that. Thank you for sharing. Good luck for this year. We're gonna be rooting you on this year and next year. And now let's pivot. Let's go into like your jam. You're in BirdEye, you're in marketing, you're on online reviews. AI has come into the scene. Practices are changing.   I also will say, I hope everybody listens to you of their like succession story. You hung up the hand piece, but you are still full steam ahead in dentistry. And so I hope people see that like there is no path to dentistry. Like you just, it's a, it's a beautiful world that you're in. So let's talk though, online reviews, AI, how is this working? How do we make sure that practices are still being visible? Chat GPT is on, on the prowl.   There are clients signing up with us now that have found us on chat. GPT, which is so random. It's changing how people have been doing things. Walk me through. What are you seeing with these online reviews? The importance, how to bring AI in? Like, let's just kind of go in a rift on how practices can still be visible with AIs. Like just showing up to the scene.   Dr. Len Tau (07:43) So I wanna talk about chat CPT for a second. ⁓ I refer to it as my best friend. ⁓ It helps me edit. No, I haven't named it yet. No, I haven't named it. ⁓ you have?   Kiera Dent (07:50) Have you named it? I've got to just ask Len. Have you named? I have! Me and Chet,   I had a name and now her name is Wanda. I don't know why, I don't even know where Wanda came, but people are like, here, are you hanging out with Wanda again? Cause I agree. Like they're our best friends. So go on Len. I can't wait to hear what you name your Chet GPT cause mine is currently Wanda.   Dr. Len Tau (08:06) I'll have to, I   have to name it now that I have to think of something. ⁓ but no, I started using it. I'm like, this is really helpful and it's only gotten better. And, just to give you an idea is, ⁓ my wife and I, and my son, my son just graduated high school. He's literally just started his freshman year at, university of Florida on a free ride. ⁓ smart, smart ass kid. I'm very proud of him. But, you know, and I travel a ton, but I travel a ton for business and I made a commitment. I think I told you that,   Kiera Dent (08:25) Boo? Yeah.   Dr. Len Tau (08:35) during the summer when he was going away for school, I was not going to travel. So from March to literally next week, beginning of September, I haven't traveled at all for business. we did plan some really great travel for our personal lives. And one of the things we did was we had a cruise, a 17 day cruise to Europe. ⁓ And when I decided I did not want to do the excursions to the cruise, cause they're really expensive and you're with all these people. I prefer to kind of just go and tour myself.   Kiera Dent (08:44) It's awesome.   Dr. Len Tau (09:05) So I use ChatGPT in every city. And I said, I'm going to the city. This is what I'm going to get in. This is the cruise I'm going on. It got the cruise itinerary. And I said, I want to set up private tours in every city with different people. And it helped me pick the best tour guides. They referred me to a website called Tours by Local, which is an amazing website that you can meet people who are local that will take you around.   show you the city and it was amazing. It was amazing. So I thank Chachi PT for doing that because I wouldn't have known about half these things if I didn't do it. And in fact, one of the women, and actually the very first place you went to, which was in Split, Croatia, which was beautiful. I told her that literally that's kind of how I went down this road was I asked Chachi PT, what should I do in Split? And they said, you need to use this tour guide. She's the highest rated tour guide and has the best reviews on tours by local. like,   What's towards by local? And that started this whole thing. So she was, she was amazed to hear that. So, ⁓ I have been using Chad GPT for a long time, like I said, and even now it is people I know type in, know, get me to the best dentists in the area. And it's very much based on reviews. So you have to be a highly rated practice. you may not believe in reviews and if you do, think you're not smart, but you know, if, if you want to be at the forefront of where people are looking,   Kiera Dent (09:58) Yeah.   Yes.   Dr. Len Tau (10:25) You have to generate reviews in a significant amount. Velocity now, which is how often you're getting them, is one of the biggest ranking factors on Google, whether you want to believe chat GPT or not. ⁓ But you have to get reviews. You can't, you know, rest on your laurels and say, well, I have enough because you never have enough. Okay. And, ⁓ and you've got to let Google rank you high. And there's been a big discrepancy in the industry, a big, I don't want to say a misunderstanding.   Kiera Dent (10:43) read.   Dr. Len Tau (10:52) But I've been in the review space now since 2013, so 12 years. And in the past, dentists thought that if they get reviews, they're going to rank. And that's not the way it is anymore. If you have reviews, but don't pay attention to the other ranking factors, you actually don't rank well. And that's a problem. So, chat GPT AI is so important, but you still got to dominate Google. You still got to get to the top of the pages.   And that's really where the direction is going. and if you aren't there now and you are ignoring it, you're never going to get there. So I would love to talk to you about our list in instruct or educate the listeners and viewers of these ranking factors that they need, need to pay attention to, or they're going to be left behind when it comes to ranking on Google.   Kiera Dent (11:27) Yeah.   absolutely. And I'm excited for this too, because, I did notice that you've got to like, AI is just crawling the web. That's where it's getting, it's being taught. It's crawls it. It looks through all of it. And so agreed with you. have a lot of clients and like, we want the secret pill of marketing. And I might get your reviews up. Like it is constant and consistent that if you get those reviews up and you bring pieces to the table, that people literally like that's what's going to rank you higher. So I'm excited, Len to, to dig in deeper because it is like how   getting more reviews, but to hear that there's more beyond just the reviews really can help these offices like get the best bang for their buck, help more practices. And I'm like, it used to be when I first started consulting when I used to tell offices get to like 100 Google reviews. It is now I'm pushing people like five, six, 700 reviews that you need to be getting ranked into. And I don't know if you're seeing like a cutoff line or if it matters on that. So I'm really excited to dive into like, what are the rankings? What are the pieces? Is there a difference? But I'm like now   100 reviews, when I look at somebody I'm like, hmm, like if there's another dental practice that has maybe 400, 500 new clients come on, the first thing I do is I go look them up to see how many reviews do you have? And I'm shocked at how many dental practices actually are not showing up when I Google their names and they're like, no, no, care, we're here. And I'm like, but if I'm a prospective new client that doesn't work in your practice and I don't see you all the time and I just tried to find you and I'm looking for you.   How many patients who are not looking for you are not finding you as well. So yeah, take us away, and I'm super curious, very intrigued by this. It's fascinating. And I'll also say, because AI is new, feel like people got like a reset slate. Like, hey, you can actually get back into the game if you haven't been into the game, if you just start playing now. If you don't, I agree with you. I do think that you will unfortunately get obliterated without trying if you don't get into the game now.   Dr. Len Tau (13:28) 100 % so and I couldn't agree with you more. So the best thing to do here is if you're listening to this, I want you to go to a Google search and I want you to type your practice name in. Okay, so that's the first thing to do. Right.   Kiera Dent (13:39) and not in your office. Don't do it in   your office. Go somewhere else. Like try it somewhere else.   Dr. Len Tau (13:44) Right, well, and 100%, that's another thing is that if you're gonna look up your ranking specifically, you do not wanna do that from your office location, okay? Because you're not gonna get real results. You also wanna go into incognito mode or private browsing mode on your phone or your computer if you're doing that to check ranking. But this is not specifically about ranking. This is more about how you appear online. So go to Google and type in your practice name. Not your name unless it's the name of the practice, but your business name, okay?   Kiera Dent (13:52) Yes.   Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (14:13) and it doesn't have to be what's registered with the state board. It's how you, when you answer the phone, what you say, okay? Pennsylvania Center for Dental Excellence was my practice name, okay? So you wanna look yourself up. So these are some of the ranking factors that Google looks at. Obviously one of them is your total number of reviews you have. Definitely a ranking factor, but the total number has not been as important as some other factors as well. So.   Kiera Dent (14:20) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (14:40) Average number of reviews in the industry right now is about 350. It used to be like 100 was the golden number. Now 350 is the average in the industry. So are you average? Are you below average or are above average? Okay, that's something to look at. The second ranking factor, which is even more important is the velocity of reviews. So how many reviews, how often you're getting them. Okay, so if you're getting once every two weeks, not enough. If you're getting them once every week,   Kiera Dent (14:46) Yes.   Dr. Len Tau (15:10) Not enough. You don't need them every single day, but two or three every single week is ideal. Okay, because you think two or three every week gives you eight to 15 a month times 12 months is 100 reviews a year, which is a nice number. Okay, so you have to have that velocity. All right. Third ranking factor is the total score, your average number of stars. So   I would like you to be anywhere from 4.6 to five stars. Okay. I don't think you have to be only five stars. think there's a negativity related to that. If you're only five star reviews, but I also don't want you to below 4.5. Okay. ⁓ And if you're at 4.3, 4.2, or even 4.1, another better review or two, and you're to be in the threes. And that's really where you don't want to go. Cause you lose a huge percentage of patients who may come in if you're less than four stars. Okay. Another ranking factor.   is the primary category. So how do you know your primary category? If you look under your Google, your name, will say right where the stars is, will say, hopefully dentist in your town or dentist in your county or dentist in your city. Okay. So your primary category should be dentist because we're a dental practice. Okay. If you're an oral surgeon, you may want it to be oral and actual facial surgeon. If you're an endodontist, want it to say endodontist. You don't want it to say dentist if you're a specialist. Okay.   ⁓ That's a big ranking factor and I'll give you an example. I, ⁓ my wife had some plastic surgery over the last couple of years and we were referred to that doctor. So we didn't need to search for him. We were referred to him. went in, we liked him, we used his services. ⁓ And of course, being a plastic surgeon, I talked to him about reviews. He now uses BirdEye, but he had me speak in an event that he holds down here in Boca Raton.   And I talked about this exactly. And I asked everybody, cause it was a small group. What is your primary category? And he goes, he said to me, literally, he says, I'm listed as a nurse practitioner. He wasn't listed as a plastic surgeon. He was listed as a nurse practitioner. So his categories were all messed up. So when you actually typed in plastic surgeon near me, he never showed up because his category was wrong. So primary category is a very important ranking factor as well. Now you also have to make sure your secondary categories are also. ⁓   Kiera Dent (17:15) No.   Dr. Len Tau (17:35) ⁓ under ⁓ are there as well as under the proper categories. So secondary categories, if you're a dentist, dental clinic, teeth whitening services, denture care center, orthodontist, if you're doing aligners, if you're endo, you're doing root canals, you can have endodontist. If you do periodontist, can do periodontist. You want to make sure you have nine secondary categories. Okay, if you don't have them, you want to add them.   Now, how do you add them? It's very easy. You go to Google using ChatGPT or anything and say, how do I add secondary categories to my Google business listing? Okay. It will tell you exactly like a recipe how to do it. You need to add those secondary categories. All right. And if you want help doing it, you can always reach out to me. The last ranking factor, which is really important is making sure that the practices name, address, and phone number is consistent. Okay. So just to be clear, most   website companies do not do local SEO. They do website SEO, which is making sure the website is SEOed so the website ranks higher on the organic rankings. We're talking about getting the Google business page ranking higher, which the website companies are not focused on. So when it comes to the name, address and phone number, is it consistent? You have to be consistent. And this is a Google requirement.   It is not a patient thing. It's not a me thing or you thing. It's a Google requirement that this data is consistent. So the name is obviously important. So if you have the and or the ampersand, you may find things inconsistent. When it comes to the address, if you have, you know, South State Streets, Unit 510, you can have South or S, you can have Street or ST, and then you can have Suite, Unit, Number, or STE.   All these variations need to be consistent. So one of them has to be done and one and stuck with. And then if you are using a tracking number for whatever reason on your Google business listing, you may find your inconsistent there as well. So when you make everything consistent and you get a higher velocity of reviews, guess what happens over time? You rank higher on the maps. And when you rank higher on the maps, you get more visible for patients to find you. So that's where the secret sauce is. And   Not that this is a sales pitch about BirdEye, but that's exactly what BirdEye does. BirdEye does those. We check all those boxes for you. And then what ends up happening is a practices get more reviews. But more importantly, when they ask patients how they find them, they're going to see that they found them because of their ranking online and the reviews drove them to the practice. So that's how this whole thing plays a role in getting a practice more visible and credible.   Kiera Dent (20:06) Thank   Wow. So I was over here like taking a lot of notes, which I really loved. I love the number, the 350 at the average, the velocity, like three to five per week you were saying. It doesn't need to be an everyday, but I do agree like them consistently coming through the total score, the 4.6 to five primary category, secondary category, making sure we have nine. And then you were talking about like the practice name, phone number, all of that has to be consistent. So the addresses have to be the same. And that's going to help you rank higher.   Did I miss anything? Those are my notes, Len. And I'm just curious, like, did I catch them all? Because there was a lot of pieces to consider. And then I have some follow ups as well. So like, did I miss anything in that list?   Dr. Len Tau (21:02) No, I   think you got it all there.   Kiera Dent (21:06) Okay, so hopefully that was a good recap for everybody. If you were listening, I tried to like summarize everything he said, because I really feel that those are super valuable pieces to know. Now, Len, there's a couple of things that happen and I'm very curious of what you've seen. Maybe you know, maybe you don't know. It's just a riff for me genuinely curious over here. Does it impact for the business to respond to the reviews? Because I know there was like a big misnomer out there like for a while, like you have to respond to every single review that helps you rank higher. What's the   What's kind of the lay of the land right now responding to the reviews that come in?   Dr. Len Tau (21:39) So there's been a big push over the years to respond to reviews. And there's also been those naysayers who don't want you to respond to reviews. So I want to make this very clear. When you respond to a review and you acknowledge them as a patient, you are technically violating HIPAA. Okay. Now by the letter of the law, if you do that, you violated HIPAA and can be in trouble. Now in all the years I've been doing this, I've only seen one   Kiera Dent (21:49) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (22:08) example of a positive review being responded to and the dentist got in trouble. Okay. So if someone writes a review for you and it's five stars and you say, thank you so much for your feedback. We were glad you had a great experience in our practice. Okay. You technically violated HIPAA there because you acknowledged that they came into the practice. I don't think you'll ever run into any problems with that. I don't, I've never seen any instance when a, when a practice has got into trouble. But again, by the letter of the law, it's a violation.   Here's where the person ran into a problem. Okay. So the review in question, the patient wrote, I'm so happy with my appearance after I went to so-and-so's dental office. I think they were in Texas. The dentist responded, we're so happy that you, thank you so much for your review. We're so happy that you loved our magic needles. Okay. So it, from what I understand is the patient had Botox or   dermal fillers placed and that's what they call their magic needles. So the patient wrote, wrote a letter to the practice saying, I didn't appreciate you letting the world know that I had Botox done and asked for the review response to be taken down, which the dentist immediately did. Took it down and apologized, but it really pissed the patient off and the patient sued the dentist and won. Okay. Because the dentist went out of their way to   Kiera Dent (23:08) Mm-hmm.   Right.   Dr. Len Tau (23:33) you know, release private information that wasn't supposed to be done. So in that case, you shouldn't be doing that. Okay. Now on the same note, I would be very careful responding.   Kiera Dent (23:37) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (23:45) to a review that's left by a negative, a negative review that's written by a patient. I would be very careful responding publicly to that because it's very hard to respond without violating HIPAA. So a simple response like, we're sorry to hear about your experience. Please contact the office to discuss the concerns as we're unfortunately unable to comment due to HIPAA release privacy stuff. That's fine. But.   Again, I just not sure it's the best thing to do. So you have to be careful with negative reviews. What it doesn't do is we really haven't found any relationship between responding and ranking. Okay, so you have to, I always leave it up to the people to respond. I like using AI to respond as well, because I think it comes up with HIPAA compliant and really good responses. ⁓ But you have to decide what you want to do for your own practice.   Kiera Dent (24:16) Mm-hmm.   Interesting.   That's actually really helpful to know. ⁓ Okay, good feedback for people to ponder and decide what they want to do on. The second piece is   some people lose their Google My Business and they're not able to be found. ⁓ And I don't know if you have reasons why. I don't know if it's from like a name change or it's inconsistent. So like a lot of offices have a lot of reviews, but when you go to search them, they're hidden on Google My Business. Like it will show up on the person's side, but nobody externally can find it. Do you have any ideas of like what causes that or what offices can do if they're struggling with that?   Dr. Len Tau (25:11) So I want to clarify that what question you asked there. I'm sorry to ask a question when you asked the question was when you say that you're saying that when they search for their Google business listing, they can't find it or when someone is searching for the office, they're not visible on the maps.   Kiera Dent (25:15) Hey, that's okay.   So when they're searching, so if I just go into Google and I type in like my perfect smile, the website might link, but the Google My Business with all, and they might have like 150 Google reviews, like it might be, like they've got them all and the office can see it when they like log in as like, this is, you own this, but they've lost it and it's no longer visible publicly. Do you know what causes that or how they can get that back? It's okay if you don't, I'm just genuinely curious. Cause I know some offices struggle with this, especially with like name changes of practices.   going through different ownerships. ⁓ Some of them have told me it's like when I changed the name of my practice, it no longer showed up. Like we have all these reviews, but we're not showing up. Do you know what causes that or how practices can get back being visible?   Dr. Len Tau (26:02) Yep. Now that you   asked it that way, so that usually means that your Google business listing has been suspended. And if you can't find it on search, but you see it, means it's suspended in most cases. Name changes, address changes, other things you do can cause it to be suspended. There are, if you look up on use chat GPT, ⁓   and say, why is, why can your Google business page be suspended? There is a list of different reasons why it can get suspended. ⁓ if you're getting reviews the wrong way is a big one. So, like you should not be incentivizing for reviews. And I'm talking about incentivizing the patients. You shouldn't be getting reviews in your physical office space because there's IP address conflicts and location services on the patient's phone. So if you're doing that, not only will you can potentially lose reviews, but you can't get it suspended, but you can look on.   Kiera Dent (26:37) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (26:55) on chat GPT or Google and just say, what are the reasons that your business page can be suspended? And they're there. So usually you have to ⁓ re-approve it or re-verify that page. And there's certain things you do. You'll have to take a video of yourself in front of the practice, showing the address, showing the name of the business on the door. So there's things you will have to do to get it over to Google. So they'll re-verify you. And then once it happens, there's a good chance they'll unsuspend the listing. But that happens for that reason.   Kiera Dent (27:24) Gotcha. Okay. That's super helpful because I know a few offices have struggled with that. So was just curious for that. All right. This has been so helpful to figure out rankings. It's been helpful to understand. ⁓ My last question as we wrap up today on reviews has been so helpful, Len, is how do offices go about like, what are your recommendations? Yes, bird eye, swell, podium. Like there's a lot of review in Weave. I do, I usually recommend using an external one outside of things. think that they like, if they're just, if that's what they do, they're going to be experts at it.   But how can offices ethically and appropriately, like obviously great patient experience, but how do they increase these Google reviews? What are some of the best tactics you've seen to help these offices out?   Dr. Len Tau (28:04) So being biased, I mean, I'm a true believer in BirdEye because we help with the reviews and the ranking part. ⁓ Swell, which is a great product. know the guys who swell really well. A lot of their doctors don't rank well because they don't focus on the listings part of it or the ranking part of it. ⁓ I'm not a fan of Wee from a review perspective because they swell BirdEye and Podium, make it very easy. Weave doesn't. It's just the way we do it with our three other products. ⁓   I always say this, you can get reviews any way you want. The most effective is gonna be use some software, simple as that. But it all starts with the practice and it all starts with, I like to create a reputation culture in the practice, which means you know that every time a patient comes in the practice, that they're going to be evaluating you and reviewing you potentially. And you've gotta be on your best behavior, you've gotta put a happy smile on your face, you gotta treat them like they're the...   Kiera Dent (28:40) Mm-hmm.   Dr. Len Tau (29:00) king of the world, okay? You gotta roll out the red carpet. And if you don't do that, they may write a bad review, okay? But if you don't create that reputation culture, I think it's gonna be hard to get the practice to really accelerate the reviews. So creating that reputation culture using great verbiage skills. I love calling it feedback, not a review. If you call it a review, it sounds like you're begging for it. ⁓ The feedback conversation is much more comfortable to have. So, you know, it's an interesting situation, but if you don't ask, you don't get.   So you've got to ask. I think if you ask and you combine it with a really good software, you'll get a really good number of reviews. If you don't ask, you don't get. It's that simple.   Kiera Dent (29:30) Mm-hmm.   Yeah.   ⁓ well, that was so great. I appreciate this so much. And it's fun to hear about how AI is helping. It's fun to hear about how you still have to be great on Google. So ⁓ I just appreciate you. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate the knowledge you shared. appreciate for offices. I hope they take action and Len any last thoughts, how people can connect with you if they want more help on this. know ⁓ like truly in my opinion, this is the simplest marketing. Everybody wants to like sexy magic pill of marketing. And I'm like, no, it's like really great experience. Ask for the reviews, ask for the feedback.   like rank so that way people can find you I've had offices that had like three four or five new patients and they're like I need this marketing I need all these things which I'm not here to say not to do it but I will say great reviews will boost you very quickly so Len any last thoughts you've got how people can connect with you because it's been truly just an incredible episode today   Dr. Len Tau (30:26) So ⁓ I'm around the country a lot. So you can always connect with me in person if I'm at some of these events. If you wanna come to Supercharge, you can connect me there. SuperchargeYourDentalPractice.com You can use the code RAVING to save $100 on registration. ⁓ We also have some scholarships available. So if you do wanna come, you can reach out to me personally. So ⁓ my cell phone's all over the internet. The easiest way, if you have any questions, you want advice, you want help, I'm the guy to reach out to. My phone number is 215.   Kiera Dent (30:40) Awesome.   Dr. Len Tau (30:55) 292-2100. And my best email is Len, L-E-N, at drlentau.com, which is D-R-L-E-N-T-A-U.com. And you can email me, you can text me, you can call me, tell me you heard about me here and you need some advice. I'm more than happy to offer it to you. I do it all the time. ⁓ I love when people reach out to me because they know I'm an expert. So I do it kind of as a favor to people. ⁓ But no, you reach out to me, I'm happy to give advice.   Kiera Dent (31:23) amazing. Len, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm super excited for Supercharge 2025 and especially 2026. So everybody snag that. And truly, I hope you take action from today's podcast. This is easy ways for you to boost your marketing, be found and seen online. And Len, thank you for joining me today. I truly, truly appreciate you.   Dr. Len Tau (31:41) Thank you for having me, Kiera, I appreciate it.   Kiera Dent (31:43) Of course. And for all of you listening, thank you for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

They say new York drinking water is some of the cleanest— don't buy it! I saw a billboard that said 8 glasses of tap water will prevent a heart attack. That's because it already has so much asprin in it! Yooo! Don't drink that! “Some of the cleanest drinking water in the country” Then what the fuck is in the tap water in the rest of the country?! New York tap water ain't right! It's not. Even my brita filter is like “Well, I'll do my best” But it doesn't. I drink tap water out the brita filter and I'm still like “Well geez, I'm sleepy” Fuck that. I moved to New York and had to double triple my budget for water. “New York tap water is “potable” What doe ther even mean. Notice it's not the word “safe” or “healthy” or “clean” It's “potable” Which means— It passes for people we don't really consider people anyway. If you can't afford a real clean water then you deserve whatever's in this mess here— “It's potable” Don't trust that. This is coming from the same government that tried to tell us ketchup was a vegetable. KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE = NEW YORK DRINKING WATER IS SAFE TO DRINK. THIS IS THE SAME LIE. TRANSACRIPT: (Uncorrected, cause this is a lot of words.) We'll see how bad it gets. Good morning Krusty crew! you guys are Kusty crew now. I'm sure at least a few of you listeners are Krusty, like my morning voice. Hello. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. I'm just kidding. They're not paying me. However, I always have like a particular difficulty, like retrieving my Amazon fresh order, and I'm pretty sure so that it's it's so that I can come back on here and be like,Yo, okay, like what the fuck is up with Amazon? And allthough I don't think they need advertising. I haven't seen an actual television and like years, but I've never seen a commercial for Amazon. I've never seen a commercial like they don't need it. They fucking totally cornered the market on every fucking thing you need. Everything. like to the point that some people are like specifically like anti-amazon, which I don't know, I think I want to pride myself on being anti-amon for a while, but really Amazon was like anti-me. They're like your identity. You're sketchy. Now, who are you? I like I couldn't I couldn't Amazon for the longest time and it caused me the greatest difficulty in my life. I was literally paying like more for everything that I needed period. There was no like there was no finagling. I just love finagling. I don't know why. There't there was no getting around it. Like I couldn't just like oh, like here's a here's a fucking alternative to Abbott, there's no alternatives. Like I found companies in the process of doing that that I do like, but like I still have to revert back to Amazon because like most of those companies are like really good, like sustainable companies and like organic companies and like even small businesses, but at the same time, because they are those things, they cost me more and so it's like I can't afford like not to do this anyway. what's going on? We get an episode today. Well, we get we get an episode. We according to this Amazon hall, by the way took two days, like I thought that I was making an order because I was well, here here it is. It's like this was my equivalent for like drunk ordering anything. I don't drink. But if there, you know, if there's like a close, you know, like, I don't know. I don't think I could actually manage to my indigenous heritage kind of grants me like a certain functionality when drinking, although there's like a level. There's like a limit. Like I go from completely functional and like cooperative to no, like very quickly. So I don't think that I could be the type of like blacked out drunk person to order on Amazon. But if I were, this is this is the order I would have made. I guess you could I guess you could kind of compare the fact that like I went out after, what, two days of not working out? I had to go run an errand and that was the worst. That was the worst. I went out in New York ugly for the first time and I went out in New York ugly for the first time in a long time because I I was like, okay, I learned my lesson. like don't be ugly in New York. So I went out ugly because I didn't care. I was like, okay, well, I have to do this fucking errand and everything was bad. Everything went wrong. Everything was bad because well, I mean like I blamed myself I wasn't working out. I think I ran like a considerable amount that day and did like maybe 15 minutes on the pelone, but it wasn't enough. because I I went out and like lights were flickering and there was I was like, what? fucking side dimension is this is not where I live? This is not the place, this is not the place. and so I went out and I had a horrible time, and when I came back, I was like, fuck it, I'm hungry. and I'm pretty sure I just did what's fucked up is damn, I meant to Google. I meant to Google whatever the fuck the thing is that you do before Passover. I'm pretty sure it's called Schchitz. Like I'm not 100% sure because I keep telling myself like I'm gonna Google that. Passover is literally like tomorrow. But also I just got rice. And I left lintils off of my I think lintils is a no, no. I think it's disputed. Like people are like lintels and oats and some people are like yes, and some people are like no. And I'm like,Yo, dude, well, I'm vegan. And a lot of Jews are not, so I mean, like can't we just like substitute, but like the whole point of schitz or whatever you call it, I need to look it up. I'm pretty sure it's Fish. Sch fits like 90% sure, but that's I mean like 90 still 90's and A. It's a low A, but it's an A. And so I think it's something close. I think it starts with the S and ends with a Z like most Jewish and or Yiddish slang terms. or words. I don't know, I love Jews. I'm obsessed with them. I've been thinking about going to like actual services on Saturdays. However, I I like I find it hard to actually move myself on Saturdays in New York. I'm like there's too much. It's too much. It's too much. I don't wanna be out. fuck this. I don't wanna go out even if it's like too a Jew church, like it might be worth it. Especially if it was like like you know, nothing like Mormon church, not in the middle of the day for five hours. Not in the middle of the day for five hours, it might be. I mean, like I don't I don't know. I don't know anything about the actual, like I don't know anything about that shit. I just have it somewhere in my body. I'm like Jew things. hello Jews. anyway. it's no secret. I love Jews. I love Mormons. I actually like all the people. especially people who practice religiously like religiously. I'm like, oho, dude, like, well, I mean like they're extremists, but they're extremists atheists. so I mean like both of like just to be an extremist in any way is wrong. I worked very, very minimally for in for an extremist vegan last year, and I'm still traumatized by it. I still like he grabbed my backpack to keep me from fucking catching the bus and which, by the way, was the day that I lost my wallet. I specifically blame that. like I blame him for that. like I dropped my wallet because he was like, oh, we have to do this or we have to do a group hug. And he like, I was like, oh, nope, my bus is coming and he grabbed the in and he grabbed the back of my backpack and like for some reason now he grabbed the back of my backpack and I was like, what the fuck you doing? He was like, we have to do a group hug. And then I was like, yo, and then I ended up running for the bus and like g getting paid and not having my wallet with me by the time I got back to my apartment, cause I was like shaking him. I was like, the fuck are you pulling on me? Now every time I get every time I get caught on something, I cuss that motherfucker out. like, I don't know. I don't know if it has any direct, like effect on him, cause like every time, every time I get caught on something, and I feel like the motion of a pull, I I just start cussing him out in my brain. I'm like,uck this dude. I hate you. But anyway, I hated him for a lot of reasons. I didn't quit that job cause he paid in cash at the end of each day. It was like he was like one of those horrible people that's like bro, I don't like and everybody knew it and everybody like tipted and walked on eggshells around this motherfucker. But like he paid in cash. He paid in cash tax free at the end of each day, so it was like, yo, if you could get through the end of each day without quitting, you get your whole paycheck today, which and he was paying like a pretty living wage like over minimum wage for New York. So I was like, okay, all right. But I think that I think that was the game. It was like I was supposed to quit because he was like he was terrible. and it was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm like, he pays in cash. At the end of the day, like all I have to do is suffer through this fruit. however long it takes to get cash at the end of the day. Then I drop my wallet and that was a terrible thing because he paid in cash at the end of the day and I dropped my wallet and nobody's turning in a fucking wallet with a full paycheck of cash in it. So I never got that wallet back and then I well, we could call it like a draw not too long after because he he was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm going to make you quit. I'm like, you will not make me quit. I will get paid cash at the end of this day. Cash. Anyway, anyway, it's tax free cash, daily, I'll be back. Anyw, what's going on? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Was that saying something about Amazon? Oh, extremists. I mean, like I don't I don't think that has anything to do with anything, but being extreme oh, he is extremist vegan. Like he would do mean things to you to try to make you be like oh, I give up meat completely and like veganism is one of those things where it's like it's like alcoholism. Like you have to be ready to change. You get or like ear anything, honestly. like any kind of whatever, like you can't make a person do anything until they're ready. Like you can try, but like most of the time the behavior is just gonna revert back to itself like overeating not working out not working out, like the sugar, like dietary changes, like pretty much any like major behavioral changes have to be initiated by that person for like a personal reason. Like you and even if you are going to convince them to change in some way, you have to like you have to suit them. You have to make it kind of seem like it's their idea. Like you can't just force your ideas onto somebody and be like, oh, you're you know what, you're right. Like I would change because you were this fucking mean to me. I'm like, that doesn't make actually, you know what, after a year of going out at New York, I was like, fine. And then I remembered why because I was like, it's not that bad, whatever, sweatuit and I had fucking I've been getting a lot of work done, so I had my nails like Cardi B long for a while, but then I was like, this is inefficient. if for the things that I have to do, like the amount of things that I have to do with my hands, I can get all this done quicker and then do my nails again later as's not gonna be like that big of a deal, because it, you know, like it you do just figure out a different way to do things with your hands. It's like almost like the nails aren't there, except for typing. And I type very fast and I work very fast, so I'm like, okay, like, these nails gotta go. And so they went. And so I've just been down back to bare bones and like natural hair and no makeup and like yo, yesterday, yes, because I did this twice because I was like once you do it once, I was like I was already like in the bottom of like people scowling at me and shit. So I was like, okay, well, you know, scowls, whatever, I can do this again because I have like one more errand and this dude, this kid this kid that works at the Walgreens was like, oh, I thought you were a terrorist. Like, he didn't say that, but he did. He was like he was like, I thought you were gonna lay down and like, I thought it was over. I thought you were gonna like pull out a can of C4 and blow us all up. And I was like, what? And I forgot that I was like usually like when I go out pretty people treat me nice cause duh. felt like when I go out like regular, people are like oh, like oh, like I'm like, oh, is it that bad? That's what I told the kid, cause I forgot like, I'm just so used to like, I'm still the same consciousness. I'm still the same personality on the inside like it don't matter like, you know, like I just ran here. I I'm like high on endorphins or whatever. likeT's like he was like, oh, like, oh, and I was like, oh, God, is it that bad? I have like a cone head because I'm wearing a bun, but I'm also wearing a hat and a hood, cause it's been nicely cold. It's been great and I I'm worried about the environment cause it's not raining. It's spring, like we're about the hop straight from like the dead of winter to summer and it like and I know it's almost summer because it was like 9 pm last night and the sun had just gone down. I was like, oh, that's fucked up. It's spring again. I was like no, as bad news. It's like that's bad news. It hasn't rained once. Like how are the fucking people? Like, what is the birth doing? Because I mean, like the P people are bad. Well, I mean, like no, not necessarily. I just hadn't like, honestly, the people are always the same. It's like perception, so like when I do my hour on the pelotone and my mild minimum run or whatever, and then I go out into the world, I'm like literally don't like all that shit like bounces off of me. Like the people are still shitty. I'm sure of it. but like I'm just just don't care. It's like a shield live like indoor friends feeling at my peak. That's what I feel. But lately I haven't been feeling great so I haven't been working out, so I haven't I haven't been feeling great because I haven't been working out and it is it has the possibility to be what's it called a vicious cycle, but it did it. Like I was I realized it right away that I was like, oh, this is this is wrong. This is wrong, I don't live here. I don't live here, and I had a very good hour on the pillot last night because two two days ago, I was like, oh, this is this is what happened. I went out and I came back and I was feeling like negative. I was like, no, that was a bad experience. I' hungry now because, you know, sometimes anxiety causes my stomach to churn in a way that's like just fill it with something. And I'm like, okay, usually I understand like anxiety, eating and I can avoid it. Like I understand that like, okay, this is stress or whatever. and I can like, you know, just fill my stomach with water as I'm not hungry. I'm like nervous. I'm not hungry I have anxiety. Like most of the time people eat because they're bored, not because they're hungry. And so I'm like, you know, I'm I don't I haven't I don't mind at all. And so I kind of refuse to allow myself to get bored, but like I do notice like like I eat more when I put like, okay, this this Amazon hall says to me that I'm about to make some ball music because it is the equivalent of something that's like I would have done in a state of like a different state of mind or consciousness as if I were drinking. This this like, okay, like our only emptied it pre-pisode because I was sure that I was like, oh, I know I have ice cream in here. I finally found the fucking bin and Jerry's that I wanted. I was so sick of going to the store and looking through fucking like container after container of bin and Jerry's and not finding the one that I rigid like the first one that I picked up, the first time that I decided like, I'm going to give n non-air Ben and Jerry's a try. I've tried all the other expensive fucking ice creams vegans, and I'm for the most like oh, this one's kind of got like ice chips in it's like freezer burnt tasting this one melts funny and turns into like a gelatinous goo. So I'm like okay Ben and Jerry's like knows what the fuck they're doing and they do what's fucked up about Ben and Jerry's is they're non-airy tastes and is texturized, like they regular ice cream. So it's like the closest thing to regular ice cream. I don't get paid by the way, by any of these people. However, I am like now getting into like the the likeet verse of doing things because I have to because I'm like I make too much music for people not to know about it. Like whether it's gonna be like mediocre bass music or eventually like, I don't know, the most legendary bass music of all time. I now have goals. Well, I mean, like I kind of entered into this DJ thing with like the one thing. I was like, okay, like, if I can't be this, like, what is the point of being like anything else if I can't be this good at doing that, like why would I even like and then I realized I'm like, oh, I'm doing like a house oriented sets, but like, yo, I came here for dubstep. Like, what? oh, are we going to talk about some? We have to talk about subtrronics because I can't I'm like, yo, I can't like, what? Like, I understand as a like, I'm I'm a double fan now because I okay, let's finish all these things. Don't go out in New York ugly. Just don't be ugly in New York. Just don't do it. Just try. just try. just try and New York will give you back an energy what you fucking like it's you you get out of it what you put in. Just try, try. I see people wearing less croccks now. This is good, like, but my equivalent of not wearing crocs is like yo like hair and makeup every day, like non-negotiable. Don't be ugly. I'm like, okay, all right, whatever. I get an out, that kid was like, oh, are you a terrorist? I was like, what the fuck, kid? Like, you were you were nice to me the other day. I'm the same person. I'm the same person making the same transaction, what the fuck? Anyway, so I got back from my errands feeling just totally destroyed. and I made this Amazon hall, but I thought that I was gonna eat in a few hours, whatever I was ordering instead of two days from when I was ordering, they were like, oh no, this is the next available delivery window. I was like that is a deficit to like my like, what if I don't want it two days from now? This is technically an impulse decision based on the fact that I'm reacting badly to whatever the fuck just happened outside. Actually, you know what, though. I just unpacked this fucking Amazon hall, which, by the way, I get the most expensive and non-exciting Amazon haul of all time. The only is like of all time, every time I order Amazon, I'm disappointed unless dish soap or like, I don't know, cleaning supplies. I get like a certain I'm like, yes, it's here. Lysyle has a new fucking scent that I'm just I adore it. I'm like, yo, yo, this doesn't smell like anything I've smelled before for like cleaning. It's like the fabulosa ofysol, which why haven't I just been using fabuloso? Fabuloso used to be mad cheap. Now everybody like caught on to the fact that fabuloso is one of the best multiurpose cleaners ever like of all time. No, they're not paying me either, but I don't really care. Like my whole new thing is like, my whole new thing is like everybody's like subscribe this and fucking $15 a month and like y, dude, you're sucking everybody's income out of them, like everybody who's living under a certain level of fucking like everybody who can't just buy things flat out has to buy them on a subscription and if you count up all the subscriptions like that's like the whole like the common American worker right now, like the common one, like not the, oh, I have an okay job or like, you know, you should just get an education or like, whatever you're elitist mentality makes you think that like your life and your privilege is not like your life and your privilege is your merit. That's I'm not talking about you because you skated through life on your genetics, basically, and you think that you earned what you have, but you didn't. Your grandparents and their parents did and blah, blah, blah, and your lucky that way. But the rest of us are out here like $15 a month for this $20 a month for that. and it adds up to like your entire income is like, okay, after your living expenses like you're still gonna be in like a pretty unshakable amount of debt. because you're like, okay, well, I mean, like I can't afford to do it flat out. Like if I did all these subscriptions at once, flat out, and each of them is like 200 hundred a year, if I did them all flat out, I would be like, I don't know, like at least 5K like a year just like at once. I don't have that. Most people don't have that. and so it's like, okay, well, you can break it down and this is how the businesses are fucking people. They're like oh well, I mean like you can pay for it monthly but it's actually more monthly. Like you save money if you do it yearly, but it's like oh, but if I need everything pretty much all at wants if I need everything pretty much all at once and I can't afford to do everything all at once by the year, I'm actually going to pay more doing it by the month, but I can only afford to do it by the month. So this is the thing that's like fucking with me. I'm like, oh, you guys are fucking with people. What's my point? Oh, I don't know, oh, everybody's being fucking greedy as fuck, which is is just leaving a bad taste in my mouth for humanity at all. I'm like, you greedy motherfuckers. Like, I might live this life in an in an ideal way for now, but it is a temporary space of like discomfort in order for me to observe and understand, like, how better my energy can be suited in the next don't I don't. I mean, like my next incarnation needs to be like a body list, like orb of air and light. Like that's I don't want another like human body, because first of all the planet is like unless you guys find like another habitable planet. and like, I'm not in the I'm not in the fucking level yet where they're gonna be like, oh, like you're fucking worth saving, like we'll take you to our like, we'll take you to our Elysium in space, where only the elite people and the people that we deem worthy will be here and we'll leave like pretty much Hollywood's been telling us forever. They're like, yo, we're gonna leave all the poor ugly, colored people on this planet. and like, when this planet is like destroyed by it by pretty much our doing. And we're gonna like float on some kind of system and space because we have no idea for like a second, like a close enough habitable planet for us to then, like just move on to, like, I don't care what you say, like repopulating Mars is dumb. It is dumb. It is dumb. It's not a fucking it's not a happy place. Like because at one point, because at one point it was a habitable planet. And guess what? we're we're pretty destructive species. It's just historically and like beyond historically, because typically once we destroy ourselves, like as a species, all of our knowledge all of our knowledge and records are destroyed with us. So we have this like, we have this sense of knowing within our like within our mega that's like, oh, if something happened here. But what? And some people have actually access to that within their minds and within their consciousness. It's like, oh yeah, it's like, like, yeah, a lot ofass music producers are like, what, you think I'm from here? I don't give a fuck about this. I don't give a fuck about this. I'm like, I get it. Like this is just for now. This is just for now. I might be included in this, but also I'm like, yo, dude, like I'm pretty environmental when it comes down to like this planet is, you know, anyway. was I just saying, don't be ugly in New York. Oh, okay, so I made this Amazon fucking hall, like a drunk fucking person. Although, like a drunk person, I was kind of looking out for my future self because there's a lot of stable, like there's a lot of pantry staples in here that's like, bro, you won' run out of food. like you might have rice blowat, but you won't run out of food because sometimes I do sometimes I spring so much for the organic and for the like for the like vitamin packs, like superfoods they call it superfoods, but those are just regular foods. Like if you strip down all the foods that are not foods, like all the foods that are actually just like chemical and overprocessed, like if you took all those things off the planet, because they shouldn't exist really anyway. Like you would be left with what they call superfoods or what they market as superfoods that are actually just foods. like, no, these are the foods that you were technically like designed to eat. These are the foods that will fuel your energy for whatever the fuck you have to take on. This is the food that you're like you're made to eat. But they call it superfoods and market it as such and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just got bored. Anyway, what the fuck was that saying? Oh, I took I had like had a hand and creating my next masterpiece. Because I got things that I typically don't. I'm I don't fuck with things like that, like snack foods. But as I said before, like we're not produced that snack, I really do, and I haven't been snacking because I'm like, oh dude, like it's not worth it. I'm I'm New York vein like also have these DJs are just like so skinny, and I'm just like, oh, this body shaving, you can't say that or. I'm like, no, like I aspire to be that. so that people actually pay attention not for what I'm doing, but how I look. So trust me, I'm assimilating. I really am. Oh, which, by the way, I have a discord now. I don't know what the fuck it's for. I have no idea I also have a twitch. I have a twitch. There's nothing on it. I have I have pretty much everything. I even got a Snapchat. I haven't had a sn Snapchat since Ollie died because Ollie was my only sn Snapchat friend as it I have a sn Snapchat. This is all for music though. It's not like when I think about it, I'm like oh, this is the dumbest fucking shit ever and I'm do it when I'm fucking I'm actually figuring out like I'm using like I have TikTok eww and well what's great about it is I am using it like as a business tool so I'm not stuck on the shit like I'm not I am scrolling now, but not I'm like what's weird is like my energy is like looking for something. I'm like oh like okay, like this DJ posted something or like this might want a free copy of my fucking of my music to play or whatever. So I should hit them up. Like as I'm using it as a business platform more than like a social platform because I'm just not just not a social person. It doesn't make sense to be, but now I'm understanding like with the feedback that I'm getting that like, oh, this is how you do it. Like I'm not gonna get a job in this industry unless I assimilate to like what I'm hoping doesn't happen is that I assimilate too much because now all of a sudden I'm like I should get a vape I should get a vape like all the kind that I like are illegal in New York. And I'm actually really proud of the fact that I quit vaping when I got here like when I got here because I was thinking that I was traveling outside of the country and like I didn't want to be like I don't know, traveling outside of the US makes me feel like I'm an ambassador for my country so I don't want to represent my country badly. However, I feel like the actual chosen representatives of the country are not doing like the greatest job. so it doesn't matter what I do like because they are technically the ambassadors to this country like they like I'm pretty much aware like a stamp on my head that has their fucking face and or name on it when I go outside the country anyway I don't know I I usually try to assimilate in that way when I travel outside of the country like learn to speak like you're not American because most countries have an opinion about that. They're like oh you're an American deer, they're you're stupid. I'm like I'm not arguing. How many miles is a kilometer? Can you translate this before we hold up? Let me get Google translate? I'm I'm American, man. I'm American to the point where I have the fucking math doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't make sense. Apple pie, I yeah, apple pie. However, though, I realized because of this, and my indigenous heritage, I have kind of like a like a weird, I don't know, I can't I amm not sure. Like I think because of the way that I've decided to craft my lifestyle, I have like kind of an upperhand advantage at like understanding culture, like understanding culture just culturally, like what has happened from like the inside of the like the like the corporate, like conglomerate capitalists, like like set epicenter. Well, I don't know. I've been reading enough about China to be like wow, China. Also, I't I'm loving this. I'm getting I'm getting feedback on my fucking like my what's it called? My stats or whatever. And I don't have a lot of fans and followers, which is sad, which by the way, if you're listening to this, like check check out my other big gold check out the YouTube. It's at the festival project by the way YouTube YouTubeube.com slash at because it's weird that they have like for their backslashes, but it's at the festival project I'm the festival project. There's a whole bunch of people trying to really like I've been telling people that my project is the festival project for a while and now all these people are coming out of nowhere like I'm the festival project. I'm like, you are not. Like, you are not the festival project. Stop lying on yourself. I'm the festival project. I've always been the festival project, at the festival project, that's me, not anybody else. That's you, technically, like the letter you, with no check mark because I'm not paying for that shit. Would I become notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, they'll put the fucking check mark on it for me. I ain't paying for it. I'm paying for it the fuck that like that's like you could buy a grabby award now. I'm sure that you can. I' 100% sure that you could do that. Which is sad and it's likeo, dude, I actually like I what's it? I I don't know. I think I come from a weird world where it's like I hold the academy to like such high regard that it's like I'm like the fact that I'm like pretty certain that you could buy a Grammy makes me sad because it's like like I don't know this whole oh, that's what I was saying. I'm giving away all my shit for free because everybody's greedy motherfuckers. Like I'm giving away my music for free like the album that I dropped yesterday all the rage is 100% free. All you have to do is go on my website and download it. That's it like you don't even have to spend money on a subscription for a streaming service like you could just go get that at my website www.mU.uru. That's the website you can just download whatever the fuck I haven't put all my music up there because honestly I'm I'm realizing how much music I have and like how long I've been making music and I'm like, oh you're like oh okay, first of all, I'm like it's gonna be it's hard it's hard enough for me to just format it and put it on a flash drive just to like have all my music together because I've made it over time and so the expand it it's just a lot like it's just a lot all my music's not in one place, all my mixtapes are not in one place. I just got to sound cloudy yesterday. I only got a SoundCloud to enter a fucking beat making contests the first time I've ever done anything like that like I've entered DJ contests so I can try to get a job, but I've never done a beat making contest, so I've never had to actually like condense my creative space into like a one minute thing. And so, I don't know, I really enjoyed doing that, but it's not something that I was looking at the other contest, they were like, it's for a clout. I'm like, that's stupid. I don't want to waste time on clout. Cloths not gonna pay my bills, anyhho. Clout. Oh, what was I saying? Oh, I was supposed to talk about subtrronics, my Galypes, refrigerator. These Ecuadorian bananas. Okay, I have a like I eat a lot of bananas because bananas and for whatever reason, if found bananas like synonymous with New York City, I always have even before before I lived here, I think it's just because it was like the cheapest thing that I could find is like bananas like bananas. That's what I gonna eat bananas. So I always just kind of like for some reason it was like, oh, from in New York, I need bananas. Now I live in New York and I'm like I see why. But now I'm like my flavor palate is changing to be more specific and so I'm like a banana connoisseur, but I finally like I landed on a I landed on bananas. I landed on bananas that I just love so much. First of all, they're huge, they're huge. I also like these really tiny bananas that are like sweet and little and like they have a very specific taste, and I like the red ones, and yo, that lady when I lived in Mexico, she was so elusive, like she came she was the only lady in the whole place with red bananas and like these red, these really tiny red bananas have like the like they're the best bananas I've ever tried. But the second bananas, the second best bananas I've ever tried are Ecuadorian bananas. and I'm like, yo, dude, first of all, they are huge. Like they're big thick, they're like big, they're big and they're d they're big, big, perfectly sized bananas. good girth. good, nice, just good bananas. They're huge. and uh I don't know, like I started going to the store and then I stopped going to it because rac is oops, I'm not supposed to say that. I I just realize something. I realize something about the world like that you can't even you can't even insinuate like a conversation about race. Like people people will get like people start to get upset, like one way or another. Like I said, extremism on both sides exists. I don't like I can't I'm I'm post racial. Like I can't pick a side anyway like you're gonna put me on one side or another based on your perception of who I am or what I do but like I'm completely like I'm like literally the most neutral thing that ever like literally the most neutral thing that ever. And so what was I just saying, oh, I don't know, I went into a hole. Acuadorian bananas. We'll just we'll just re her back to Acuadorian bananas. Yes, extremism, no. Ecuadorian bananas, yes. They are the best. They are the best, and not only is the size perfect, but the flavor of the banana is just a little bit different from like Guatemalan bananas or Mexican bananas, like no, Ecuadorian bananas. And so now I've gotten into the habit of like, I found another store that has Ecuadorian bananas, thank goodness, because like when I stopped going to the other store, I was like god damn it, they have the Ecuadorian bananas. like that was the one thing from there that I liked and the Uber pancakes. But we'll it's okay. That controversial episode, which I'm like, what's it called? referencing may or may not er. I need to it's like a twohour episode that I did in an emotional kind of turmoil. I need to check that episode to see if I want to air it. It might it might not. Like it could just be like deleted, because I felt like it was forced. I was like why are you try why are you trying to make me act out of my fucking character? Fuck you. Like I don't like when people try to force things. So that sometimes happens where people will come out of the woodwork and be like, talk about this experience. And I'm like, "Yo, dude, you just cornered me into making me feel like unsafe and not great. I don't necessarily and then it was like the energy was like, okay, I have to talk about this, but I didn't like the way that it made me feel. So the fact that it felt forced was like eh but I definitely earned that next tattoo. I'm I'm behind on tattoos I have two tattoos that I have to get it. I definitely earn that one. I earn that one with the help of Erica body, but I'll explain that in some in the multiverse and legends things later. I don't understand how things work sometimes in the universe, but that was one of those things I was like this is this is not even a synchronicity. This is like a this is an experience. We'll see if that episode's worth posting, but either way, I in the tattoo, I earn the tattoo beforehand, that was just the solidification, I think. Anyhho. what the fuck is I say? Ah, Ecuore bananas, yes, yes. Because it makes me think like like, if their bananas are like this, what are their women like? Like, I could give no fucks about the men. I'm not a lesbian, but like, I'm thinking in the way of like a I'm thinking in the masculine way that's like, you know, if they're bananas tastes like this, like, what are their women like Ecuadorian bananas? I think about that, because I'm like yod dude, like my taste profile is based on my diet. So, if these bananas come from Euador, like, what else comes from Ecuador that's fucking perfect. probably women. I don't believe in perfect men. I mean, like perfect looking, sure, perfect acting, sure, a combination of these things to together, rare, but like a per perfect women exist all over the place. Like perfect men. I don't think is a thing. I don't think it is. And that's not me being sexist or like because honestly, if you listen to the way that I speak, like being like a I don't have a preference for gender, just don't be a fucking sh shit hole of a human being. Like I don't care what you are, how you are, like just be cool, you know, like B peaceful and mind your manners and shut the fuck up. I mean like I'm not trying to silence people, but like be mindful of your environment. You know what I'm saying? Be mindful of people around you because there are so many there so many. And you are the focus I to try to say Acuadorian bananas, yes, as good. Are we ready to talk about subronics? Did I talk about all my websites and stuff? We have a discord. It's I think you can find me on discord at blue the guru and it's the same on twitch. I haven't posted anything to twitch yet. I did. I did tape a couple of my performances, but they were horrible. They were horrible and honestly they were just so that I could enter a contest so I could try to get a job. Like that was it. I did that. I was like, well, I have to do something because you you miss 100% percent of the chances you don't take. I believe truly in that so like I would rather enter something that's like mediocre and at least be on the radar and be like, hey, I'm trying. Like I'm really trying with all the things that like all the things that I'm going through and all the work that I have to do like I'm at least trying to get my work seen and I'm at least trying to put it out there and like, you know, the odds of me winning at something like that, especially if it is last minute and it is like mediocre and I know it's not my best performance, which, by the way, I think okay, people really like, oh, this is what I was saying about my audience. One, people really like talkatoo. That's one of my first actual productions, okay? It has almost no technique whatsoever. Well, it does, and I I did work like really hard on it, but like yo, I made that song in a tree, literally a tree, like like a tree. People like this song. It's for some reason gotten really popular, like no out of nowhere. Like people are like this song. I'm like, really? I made that in a tree with no plugins, no I'm pretty sure it's all stock samples. People love it. People love that song, but honestly it is one of my like it is it like it mixes with everything, talking to like if you need like a filler song and I think it is long enough that's like, yo, dude. Like, if you need to go to the bathroom or whatever, like this song is like the song rocks. And honestly, I don't know why that well, I mean, like that song is special. It was the first song I ever heard played back on a system at a festival. because I was like, like here's my music, whatever. And I didn't expect because the DJ was like,, you suck. And I was like, and just be just looking at me because I like ran up during a fucking uh, like a power outage at this fucking rave. I was like, yo, like this this might be the only time that I could actually talk to the you you miss 100% of the chances you don't take. So I was like, okay, like, this might be the only time I could talk to this guy. The power just went out and I was like, then now is my chance because like otherwise mid party and it was a good party, like it was a good one. It was a good it was it was a good one. It was a really great. It was a really great. um but, yeah, that was the first time I ever heard my music played back because I like ran up and I was like yod like here here's me, here's my music, here's a flas I have like you could keep it. has my music on it and it had I think at the I think it just had copy and paste on it like that whole EP was done and so a copy and paste is just talk to this other song called Nero, which has me like hand drumming on it, which is a cool song too. I use the Ableton push. I love the Ableton push and I had to forfeit it because it wasn't going back in my luggage. I couldn't afford it. So somebody fucking I feel charitable about this. Somebody inherited a $1200 at the time that it's depreciated, somebody inherited what I paid $1200 for for free, I think we're even. Anyway, um I add in uteroakatu and 43 on it. That's copy and paste and like, I I ran up during a blackout and I was like here. like, here's my stuff. And he was so annoyed. The DJ was so fucking annoyed. He was like, what are you saying? Like, and if they were like, the powers are, we can't get the power to come back on. so like people had started like a drum circle over in the corner and some people were leaving, they're like, you know, when the power goes out of a fucking festival or a rave like first of all, it's not a it's not a slammer. Like it's not a banging fucking festival and or rave if the power doesn't go out at least once or the cops come. Like if there's no raid, people don't get raided these days, do they? Yeah, that used to bring like a certain element of fucking like fear and excitement that like, yo, this party might only last five minutes. Let's get it anyway. It's New York old New York rave culture. hey, they're having a party over here because we're having a party over here but like shut down that party. Snitches in New York have always been a thing. like, if somebody over there is doing something that competes with your business, like you snitch on them, that would that's old school dance music culture. That's what they used to do, like those little preppy and we're not gonna put a color to it, but those little preppy boys that were like doing the old school, like underground, like break it in raves. Like that's what they were doing. They were like, oh, he's uh doing a there's a party over here in a secret place over here that shouldn't be. But those people were also doing a party and they wanted all the fucking people to come to their party and said that that party. So they were just snitch. They were just like hey, I got a tip. I got a tip on these motherfuckers. And then and then the other party would get shut down and everybody would be like, rolling balls, be like okay, we're still need a I need a party, like where's the other party? And there would always be somebody from the other party there to like usher people to the other party, like, I know where the party is. Yeah, these people. Anyway, I have I have such a love for the culture. What what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, one people have talked to which I made in a tree. That's almost that's almost discouraging. I'm like, yo dude, I'm footing in all this fucking like putting in all this extra work and like this fucking sound design and engineering and like trying to fucking trying to achieve subtronics but sober. Ha ha I'm like, uh, I'm also like ten years older than this kid. at least, excuse me, I don't know what the fuck is happening. Coffee early in the morning. Is my nose running or is it just like, oh, it's almost summer, so we're getting moist in the bitch, like we're just gonna get tepid for the next six months with no rain. Like it's gonna be like the moistures in the air. Enjoy that crawls. anyway I need to figure out what the fuck is schitz is or if that's what it's called. the longer I stay in New York. The easier it is for the old Jew and me to fucking arise. Ugh Anyway, what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, I love this about my statistics. My fans, although there are a few of them are speckled all over the world. I still don't know where Kazakhan is. but I think I have I have a couple listeners in Kazakhstan and they're in two different cities. I'm like that's pretty incredible to me. I was likeYo, dude, where the fuck is Kazakh stand? I don't know. I also found like, okay, like I don't I don't know where half these places are, but like I don't wanna go there although this place this one particular place I'm like oh dude, I don't know where the fuck you're at. I don't know where the fuck you're at and nobody knows where the fuck you're at cause I tried to look you up on a map and it was too distinctively like non places. I was like, is it this place or this place? And they're like it could be this place where that place? And I'm like cracked, but where is it? They're like nowhere, don't worry about it. I'm like damn! Okay, but I have a family there, so that's cool. I got fans all over the world, but they're like speckled. They're not, you know, by the hundreds or millions or billions. Are we gonna talk about that? Eventually, eventually, yes, we'll talk about my love of late night television. Yes, we have talked about that. But not right now. Because that could easily take up a whole episode, easily take up a whole episode. If you ever want to know the state of like if you ever want to know the state of mainstream, America, just check late night, because honestly, that's just like an anchor man dressed up in a little monkey suit as to whatever the fucking day people were talking about reiterated for the night people to understand. It's the same news. They are part of the news networks. I've just realized this cause I'm like oh no that's more like entertainment oh, it's the news. It's just the news kind of funny. It's just the same news that like whatever the NBC oh no, okay, like let's not NBC. Oh, yeah, NBC is doing enough right now. like go. No wonder why they didn't want causeby to buy the network, they would've fucked up their plans. He would have fucked up their plans. I'm like, I don't know what he was gonna do with MBC, but like he would have fucked up whatever they're doing now. That's why they prevented that. They were like, no. no, we have plans. They they're for the foreseeable future. Anyway, let's not NBC, because there's also CBS and uh that's it. At this point, I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're just like moving towards like the like a mass conglomeration of like, we're all the same. I'm like kind of like, and what's funny is they outfit themselves to pretend that they're like, I like this is so funny how left leaning it is when like all y' motherfuckers swing right easily. But I'm like, okay, I understand that this is for the masses, the masses are left swing. I'm like, okay, this is politics again, let's not do this. But everything is, it really is. Anyway, oh my go, what'll talk about my love for late night honor diff episode completely. Well, I mean, like we have a season devoted to it. We do, because I'm like, oh, they have to be like included in this in into the multiverse in legends, because like basically all of the mainstream pop culture like go like flows through late night TV. like that's where it goes. Like if you heard about it, you probably heard about it on late night TV because it is media like that's like anybody who's anybody goes through late high TV. I will not talk about all of I mean like there's so many different there's not really variations. I just said what it is. They're basically anchormen that are disguised not as anchorman. They are giving you the same news from the morning time news or the daytime talk shows, but watered down so that it seems like different news, but it's not as the same news all day. They work for the network, the network works for the dest network work for it themselves. What the fuck? I haven't figured this out yet, like on an intellectual level, I'm starting to, but it's one of those things where it's like mm kid, curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity killed and skinned many cats. Don't look here. I'm like, I got it, I get this. I got it, shut up. Shut up. Let me sit my fucking mug. guys when it comes down to it, I am assimilating well enough to be like, okay, I'm on Instagram twitch. Fucking I'm on Twitter, which is now X. I don't know. I think so. I have it. It's there like I don't use it or anything, but like I'm trying to see what the engagement for this upcoming season will be and if it works, then it works, but I have kind of thought about shooting this podcast in like a if I'm going to do anything, it's going to be anhilate night format where I have like a specific set of like this is what we're going to talk about. I do have a monkey suit picked out. I do have that because I like the format. It's easier it's easier for me to digest and then regurgitate information for my fans and followers this way. Like that's I don't know, like besides the fact that like I have been studying comedy for like the better part of two years now and that I grew up screenwriting and w like, ah, I don't know, like like I get it, though. I get why I'm so like hardwired to this. It's like yo dude, like via the television, we're so comfortable with these people because it's like oh like you're in my house like Lin Letterman, you're in my house like my whole entire existence, my whole childhood. So it's like that's like familiarity to a point that you can't you can't shake it. So like you can grow up and like, you know, the next the predecessors of the next and the next any man comes and like takes over the role of the last any man, but also like evolves the masses for the next coming generation and like the traits of the like it's it's a very interesting culture. I'm obsessed. like I love late night TV. I love TV, but I love late night TV specifically and we'll talk about that more in depth. I guess at some point because I do have to explain this entire weird what seems like an offshoot season well, it was kind of an offshoot season because I lost a season. I don't know what the fuck happened to it. Well now I'm going through my hard drives and I'm like, here it is. It's in here. It's all in here. I'm like, oh, so here we will answer my question. Soon, what did I write last year? I don't know. don't know at all. I really don't. I know a post in some of it. Some of it got like mirrored back in the universe, like, did you know you wrote this? I'm like, no, it's kind of prophetic in a way. just kind of happened. It took over my body anyway. What did I write last year? I don't know. Somebody read it. Somebody read it and then I have to do I have to do more like protections for my intellectual property because yo, I wrote half the Super Bowl commercials facts. I did I did. I was like yo,ude, I wrote this. Michael documents, what the fuck you do I Google documents? Like fuck you like fuck you unless that money is going into a pool to later pay me. When I like reach a certain level as an incentive, like we know we stole this from your fucking show, which, by the way, is just available online to anybody who fucking wants to copy and paste it and the descriptions you idiot. Yeah, I'm like yeah, well I mean like I can't really afford to join the writer's guild. They're like in that respect we will rip you off. only so that I can make sure that this commercial reaches your eyes and time for you to understand that like yo, you just put this out here for free. I'm like well love is free and music should be free. Like I'm technically just taking like a bag like a like a back step to like what the fuck is happening in the corporate world, which is sucking people like it's bleeding people who are already tired dry. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to be like, you know, like like, like, yes, I put like a PayPal about me link like if you want to donate to the festival project or later the complex collective cause I will not collect donations for my nonprofit until it's actually I've actually established the nonprofit as a 501 C3 and so like like the way that I'm doing my music right now is that like half of my profit goes to the festival project, which is like my my label, my independent label and media company. But the other half of my my like income, my earned income from music or, you know, however I earn or monetize, goes to the complex collective, which is a completely nonprofit organization, like meant to contribute back to the artists and like the artist community. not just the artist community, but just like to the overall health and wellness of like the like to to humanity as a whole, I think. Well, that's what the complex collective is kind of it's it's a health and wellness based nonprofit to the charity. So my the way that I what's it the way that I credit myself is that like the I use the complex collective, which is a nonprofit, as my music publisher, so that anything from the complex collective goes into the pool for the nonprofit, because I have to like, I can't consciously go throughout the rest of my life without giving back to my community and that way. like be because the way my life has gone so far, I don't like as much as I want to volunteer, I like well, I tried and then I like the the food bank that I volunteered for was like so and they had some organizational issues. They had some uh leadership issues. And so I was like, this is actually a toxic environment, which sucks. so I decided not to do that and uh and, you know, put all my uh energy of being like a charitable person into like my own, like I'll just my own nonprofits, non-for-profit is to give back to the community to artists and people in it in like transitionary, whatever. um That's the complex collective. So that's that's why you see that. That's why you see that badge on everything. That's the nonprofit sector. It is a subsidiary to the festival project, and I'm pretty much like devote my like I pretty much devote my my uh my gains, so to speak, into like both pools. Eventually, I'll have enough to then solidify the nonprofit with a um well, I have to you know, you have to pay. It's not it's not free for nonprofit. It's not. And so that's what that is. What else was I saying? Fans all over the world? Yes, we have fans all over the world. It's really cool. A lot of these places I've never heard of, but I do I find it a little bit, uh heartwarming and chanting, like I'm a little bit magical that like I'm hitting people in like some of the major dance cities, like Sal Paulo, Brazil, and uh like like places that are Amsterdam, London, uh I have more. I have more people in the UK than I thought, but it's okay because I I like them. I like them. Well, I like people. I like people that are people. Well, people be people on it so not all the time. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, this is like this is characteristic of your species. Like this is why this is this way. Like this is this is a whole human thing. It's not attractive at all. But I think we' close to an hour, I'd had to be oh, six minutes what do I got for six minutesronics. I'm I can't okay, I love subronics like as like Won as a fan because I went to a few of his performances. I'm not gonna lie. Every time his whole audience has BO. everybody. I'm like, oh, nobody in here has D right. But I think I got my fucking I don't know, maybe it was a sign. I was I was mixing the other day like nonstop and I'd been running around and I have a special jacket that I wear when I DJ that's like a really it's like a nice, I don't know what material it is, but it's really nice, like a uh a sports jacket, like a bomber. No, it's not a bomber style. It's like a I can't I can't remember this. It's like a sports jacket, but it's this material that's really nice. it's just always been my DJ jacket. It's like my lucky DJ jacket. and uh I usually wash it like on a delicate cycle and don't put it in the dryer to keep it preserved because it's really, really nice and I had been running around for a couple days and then mixed for like a solid, I don't know, I was in there like all together, I was in there, I think like nine or ten hours and I spent most of those the most of that time, like actively mixing because my music was not it was not s synched, so I had to hand pitch everything on four decks, which was overwhelming, which, by the way, I also did not know, which is why, like you like I did post at least one of the videos. but it's I'm embarrassed. I'm wearing yellow. yellow's not a good color. I'm looking heavy as fuck, like, oh, man, they had that video in the sidebar next to this girl, that's like a size double zero model. like fucking DJ and the rainforest with like grown footage and like HD, like, and then all her videos were like, she was she was like DJing and the one was like in the rainforest. one was like on a beach. Like she just had like she was all these destinations that had the drone footage, like money, but also like beauty just like pure beauty. Like she didn't have to do good. Like her music sounded good, but like she looked awkward as fuck not being able to dance to her own music. But still, like the like what why would you be paying attention to that when A she's beautiful, that's a distraction, be drone footage of like whatever the fucked rainforest or like tropical beach, like she was everywhere. I was like fuck this bitch. And algorithm's like Toby salty. I was like, I'm a little salty because it showed my thumbnail next to her thumb nail and I was like, no, no, no no. no like, oh so bad. So now I know. I know better than to look fat. Don't be ugly in New York. I was actually in full hair and makeup with my nails done with my Cardi B style nails. Yes, I was, but the yellow shirt on camera and it wasn't the best camera. It was like so I like I I used to have a camera like that when I first got into filmmaking when I was like eight. It was like the same camera. I'm like yo, this is bad. It's really bad. But, you know, all that's investments, investments. I don't think it's gonna be even I don't think it's gonna be any better, which, by the way, some people are delusional, bro. I just got Snapchat. I haven't had Snapchat since Allie died so I've been like I've been away from like that whole world and like seeing first of all, people actually pay money to dress their fucking, like, what are those things called? their little animated. Like, okay, you're paying money to put clothes on a on a 2D creature, you are dumb. That's why they do that, though. I'm like, oh, I need this forage shirt for my fucking Snapchat animated thing. I'm like, that's stupid. I mean, like if you got it. But still, even if you got it, it seems like I could have a million dollars and I still wouldn't spend a dollar to dress a fucking animime character. That's stupid. I like that's stupid. However, these are the same people that are posting actual like I could never post a selfie without filter on, cause I'm looking at myself in the camera with no make up and no hair and like just ugly. And I'm looking at myself in the camera and then one of these filters comes on and I'm like yo, I am beautiful. One of these filters comes out and just automatically made me pretty. And I was like, oh, like, but some people post that selfie and then they're under the or they put that as the background on their phone and they're under the illusion that that's what they look like like bitch, you don't look like that. You don't look like that you should not like that's for fun. You should not send those pictures. You should not you I don't think you should be able to save those pictures. Like, no, like, honestly, and if you post them, wouldn't it be funny if the algorithm just took off all the fucking corrections? Wouldn't it be funny if like, oh, like we see this filter, we'll just take off the filter when you post it. So like it posts with all without the Photoshop or without the filter, that would be hilarious. That'd be a funny hack. But coders who doing more like ethical things are nonethical things. I don't know what hackers do. I got accused of being one once, because I had a bunch of flash drives and hard drives. I realized that this is just like this is just what happens when you become a music producer. I'm like, I don't have space for this. I need more like I need more flash drives. I need more hard drives. I need more SD cards. Like I need space for my stuff. Somebody was like people think you're a hacker. I was like, you're an idiot. But that's hilarious. And that was one of the funniest things I've ever been accused of being, because it's like, bro, if I was a hacker, do you think I'd be staying in this fucking hostel, dummy? Fucking dumb. Why would I be hacking from this hostel? Well, I do really actually, you know what? I think that yes. But also we have more stories to tell eventually, what was I gonna say about subtrronics? I just love this music, very good, very, very good, very good. That's it. I don't have anything else to say. I thought I was gonna take up at least half an episode, because I was actively listening to it. I've been actively listening to it like sober in the middle of the day, but it is good running music sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, oh dude, like I have to stop running and head bang. like this is inappropriate, this is inappropriate. I don't I don't know, I don't highly recommend a lot of bass music, like in the city setting, because something happens mechanically in your brain, something at least my brain, where it's like, oh, like that shouldn't synchronize this way. That shouldn't do that. Don't do that. why? What frequency? Idiots. idiots. lots the same guy, by the way. This is the same guy. He doesn't like, what's fucked up is he have a whole vehicle, he doesn't leave the neighborhood. Like he's a menace, like he does not leave the neighborhood. He doesn't. like he drives in circles all day. And like that's his that's he has like no other power. I get it. Like I' I'm understanding like I'm studying the psychology of people with small brains like this. is that like he has no power over like the rest of his life, so like that's his that's his like freedom. That's his power as being able to do that for like a second at a time, like he that's it, then he rounds the corner and does it again, then he rounds like the fucked up thing to me is it's like bro, you're not going to go anywhere with that. Like you have a whole vehicle, a whole vehicle, like anything I have to do I have to go on foot. That's I'm not gonna lie to disadvantage. I mean, like it's not too much of a disadvantage in New York, but anywhere else it's like, you don't have a car. I'm like, yeah. I don't. Like New York is probably the only place in the US that you absolutely really don't need one. You really don't. And honestly, when I see people with cars here, I'm like yo dude, I hope you paid that all the way off because like, honestly like if you're in debt for that, like you you lost like, you lost, like you're not going anywhere and it's like depreciating as you drive it, like this just like, I don't know. I saw well, I was on the bus and we hit a car. The bus kept going. Bus kept going and totally did. It did not make it didn't even flinch like the bus was like oops, you were over the line. I was like damn damn. So eventually eventually that person is gonna come out and be like, oh. ho No, anyway, we do have to talk about some of this entered the multiverse. We are over an hour, so thank you for listening. Yay, what I want on the peloton one arm on the pelotone. Again, I'm not getting paid, but I think going against the grain of like corporate greed right now is the best thing. So all of the things that I can possibly like put online for free. I'm putting online for free. um I'm also trying to get I'm trying to start the process of giving away like copies of my album for free and you know, as springtime and festival season gears up, public spaces. Oh, we didn't talk about the fluffer. First of all, I was worried that it wasn't gonna come out. Excuse me, gosh, what is happening right now? Flip? It snot. stuck somewhere trapped in my space. I'm sorry about that. If you can hear that on this recording, I apologize for that. I apologize, but whatever. Ooh, maybe, well, yeah, I do get like weird. I get weird when I don't work out enough, so I did that. I also went to the gym. I ran yesterday, and then I got on the peloton for an hour and I slept hard between like shaking myself awake to be like, my Amazon

They say new York drinking water is some of the cleanest— don't buy it! I saw a billboard that said 8 glasses of tap water will prevent a heart attack. That's because it already has so much asprin in it! Yooo! Don't drink that! “Some of the cleanest drinking water in the country” Then what the fuck is in the tap water in the rest of the country?! New York tap water ain't right! It's not. Even my brita filter is like “Well, I'll do my best” But it doesn't. I drink tap water out the brita filter and I'm still like “Well geez, I'm sleepy” Fuck that. I moved to New York and had to double triple my budget for water. “New York tap water is “potable” What doe ther even mean. Notice it's not the word “safe” or “healthy” or “clean” It's “potable” Which means— It passes for people we don't really consider people anyway. If you can't afford a real clean water then you deserve whatever's in this mess here— “It's potable” Don't trust that. This is coming from the same government that tried to tell us ketchup was a vegetable. KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE = NEW YORK DRINKING WATER IS SAFE TO DRINK. THIS IS THE SAME LIE. TRANSACRIPT: (Uncorrected, cause this is a lot of words.) We'll see how bad it gets. Good morning Krusty crew! you guys are Kusty crew now. I'm sure at least a few of you listeners are Krusty, like my morning voice. Hello. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. I'm just kidding. They're not paying me. However, I always have like a particular difficulty, like retrieving my Amazon fresh order, and I'm pretty sure so that it's it's so that I can come back on here and be like,Yo, okay, like what the fuck is up with Amazon? And allthough I don't think they need advertising. I haven't seen an actual television and like years, but I've never seen a commercial for Amazon. I've never seen a commercial like they don't need it. They fucking totally cornered the market on every fucking thing you need. Everything. like to the point that some people are like specifically like anti-amazon, which I don't know, I think I want to pride myself on being anti-amon for a while, but really Amazon was like anti-me. They're like your identity. You're sketchy. Now, who are you? I like I couldn't I couldn't Amazon for the longest time and it caused me the greatest difficulty in my life. I was literally paying like more for everything that I needed period. There was no like there was no finagling. I just love finagling. I don't know why. There't there was no getting around it. Like I couldn't just like oh, like here's a here's a fucking alternative to Abbott, there's no alternatives. Like I found companies in the process of doing that that I do like, but like I still have to revert back to Amazon because like most of those companies are like really good, like sustainable companies and like organic companies and like even small businesses, but at the same time, because they are those things, they cost me more and so it's like I can't afford like not to do this anyway. what's going on? We get an episode today. Well, we get we get an episode. We according to this Amazon hall, by the way took two days, like I thought that I was making an order because I was well, here here it is. It's like this was my equivalent for like drunk ordering anything. I don't drink. But if there, you know, if there's like a close, you know, like, I don't know. I don't think I could actually manage to my indigenous heritage kind of grants me like a certain functionality when drinking, although there's like a level. There's like a limit. Like I go from completely functional and like cooperative to no, like very quickly. So I don't think that I could be the type of like blacked out drunk person to order on Amazon. But if I were, this is this is the order I would have made. I guess you could I guess you could kind of compare the fact that like I went out after, what, two days of not working out? I had to go run an errand and that was the worst. That was the worst. I went out in New York ugly for the first time and I went out in New York ugly for the first time in a long time because I I was like, okay, I learned my lesson. like don't be ugly in New York. So I went out ugly because I didn't care. I was like, okay, well, I have to do this fucking errand and everything was bad. Everything went wrong. Everything was bad because well, I mean like I blamed myself I wasn't working out. I think I ran like a considerable amount that day and did like maybe 15 minutes on the pelone, but it wasn't enough. because I I went out and like lights were flickering and there was I was like, what? fucking side dimension is this is not where I live? This is not the place, this is not the place. and so I went out and I had a horrible time, and when I came back, I was like, fuck it, I'm hungry. and I'm pretty sure I just did what's fucked up is damn, I meant to Google. I meant to Google whatever the fuck the thing is that you do before Passover. I'm pretty sure it's called Schchitz. Like I'm not 100% sure because I keep telling myself like I'm gonna Google that. Passover is literally like tomorrow. But also I just got rice. And I left lintils off of my I think lintils is a no, no. I think it's disputed. Like people are like lintels and oats and some people are like yes, and some people are like no. And I'm like,Yo, dude, well, I'm vegan. And a lot of Jews are not, so I mean, like can't we just like substitute, but like the whole point of schitz or whatever you call it, I need to look it up. I'm pretty sure it's Fish. Sch fits like 90% sure, but that's I mean like 90 still 90's and A. It's a low A, but it's an A. And so I think it's something close. I think it starts with the S and ends with a Z like most Jewish and or Yiddish slang terms. or words. I don't know, I love Jews. I'm obsessed with them. I've been thinking about going to like actual services on Saturdays. However, I I like I find it hard to actually move myself on Saturdays in New York. I'm like there's too much. It's too much. It's too much. I don't wanna be out. fuck this. I don't wanna go out even if it's like too a Jew church, like it might be worth it. Especially if it was like like you know, nothing like Mormon church, not in the middle of the day for five hours. Not in the middle of the day for five hours, it might be. I mean, like I don't I don't know. I don't know anything about the actual, like I don't know anything about that shit. I just have it somewhere in my body. I'm like Jew things. hello Jews. anyway. it's no secret. I love Jews. I love Mormons. I actually like all the people. especially people who practice religiously like religiously. I'm like, oho, dude, like, well, I mean like they're extremists, but they're extremists atheists. so I mean like both of like just to be an extremist in any way is wrong. I worked very, very minimally for in for an extremist vegan last year, and I'm still traumatized by it. I still like he grabbed my backpack to keep me from fucking catching the bus and which, by the way, was the day that I lost my wallet. I specifically blame that. like I blame him for that. like I dropped my wallet because he was like, oh, we have to do this or we have to do a group hug. And he like, I was like, oh, nope, my bus is coming and he grabbed the in and he grabbed the back of my backpack and like for some reason now he grabbed the back of my backpack and I was like, what the fuck you doing? He was like, we have to do a group hug. And then I was like, yo, and then I ended up running for the bus and like g getting paid and not having my wallet with me by the time I got back to my apartment, cause I was like shaking him. I was like, the fuck are you pulling on me? Now every time I get every time I get caught on something, I cuss that motherfucker out. like, I don't know. I don't know if it has any direct, like effect on him, cause like every time, every time I get caught on something, and I feel like the motion of a pull, I I just start cussing him out in my brain. I'm like,uck this dude. I hate you. But anyway, I hated him for a lot of reasons. I didn't quit that job cause he paid in cash at the end of each day. It was like he was like one of those horrible people that's like bro, I don't like and everybody knew it and everybody like tipted and walked on eggshells around this motherfucker. But like he paid in cash. He paid in cash tax free at the end of each day, so it was like, yo, if you could get through the end of each day without quitting, you get your whole paycheck today, which and he was paying like a pretty living wage like over minimum wage for New York. So I was like, okay, all right. But I think that I think that was the game. It was like I was supposed to quit because he was like he was terrible. and it was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm like, he pays in cash. At the end of the day, like all I have to do is suffer through this fruit. however long it takes to get cash at the end of the day. Then I drop my wallet and that was a terrible thing because he paid in cash at the end of the day and I dropped my wallet and nobody's turning in a fucking wallet with a full paycheck of cash in it. So I never got that wallet back and then I well, we could call it like a draw not too long after because he he was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm going to make you quit. I'm like, you will not make me quit. I will get paid cash at the end of this day. Cash. Anyway, anyway, it's tax free cash, daily, I'll be back. Anyw, what's going on? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Was that saying something about Amazon? Oh, extremists. I mean, like I don't I don't think that has anything to do with anything, but being extreme oh, he is extremist vegan. Like he would do mean things to you to try to make you be like oh, I give up meat completely and like veganism is one of those things where it's like it's like alcoholism. Like you have to be ready to change. You get or like ear anything, honestly. like any kind of whatever, like you can't make a person do anything until they're ready. Like you can try, but like most of the time the behavior is just gonna revert back to itself like overeating not working out not working out, like the sugar, like dietary changes, like pretty much any like major behavioral changes have to be initiated by that person for like a personal reason. Like you and even if you are going to convince them to change in some way, you have to like you have to suit them. You have to make it kind of seem like it's their idea. Like you can't just force your ideas onto somebody and be like, oh, you're you know what, you're right. Like I would change because you were this fucking mean to me. I'm like, that doesn't make actually, you know what, after a year of going out at New York, I was like, fine. And then I remembered why because I was like, it's not that bad, whatever, sweatuit and I had fucking I've been getting a lot of work done, so I had my nails like Cardi B long for a while, but then I was like, this is inefficient. if for the things that I have to do, like the amount of things that I have to do with my hands, I can get all this done quicker and then do my nails again later as's not gonna be like that big of a deal, because it, you know, like it you do just figure out a different way to do things with your hands. It's like almost like the nails aren't there, except for typing. And I type very fast and I work very fast, so I'm like, okay, like, these nails gotta go. And so they went. And so I've just been down back to bare bones and like natural hair and no makeup and like yo, yesterday, yes, because I did this twice because I was like once you do it once, I was like I was already like in the bottom of like people scowling at me and shit. So I was like, okay, well, you know, scowls, whatever, I can do this again because I have like one more errand and this dude, this kid this kid that works at the Walgreens was like, oh, I thought you were a terrorist. Like, he didn't say that, but he did. He was like he was like, I thought you were gonna lay down and like, I thought it was over. I thought you were gonna like pull out a can of C4 and blow us all up. And I was like, what? And I forgot that I was like usually like when I go out pretty people treat me nice cause duh. felt like when I go out like regular, people are like oh, like oh, like I'm like, oh, is it that bad? That's what I told the kid, cause I forgot like, I'm just so used to like, I'm still the same consciousness. I'm still the same personality on the inside like it don't matter like, you know, like I just ran here. I I'm like high on endorphins or whatever. likeT's like he was like, oh, like, oh, and I was like, oh, God, is it that bad? I have like a cone head because I'm wearing a bun, but I'm also wearing a hat and a hood, cause it's been nicely cold. It's been great and I I'm worried about the environment cause it's not raining. It's spring, like we're about the hop straight from like the dead of winter to summer and it like and I know it's almost summer because it was like 9 pm last night and the sun had just gone down. I was like, oh, that's fucked up. It's spring again. I was like no, as bad news. It's like that's bad news. It hasn't rained once. Like how are the fucking people? Like, what is the birth doing? Because I mean, like the P people are bad. Well, I mean, like no, not necessarily. I just hadn't like, honestly, the people are always the same. It's like perception, so like when I do my hour on the pelotone and my mild minimum run or whatever, and then I go out into the world, I'm like literally don't like all that shit like bounces off of me. Like the people are still shitty. I'm sure of it. but like I'm just just don't care. It's like a shield live like indoor friends feeling at my peak. That's what I feel. But lately I haven't been feeling great so I haven't been working out, so I haven't I haven't been feeling great because I haven't been working out and it is it has the possibility to be what's it called a vicious cycle, but it did it. Like I was I realized it right away that I was like, oh, this is this is wrong. This is wrong, I don't live here. I don't live here, and I had a very good hour on the pillot last night because two two days ago, I was like, oh, this is this is what happened. I went out and I came back and I was feeling like negative. I was like, no, that was a bad experience. I' hungry now because, you know, sometimes anxiety causes my stomach to churn in a way that's like just fill it with something. And I'm like, okay, usually I understand like anxiety, eating and I can avoid it. Like I understand that like, okay, this is stress or whatever. and I can like, you know, just fill my stomach with water as I'm not hungry. I'm like nervous. I'm not hungry I have anxiety. Like most of the time people eat because they're bored, not because they're hungry. And so I'm like, you know, I'm I don't I haven't I don't mind at all. And so I kind of refuse to allow myself to get bored, but like I do notice like like I eat more when I put like, okay, this this Amazon hall says to me that I'm about to make some ball music because it is the equivalent of something that's like I would have done in a state of like a different state of mind or consciousness as if I were drinking. This this like, okay, like our only emptied it pre-pisode because I was sure that I was like, oh, I know I have ice cream in here. I finally found the fucking bin and Jerry's that I wanted. I was so sick of going to the store and looking through fucking like container after container of bin and Jerry's and not finding the one that I rigid like the first one that I picked up, the first time that I decided like, I'm going to give n non-air Ben and Jerry's a try. I've tried all the other expensive fucking ice creams vegans, and I'm for the most like oh, this one's kind of got like ice chips in it's like freezer burnt tasting this one melts funny and turns into like a gelatinous goo. So I'm like okay Ben and Jerry's like knows what the fuck they're doing and they do what's fucked up about Ben and Jerry's is they're non-airy tastes and is texturized, like they regular ice cream. So it's like the closest thing to regular ice cream. I don't get paid by the way, by any of these people. However, I am like now getting into like the the likeet verse of doing things because I have to because I'm like I make too much music for people not to know about it. Like whether it's gonna be like mediocre bass music or eventually like, I don't know, the most legendary bass music of all time. I now have goals. Well, I mean, like I kind of entered into this DJ thing with like the one thing. I was like, okay, like, if I can't be this, like, what is the point of being like anything else if I can't be this good at doing that, like why would I even like and then I realized I'm like, oh, I'm doing like a house oriented sets, but like, yo, I came here for dubstep. Like, what? oh, are we going to talk about some? We have to talk about subtrronics because I can't I'm like, yo, I can't like, what? Like, I understand as a like, I'm I'm a double fan now because I okay, let's finish all these things. Don't go out in New York ugly. Just don't be ugly in New York. Just don't do it. Just try. just try. just try and New York will give you back an energy what you fucking like it's you you get out of it what you put in. Just try, try. I see people wearing less croccks now. This is good, like, but my equivalent of not wearing crocs is like yo like hair and makeup every day, like non-negotiable. Don't be ugly. I'm like, okay, all right, whatever. I get an out, that kid was like, oh, are you a terrorist? I was like, what the fuck, kid? Like, you were you were nice to me the other day. I'm the same person. I'm the same person making the same transaction, what the fuck? Anyway, so I got back from my errands feeling just totally destroyed. and I made this Amazon hall, but I thought that I was gonna eat in a few hours, whatever I was ordering instead of two days from when I was ordering, they were like, oh no, this is the next available delivery window. I was like that is a deficit to like my like, what if I don't want it two days from now? This is technically an impulse decision based on the fact that I'm reacting badly to whatever the fuck just happened outside. Actually, you know what, though. I just unpacked this fucking Amazon hall, which, by the way, I get the most expensive and non-exciting Amazon haul of all time. The only is like of all time, every time I order Amazon, I'm disappointed unless dish soap or like, I don't know, cleaning supplies. I get like a certain I'm like, yes, it's here. Lysyle has a new fucking scent that I'm just I adore it. I'm like, yo, yo, this doesn't smell like anything I've smelled before for like cleaning. It's like the fabulosa ofysol, which why haven't I just been using fabuloso? Fabuloso used to be mad cheap. Now everybody like caught on to the fact that fabuloso is one of the best multiurpose cleaners ever like of all time. No, they're not paying me either, but I don't really care. Like my whole new thing is like, my whole new thing is like everybody's like subscribe this and fucking $15 a month and like y, dude, you're sucking everybody's income out of them, like everybody who's living under a certain level of fucking like everybody who can't just buy things flat out has to buy them on a subscription and if you count up all the subscriptions like that's like the whole like the common American worker right now, like the common one, like not the, oh, I have an okay job or like, you know, you should just get an education or like, whatever you're elitist mentality makes you think that like your life and your privilege is not like your life and your privilege is your merit. That's I'm not talking about you because you skated through life on your genetics, basically, and you think that you earned what you have, but you didn't. Your grandparents and their parents did and blah, blah, blah, and your lucky that way. But the rest of us are out here like $15 a month for this $20 a month for that. and it adds up to like your entire income is like, okay, after your living expenses like you're still gonna be in like a pretty unshakable amount of debt. because you're like, okay, well, I mean, like I can't afford to do it flat out. Like if I did all these subscriptions at once, flat out, and each of them is like 200 hundred a year, if I did them all flat out, I would be like, I don't know, like at least 5K like a year just like at once. I don't have that. Most people don't have that. and so it's like, okay, well, you can break it down and this is how the businesses are fucking people. They're like oh well, I mean like you can pay for it monthly but it's actually more monthly. Like you save money if you do it yearly, but it's like oh, but if I need everything pretty much all at wants if I need everything pretty much all at once and I can't afford to do everything all at once by the year, I'm actually going to pay more doing it by the month, but I can only afford to do it by the month. So this is the thing that's like fucking with me. I'm like, oh, you guys are fucking with people. What's my point? Oh, I don't know, oh, everybody's being fucking greedy as fuck, which is is just leaving a bad taste in my mouth for humanity at all. I'm like, you greedy motherfuckers. Like, I might live this life in an in an ideal way for now, but it is a temporary space of like discomfort in order for me to observe and understand, like, how better my energy can be suited in the next don't I don't. I mean, like my next incarnation needs to be like a body list, like orb of air and light. Like that's I don't want another like human body, because first of all the planet is like unless you guys find like another habitable planet. and like, I'm not in the I'm not in the fucking level yet where they're gonna be like, oh, like you're fucking worth saving, like we'll take you to our like, we'll take you to our Elysium in space, where only the elite people and the people that we deem worthy will be here and we'll leave like pretty much Hollywood's been telling us forever. They're like, yo, we're gonna leave all the poor ugly, colored people on this planet. and like, when this planet is like destroyed by it by pretty much our doing. And we're gonna like float on some kind of system and space because we have no idea for like a second, like a close enough habitable planet for us to then, like just move on to, like, I don't care what you say, like repopulating Mars is dumb. It is dumb. It is dumb. It's not a fucking it's not a happy place. Like because at one point, because at one point it was a habitable planet. And guess what? we're we're pretty destructive species. It's just historically and like beyond historically, because typically once we destroy ourselves, like as a species, all of our knowledge all of our knowledge and records are destroyed with us. So we have this like, we have this sense of knowing within our like within our mega that's like, oh, if something happened here. But what? And some people have actually access to that within their minds and within their consciousness. It's like, oh yeah, it's like, like, yeah, a lot ofass music producers are like, what, you think I'm from here? I don't give a fuck about this. I don't give a fuck about this. I'm like, I get it. Like this is just for now. This is just for now. I might be included in this, but also I'm like, yo, dude, like I'm pretty environmental when it comes down to like this planet is, you know, anyway. was I just saying, don't be ugly in New York. Oh, okay, so I made this Amazon fucking hall, like a drunk fucking person. Although, like a drunk person, I was kind of looking out for my future self because there's a lot of stable, like there's a lot of pantry staples in here that's like, bro, you won' run out of food. like you might have rice blowat, but you won't run out of food because sometimes I do sometimes I spring so much for the organic and for the like for the like vitamin packs, like superfoods they call it superfoods, but those are just regular foods. Like if you strip down all the foods that are not foods, like all the foods that are actually just like chemical and overprocessed, like if you took all those things off the planet, because they shouldn't exist really anyway. Like you would be left with what they call superfoods or what they market as superfoods that are actually just foods. like, no, these are the foods that you were technically like designed to eat. These are the foods that will fuel your energy for whatever the fuck you have to take on. This is the food that you're like you're made to eat. But they call it superfoods and market it as such and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just got bored. Anyway, what the fuck was that saying? Oh, I took I had like had a hand and creating my next masterpiece. Because I got things that I typically don't. I'm I don't fuck with things like that, like snack foods. But as I said before, like we're not produced that snack, I really do, and I haven't been snacking because I'm like, oh dude, like it's not worth it. I'm I'm New York vein like also have these DJs are just like so skinny, and I'm just like, oh, this body shaving, you can't say that or. I'm like, no, like I aspire to be that. so that people actually pay attention not for what I'm doing, but how I look. So trust me, I'm assimilating. I really am. Oh, which, by the way, I have a discord now. I don't know what the fuck it's for. I have no idea I also have a twitch. I have a twitch. There's nothing on it. I have I have pretty much everything. I even got a Snapchat. I haven't had a sn Snapchat since Ollie died because Ollie was my only sn Snapchat friend as it I have a sn Snapchat. This is all for music though. It's not like when I think about it, I'm like oh, this is the dumbest fucking shit ever and I'm do it when I'm fucking I'm actually figuring out like I'm using like I have TikTok eww and well what's great about it is I am using it like as a business tool so I'm not stuck on the shit like I'm not I am scrolling now, but not I'm like what's weird is like my energy is like looking for something. I'm like oh like okay, like this DJ posted something or like this might want a free copy of my fucking of my music to play or whatever. So I should hit them up. Like as I'm using it as a business platform more than like a social platform because I'm just not just not a social person. It doesn't make sense to be, but now I'm understanding like with the feedback that I'm getting that like, oh, this is how you do it. Like I'm not gonna get a job in this industry unless I assimilate to like what I'm hoping doesn't happen is that I assimilate too much because now all of a sudden I'm like I should get a vape I should get a vape like all the kind that I like are illegal in New York. And I'm actually really proud of the fact that I quit vaping when I got here like when I got here because I was thinking that I was traveling outside of the country and like I didn't want to be like I don't know, traveling outside of the US makes me feel like I'm an ambassador for my country so I don't want to represent my country badly. However, I feel like the actual chosen representatives of the country are not doing like the greatest job. so it doesn't matter what I do like because they are technically the ambassadors to this country like they like I'm pretty much aware like a stamp on my head that has their fucking face and or name on it when I go outside the country anyway I don't know I I usually try to assimilate in that way when I travel outside of the country like learn to speak like you're not American because most countries have an opinion about that. They're like oh you're an American deer, they're you're stupid. I'm like I'm not arguing. How many miles is a kilometer? Can you translate this before we hold up? Let me get Google translate? I'm I'm American, man. I'm American to the point where I have the fucking math doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't make sense. Apple pie, I yeah, apple pie. However, though, I realized because of this, and my indigenous heritage, I have kind of like a like a weird, I don't know, I can't I amm not sure. Like I think because of the way that I've decided to craft my lifestyle, I have like kind of an upperhand advantage at like understanding culture, like understanding culture just culturally, like what has happened from like the inside of the like the like the corporate, like conglomerate capitalists, like like set epicenter. Well, I don't know. I've been reading enough about China to be like wow, China. Also, I't I'm loving this. I'm getting I'm getting feedback on my fucking like my what's it called? My stats or whatever. And I don't have a lot of fans and followers, which is sad, which by the way, if you're listening to this, like check check out my other big gold check out the YouTube. It's at the festival project by the way YouTube YouTubeube.com slash at because it's weird that they have like for their backslashes, but it's at the festival project I'm the festival project. There's a whole bunch of people trying to really like I've been telling people that my project is the festival project for a while and now all these people are coming out of nowhere like I'm the festival project. I'm like, you are not. Like, you are not the festival project. Stop lying on yourself. I'm the festival project. I've always been the festival project, at the festival project, that's me, not anybody else. That's you, technically, like the letter you, with no check mark because I'm not paying for that shit. Would I become notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, they'll put the fucking check mark on it for me. I ain't paying for it. I'm paying for it the fuck that like that's like you could buy a grabby award now. I'm sure that you can. I' 100% sure that you could do that. Which is sad and it's likeo, dude, I actually like I what's it? I I don't know. I think I come from a weird world where it's like I hold the academy to like such high regard that it's like I'm like the fact that I'm like pretty certain that you could buy a Grammy makes me sad because it's like like I don't know this whole oh, that's what I was saying. I'm giving away all my shit for free because everybody's greedy motherfuckers. Like I'm giving away my music for free like the album that I dropped yesterday all the rage is 100% free. All you have to do is go on my website and download it. That's it like you don't even have to spend money on a subscription for a streaming service like you could just go get that at my website www.mU.uru. That's the website you can just download whatever the fuck I haven't put all my music up there because honestly I'm I'm realizing how much music I have and like how long I've been making music and I'm like, oh you're like oh okay, first of all, I'm like it's gonna be it's hard it's hard enough for me to just format it and put it on a flash drive just to like have all my music together because I've made it over time and so the expand it it's just a lot like it's just a lot all my music's not in one place, all my mixtapes are not in one place. I just got to sound cloudy yesterday. I only got a SoundCloud to enter a fucking beat making contests the first time I've ever done anything like that like I've entered DJ contests so I can try to get a job, but I've never done a beat making contest, so I've never had to actually like condense my creative space into like a one minute thing. And so, I don't know, I really enjoyed doing that, but it's not something that I was looking at the other contest, they were like, it's for a clout. I'm like, that's stupid. I don't want to waste time on clout. Cloths not gonna pay my bills, anyhho. Clout. Oh, what was I saying? Oh, I was supposed to talk about subtrronics, my Galypes, refrigerator. These Ecuadorian bananas. Okay, I have a like I eat a lot of bananas because bananas and for whatever reason, if found bananas like synonymous with New York City, I always have even before before I lived here, I think it's just because it was like the cheapest thing that I could find is like bananas like bananas. That's what I gonna eat bananas. So I always just kind of like for some reason it was like, oh, from in New York, I need bananas. Now I live in New York and I'm like I see why. But now I'm like my flavor palate is changing to be more specific and so I'm like a banana connoisseur, but I finally like I landed on a I landed on bananas. I landed on bananas that I just love so much. First of all, they're huge, they're huge. I also like these really tiny bananas that are like sweet and little and like they have a very specific taste, and I like the red ones, and yo, that lady when I lived in Mexico, she was so elusive, like she came she was the only lady in the whole place with red bananas and like these red, these really tiny red bananas have like the like they're the best bananas I've ever tried. But the second bananas, the second best bananas I've ever tried are Ecuadorian bananas. and I'm like, yo, dude, first of all, they are huge. Like they're big thick, they're like big, they're big and they're d they're big, big, perfectly sized bananas. good girth. good, nice, just good bananas. They're huge. and uh I don't know, like I started going to the store and then I stopped going to it because rac is oops, I'm not supposed to say that. I I just realize something. I realize something about the world like that you can't even you can't even insinuate like a conversation about race. Like people people will get like people start to get upset, like one way or another. Like I said, extremism on both sides exists. I don't like I can't I'm I'm post racial. Like I can't pick a side anyway like you're gonna put me on one side or another based on your perception of who I am or what I do but like I'm completely like I'm like literally the most neutral thing that ever like literally the most neutral thing that ever. And so what was I just saying, oh, I don't know, I went into a hole. Acuadorian bananas. We'll just we'll just re her back to Acuadorian bananas. Yes, extremism, no. Ecuadorian bananas, yes. They are the best. They are the best, and not only is the size perfect, but the flavor of the banana is just a little bit different from like Guatemalan bananas or Mexican bananas, like no, Ecuadorian bananas. And so now I've gotten into the habit of like, I found another store that has Ecuadorian bananas, thank goodness, because like when I stopped going to the other store, I was like god damn it, they have the Ecuadorian bananas. like that was the one thing from there that I liked and the Uber pancakes. But we'll it's okay. That controversial episode, which I'm like, what's it called? referencing may or may not er. I need to it's like a twohour episode that I did in an emotional kind of turmoil. I need to check that episode to see if I want to air it. It might it might not. Like it could just be like deleted, because I felt like it was forced. I was like why are you try why are you trying to make me act out of my fucking character? Fuck you. Like I don't like when people try to force things. So that sometimes happens where people will come out of the woodwork and be like, talk about this experience. And I'm like, "Yo, dude, you just cornered me into making me feel like unsafe and not great. I don't necessarily and then it was like the energy was like, okay, I have to talk about this, but I didn't like the way that it made me feel. So the fact that it felt forced was like eh but I definitely earned that next tattoo. I'm I'm behind on tattoos I have two tattoos that I have to get it. I definitely earn that one. I earn that one with the help of Erica body, but I'll explain that in some in the multiverse and legends things later. I don't understand how things work sometimes in the universe, but that was one of those things I was like this is this is not even a synchronicity. This is like a this is an experience. We'll see if that episode's worth posting, but either way, I in the tattoo, I earn the tattoo beforehand, that was just the solidification, I think. Anyhho. what the fuck is I say? Ah, Ecuore bananas, yes, yes. Because it makes me think like like, if their bananas are like this, what are their women like? Like, I could give no fucks about the men. I'm not a lesbian, but like, I'm thinking in the way of like a I'm thinking in the masculine way that's like, you know, if they're bananas tastes like this, like, what are their women like Ecuadorian bananas? I think about that, because I'm like yod dude, like my taste profile is based on my diet. So, if these bananas come from Euador, like, what else comes from Ecuador that's fucking perfect. probably women. I don't believe in perfect men. I mean, like perfect looking, sure, perfect acting, sure, a combination of these things to together, rare, but like a per perfect women exist all over the place. Like perfect men. I don't think is a thing. I don't think it is. And that's not me being sexist or like because honestly, if you listen to the way that I speak, like being like a I don't have a preference for gender, just don't be a fucking sh shit hole of a human being. Like I don't care what you are, how you are, like just be cool, you know, like B peaceful and mind your manners and shut the fuck up. I mean like I'm not trying to silence people, but like be mindful of your environment. You know what I'm saying? Be mindful of people around you because there are so many there so many. And you are the focus I to try to say Acuadorian bananas, yes, as good. Are we ready to talk about subronics? Did I talk about all my websites and stuff? We have a discord. It's I think you can find me on discord at blue the guru and it's the same on twitch. I haven't posted anything to twitch yet. I did. I did tape a couple of my performances, but they were horrible. They were horrible and honestly they were just so that I could enter a contest so I could try to get a job. Like that was it. I did that. I was like, well, I have to do something because you you miss 100% percent of the chances you don't take. I believe truly in that so like I would rather enter something that's like mediocre and at least be on the radar and be like, hey, I'm trying. Like I'm really trying with all the things that like all the things that I'm going through and all the work that I have to do like I'm at least trying to get my work seen and I'm at least trying to put it out there and like, you know, the odds of me winning at something like that, especially if it is last minute and it is like mediocre and I know it's not my best performance, which, by the way, I think okay, people really like, oh, this is what I was saying about my audience. One, people really like talkatoo. That's one of my first actual productions, okay? It has almost no technique whatsoever. Well, it does, and I I did work like really hard on it, but like yo, I made that song in a tree, literally a tree, like like a tree. People like this song. It's for some reason gotten really popular, like no out of nowhere. Like people are like this song. I'm like, really? I made that in a tree with no plugins, no I'm pretty sure it's all stock samples. People love it. People love that song, but honestly it is one of my like it is it like it mixes with everything, talking to like if you need like a filler song and I think it is long enough that's like, yo, dude. Like, if you need to go to the bathroom or whatever, like this song is like the song rocks. And honestly, I don't know why that well, I mean, like that song is special. It was the first song I ever heard played back on a system at a festival. because I was like, like here's my music, whatever. And I didn't expect because the DJ was like,, you suck. And I was like, and just be just looking at me because I like ran up during a fucking uh, like a power outage at this fucking rave. I was like, yo, like this this might be the only time that I could actually talk to the you you miss 100% of the chances you don't take. So I was like, okay, like, this might be the only time I could talk to this guy. The power just went out and I was like, then now is my chance because like otherwise mid party and it was a good party, like it was a good one. It was a good it was it was a good one. It was a really great. It was a really great. um but, yeah, that was the first time I ever heard my music played back because I like ran up and I was like yod like here here's me, here's my music, here's a flas I have like you could keep it. has my music on it and it had I think at the I think it just had copy and paste on it like that whole EP was done and so a copy and paste is just talk to this other song called Nero, which has me like hand drumming on it, which is a cool song too. I use the Ableton push. I love the Ableton push and I had to forfeit it because it wasn't going back in my luggage. I couldn't afford it. So somebody fucking I feel charitable about this. Somebody inherited a $1200 at the time that it's depreciated, somebody inherited what I paid $1200 for for free, I think we're even. Anyway, um I add in uteroakatu and 43 on it. That's copy and paste and like, I I ran up during a blackout and I was like here. like, here's my stuff. And he was so annoyed. The DJ was so fucking annoyed. He was like, what are you saying? Like, and if they were like, the powers are, we can't get the power to come back on. so like people had started like a drum circle over in the corner and some people were leaving, they're like, you know, when the power goes out of a fucking festival or a rave like first of all, it's not a it's not a slammer. Like it's not a banging fucking festival and or rave if the power doesn't go out at least once or the cops come. Like if there's no raid, people don't get raided these days, do they? Yeah, that used to bring like a certain element of fucking like fear and excitement that like, yo, this party might only last five minutes. Let's get it anyway. It's New York old New York rave culture. hey, they're having a party over here because we're having a party over here but like shut down that party. Snitches in New York have always been a thing. like, if somebody over there is doing something that competes with your business, like you snitch on them, that would that's old school dance music culture. That's what they used to do, like those little preppy and we're not gonna put a color to it, but those little preppy boys that were like doing the old school, like underground, like break it in raves. Like that's what they were doing. They were like, oh, he's uh doing a there's a party over here in a secret place over here that shouldn't be. But those people were also doing a party and they wanted all the fucking people to come to their party and said that that party. So they were just snitch. They were just like hey, I got a tip. I got a tip on these motherfuckers. And then and then the other party would get shut down and everybody would be like, rolling balls, be like okay, we're still need a I need a party, like where's the other party? And there would always be somebody from the other party there to like usher people to the other party, like, I know where the party is. Yeah, these people. Anyway, I have I have such a love for the culture. What what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, one people have talked to which I made in a tree. That's almost that's almost discouraging. I'm like, yo dude, I'm footing in all this fucking like putting in all this extra work and like this fucking sound design and engineering and like trying to fucking trying to achieve subtronics but sober. Ha ha I'm like, uh, I'm also like ten years older than this kid. at least, excuse me, I don't know what the fuck is happening. Coffee early in the morning. Is my nose running or is it just like, oh, it's almost summer, so we're getting moist in the bitch, like we're just gonna get tepid for the next six months with no rain. Like it's gonna be like the moistures in the air. Enjoy that crawls. anyway I need to figure out what the fuck is schitz is or if that's what it's called. the longer I stay in New York. The easier it is for the old Jew and me to fucking arise. Ugh Anyway, what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, I love this about my statistics. My fans, although there are a few of them are speckled all over the world. I still don't know where Kazakhan is. but I think I have I have a couple listeners in Kazakhstan and they're in two different cities. I'm like that's pretty incredible to me. I was likeYo, dude, where the fuck is Kazakh stand? I don't know. I also found like, okay, like I don't I don't know where half these places are, but like I don't wanna go there although this place this one particular place I'm like oh dude, I don't know where the fuck you're at. I don't know where the fuck you're at and nobody knows where the fuck you're at cause I tried to look you up on a map and it was too distinctively like non places. I was like, is it this place or this place? And they're like it could be this place where that place? And I'm like cracked, but where is it? They're like nowhere, don't worry about it. I'm like damn! Okay, but I have a family there, so that's cool. I got fans all over the world, but they're like speckled. They're not, you know, by the hundreds or millions or billions. Are we gonna talk about that? Eventually, eventually, yes, we'll talk about my love of late night television. Yes, we have talked about that. But not right now. Because that could easily take up a whole episode, easily take up a whole episode. If you ever want to know the state of like if you ever want to know the state of mainstream, America, just check late night, because honestly, that's just like an anchor man dressed up in a little monkey suit as to whatever the fucking day people were talking about reiterated for the night people to understand. It's the same news. They are part of the news networks. I've just realized this cause I'm like oh no that's more like entertainment oh, it's the news. It's just the news kind of funny. It's just the same news that like whatever the NBC oh no, okay, like let's not NBC. Oh, yeah, NBC is doing enough right now. like go. No wonder why they didn't want causeby to buy the network, they would've fucked up their plans. He would have fucked up their plans. I'm like, I don't know what he was gonna do with MBC, but like he would have fucked up whatever they're doing now. That's why they prevented that. They were like, no. no, we have plans. They they're for the foreseeable future. Anyway, let's not NBC, because there's also CBS and uh that's it. At this point, I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're just like moving towards like the like a mass conglomeration of like, we're all the same. I'm like kind of like, and what's funny is they outfit themselves to pretend that they're like, I like this is so funny how left leaning it is when like all y' motherfuckers swing right easily. But I'm like, okay, I understand that this is for the masses, the masses are left swing. I'm like, okay, this is politics again, let's not do this. But everything is, it really is. Anyway, oh my go, what'll talk about my love for late night honor diff episode completely. Well, I mean, like we have a season devoted to it. We do, because I'm like, oh, they have to be like included in this in into the multiverse in legends, because like basically all of the mainstream pop culture like go like flows through late night TV. like that's where it goes. Like if you heard about it, you probably heard about it on late night TV because it is media like that's like anybody who's anybody goes through late high TV. I will not talk about all of I mean like there's so many different there's not really variations. I just said what it is. They're basically anchormen that are disguised not as anchorman. They are giving you the same news from the morning time news or the daytime talk shows, but watered down so that it seems like different news, but it's not as the same news all day. They work for the network, the network works for the dest network work for it themselves. What the fuck? I haven't figured this out yet, like on an intellectual level, I'm starting to, but it's one of those things where it's like mm kid, curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity killed and skinned many cats. Don't look here. I'm like, I got it, I get this. I got it, shut up. Shut up. Let me sit my fucking mug. guys when it comes down to it, I am assimilating well enough to be like, okay, I'm on Instagram twitch. Fucking I'm on Twitter, which is now X. I don't know. I think so. I have it. It's there like I don't use it or anything, but like I'm trying to see what the engagement for this upcoming season will be and if it works, then it works, but I have kind of thought about shooting this podcast in like a if I'm going to do anything, it's going to be anhilate night format where I have like a specific set of like this is what we're going to talk about. I do have a monkey suit picked out. I do have that because I like the format. It's easier it's easier for me to digest and then regurgitate information for my fans and followers this way. Like that's I don't know, like besides the fact that like I have been studying comedy for like the better part of two years now and that I grew up screenwriting and w like, ah, I don't know, like like I get it, though. I get why I'm so like hardwired to this. It's like yo dude, like via the television, we're so comfortable with these people because it's like oh like you're in my house like Lin Letterman, you're in my house like my whole entire existence, my whole childhood. So it's like that's like familiarity to a point that you can't you can't shake it. So like you can grow up and like, you know, the next the predecessors of the next and the next any man comes and like takes over the role of the last any man, but also like evolves the masses for the next coming generation and like the traits of the like it's it's a very interesting culture. I'm obsessed. like I love late night TV. I love TV, but I love late night TV specifically and we'll talk about that more in depth. I guess at some point because I do have to explain this entire weird what seems like an offshoot season well, it was kind of an offshoot season because I lost a season. I don't know what the fuck happened to it. Well now I'm going through my hard drives and I'm like, here it is. It's in here. It's all in here. I'm like, oh, so here we will answer my question. Soon, what did I write last year? I don't know. don't know at all. I really don't. I know a post in some of it. Some of it got like mirrored back in the universe, like, did you know you wrote this? I'm like, no, it's kind of prophetic in a way. just kind of happened. It took over my body anyway. What did I write last year? I don't know. Somebody read it. Somebody read it and then I have to do I have to do more like protections for my intellectual property because yo, I wrote half the Super Bowl commercials facts. I did I did. I was like yo,ude, I wrote this. Michael documents, what the fuck you do I Google documents? Like fuck you like fuck you unless that money is going into a pool to later pay me. When I like reach a certain level as an incentive, like we know we stole this from your fucking show, which, by the way, is just available online to anybody who fucking wants to copy and paste it and the descriptions you idiot. Yeah, I'm like yeah, well I mean like I can't really afford to join the writer's guild. They're like in that respect we will rip you off. only so that I can make sure that this commercial reaches your eyes and time for you to understand that like yo, you just put this out here for free. I'm like well love is free and music should be free. Like I'm technically just taking like a bag like a like a back step to like what the fuck is happening in the corporate world, which is sucking people like it's bleeding people who are already tired dry. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to be like, you know, like like, like, yes, I put like a PayPal about me link like if you want to donate to the festival project or later the complex collective cause I will not collect donations for my nonprofit until it's actually I've actually established the nonprofit as a 501 C3 and so like like the way that I'm doing my music right now is that like half of my profit goes to the festival project, which is like my my label, my independent label and media company. But the other half of my my like income, my earned income from music or, you know, however I earn or monetize, goes to the complex collective, which is a completely nonprofit organization, like meant to contribute back to the artists and like the artist community. not just the artist community, but just like to the overall health and wellness of like the like to to humanity as a whole, I think. Well, that's what the complex collective is kind of it's it's a health and wellness based nonprofit to the charity. So my the way that I what's it the way that I credit myself is that like the I use the complex collective, which is a nonprofit, as my music publisher, so that anything from the complex collective goes into the pool for the nonprofit, because I have to like, I can't consciously go throughout the rest of my life without giving back to my community and that way. like be because the way my life has gone so far, I don't like as much as I want to volunteer, I like well, I tried and then I like the the food bank that I volunteered for was like so and they had some organizational issues. They had some uh leadership issues. And so I was like, this is actually a toxic environment, which sucks. so I decided not to do that and uh and, you know, put all my uh energy of being like a charitable person into like my own, like I'll just my own nonprofits, non-for-profit is to give back to the community to artists and people in it in like transitionary, whatever. um That's the complex collective. So that's that's why you see that. That's why you see that badge on everything. That's the nonprofit sector. It is a subsidiary to the festival project, and I'm pretty much like devote my like I pretty much devote my my uh my gains, so to speak, into like both pools. Eventually, I'll have enough to then solidify the nonprofit with a um well, I have to you know, you have to pay. It's not it's not free for nonprofit. It's not. And so that's what that is. What else was I saying? Fans all over the world? Yes, we have fans all over the world. It's really cool. A lot of these places I've never heard of, but I do I find it a little bit, uh heartwarming and chanting, like I'm a little bit magical that like I'm hitting people in like some of the major dance cities, like Sal Paulo, Brazil, and uh like like places that are Amsterdam, London, uh I have more. I have more people in the UK than I thought, but it's okay because I I like them. I like them. Well, I like people. I like people that are people. Well, people be people on it so not all the time. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, this is like this is characteristic of your species. Like this is why this is this way. Like this is this is a whole human thing. It's not attractive at all. But I think we' close to an hour, I'd had to be oh, six minutes what do I got for six minutesronics. I'm I can't okay, I love subronics like as like Won as a fan because I went to a few of his performances. I'm not gonna lie. Every time his whole audience has BO. everybody. I'm like, oh, nobody in here has D right. But I think I got my fucking I don't know, maybe it was a sign. I was I was mixing the other day like nonstop and I'd been running around and I have a special jacket that I wear when I DJ that's like a really it's like a nice, I don't know what material it is, but it's really nice, like a uh a sports jacket, like a bomber. No, it's not a bomber style. It's like a I can't I can't remember this. It's like a sports jacket, but it's this material that's really nice. it's just always been my DJ jacket. It's like my lucky DJ jacket. and uh I usually wash it like on a delicate cycle and don't put it in the dryer to keep it preserved because it's really, really nice and I had been running around for a couple days and then mixed for like a solid, I don't know, I was in there like all together, I was in there, I think like nine or ten hours and I spent most of those the most of that time, like actively mixing because my music was not it was not s synched, so I had to hand pitch everything on four decks, which was overwhelming, which, by the way, I also did not know, which is why, like you like I did post at least one of the videos. but it's I'm embarrassed. I'm wearing yellow. yellow's not a good color. I'm looking heavy as fuck, like, oh, man, they had that video in the sidebar next to this girl, that's like a size double zero model. like fucking DJ and the rainforest with like grown footage and like HD, like, and then all her videos were like, she was she was like DJing and the one was like in the rainforest. one was like on a beach. Like she just had like she was all these destinations that had the drone footage, like money, but also like beauty just like pure beauty. Like she didn't have to do good. Like her music sounded good, but like she looked awkward as fuck not being able to dance to her own music. But still, like the like what why would you be paying attention to that when A she's beautiful, that's a distraction, be drone footage of like whatever the fucked rainforest or like tropical beach, like she was everywhere. I was like fuck this bitch. And algorithm's like Toby salty. I was like, I'm a little salty because it showed my thumbnail next to her thumb nail and I was like, no, no, no no. no like, oh so bad. So now I know. I know better than to look fat. Don't be ugly in New York. I was actually in full hair and makeup with my nails done with my Cardi B style nails. Yes, I was, but the yellow shirt on camera and it wasn't the best camera. It was like so I like I I used to have a camera like that when I first got into filmmaking when I was like eight. It was like the same camera. I'm like yo, this is bad. It's really bad. But, you know, all that's investments, investments. I don't think it's gonna be even I don't think it's gonna be any better, which, by the way, some people are delusional, bro. I just got Snapchat. I haven't had Snapchat since Allie died so I've been like I've been away from like that whole world and like seeing first of all, people actually pay money to dress their fucking, like, what are those things called? their little animated. Like, okay, you're paying money to put clothes on a on a 2D creature, you are dumb. That's why they do that, though. I'm like, oh, I need this forage shirt for my fucking Snapchat animated thing. I'm like, that's stupid. I mean, like if you got it. But still, even if you got it, it seems like I could have a million dollars and I still wouldn't spend a dollar to dress a fucking animime character. That's stupid. I like that's stupid. However, these are the same people that are posting actual like I could never post a selfie without filter on, cause I'm looking at myself in the camera with no make up and no hair and like just ugly. And I'm looking at myself in the camera and then one of these filters comes on and I'm like yo, I am beautiful. One of these filters comes out and just automatically made me pretty. And I was like, oh, like, but some people post that selfie and then they're under the or they put that as the background on their phone and they're under the illusion that that's what they look like like bitch, you don't look like that. You don't look like that you should not like that's for fun. You should not send those pictures. You should not you I don't think you should be able to save those pictures. Like, no, like, honestly, and if you post them, wouldn't it be funny if the algorithm just took off all the fucking corrections? Wouldn't it be funny if like, oh, like we see this filter, we'll just take off the filter when you post it. So like it posts with all without the Photoshop or without the filter, that would be hilarious. That'd be a funny hack. But coders who doing more like ethical things are nonethical things. I don't know what hackers do. I got accused of being one once, because I had a bunch of flash drives and hard drives. I realized that this is just like this is just what happens when you become a music producer. I'm like, I don't have space for this. I need more like I need more flash drives. I need more hard drives. I need more SD cards. Like I need space for my stuff. Somebody was like people think you're a hacker. I was like, you're an idiot. But that's hilarious. And that was one of the funniest things I've ever been accused of being, because it's like, bro, if I was a hacker, do you think I'd be staying in this fucking hostel, dummy? Fucking dumb. Why would I be hacking from this hostel? Well, I do really actually, you know what? I think that yes. But also we have more stories to tell eventually, what was I gonna say about subtrronics? I just love this music, very good, very, very good, very good. That's it. I don't have anything else to say. I thought I was gonna take up at least half an episode, because I was actively listening to it. I've been actively listening to it like sober in the middle of the day, but it is good running music sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, oh dude, like I have to stop running and head bang. like this is inappropriate, this is inappropriate. I don't I don't know, I don't highly recommend a lot of bass music, like in the city setting, because something happens mechanically in your brain, something at least my brain, where it's like, oh, like that shouldn't synchronize this way. That shouldn't do that. Don't do that. why? What frequency? Idiots. idiots. lots the same guy, by the way. This is the same guy. He doesn't like, what's fucked up is he have a whole vehicle, he doesn't leave the neighborhood. Like he's a menace, like he does not leave the neighborhood. He doesn't. like he drives in circles all day. And like that's his that's he has like no other power. I get it. Like I' I'm understanding like I'm studying the psychology of people with small brains like this. is that like he has no power over like the rest of his life, so like that's his that's his like freedom. That's his power as being able to do that for like a second at a time, like he that's it, then he rounds the corner and does it again, then he rounds like the fucked up thing to me is it's like bro, you're not going to go anywhere with that. Like you have a whole vehicle, a whole vehicle, like anything I have to do I have to go on foot. That's I'm not gonna lie to disadvantage. I mean, like it's not too much of a disadvantage in New York, but anywhere else it's like, you don't have a car. I'm like, yeah. I don't. Like New York is probably the only place in the US that you absolutely really don't need one. You really don't. And honestly, when I see people with cars here, I'm like yo dude, I hope you paid that all the way off because like, honestly like if you're in debt for that, like you you lost like, you lost, like you're not going anywhere and it's like depreciating as you drive it, like this just like, I don't know. I saw well, I was on the bus and we hit a car. The bus kept going. Bus kept going and totally did. It did not make it didn't even flinch like the bus was like oops, you were over the line. I was like damn damn. So eventually eventually that person is gonna come out and be like, oh. ho No, anyway, we do have to talk about some of this entered the multiverse. We are over an hour, so thank you for listening. Yay, what I want on the peloton one arm on the pelotone. Again, I'm not getting paid, but I think going against the grain of like corporate greed right now is the best thing. So all of the things that I can possibly like put online for free. I'm putting online for free. um I'm also trying to get I'm trying to start the process of giving away like copies of my album for free and you know, as springtime and festival season gears up, public spaces. Oh, we didn't talk about the fluffer. First of all, I was worried that it wasn't gonna come out. Excuse me, gosh, what is happening right now? Flip? It snot. stuck somewhere trapped in my space. I'm sorry about that. If you can hear that on this recording, I apologize for that. I apologize, but whatever. Ooh, maybe, well, yeah, I do get like weird. I get weird when I don't work out enough, so I did that. I also went to the gym. I ran yesterday, and then I got on the peloton for an hour and I slept hard between like shaking myself awake to be like, my Amazon

They say new York drinking water is some of the cleanest— don't buy it! I saw a billboard that said 8 glasses of tap water will prevent a heart attack. That's because it already has so much asprin in it! Yooo! Don't drink that! “Some of the cleanest drinking water in the country” Then what the fuck is in the tap water in the rest of the country?! New York tap water ain't right! It's not. Even my brita filter is like “Well, I'll do my best” But it doesn't. I drink tap water out the brita filter and I'm still like “Well geez, I'm sleepy” Fuck that. I moved to New York and had to double triple my budget for water. “New York tap water is “potable” What doe ther even mean. Notice it's not the word “safe” or “healthy” or “clean” It's “potable” Which means— It passes for people we don't really consider people anyway. If you can't afford a real clean water then you deserve whatever's in this mess here— “It's potable” Don't trust that. This is coming from the same government that tried to tell us ketchup was a vegetable. KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE = NEW YORK DRINKING WATER IS SAFE TO DRINK. THIS IS THE SAME LIE. TRANSACRIPT: (Uncorrected, cause this is a lot of words.) We'll see how bad it gets. Good morning Krusty crew! you guys are Kusty crew now. I'm sure at least a few of you listeners are Krusty, like my morning voice. Hello. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. I'm just kidding. They're not paying me. However, I always have like a particular difficulty, like retrieving my Amazon fresh order, and I'm pretty sure so that it's it's so that I can come back on here and be like,Yo, okay, like what the fuck is up with Amazon? And allthough I don't think they need advertising. I haven't seen an actual television and like years, but I've never seen a commercial for Amazon. I've never seen a commercial like they don't need it. They fucking totally cornered the market on every fucking thing you need. Everything. like to the point that some people are like specifically like anti-amazon, which I don't know, I think I want to pride myself on being anti-amon for a while, but really Amazon was like anti-me. They're like your identity. You're sketchy. Now, who are you? I like I couldn't I couldn't Amazon for the longest time and it caused me the greatest difficulty in my life. I was literally paying like more for everything that I needed period. There was no like there was no finagling. I just love finagling. I don't know why. There't there was no getting around it. Like I couldn't just like oh, like here's a here's a fucking alternative to Abbott, there's no alternatives. Like I found companies in the process of doing that that I do like, but like I still have to revert back to Amazon because like most of those companies are like really good, like sustainable companies and like organic companies and like even small businesses, but at the same time, because they are those things, they cost me more and so it's like I can't afford like not to do this anyway. what's going on? We get an episode today. Well, we get we get an episode. We according to this Amazon hall, by the way took two days, like I thought that I was making an order because I was well, here here it is. It's like this was my equivalent for like drunk ordering anything. I don't drink. But if there, you know, if there's like a close, you know, like, I don't know. I don't think I could actually manage to my indigenous heritage kind of grants me like a certain functionality when drinking, although there's like a level. There's like a limit. Like I go from completely functional and like cooperative to no, like very quickly. So I don't think that I could be the type of like blacked out drunk person to order on Amazon. But if I were, this is this is the order I would have made. I guess you could I guess you could kind of compare the fact that like I went out after, what, two days of not working out? I had to go run an errand and that was the worst. That was the worst. I went out in New York ugly for the first time and I went out in New York ugly for the first time in a long time because I I was like, okay, I learned my lesson. like don't be ugly in New York. So I went out ugly because I didn't care. I was like, okay, well, I have to do this fucking errand and everything was bad. Everything went wrong. Everything was bad because well, I mean like I blamed myself I wasn't working out. I think I ran like a considerable amount that day and did like maybe 15 minutes on the pelone, but it wasn't enough. because I I went out and like lights were flickering and there was I was like, what? fucking side dimension is this is not where I live? This is not the place, this is not the place. and so I went out and I had a horrible time, and when I came back, I was like, fuck it, I'm hungry. and I'm pretty sure I just did what's fucked up is damn, I meant to Google. I meant to Google whatever the fuck the thing is that you do before Passover. I'm pretty sure it's called Schchitz. Like I'm not 100% sure because I keep telling myself like I'm gonna Google that. Passover is literally like tomorrow. But also I just got rice. And I left lintils off of my I think lintils is a no, no. I think it's disputed. Like people are like lintels and oats and some people are like yes, and some people are like no. And I'm like,Yo, dude, well, I'm vegan. And a lot of Jews are not, so I mean, like can't we just like substitute, but like the whole point of schitz or whatever you call it, I need to look it up. I'm pretty sure it's Fish. Sch fits like 90% sure, but that's I mean like 90 still 90's and A. It's a low A, but it's an A. And so I think it's something close. I think it starts with the S and ends with a Z like most Jewish and or Yiddish slang terms. or words. I don't know, I love Jews. I'm obsessed with them. I've been thinking about going to like actual services on Saturdays. However, I I like I find it hard to actually move myself on Saturdays in New York. I'm like there's too much. It's too much. It's too much. I don't wanna be out. fuck this. I don't wanna go out even if it's like too a Jew church, like it might be worth it. Especially if it was like like you know, nothing like Mormon church, not in the middle of the day for five hours. Not in the middle of the day for five hours, it might be. I mean, like I don't I don't know. I don't know anything about the actual, like I don't know anything about that shit. I just have it somewhere in my body. I'm like Jew things. hello Jews. anyway. it's no secret. I love Jews. I love Mormons. I actually like all the people. especially people who practice religiously like religiously. I'm like, oho, dude, like, well, I mean like they're extremists, but they're extremists atheists. so I mean like both of like just to be an extremist in any way is wrong. I worked very, very minimally for in for an extremist vegan last year, and I'm still traumatized by it. I still like he grabbed my backpack to keep me from fucking catching the bus and which, by the way, was the day that I lost my wallet. I specifically blame that. like I blame him for that. like I dropped my wallet because he was like, oh, we have to do this or we have to do a group hug. And he like, I was like, oh, nope, my bus is coming and he grabbed the in and he grabbed the back of my backpack and like for some reason now he grabbed the back of my backpack and I was like, what the fuck you doing? He was like, we have to do a group hug. And then I was like, yo, and then I ended up running for the bus and like g getting paid and not having my wallet with me by the time I got back to my apartment, cause I was like shaking him. I was like, the fuck are you pulling on me? Now every time I get every time I get caught on something, I cuss that motherfucker out. like, I don't know. I don't know if it has any direct, like effect on him, cause like every time, every time I get caught on something, and I feel like the motion of a pull, I I just start cussing him out in my brain. I'm like,uck this dude. I hate you. But anyway, I hated him for a lot of reasons. I didn't quit that job cause he paid in cash at the end of each day. It was like he was like one of those horrible people that's like bro, I don't like and everybody knew it and everybody like tipted and walked on eggshells around this motherfucker. But like he paid in cash. He paid in cash tax free at the end of each day, so it was like, yo, if you could get through the end of each day without quitting, you get your whole paycheck today, which and he was paying like a pretty living wage like over minimum wage for New York. So I was like, okay, all right. But I think that I think that was the game. It was like I was supposed to quit because he was like he was terrible. and it was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm like, he pays in cash. At the end of the day, like all I have to do is suffer through this fruit. however long it takes to get cash at the end of the day. Then I drop my wallet and that was a terrible thing because he paid in cash at the end of the day and I dropped my wallet and nobody's turning in a fucking wallet with a full paycheck of cash in it. So I never got that wallet back and then I well, we could call it like a draw not too long after because he he was like, why haven't you quit yet? I'm going to make you quit. I'm like, you will not make me quit. I will get paid cash at the end of this day. Cash. Anyway, anyway, it's tax free cash, daily, I'll be back. Anyw, what's going on? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Was that saying something about Amazon? Oh, extremists. I mean, like I don't I don't think that has anything to do with anything, but being extreme oh, he is extremist vegan. Like he would do mean things to you to try to make you be like oh, I give up meat completely and like veganism is one of those things where it's like it's like alcoholism. Like you have to be ready to change. You get or like ear anything, honestly. like any kind of whatever, like you can't make a person do anything until they're ready. Like you can try, but like most of the time the behavior is just gonna revert back to itself like overeating not working out not working out, like the sugar, like dietary changes, like pretty much any like major behavioral changes have to be initiated by that person for like a personal reason. Like you and even if you are going to convince them to change in some way, you have to like you have to suit them. You have to make it kind of seem like it's their idea. Like you can't just force your ideas onto somebody and be like, oh, you're you know what, you're right. Like I would change because you were this fucking mean to me. I'm like, that doesn't make actually, you know what, after a year of going out at New York, I was like, fine. And then I remembered why because I was like, it's not that bad, whatever, sweatuit and I had fucking I've been getting a lot of work done, so I had my nails like Cardi B long for a while, but then I was like, this is inefficient. if for the things that I have to do, like the amount of things that I have to do with my hands, I can get all this done quicker and then do my nails again later as's not gonna be like that big of a deal, because it, you know, like it you do just figure out a different way to do things with your hands. It's like almost like the nails aren't there, except for typing. And I type very fast and I work very fast, so I'm like, okay, like, these nails gotta go. And so they went. And so I've just been down back to bare bones and like natural hair and no makeup and like yo, yesterday, yes, because I did this twice because I was like once you do it once, I was like I was already like in the bottom of like people scowling at me and shit. So I was like, okay, well, you know, scowls, whatever, I can do this again because I have like one more errand and this dude, this kid this kid that works at the Walgreens was like, oh, I thought you were a terrorist. Like, he didn't say that, but he did. He was like he was like, I thought you were gonna lay down and like, I thought it was over. I thought you were gonna like pull out a can of C4 and blow us all up. And I was like, what? And I forgot that I was like usually like when I go out pretty people treat me nice cause duh. felt like when I go out like regular, people are like oh, like oh, like I'm like, oh, is it that bad? That's what I told the kid, cause I forgot like, I'm just so used to like, I'm still the same consciousness. I'm still the same personality on the inside like it don't matter like, you know, like I just ran here. I I'm like high on endorphins or whatever. likeT's like he was like, oh, like, oh, and I was like, oh, God, is it that bad? I have like a cone head because I'm wearing a bun, but I'm also wearing a hat and a hood, cause it's been nicely cold. It's been great and I I'm worried about the environment cause it's not raining. It's spring, like we're about the hop straight from like the dead of winter to summer and it like and I know it's almost summer because it was like 9 pm last night and the sun had just gone down. I was like, oh, that's fucked up. It's spring again. I was like no, as bad news. It's like that's bad news. It hasn't rained once. Like how are the fucking people? Like, what is the birth doing? Because I mean, like the P people are bad. Well, I mean, like no, not necessarily. I just hadn't like, honestly, the people are always the same. It's like perception, so like when I do my hour on the pelotone and my mild minimum run or whatever, and then I go out into the world, I'm like literally don't like all that shit like bounces off of me. Like the people are still shitty. I'm sure of it. but like I'm just just don't care. It's like a shield live like indoor friends feeling at my peak. That's what I feel. But lately I haven't been feeling great so I haven't been working out, so I haven't I haven't been feeling great because I haven't been working out and it is it has the possibility to be what's it called a vicious cycle, but it did it. Like I was I realized it right away that I was like, oh, this is this is wrong. This is wrong, I don't live here. I don't live here, and I had a very good hour on the pillot last night because two two days ago, I was like, oh, this is this is what happened. I went out and I came back and I was feeling like negative. I was like, no, that was a bad experience. I' hungry now because, you know, sometimes anxiety causes my stomach to churn in a way that's like just fill it with something. And I'm like, okay, usually I understand like anxiety, eating and I can avoid it. Like I understand that like, okay, this is stress or whatever. and I can like, you know, just fill my stomach with water as I'm not hungry. I'm like nervous. I'm not hungry I have anxiety. Like most of the time people eat because they're bored, not because they're hungry. And so I'm like, you know, I'm I don't I haven't I don't mind at all. And so I kind of refuse to allow myself to get bored, but like I do notice like like I eat more when I put like, okay, this this Amazon hall says to me that I'm about to make some ball music because it is the equivalent of something that's like I would have done in a state of like a different state of mind or consciousness as if I were drinking. This this like, okay, like our only emptied it pre-pisode because I was sure that I was like, oh, I know I have ice cream in here. I finally found the fucking bin and Jerry's that I wanted. I was so sick of going to the store and looking through fucking like container after container of bin and Jerry's and not finding the one that I rigid like the first one that I picked up, the first time that I decided like, I'm going to give n non-air Ben and Jerry's a try. I've tried all the other expensive fucking ice creams vegans, and I'm for the most like oh, this one's kind of got like ice chips in it's like freezer burnt tasting this one melts funny and turns into like a gelatinous goo. So I'm like okay Ben and Jerry's like knows what the fuck they're doing and they do what's fucked up about Ben and Jerry's is they're non-airy tastes and is texturized, like they regular ice cream. So it's like the closest thing to regular ice cream. I don't get paid by the way, by any of these people. However, I am like now getting into like the the likeet verse of doing things because I have to because I'm like I make too much music for people not to know about it. Like whether it's gonna be like mediocre bass music or eventually like, I don't know, the most legendary bass music of all time. I now have goals. Well, I mean, like I kind of entered into this DJ thing with like the one thing. I was like, okay, like, if I can't be this, like, what is the point of being like anything else if I can't be this good at doing that, like why would I even like and then I realized I'm like, oh, I'm doing like a house oriented sets, but like, yo, I came here for dubstep. Like, what? oh, are we going to talk about some? We have to talk about subtrronics because I can't I'm like, yo, I can't like, what? Like, I understand as a like, I'm I'm a double fan now because I okay, let's finish all these things. Don't go out in New York ugly. Just don't be ugly in New York. Just don't do it. Just try. just try. just try and New York will give you back an energy what you fucking like it's you you get out of it what you put in. Just try, try. I see people wearing less croccks now. This is good, like, but my equivalent of not wearing crocs is like yo like hair and makeup every day, like non-negotiable. Don't be ugly. I'm like, okay, all right, whatever. I get an out, that kid was like, oh, are you a terrorist? I was like, what the fuck, kid? Like, you were you were nice to me the other day. I'm the same person. I'm the same person making the same transaction, what the fuck? Anyway, so I got back from my errands feeling just totally destroyed. and I made this Amazon hall, but I thought that I was gonna eat in a few hours, whatever I was ordering instead of two days from when I was ordering, they were like, oh no, this is the next available delivery window. I was like that is a deficit to like my like, what if I don't want it two days from now? This is technically an impulse decision based on the fact that I'm reacting badly to whatever the fuck just happened outside. Actually, you know what, though. I just unpacked this fucking Amazon hall, which, by the way, I get the most expensive and non-exciting Amazon haul of all time. The only is like of all time, every time I order Amazon, I'm disappointed unless dish soap or like, I don't know, cleaning supplies. I get like a certain I'm like, yes, it's here. Lysyle has a new fucking scent that I'm just I adore it. I'm like, yo, yo, this doesn't smell like anything I've smelled before for like cleaning. It's like the fabulosa ofysol, which why haven't I just been using fabuloso? Fabuloso used to be mad cheap. Now everybody like caught on to the fact that fabuloso is one of the best multiurpose cleaners ever like of all time. No, they're not paying me either, but I don't really care. Like my whole new thing is like, my whole new thing is like everybody's like subscribe this and fucking $15 a month and like y, dude, you're sucking everybody's income out of them, like everybody who's living under a certain level of fucking like everybody who can't just buy things flat out has to buy them on a subscription and if you count up all the subscriptions like that's like the whole like the common American worker right now, like the common one, like not the, oh, I have an okay job or like, you know, you should just get an education or like, whatever you're elitist mentality makes you think that like your life and your privilege is not like your life and your privilege is your merit. That's I'm not talking about you because you skated through life on your genetics, basically, and you think that you earned what you have, but you didn't. Your grandparents and their parents did and blah, blah, blah, and your lucky that way. But the rest of us are out here like $15 a month for this $20 a month for that. and it adds up to like your entire income is like, okay, after your living expenses like you're still gonna be in like a pretty unshakable amount of debt. because you're like, okay, well, I mean, like I can't afford to do it flat out. Like if I did all these subscriptions at once, flat out, and each of them is like 200 hundred a year, if I did them all flat out, I would be like, I don't know, like at least 5K like a year just like at once. I don't have that. Most people don't have that. and so it's like, okay, well, you can break it down and this is how the businesses are fucking people. They're like oh well, I mean like you can pay for it monthly but it's actually more monthly. Like you save money if you do it yearly, but it's like oh, but if I need everything pretty much all at wants if I need everything pretty much all at once and I can't afford to do everything all at once by the year, I'm actually going to pay more doing it by the month, but I can only afford to do it by the month. So this is the thing that's like fucking with me. I'm like, oh, you guys are fucking with people. What's my point? Oh, I don't know, oh, everybody's being fucking greedy as fuck, which is is just leaving a bad taste in my mouth for humanity at all. I'm like, you greedy motherfuckers. Like, I might live this life in an in an ideal way for now, but it is a temporary space of like discomfort in order for me to observe and understand, like, how better my energy can be suited in the next don't I don't. I mean, like my next incarnation needs to be like a body list, like orb of air and light. Like that's I don't want another like human body, because first of all the planet is like unless you guys find like another habitable planet. and like, I'm not in the I'm not in the fucking level yet where they're gonna be like, oh, like you're fucking worth saving, like we'll take you to our like, we'll take you to our Elysium in space, where only the elite people and the people that we deem worthy will be here and we'll leave like pretty much Hollywood's been telling us forever. They're like, yo, we're gonna leave all the poor ugly, colored people on this planet. and like, when this planet is like destroyed by it by pretty much our doing. And we're gonna like float on some kind of system and space because we have no idea for like a second, like a close enough habitable planet for us to then, like just move on to, like, I don't care what you say, like repopulating Mars is dumb. It is dumb. It is dumb. It's not a fucking it's not a happy place. Like because at one point, because at one point it was a habitable planet. And guess what? we're we're pretty destructive species. It's just historically and like beyond historically, because typically once we destroy ourselves, like as a species, all of our knowledge all of our knowledge and records are destroyed with us. So we have this like, we have this sense of knowing within our like within our mega that's like, oh, if something happened here. But what? And some people have actually access to that within their minds and within their consciousness. It's like, oh yeah, it's like, like, yeah, a lot ofass music producers are like, what, you think I'm from here? I don't give a fuck about this. I don't give a fuck about this. I'm like, I get it. Like this is just for now. This is just for now. I might be included in this, but also I'm like, yo, dude, like I'm pretty environmental when it comes down to like this planet is, you know, anyway. was I just saying, don't be ugly in New York. Oh, okay, so I made this Amazon fucking hall, like a drunk fucking person. Although, like a drunk person, I was kind of looking out for my future self because there's a lot of stable, like there's a lot of pantry staples in here that's like, bro, you won' run out of food. like you might have rice blowat, but you won't run out of food because sometimes I do sometimes I spring so much for the organic and for the like for the like vitamin packs, like superfoods they call it superfoods, but those are just regular foods. Like if you strip down all the foods that are not foods, like all the foods that are actually just like chemical and overprocessed, like if you took all those things off the planet, because they shouldn't exist really anyway. Like you would be left with what they call superfoods or what they market as superfoods that are actually just foods. like, no, these are the foods that you were technically like designed to eat. These are the foods that will fuel your energy for whatever the fuck you have to take on. This is the food that you're like you're made to eat. But they call it superfoods and market it as such and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just got bored. Anyway, what the fuck was that saying? Oh, I took I had like had a hand and creating my next masterpiece. Because I got things that I typically don't. I'm I don't fuck with things like that, like snack foods. But as I said before, like we're not produced that snack, I really do, and I haven't been snacking because I'm like, oh dude, like it's not worth it. I'm I'm New York vein like also have these DJs are just like so skinny, and I'm just like, oh, this body shaving, you can't say that or. I'm like, no, like I aspire to be that. so that people actually pay attention not for what I'm doing, but how I look. So trust me, I'm assimilating. I really am. Oh, which, by the way, I have a discord now. I don't know what the fuck it's for. I have no idea I also have a twitch. I have a twitch. There's nothing on it. I have I have pretty much everything. I even got a Snapchat. I haven't had a sn Snapchat since Ollie died because Ollie was my only sn Snapchat friend as it I have a sn Snapchat. This is all for music though. It's not like when I think about it, I'm like oh, this is the dumbest fucking shit ever and I'm do it when I'm fucking I'm actually figuring out like I'm using like I have TikTok eww and well what's great about it is I am using it like as a business tool so I'm not stuck on the shit like I'm not I am scrolling now, but not I'm like what's weird is like my energy is like looking for something. I'm like oh like okay, like this DJ posted something or like this might want a free copy of my fucking of my music to play or whatever. So I should hit them up. Like as I'm using it as a business platform more than like a social platform because I'm just not just not a social person. It doesn't make sense to be, but now I'm understanding like with the feedback that I'm getting that like, oh, this is how you do it. Like I'm not gonna get a job in this industry unless I assimilate to like what I'm hoping doesn't happen is that I assimilate too much because now all of a sudden I'm like I should get a vape I should get a vape like all the kind that I like are illegal in New York. And I'm actually really proud of the fact that I quit vaping when I got here like when I got here because I was thinking that I was traveling outside of the country and like I didn't want to be like I don't know, traveling outside of the US makes me feel like I'm an ambassador for my country so I don't want to represent my country badly. However, I feel like the actual chosen representatives of the country are not doing like the greatest job. so it doesn't matter what I do like because they are technically the ambassadors to this country like they like I'm pretty much aware like a stamp on my head that has their fucking face and or name on it when I go outside the country anyway I don't know I I usually try to assimilate in that way when I travel outside of the country like learn to speak like you're not American because most countries have an opinion about that. They're like oh you're an American deer, they're you're stupid. I'm like I'm not arguing. How many miles is a kilometer? Can you translate this before we hold up? Let me get Google translate? I'm I'm American, man. I'm American to the point where I have the fucking math doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't make sense. Apple pie, I yeah, apple pie. However, though, I realized because of this, and my indigenous heritage, I have kind of like a like a weird, I don't know, I can't I amm not sure. Like I think because of the way that I've decided to craft my lifestyle, I have like kind of an upperhand advantage at like understanding culture, like understanding culture just culturally, like what has happened from like the inside of the like the like the corporate, like conglomerate capitalists, like like set epicenter. Well, I don't know. I've been reading enough about China to be like wow, China. Also, I't I'm loving this. I'm getting I'm getting feedback on my fucking like my what's it called? My stats or whatever. And I don't have a lot of fans and followers, which is sad, which by the way, if you're listening to this, like check check out my other big gold check out the YouTube. It's at the festival project by the way YouTube YouTubeube.com slash at because it's weird that they have like for their backslashes, but it's at the festival project I'm the festival project. There's a whole bunch of people trying to really like I've been telling people that my project is the festival project for a while and now all these people are coming out of nowhere like I'm the festival project. I'm like, you are not. Like, you are not the festival project. Stop lying on yourself. I'm the festival project. I've always been the festival project, at the festival project, that's me, not anybody else. That's you, technically, like the letter you, with no check mark because I'm not paying for that shit. Would I become notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, they'll put the fucking check mark on it for me. I ain't paying for it. I'm paying for it the fuck that like that's like you could buy a grabby award now. I'm sure that you can. I' 100% sure that you could do that. Which is sad and it's likeo, dude, I actually like I what's it? I I don't know. I think I come from a weird world where it's like I hold the academy to like such high regard that it's like I'm like the fact that I'm like pretty certain that you could buy a Grammy makes me sad because it's like like I don't know this whole oh, that's what I was saying. I'm giving away all my shit for free because everybody's greedy motherfuckers. Like I'm giving away my music for free like the album that I dropped yesterday all the rage is 100% free. All you have to do is go on my website and download it. That's it like you don't even have to spend money on a subscription for a streaming service like you could just go get that at my website www.mU.uru. That's the website you can just download whatever the fuck I haven't put all my music up there because honestly I'm I'm realizing how much music I have and like how long I've been making music and I'm like, oh you're like oh okay, first of all, I'm like it's gonna be it's hard it's hard enough for me to just format it and put it on a flash drive just to like have all my music together because I've made it over time and so the expand it it's just a lot like it's just a lot all my music's not in one place, all my mixtapes are not in one place. I just got to sound cloudy yesterday. I only got a SoundCloud to enter a fucking beat making contests the first time I've ever done anything like that like I've entered DJ contests so I can try to get a job, but I've never done a beat making contest, so I've never had to actually like condense my creative space into like a one minute thing. And so, I don't know, I really enjoyed doing that, but it's not something that I was looking at the other contest, they were like, it's for a clout. I'm like, that's stupid. I don't want to waste time on clout. Cloths not gonna pay my bills, anyhho. Clout. Oh, what was I saying? Oh, I was supposed to talk about subtrronics, my Galypes, refrigerator. These Ecuadorian bananas. Okay, I have a like I eat a lot of bananas because bananas and for whatever reason, if found bananas like synonymous with New York City, I always have even before before I lived here, I think it's just because it was like the cheapest thing that I could find is like bananas like bananas. That's what I gonna eat bananas. So I always just kind of like for some reason it was like, oh, from in New York, I need bananas. Now I live in New York and I'm like I see why. But now I'm like my flavor palate is changing to be more specific and so I'm like a banana connoisseur, but I finally like I landed on a I landed on bananas. I landed on bananas that I just love so much. First of all, they're huge, they're huge. I also like these really tiny bananas that are like sweet and little and like they have a very specific taste, and I like the red ones, and yo, that lady when I lived in Mexico, she was so elusive, like she came she was the only lady in the whole place with red bananas and like these red, these really tiny red bananas have like the like they're the best bananas I've ever tried. But the second bananas, the second best bananas I've ever tried are Ecuadorian bananas. and I'm like, yo, dude, first of all, they are huge. Like they're big thick, they're like big, they're big and they're d they're big, big, perfectly sized bananas. good girth. good, nice, just good bananas. They're huge. and uh I don't know, like I started going to the store and then I stopped going to it because rac is oops, I'm not supposed to say that. I I just realize something. I realize something about the world like that you can't even you can't even insinuate like a conversation about race. Like people people will get like people start to get upset, like one way or another. Like I said, extremism on both sides exists. I don't like I can't I'm I'm post racial. Like I can't pick a side anyway like you're gonna put me on one side or another based on your perception of who I am or what I do but like I'm completely like I'm like literally the most neutral thing that ever like literally the most neutral thing that ever. And so what was I just saying, oh, I don't know, I went into a hole. Acuadorian bananas. We'll just we'll just re her back to Acuadorian bananas. Yes, extremism, no. Ecuadorian bananas, yes. They are the best. They are the best, and not only is the size perfect, but the flavor of the banana is just a little bit different from like Guatemalan bananas or Mexican bananas, like no, Ecuadorian bananas. And so now I've gotten into the habit of like, I found another store that has Ecuadorian bananas, thank goodness, because like when I stopped going to the other store, I was like god damn it, they have the Ecuadorian bananas. like that was the one thing from there that I liked and the Uber pancakes. But we'll it's okay. That controversial episode, which I'm like, what's it called? referencing may or may not er. I need to it's like a twohour episode that I did in an emotional kind of turmoil. I need to check that episode to see if I want to air it. It might it might not. Like it could just be like deleted, because I felt like it was forced. I was like why are you try why are you trying to make me act out of my fucking character? Fuck you. Like I don't like when people try to force things. So that sometimes happens where people will come out of the woodwork and be like, talk about this experience. And I'm like, "Yo, dude, you just cornered me into making me feel like unsafe and not great. I don't necessarily and then it was like the energy was like, okay, I have to talk about this, but I didn't like the way that it made me feel. So the fact that it felt forced was like eh but I definitely earned that next tattoo. I'm I'm behind on tattoos I have two tattoos that I have to get it. I definitely earn that one. I earn that one with the help of Erica body, but I'll explain that in some in the multiverse and legends things later. I don't understand how things work sometimes in the universe, but that was one of those things I was like this is this is not even a synchronicity. This is like a this is an experience. We'll see if that episode's worth posting, but either way, I in the tattoo, I earn the tattoo beforehand, that was just the solidification, I think. Anyhho. what the fuck is I say? Ah, Ecuore bananas, yes, yes. Because it makes me think like like, if their bananas are like this, what are their women like? Like, I could give no fucks about the men. I'm not a lesbian, but like, I'm thinking in the way of like a I'm thinking in the masculine way that's like, you know, if they're bananas tastes like this, like, what are their women like Ecuadorian bananas? I think about that, because I'm like yod dude, like my taste profile is based on my diet. So, if these bananas come from Euador, like, what else comes from Ecuador that's fucking perfect. probably women. I don't believe in perfect men. I mean, like perfect looking, sure, perfect acting, sure, a combination of these things to together, rare, but like a per perfect women exist all over the place. Like perfect men. I don't think is a thing. I don't think it is. And that's not me being sexist or like because honestly, if you listen to the way that I speak, like being like a I don't have a preference for gender, just don't be a fucking sh shit hole of a human being. Like I don't care what you are, how you are, like just be cool, you know, like B peaceful and mind your manners and shut the fuck up. I mean like I'm not trying to silence people, but like be mindful of your environment. You know what I'm saying? Be mindful of people around you because there are so many there so many. And you are the focus I to try to say Acuadorian bananas, yes, as good. Are we ready to talk about subronics? Did I talk about all my websites and stuff? We have a discord. It's I think you can find me on discord at blue the guru and it's the same on twitch. I haven't posted anything to twitch yet. I did. I did tape a couple of my performances, but they were horrible. They were horrible and honestly they were just so that I could enter a contest so I could try to get a job. Like that was it. I did that. I was like, well, I have to do something because you you miss 100% percent of the chances you don't take. I believe truly in that so like I would rather enter something that's like mediocre and at least be on the radar and be like, hey, I'm trying. Like I'm really trying with all the things that like all the things that I'm going through and all the work that I have to do like I'm at least trying to get my work seen and I'm at least trying to put it out there and like, you know, the odds of me winning at something like that, especially if it is last minute and it is like mediocre and I know it's not my best performance, which, by the way, I think okay, people really like, oh, this is what I was saying about my audience. One, people really like talkatoo. That's one of my first actual productions, okay? It has almost no technique whatsoever. Well, it does, and I I did work like really hard on it, but like yo, I made that song in a tree, literally a tree, like like a tree. People like this song. It's for some reason gotten really popular, like no out of nowhere. Like people are like this song. I'm like, really? I made that in a tree with no plugins, no I'm pretty sure it's all stock samples. People love it. People love that song, but honestly it is one of my like it is it like it mixes with everything, talking to like if you need like a filler song and I think it is long enough that's like, yo, dude. Like, if you need to go to the bathroom or whatever, like this song is like the song rocks. And honestly, I don't know why that well, I mean, like that song is special. It was the first song I ever heard played back on a system at a festival. because I was like, like here's my music, whatever. And I didn't expect because the DJ was like,, you suck. And I was like, and just be just looking at me because I like ran up during a fucking uh, like a power outage at this fucking rave. I was like, yo, like this this might be the only time that I could actually talk to the you you miss 100% of the chances you don't take. So I was like, okay, like, this might be the only time I could talk to this guy. The power just went out and I was like, then now is my chance because like otherwise mid party and it was a good party, like it was a good one. It was a good it was it was a good one. It was a really great. It was a really great. um but, yeah, that was the first time I ever heard my music played back because I like ran up and I was like yod like here here's me, here's my music, here's a flas I have like you could keep it. has my music on it and it had I think at the I think it just had copy and paste on it like that whole EP was done and so a copy and paste is just talk to this other song called Nero, which has me like hand drumming on it, which is a cool song too. I use the Ableton push. I love the Ableton push and I had to forfeit it because it wasn't going back in my luggage. I couldn't afford it. So somebody fucking I feel charitable about this. Somebody inherited a $1200 at the time that it's depreciated, somebody inherited what I paid $1200 for for free, I think we're even. Anyway, um I add in uteroakatu and 43 on it. That's copy and paste and like, I I ran up during a blackout and I was like here. like, here's my stuff. And he was so annoyed. The DJ was so fucking annoyed. He was like, what are you saying? Like, and if they were like, the powers are, we can't get the power to come back on. so like people had started like a drum circle over in the corner and some people were leaving, they're like, you know, when the power goes out of a fucking festival or a rave like first of all, it's not a it's not a slammer. Like it's not a banging fucking festival and or rave if the power doesn't go out at least once or the cops come. Like if there's no raid, people don't get raided these days, do they? Yeah, that used to bring like a certain element of fucking like fear and excitement that like, yo, this party might only last five minutes. Let's get it anyway. It's New York old New York rave culture. hey, they're having a party over here because we're having a party over here but like shut down that party. Snitches in New York have always been a thing. like, if somebody over there is doing something that competes with your business, like you snitch on them, that would that's old school dance music culture. That's what they used to do, like those little preppy and we're not gonna put a color to it, but those little preppy boys that were like doing the old school, like underground, like break it in raves. Like that's what they were doing. They were like, oh, he's uh doing a there's a party over here in a secret place over here that shouldn't be. But those people were also doing a party and they wanted all the fucking people to come to their party and said that that party. So they were just snitch. They were just like hey, I got a tip. I got a tip on these motherfuckers. And then and then the other party would get shut down and everybody would be like, rolling balls, be like okay, we're still need a I need a party, like where's the other party? And there would always be somebody from the other party there to like usher people to the other party, like, I know where the party is. Yeah, these people. Anyway, I have I have such a love for the culture. What what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, one people have talked to which I made in a tree. That's almost that's almost discouraging. I'm like, yo dude, I'm footing in all this fucking like putting in all this extra work and like this fucking sound design and engineering and like trying to fucking trying to achieve subtronics but sober. Ha ha I'm like, uh, I'm also like ten years older than this kid. at least, excuse me, I don't know what the fuck is happening. Coffee early in the morning. Is my nose running or is it just like, oh, it's almost summer, so we're getting moist in the bitch, like we're just gonna get tepid for the next six months with no rain. Like it's gonna be like the moistures in the air. Enjoy that crawls. anyway I need to figure out what the fuck is schitz is or if that's what it's called. the longer I stay in New York. The easier it is for the old Jew and me to fucking arise. Ugh Anyway, what the fuck was I just saying? Oh, I love this about my statistics. My fans, although there are a few of them are speckled all over the world. I still don't know where Kazakhan is. but I think I have I have a couple listeners in Kazakhstan and they're in two different cities. I'm like that's pretty incredible to me. I was likeYo, dude, where the fuck is Kazakh stand? I don't know. I also found like, okay, like I don't I don't know where half these places are, but like I don't wanna go there although this place this one particular place I'm like oh dude, I don't know where the fuck you're at. I don't know where the fuck you're at and nobody knows where the fuck you're at cause I tried to look you up on a map and it was too distinctively like non places. I was like, is it this place or this place? And they're like it could be this place where that place? And I'm like cracked, but where is it? They're like nowhere, don't worry about it. I'm like damn! Okay, but I have a family there, so that's cool. I got fans all over the world, but they're like speckled. They're not, you know, by the hundreds or millions or billions. Are we gonna talk about that? Eventually, eventually, yes, we'll talk about my love of late night television. Yes, we have talked about that. But not right now. Because that could easily take up a whole episode, easily take up a whole episode. If you ever want to know the state of like if you ever want to know the state of mainstream, America, just check late night, because honestly, that's just like an anchor man dressed up in a little monkey suit as to whatever the fucking day people were talking about reiterated for the night people to understand. It's the same news. They are part of the news networks. I've just realized this cause I'm like oh no that's more like entertainment oh, it's the news. It's just the news kind of funny. It's just the same news that like whatever the NBC oh no, okay, like let's not NBC. Oh, yeah, NBC is doing enough right now. like go. No wonder why they didn't want causeby to buy the network, they would've fucked up their plans. He would have fucked up their plans. I'm like, I don't know what he was gonna do with MBC, but like he would have fucked up whatever they're doing now. That's why they prevented that. They were like, no. no, we have plans. They they're for the foreseeable future. Anyway, let's not NBC, because there's also CBS and uh that's it. At this point, I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're just like moving towards like the like a mass conglomeration of like, we're all the same. I'm like kind of like, and what's funny is they outfit themselves to pretend that they're like, I like this is so funny how left leaning it is when like all y' motherfuckers swing right easily. But I'm like, okay, I understand that this is for the masses, the masses are left swing. I'm like, okay, this is politics again, let's not do this. But everything is, it really is. Anyway, oh my go, what'll talk about my love for late night honor diff episode completely. Well, I mean, like we have a season devoted to it. We do, because I'm like, oh, they have to be like included in this in into the multiverse in legends, because like basically all of the mainstream pop culture like go like flows through late night TV. like that's where it goes. Like if you heard about it, you probably heard about it on late night TV because it is media like that's like anybody who's anybody goes through late high TV. I will not talk about all of I mean like there's so many different there's not really variations. I just said what it is. They're basically anchormen that are disguised not as anchorman. They are giving you the same news from the morning time news or the daytime talk shows, but watered down so that it seems like different news, but it's not as the same news all day. They work for the network, the network works for the dest network work for it themselves. What the fuck? I haven't figured this out yet, like on an intellectual level, I'm starting to, but it's one of those things where it's like mm kid, curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity killed and skinned many cats. Don't look here. I'm like, I got it, I get this. I got it, shut up. Shut up. Let me sit my fucking mug. guys when it comes down to it, I am assimilating well enough to be like, okay, I'm on Instagram twitch. Fucking I'm on Twitter, which is now X. I don't know. I think so. I have it. It's there like I don't use it or anything, but like I'm trying to see what the engagement for this upcoming season will be and if it works, then it works, but I have kind of thought about shooting this podcast in like a if I'm going to do anything, it's going to be anhilate night format where I have like a specific set of like this is what we're going to talk about. I do have a monkey suit picked out. I do have that because I like the format. It's easier it's easier for me to digest and then regurgitate information for my fans and followers this way. Like that's I don't know, like besides the fact that like I have been studying comedy for like the better part of two years now and that I grew up screenwriting and w like, ah, I don't know, like like I get it, though. I get why I'm so like hardwired to this. It's like yo dude, like via the television, we're so comfortable with these people because it's like oh like you're in my house like Lin Letterman, you're in my house like my whole entire existence, my whole childhood. So it's like that's like familiarity to a point that you can't you can't shake it. So like you can grow up and like, you know, the next the predecessors of the next and the next any man comes and like takes over the role of the last any man, but also like evolves the masses for the next coming generation and like the traits of the like it's it's a very interesting culture. I'm obsessed. like I love late night TV. I love TV, but I love late night TV specifically and we'll talk about that more in depth. I guess at some point because I do have to explain this entire weird what seems like an offshoot season well, it was kind of an offshoot season because I lost a season. I don't know what the fuck happened to it. Well now I'm going through my hard drives and I'm like, here it is. It's in here. It's all in here. I'm like, oh, so here we will answer my question. Soon, what did I write last year? I don't know. don't know at all. I really don't. I know a post in some of it. Some of it got like mirrored back in the universe, like, did you know you wrote this? I'm like, no, it's kind of prophetic in a way. just kind of happened. It took over my body anyway. What did I write last year? I don't know. Somebody read it. Somebody read it and then I have to do I have to do more like protections for my intellectual property because yo, I wrote half the Super Bowl commercials facts. I did I did. I was like yo,ude, I wrote this. Michael documents, what the fuck you do I Google documents? Like fuck you like fuck you unless that money is going into a pool to later pay me. When I like reach a certain level as an incentive, like we know we stole this from your fucking show, which, by the way, is just available online to anybody who fucking wants to copy and paste it and the descriptions you idiot. Yeah, I'm like yeah, well I mean like I can't really afford to join the writer's guild. They're like in that respect we will rip you off. only so that I can make sure that this commercial reaches your eyes and time for you to understand that like yo, you just put this out here for free. I'm like well love is free and music should be free. Like I'm technically just taking like a bag like a like a back step to like what the fuck is happening in the corporate world, which is sucking people like it's bleeding people who are already tired dry. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to be like, you know, like like, like, yes, I put like a PayPal about me link like if you want to donate to the festival project or later the complex collective cause I will not collect donations for my nonprofit until it's actually I've actually established the nonprofit as a 501 C3 and so like like the way that I'm doing my music right now is that like half of my profit goes to the festival project, which is like my my label, my independent label and media company. But the other half of my my like income, my earned income from music or, you know, however I earn or monetize, goes to the complex collective, which is a completely nonprofit organization, like meant to contribute back to the artists and like the artist community. not just the artist community, but just like to the overall health and wellness of like the like to to humanity as a whole, I think. Well, that's what the complex collective is kind of it's it's a health and wellness based nonprofit to the charity. So my the way that I what's it the way that I credit myself is that like the I use the complex collective, which is a nonprofit, as my music publisher, so that anything from the complex collective goes into the pool for the nonprofit, because I have to like, I can't consciously go throughout the rest of my life without giving back to my community and that way. like be because the way my life has gone so far, I don't like as much as I want to volunteer, I like well, I tried and then I like the the food bank that I volunteered for was like so and they had some organizational issues. They had some uh leadership issues. And so I was like, this is actually a toxic environment, which sucks. so I decided not to do that and uh and, you know, put all my uh energy of being like a charitable person into like my own, like I'll just my own nonprofits, non-for-profit is to give back to the community to artists and people in it in like transitionary, whatever. um That's the complex collective. So that's that's why you see that. That's why you see that badge on everything. That's the nonprofit sector. It is a subsidiary to the festival project, and I'm pretty much like devote my like I pretty much devote my my uh my gains, so to speak, into like both pools. Eventually, I'll have enough to then solidify the nonprofit with a um well, I have to you know, you have to pay. It's not it's not free for nonprofit. It's not. And so that's what that is. What else was I saying? Fans all over the world? Yes, we have fans all over the world. It's really cool. A lot of these places I've never heard of, but I do I find it a little bit, uh heartwarming and chanting, like I'm a little bit magical that like I'm hitting people in like some of the major dance cities, like Sal Paulo, Brazil, and uh like like places that are Amsterdam, London, uh I have more. I have more people in the UK than I thought, but it's okay because I I like them. I like them. Well, I like people. I like people that are people. Well, people be people on it so not all the time. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, this is like this is characteristic of your species. Like this is why this is this way. Like this is this is a whole human thing. It's not attractive at all. But I think we' close to an hour, I'd had to be oh, six minutes what do I got for six minutesronics. I'm I can't okay, I love subronics like as like Won as a fan because I went to a few of his performances. I'm not gonna lie. Every time his whole audience has BO. everybody. I'm like, oh, nobody in here has D right. But I think I got my fucking I don't know, maybe it was a sign. I was I was mixing the other day like nonstop and I'd been running around and I have a special jacket that I wear when I DJ that's like a really it's like a nice, I don't know what material it is, but it's really nice, like a uh a sports jacket, like a bomber. No, it's not a bomber style. It's like a I can't I can't remember this. It's like a sports jacket, but it's this material that's really nice. it's just always been my DJ jacket. It's like my lucky DJ jacket. and uh I usually wash it like on a delicate cycle and don't put it in the dryer to keep it preserved because it's really, really nice and I had been running around for a couple days and then mixed for like a solid, I don't know, I was in there like all together, I was in there, I think like nine or ten hours and I spent most of those the most of that time, like actively mixing because my music was not it was not s synched, so I had to hand pitch everything on four decks, which was overwhelming, which, by the way, I also did not know, which is why, like you like I did post at least one of the videos. but it's I'm embarrassed. I'm wearing yellow. yellow's not a good color. I'm looking heavy as fuck, like, oh, man, they had that video in the sidebar next to this girl, that's like a size double zero model. like fucking DJ and the rainforest with like grown footage and like HD, like, and then all her videos were like, she was she was like DJing and the one was like in the rainforest. one was like on a beach. Like she just had like she was all these destinations that had the drone footage, like money, but also like beauty just like pure beauty. Like she didn't have to do good. Like her music sounded good, but like she looked awkward as fuck not being able to dance to her own music. But still, like the like what why would you be paying attention to that when A she's beautiful, that's a distraction, be drone footage of like whatever the fucked rainforest or like tropical beach, like she was everywhere. I was like fuck this bitch. And algorithm's like Toby salty. I was like, I'm a little salty because it showed my thumbnail next to her thumb nail and I was like, no, no, no no. no like, oh so bad. So now I know. I know better than to look fat. Don't be ugly in New York. I was actually in full hair and makeup with my nails done with my Cardi B style nails. Yes, I was, but the yellow shirt on camera and it wasn't the best camera. It was like so I like I I used to have a camera like that when I first got into filmmaking when I was like eight. It was like the same camera. I'm like yo, this is bad. It's really bad. But, you know, all that's investments, investments. I don't think it's gonna be even I don't think it's gonna be any better, which, by the way, some people are delusional, bro. I just got Snapchat. I haven't had Snapchat since Allie died so I've been like I've been away from like that whole world and like seeing first of all, people actually pay money to dress their fucking, like, what are those things called? their little animated. Like, okay, you're paying money to put clothes on a on a 2D creature, you are dumb. That's why they do that, though. I'm like, oh, I need this forage shirt for my fucking Snapchat animated thing. I'm like, that's stupid. I mean, like if you got it. But still, even if you got it, it seems like I could have a million dollars and I still wouldn't spend a dollar to dress a fucking animime character. That's stupid. I like that's stupid. However, these are the same people that are posting actual like I could never post a selfie without filter on, cause I'm looking at myself in the camera with no make up and no hair and like just ugly. And I'm looking at myself in the camera and then one of these filters comes on and I'm like yo, I am beautiful. One of these filters comes out and just automatically made me pretty. And I was like, oh, like, but some people post that selfie and then they're under the or they put that as the background on their phone and they're under the illusion that that's what they look like like bitch, you don't look like that. You don't look like that you should not like that's for fun. You should not send those pictures. You should not you I don't think you should be able to save those pictures. Like, no, like, honestly, and if you post them, wouldn't it be funny if the algorithm just took off all the fucking corrections? Wouldn't it be funny if like, oh, like we see this filter, we'll just take off the filter when you post it. So like it posts with all without the Photoshop or without the filter, that would be hilarious. That'd be a funny hack. But coders who doing more like ethical things are nonethical things. I don't know what hackers do. I got accused of being one once, because I had a bunch of flash drives and hard drives. I realized that this is just like this is just what happens when you become a music producer. I'm like, I don't have space for this. I need more like I need more flash drives. I need more hard drives. I need more SD cards. Like I need space for my stuff. Somebody was like people think you're a hacker. I was like, you're an idiot. But that's hilarious. And that was one of the funniest things I've ever been accused of being, because it's like, bro, if I was a hacker, do you think I'd be staying in this fucking hostel, dummy? Fucking dumb. Why would I be hacking from this hostel? Well, I do really actually, you know what? I think that yes. But also we have more stories to tell eventually, what was I gonna say about subtrronics? I just love this music, very good, very, very good, very good. That's it. I don't have anything else to say. I thought I was gonna take up at least half an episode, because I was actively listening to it. I've been actively listening to it like sober in the middle of the day, but it is good running music sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, oh dude, like I have to stop running and head bang. like this is inappropriate, this is inappropriate. I don't I don't know, I don't highly recommend a lot of bass music, like in the city setting, because something happens mechanically in your brain, something at least my brain, where it's like, oh, like that shouldn't synchronize this way. That shouldn't do that. Don't do that. why? What frequency? Idiots. idiots. lots the same guy, by the way. This is the same guy. He doesn't like, what's fucked up is he have a whole vehicle, he doesn't leave the neighborhood. Like he's a menace, like he does not leave the neighborhood. He doesn't. like he drives in circles all day. And like that's his that's he has like no other power. I get it. Like I' I'm understanding like I'm studying the psychology of people with small brains like this. is that like he has no power over like the rest of his life, so like that's his that's his like freedom. That's his power as being able to do that for like a second at a time, like he that's it, then he rounds the corner and does it again, then he rounds like the fucked up thing to me is it's like bro, you're not going to go anywhere with that. Like you have a whole vehicle, a whole vehicle, like anything I have to do I have to go on foot. That's I'm not gonna lie to disadvantage. I mean, like it's not too much of a disadvantage in New York, but anywhere else it's like, you don't have a car. I'm like, yeah. I don't. Like New York is probably the only place in the US that you absolutely really don't need one. You really don't. And honestly, when I see people with cars here, I'm like yo dude, I hope you paid that all the way off because like, honestly like if you're in debt for that, like you you lost like, you lost, like you're not going anywhere and it's like depreciating as you drive it, like this just like, I don't know. I saw well, I was on the bus and we hit a car. The bus kept going. Bus kept going and totally did. It did not make it didn't even flinch like the bus was like oops, you were over the line. I was like damn damn. So eventually eventually that person is gonna come out and be like, oh. ho No, anyway, we do have to talk about some of this entered the multiverse. We are over an hour, so thank you for listening. Yay, what I want on the peloton one arm on the pelotone. Again, I'm not getting paid, but I think going against the grain of like corporate greed right now is the best thing. So all of the things that I can possibly like put online for free. I'm putting online for free. um I'm also trying to get I'm trying to start the process of giving away like copies of my album for free and you know, as springtime and festival season gears up, public spaces. Oh, we didn't talk about the fluffer. First of all, I was worried that it wasn't gonna come out. Excuse me, gosh, what is happening right now? Flip? It snot. stuck somewhere trapped in my space. I'm sorry about that. If you can hear that on this recording, I apologize for that. I apologize, but whatever. Ooh, maybe, well, yeah, I do get like weird. I get weird when I don't work out enough, so I did that. I also went to the gym. I ran yesterday, and then I got on the peloton for an hour and I slept hard between like shaking myself awake to be like, my Amazon

- TROLLS: CHECK YOUR OWN REVIEWS FIRST!- Some Dentists Hate Admitting That Social Media & Marketing Matters…- New Fear Unlocked: GOING BALDQuestions:(03:04) – Are you going bald?(05:10) – Do you have a big backyard?(05:20) – How's the raccoon doing?(06:08) – In winter, do raccoons hibernate?(07:08) – When is the annual AAOMS meeting?(07:36) – Have you done tracheostomies before?(09:12) – Did you ever assist in gastric bypass surgeries?(12:20) – Do you think social media has changed the way specialists market themselves?(15:17) – How do you deal with trolls and critics on social media?(24:27) – Do you follow other creators for inspiration, or do you try to stay original?(28:36) – Did you look up the person who wrote that article in JOMS?(29:56) – Do you think younger dentists are too focused on looking like doctors rather than practicing as one?(34:01) – You own a Panerai watch?(42:21) – Would you ever buy a smartwatch, or do you prefer traditional watches?Quotes & Wisdom:"You can be the best surgeon in the world, but if your marketing sucks, you might not be busy." (12:20)"People are learning new techniques through social media. It's a quick and free way to gain knowledge. If you're not comfortable with it, that's fine, but the profession is shifting." (14:43)"If someone's criticizing your work but doesn't have any of their own content to show for it, that tells you everything you need to know." (16:43)"I Google trolls sometimes. 90% of the time, they have no clinical posts, or they're private. And their clinic reviews? 2.5 stars. It's always the same profile." (20:29)"Research is the foundation of our specialty, but social media is changing how people interact with their doctors." (27:47)"At conferences, the research guys sit at one end of the table, and the social media guys sit at the other. But why does it have to be divided?" (26:54)"I worry that some younger dentists focus too much on looking like a doctor rather than being one." (32:55)"When I passed my boards, I bought my Panerai watch. It was my way of marking that milestone, my reward for years of hard work." (36:13)Now available on:- Dr. Gallagher's Podcast & YouTube Channel- Dose of Dental Podcast #127- 2.2025#podcast #dentalpodcast #doctorgallagherpodcast #doctorgallagherspodcast #doctor #dentist #dentistry #oralsurgery #dental #dentalschool #dentalstudent #doctorlife #dentistlife #oralsurgeon #doctorgallagher

Lesley Logan and Brad Crowell break down key insights from Lesley's conversation with Sam Mandel, CEO and co-founder of Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, one of the first ketamine clinics in the country. They explore how ketamine therapy can help reframe trauma, unlock new mental pathways, and provide clarity for lasting change. In this recap episode, they discuss the power of perspective shifts, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and why taking action—despite fear or perfectionism—is the key to growth. If you've ever felt stuck in your past, this conversation will give you a fresh way to move forward.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:How ketamine therapy helps reframe past experiences and shift perspectives on trauma.The role of ketamine in rewiring the brain and breaking old thought patterns.Why a structured clinical environment ensures the best results with ketamine therapy.The importance of normalizing alternative mental health treatments and breaking the stigma.How perfectionism holds you back and why taking “messy action” leads to real growth.Episode References/Links:Cambodia October 2025 Waitlist - https://crowsnestretreats.com Spring Pilates Training - https://opc.me/eventsPilates Studio Growth Accelerator - https://prfit.biz/acceleratorAccessories Flashcards Waitlist - https://opc.me/flashcardwaitlistKetamine Clinics LA Website: https://Ketamineclinics.com Sam Mandel's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thesammandel If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox.DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS!Check out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSoxBe in the know with all the workshops at OPCBe It Till You See It Podcast SurveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates MentorshipFREE Ditching Busy Webinar Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable Pilates Follow Us on Social Media:InstagramThe Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channelFacebookLinkedInThe OPC YouTube Channel Episode Transcript:Brad Crowell 0:00  The past is the past, but our story about it can change at any given moment. So the event still happened, but the story we tell ourselves about that event that is something that we can change. And he said the ketamine really helps you dig in, because, well, first off, he said the most challenging aspect of trauma is that we feel like it can define us, and ketamine helps you see the traumatic events with a new perspective, detaching from the overwhelming emotions and allowing for more objective processing. Lesley Logan 0:31  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.Lesley Logan 1:10  Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It interview recap where my co-host in life, Brad, and I are going to dig into the eye-opening convo I had with Sam Mandel in our last episode. If you haven't yet listened to that interview, feel free to pause this now go back and listen to that one or you can listen to this one and then listen to that one. You can listen, too, in whatever order you want. I found it to be really fascinating.Brad Crowell 1:35  Yeah, actually, I always find it funny that people tell us we've clearly said this almost 300 times now, or 250 times now saying you could pick if you want to watch one, listen to one first or the other, or watch and. Lesley Logan 1:48  People need permission. Brad Crowell 1:49  But then when people meet us, they say, oh, I'm really enjoying your recap. So I listen to them first and then go back. Or other people are like, I don't know. I have to listen to this first versus the I can't listen (inaudible).Lesley Logan 1:59  They want to guess. They want to know if their takeaway is what we're going to talk about, which I think is really fascinating. I think it's also what a great personality test.Brad Crowell 2:08  Yeah. I don't know what conclusions we're drawing from it but yes. Lesley Logan 2:11  Here's what I would say. I listen to a couple true crime shows, and I cannot listen to the talking about the show until I've listened to the show, because I like the anticipation of, like, did he do it? What's going on? Like, I like that. And then I like listening to. Brad Crowell 2:26  What are you talking about you skip to the end? Lesley Logan 2:30  Well, when we watched The Crown, yes, I Google. I Google, like, if it is true. Well, sometimes the anxiety makes me want to know.Brad Crowell 2:37  This is the Lesley thing. We start a thing, there's some kind of stress, which is, in every TV show, it's on purpose. And then she pulls out her phone, Google's the resolution for the entire show. And then I'm always like, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I literally don't want to know. I want to enjoy the show the way they made it. Lesley Logan 2:54  I am not your friend to support you not finding out if you're having a boy or girl, even though I completely support whether or not they identify as that, I like to know. Brad Crowell 3:06  You're not going to do the Moira Rose, I don't know if you trust me with that secret. Lesley Logan 3:13  No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to be I don't want to hold a secret. No, that's not true. I can't hold a secret. Brad Crowell 3:20  Hilarious. All right. Well, today is March 13th 2025 and it's a day for two specials things here. Lesley Logan 3:26  Oh, okay. So here we go. First up, it's International Every Girl Wins Day. This holiday helps bring attention to women's rights worldwide, especially to young girls. The celebrations involve talks, lectures and conferences on women's empowerment in every country, the goal is to achieve long-term systemic change that addresses women's rights to equity. The day also inspires young girls to take pride in their most essential assets. They're encouraged to support each other and be ambassador of the female empowerment movement, not just beneficiaries of it. The Ever Girl Wins Institute introduced this holiday. That's so cool. Brad Crowell 3:59  Yeah, pretty cool. Lesley Logan 4:00  What a fun day. Okay, well, that's so fun, we have to figure out how to celebrate that more. Let's participate next year. I don't know. Lex, if you're listening, let's talk about it.Brad Crowell 4:08  Yeah. Second up, it's National Open An Umbrella Indoors Day. Lesley Logan 4:13  What? Brad Crowell 4:13  Right? I was like, okay, I need to include this. So it's a day to test the popular superstition that opening an umbrella inside will bring bad luck. So I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't realize it. I've heard of walking under a ladder, something about black cats. I don't actually know. Lesley Logan 4:29  I have always heard that opening the umbrella inside is bad luck, but I've never participated in it, because where else are you supposed to open the umbrella, outside in the rain? Not everythin has a.Brad Crowell 4:39  You always open it indoor first, and then go outside with it.Lesley Logan 4:42  Oh, I kind of want to, if I can push the door open, I want to open the umbrella as I'm going outside, because. Brad Crowell 4:48  Yeah, as you're going outside.Lesley Logan 4:49  If there's not a, most buildings don't have a porch, like a, what do you call it? It's not a porch. It's not what you're staying on, it's, it's overhang. Most of them don't have the overhang. And I just think it's annoying, because then you're wet under your umbrella.Brad Crowell 4:49  Yes, yes.Lesley Logan 4:55  Okay, well, tell us more about this day. Brad Crowell 5:03  Apparently, superstitions are baseless beliefs held by people that influence their behavior. So, shame on you, apparently. There are irrational beliefs that performing or not performing particular acts will lead to either bad luck or good luck. National Open An Umbrella Day, Indoors Day, allows you to try your luck and see how your day goes. So if you're willing to risk it. Lesley Logan 5:27  I just think that this person is kind of an ass. It's baseless. Your superstitions are baseless beliefs. There are so much studies on where you have attention, that's where things go, and that's why manifesting works. So I would just say, focus on the good things. You don't bring in the bad. I wouldn't go wrong going, oh my God, this happened because I opened an umbrella inside, but maybe you do. And so this day is for you. Lesley Logan 5:47  Okay, so we are at P.O.T. Denver. It actually starts Friday, but we are on our way. And so if you're there, make sure you come and say hi. If you're an OPC agency or eLevate member, we are having a little happy hour, so make sure you come over and find us. We want to talk about it. We want to hug you. Then get this, guess what, guys, March 18th to the 24th the Accessories Deck is on presale.Brad Crowell 6:09  So that's less than one week, y'all. Lesley Logan 6:11  Yes, so if you go to opc.me/flashcardwaitlist, this is your last chance, because next week's podcast, we won't even be talking about it, because if you're not on the waitlist, you can't get the discount. So you must go to opc.me/flashcardwaitlist to get that 30% off. Brad Crowell 6:27  I think we'll still talk about it this week. Lesley Logan 6:29  No, no. Urgency, people. Get on it.Brad Crowell 6:30  Get on it right now, opc.me/flashcardwaitlist. Lesley Logan 6:34  Hey, look, in case our things fuck up, and even though you get on the waitlist, you don't hear about it. Brad Crowell 6:38  It's possible. Lesley Logan 6:38  Also, because this is the last flashcard deck. Is there a waitlist anymore? Brad Crowell 6:43  Yeah, what are we going to do with this waitlist? We're going to have to email y'all and be like, hey, this waitlist is now closed. Do you want to go over to other waitlists and we'll, we'll let you know what we got.Lesley Logan 6:52  Yeah, we'll have to, someone, whoever was on the team listening, please assign me that task. Okay.Brad Crowell 6:56  Okay. Lesley Logan 6:57  April. Brad Crowell 6:58  Coming up hard. Coming up fast. Lesley Logan 7:00  April is coming up fast, and Spring Training is going to be April 27th through May 3rd, and those who are on the waitlist are going to get the early bird special. And this is a different waitlist than the flashcard waitlist. Brad Crowell 7:12  True. They're not the same waitlist. Lesley Logan 7:13  No, they're not. And so if you go to opc.me/events you are going to be entered.Brad Crowell 7:19  That is plural, opc.me/eventsLesley Logan 7:21  Plural. That's where you go to make sure you get the early bird opportunity, because we will open up the early bird sign-ups a few days before regular sign-ups, and only those on the waitlist are going to get the discounted rate. Up next, Brad, what do you got for them? Brad Crowell 7:35  Okay, we've got the Profitable Pilates Accelerator free webinar, if you are taking any clients on your own anywhere, whether that is at your house or in the park or your friend is, I don't know, buying you lunch. Technically, you are getting paid to teach, and that means you have your own business. And I'm sure you're aware, Lesley and I have been working with business owners just like you, just like us, where we were and where we are, coaching them through all the hard questions. How do you get new clients? How do I make this a living? Whatever the question might be, but I have a free webinar for you, specifically on increasing your income. Okay. So, come join me. Go to prfit.biz/accelerator that is profit without the O dot B-I-Z slash accelerator and join me for this free webinar. I can't wait to dig into the three biggest secrets that Lesley and I have learned after coaching more than 2500 small business owners just like you. And then finally, we've got October of this year. Lesley Logan 8:40  Cambodia.Brad Crowell 8:41  Cambodia. We literally just got back. Lesley Logan 8:43  We just got back and it was kind of a quick trip for us. We were only there. Brad Crowell 8:47  Two and a half weeks. Yeah, we were traveling for two and a half weeks. Lesley Logan 8:50  Yeah, we had a couple of days in Singapore, so not really two full weeks in Cambodia, but we loved it, and we're jonesing to go back already. And we have some epic people who already signed up. I'm really excited. Some of these people have been on the next time I'm gonna go next time for years, and now they're coming. Brad Crowell 8:50  It's true. Lesley Logan 8:55  And we have some repeat offenders. Brad Crowell 9:09  We have someone else signing up this weekend. It's definitely starting to get full. October is a very popular time for our community. The weather is lovely. It's quite beautiful. If that's something of interest to you, make sure you reach out to us as soon as possible, and we'll get you all the information that you need to make the decision. But it's going to be October 12th through the 18th, 2025 so, come hang out in our favorite place in the world. Lesley Logan 9:33  Yes. Brad Crowell 9:33  Where do you go? Crownestretreats.com crowsnestretreats.com okay.Lesley Logan 9:39  Okay, so we're gonna get into the amazing Sam Mandel, and we're gonna learn all about ketamine and talk about it. Before we do that, we have a question from the audience. Brad Crowell 9:48  We sure do. Okay. Eva de Brune from Instagram, states and asks, I know you enjoy lifting weights. Is the reformer, like the Contrology reformer and mat and Wunda chair, etc., is that enough? Or do you recommend adding weights to the workout routine? I get asked a lot, is mat enough? Yoga, you are using your body weight. What is your take on this? So a couple of things. So I think the way that this is written, I'm not sure if she's asking if she should go to the gym and be lifting weights, or if she's asking if she'd be adding weights to your Pilates practice. Lesley Logan 10:21  I think it's go, I think it's the first, which is going to the gym and lifting weights in addition to your Pilates and your yoga. So here's the deal. Unfortunately, many of the studies that have been done on Pilates implies resistance has been done with Pilates isn't how I teach. Scientific studies cost a fuck ton of money. I actually, I've postponed a particular call with a group that does these studies multiple times, because it's tens of thousands of dollars. And the reality is, it's not even the best way of testing, because the more Pilates you do, the more muscles you bring in. So then who should we be testing? You know, there's just a lot of things. So what I can tell you is, my Contrology equipment has the heavy springs, obviously, that is resistance. That is absolutely resistance. Is it the same resistance training as heavy weights? I don't think we can say that it is. And so what I'm going to say is, I know you're very busy. I know you've got a lot going on. I would love to be able to say Pilates is all you need. I don't think it's true. Brad Crowell 10:21  It's all you need. Lesley Logan 10:21  I don't think it's true, but here's what I would say, pick a couple of days to do some heavy kettlebells. Pick a couple of days to do some barbell training. You don't have to hit. I'm not actually a big fan of hit for women over a certain age, it's can be really cortisol-inducing, but I would do some or do some heavy weightlifting. I would, also, because it's cool, because it's really cool to see what you can lift. It's really fun. The mat alone is epic and amazing for mobility and strength training. But even Joe realized that people needed more, and that's why he brought the springs in. And it's not that they need more because the mat isn't enough. It's because they need support to teach the body parts that don't have the access yet. So I actually use my weight training as information on where I have work to do, like my Pilates practice could support my weight training. I recognize like I have a balance issue when I do my single leg dead lifts. And so I use my Pilates Cadillac and my reformer to help train the things that I need so I can weight-train better. So to me, Pilates is actually so I can do my life. I'm sure there's a yogi out there who's gonna get pissed if I say yoga is not an not enough, but I'm gonna be really honest, depending on what your bone density is doing, body weight exercises alone are not necessarily enough, because you need to stress the muscles. So that is where I do think heavy springs can be compared to lifting weights, but they're just different things. Brad Crowell 12:40  Stress the bones. Lesley Logan 12:41  Stress the bones, yeah, you stress the muscles, which pull in the bones, which creates good stress on the bones, which creates good bone density. So, the other thing I would just say is your body is you got one, and the longer we wait to challenge it, the harder it is to support it. And so if you went in my routine, I do Pilates five to six days a week. I lift three to four days a week. I do yoga twice a week. I walk every day. And I do these things because I actually want to be 100 years old and still be able to travel and hike and be independent. So it's just like, what do you want in your future? And then how does your fitness regimen actually support what you want? Where are you at in your age group? Notice I didn't mention any cardio in there, because my Pilates practice has bouts of cardio in it. When I'm doing some of my yoga stuff, my heart rate goes up. When I do some of my lifting stuff, my heart rate goes up. So I'm challenging my heart in multiple ways. I don't need to spend time doing that, but I would, I would lift some weights, babe. And yes, your mat practice is essential. It's amazing. It's great for mobility and longevity. But I do not have a study in front of me that says it's enough.Brad Crowell 13:46  Right. Well, great question, Eva, thanks for asking. Lesley Logan 13:49  Yeah. You know, here's the deal. If someone wants me to do a study, I would love to do it. You have no idea how much money you actually need to do it, and you need people who know the method. I would want to have people who are beginners, people who are advanced. I want to have women, men, but then, you need to know the women's cycle and where they're at. There's so much information. And I think that until we have that, you got to do it all. Brad Crowell 14:10  You got to do it all. All right, well, stick around we'll be right back, because we're about to dig in to a really interesting conversation with a doctor, Dr. Sam Mandel. We're going to talk about. Lesley Logan 14:20  Ketamine. Brad Crowell 14:21  Ketamine. Special K, all the drug paraphernalia names. It's all the same stuff, y'all, it's just actually how you use it. And he went way deep on that, so I thought it was really interesting. We'll be right back. Brad Crowell 14:33  Okay, welcome back. Let's talk about Sam Mandel. Sam Mandel is the co-founder and CEO of Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, Sam and his father, who's also a doctor, opened KCLA in 2014 making it one of the first ketamine clinics in the entire country. Sam's passion for this innovative treatment stems from the profound and lasting positive impacts it has on people's lives. He believes ketamine therapy offers individuals the oportunity to rewrite their stories, overcome deeply ingrained mental patterns and step into a life filled with hope, resilience and joy.Lesley Logan 15:09  Okay, so when I got to talk to Sam, I was like, okay, I'm very interested, because we've had Dr. Kelly Bender on. Brad Crowell 15:15  Yes. Lesley Logan 15:15  She's a dear friend of mine, and I know that she does ketamine therapy and treatment, and we have a personal friend who we know has done ketamine treatments. She tried to do them on her own and. Brad Crowell 15:26  Yes, I mean, she was prescribed it, but she did them at home alone, which I thought, I didn't realize that was an option.Lesley Logan 15:32  And also, we have another friend where his wife has gone to the clinic like Sam's, and then he did on his own. And so anyways, so I just was very interested, because also, I think there's a lot of misinformation out there, and then when you have a death of someone who is abusing it with other things, then people get scared of something. And so I was really intrigued, because I think a lot of ways that people are affected of being it till they see it is they have past traumas or things going on in their brain that keep them from having the ability to be it till they see it. They have all the ideas. They've been listening this podcast. They have all this support, but then they have this stuff that's keeping them in their way. And so I really want to have Sam on because if ketamine can help them, then they need it to be it till they see it, right? So here's one thing I learned, ketamine is actually a psychedelic. I guess I didn't know that. I don't know what I thought ketamine was, so I thought that was really interesting. And it's really the only legally available psychedelic in the United States. It has the ability to dissolve these barriers that get in our way and help people get out of their own way. And so obviously, traditional talk therapy is really great. It can be helpful, but it says limitations. It's because our conscious mind gets in the way and makes it difficult to confront those deep seated issues. But ketamine acts in a different part of the brain than antidepressants can, and it allows these breakthroughs that aren't necessarily possible with other methods. And I think that's really cool, because we've heard of great stories of how ketamine can help people, like vets and different things, and like. Brad Crowell 16:57  PTSD.Lesley Logan 16:58  Oh yes, and it also like just kind of helps you take a different look at what the thing is. And I think in our own brains, we can judge ourselves for our actions we took or we didn't take in that situation, because it can be difficult to kind of forgive yourself about how you participated in an event that's affecting you, or how long it's, you just get in your head about it. And the way that ketamine can actually, when prescribed correctly and when done at a I think it's so cool that there's a clinic that you can go so, you know, you're safe, you know, I mean, first of all, it is safe. Brad Crowell 17:30  It's a controlled environment. Oh, yeah. Lesley Logan 17:31  It's a controlled environment, yes.Brad Crowell 17:32  I think that's half the reason why I stayed away from drugs was I didn't know what was going to happen, and if I knew something was going to happen to me and I was going to be impaired. Am I in a place where I'm going to be safe, right? So.Lesley Logan 17:45  Right. When I finally tried doing a little like micro dosing of mushrooms, it has to be at the house. There can be nothing going on. Brad Crowell 17:53  I can't have any obligations, no expectations from anybody else.Lesley Logan 17:59  Yeah, all these things we didn't even need to do that we could have just gone to Sam's clinic, and it's all set up in his clinic. Brad Crowell 18:05  Sam's clinic. Lesley Logan 18:05  Sam's clinic. It's called, not Sam's clinic. It's called, Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, KCLA. So anyways, I just think that it's important for me to bring to everyone's attention here, that this is something that exists, and there are places that you can do it in a controlled way to actually get the true benefits from it. And because I've had so many people tell me that they have good benefits, I just didn't want negative stuff to keep people from doing it in the right way. Brad Crowell 18:32  Well, let's talk about why you might want to participate. Why would you be signing up to do a psychedelic? What I really enjoyed about Sam was him breaking it down from the perspective of a doctor, of what it actually is doing, how it's affected his patients. They've been around since 2014 so they're 10 years. So, they've done like, 30,000 treatments or something, you know, amazing. So he said ketamine helps people to craft the story around the trauma that they have. He said what happened is fixed, meaning the past. Whatever traumatic event happened, it's fixed, and it can never be changed. The past is the past, but our story about it can change at any given moment. So the event still happened, but the story we tell ourselves about that event that is something that we can change. And he said that ketamine really helps you dig in, because, well, first off, he said the most challenging aspect of trauma is that we feel like it can define us, and ketamine helps you see the traumatic events with a new perspective, detaching from the overwhelming emotions and allowing for more objective processing. The potential for ketamine to promote neuroplasticity, meaning your brain is creating new pathways, right? So, you know the expression, old dog can't be taught new tricks, right? Well, the whole idea there is that you're in a rut. You're in a groove, and it's really hard to jump out of that groove and create a new way of thinking, because we just default to what is easiest, and what is easiest is what we already know. So if we've defined for ourselves years ago that this thing equals pain, this thing equals fear, this equals whatever the thing is the story we tell ourselves, it is actually really hard to rewrite that story, and ketamine can help allow your brain to create those new storylines, those new pathways, so it helps bump out of that rut, which I thought was pretty cool. He said ketamine provides this kind of objective clarity. It can be extremely healing and transformational for people. Lesley Logan 18:51  Yeah, it kind of makes you go, should we all just go and do a ketamine treatment? Like, can it just be, like, the jump start you need? I don't know. It feels, I just, I feel like maybe it would help me get the all the journaling in the world that I've been doing, I might be able to speed up the process if I just did a treatment around the thing that keeps coming up.Brad Crowell 20:55  I think that's the idea. And I think also, even just the concept of that, it still feels taboo. It still feels like this scary thing that, great we've put it in a controlled environment, but I actually think it would benefit society if we normalized it. Lesley Logan 21:12  Yeah, well, we have to, first of all, we got to normalize mental health and that we all have different ways.Brad Crowell 21:17  Yes, same exact stigma as any kind of therapy, or any of that. This is a different form of therapy than talk therapy, than. Lesley Logan 21:25  I don't know. Maybe this is because we actually did do 14, 15 years in LA, and I knew people who were doing these things and doing controlled micro dosing of other things. And because my friend studies it, I know the benefits. And so to me, it doesn't feel taboo. Also, maybe we all could use a little bit of like, when you lived in LA, everyone had a therapist, and it was not unheard of for people to go, yeah, I'm gonna go get some ketamine therapy. We need to normalize all that for the rest of the country. Therapy is real. Do it. And also, if you can't get to, LA, do your research. But I would definitely use Sam's website for what you're looking at, as far as what the standard should be.Brad Crowell 22:07  Like the standard, which organization's the gold standard, you know, go look up Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, and then compare that to a local clinic. Lesley Logan 22:14  Or and or go to LA. Brad Crowell 22:16  Yeah, or reach out to them and talk to them and ask them, you know, what they recommend. Lesley Logan 22:19  Yeah, they had some great stuff. So anyways, I think it's great. I think I could see where this could be really useful. And obviously it's not what you go do every Thursday. But if you've got -ish holding you back, what are you waiting for? Brad Crowell 22:33  Yeah, let's splash that -ish.Lesley Logan 22:35  I don't think that's what Sam wants.Brad Crowell 22:42  All right, stick around. We'll be right back with those Be It Action Items from Dr. Sam Mandel. Brad Crowell 22:47  All right. So finally, let's talk about those Be It Action Items. What bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted action items can we take away from your convo with Sam Mandel? Borrowing Nike slogan, he said take action. Just do it. Honestly, planning and strategizing is important, thinking things through, figuring out who you are, what you want, and putting together a plan that actually matters. So, the just do it part could start with the planning, but I think it's so easy for us to have analysis paralysis. I was just having this conversation with someone over the weekend of yeah, I started to do the thing, and then I ran into a speed bump, and I had to make a choice. But to make the choice, I had to learn a whole lot of stuff, and to learn a whole lot of stuff, it was going to take me a lot of time. And then what did I do? Nothing, right? So sometimes maybe we can phone a friend and shortcut that maybe we can, I don't know, join a coaching group and shortcut that maybe we can call a doctor and shortcut that when it comes to the planning and whatever, but I think just getting out there and taking messy action, we talk about that all the time. Lesley Logan 23:43  And also, if you haven't yet listened to the interview, go listen to it, because you actually hear about how he and his father started the clinic, which was like just doing it. It was like a freaking closet with a tiny desk and everything. But I think as we plan different things, there's part of me that loves how I do things. I just go for it. And then sometimes you and the team have too many questions, and I'm like, I don't have the answer for that. I think we're gonna figure it out when we get there. And it doesn't always work that way. So I would say, if you are someone who has to know every single thing before you get started this Be It Action Item is for you.Brad Crowell 24:14  Yeah, there's just too many unknowns. So planning can stop you in your track. Lesley Logan 24:18  We've coached so many people who have made sure they have all their plans to a tee, and then something out of everyone's control comes in and fucks it all up. I've had friends who've literally planned exactly what they want their business do, and then literally, two months later, after they did everything to a tee, perfectly, exactly how they wanted, they spend the budget the right way, everything, then COVID happened, fucked it all up. Didn't matter. So, you know, I think there's a healthy balance. Brad Crowell 24:44  Yep. What about you? Lesley Logan 24:45  Okay, he talked about it's too easy to let perfection keep us from taking the steps that we need to take to get done who we want to be, so. Brad Crowell 24:51  Wait, say that one more time. Lesley Logan 24:53  It's too easy to let perfectionist keep, perfectionism keep us from taking the steps we need to take to get done who we want to be. So like. Brad Crowell 24:53  I think it would be better to say to become who we want to be. Lesley Logan 25:03  To become who we want to be, probably. So I couldn't agree more. And he said you're going to make mistakes, and it's really the only way you actually succeed in life. And he said, if you're dealing with mental health condition, he encourages you to call and so a lot of times perfectionism shows up as a sign of imposter syndrome that you're dealing with, but it could also be a way of you controlling things, which can be part of a mental health situation. And so.Brad Crowell 25:26  I mean, it's the same exact, here's a perfect example. If he's the gold standard and you don't live in Los Angeles, then you won't take any action, because you can't get to the best one, right? That is perfectionism. What you could do is take messy action, give them a call and say hey, I don't live there, but.Lesley Logan 25:44  What are my options? Brad Crowell 25:45  What am I, what should, what should we be talking about here and just see if there is a path or some kind of alternate option for you, wherever it is that you live. So. Lesley Logan 25:52  Yeah, I mean, we talk about perfectionism here a lot, and I would just say, don't get mad at the perfectionist tendencies that you have. Use them as a highlighter of where you have work to do, whether that is doing a controlled ketamine treatment to get over this perfectionist issue that you have, or it's how can I get a friend over here who I just envy that they just go for things to help me take a look at this thing that I want to do, because I can borrow a little bit of their imperfection and go-getterness and help you. You know what I mean? Brad Crowell 26:23  It's like a barrier. Perfectionism is a barrier that we throw up to keep ourselves from failure. Lesley Logan 26:33  It is a great excuse for not getting shit done. You are correct, sir. Like, I know a lot of people who will say, oh, it's because I'm perfectionist. That's why I haven't done it. And it's a really good excuse that people will just go, oh, well, that's true.Brad Crowell 26:45  For me, I think it's the other extreme of the concept of, oh, I don't set any goals, because then I can't be let down. If you heard someone say that, you would go, well, that's not how I want to live. Well, the irony is that perfectionism is just the flip side of that coin. We are inadvertently putting roadblocks in the way. We've got to make sure everything's good, because if we don't, then it's going to fail, right? Then I'm going to be let down. Lesley Logan 27:09  I really enjoyed him sharing his stories of how he built everything, because they had to be (inaudible). Even if everything they did around how they controlled the environment for ketamine was exactly to a tee, the way they had to open the business, grow the business, put things together, you know, they had to do it, trying to figure it out, because it didn't exist before. And so a lot of you who are listening have ideas. Brad Crowell 27:30  He said he went to a Radio Shack and bought a burner phone so that they could make sure they had some kind of a (inaudible).Lesley Logan 27:36  I think it was the Radio Shack that, like, is on Santa Monica Boulevard. Brad Crowell 27:36  No it's the other one. That one, you brought up, though. Lesley Logan 27:42  Yeah. I was like, but even if you just listen to this episode to learn from Sam, just getting started with what you have access to that helps you get going, we have to stop allowing ourselves to be like, well, I don't have enough information. I don't have enough of this. I don't have enough this to start, it's affecting your gifts from being enjoyed by the people who it's for. Imagine if Sam and his dad hadn't started in an office because it's not sexy enough, right? So anyways, just do it. That's what he said.Brad Crowell 28:09  Just do it.Lesley Logan 28:10  Yeah, I'm Lesley Logan. Brad Crowell 28:11  And I'm Brad Crowell. Lesley Logan 28:12  Thank you so much for listening to our episode today. How are you going to use these tips in your life? Are you going to go to KCLA? Please let us know. Tag Sam Mandel. Tag the Be It Pod. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Brad Crowell 28:23  Bye for now. Lesley Logan 28:25  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 29:07  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 29:12  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 29:17  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 29:24  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 29:27  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Renee Morris, Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. We explore her path from management consultant to leading a national hair care brand. Renee shares her approach to maintaining business control by relying on personal savings and family support rather than external investors. She discusses forming partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens while building a creative team to drive innovation. I learned how she tackles recruitment challenges and ensures brand visibility at a national level. Looking ahead, Renee explains her vision to expand into skincare and education, and serving communities of color in new ways. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Renee Morris discusses her journey from management consultant to Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter, emphasizing her desire to balance career ambitions with family life. We explore Renee's decision to purchase an existing company rather than starting from scratch, leveraging her experience in sales and marketing strategy within the consumer products sector. Renee highlights the importance of having a financial safety net when transitioning to entrepreneurship, sharing her personal experience of not drawing a salary for years and relying on her husband's support. We talk about Renee's strategic decision to avoid third-party investors to maintain control over her business, focusing on conservative growth and solving customer problems. Renee explains her approach to forming strategic partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens, discussing the role of distributors in helping small brands enter national markets. We discuss the challenges of recruiting and nurturing talent, emphasizing the importance of fostering a collaborative environment that encourages innovation and creative thinking. Renee outlines her vision for expanding the brand into adjacent areas such as skincare and education, aiming to serve the community of color more broadly. We explore Renee's leadership style, focusing on adaptability and learning from failures as she considers new business ventures. Renee shares personal insights from her early career and hiring experiences, emphasizing the importance of trusting one's instincts during the recruitment process. We examine the role of social media and influencers in maintaining customer confidence and visibility during brand transitions, particularly when changes are made to product packaging. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Uncle Funky's Daughter GUESTS Renee MorrisAbout Renee TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Renee Morris, chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. Renee shares her passion for helping curly girls solve their hair problems with unique and innovative natural hair products. Renee, I want to thank you for coming on Building Texas Business. It's so glad, happy to have you as a guest. Renee: Thank you, I'm excited to be here. Chris: Okay, so you won the award so far for having the coolest and, I would say, funky, but that would be. Renee: Play on words Right. Chris: But as far as a name for a company, uncle Funky's Daughter, yes. Okay, tell us what is your company known for and what do you do? Renee: So Uncle Funky's Daughter is a hair products company. We're based here in Houston, texas. I bought the company, so the parent company is Rotenmore's Consumer Group. But I bought the brand Uncle Funky's Daughter 10 years ago from a husband and wife team. So Uncle Funky's Daughter curates natural hair products for women, men and children who choose to wear their hair naturally, and so that's shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers. Shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers you name it, we make it. We also have a thermal protection line for women who want to blow dry and style their hair with heat, and we're distributed nationally Target, walgreens, kroger, cvs, heb, locally, so you name it, other than Walmart, we're there. Chris: Beauty Easy to find, easy to find, easy to find well, I have to ask this because I have daughters. I mean Sephora or Ulta. Renee: No, Sephora or Ulta. Yet we've been working that line. We can talk about that as part of this deep dive, but we've been working that line and but no land in Sephora or Ulta just yet okay, very good. Chris: So how did you find your way into the hair care product world? Because you didn't start there. Renee: No, I am a former management consultant 20 years management consulting, advising clients multi-billion dollar companies on how to drive revenue growth and through sales and marketing. And I was a mother of three kids. At the time my son was probably three or four, my daughters were two and I was flying back and forth between Houston and New York for a client. And I had this realization that I didn't want to do that as a mom. I needed to be home, but I still wanted to be a career person. So I knew I am not built to be a stay-at-home mother. That is not who I am, and COVID taught me that with isolation. And so what I started deciding was I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next and I realized I had some options. Right, it's that fork in the road that you go through. You start to look inwardly every time you have that fork in the road and I did that and I said okay, your option A is to go find a company based in Houston and be a VP or senior VP of some operation. Option B is you find a small company and you're like a big fish in a small pond kind of thing. Option C is you just go do your own thing. And after I kind of went through it, I realized I worked for the Coca-Colas, like in GE Capitals of the world, in my past. I didn't want to go work for a big company. I didn't think I wanted to work for a small company because of my personality style, right, um. And so I decided I wanted to go buy something and then or have my own company. And so then the question becomes do you build or do you buy my? I'm a management consultant by heart, so it's always go buy something. Why? Because I can take it, I can fix it and I can grow it. And so then it became all right, well, what are you going to go buy? And so, like most people out there, they're thinking about buying a company. I started reaching out to brokers, I started doing some networking, calling attorneys, people that work on deals, that kind of stuff, just putting my name out there, and I got all the things that you normally get when you're looking to buy a company the gym, the dry cleaner, the storage facility, the gas station, all the things that I didn't want to buy because I didn't have a passion for them. And so, also, for background, my consulting experience in sales and marketing strategy has been predominantly in consumer products. So I know consumer products, I know revenue growth, I know marketing strategy. So I was like okay, so I kept looking and I used this hair product called Uncle Funky's Daughter. I found it when I first moved here in 2000. Like all curly girls out there back then, that was almost 20 years ago, my goodness. But 15 years ago back then there weren't a lot of natural hair products out there for women of color and women of curly hair with curly hair specifically. And so I googled when I first moved here natural hair products, curly hair, houston and Uncle Funky Stoddard came up. I've never heard of this company right. So I go to rice village and buy this product and I start using it. Extra butter, start using it. And for those out there that are, you know, african American descent, you know thick, curly hair, we do this thing called two strand twists to what. I love it. Two strand twist. Chris: Okay. Renee: So, you take your hair and you twist it in like instead, instead of braiding it, you put it in twists, and there are single twists all over my head right. So that's how I would style my hair wear it, rock a two strand twist. Those out there will understand that, look it up and then Google it and then and so that worked on my hair really well. And so, again, for those with tight, curly hair, finding the right hair product that works for your hair is tough. It is not easy, as you know. One of your team members, courtney, was talking about. She's gone through all the products Because you go through this product journey trying to find something that works for you right. So found Extra Butter, worked, loved it, and then I would stop using it while I'm traveling because I would forget it right at home sure. I would go back to some other competitive brand and it didn't work for my hair. So I'm like, okay, uncle Funky's daughter is the only thing that works for my hair. So I go in to get my Uncle Funky's daughter one day, after I, you know, had braids and wash them out. And yada, yada, yada. I'm going in, I'm getting my extra butter and this guy behind the counter who I bought hair products from for the past at this point, five years, says yeah, my wife and I are going through a divorce and I'm like, oh, so I do have an MBA right. I'm not some, you know, trying to sound like a shark, but my MBA said distressed asset might be willing to sell stress asset might be willing to sell. Like literally, that is the voice that went in my head. And so I was like, oh really. So I stood there in that store and I just chatted with him for hours and about the company, you know what, you know personally what he was going through, because divorce, you know, for those that may have gone through it, can be an emotional, you know troubling time. So I was a listening ear. But as I'm listening, I'm also thinking about like, okay, what's the story behind the brand? Is this going to resonate? And I'm also watching people come in and out, right. And so I said, well, if you guys are you guys thinking about selling it? And he gives me a story about you know what's happening with the sell and cell and I said, well, if you're ever thinking about selling it, let me know. So I walk out, I Google, because you know this is horrible to say, but divorces are public right right. Chris: Is it filed in state court? Renee: it's a public record so I'm figuring out what's happening with the divorce and I find out that the company is in receivership. And for those who don't know, because I did not know at the time what a receivership was, a receivership happens when a divorce is happening and the husband and wife aren't operating, behaving appropriately. Chris: Well, they can't agree on the direction of the company and it can be not in a divorce. But basically, owners cannot agree and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company. Renee: Exactly. Thank you, that's why you're the attorney and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company Exactly. Chris: Thank you. That's why you're the attorney. Renee: Have a little experience with that yes, so the judge had appointed this guy to be the receiver. I reached out to the gentleman and I said I'm interested in the sale of Uncle Funky's daughter, if that so happens to be the case. And so the one thing I did learn and you can probably expound on this is oftentimes in a divorce, when the receiver comes in, at that point that receiver is really thinking about how to get rid of this asset. And so those are all the things that I learned during this process, and I was like, okay, so he wants to sell because he wants to get paid and he knows nothing about this business. Chris: He was, you know no offense, no emotional tie to it, for sure no emotional tie. Renee: He's an older white gentleman who knows nothing about black hair products and so I was like, okay, so he doesn't know, he doesn't have an appreciation for the value of the company. And so I reached out and I said, okay, here's a number. You wouldn't believe the number I gave him and he counted with some minor you, some minor adjustment, and we bought this company for less than $100,000. And they had a revenue at the time. When I saw their tax returns, I think it was maybe a million or so that they claimed in revenue. At some point they said, but at least for sure I think our first year of revenue was probably around and it was a partial year. Probably a quarter million dollars is what revenue they generated, and so we really, if you talk about a multiple of sales, we bought it on a tremendous it's a heck of a deal the deal. Okay, I can't find those deals these days. If anybody has one of those deals, you come let me know and so. So that's how we ended up buying this company ten years ago and shortly thereafter, target comes knocking at the door and says, hey, we were having this discussion with the owners about, you know, potentially launching. Would you be interested? And I'm like, absolutely. And it was because they were going through this divorce that they couldn't get over the finish line, right? And so shortly after we buy, we're launching in target. But before I did that, one of the first things I did was because, if you ever, if any, it's probably so old you can't find it. But the label. When I first bought the company, when I was buying it, it was this woman's face with a big afro on the front and it had a cute little 70s vibe on it and it was in this white hdpe bottle which, by the way, those aren't recyclable. So I said first, we need to change this, we got to change the packaging, we got to upgrade the label, we need to make it universally appealing to all curly girls, because if I look at a woman with a big afro, I think tight, curly hair like mine right and our products work across the spectrum from wavy, like Courtney, to really tight, like Renee, and that wasn't representative on the label okay so we redesigned the label, changed the bottle from an HDPE bottle to a PET bottle, which is recyclable, and then just upgraded this packaging to what I consider a sleeker new look. Chris: Very good, Great story, Thank you. So back up a little bit, share a little bit, because so you go from big corporate consulting job some comfort in there probably. You mentioned travel and you did mention the mom aspect playing a role. But let's talk a little bit about actually getting the courage to take that leap out of the big corporate role into. I'm going to buy something that's all on me now to either make it or break it. Yeah, that had to be scary. Renee: It was, and I am fortunate in that. You're right. I had comfort. We have financial security. I had a husband who was, who still is, who's a senior executive in medical devices has nothing to do with anything about consumer products, but you know, we have the luxury for him to say I can carry this load, financial load, and I think that's the big mix, right? I tell people all the time if you're going to take that leap, you got to make sure you've got cash flow, because for not only for your, you know, for the company, but for you personally, right? Because there were several years where my husband called my business a hobby Because I was contributing nothing to the financial plan. Chris: In fact, you were probably taken away. Yeah, I was taken away. Renee: So every year I mean. So I wasn't drawing a salary. I didn't draw a salary for a couple of years after I, I didn't draw a salary until our tax accountant said you have to draw a salary because we're changing you from whatever tax to an S-corp. And I was like oh, wow, really Okay. So what am I going to pay myself? Okay, and then he goes Well, you have, and it has to be reasonable. So for probably three or four years after I bought the company, I didn't draw a salary. I was paying my employees but I wasn't paying myself. And so I think and I say all that to say yes, it takes a leap, but it also takes the ability and the willingness to take that financial hit Right. So were there things that we probably wanted to do as a family that we didn't do? Probably so. Chris: Yeah. Renee: Because I'm growing this brand and was there times I went to my husband like I need another thirty thousand dollars? Probably so. And because one of the things I specifically had chosen is I did not want, and I currently still don't want, to pull in private equity, vc any type of third party investor funding. That is a personal decision I've made and it's because I am a former accountant and I'm extremely financially conservative and I also don't want different incentives to help influence how I run my business, different incentives to help influence how I run my business, and what I mean by that is I personally just didn't want to have a PE company saying you need to do these three things because your multi, your EBITDA needs to look like this and your revenue growth needs to look like that. Right, so I could have we could have easily grown really fast, like a lot of brands do, and grown themselves out of business, or, but I chose the path to grow really conservatively Now, and so I think I say all that to say I think, yes, financially speaking, having the bandwidth to be able to float yourself and your company for a while is critical, and so don't take the leap if you're still, if you're at your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. Your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. So what that means is, maybe if you're trying to start the company, then you're running your business while you're living paycheck to paycheck and oh, by the way, you gotta stop living paycheck to paycheck because you got to start to build that cushion, right. So some of the you got to make sacrifices and I think that's the hard thing. Not everyone's willing to make the financial sacrifice that it takes to really run and grow a business without third party support. Now, in today's world, you can go get bc capital funding and you know money is flowing, or at least it was, you know but there, but there's sacrifices, but there's sacrifices with that, and so, yeah, that's great advice, you know. Chris: The other thing that you mentioned, as you were evaluating companies is one of my favorite words when it comes to business is passion. You passed on a ton of things because you weren't passionate about it. Renee: Yeah. Chris: You found something you were passionate about, and I think that's a lesson for people too, right Is? It's not easy to do. As you mentioned. Sacrifices have to be made. So if you're not really passionate about that decision to go be an entrepreneur, start your own business. It's going to be tough. Renee: Yeah, it's going to be tough, and so, because I have to wake up every day, I my passion is really helping people solve problems, and I do that through hair, because hair is a problem in the curly hair community. How do I maintain frizz? How do I keep it under control? How do I keep it healthy so it doesn't break? How do I keep it healthy so it can grow? How do I stop the scalp irritation? There's so many problems that happen in hair and so I what I think about. Like literally yesterday I was with my marketing team and we're talking about a campaign for the next month for products etc. Or really November, and I said, OK, what problem are we helping her solve? And that's literally the way I think about stuff what problem are we helping her solve? Because if we're not helping her solve a problem, then I don't have anything to talk about. Chris: Ok, Right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. Renee: It's not going to move off the shelf thing to talk about. Chris: Okay, right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. It's not going to move off the shelf. So another thing that you kind of alluded to, you went through somewhat. It sounds like a kind of transforming the business that you took over, right? You mentioned the product label and packaging. Let's talk. What else did you, you know, in taking that business over, did you find yourself having to change, and how did you go about making those decisions? Are either prioritizing them and you know we can't do it all- at once yeah, so what walk? us through some of the learning you went through that well, you know what's interesting is. Renee: So it wasn't much of a transformation, but it was. If you think about learning from a marketing standpoint, if you're going to buy a business, especially a consumer product company, and you buy it in today's world where we're so used to knowing who the owner is the first people don't like change. So one of the first things I had to do was convince our current customers that nothing had changed other than the label. The minute your package changes and it looks different, they're like the formulas have changed, it's not the same be the same. It's not the same product. So the first thing I had to do was convince them that this is the same product. In fact, I brought back discontinued SKUs that the receiver had stopped selling because they were slow moving. **Chris: How did you go about convincing the existing customer base? Nothing changed. Renee: So news articles, facebook articles, facebook social ads, like having live conversations, going live on social media all of those were things that I had to go in and dispute or Dubuque being like I was the person respond. There was no team, it was me and one other person. The first person I hired was a social media person. Okay, wasn't a warehouse person, it was a social media person because I knew being the being in the face of the customer was so important. So being live and answering questions online, answering the phone and people would call they will go. I heard that this wasn't the same formula. No, ma'am, it's the same formula. And actually having those, it was me having those live, one-on-one conversations. And so I think really touching the customer and being personal with her was the key to our success in in gaining that confidence. And we also you know this was early in the days of influencers we also had to partner with people to be able to talk about. Like it's the same stuff, guys, this is the bottle. This is the old bottle. This is the new bottle. This is both sides of my hair, no change. Chris: Okay, okay, very smart to especially, like you said, I mean so many people now the social media influencers have such impact on what products get picked up in the mainstream. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Chris:So let's move forward a little bit. Part of changing things new products. There's a level. You mentioned your marketing meeting yesterday. What do you do within the company to help kind of foster innovation and inspire your people to be innovative about the products? Renee: That's a tough one because it's hard. Here's the challenge that we have as a small company. As a small company, it's hard for me to afford to pay me like the equivalent of a me right. The woman or a man with the MBA in marketing who's got, you know, 10 years at Coca-Cola. I am oftentimes recruiting talent, that's learning and I'm teaching, as they, you know, grow up in our company and so innovation is really. You know, I'm usually in that meeting asking the provocative question Like do these assets, does this story come together like cohesively, what problems are we helping them solve? Like, I am there helping them think through and push their thinking a little bit forward. We'll sit and we just do brainstorming with, you know, little toys in the room and stuff to play with, but it's really just helping them kind of. All right, just toss some ideas out there. Let's just throw like what is this, what does this mean? What's her brand voice? What does she sound like? What does she look like? Like asking those questions to help them just kind of think outside of the box. Now, if she looks like this, so what kind of tone is she going to have? All right, so what would she say then? Okay, so let's talk about, like how then that manifests itself and how it shows up creatively, and so just helping them kind of drill down to the so what is really kind of the role I like to play. It's the role I'm playing right now because I'm looking for a marketing director. Chris: Okay, yeah, anybody listening out there. Renee: Anybody listening out there? Submit resumes. Chris: So you talked about some major players as partners that you have right, yeah. Target and Walgreens and CVS, et cetera. So let's talk a little bit about that. How did you go about? You kind of you told a little bit about Target, but what have you done and what have you found to be successful? And maybe strategies that weren't successful in forming those relationships, but maybe, even more importantly, fostering and maintaining those relationships. Renee: So forming on the forming side retailers. For those who may or may not know the space, they want to come to you in one of two ways either direct or indirect through a distributor. For a small brand like mine, it's usually hey, I don't want to service direct, I want you to go through a distributor. And usually it's because when you first launch, you're going to be in a handful of their stores not full distribution is what they call it so not in all 1700 Target stores, but I think we started out in a hundred and so we had to go through a third-party distributor, and so that distributor then opened the door to other national retailers for us. So if you're thinking about launching into a national retail partner and you're a small company like mine, your best route to market is finding a distributor that represents your category in a national retailer. So whether that's peanut butter, hair products, lotions, flat tires, whatever, so you have to go and find that distributor. So that was step one. Once we got that relationship, our job is to grow it by driving traffic through the stores and getting that sell through. If it's not generating units per store per week, it gets pulled right. So one person wisely said a retail shelf space is like real estate. Once you buy your home, you don't want to lose it to foreclosure. So once you've got that slot, my job is to defend those two slots. And when I say we're national retailers, we're not like a P&G where P&G dominates the shelf. We've got sometimes two slots, sometimes four, but we're not, we don't have 10. So our slots are really important for us at a retailer and so for me, maintaining the relationship comes back to driving the traffic to the store. But, more importantly, supply chain. So when I talked about growing too fast for some brands and having measured growth, it was very important for me because I understood I came from a consulting company, although I did did sales and marketing most of what we did as an organization was supply chain. I wasn't the supply chain person, but I like to say I knew enough to be dangerous when I bought Uncle Plunky's daughter. So because I understood supply chain, I knew that not, we could not risk. We needed to have safety stock, we need to have inventory levels that look like x, and so that's why I did what I called measured growth. And so you know the distributor may come to me and go. I can get you into Kroger, walmart. Nope, we're going to do one retailer a year, one big guy a year, because I need to make sure I can scale, I need to make sure my contract manufacturers can scale, I need to make sure my team knows what to do and they know how to execute and fulfill the requirements of that specific retailer and so that we are successful. So that was the way that we grew and that's kind of the way we've continued to grow. Chris: That's so smart, that discipline right. It's easier said than done, because you just start a company and you go a couple years not making any money, or what you do make you put back in the company and then you got all these great opportunities. Come at you once. Renee: It's easy to say yes yes, yes, yes and yes, but you can't fulfill those promises, no one will come back. And there are horror stories where brands have been like yes, I'll go into Target, walmart, kroger, heb, cvs and Walgreens all at the same time and they can't meet the demand or they launch and they don't have enough awareness in the consumer market to be able to support and drive the traffic in all of those stores. So you really have to focus on how you're going to grow, where you're going to grow, and how you're going to drive traffic into these markets and into those stores. Chris: I mean any details you can put behind that, just as some examples to make it a little more tangible of things that you did, things that you thought about. Okay, we have to get this right to kind of prove that we can go to the next level. Renee: Yes. So for Target we did a lot of in-store events, so we took Target. So imagine if I was doing replicating this across like five different retailers. But for Target back in the day, for social media was much more organic and less pay-per-play than it is now, right, so we would do like it's a 10-day countdown. You know, to Target we're launching in 10, 9, 8, like on social media, it was like running ads. Then we did a find us in the Target, so we would do these fun games on social media and our followers would have to find us in their local Target and if they found us and they won a gift card, so we were doing anything we could. We would do in-store events where we would just have a table popped up where you can try products, give away products, get coupons, you name it. We were doing it. Gotcha, we were doing events outside the store. Inside the store. I was rogue because I didn't have permission from Target to do this. I mean because that would have cost me tens of thousand dollars, right, Target, I hope you're not listening and so we would literally just grab a camera and kind of come in and we would kind of sneak our little basket through the store down the hall and we would sit in there and the manager would come like, oh, we're just doing some footage, and I would say I just launched and I'm really trying to help my business and they would get it because you know, their local store manager, and so they would allow us to do like a little bit of a, a little bit of a pop-up shop kind of thing, and they would allow it. Now, today they probably wouldn't allow it because we're probably a lot more disciplined, but 15 years ago, 10 years ago, they would allow it and so, yeah, so those are the things that we had to do. So imagine if I was doing that for sally, for walmart, for kro, all in the same year, and I'm still trying to drive the traffic right, because we were still a small brand. Chris: Sure. Renee: I still call us a small brand because you know, if I go to you and I say, have you heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter? And your answer is no, then I'm a small brand, right. If I say you cause, everybody's heard of Clorox, coca-cola, pepsi, all the things, right, lacroix, you name it, they've heard of it, they haven't heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter. And so we're still in constant mode of brand awareness, and so trying to build that brand awareness and drive demand in every retail shelf at the same time would have been a daunting task for a brand like ours. Chris: Sure, do you still have the Rice Village? No, okay, shut that down we shut it down. Renee: I shut it down when I bought the company. That was the condition of the acquisition, because the day that I went and discovered who the owner was of the brand and I was sitting there chatting up the guy, in about a four hour period that I was there, maybe three people walked into that door okay so that you know, my brain said all right, that's a like a revenue killer. I'm not, you're not driving revenue right you need to focus on driving traffic on the retail shelf, and so are. We have no physical retail store now. Will we once again one day, maybe in a different format? Right, because now you, my friends? Other people have said you guys should open up a salon, and I'm like so maybe we'll open up a salon where the products are available and featured, but a retail store exclusively focused on our products will not be in a timeline. Chris: Okay. So there's an example right of an idea from friends. Maybe you thought about it, of branching out from what's core to your business. So far you've said no because you haven't done it. Maybe it's still out there. Why have you not done that? And I guess what could you counsel some listeners if they're faced with that? Or maybe they've done it and trying to make it work Again. That's another danger point, right Before you kind of branch into something different. Renee: So there are two things what I think about. Again. I always go from management consultant first right when I think about my business. I don't think about it personally, right, I think about it objectively. So I can go deep in my vertical or I can go wide horizontally, and I can do both. And so right now, where we are as a brand, honestly, is we need to go deeper in R&D and innovation. So we have not had an opportunity to launch a new product since COVID, and so we're in the process of developing a new product, so that's my primary focus. A new product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. New product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. Then, as I start to think about adjacency, about how do we take our core and expand and pivot beyond. Do you go to Skin next and stay in consumer products and go into Skin? Do you go in the two places that I'm more actively looking at Skin is out there as a product extension, but that's still core to Uncle Funky's Daughter. Do you go and do you buy another small company within Rote Morris Consumer Group and now you build a portfolio of brands? Because that's, really what I wanted to do when I started Rote Morris Consumer Group. My vision is to have a portfolio of consumer goods brands that meet the needs of the community of color, whether it's beauty, so for beauty. So that could be hair, that could be skin, it could be makeup, it could be a variety of different things that help her solve her problems every day. So that's really the vision. And then I bought this building a couple years ago and we have this wonderful, amazing space, and so and I open up this space I'm looking around. What are we gonna do with the rest of this space? We have this whole first floor, we have a whole second floor that's unoccupied, and even before I bought the building, this idea of building talent and a pipeline of funky junkies is what we call our followers funky junkies yeah that's what we call our followers, our customers. But how do you start to build not only a pipeline of loyal customers but a pipeline of loyal users? And so I started thinking about what if you actually had a trade school? What if you actually started? What if you were the next Paul Mitchell for African-American hair products, right when there's a Paul Mitchell school and you're teaching natural hair instead of you know other treatments that they do, and those exist outside of Texas. There's one that exists in Houston, but not focused on natural hair, but focused on beauty school. And so for those people out there who choose to have a different path in life and not go to college, but they're looking for a vocation or trade school and they want to be a hairstylist or barber, do you create a space for them to be able to do that? So that's the second adjacency. And then the third adjacency is then do you go the other end? So I know how to do hair, I'm learning how to do hair, I've got hair products, I'm doing hair on the other side and that's where the salon comes in. So in all both ends of the spectrum, I am a deep analytical person, so it's understanding what's happening in the market. So in the salon side, you look and you have to figure out and this is for anyone right. You never take a leap in adjacencies just because you think you have the money, the capability, the resources, whatever. You have to understand what's happening in the market because you're not smarter than the whole market. You might be smarter than a couple people in the market, but not the whole market. And so when I look at the hair salon space, I knew of several people in the Houston market that had launched salons and they had failed. They had failed within a three-year cycle and they had failed because the type of offering service offering that they wanted to provide was challenging. And that's the same service offering that we would need to provide as a brand. Chris: Right. Renee: And resources and talent. Going back to this other end of the pipeline I was talking about, in the supply chain, those can be sometimes challenging resources to recruit and retain in a salon side, and so when I do the analysis, it's looking at the risk versus reward. How am I smarter than the next person? How do I learn from those failures and ensure that I can recruit talent where I'm not? I don't have a high degree of turnover. I can create brand consistency. I can create service levels that meet the needs of not only what I want to offer, but what our customers expect. I need to exceed it, and so, because I haven't gotten that magic formula yet, we're leaving the salon right here in the marketplace. Chris: It's still on the drawing board right. Still on the drawing board, I like. I like it well, as it should be, until you figure it out, right? Yeah well, so let's turn a little bit and talk a little more about you yeah in leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? How do you think that's changed or evolved in the last 10 years? Renee: so I am a type a, hardcore type a. I am a driver and I know that about myself. But I also know that one of my weaknesses as a leader is I don't micromanage. What I have learned to evolve because of my consulting background, right In a consulting world you know 20 plus years is how I was trained. I'm a former salesperson. You just go get it done right, you know. So that is that's kind of like my bread and butter, and you have a team of type A's that are pretty much driven just like you are. So when you guys have a clear plan and you've got the end goal, all you're doing is managing the type A's to make sure that they get to the goal right at a very high level. No one needs to. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and the spreadshe's done right. Fast forward to Uncle Funky's daughter. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and it's like, oh, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, what you wanted me to do, so it requires much more. What I'm learning is it requires me to evolve my leadership style from one that's hands off, that's a little bit more hands-on, to make sure that my team understands where the bar of excellence is what our customers want from us, what the implications are when we miss deadlines, what the implications are if we ship the wrong product to the wrong customer, and so showing them and teaching them is where I've kind of learned. That's where my role is as a leader, really helping them really understand the implications of behaviors. And so I've evolved to from a leader that's I'm still. I still tell my team hey, I don't micromanage. If I have to, if I know it before you do, that's probably a problem, and so so they understand that, and so I think I'm still evolving my leadership style to adapt to a smaller company with a different team that thinks differently from the type A consultants with the MBAs that I'm used to working with, to the ones who you know maybe they don't have the MBA or maybe they're going to get it, or maybe they have a desire to get there, and so it really has required. It's a growth opportunity for me that I'm still learning to grow in, to be able to shift my mental mindset away from I got a team of driven people to I got a team that needs to be inspired, you know. Chris: Yeah, that's great. So what have you done to try to help you in the hiring process? Make sure you're making the best decision you can make about who you're bringing on your team? Renee: You know it's the hire slow, fire quick. Chris: Yes, another easier said than done. Renee: Easier said than done and that's where I am right now. Even in this open marketing director job that I'm looking for, it's really making sure I've gone through I go through so many, I go through all the resumes. My assistant will filter out the trash. But once she's filtered out the trash, I'm looking at those resumes going okay, is this someone who's going to? Because I'll openly say the reason I'm looking for a marketing director. I'll tell you this story. So I hire this person and she's from Adidas. She comes from Adidas background in marketing and she's Under Armour in marketing and she was in Latin America director of Latin America markets and she's just moved from Houston. So I'm thinking I've got a Latina because it's part of my demographic. That's awesome. She's got this global brand experience that's awesome. All in athleisure but transferable skills. It's marketing. She quits three months later, found another job in athleisure. So I interviewed, interviewed and found this one and this woman, you know, sold me on. I mean we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, sold me on. I mean, we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, hey. Chris: I'm really concerned about whether or not you know you can migrate from big company to this small company Cause it is a very valid concern. Renee: It's a big change. Right, you don't have a team. Your team is a team of three, not a team of 20. Right, and so your role really changes. And so she. You know, she convinced me that, but the lesson learned was that you know my spidey senses. I didn't listen to them. Like my spidey senses said, she may not stay. Like there were little things that happened along the way you get enamored with all the other stuff. Right, but I was so hungry to have a big company, someone to come in to show my team other than me, for them to hear it from someone other than me that this is what marketing looks like, Right, this is the marketing discipline that we need to have. And so she came in. She brought some marketing discipline. She heard that, you know she brought some value in the three months, but it was. It's been really a painful learning process, right, because now I'm short of marketing director, I'm stepping in, yeah, yeah. Chris: Well, what you alluded to there, right, is just the cost hard cost and soft cost when you make a bad hiring decision yeah Because you know you're having to fill the role or someone else. Renee: Yep, so that distracts, you, it's me right now. Chris: It distracts you from doing your full-time else. Yep, so that distracts you. It's me right now. It distracts you from doing your full-time job. Yep, you're now spending time going through resumes and going to be interviewing and you wasted, if you will, all the time on the one that only lasted three months. Yeah, so there's a lot of cost there. There's a lot of cost there. Renee: And then you're sitting there and knowing I've got to restart this whole process, I've got to try to maintain the momentum within my team this is the second marketing person they've had in the past year so and so how do you start to just kind of manage through that and so, instead of and when you get burned, that one time, as I'm looking at resumes, I'm looking at people with deep experience in a particular industry and I'm going oh nope. Chris: Learn, that is, that there's that bias creep right you're. You have to not let yourself penalize these people you've never met, just as they might look the same on paper yeah, as the one bad actor in the group. Renee: Yeah, and so you and you're right, and so I'm going well, and I'm having these conversations and then yeah, so it's just. Yeah, I think that's like one hiring, firing, hiring slow, firing quick. Chris: Sometimes, even when you hire slow, you still get I tell people it's part science, it's part art and it's the more process I think you can put in place and follow the better. But you're never going to be 100 right and I think figuring out the characteristics that work in your organization is something that you can incorporate into your hiring process and know that this is the kind of background traits, characteristics that thrive here. Renee: Yeah, and even and I would also say, listening to that, you know, those spidey senses that are coming with those thoughts creep in like, and they were coming like there were things, there were triggers that happened through the hiring process. Then I was like I'm not sure she's going to be a good fit. Like you know, for example, she called and said hey, can I work from home? I was like no, you cannot work from home. So that was like that was. Oh, renee, we're gonna do a whole episode on work from home. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And so those were the triggers of like, okay, she might not be the good fit. And when those were the when that happens to you, you got to listen to it and like and be okay with backing out. But I didn't listen to the trigger because we were so far down in the negotiation and I should have just said, you know, I don't think this is going to work out Right, and rescinded the offer. But I had already extended the offer, right, and I didn't want to have egg on my face. Chris:Sure. Renee: So I mean I, what I should have done is just let my ego go, rescinded the offer and continue to look. Chris: Yeah, or at least be upfront about this is starting to give me concerns. Here's why. Renee: Yeah. But I you know you know it's which I did that I did that okay, she covered it up she covered that up. She told me exactly what I wanted to hear, but still the those doubts were in my head and I should have listened to my gut. And that gut is a powerful thing. You know that, maxwell Galt, maxwell Galt Gladwell, it's a powerful thing. And if, when you listen to it, you're usually right, 100%. Yeah, 100%. Chris: Renee, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just to wrap it up, I have a few just personal things. I always like to ask yeah, what was your first job as a kid? Renee: Newspaper. I was a newspaper girl. You had a newspaper route? Yes, Absolutely I did. I'll be darned. My sister got up in the morning and helped me through my newspapers. Chris: You're not the first guest. That was their first job it was fairly common. Renee: You had to make me dig deep for that one. Chris: Okay, you made me dig deeper on this one. Sometimes people say this is the hardest question. Yeah, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Renee: Barbecue no sauce Seasoned, very well seasoned, no hesitation. Chris: No, no hesitation and the woman knows what she wants. Yes, right. Renee: Don't bring me brisket with sauce on it. No. Chris: No sauce Extra seasoned. Renee: I want seasoned brisket, the moist kind. Okay, and, by the way, I'm not a Texan, but I moved to Texas and now I've been here 15 years and now it's like brisket barbecue. It's the only thing that I eat. Chris: I eat it's the only thing I want to eat. I might die of a heart attack, but it's the only thing I want to eat. I love it All right. So because you have four kids and I know your life's running crazy, this will be more of a fantasy. Renee: Yeah, if you could take. Chris: If you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Renee: Oh, I would be somewhere, probably in South Africa, in the, probably on a safari. I would tour safaris. I would go South Africa, kenya. I want to see the migration of animals. I would do that. Chris: I love it. Renee: That's where I would be. Chris: Renee, thank you so much for being on. This has been just a pleasure getting to know you and hear your story. Renee: Thank you. This is awesome. I listened to NPR how I built this. So this is like my. I feel like I'm excited. I've kind of done the NPR check. I like the how I built this check. Do you listen to that? Chris: I do, I do, I love it. I love that analogy. Renee: Yeah, it's great. Chris: Thanks again. Renee: Thanks for doing this. Special Guest: Renee Morris.

AI agerar som kassör på McDonalds men beställningarna blir inte riktigt som tänkt... Vi fortsätter prata om saker som är överskattade och det snackas fotboll med Marcus Birro. I Google trends får vi höra vad vi ska göra om vi inte vill vara fattiga och hörni, glad midsommar på er!!

Entrevista interessant, ja que aquesta setmana s'està parlant de ciència amb alguns dels investigadors més destacats, però d'una manera molt distesa i en llocs singulars. En parlarem a l'espai entrevista. I en l'actualitat setmanal, que tenim preparat per la tertúlia frik? El Banc de Santander confirma un atac no autoritzat a les dades dels seus clients. Nove versió de IO's 17.5 amb una gran funció de seguretat. El governs ja te preparat el seu pla de IA, i costarà 1500 milions d'euros Andorid auto la lia amb la nova versió I Google mostra un vidio que Gemini competirà amb GPT-4.0

We have seen an exponential growth in AI development over the past year. I mean, it has invaded every corner of every market and real estate is no exception. Today we are gonna talk about how you can use AI to improve your business and improve your life.ResourceCheck Out Nick Krem's WebsiteReal Estate Marketing DudeThe Listing Advocate (Earn more listings!)REMD on YouTubeREMD on InstagramTranscript:What's up? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Another episode of the Real Estate Marketing Dude podcast. Folks, remember chatting today about a topic that a lot of people are like, What the fuck? You say It could do this. You could do that. Really? I can't use AI. I can't use automation. It's too confusing. That's stuff's only if you're really, really smart people.00:07:07:16 - 00:07:25:16UnknownDo you guys? I've been literally messing with the air automation and I'm looking at chat and Tiny in the Zapier and looking at automating my content from my blog, from my YouTube channel, all the way across all social platforms. And I mean, honestly, if I could do it, you can't do it. This is not anything that is. I didn't believe how much you could do with it.00:07:25:16 - 00:07:47:15UnknownI'm getting really into this in the last few weeks, so I'm really excited to have today's guest on because this is what we're going to be chatting about. We've seen this dude on social media like popping up all over my feed and he popped open a message and he's like, Yo, I want to do some podcast, but I'm probably guessing that he probably had an AI bot responding to those passages on top of it that he got on this show.00:07:47:17 - 00:08:05:22UnknownBut this is a really good topic to talk about, man, because a lot of people are talking about how they can get more done for less. And honestly, like some stuff you could do with I literally can replace your social media manager nowadays and it's crazy and you need to know this stuff in anyways. This isn't even just a real estate thing.00:08:05:22 - 00:08:24:19UnknownThis is just a business owner thing and you guys got to know this shit. So I'm excited going to their show and I'm to go ahead and introduce our guest, Mr. Nick Grimm. What's up, Nick? What's going on, man? Yeah, and you're absolutely right. You know, I was talking about this with my brother last night was my business partner, and we're like, There's not a future where you where if you don't learn A.I., that you'll still be in business.00:08:24:24 - 00:08:40:03UnknownSome people think that, like, yeah, I don't need to learn that there is literally not a future where if you don't learn A.I. that you will still be in business. The quicker you get that out and just jump into it, the better you're going to be all for it. Well, I'm one of those late adopters to the sense where I'm like, No, I got to.00:08:40:03 - 00:08:54:18UnknownShould I correct content? Could create content better than me. Like, fuck those guys. This guy can't create content. This bot can't create content. They can't tell me no, actually, it's helping me create its album. Me like create better content. Yeah. And it's not so much of like how to use it to replace you as much as how to use it to enhance you.00:08:54:23 - 00:09:10:11UnknownAnd that's the way you got to look at it, folks. So, Nick, why don't you talk to us like let's take a very let's start from the high level. Don't get into really nerdy shit like towards the end here, right? So I don't know how what level people are on listening right now, but let's just get right into the use cases of it.00:09:10:11 - 00:09:25:21UnknownLike, let's just go ahead and define because I think people get scared about this. I was what's the difference? We chat, graffiti and I have a thing called copy coach I use that's an AI tool that I hear other guys say, I train my A.I. bottom, like, what are your fucking pokemon? What the hell is this? Like, what are you training bots and shit?00:09:25:21 - 00:09:46:04UnknownWhat is what's going on? So just help me understand this. So I think like the best way to put it, I think that's a great question too, because it's like understanding it's first half of the battle. You know, it's like I look back to like when the Internet first came out, there are like there were posts in the new York Times that said computer virus spreads to humans and people just didn't understand the Internet, which is why they weren't using it.00:09:46:10 - 00:10:01:23UnknownSo here's the best way I can say when it comes to like when people say training, I think about your chat as your employee. If you don't train your employee and then you just go in there and start asking on to do a bunch of things, it's not going to work. And you're like, Why aren't you doing this?00:10:01:23 - 00:10:22:02UnknownWhy aren't you doing that? So when it comes to Chad GPT, think about your Chad GBG as your lifelong personal employee that once you train it to do something once, you never have to train it to do something again because it just remembers over and over and over again. And it will only be as good as what you train it to do.00:10:22:04 - 00:10:51:20UnknownSo like to me, Chad GPT, you don't even think about it as A.I.. It is a lifelong employee that can just multiply what you are already doing. You can teach it how you speak and then it knows how you speak for the rest of your life. You can teach it about My ideal client profile is, you see, I'm getting a little bit more depth, but the overall view of this is just think about AI and chat CBT as your lifelong employee that will work for you.00:10:51:20 - 00:11:12:16Unknown24 seven That will never quit, that will never not show up, and that will remember every bit of training you ever give it. So that well said. Like I'm like, Great, that makes sense. Yeah, like I'm in my chat now. I just signed up for like the four, right? no, I'm okay. I'm getting all kinds of new gadgets here and all different types of things.00:11:12:16 - 00:11:31:23UnknownRight. But it asks you, like when you come in here, like, like basically describe yourself. And as I've been taking different training courses and I watch a lot of YouTube videos myself here, you basically, when you're training these, tell me if I have this correct, because I'm sure other people are doing this. When you're training this, I like how you said it's like your employee, but you could train it in your voice, like, Look how I talk right now.00:11:31:23 - 00:12:00:02UnknownNick I could tell is Midwest. You talk just like me. You guys are pretty. There's another fucking Midwest guy, bro. I love it, man. But yeah, we have a certain tonality that we speak with, right? And so a lot of the times when people are like, Well, how do I use chat for just creating like social content? And it doesn't sound like me, it sounds robotic, you're telling it, What do I need to have a lot of content or content, like read my Facebook profile, Can it read my Instagram profile or can it read like my podcast, for example, or my YouTube channel or stuff like that?00:12:00:04 - 00:12:15:04UnknownSo I mean, this is a little bit of a loaded question. Can it do those things? Yes, But here, like the first thing you have to do is like what it calls this customized chair in the bottom left. You'll see your name, you click it and it says Customize chair, and that's where you tell it who you are.00:12:15:08 - 00:12:32:18UnknownAnd how you want it to respond. So before you go in there and start training it, customize it so that way you at least you don't have to tell it every freaking time. I am a real estate agent in Cleveland, Ohio, and to start every project, if you put that in your custom at the beginning, it's like your profile.00:12:32:20 - 00:12:50:19UnknownYeah, it's like your profile. Exactly. So that way it's like every chat, it knows you're a real estate agent, it knows the area you're located. And like, unfortunately, what I tell agents too, is like, I wanted to sound like me. Yes, you wanted to sound like you, but you want it to sound better than you when it comes to marketing.00:12:51:00 - 00:13:14:19UnknownBecause I'll be honest, most real estate agents aren't copywriters. They didn't come into the business thinking they had to be copywriter. So I'm not blaming them. But there is an extent of, yes, you want it to sound like you. You can go into the bottom half of what I just said. The customized and then let's hear are some common phrases are like little things that I always say or like words that I use and then words I don't use because I thought this was funny.00:13:14:19 - 00:13:33:09UnknownSomeone's like, I don't use chatbots because I use the word post too often. I'm like, Well, that's what happens when you listen to fucking amateurs, because all you have to do is go in there and tell it's in your how do you respond? Never use the word boast. It's almost like negative words don't use these words. Exactly. So like there's things like that, but like, I wanted to sound like you.00:13:33:09 - 00:13:50:01UnknownIf you really are that dedicated to sounding like you, you can copy and paste your last 30 Facebook post, put it into there, and then there's a whole knowledge base for it of like I sound like. And then you can just go in there and say, Hey, write me five more posts just like this. It's not the way I would recommend.00:13:50:04 - 00:14:09:23UnknownYeah, if you want it to really just sound like you and write like you, that would be one way to start. And this is like one use of you guys. This is like just one use of air here, right? Just on how to write like you, like there's a so and in referral suite which you guys also will be checking out and buying very soon as I release it to the market.00:14:09:23 - 00:14:27:24UnknownIt's coming in really quick. It's really about us. I'm going to keep you guys in front of your database, so never going to forget about you. Great sales pitch and we have a direct mail system in there that can literally use AI to create a local based restaurant campaign. Literally, it has a postcard and it goes in there.00:14:27:24 - 00:14:43:21UnknownIt grabs a five burger places from your local market, puts them into the postcard customized it for the postcard, and then boom, sent that out. Traditionally, that would take us like God knows how long to create and be able to customize and scale out. We wouldn't be able to do it nationally. Now we can automate it. So it's also design elements.00:14:43:23 - 00:15:03:11UnknownAnd I do part of the same system I'm talking about is I started designing all of my images in and using canvas I tool because I'm get I'm getting the backgrounds from Canvas I tool, which is cool because there's nothing like it, right? So I can just tell it. And I know those images for our social library now standing out, right?00:15:03:11 - 00:15:21:04UnknownSo like you guys, I just start diving into this. I act like I'm trying not to talk. I have no idea what I'm doing. Right. But these are the cases that I'm seeing you can utilize this thing for. And guys like Nixon are just made it easy for you guys to understand it. So yeah, it's like you're a little employee.00:15:21:04 - 00:15:40:19UnknownI like that analogy. It's good. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How long does it take to, like, train this employee? How much work is when you say train them? Like, do I have to like, do sit ups with it? Do I got to like, do bench presses? Like, just sounds like this sounds tiring. I mean, the reality is this this is where listening to pros and listening to amateurs makes a huge difference, right?00:15:40:19 - 00:15:55:05UnknownBecause amateurs don't even know what training is. They don't know how to do it. And then like, do like. Mike, if I ask you to dumb ass question, what kind of answer do you think I'm going to get? Dumb A dumb ass answer right? Like that's what it's going to be. This isn't like school where there's no such thing as a dumb question.00:15:55:11 - 00:16:19:20UnknownThere is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it for us. So like we have, we created a certified agent. We have a list of about 13 to 15 different prompts. You ask it before you start asking it for like for pose, for emails, for content, for this or that. So the first thing I always tell people is clearly identify your target audience because that's like you go to any marketing class, what do they say?00:16:19:20 - 00:16:45:11UnknownCreate your avatar before you start creating content, creating marketing, create your avatar. And this is the exciting part because when you actually create your avatar within there, it remembers it's in the certain chat that you create. So like, for example, when you create your create your ICP, your ideal client profile, you want, you don't want to just say buyers, first time homebuyers are great target audience, which LGBT is a first time millennial homebuyer or in Sarasota.00:16:45:15 - 00:16:59:21UnknownSo go deep, right? And then dude. And that's just the beginning. You're absolutely right. Going deep. Then you ask it What are the goals of a first millennial homebuyer and Sarasota, Florida? What are the fears? What are the motivations? What will happen if they do get a home? What will happen if they don't get home? One of my favorites.00:17:00:01 - 00:17:18:16UnknownWhat's the internal dialog of a first time millennial homebuyer in Sarasota? And then you ask it all these questions and then this chat is now trained on all of these things about your target audience, and then you start asking it, All right, now write me a five email sequence. Go into these people now write me three Facebook posts.00:17:18:18 - 00:17:37:07UnknownWhy? Because it knows the goals, fears, motivations, internal dialog, all of these things that's now trained on. So that's done. Doesn't sound very long. It doesn't do. That's the thing. You have to do that. No, go ahead. It's this reminds me of like Pokemon Summer because I my kids like that stuff. I just like they train the Pokemon, right?00:17:37:07 - 00:17:56:01UnknownAnd it becomes more powerful and smarter and then he like, become super Pokemon and it's like you started doing that with your employee here and then what you do over time is like, you go through that and then you start asking you to create these prompts and you're like, Well, I like it more like this and this. So now it starts getting trained, even how you like certain things done.00:17:56:03 - 00:18:13:08UnknownSo then the more you use it, the better trained it is. But it all starts at the beginning is how well are you identifying your target audience, How well have you trained, and on what their emotions actually are in the process? Because yes, you can teach chatbots to speak emotionally in your marketing. If you do it right. It's got to be trained.00:18:13:08 - 00:18:27:05UnknownBy the time it does it out the box, it's not going to come out and being like, it's just like your employee, like, you know, editors on staff, they don't start out like the way we want them they ever could edit. But it takes us about 60 to 90 days to train them, which is about 20 to 30 plus videos.00:18:27:05 - 00:18:46:15UnknownThey have to do and plus hours and all that. And then they go through this process and now they're they're great. Now they're hands off. No differently. Guys, when you're when you said train it, I'm like instantly thinking of like, my God, look at the market. I'm going into people who are missing credit card payments. I'm going after nodes, going after late payments and distressed right now.00:18:46:19 - 00:19:05:23UnknownRight. And that's one category of content. Then I'm going to go create another one for divorce. Then I'm gonna create another one for all these life scenarios because those are the only people moving right now, folks. Is that how you could basically create what I have to create like multiple chat beats per audience because there's so many different types.00:19:06:00 - 00:19:26:23UnknownYeah. So what you would do is like for these different ones you wouldn't want to create. It's the same chat GPT account, but you open up a chain so you just click new chats and then only change, only train that chat on this ideal client profile and then you go in depth on it and every time you want to go get more information, go back to that chat.00:19:27:00 - 00:19:43:24UnknownAnd it keeps and it keeps getting smarter and smarter overall. It's like right now it's almost like having a I mean, look at you have a YouTube channel, right? People get this concept, you have a YouTube channel, you put one video on, it's like, Great, this guy's awesome. Then you then there's a guy who's been on it for five years and he's got thousands of users like, Wow, this guy's legit.00:19:44:01 - 00:20:01:20UnknownSame concept, right? Yeah. So, so it's the same concept. There's actually something brand new that came out January 12th that is literally going to put about 80% of AI startups out of business. On Chad GPT. They came out with Chat Store. So if you see now you said you just upgraded to four, right? So you did the pro.00:20:01:20 - 00:20:20:06UnknownYeah I'm in there right now. If you look on the left you'll see explore GPT TS Right. Yep. So you click on that and there's literally Canva AI built into Chad. GPT Now there is 11 labs which is the ones with this as Yeah, wow, that's built in there. You can really just go in there, think about it like Netflix for AI.00:20:20:11 - 00:20:36:23UnknownSo all these AI startup companies that were really transparency on the back end, right? It was like Scooby-Doo, you take the mask off. Well, it was strategy beat the whole time. You can literally go in there and just type in real estate and you'll see a bunch of real estate like trained, ready to go, Chat's ready to go.00:20:37:02 - 00:20:56:12UnknownOne of hours in there, I'll do a plug. this is my listing, buddy. Creates all your listing descriptions, create your marketing materials for your listing, creates all your openings, it creates it right here. Boom. And that what is saving agents hours every single day. Here is another way that we utilize this feature. So, look, I'm not the YouTube guy.00:20:56:17 - 00:21:15:08UnknownThat's just not been my jam. But of course, a lot of our clients that want to learn about it is like, I want to learn at YouTube. Here's what we did. We bought a lot of these courses that are out there are these YouTube courses that are out there, right? So this is where it's like, Dude is great because how creative can you be with using it?00:21:15:10 - 00:21:37:00UnknownWe bought a lot of these courses. We transcribe the courses and then with the custom GPT, we put all these courses is a knowledge base behind it and then you just go in and you can ask questions and then it's like, what are the top ten headlines? It reads all these courses that these people came out with, say, here are the headlines for this target audience.00:21:37:02 - 00:21:53:21UnknownSo now we have a bot in there which is only available to our students, but it's YouTube AI. So it's like, look, I might not know this, but I use the best people I know as a knowledge base, and instead of watching a 510 hour course and trying to think about how to do it, chatbots is already trained how to do it.00:21:53:23 - 00:22:10:24UnknownSee? Like if so, let me tell tell me if this is a good or bad idea. This sounds like a really good idea, but tell me using. Yeah, we made this just created 3 million our business idea. If I'm a brokerage, why not creating a hyperlocal version for a brokerage and just owning that and then send that to my agent?00:22:10:24 - 00:22:31:24UnknownI'm talking about become like a local celebrity, local digital mayor concept, right? Where they just they're literally like a tour guide. Like, you just like that would just be so awesome to have on a site. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that just like, makes a whole lot of sense. It's almost like, yeah, I mean, I and we're probably only scratching like, what, Like 5% of what the capabilities are.00:22:31:24 - 00:22:47:21UnknownThis this is so early on, right? Even 5%. And it's just amazing how it's going to continue to evolve in like what I think people need to understand is the more it evolves in, the more in-depth it gets as it goes, the harder it's going to be to just jump into it. And you might say like, that's that.00:22:47:21 - 00:23:03:24UnknownLike it's not the case. But I paint this picture for some people. I was just in the Apple store. Mike I was an Apple store, and I don't know if you've seen this, but there's like there's a section where it's old people sitting around a desk and there's this guy saying, All right, now open up your email. Here's how you open it.00:23:04:02 - 00:23:24:08UnknownAnd he's giving the computer lesson like how to use the Internet and open up your email. We have a lot of clients like that that is going to be people in the next five years when it comes to A.I., if they don't, like, start just trying to learn the basics, because right now it's easy. You get in there, you learn the basic, you learn how it works, you know how things are evolving.00:23:24:11 - 00:23:41:11UnknownAnd as it evolves, you're gonna be able to pick up and keep up easier. But if you wait a couple of years and it's evolves into, well, how does this really work? Well, now let's go back to the bit like there's a huge learning curve that will come. It's the perfect time to get into it and start learning the basics and how it works.00:23:41:13 - 00:24:00:09UnknownYeah, I mean, I just clicked on your like I'm in his, my in my listing buddy. Like, this is pretty cool. I'm going to throw you a little plug below. You type in here like he's got like an ace, like a type in the career listing description. Create all marketing from write listing, create marketing for just sold or create my marketing for my open house.00:24:00:09 - 00:24:20:04UnknownSo basically, it sounds like you have a system behind each one of these four prompts. You wanted to do four things for my listing buddy, and once I tell it, if I type in here, describe my four bedroom, three and a half bath ocean view, front house with a three car garage, I want you to put a maserati in the front, put a pool in the back, make sure that fucker has a hot tub attached to it.00:24:20:04 - 00:24:52:24UnknownAnd I want the world's best looking, you know, outdoor kitchen like this is going to come up with know it's not going to come up with the images. I mean, I'm reversing. I mean, I'm sorry you're describing. That's my I'm writing the listing description. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So essentially, like, what we tell people is you just take all the, all the things you put into the MLS, like all the facts and features and then you put it in there for create my listing description and then boom, it creates your listing description and it creates like 2000 characters or less, or that you put in the MLS and then you copy and paste that listing description00:24:53:01 - 00:25:12:06Unknownand then you just paste it in to create all my marketing for my listing. And then it's trained right to Facebook, post to Instagram post with hashtags, a YouTube video script with keywords, headline and description, two emails inviting buyers and a Facebook ad copy. And it's trained on like good copy on the back. And a lot of the copywriting that we put on the back end.00:25:12:08 - 00:25:35:07UnknownThen the same thing with your open house, you copy and paste your listing description and just say Open House is next Thursday at 2 p.m. and it writes same thing like all your materials for it to awesome. Yeah, yeah. I mean I could see the amount of time even we had a need in our company now where we're trying to, you know, for, for our content distribution.00:25:35:07 - 00:25:52:22UnknownWe want to distribute our content for our clients in more places. So we want to you, we want to take our videos and upload them both short form and long form to that LinkedIn and all their social profiles. And our problem we're having right now is that every time if you try to log into someone's social profile, you're gonna get like a security check and then you have to like, log in and then they have to tell you where you're at.00:25:52:22 - 00:26:17:16UnknownSo like, it's literally impossible to try to post content on behalf of people when you're in video or anything right now. Right. Or use a social tool. So we're testing it with this process because it bypasses all of that. And just short answer, does that work? Would which work if I'm just content distribution? Just so if I wanted to streamline all my content distribution, I, I can't say confidently yes or no.00:26:17:16 - 00:26:35:12UnknownWe haven't tried that yet because like the personal profile you say, like posting on the personal profiles on the business pages, I want to take like business pages so it's not as personable, it's just more business, you know, like, yeah, I mean, hello, Roofie. That's the one that we recommend for people to use because it'll even like Roofie is the name of it.00:26:35:14 - 00:27:01:03UnknownHello, Wolfie. I said, Hello, Roofie. I'm like, That is like all these platforms. They did it. It has like 15 different platforms that you can post from at once. You know, it does business right for you. And then even if it's your personal you can like for your clients, you can set them up on the account and then schedule their personal and for them it'll just pop up every day like, this is what they want us to do, you know?00:27:01:03 - 00:27:18:09UnknownAnd that's why we're trying it. That's what we're trying to solve for. And I was like, Okay, how do we figure this out? Because it's not working this way. And it it's this sounds, it's cheaper, it's more economical, you know, scale like, hello. Yeah, it's well, and that's what people don't understand too. It's like, man, So we were marketing.00:27:18:09 - 00:27:35:13UnknownLike, we are marketing, we're still marketing branding company, but now we specialize in I Why? Because our asses, we're going out of business. If we didn't make the change because I look all the things that we were doing for clients that they pay us thousands a month to do. Like now I can just train them. Well, what was the first business here?00:27:35:15 - 00:27:52:01UnknownSo. Well, my brother you got before you got into the the AIDS stuff. Because what happened prior? Not then. Tell me about that, because that's going to have some relevance to some of these realtors. Yeah. So for like, for the last five years, my brother and I, like, we traveled really the country learning from a lot of the top agents how they do doing their marketing and branding.00:27:52:07 - 00:28:14:13UnknownAnd then from there we launched a lot of different like services and products like as far as like creating your whole online platform, like your interview platform, how to create your podcast and do these things, how to create all your entire branding and marketing materials for social media. Now, we got into shorts before a lot of people going into shorts, creating shorts for people on how to repurpose your content that you've already created.00:28:14:15 - 00:28:30:13UnknownAnd then what we did is we actually had a seven bedroom content house in Orlando, Florida. We lived in three of the bedrooms, had a full time cameraman, and my myself and my brother and clients would fly in from all over the country. They would stay at our apartment downtown, come to our house and shoot 30 days worth of content in one day.00:28:30:15 - 00:28:49:05UnknownBut we would sit there and we'd be like, All right, We would go to the whiteboard. Who is your ideal client profile? Who are we making content for? And then we would write it down and then we would say, What are your goals? And we would sit there for almost half of the day and come up with that person's goals, their fears, and try and get inside of their mind about all of these things.00:28:49:07 - 00:29:05:16UnknownAnd then we would sit down and shoot all the content with them. Once we knew that and then we would go from there. Then this is where I had a full team of copywriters, graphic designers, video editors on the back end, because then we would take their videos, transcribe them, send it to our copywriters, and they would write emails that would go out.00:29:05:19 - 00:29:23:08UnknownThen they were a blog post that would go out. Then they were right Facebook posts and I was like, Well, that's done in about 3 minutes now using Chatbot. Yeah. And then we would send it to our video editors and then they would. We had one person's job on our staff was to watch people's videos and say from 2 minutes, 2 seconds to 2 minutes, 50 seconds, clip it.00:29:23:10 - 00:29:39:22UnknownThen they would send it to the Clipper, then they would send it to the subtitle person. Then they would send it to the copy person who would put the headlines on it. That video is now done using Opus. It does all that for you within about 3 seconds. So I was like, Man, we are literally going to go out of business if we don't make this shift.00:29:39:24 - 00:29:59:13UnknownYep, yep. Let's what let's go on to just for realtors in general. Like what? Let's look at the applicable users. I like everyone. What do they need to be using? Like at the bare minimum? Like where do you get started with? And then you're in real estate. Here's what you have to be doing right now. Have bare metal.00:29:59:15 - 00:30:21:16UnknownChad is the bare minimum. Chad You you get the pro version and start exploring the the custom teams. Because from there, like I said, 80% of those startups that that they've been seen other time are now built into Chad. So get into there and then just start getting comfortable with how to train your chad. GPG I think that's almost a bare minimum.00:30:21:18 - 00:30:42:23UnknownThe other tools that we say because we go deep on five, so I guess I'll go through those five. The next one which I love personally is called Hey Jenn, why? And so you literally create a video duplicate of yourself. It looks like you and it sounds like you. So we have real estate agents. They take their market updates and then put it in the.00:30:42:23 - 00:31:01:03UnknownHey Jenn, you have a market update video of you saying it. You take your listing videos, pictures behind it, your listing description, make your market update. Are your listing video or I thought this was creative. One of the agents did this. They went out and they got happy birthday balloons and a hat. They created an agent avatar and they said Happy birthday videos to every one of their clients.00:31:01:03 - 00:31:28:00UnknownNow I'm open top. God, that's dope. Open stop Pro opus just creates shorts for you or reels at scale. You upload your 50 minute video, gives you ten shorts within seconds, so pick the good sound clips out of it. It takes like. So yeah it is determined that's always been that's the hardest part is getting like a given this show like finding someone to come to this show and just take There's a lot of nuggets we've already had here, probably a lot of good repurpose content.00:31:28:02 - 00:31:48:12UnknownHow does does it know that the grab the nuggets right here. Yeah great question. So it's actually trained based on the algorithm and what's online to look through your video, find the highest engaging points in the video, and then it even gives you an engagement score on the side and it tell you what you can do better. Or if you want to like make more engaging content.00:31:48:16 - 00:32:19:02UnknownSo you have like an engagement score on the side, a description for you, the subtitles on there, you can turn on and off B-roll, so I'll add B-roll to your videos. So that way, like you know how media works from there, I did one of my personal favorites called Merlin Get Merlin. Diane So this one, it follows me around to any website that I go to and like, let's say I Google something, Merlin's on the side and it reads the top like five or ten links and gives me the summary from all of the links of things.00:32:19:02 - 00:32:34:03UnknownI just Google. I can go to any landing page and it gives me the summary of the entire landing page and create other copy for me. It responds to emails for me. So a little it reads the emails and I could just say, Hey, let them down nicely, but say I'm not interested. And it responds in a very nice way.00:32:34:08 - 00:32:53:22UnknownOr you can counter and offer and it'll counter each one of the points and then give you the new price. So that's what we use there. And the last one was virtual ad. I think that was just super simple stage homes virtually. And then like if you're looking for buyers, you can let show them a home and be like, how would you like how would you like to design this home?00:32:53:22 - 00:33:11:20UnknownSo you can sit there and design homes with buyers to see how interested they really are in it. That's cool. Yeah. And a lot of this too is like just you guys imagine like the if you're communicating this way, imagine a brand that's been built on a side like because or people will hire you for like how you're doing business, not one.00:33:11:22 - 00:33:26:00UnknownLike you're going up against a bunch of blue hair, gray haired agents and I'm the blue hairs, right? Yeah. And they're traditional, right? So a lot of agents are the newer agents has this question all the time, How am I going to break into this business? Well, there you go, dude. You start doing it differently than all the old school people.00:33:26:00 - 00:33:44:03UnknownRemember, the average age of realtors, I think was last I checked, was 54 or 56 and a half years old. Yeah, I'm 43 and I'm behind the eight ball. Just me. I'm just no dig to you guys, the 50 year old man. But yeah, I'm sure you're much like I am. Right? And then that sense and the young bucks come ready right around here.00:33:44:03 - 00:34:13:23UnknownThose young whippersnappers and those. Those young bucks. All right. But that's what happens. Called innovation innovation, folks. And and nobody is going remember in real estate, whether you want them in or not, your commodity or service service based business. And that service based business is only as has longevity until the next recipe comes out, the next best tasting food or the next best thing or the next best offer, the next best version.00:34:14:00 - 00:34:32:19UnknownCarvana is going through that right now and in the space, but for some weird reason, the stock's going through the roof. But it's I have been to one of these conspiracy theory things that's a lot of the podcast, but you know, I mean, like this is people remember how you do things right so you could I'm just talking about how you market this and have it come through.00:34:32:19 - 00:34:53:08UnknownLike you could just literally say I just used AI to do my listing packet, right? And then someone's going to see that. Yeah. And they're not going to think you're taking a shortcut. They're going to think, Holy shit, this person is advancing, gets marketing. Yeah, it's like that's, that's part of like what we're teaching agents how to do tools like that as certified agent program.00:34:53:10 - 00:35:13:08UnknownPart of it is the AI listing advantage, right? Yeah. So it's how you market and packaged things 200%. Use it on the back end. We have agents sitting down on the listing appointment on the back end of it. We carve out 10 minutes. There's a video sharing how important AI is and then you sit down with them using the tools that we give you and you show them, You know what?00:35:13:08 - 00:35:29:02UnknownI'm going to show you how out market your house using act now how I did other homes and you sit there with them and just click enter a couple of times based on the programs you created and it creates it all them right in front of their eyes and they're like, You know, other agents spend hours, days or even weeks figuring out how to market your property.00:35:29:08 - 00:35:50:05UnknownI did it for you right here so I can spend all my time selling your home and notes. I'm trying to figure out how to market. Yeah, right. I'd rather spend time selling your house and preparing to market it. Exactly. Makes a lot of sense. I do. Since 2014, when we started to show we had the initial message for this show was don't be an agent, be a marketer.00:35:50:07 - 00:36:09:09UnknownYeah. And back down. It was like was a 24th back down. It was like we're talking about bro, like Rooster and Rooster. Now you see people are talking about database and brand and personal brand and content creation and this stuff. All started happening and this is it. This is the next thing to say. I movement. I'm a fan.00:36:09:09 - 00:36:30:09UnknownI like it. What other thoughts? Any other closing thought you want to give people? What else could we use this for? For George? Yeah. You know, I think it's just really understanding what's happening here that you know, on social media through commercials and things that we see, we almost get like immune to big things that are actually happening in the world because every commercial is the next best thing.00:36:30:14 - 00:36:57:02UnknownThis is advancing technology and it's like a Roomba or it's like something that's just like a squeegee. And the latest technology is out. This is artificial intelligence getting introduced to the world. This is the next advancement in technology to human history that is happening right now. And the next five years, there will be some agencies say that was the year that everything changed for me because they jumped on to this and they understood what was happening.00:36:57:06 - 00:37:13:01UnknownAnd then there was going to be everybody else. And years have to decide. It's not a question of if you have to learn this, it's a question of when you choose to, because you're either going to choose to get into an hour, be forced to do it later. So you just had to make it's a business decision. Would you rather wait your app?00:37:13:01 - 00:37:31:22UnknownGo ahead. Would you create I mean, is this as big as like the Internet? It's bigger than the Internet. Yeah, I think so. Literally bigger than the Internet. And, you know, it's just taking a look at it and saying, when are you going to choose to get involved in it? This is changing the world. The biggest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars to get ahead of this thing.00:37:32:01 - 00:37:59:20UnknownThey're stopping everything they're doing and focusing on A.I. real estate agents. It should be no different. So if you think this is a passing fad, if you're one of the people who are the amateurs who tried it and then said it didn't work, remember this? There were millions of people who gave up on the internet when it first came out in the New Times was calling it a passing fad, which what are you going to choose to do yet stalled.00:37:59:22 - 00:38:15:24UnknownSo the guy over here in the Midwest. Yeah, I mean, that's it. I mean, sad. It's just it's here, guys. Whether you embrace it or not, it's up to you. But if you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs, wondering how you're going to get out ahead because there's no houses to sell the wall, what the people pay you for your skill set.00:38:15:24 - 00:38:32:13UnknownThat's really it. Yeah. And while yeah, you might not be selling a bunch of homes right now or maybe you are, I don't know, but you got to sharpen your skills. The reason why I'm taking courses, I've taken two courses this month. Yeah, I'm sharpen skills like I'm going out and I want more, you know, So it's like, this is the next thing I'm on.00:38:32:13 - 00:38:54:11UnknownI'm probably buy your shit, check all that out. But still, it's because you have to learn this stuff. You guys, you just have to put your money where your mouth is and your broker can do it for you. Yep. You know, if you're one of these mega brokers, I could do it for you either. It doesn't matter. You are the CEO, CFO, CMO and everything and everything and the buck stops with you.00:38:54:13 - 00:39:13:22UnknownNeck watched people watch you. Where can they learn more about you? Yeah, so they could just go to cram I everything they need to know about myself. My company is that crammed I we started the Chrome Institute of Artificial Intelligence. We created the world's very first as certified agent and we dropping certified agent 2.0 actually this week, tomorrow.00:39:13:24 - 00:39:38:15UnknownSo we're dropping that tomorrow. Why? Because we spent the last year with agents every single week figuring out more about how they're using AI, what's actually working to get them listings. We're about to launch 2.0 after an entire year of studying with all these agents. Awesome. Go check out his stuff, guys. Appreciate you guys. Let's another app. So the Real Estate Marketing Dude podcast visit our software referral suite Ecom re first FT.com just like the sweet candy, the WPT.00:39:38:17 - 00:39:54:24UnknownWe keep you in front your database and I think I want to put next course in there as well, because this is some good shit. I like it, man. Congrats and keep it up. All this guy files social profiles. Guys. I will see you guys next week. Bye. Thank you for watching. Another episode of the Real Estate Marketing Do podcast.00:39:54:24 - 00:40:15:19UnknownIf you need help with video or finding out what your brand is. Visit our website at WW dot Real Estate Marketing do dot com. We make branding and video content creation simple and do everything for you. So if you have any additional questions, visit the site, download the training and then schedule time to speak with the dude and get you rolling in your local marketplace.00:40:15:24 - 00:40:18:18UnknownThanks for watching Another episode of the podcast. We'll see you next time.

I can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed when I hear about a musician who I want to check out, and they only have social media. Most don't know how to use their socials very well, and even when they do, I don't find everything I need to know about them. How much success have you had with your music that can be directly attributable to your social media? Yep, that's what I thought — practically none. However, when I Google a musician, and the first thing I see at the top of the page is something like XYZMusician.com, I click and usually learn everything I need to know: What their story is, what their music sounds like, when and where their gigs are, what their videos look like if they have an EPK if they sell merch, do they have a Patreon, what their career path looks like, and how to contact him or her. Oh yeah, and links to all of their social media.

Matthew Rosenblum, a geographer by training, shares his journey from PhD candidate to pancreatic cancer patient. He discusses the interplay of space, time, and identity, particularly in relation to his Jewish background and cancer diagnosis. Matthew shares his diagnosis and treatment experience candidly with his unique sense of humor.  While addressing the realities of living with terminal cancer aren't often funny, Matthew will keep you laughing during this episode that will educate and inspire. Key Highlights: The intersections of identity, including being Jewish and BRCA2 positive. The importance of advocating for yourself with your care team. How the emotional and physical toll of living with terminal cancer can still bring moments of resilience and humor. About our guest: Matthew Rosenblum is a pancreatic cancer survivor and BRCA-2 previvor based in metro Detroit with his loving partner, Natalie, and their 6 year-old pug, Monique. Trained as an academic geographer at Florida State University and the University of Kentucky - and with 18 months of remission under his belt - Matthew has pivoted career trajectories to cancer advocacy. He is currently doing freelance writing in the nonprofit world while he looks for a more permanent position in the cancer space. As he searches for meaningful work, Matthew has been preparing a memoir covering his wild ride with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Key Moments: 18 minutes: On intersecting identities. “I think it's like something my oncologist said to me very casually after they discovered the tumor on my pancreas and throughout my gut. He said, ‘Your sister has a BRCA2 mutation and your mom died? Yeah, you're Jewish?' Yes, probably. I wasn't offended or anything like that. It's just there is a very clear connection historically between narratives of cancer and Jewish identity. 34 minutes: On advocating for himself. “I think it's a product of my personality, and I think it's also a way I've found to advocate for myself effectively, that sometimes doctors are not used to being spoken to in a certain way, and if you are willing to get up in their grill a little bit, oftentimes you can get what you want, or you can come to some kind of understanding. My oncologist is the Chief of Oncology at a major cancer research institute – he's the boss. And sometimes that colors people's judgment. So sometimes if you shake them a little bit, you might not steer the ship, but you can be involved in the direction, right? You're controlling the trajectory as a partner, at least.” 50 minutes: Finding humor in dark moments. “I got an automatic notification with the rest of my results on the MyChart app and it used the word adenocarcinoma. And I didn't know that word. But I knew enough that I knew it wasn't good because cancer words, they all sound like they could be the bad guy in Star Wars, right? Like sarcoma. Honestly, are the people who write Star Wars, are they just stealing cancer words? Who's to say? In any case, I flipped out because I Google adenocarcinoma, and it's not good.” -- Visit the Manta Cares website  Disclaimer: This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard, or delay in obtaining, medical advice for any medical condition they may have, and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/manta-cares/support

Episode 69: Find Balance as a Mom with a Demanding Career with Dr. Bonnie Koo   Join Dr. Prianca Naik on the Empowering Working Moms Podcast! In this episode, she and her special guest Dr. Bonnie Koo discuss various topics ranging from how important it is to take care of your mental health to how doing so creates a positive model of behavior for your kids. Dr. Naik and Dr. Koo invite you to learn about investing time into yourself in order to build a life you don't need a vacation from.   In this episode, you will learn: Take time for yourself: This gives you time, space, and a breather to get clarity in what you want to do with your life. Get coached: Dr. Bonnie emphasizes the importance of seeking coaching, therapy, or other forms of support for your mental and emotional health. Coaching can help you understand how your thoughts create your feelings and how to navigate life's challenges. Take Solo Trips: Taking solo trips or spending time alone can be rejuvenating. Whether it's a weekend getaway or a spa resort experience, dedicating time to yourself allows for reflection and self-discovery.  Start with a dinner if that's too daunting. Focus on Emotional Regulation: Dr. Bonnie also highlights the significance of focusing on emotional regulation, especially for parents. Teaching children how to handle their emotions and modeling healthy emotional regulation is vital for their growth.   To end burnout and exhaustion and get your peace of mind back, check out her free masterclass on 4 steps to overcome burnout, get rid of overwhelm, and get your peace of mind back. https://program.stresscleansemd.com/4-secrets-to-living-a-life-you-ll-love-podcast   If you want to work with Coach Prianca Naik, MD, go to www.priancanaikmdcoaching.as.me to book a 30-minute consultation call.   Follow Dr. Prianca on social media:   https://www.facebook.com/prianca.naik   https://www.instagram.com/doctorprianca   https://www.linkedin.com/in/prianca-naik-md-0524a196/   Join her FREE Facebook group:   https://www.facebook.com/groups/646992382603860   Follow Dr. Bonnie Koo on social media:   Instagram: https://instagram.com/wealthymommd or @wealthymommd   Facebook: https://facebook.com/wealthymommd   Website: https://wealthymommd.com     [FULL TRANSCRIPTION:]   You're listening to the empowering working moms podcast episode number 69. Today I am so excited to have a special guest coming to us on this podcast, Dr. Bonnie Koo. She is a master certified life coach, physician, and founder of Wealthy Mom, MD.   She's a money coach for women physicians, and a proud graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is the host of the WealthyMomMD podcast and author of Defining Wealth for Women: Peace, Purpose, and Plenty of Cash. She currently resides in northern jersey with her family. So let's get to it and dive in.   All right, I am so excited today because I have a very, very special guest. Her name is Dr. Bonnie Koo. She was actually a coach of mine, and I'm thrilled to have her here. She's been doing amazing things and really thinking outside the box, which is what I want to dive into today. So welcome, Bonnie. Hey, there. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you on. So I wanted to ask you, I know you're a dermatologist by trade, what really led you to becoming a coach?   Yeah. So I'm just laughing because like, it was not what I was expecting. I think that's the story for a lot of us. It's not like we were like, let's go to medical school or whatever career and then let's just change your mind a few years into it, right? Like, I don't think any of us had that goal. And so, I mean, the short story is that I was learning about money just for myself, because I realized I had no idea what I was doing. And then I was in a Facebook group of other physicians and it was for money, specifically. Just a community group where people were helping each other out.   And then I noticed that I was answering all the questions, and then people started tagging me, this was just fun for me. And then someone was like, why don't you start a blog? And so I did. And then it just went on from there. And then I just started getting asked to speak. And then I started working with a coach because to me, this was just a hobby. And then eventually, I got to the point where I had to either let it go, because I just had my son who's now six or make it a business, although there's obviously a lot of options in between, but those were the two options in my head.   And then at some point, I just decided, it wasn't like there was a specific reason if I'm perfectly honest, I was like, why not? The worst that can happen is that it fails and I'm still a doctor. Yeah, being a physician is not a bad fallback career, I suppose. I'm sure people are thinking that. Okay. So the personal development is the hobby, right? Which leads you to something that you're really enjoying, and then you make a decision to monetize it.   So what I think is really remarkable here, and why I really wanted to have you on the podcast is what gave you the courage to step out of that box, because there is pretty much, with or without people acknowledging it, there is kind of a box that physicians are put into or whatever box you might be in, in your culture, and just having the guts to step outside of that not really knowing what comes next.   Yeah, that's a great question. I think for me, I started meeting other people doing similar things. And so there's a conference called fincon, it's like in the fall of every year, it's probably like, happening this week or last week. And it's where all the people in the finance media world come together. And so I started to just meet other people who are doing this, including other doctors, there were a few other doctors. So I think just having that community, it was small, but just other people doing it. So like, I wasn't the only like weird and crazy person doing this. I think that was helpful.   And then honestly, working with a coach, like she helped me navigate the decision. And then once I decided to do a business, she helped me figure out what I could or couldn't do. And she also pointed out some things that maybe I wasn't thinking of, she's like, you have basically been building an audience for the past two years, not like on purpose, but just because I've been just helping people. And so she was like, you're in the perfect position to monetize it, if you want. And then I was like, okay. So it's interesting.   And then I took all these courses on how to learn how to run a business, because I didn't have any business skills. And so why would I Google it myself? I feel like a lot of people do this. I'm like, why would I Google it like people already know how to do this. I'm just gonna learn from them. I don't know if I'd describe it as courage. I think again, it's like being surrounded by these people. So it was almost like normalized that you can do this.   But what's really fascinating in life in general, is that a lot of us think that, especially physicians, you go to college, you go to med school, you pick a speciality, you go into residency, maybe fellowship, and then you work and then it's going to be a steady income, and all the steps are there.   So it feels so certain, even though you do have to pass the boards and do a lot of steps along the way. So it isn't actually certain but this false sense of certainty that we have in our careers, as opposed to being an entrepreneur, which just by nature is much more shaky, and it's more obvious that step A is the opposite of certainty. Exactly right.   So it's a lot of trial and error or failing forward or any of those concepts. So that is why I bring up the courage piece. Where of course, stepping into the unknown pretty much we're doing that all the time. We have no control over what the future holds.   Right, but at the same time doing something that's so different from what you're used to, or what you've been taught, or what you thought your life was going to be, and really just going for it, I think is really inspiring for people like, and that's why I say courage because for many people staying in the status quo, no matter how boring or dissatisfying or even malignant and might be, they'll stay there because they're terrified of the change. So yeah, can you relate to any of that, or can you elaborate on?   Yeah, well, here's a few things that I didn't mention. So two things is I had a different career before medical school, I was a non traditional student, I worked at Morgan Stanley, not in finance, but I worked in IT. And so I didn't have this like identity of just being a student. So I think that's part of it. The second thing is right after college, I did some pretty intense personal development work. And so I say that because I think I was already sort of more open minded that things can change, and that people do this, if that makes sense. Like, I'd forgotten about it. And I feel like I regressed during medical training.   But I think that's also why when I started working with my first coach, it was just really clear to me like, oh, yeah, remember this work, and just how fun it is to always be growing. Because I think what happens is, whatever career you choose, you become stagnant at some point, right? Because like in med school, it's like, we're learning all these new things, and you have residency, you're learning all these new things. And the first year or two of being attending is also exciting, right? And I feel like a lot of doctors get bored after like, three to five years, sometimes earlier.   Well, there's nowhere to go. The beauty of medicine is it is a steady job. People will always need doctors. But at the same time, there's not that much upward growth, like you're a doctor and you're doing the same thing more or less, unless let's say you're managing your practice, and maybe you work less, or maybe you become an entrepreneur on the side, but just straight being a doctor, you're going to do the same thing in your 10th year that you're doing in your first or second year. And that, I agree, like you kind of just hit like a plateau there and you aren't really growing in your career, per se.   Yeah. And I think that's when a lot of people get. They talk about the seven year itch and marriage, but I feel like it's more like a three to five year itch in medicine. I think people look around and are like, oh, is this it? Because I think we all thought like once we became attendings that we would live happily ever after, basically. And then we learned that's not a thing, and then we're really disappointed.   Correct. And then the beauty is you have the steady income. And sometimes you can, well that's the work that you do, which feel free to talk about that. Like so, you have the money. And then what do you do with it? You have the luxury of maybe making your money work for you? Yeah, I mean, so I coach people on money. But what I realized after doing this for some time is it's not just about the money because you can have all the money in the world. But if you're an unhappy person, it doesn't matter. Right, you can take nicer vacations and eat at Michelin star restaurants, I guess, right?   So I really try to teach my clients money is a tool to help you do things, it is very useful, obviously. But also money is not going to make you happy. And because we all know that technically, but we really think we'll be happier with money, like certain things are possible. And certain things are more fun.   Like I love traveling first class, like I definitely am happier while flying first class, right? Like, there's no doubt about that. But those experiences alone aren't going to make my life rich and fulfilled. So I really try to help my clients do a little bit of both. And that's mainly from like the coaching because once you get coached on one area of your life, it kind of filters into other areas of your life.   I was laughing about the first class business class flying, laughing silently, but what that brought up for me was that those kinds of experiences are transient. Right? So money might buy you that but that comes and it goes but a lack of money, I think also can create a lot of stress that will make you unhappy.   Yeah. Well, so I don't know exactly who your listeners are. Are they mostly physicians or high income women?   It's pretty much career driven, high achieving, working moms.   I mean, pretty much everyone listening is not going to struggle with basic needs that money provides, right. And so I'm sure you've heard of a study that over a certain amount of money adjusted for where you live doesn't increase happiness, right? Obviously, if you don't have money to buy food, being able to buy food is definitely going to increase. It's not even happiness. It's like, just be not worrying about those primal things you need to live right. But yeah, after a certain amount of money, like it doesn't do as much as we think except for flying first class.   And the fancy meals, which by the way, I feel like the fancy meals that are curated and they look beautiful on the plate. I always leave those places hungry, wanting a piece of pizza. Like if you've ever been to 11 Madison Park, or you know they do these, well, that's a bajillion courses. But if you go do like a lesser version of that, like three courses, of like bite sized food, and then I'm leaving craving more, having spent how much money.   It's funny. I just went to France a few months ago, Paris specifically and I don't think I enjoy fancy food as much as I used to. To me it was like it's about the food. It's also the experience and I'm not sure if I enjoyed it. Maybe I'm just getting older and I'm just not used to going out as much as I used to. But basically what I'm saying is I don't need to go to a fancy two or three Michelin star restaurant, they tend to be kind of stuffy anyway, you know. And I feel like you know, a bit more of a modern hip restaurant is more my style now.   I agree. During COVID, when I didn't go to restaurants, after people started emerging, I remember being really appreciative of service. But now I'm at a point where I think most of like the fancy meals, it's the same thing like every single time. So it does start to lose its novelty. And then you're kind of just looking for the quality of food, rather than the fanfare of it all. So something I wanted to also ask you is, what do you think would be useful for the exhausted burnt out professional moms, in terms of if they're on the precipice of making a change? What advice would you give them?   Wow, there's so much. Well, I think the first thing is to take care of yourself, right? Because all those things you described is mostly a result of just not prioritizing themselves. So I think there's a lot of work in that, right. And women, we're basically socialized to be caretakers. And even if you don't have kids, that extends to just the people around you, maybe your parents, etc, right?   Maybe in your culture, too. But in my culture, or a lot of other cultures, like you want to have a daughter because a daughter takes care of you, the sons don't. Right, have you heard that before? Yes, of course, in general, cultures, letting men walk away scot free from so many things that they could actually be contributing to including caring for your parents. Right?   Yeah. So I think there's a lot of that. And I think it's even way more exacerbated if you're a parent, because you're just giving so much to your kids. And that has a toll on you. Because then I see a lot of women, they feel like they don't even know who they are anymore. Because they've just been giving, giving, giving. And then obviously, depending on your work circumstances, and whether you've gone through a divorce, there's obviously a lot of things that can cause stress. And so I would say number one is really take care of yourself.   I actually taught a lot of my clients be willing to go part time and work less. But of course, they're always like, Well, what about money, right? They don't want to make less money. I was like, listen, money circumstances are temporary. And part of me is like, you might need to go part time or even take a sabbatical in order to a) recoup.   And then what if that's necessary to actually make more money? That's something people don't consider, because they're so focused on like, well, if I work part time, that means I make less money. In the short term, yes. But then the thing is, you don't have headspace to think about things or be creative, or to even think about having a side gig when you're burned at both ends, you know?   Absolutely. So I'm really intrigued by that. I love that concept that you're mentioning, what's the strategy behind that? Like, how do you coach your clients who you're saying, hey, maybe go part time, maybe take a sabbatical? What does that look like in reality? And how are you helping women to actually do this? Because that sounds really scary. And I'm sure many women are listening to this thinking, yeah, that's great and everything, but no, thanks. You know, they're all freaked out.   Yeah. So part of it is looking at their money to see what's going on. The thing is, most of my clients aren't going to go broke. Like when I say go broke, like, they're not going to not be able to feed their kids or their family if they take some time off. Most of them will just go part. I mean, it's all different. To be honest, the thing is, even when you're doing a sabbatical, there are so many options to make money. Like you can just do like a per diem or locums. Right, I think you do something like that.   So it's not like you turn the money faucet completely off. But it's like, how can we create more space and time and for some people, it's like literally just working one less day a week at their current job or, again, as physicians, there are a lot of options, expert witness work, etc. So it's not like you have to completely turn off the money income, but then it's also getting their money in order. Because the goal is to be in a position where if your job income stops, there shouldn't be a catastrophe in a month or two, right?   Yes, exactly. It's more, I think, just the idea of slowing down the incoming and what am I doing about the outgoing, that people just kind of freeze and have a fight or flight moment during that conversation.   I think they also have to realize that what they're doing now is completely unsustainable. If you think about the decrease in income being temporary, you could think of that as like the investment in yourself to get better, and to build a life where you're not going to need a vacation from right.   Yeah, we need time and space to actually create and have thoughts flow. Because when you are in the day in and day out, day to day grind, you're just surviving. So there's very little room to actually transform or grow during that time. What else besides the part time work would you add to your advice for busy exhausted mothers?   Well obviously getting coached. And I'm not just saying that as a coach, but also as a client. Like I don't know if you're getting coached actively right now, Prianca, but like people always. Actually I was just doing a call with someone and they were like, surprised that I was still getting coached on stuff.   What I've learned from that is, I think people think, whether it's for themselves or looking at other coaches, that we get to a point where our brains are just beautiful inside and like there's no negative thoughts and like, I can handle anything and that kind of thing, unfortunately, yeah, we're human.   Yeah, we're still human. Like, I'm working with a parenting coach now and like. Oh, that's cool. I would say parenting it's like the hardest job in the world right?    And the most important too. I feel like most people feel like for me, my job as a mom is the number one job even though I spend a lot of time with my career and other things but it's top of mind.   Yeah. And then also what I realized is like I think every parent absolutely needs a parent coach. And part of being the best parent that you want to be is like working on yourself. And so that's why I also think coaching is, every parent coach does it differently. Mine coaches me and then also helps with some tips and tricks, but a lot of it's just coaching me and I'm like, freaked out, Jack's gonna get kicked out of school, like, you know, our brains just go to worst case scenario, he's gonna get kicked out of school, and then wanting to fix it right away. And so she has to coach me to calm my brain on that topic.   But yeah, I think getting coached is so important because understanding that our thoughts create our feelings, it's just life changing. But there's more than just, as you know, like, the way I'm trained is like really just working on your thoughts and how they downstream to feelings. But as you probably know, there's like other things at play that aren't just related to thoughts.   So like, I just feel like there's so much support that's available for your mental and emotional health that I think a lot of us neglect, because everyone kind of knows, like, oh, yeah, you should work out and go to the gym, because you'll feel better. And it's good for your health, right. But our mental health is just not prioritized at all, as you know. So I think that's really, really important is to prioritize your mental health. And there's so many ways to do that. Whether psychiatrists, therapists, coaching all the above.   I mean, I have a personal therapist, I'm in group therapy, and I have a coach. So I very much believe in taking care of myself first. Because that's always how we get to show up as the best versions of ourselves for them, and also setting an example for them, hopefully, so that they grow up caring for their own mental health as adults.   Oh, that's such a good point. I don't think I really thought about that. Here's another thing, right? And I didn't mean to make this into a parenting thing. But this applies whether you're not parent is if you think about it, our generation, although I think you're a lot younger than me Prianca. I'm not that much younger than you. I think I'm like a couple years younger than you. Yeah.   You just look so young. But you know, we were raised not being taught anything about how to handle our emotions. And if anything, especially cultural is like, don't show emotion, like, be stoic. And then if you're highly educated, it's just like pushing on through school and getting whatever you have to done. And then if you're a doctor, it's worse as well through residency.   So I think we have to learn that skill ourselves and learning it ourselves. Everything we do, our kids are watching us, it's modeled for them, right? And so if you grew up in a family just yelled and punished, and grounded you all the time. It's so funny, because no one's gonna say like, well, how a parent I'm gonna do the same thing for my kids. But as you know, like you end up parenting like your parents. It's kind of insane kind of a mind f, if you think about it.   Well, it comes really naturally. My experience is, I think about the way I was parented, and then I think about. It's in a book, How to Raise Successful People, which I may have recommended to you by Esther Wojcicki but she talks about really going through everything, how you were raised, and thinking about what you want to propagate forward and what you want to eliminate.   I don't know if I want to propagate any of it.   Okay, so for me, a lot of it. I'm like, okay, I'm not like my parents at all. But then what I find is in an academic setting, or like, when I start seeing my son, if he's doing well in school, then I'm kind of like, Alright, I have to help foster this, but not in the same way that my parents did, in a gentle kind way. But I can feel that it's all stirring up the old stuff where I was trying to do the best I could in school, and then I'm thinking alright, yeah, let him do the best he can do but without the punishment, and without tying in any his self worth to that and having like, a way bigger distance from all that.   Well yeah, we definitely were raised in the punishment is how you get people to comply and I mean, it is effective, but it also totally squashes self esteem. Anyway, that's what I'm learning how to navigate. And it's been fascinating for me, and also just showing me like all the areas that I still have work to do, you know?   Yeah, well, we're all constantly growing and changing and doing the best we can. And I really believe that our generation, we are doing better than our parents did. And hopefully our kids will do even better. I think so. Yeah, yeah. Although, I bet our kids are gonna say the same thing about us.   Well, I'm wondering if it's gonna be because even social media and all the info that's out there, it's very much we're trying to foster these independent people. And we ask them all these questions, and we're much more into mental health, but I wonder if the complaints gonna be the other way. Like, why couldn't my mom just be normal? And why did she have to ask me like how I felt about this? Like it was too psychological?   Interesting, but everything comes down to feelings, like truly.   Well, yes. So today, I was talking to coaches in my mastermind. And I was saying that really the work that pretty much we all do is helping people to sit in the discomfort because once you learn to actually sit with it, that's the currency for the good life because it's being able to be present with your anxiety sometimes, or whatever negative emotions and getting a little bit distance from them, be it through the model or other methods, but really not being one with our thoughts and our feelings. 24/7 Because that's where the torture lies.   I know and little kids, they can't understand like, why can't I have something that I want? Or why do I have to do things I don't want to do. Like brushing his teeth it's like a battle. Like, well I don't want to brush my teeth? None of them do. They don't. Yeah. And he's like, so why should I like I don't want to so therefore I shouldn't.   If I'm really honest here, one of my least favorite things with my kids is the ADLs like, I dread the morning brush teeth and the evening like brush your teeth before bed. And it really depends on how tired I am at night. But especially my two year old, she won't let me brush her teeth. And then I just let her do like very subpar job. And I'm like, alright, it's over.   I mean, which kid actually does the full two minutes? I mean, I don't think anyone does. I do 30 seconds. I'm like, You know what, 30 seconds is good enough?   Yeah I don't know. They hate brushing their teeth. I don't know. And they can't understand that is an automatic and a non negotiable of life. It's just one of the things that we don't need to get into the reason with them, but they hate it.   It boggles my mind. I'm like, doesn't he like. But like, wake up and you've got that, like morning mouth thing going on? I'm like, how is he not bothered by that? But kids just don't seem to be.   They don't care. I know. I hear you. Anyway. Yeah, those chores are tough. I will say though I have an au pair now. She often does the morning brush teeth. And they actually let her help and whatnot, like more than they will me. So yeah, my life has become infinitely better with that. Extra set of hands with her. So I highly recommend that if you have the space for it. It will take that stuff off your plate.   Yeah, I mean, we just have one. We both work from home. So we haven't needed one. But I wouldn't hesitate to hire one if I had multiple kids and had a schedule that made it hard to handle it myself.   Any other advice for exhausted professional moms?   So even if you can't, like I talked about go part, time take a sabbatical. Like you could take a little trip and go to a spa resort by yourself. I'm glad you asked this again. Because when I tell people that I take solo trips, they're shocked. A lot of women are shocked whether they have kids or not. Right. They're just like what, you can do that? And so I travel a decent amount for work. I go to a lot of conferences, but for my birthday this year, I went to Maribel for two nights by myself.   I remember when I told Matt he was like, what? You're not going to hang out with the family? I'm like no. Maribel is an all inclusive spa resort. I love it. I've been there many times. It's amazing what just even a weekend away will be so like nourishing and for anyone listening Maribel, there's three locations, Austin, Berkshire's, which is Massachusetts and Arizona, just two hours south of Phoenix. They are amazing resorts. It's all about wellness and prioritizing and mindfulness. Have you been to one?   I have. I enjoyed it. I also went by myself. My only thing was I felt like I was hungry there. They're too healthy. And I know it's all about wellness. They do the food health, you know, the healthful eating, you know.   You can always get more food, right?   I know but it's all, it's too healthy for me, like I need a steak or a burger like.   Oh, you should have done cook for me. Do you do that? That's good.   I did do that one of the nights. Yes. And that was good. But yeah, that was my only qualm with that place. Yeah.   So yeah, I think that's a great place or just like taking a trip with your girlfriends. I think, again, so easy to just stop doing that because you get into this routine. So I think even that, like I require a decent amount of time for myself. And now it's like normal, I don't feel like, although lately I have been trying to minimize travel a bit more just because Jack started kindergarten and I want to be available for him because we sent him to a Waldorf school.   I saw your post on social media about a more nature immersed school, and I thought, wow, that's awesome.   He's on a farm. And he is gardening and feeding animals, like they're outside, even when it's wet outside. So I had to buy him all this special gear. There's zero academics in their kindergarten. Because their whole philosophy is that developmentally like it's easier to learn when they're a little older. So they actually read a lot later than mainstream school. And so my friends warned me that they won't be reading until second or third grade, even.   They really focus on social and emotional development. And so it just was in line with all the things that I've been learning myself, right, just like really focusing on emotional regulation. Because if you think about it, those skills are way more important than your academics.   It's so true with my children, too. I always think like, well, what is the endgame in this? Like, whatever it is. It's not straight A's. Right, that's for sure. And also people get really crazy about sports and teams and this and that. And I'm like, alright, well are you gonna become a professional athlete? If not, like we don't have to be so crazy about this. Like, it's okay. They learn to be on a team. To me, it's more of a social, like you're talking about skill building.   I don't understand. Like I remember even before Jack was born, just like seeing that this was a thing. And I was so confused, because that's not how it was when we grew up, like our activity was just roaming around the neighborhood on our bikes and our parents not knowing where we were, you know those were our activities.   And so I actually, because he is on a farm all day, like they're literally being physically active. Like, I don't feel the need to do it. And also, they actually said that it's actually not great for them at this age, I forget, but that was enough for me to be like see, they told me not to do it, I'm not gonna do it.   Yeah, I think that's amazing. One thing I will say is my son's kindergarten teacher was saying that she teaches the kids a song about boundaries. And I said, oh, my, I was freaking out. I said, Oh my god, that's amazing. I said, can you imagine if we had learned that at a young age, boundaries like I didn't know what that was until.   They just learned about the personal bubble, the space bubble. Learning that like yeah, there's like everyone has a bubble and you have to ask for consent. And Jack that's his challenging area because he doesn't understand that and because he's so sweet and loving. If he met you like he would just like hug you but he's very strong. So it's almost like he's tackling you. So he doesn't quite understand that not everyone likes to get hugged. I'm like, listen, I know some people are weird. They don't want hugs. So you always have to ask, he still doesn't ask he just will embrace you.   Aw he has to regulate his kindness. Aw. I love that. So I love this concept of take some time and go on a trip alone. I think people are really afraid to do it.   Start with, it doesn't have to be even a night like I think baby steps, right? Because if you're married with kids, I know we're focused, because I'm sure not everyone listening has kids. Like, I have met women who are married with kids who literally never been away from their kids, even one night and their kids are older. I know your eyes are just wide.   I don't even know how that's possible. That's really intense.   So many people, they don't even go out to dinner without their kids.   It's too much. Start with a dinner. Let's just say that, start with a dinner alone. And actually, you never know if you let's say you sit at the bar and you eat dinner, you can meet people around you and you make new friends or just the possibilities are endless with that. What I was going to say about the alone time, I recently realized because I would take my kids on trips, and I took a few days to just reset by myself. And it was so magical that I only had to care for myself.   That was the whole thing that I didn't have to worry about. All right, the brushing teeth or the breakfast. All their needs, which we care for all the time. It's so automatic that one day even to just only think about yourself and be quiet. I like the friends trip idea. But I also think the time when you're not talking to other people and feeling like you have to be entertaining, or engage or listen or any of those.   That's why I like Mirabel solo. Because you don't have to talk to anyone. And it's fine, because a lot of them are there by themselves. Some people go with their girlfriends, but like no one's expecting you to like engage. And it's in that solitude and the quietness that you can get your best ideas or just restore or you're not giving to anyone except yourself.   And I think that's so fascinating that so many women, that concept of oh, let me just give to myself, and no one else, is so shocking for them. It's a world that they don't know. So yeah, start with that. Even if you can do, like I have a goal of doing it one 24 hour shift a month alone, like that is my goal.   That's amazing. I don't think I have, well, when I went to Paris for 10 Nights. Yeah, I didn't bring my family. I didn't mean for it to be that long. But you know, my business class tickets were already booked. So I couldn't change them. Probably not entirely true.   That's so funny. Yeah. So I have that as a goal. In addition to I think with friends, it's always good to have like a yearly trip you do with a certain group, let's say for doctors or med school friends, or college friends, or whatever other group you have, and just make it an annual thing. And that way, it's already there. Because if you just let these things go years go by. I know time goes so fast. And it's also like I only have one I can't imagine what it's like with more than one little one. But I think lately I've been trying to pick resorts to have a kids club of some sort.   So we can just park them there for even a few hours is helpful. Or I bring my mom sometimes. Yeah, although she needs a break too. Well, that's not your job, though. But yeah, I mean, I think that's another thing, it's like, don't feel bad about having support. Because I think also we think do everything ourselves. Right.   So like hiring the au pair, or just hiring a part time babysitter or like, don't clean your house, someone else could do that. Like there's so many things you can outsource and they don't cost as much as people think. Like a lot of women I meet don't like to cook, I'm like you can hire a personal chef or get meal, like there's so many services now that do that. Even if you did it a few times a week, that would be helpful.   Absolutely, or just really taking inventory of the things that bring you joy and don't and then start outsourcing the ones that you don't enjoy. Like if you don't find cooking therapeutic, some people do, but if it's not a therapy session for you, and you find it tiring, you don't want to clean up. For me all the prep, the cooking the cleaning afterwards, like that's a big chore for me. So I'd rather have someone help.   I don't do that Matt does it and then he just leaves stuff everywhere. And I was like, listen, you do the laundry. He loves doing laundry. Like you do the laundry, I sometimes cook, I take care of all things Jack, and then you have to deal with dishes and the garbage. Like it's a great division of labor that we have, you know.   I clean up sometimes but it's just putting stuff in the dishwasher. It's not like it's hard, you know? No, it's not.   No, I was gonna say and also he can manage Jack when you take your solo trips.   Yes, I think that might be harder. So that's something we have to navigate because his school is kind of far right now. And so it's a lot of driving. And so I think this fall, I've kind of minimized although I already took one trip and I have another one coming up but just being more picky with like speaking engagements and things like that, because I want to be away a little less because last year I was gone a lot. I mean, it was fun for me. Don't get me wrong.   Yeah, things wax and wane. I love that. Well, thank you so much for all of your pearls and your journey. So beautiful that you shared with us today. And please tell us anything about your business, how we can find you, follow you, all those good things. And of course, I will link to everything in the show notes as well. But definitely tell us verbally.   Yeah, so everything is wealthy mom MD. So it's my website. That's my instagram handle, same as my podcast, wealthy mom MD. And then as you know, I have a book, you can find that on my website, but it's called Defining Wealth For Women. It's a pink book.   I love that you wrote a book and I just think that that speaks to how we all have the ability to make our dreams come true. It's just them matter of getting your mind to it and then taking the action to make it happen Exactly just taking steps, like all this stuff happens by doing like a lot of little things   Wonderful, well thanks so much for coming today, it was great having you.

Gamers know the longtime PlayStation racing series Gran Turismo. The story of Jann Mardenborough, who turned a passion for the game into a career racing real cars was brought to theaters this summer in the film "Gran Turismo." But how closely do these films stick to reality? There's a reason why many include a disclaimer at the start that some characters and stories have been changed or dramatized. We talk about the recently completed HBO series "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty," which has been criticized by some portrayed on the show. The there is the 1989 film "Great Balls of Fire!" starring Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis. A lot of people were critical of the film, but co-host Bruce Miller interviewed Lewis and says the singer loved Quaid's performance.. What about movies like "Elvis" and the upcoming film "Priscilla," which both had the involvement of Priscilla Presley? Or the music biopic that largely led to the modern music biopics, Oliver Stone's "The Doors," which was criticized by the surviving members of the band? Even documentaries have been known to stray a little, such as the Oscar-winning "Searching for the Sugar Man" based on the life of Sixto Rodriguez. The film failed to mention the singer had modest success in Australia, so he wasn't a complete unknown.  We take a deep dive into true stories that have been turned into movies and even have an interview with Mardenborough, who was involved with the film. He also talks about his involvement with actor Archie Madekwe, who played Mardenborough. Where to watch "Gran Turismo" in theaters "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" on Max Contact us! We want to hear from you! Email questions to podcasts@lee.net and we'll answer your question on a future episode! About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome everyone to another episode of Streamed & Screened an entertainment podcast about movies and TV from Lee Enterprises. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee and co-host of the program with Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. But first, an important disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are a fusion of professional critiques and passionate fandom. While Bruce's experience and my dedication to the couch may suggest an odd pairing, it's what makes this podcast a delightful mix of the expected and the unexpected. Listener discretion is advised and an important addendum to that. Bruce. No animals were harmed during the recording of this episode. Where did you get that? ChatGPT. Is this the future in the film? It wrote a lot more than that. First of all, we're out of jobs. That's what happens if everything's good, right? Man, I was thinking, you know, we were talking about this episode a week ago, and I said, you know, might be fun to have a disclaimer. And I'm sitting there like, What kind of disclaimer would we have for us? A We can say whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And not be. Can I tell you, I always I hate this when somebody gets a bad review. And what do critics know? You know, why or who are critics? Well, a critic is somebody who probably watches a lot of what you do and has an idea about what is good and what isn't good. And so listen to them. But I've always said to them, anybody who pays money for something is a critic and is entitled to an opinion. So have at it. Absolutely. And you know what? I think it's like anything else where maybe, you know, you're a critic, you're doing it professionally, but you're still you're still a human being that needs to entertain yourself and something's good or something is bad. I mean, it is what it is. And I think you do need to be a fan to be a critic. Otherwise, if you hated the medium that you were were criticizing, you wouldn't do it, right. So there is that moment. But I you know, there are those who are like, greasy. They're a little over the top with the oh, my God, it's the greatest thing ever. I how many times have you read quotes from some movie ad that says this is the best thing since Gone with the Wind or, you know, and you got really I don't think it was or truth should be this great, You know? I mean, it's like, what are you saying? Right. But those are the things that you find. And they're quotable. Yeah. That they try to a lot of those when you look at reviews that are polled or quoted, those are written to get quoted because the critic who is saying, I can't believe movies have gotten this good wants to get his name in the ad. So then it helps boost his position as a critic and helps get the name out about the publication. So this podcast. Incredible. Four stars. I think the one nice thing though about the modern criticism in in any form, whether it's music or TV or movies or whatever you're following, the Internet has opened up all new avenues, right? Because in in the old days, you know, you might pick up your your Shoe City Journal and you would just have Bruce Miller, the one telling you or if you're in Chicago, you might have Siskel and Ebert or wherever you might be, you just have that local voice. But now you can go to Rotten Tomatoes where it's picking up the aggregate and and, you know, sure, the folks in the industry might not want to hear what a critic has to say, But when you go to like a Rotten tomatoes and you've got 300 critics saying your movie's terrible, yeah, it's probably it's probably stinky. It probably is not good. Well, that's really encouraging, isn't it? Is that. But it goes the other way, too, where if you actually want your critics to love it and it's, you know, certified Fresh by Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah, right. That's great. And then you get the weird ones where, you know, the critics will love it and then the fans dog on it or vice versa. And then you just bang your head on the wall and don't know what to do. The ultimately you are your best critic. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did we offend anybody in the process of that? And did we and or whatever our disclaimer said, I don't know. All I know is no animals have been harmed in the filming of this episode. So we're good. We're good. You know, we're we're going to talk about something that I think is just very fascinating. Do you know how many years in the Academy Awards have not had an actor nominee who is based on an actual person? Well, I'm eight years out of I think it's 90 some 95 years have not. How many? I'm just going it's like three. Eight, eight. Wow. Years. And look at last year we had Elvis. We had Marilyn Monroe. The famous ones could be considered beasts or, you know, sort of. Yeah. So there are those So that's it's a sure way to an Oscar is to play somebody who actually exists. Yeah. And there were the most the most at 12 in 2018. Isn't that unbelievable. It's crazy. We're just grabbing anything. We can throw it up on the screens. It's based in fact, you know, So that's a surprise to me. But it's it is sure content. You will know that there is some story to base it on. We saw now recently with the blindside, where Michael Oher is just kind of like now, this is not this isn't what I remember. So he's trying to speak against this as the ultimate. And it's never, never, ever, ever in the history of filmmaking is a film, an absolutely accurate depiction of what happened. Right. Because it's not a document, right? It's not a documentary. Even that with documentaries, Right. You can't trust them. No. I remember I This tells you how far back we go. Okay. I did a master's thesis on the validity of critics. It's like, do critics make a difference? Is basically the thesis that I did. And we looked back and there was like, this sliver of time when actually critics would have any kind of impact on the audience. And what it was was in those days they were showing what like people were like Eskimos were like. And people had never seen Eskimos. So they believed exactly what they saw on the screen and said that is exactly the way it is, even though it may not have been so. And it was just a very sliver of time that critics could have some kind of impact on what people saw after that don't make a difference at all. People just kind of watch something and. Yeah, and you see that even now with like Netflix where movies that bomb at the box office. But all of a sudden we'll get they'll be trending on Netflix. You'll see like, you know what's that most popular and it'll be some movie from seven years ago that nobody went to see all of a sudden gets hot because it's just people for some whatever reason now algorithm and then it catches fire. Yeah, well look at Green book. Green Book won Best picture the Red critics were, like, kind of lukewarm on it as a as a movie movie. And the people who were related to the man portrayed said it isn't his life. This isn't all at all what it was like. Right. But it played well because it kind of touched those heartstrings that we were looking to touch. And so they made do something to you emotionally, but they may not do it realistically. Yeah. And, you know, you talk about these dramatization scenes, but it's even in documentaries, the storytelling can be twisted in a way to help tell a narrative and one that I wanted to bring up because the person that was featured in it just died recently. Sixto Rodriguez, who was a musician out of Detroit, he released two albums and they didn't they didn't do very well commercially, and he got dropped by his label and he kind of fell into obscurity. And he got popular in South Africa during apartheid when when the the country was basically cut off from civilized nation. There is no Internet at the time, so there's no way of researching. And this mythology was built about the sugar man and this documentary, Searching for the Sugar Man. It won an Oscar for best Documentary. But even in that case, it's failed to mention that he had like these small pockets of international fame. It wasn't you know, he never achieved some level of glory and made tons and tons of money. But in the late seventies, early eighties, Rodriguez was actually touring in Australia. And and that was before they discovered, you know, he was alive in South Africa. So even in that case where you have a story, which is it's a documentary, it's interviewing the real person, there's no actors involved. It's supposed to be reality. They kind of fudged with reality a little bit just to tell the story of, you know, here is this person that's completely obscure, even though in Australia they knew exactly who he was because he had been there a few times there. Yeah, it's well, look at the the film that's leading the way this year for best picture. Oppenheimer Right now that looks about as clean as you can get, except for some of those scenes that are kind of done in the mind, if you will. But it's it's the artistry of the director, you know, so you're not getting the story. And we've got other ones coming this year. We we had air which was about right the Michael Jordan selling of Nike Napoleon is coming up. Ferrari is coming up. Priscilla, about Elvis Presley's wife. You know, so there are the and the killers of the flower moon, what you're waiting for, right? Right. Not all these are based, in fact, for some reason. And it's a jumping off point is what it amounts to. Reality becomes a starting point, but not necessarily an end point. Right. And we saw this also in another in a series on HBO that just wrapped this past weekend, you know, winning time. Right. Which looked at the the the rise of the Lakers dynasty in Los Angeles. And a year ago, there was a lot of controversy after season one. Jerry West, who is portrayed in it was very unhappy with his portrayal in the show and you know is basically making him look like this crazed lunatic. And he's not true and he wasn't like it. And and then season two comes along and, you know, of course, they're opening it up with this disclaimer that this is a dramatization. Some of the characters have been changed. And what I found myself doing through the that every single episode that I watched, something would happen. And I was immediately on my phone. Looking, is. It is this part, you know, because one of the things near the end was this lawsuit by, you know, a wife of Dr. Jerry Buss, who's trying to take the team from him. It's like, well, you know, who is this person? And I'm I'm kind of Googling it and person's not really a real person. It's sort of a fictional ization of another person. And so it's those little things like that that they're introducing. But on the flip side, you know, you have Jerry West, who was very unhappy with it, but I read in I think it was in Vulture, they were talking to the to the folks behind the series and they said they showed the episodes to Jeanie Buss, Jerry Buss daughter, who's portrayed in it. And she loved the series and she felt a connection to her father again, who had passed away a number of years ago. So she really enjoyed watching the show because it kind of, you know, rekindled those memories of of kind of growing up in that time. So it's I guess, you know, how you're being portrayed and in what way and and whatnot. But, you know, that that was kind of an interesting one from that perspective. We have this year weird about Weird Al Yankovic, and it's so off the beam. It's not at all what his life was like. He was participating in it. So he, if you will, signed off on it right? Elvis had Priscilla as kind of their guide or through it all, all of this, and it was nominated for best Picture last year. You know, now this year, Priscilla is probably going to be nominated and Priscilla is talking. So she's rewriting the narrative of Elvis Presley just by what she'll allow or what she won't allow in the story. So that's interesting. But there are duds. There are duds that didn't really work. You know, Can you think of movies where you thought, Oh, my God, that's just terrible, that one. That one doesn't cut it. And I think one that people always mention is John Travolta as Gotti. Oh, that was a real stinker. It was so bad. Yeah. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. Yeah, not much there. Michael was his John Belushi and Wired. Well, now somebody didn't like Jerry Lee Lewis portrayed by Dennis Quaid in Great Balls of Fire. But I got to tell you, I interviewed Jerry Lee Lewis about this and he loved it. He thought he captured every bit of him. So, you know, it's all perspective. If it's my life, you know, come on, Brad Pitt, I'm telling you that right now. Right. And there's no way that I am remotely in the same ballpark as Brad Pitt, But they get a chance to kind of rewrite their own history by having control over who plays them. Yeah, you have play you would you pick and you know better. You're not going to say, oh, I'm going to take you know, I don't even want to name names, but you're going to pick. So you see, George Clooney is going to play me. Of course. It would probably be Clooney. I you're right. Right? Yeah. Either yeah. These a older. Clooney were there. You know, you mentioned Brad Pitt. He was on day of the last season, the day of portraying himself. But it was it was a fictionalized version of himself. And that was so good, right? So he was so good because you even felt the kind of like tension that he had in that situation, because I don't want to spoil it, but there's this nutty person in the house or that Brad Pitt is in the house and Dave is in the house, and you've got to be How do we get out of the house? Yeah. There was that scene to where he in it. He says, Well, you can call me and I can't remember what the name was. He's like, Well, that's that's really what my name is. And again, am I Google like, is that really his name? It's like this is he fictionalized that fictional name, which is comical. And it doesn't always work. Like I say, there are situations where you go, Mm, this really laid an egg and I think we'll see it this year or two. We're going to see, yeah, films that just might not make it at all. Last year we had blond, which was about Marilyn Monroe in there. Ana de Armas played her and got an Oscar nomination and she was good, but the movie sucked. It was awful. And I defy you to say that you watched the whole thing. People didn't watch the whole thing. They got to the nude scenes and they shot it off. After that, it was not worth watching because the story didn't make any sense. You know, you have like Freddie Mercury story, Bohemian Rhapsody, right? Liked it because it plays into the the myth that I think has been created. So who? Yeah, well, I got to talk to one of those real people who's featured in Gran Turismo, which is a film about a guy who won the right to become a race car driver by playing video games. There was a competition and they, you know, whatever. And for whatever reason it clicked. Jann Mardenborough is his name and he is portrayed in this film as that naive person getting into the race car business and what it meant. He's still a race car driver. And we got a chance to talk about that whole trajectory and what it was like for him and what he thinks of the guy, Archie Madekwe, who plays him, what he thought of his performance. So we have a tape here. If you'd like to run it. We'll listen to what he has to say about portraying real people on screen. What is it like seeing yourself on a screen? I mean, we're not how many people get this story of their life told in a film? It's like 0.0001% or something? Yeah, it's it's very it's surreal, really. Being honest. It's it's even more surreal with somebody tells people tell me that the racing driver that had movies based on their lives, they no longer around single that they passed away so soon being 31 years old and have your life attractive. Your life. You told of the Big three. An audience is rare and in my industry very rare. So I feel very blessed and honored. That can actually tell. You know what shop in my life. Did you feel a connection to the character or did you see it as somebody else. Noticed me? I yeah, it really does feel like you did you have any did you have any say then in who gets to play you? Did you say, I'm going to look at these people and just see. If it's no secret you was always on the phone by the producers. They kept me in the loop, involved in all the scripts, you know, sets as well. And I was always kept informed of who they like. I see an actor to play me. Apparently the casting will be so long, even a year before Benigni was even shot. Oh, wow, Boss, she was always been number one favorite, as far as I understand, with many different levels of casting processes. But she was the one from day one. And did you like him from day one or did you go or. I don't know. He spoke on Face Time, The lowland scene with a mouth eat it plainly and pseudovirus Because I was in labor at the time that I was like, This looks like straight away. And so that was a great start. We met in person as well. Weeks later, after that phone call, and I it gave you a confidence because I was happy with the script, but meeting the person for the first face, it gave me even more confidence in things like be great, because he was absolutely casting Steely. Obviously he knew from producers as well and all time and face time and texts that meet somebody face to face difference. And he caught it really mean okay, I can focus on being studied rather and make it to focus on the acting and because we're completely allied on this. Yeah in yes he killed it. Did he ask you a lot of questions? Absolutely. And what he. What did what surprised you that he wanted to know? A lot of I'm not repeating his emotional my support is in the while it it's sports you have to be quite clinical but he was asking questions about the relationships I've had with certain people within the industry, my friends, my family. I just kind of try to be open is we all. And it became this very good at asking those questions that was so provoking and as two things which are them? He still dealt with soul so he can work on his craft when he's allowed a chance at this and he can show that and he got on set. How good was he had driving? Well, didn't have a driver's license very recently before shooting. I think for insurance, we'd really have to pass his test. And I didn't know at the time I think it was that a make or break, because if he didn't pass the test, we could have shot with Michelle McCann. But I know everybody at the meeting. But yeah, he was on a fast track course and then I'd passed and he said it interesting. But he said the favorite brand, right? I was always so, so is mine. But there you go. Yeah. He's got good taste, wrong behavior. So yeah, I think if you were bring somebody that have been involved, it looks sort of caused the fault. So it feels very nice. But I have a lot of respect to somebody. Go to another industry and be honest. If I go dancing all through dancin or being a ballerina and let me see myself in that. So I would not risk that in the business. He'd never done this before, yet no interest because now he is a face granturismo which is just racing was and he is he, he nailed it. So yeah, I will respect that. But you know, the movie makes a big deal about can you really make the transition from being a gamer to being a driver. Is it possible? I mean, yeah, was possible with you. But in the grand scheme of things, was your dad really right? And you said, you know, this is going to lead to nothing. These are not going to be career connections for anybody. Well, I will indeed. My stepfather to that question. That was the question we were always asking ourselves, kind of be done proof. But you're one you're one person and, you know, you know, kids sit around and they're doing they're playing games all day and will it lead to something? And that's where dreams and belief comes into it, because they think that easy, everybody be able to do it but makes it easy. All that accomplishment is hard, as if all and it seems like it's not possible. Well, everything is well. I believe that you can do anything. It's a little set. You can't do everything. You can sit and do anything. He's taken line to it. I never let that like the beta racing brother go out. I didn't know how I would get from A to B, but always away very much aware from a young age or very headstrong as a person you would as a kid. That's what I want to do. And I'm not going to take no for that. So I'm not really from other people. That is the gospel of you have spoken in the past with other people about things that I'd said growing up as a teen, where I would say a BMW story, my first car as a child as that when I'm 17 years old and I had my friends because boys, boys, they would rip anything to me for years about that. And I spoke to my other friends, Solid school lives and that scene in the movie, they were a bar and they told me that they could they had a few drinks them. It must not limit the conversation. And they said to me, Look, you never said to us that you wanted to be a racing driver. And I boulevard and I was like, You're right. I never I never told anybody. I never told anybody about drink because you have to protect that. You can't walk around. I don't need you should walk out. I want to do this. I wanted that because people call you out today and also it loses the energy over Did you news that that that that you know that energy. Yeah I believe so I never spoke to anybody about it. It was always my inner drew but I believe you can do anything so anybody watching I learned via high fives in the messages for people about taking an interest in looks, but also telling me I learned to pursue my dream. It would tell me what it is, which I love you shouldn't tell me. You should tell me what it is I want to pursue my dream. You inspired me to see like me. And I love that kids want to move forward too. Why me? Yeah. The rules of life. We have to follow our actions up to this. Well, when it does happen, how do you feel? I mean, is it like. Well, now I've got to find a new dream, or, you know. While in racing, it's that is this thing as the perfect guy. So it's like and it's feel old chase So perfecting your craft and it will never be perfect. So I'm still in the trenches of how can I get better at the race? And rather that's what gives me purpose. Okay, I want to race here, but when I get there, I like to race. I want to wait. I want it to be fast. I want to recent level championships level, the championship races that lie. My drive is the constant. It's a set them and then we have living. It's up and up whether that be right and whether that can being the way out or I stop what right dress or whatever I my business lines it's always a a quality that. All right Bruce thanks for that interview. You know with the race car, movies and biopics, what was your thought on this one compared to like something like a Ford versus Ferrari? Well, this is one that actually had some kind of controversy about the way they messed with time because there's a big accident that's in this film and it has been moved from where it actually happened to a different time because it helps build tension and look at the guy who is it's his story doesn't mind, I guess I can't mind. But I think also because he's an executive producer, so there might be somebody that helped say, I don't mind. Yeah, yeah, No. I enjoy the racing movies. I enjoyed Ford versus Ferrari. I thought that was a really good story to tell. Well, this year, Ferrari, so. Yeah, exactly. Helped Ford in there. Exactly. And so you have to go into every screen biography as it ain't all true. Right? You know, it's interesting, you mentioned a lot of movies based on music, you know, with like Queen and Sugar and you had Elton John. And the one that kind of gets looked at is almost a starting point. I mean, there is there's been a few others along the way, but the one that really kind of propelled, I think the modern film was The Doors from Oliver Stone. And that's one where the three surviving members of The Doors at the time, they hated it. They were and they worked with Oliver Stone for a while on it to try to help, you know, tell the story. And when that thing came out, they were not at all happy with the way. And it hurt it because Val Kilmer should have gotten a best Actor nomination. Yeah, he was that good. And boy, they buried it. Yep. And when you look at later ones, Rami Malick, you know, when you look back on that one, you were going to say, why did he win the Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury? And it all boils down to that little number he did in front of a huge crowd because they played that thing forever before you even saw the film. And that one scene is very good, but the rest of it doesn't really back it up. And I think that's when you look at it, you'll say, you probably shouldn't have got it. You know, it wasn't it wasn't all that. The Whitney Houston one I think is awful and Rocketman is good. But then when it needs to, it'll go into these kind of fantasy sequences so that then you're not really sure what's what's shaking, what's real, what's true, what's not. You know, it's been an interesting series of films and they're not they're sort of interconnected because they're connected by almost like an individual. There's a producer. His name is Mark Girardi. He was a baseball pitcher. He actually pitched professionally. He pitched for a season with the Milwaukee Brewers. I know the story a little bit more because when I was working in New Jersey, he's actually from New Jersey. And my newspaper that I was working for at the time did a story on him when some of his movies were making out. So he finished his baseball career. He went into, I think, modeling and he started making Hollywood connections and then he started telling stories through Disney. And, you know, I'm all, you know, like Miracle about the 1980 Olympic hockey team and the rookie. And I went back and looked at, you know, I was trying to find like, you know, fact versus fiction on those. And I was having a hard time finding very much fictionalized. And I think those in general were pretty well-regarded. I was looking at a story about the Rookie with Jim Morris talking about, you know, the portrayal of him because he was the pitcher who blew out his arm and became a high school baseball coach and then all of a sudden realized he could throw 98 miles per hour again and ended up working his way back into the big leagues. And he said that the film was about 90% accurate to his real life. So it's good to see that there are some films out there, and I think I've really enjoyed those films that that they've done, like Miracle, like The Rookie, because I find them, you know, they're good, they're family friendly, they're not too over-the-top, but they seem to keep fairly close to historical facts. Yeah, it's condensing time, basically. You know, everything doesn't happen within a year. I think they're better off when they do a slice of somebody's life where it's like maybe three months of their life. And that's the movie. I think that would be the interesting kind of situation. Maestro is coming up by Leonard Bernstein. And that should be, I think, a really good one in terms of how well they track a segment of his career. But I, you know, gee, I, I would hate to be the subject of a biopic because I think that you have to kind of then live that that story instead of a real story was, you know, because that's what people think of you. They want to have things condensed and into a, you know, a neat little package that you can see in 2 hours. And we're done with you and you move on. But there there's much more beyond that. And I think when you look at those those seminal moments, maybe that's all it should be. Ken Burns is a great one to do documentaries about famous people, but what he uses are voices, other people talking about that person. So, you know, it's almost like a print news story where you hear others making some kind of assessment. And it's not just necessarily the character saying something. So those I find the most accurate in terms of believing what I'm seeing. But again, it's filtered. History is filtered by those who are telling history. I think the only thing that bothers me, I mean, I always know that there's going to be some creative license, some dramatization to these films, but it just irks me when they make weird changes for the sake of making changes that don't necessarily make sense. Because I remember somebody I've never seen the Buddy Holly story with Gary Busey. Robyn No, I haven't. I just I need to go back and watch it one of these days. But I remember a friend of mine talking about it and saying that you know, he like he liked the film, but he couldn't understand why they didn't have all the crickets. Like Buddy Holly's backing band was The Crickets. And it was like they had like three of the four members in it but not. Get their rights. Right. So it's just like, Why would you make a movie and leave out one of the band members, You know, if there is a reason for it, I guess, you know, somebody would want their story told. But if it was just more because as well, it's it gets a little unruly with four people. So we're going to just narrow it down to three. To me, those are little things that to the average person may not notice. But if you're trying to also appeal to fans of the band or the musician, these are historical pieces. It's like it's like even watching Field of Dreams, where Shoeless Joe Jackson is is batting from the wrong side of the plate. You know, it's it's you know, when you make a left in the batter right handed or vice versa, that kind of thing is like little details like that. When you're when you're a fan, you're kind of going. Like, do a fancy. Fancy get maybe that right. You know, that's that's kind of irritating. You know, now Broadway is jumping on the bandwagon and they're doing all of these musicals about musical people because they're very dramatic. They've got a built in catalog of sounds that always will work because people know them. There's a Neil Diamond one out now. There was Tina Turner, there was Cher. And you're going to see more and more of those Mamma Mia, which was just the songs with a different story. Right? But they're they're easily tapped into bowl. I always say that you can easily tap into them. Right. What I want to say, because you already know something about them, which is the music, and I think that's a shorthand that they don't have to tell other parts of the story because you just assume that's their. Yeah, though, I don't know, it's weird, but if there's a story or a moral or a caution to be added to this, it's a don't believe them. When you see a screen biography, don't believe them. They're very entertaining, but they aren't necessarily the true story. Absolutely. That's a good point to to end this episode. Thank you again, Bruce, for that interview. When Brad Pitt plays me in the movie version of the podcast, you know that it's going to have a different ending. Absolutely. Yep. And again, you know, just want to point out one last time, no animals were harmed in the recording of this podcast yet. We're all yet going to have a cat wander in here in a second. No, no, no. I know. That's all right, everyone. Thank you again. Come back again next week for another episode of Stream. The screen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's guest is a former engineer at Yahoo who understands search engines second to none. We talk about all the ways to run an agency wrong, hoping to teach you how to be successful and do it right. He founded BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that provides training and mentorship for aspiring entrepreneurs across the globe. On a mission to create a million jobs internationally, please welcome Dennis Yu. Dennis Yu, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the Learning from Others Show. How you doing, man? Good, Damon, and it's awesome hanging out with you again. I wish it was in person like we were driving race cars in Vegas. I. That was fun. You know, we got a couple stories we could probably hit. Um, you and I have engaged on mostly Facebook over the years and kinda got a little friendship going on and, um, yeah, I, I flew out and I, every time I fly out somewhere I try and kinda keep track of who's where and, um, I. And meet up with somebody and establish a relationship a little bit better. So I appreciate the opportunity of you being willing to go hang out. And we did, we went and did a limo in race cars and um, I mean, you live in Vegas, but we, we did the tourist a little bit of the touristy thing. Yeah. Yeah. And, and thanks for taking the time. That was such an honor. And you know, you're one of the few ss e o people out there. I know this is being recorded. You're one of the few ss, e o people out there that is legit and drives results. And I am not being compensated to say this. But I've been sharing this and I'm, I know people that are watching this and have seen my Facebook posts. They're coming to you. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It's, um, we'll probably talk 'cause you're legit about that today, you know? Yeah. Not, not about me, but about the industry. And, um, for, for me, that's been, uh, Good and bad to throw rocks at my own industry. Right? Like, it's unfortunate that that's such a valuable sales proposition to distinguish yourself as actually doing your job. But, but it is. So why don't we, why don't we start there? So, um, actually before we get into it, um, let's, let's have you talk about yourself the most, uh, enjoyable, comfortable part of a podcast. Um, I, I actually like how you put it on the intake form when, uh, so I ask the guests, you know, what's your elevator pitch that we can use? And Dennis just puts Google me. If we're talking about s e o and, and you don't have a knowledge panel show up when I Google you, you're a fat weight loss coach. Fat weight loss goes, where's, where's the analogy of a fat weight loss coach? Oh, fat, okay. Overweight weight, weight loss coach. That's overweight. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So Dennis, um, has been in marketing for how, how long have you been in marketing? 30 years. Yeah, how'd you get into it? And I was one of the original people, one of the first people at Yahoo. So I built the internal analytics at Yahoo. So I'm a search engine engineer, so I'm not an S E o. I am the person who's trying to protect the results from the SS e o people trying to trick us. Yeah. Have you got jaded over the years knowing like how this works and being able to see the manipulation that's going on when it's not done for the right audience and the right users? Do you think that weight loss scams will ever go away? Every year there's a new scam, right? And people fall for it. 'cause they're just like, how do you not know that? It's a scam? Hey, if I take this one pill, you're gonna lose 30 pounds in 12 days. Like it's a scam, right? Mm-hmm. So the salespeople are always inventing new techniques. And I remember, this is like back in my day, we used to walk uphill both ways. I built websites by hand using Microsoft Front page. It was engineers that were building websites, people like us that actually physically knew how to do the thing. It was before the marketing people and all that came in back then. You remember it was called web mastering. Mm-hmm. Before it became digital marketing and social media and influencer and all these other words that are now really just buzz words, new words for the same thing. Mm-hmm. Right. And now I'm, I'm gonna blame the internet money Bross. Yeah. And the motivational speakers for now, all of them are ai. Experts and crypto experts and chat G P T experts and they're SS e o experts too. So all these people have come in in the last few years seeing easy money and now they're gonna start selling S E o. I was a Josh Nelson seven figure agency conference and Josh Nelson's amazing. I love the guy. They're people that come into that program 'cause they think it's easy money. And in the program Josh teaches you should sell s e o, but he also says you should also deliver s e o too. You should also understand what it is. Some agency owners, the guilty will be unnamed, are selling ss e o and they don't even know what it is, but they know that people want it and they need it. So they sell it for $2,000 a month and they're making all this money. This one company that I'm probably gonna release a full investigation later today is making three. Well, they're, they were making last month, $320,000 a month off of 150 clients that are paying for s e o and Facebook ads and websites and things like that. It is a scam. There's no way to defend it. It's a scam, but it's a sales guy running it. He has no operations, he has no marketing. He's a sales guy and some of them even white label their stuff out. So they have no idea what it is and someone else is doing it. They, the client doesn't know anymore. I mean, you know, they, but they're selling it 'cause they're salespeople. There's too many salespeople in the s e O space. Mm-hmm. We need more mechanics, not people in the car dealership wearing a tie. Slick hair saying all these things about the car. We need more mechanics that actually have grease on their fingers, like you and me. Yeah. I mean, I often get asked what, um, what should I know as I shop s e o and, and I think that why people are so attracted to, to you know, you and your transparency is because it establishes trust when you're willing to go, Hey, you know, One example, s e o takes time, but here's why. And then you explain it. Or, hey, not only here are the advantages of s e o, but here are the disadvantages because what they're getting pitched to you. You nailed it with the sales bros and not enough actual people doing the work is the majority of the time. These people that. Sounds smooth, are not the people that are actually doing any of the work. So they're gonna tell you whatever they think that you want to hear. And so when, when I get asked, you know, what should I be, be looking out for? And I'd be curious, some of the things that are top of your mind is, is my first thing is transparency. Like, they should be able to communicate. You don't need to know, you know, the, the full granular details of, of everything that's going on, but you should be able to clearly communicate, you know, here's. The intent behind why we're gonna focus on this thing in content, not just, we're gonna write stuff, you know? Mm-hmm. And what's, how, how are we gonna measure progress? Right. And how long is this gonna take and why? Yeah. But the majority of the people that are out there are just like, oh yeah, no, we'll get to it. You know, we'll get there, you'll see. And it's just like these vague responses, and I think that's become a thing of, of. Beyond just ss e o, but you and I are, are in that space more so just marketing in general is these constant sales bros of it's yell loud or talk louder or be flashier. Mm-hmm. And the emotions overtake the sales process. And then it doesn't matter, like right before we hit record, I was telling you about somebody that we're working with and they're killing it and the data shows they're killing it. But a, a sales bro got in their ear about, Hey, you need to be louder and flashier, and they're tearing it all down. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The sales bross are focused on collecting the money. I. They'll make huge promises. They're, they don't even know whether they can hit those promises 'cause they're not operators. The fact that you are posting screenshots, of course you're masking out like the client name and the keywords and all that, but showing the increase in traffic and sales, not just ranking on more keywords. 'cause you can rank on a bunch of garbage keywords and claim victory. Yeah. We need more people doing what you're doing and actually teaching the techniques. Not that these clients wanna learn how to, you know, who wants to learn how to change a transmission or, but at least if you know that that guy who is an actual mechanic is posting videos of him as he's, you know, working on the transmission and got grease on his hands as he's working on the car. There's a lot more trust there and especially if the mechanic shows what they're doing, right? I'd love to, you know when, when you go to a car or uh, you know the dealership and something's wrong with the car, they're gonna give you an itemized list. Of the things that are broken and what, and therefore the toll and you know, maybe the dealership will still overcharge you, but at least you know what they're doing, right? Yeah. If you're buying a new car or not a new car. So Damon, let's say you're buying a, a car off of whatever, like Facebook marketplace and the guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always been in the garage the whole time and never been driven. And you see it's got 150,000 miles on it. I don't know if that's exactly true. Oh, it's, it's never been in a crash, really. I don't know. It just looks like some of these. Here don't look like they were the original parts. Are you sure? Oh yeah. It's brand new. You know, it's, it, I don't trust, I just hate to be cynical. I don't trust what other people have to say. So if you're gonna buy a car, Damon from somebody, third party, are you just gonna take what that guy says or are you gonna have a mechanic check it out real quick? Yeah. You, you're, you're doing the equivalent of an audit. Yeah. So I, you know, audits take two minutes. In two minutes we can spot all kinds of garbage. That you and I know, like buying a bunch of fake links or most commonly having done nothing. Yeah. And letting the, especially in a service-based business, letting the G M B and the reviews that are actually done by the client carry the weight and claiming credit for that. Yeah. How dare you claim credit for something the client did? Yeah. And dressing it up as, oh well, Google's algorithm changes all the time and it takes a while and it's a mystery. And I can't tell you our methods 'cause they're proprietary, can't give you access to our systems. I hope you understand. It's such a big secret. I'd have to kill you. Proprietary is one of, if the not top red flag for me, as soon as somebody says that in, in a marketing sales discussion, because we're all using the same dozen or two tools. Mm-hmm. It's just who knows how to use them most efficiently in which combination to deliver on the results. Yeah. If any that you have mapped out into SOPs, Can you imagine if you ask a mechanic, so you're fixing my transmission. What tools are you using? Oh, it's prop tools. Using wrenches are secret. Yeah, yeah, I can understand if you're like Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookies, but even they put their recipe out there as like a, a campaign to try to, you know, what was like a gorilla campaign? 'cause they, they planted that thing to try to make it popular. But I flew back from LA yesterday to Vegas and the pilot greeted me. I always liked to just have a quick chat with the pilot if I'm the last one on the plane. And can you imagine asking the pilot, so, um, How did you learn how to fly? A 7 27? And he says, oh, it's a secret. I can't tell you. It's super proprietary. No, there's flight training manuals and all that kind of stuff out there. It's, it's public. In any field. If you're a doctor, hey, you're a heart surgeon and you're gonna do heart surgery on me, what scalpels are you using? Hell yeah. Super proprietary, the scalpel and you know, it's the scalpel that I use. It's, you know what, you could be a heart surgeon too. If you pay me $10,000 and sign up for my weekend course. I'll teach you how you can be a heart surgeon just in a weekend, because I'm also gonna give you access to my proprietary scalpels. It's the skill of who's using the scalpel. It's the, do you remember Mars Blackman and the Air Jordan campaigns? I think you're old enough to remember that. Uh, I never got in the shoes and think that, but that's No. Uh, but it, but so they had Air Jordan, you know, Michael Jordan, the most famous basketball player ever, and they were making fun. It was, the commercials back in the eighties were hilarious. Mm-hmm. That Mars Blackman, who was Spike Lee would say, it's the shoes. It's the shoes. Got the shoes, Uhhuh. You could jump as high as Michael Jordan and hit your head on the rim, right? Yep. So do you think if I switched from Adidas to Nike that I'd all of a sudden be a better basketball player, do you think If like me doing ss e o, if I just switched from my primary tool to, you know, the proprietary ones or Majestic or Hfss or SEMrush, like, do you think that would matter? No, it's all the same data. There's no proprietary, like you said. Yeah, it's, it's your skill. The other red flag for me is guarantees and, and my position on gu. Sure, they sound lovely. I get why they're attractive, uh, attractive to the consumer and attractive to sell. Um, and, and, and in some forms of marketing, maybe there's guarantees. But in s e o there, there's so many abstract variables and, and wildcard that you should be able to communicate why they're variable in a wildcard and also communicate. Why you can't offer a guarantee on it. What you can do though, is you can communicate averages and expectations. Mm-hmm. You know, you can't guarantee you're gonna be on page one in 10 months, but you could say on average it's 12 months or whatever, give or take. You can talk about the home runs that took four months. But to me it's a huge red flag. It it's a sales guy. Anytime I hear somebody saying there's a guarantee. As you talked earlier, it's the guy doing the sales and not the person actually doing the fulfillment and the guarantee in our space, what, what you and I are doing, it's competitive SS e o. So for us to move from position five to position one, that means we have to get ahead of those other four guys. So we, we can't, we. Guarantee what those other four people are doing. Yeah, we can, we can guarantee our effort level, we can guarantee higher r o i because we can focus where there's less competition or where there's more bang for the buck by going, by changing our strategy. Yeah. But we can't guarantee number one on Google for city name, you know, plumbing or whatever it is. Real estate city name. Yeah. Well, let's talk to, um, Let's talk to the aspiring agency owner and how they can avoid being part of our future discussions and how to approach. You do not want me writing an article about you in that I love writing articles about people, and they're either very positive, which is 99% of the time, like I love Uplifting You, Damon. And then there's the 1% of the people that are outright scamming 'cause A, they're not delivering, and B, they know it. There's a lot of people that are unintentionally ignorant. And this is the advice that we're giving agency owners right now. You wanna take care of your clients. You recognize there's a lot of stuff that you'll never know as much as Damon Burton, but there's certain things you do need to know. You've gotta learn the basic tools to see that rankings turn into traffic. That turn into sales. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if you just generate, so there's one personal injury client that they were paying this guy. His name sounds like a whiskey. His first name is Jason. You can maybe figure out who it is. And he was charging this personal injury attorney $70,000 a month. And what he did was upload a dictionary to the site on how do you get a commercial truck driving licenses. So they, you know, attorneys, they want truck driving cases. 'cause those are million dollar cases versus like fender-bender ones, right? They really want the truck driving cases. So, This guy was ranking on all these, these truck driving terms, but they're all like, how do, what are the, you know, how long does it take to get a commercial truck, uh, driving license? And what is a C D L? And none of them had the intent of someone who got hit by a truck. Yeah. And this guy that was charging $70,000 a month, what he did was he was, he was creating 200 garbagey posts in a glossary every month. I told you about this one. Mm-hmm. We talked about this before. Yeah. And. The client who's wealthy and has made, you know, over a billion dollars, didn't know any better, but he suspect it's, you know, these guys are not dumb, but they don't know about s e o. They're real smart and they, like, you don't wanna try to pull the wool over. Just because they don't know about SS e o doesn't mean they're dumb. Okay. They're, they can kind of, they're busy. Yeah. They're, they're good at the thing that they do, and you're good at the thing you do, and I get that, but, So this guy Jason was claiming, look at all the look we're driving, we're ranking on another 2000 keywords. Yeah, but they're all garbage. And I looked inside the analytics and there is no more phone calls and no more cases being driven off of this s e o. All the cases from a search engine organic search standpoint, we're coming on. People searching for the client's name. This, this client is on TV, billboards. He has more billboards in Kentucky than anyone else. He's all over the place, right? So they Google his name and, and then this s e o guy was claiming credit for this guy's TV ads and billboards. So my number one thing for people that your agency owners and your, you know, you need to offer, you can't just offer Facebook ads 'cause then you have a 90 day churn. That's just unfortunate, right? Mm-hmm. You can't offer social media by itself unless you just wanna churn it out. You have to offer s e o, you have to offer some kind of P P C or whatnot to show that you can drive results. But the key is start with the results first. Yeah. Don't talk about all the s e o, whatever. Start with you need more cases, you need more clients, you need more book jobs, you need more phone calls. And that comes from people that. Come to our website because they search on these certain keywords and here's the competition on those keywords. So most of these s e o people, they use the s e O tools that you and I know that generate that auto, generate these reports and put the agency's name on them, right? Mm-hmm. Because why wouldn't, why wouldn't I wanna use these different tools that just send out reports to make it look like there's work being done? Mm-hmm. But that's not work that's being done. It's just showing rankings that go up and down. Hopefully the numbers are going up every month and if the business is doing well and they're taking care of their customers, even if you do nothing from an ss e o standpoint, those s e o numbers will go up, won't they? Yeah. So don't rely upon rankings. Rankings are nothing compared to traffic. And traffic is nothing compared to sales. 'cause even if you drive more traffic, this one personal injury attorney was, was driving an extra, I forgot the number, but two or 3000 visits a month to their website. People that were looking to become truck drivers. Yeah. And then that pollutes our remarketing audiences. 'cause we pay to remarket against people who come to the site. Right. 'cause all of those could be cases. So we're remarketing everywhere. 'cause of the pixels. Yeah. So s e o start, it sounds fundamental and it doesn't matter if you do Facebook ads or website building or email. Start with the client's goal and what that's worth and then trace it back to what you do. Yeah. Like there's one client, they're a big personal injury. Firm for some reason. We got a lot of these PIs and they're spending 1.7 million a month on Google ads. Yeah. And they're also doing SS e o. They're using Ben Fisher for L S a I love Ben. They're using Steve Wedeman for SS e o I love Steve. And there's more calls that are coming in. The firm has been growing, but they couldn't figure out where this. Cases were coming from because there's 10 different systems that have to be tied together. Hmm. And sometimes the in, in CallRail or, or RingCentral, we can automatically append where that call came from. But sometimes we have to ask 'em. And a lot of what we call digital plumbing wasn't in place 'cause, you know, multiple LSAs and a different website for P P C versus one for the main firm for different reasons. So we had to tie all this stuff together and it was only last week. Outta this firm's 15, 20 years. It's only last week that for the first time we're able to see Marketing Source. So if you're the agency, you've gotta be able to show that what you are doing goes all the way down to the bottom line where there's sales. And that means you often have to go into the call rail or into their C R M or whatnot. What percent of the time Damon are SS e o agencies going all the way down to see that there was a sale that was occurring. And or do you think that's important? I think it's important, but not, you know, most people don't, uh, almost never. It's, it's mind boggling to me when I get on, uh, a lead call and they're with an agency already, and I ask them for basic stuff. What, what are you currently targeting? What's been done today? And. I for, I'm 17 years into doing this and it still blows my mind like the first time. Every time when their reply is, I don't know what we're targeting. I'm like, okay, well what have they done to date? I don't know what we've done to date. They just send me these flashy reports every month that said they did something. It is surprisingly, the majority of the time, and I can't wrap, you know, I have such a hard time with this because even though I see it so often, I can't put myself in that position to rationalize that approach. And so it's such a, it's like a twilight zone to me because I can't, I can't relate to it whatsoever. Yeah. There's so many scams. I wrote an article like 15 years ago and I think it was something along the lines of, I mean we could Google it to find it, but you know how to, how to sell ss e o and I basically, it was a joke 'cause it was revealing the techniques and I said, you know, the best way. To win a client. 'cause these guys are all, all the sales bros are all about selling, selling, selling, right? They don't care about delivery. They just wanna sell. So I'm like, okay, you wanna sell? Here's the easiest way to sell. Before you go into that sales meeting, put up a blog post on a site that at least has a little bit of juice. Like hopefully you have a blog that has some amount of trust and ha optimize it for a long tail keyword. So let's say that this is, uh, you're talking to a. Veterinarian. So then write a blog post that ranks for Boulder, Colorado, golden Retriever, toenail clipping tips. Mm. Right. How difficult do you think that would be? Yeah, not at all. You were difficult to zero, right? Yeah. So write a blog post, make a video about it, rank for it, and then go in there. And say, yeah, you know, with S E O I even came prepared and I know you're a veterinarian. Go ahead and go into Google right now on your computer, on your phone and search Golden Retriever toenail clipping tips. Boulder, Colorado, and like, oh look, we're number one. See? Yeah. Then if that doesn't work, 'cause sometimes it doesn't work, you know, sometimes whatever, sometimes your site has no power. Then buy that on Google. Buy that keyword on Google and Geotarget just to Boulder, Colorado on golden retriever, toenail clipping tips. Exact match, right? And put a dollar a day on that campaign and say, go ahead and search. And then you could, ideally, they do a search on it and they see your ad and they see that you rank number one on that. That's fantastic. That's so funny. Yeah, because it's especially with local like you and I know with local, we're not talking about national golden retriever, toenail clipping tips. We're saying in Boulder, Colorado. How many other people are writing articles about Golden retriever toenail clipping tips? No one. Yeah, no one. So with SS e o, I think so. To be clear, I know it's easy to rag on these ss e o people 'cause it like 95% of it's scam, unfortunately. But here's the good news. You and I know that ranking for local. It's way easier 'cause you only have to beat the other people in Orange County, California that do whatever the thing is. You know, meds, liposuction, orange County and other Santa Ana and Newport Beach. Like that's, that's not competitive, but liposuction, if I like, how much effort would it be to rank on liposuction if I, you know, needed you to, to do that for some reason versus liposuction, small city name. Yeah. Oh, it could, it could be a night and day difference depending on the location. Yeah. 'cause you, you also have to take into consideration the indirect competition. And I think this is something that, um, I don't, I don't really hear a lot of other SEOs talk about. I'm sure plenty of 'em know about it, but I. What this goes into the transparency thing when you're explaining the realistic expectations to your client is you not only have to take into consideration the quantity of results that you're fighting against, but the quality of the big players that are in the way too. I mean, there's so many variables in in which you look at. These results that, um, you know, I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think it's just, at the end of the day, it's, you can't outrun your reputation. Right? And so these, these people that say sells over service, right? And, and just like you said, where it's just, just sell more is, is the solution that won't last forever. And then, and then what are you gonna do? Yeah. Reputation's everything I think. I'd be curious to see if you agree, but I believe that pro-level SS e o is indistinguishable from pr, reputation management, social media, whatever it is, because it's other people that are credible in that particular topic that are talking about you co-creating content like we're doing here. And that's showing up on reputable industry specific websites, not like random websites that happen to be DR. 73. About websites that are authoritative and rank on those keywords in that industry. So if you build those relationships, if you have that expertise and you've done a great job, then your reputation's great and your SEO's great. I don't know how, how someone could have great s e O in a competitive area and not have a great reputation as if me at Google, well, I was at Yahoo, but a lot of my people I trained went to Google as if we couldn't tell. Who is legit and what links were real or not, and if that content was generated by chat PT or you know, if it didn't have, maybe we can't tell if it was autogenerated, but we can certainly tell if it has pieces of experience in there as part of eat. Yeah. You know, you know, maybe what you and I should do is create, um, an ss e o escrow validating company. Oh. I do that all day. Where it's like, you know, we don't want your business, we just want to, you know, we charge a consulting fee to protect you, help vet which your choices are, you know, bring us a three. You're considering, and we'll tell you the pros and cons of all of 'em. There we go. Thanks everybody. I would love to do that. Yeah, that, I mean, I've been doing that for 20 plus years. How many friends have you had coming saying, you know, Hey, you know, can you just like look at my s e o real quick? I, I'm sort of suspicious every day. That's like a, a dude saying, I think my, I think my wife's cheating on me. Do you think like, if they're ha if they're having to ask, I think you know what the answer is, right? Yeah. Every day I had, uh, co comes and goes, uh, in higher quantities, uh, on certain days, but it is nearly, I've had three, it's, we hit record at 1:00 PM today and by 1:00 PM I had three just today that asked me that. Yeah. I've had 35 in the last 10 days. Yeah. Yeah. And it's consistent. Yeah. And I help most people for free. Like there's this one that hit me up literally just 15 minutes ago and I'm looking at their text. Hey Dennis, my name is Chris. I'm a friend of so-and-so. She gave me your number in regards to an SS e o audit I was hoping to get done on a site I'm working on. And then there's some specifics there. I'd love to chat if you're free. Anytime. Yeah, I'll, when we're done, I'll call him back. I'll take a look at the site and in three minutes I'll tell him what's going on. Yeah. Yeah, because you and I are mechanics, we pop open the hood, we take a look, we hook up the diagnostics, and we're like, okay, here's what's actually going on with the car. Why don't we talk about, you know, you, you just made the comment that you'll, you'll usually help 'em for free. Um, as do I. And a lot of times the, the industry will tell you to do otherwise. It's, it's charged. They're sales oriented, and yes, your time is valuable and like, I'm not gonna get on a whole hour call. I'll just do a, a look at a couple quick things and because I think that, I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think s e o is, is now verticalized. It's better to, if, if I know a lot about liposuction, I can do li, I can do ss e o for liposuction, doctors all over the place. I'll just have a competitive advantage over all the other people like. Over people like you and me that are just like good generally, but we also know certain categories. You've been doing 17 years, you know, a number of categories by now. But I think that when people come in and I do a quick audit, like any of us can do this, looking at the basics. Mm-hmm. It's easy to do the analysis. Doing the work is different. I'll pass them to someone that I know, like I'll pass 'em to you. Mm-hmm. Or I'll pass them to someone that's really good in that particular industry for real estate agents. For insurance brokers, for e-commerce, for like whatever, right? And the days when 25 years ago, you, you, you could be a generalist, but I feel like you have to be vertically specific if you really want to be world class. It's, it's literally minutes. Yeah. I mean, yeah, why not? Why put the berry up? Yeah. Literally, you're right. Two minutes I can, I can audit someone at two. And I've done this like we did one last week for the city of San Francisco and the small Business development center, which is this nationwide thing, part of the S B A and people were signing up. We had a whole bunch of people on Zoom and I just did audit after audit after audit. People love doing it. We've been doing it now for 18 months 'cause they started it up in the middle of Covid and we've been doing it every month. It's great. Yeah. Free audits. Why not? Not selling anything, but people say, oh, can you recommend someone to, you know, my website's on Wix. Okay. Go to Upwork and use the job postings that we have on converting and, and here's the job posting. This is my website. It's on Wix. I wanna move to WordPress. Here's another guy's website. Don't copy it exactly. But can you make it like that and host it on WP Engine? And I wanted to meet this other criteria. We have website, we have criteria. You can literally Google it, like website audit checklist, blitz metrics, you'll see. And, and it also has to fit this criteria. How much? $300. Okay, cool. This guy's 95% and has 200 ratings, and his earnings are $200,000. Like he's in Pakistan. Okay, fine. Sure. $300, let's do it. Right? Yeah. And we teach people how to hire VAs and how to hire people in Upwork, in Fiverr. But the data that you get is, is infinitely, it's worth more, more than that. I mean, you're, you're buying so much wisdom in such a compressed amount of time to make a long-term decision. Yeah. And so if it's a, it's a Fortune 500 company, I'll say, okay, it's a power hour, go to blitz metrics.com/powerhour and we have an onboarding process because they don't want just three minutes of my time. I'll give anybody three minutes of my time. 'cause it's just, it's too rude to say no and I'm important or whatever. I'll just give you three minutes of my time. Fine. Right? Mm-hmm. I'll prerecord it so it doesn't require being live. Yep. But if it's a, well, yeah, it's a well-known company, then I'm like, yeah, it's 15 hundreds, nothing for you. Mm-hmm. So we'll do that. And we had one two weeks ago and they bought that and they said, yeah, you know, we really are struggling. Can you help us? The s e o agency is playing games and like, yep. I already know what they're saying. And now we have a large contract. Yeah. So the 1500 led to, it was basically like a paid sales call. Yeah. If you're an agency, know that when you do, when you do it the right way, you just, you provide value, whether it's free or charged, or you know, you will drive more real clients because they trust you. Yep. And, and from my perspective, uh, I've talked about how there's only three types of content consumers. So the, the, and this is why you should give away your, your content for free or, or give your time as as availability permits. So consumer number one is the person that takes your advice and runs. Okay. Well they were never a client anyway, so you didn't lose them, but now you increased your reputation and your reach. Right? And then content consumer number two is somebody that may not need what you offer now, but knows somebody that does or they come back later, or three is they buy. Mm-hmm. So from my perspective, you have no losing reason to not just give away. All the answers for free, right? 'cause I want the person that values time more than money. So if, if they can implement it, I'm happy they made progress with it. Otherwise, you know, we, we, we establish trust, we establish credibility, and then when it makes sense, it, it just eliminates the sales walls. They would've been a horrible client to begin with. So we call those free tarts, right? You're a D I Y, you're gonna try to do it yourself. Save every penny. You know, you go and get your own groceries. I have the freaking ghost groceries delivered to me from Costco. I'm not gonna be a driver of like, I, you know, so those pe you give away your information for free because you don't want those kinds of clients to come to you. 'cause they're just gonna complain. They're nightmare clients. They're gonna, they're cheap. You know, you all. But I can get that for way less from the Philippines. Yeah, you go do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, I think you and I could talk indefinitely, um, about a variety of things, especially this in this, this topic of the industry. Um, now, now as we get kind of closer to wrapping up, let's, let's kinda take the opposite approach. Um, so we've kind of, we've kind of beat up on our own industry a little bit. Um, let's, let's kinda help the aspiring, um, Agency owners with some, some wins, right? So we've said, don't do these things, which I guess imply the opposite of do these other things. But, um, you know, how did you start to build up your reputation? How did you start to get your foot in the door? How did you start to earn the trust of people? So we can kind of maybe end with a couple little tips there on the high note. So I believe that, you know, when I was a, a young adult and I. I didn't even speak English, you know, until I was seven. I always felt that I wasn't good enough and I felt that all these other people were so much bigger and better than me. And I remember going to Pubcon and Kevin Lee of did it was speaking. And this guy started analytics company. He's well known in the world of SS e o, and I thought, wow, this guy's like a God. I would love to be able to do SS e o and all this, but I don't think I'm like him. He's so well spoken and just everything about him. I just worshiped this guy. Now, I was an engineer at Yahoo and I was a great engineer, but I didn't know how to communicate and. I didn't know if I could make promises to the client. 'cause you know, I wanted to make money as an agency 'cause on my way, you know, as I was about, about to leave Yahoo. And, but I didn't, you know, I knew I'd work really hard and I knew I was honest and ethical, but I, I, I didn't wanna go out there and just start making promises 'cause there's a chance I couldn't deliver. So, you know, I would tend to not say anything or tend to not. I put myself out there 'cause I thought all these other people are out there just aggressive, fast talking salespeople didn't wanna be like that. 'cause I heard so much the garbage, like what we talked about. And then I realized, you know, there are clients, if you find the right clients that they will, it's like night and day. So when we had Quiznos as a client, Hmm. They were a fantastic client. They weren't the nightmare where they're, every day they're like checking their rankings and asking what's going on. And they paid us a lot of money, and I find that if you're an aspiring s e o and you're growing, it's yes, obviously learn from people like Damon and keep improving and work hard and have great operations and all that stuff, but I think client selection is the most important part. When you have the right client and you're transparent with them and you have a relationship with them, and you, you, you go out to dinner with them, maybe if you could meet them, right? It's just so much better and it results in retention and you feel good about what you're doing. And then you have 'em on your podcast as you start to have results and they love to talk about you. Like we did this for the Golden State Warriors, the basketball team. And I loved working with the Golden State Warriors. They treated us so well. I got to meet Steph Curry and hang out in the locker room and go to the playoff games. They paid us a lot of money. And here's the, the thing that may seem too far away for most younger ss, e o people, I put them on stage. I was given the opportunity to speak, to be a keynote speaker at one of the largest conferences in Europe. The last year's keynote was Richard Branson. And they wanted me to be keynote, and I said, no, no. Instead of me being the keynote, I wanna put the head of marketing from the Golden State Warriors, the very popular basketball team as the keynote, and I'll introduce 'em. Right? And that worked wonders. There was a case study that was done by Facebook on us. So your reputation carries everything. The relationships that you have, interviewing your clients, interviewing other people that are competitors, you know, maybe Damon or I are competitors. Not really. 'cause there's plenty out there for all of us. So by having the abundance mindset that enables us to be able to share what we've learned and elevate other people like, wow, Damon just wrote this great article. I'm gonna share it. I don't if he generates more clients because of that, that is fantastic. It doesn't have to come to me. Most of my posts that I put out there on Facebook are elevating other people and how awesome they are. I think that's hard to do if you're small and you're not making money. You're like, oh, I want every dollar that comes my way 'cause I need every penny to pay rent and whatnot. I get it. But if you change your mindset, this is the last I'll say about this whole like motivational speaker walk on Kohl's, Tony Robbins kind of thing. But I found if, and I wish I knew this 20 years ago, that. If I spent more effort honoring and elevating other people in the industry that will drive me more of the right kind of clients that I want, even without me talking about my expertise or what I know or how good I am. I closed five clients last week on SS e o pieces because I was elevating, you can go back to my Facebook mm-hmm. And figure out what it was. But by elevating other people that are well-known. Industry. I interviewed yesterday on my podcast, one of the top content marketing experts, and she's a big deal at LinkedIn that's driving my reputation up. People buy based on your reputation. It's all based on your perceived authority. That's why clients buy if you're a sales minded person. The perceived authority gives you the opportunity to get the right client. And then, like you said, Damon, those three, three categories, when you do the audit, figure out which one they are. Mm-hmm. And if they're great, then you have to deliver. As long as you can deliver, then you're great. Right? And so I approached from the standpoint of I learned how to deliver first as a search engine engineer. So I feel like Damon, I'm credible to talk about ss e o 'cause I'm one of the few people that actually worked at the search engine and you know, like I have a good opinion about this thing. I have some credibility here. And so now it's easy for me to audit. It's, I've done this enough times, I've learned from, from other people. So I would hang out in, in like London. Singapore with Rand Fishkin and his mom, Jillian, who's the one who's really running the show. Mm-hmm. And you know, we're putting together s e o presentations, we're hanging out with the conference organizers, and I realized these are these people that I thought were gods, were humans too. Kevin Lee, who I told you was the guy I worshiped before he, he invited me on his podcast twice. And I said, I said to him on the podcast, I can't believe you can even Google it. And see, this is what I said. I can't believe I'm on, I'm hanging out with you, Kevin. I mean, this is a guy, like when you were done speaking on stage and then all the people would come up to you, I, and I'd never get a chance to talk to you like, oh, one day I'd love to talk to Kevin Lee. And here I, here you are reaching out to me to be on your podcast. What the heck is going on here? He said, no, no, no, Dennis, I'm just honored to be spending time with you. And then he said all these great things about me. And I said, this is being recorded, isn't it? Yeah. But maybe, you know, if you're doing ss e o and, and you feel like you don't know as much as Damon or whatnot, you know, sometimes you, you have to step back and look at how much you know. So when you interview someone or someone else interviews you, you realize like, oh wow. I actually have come a long way. I've actually learned a lot. That puts you in a, in a position of gratitude and you honor your clients and you're not worried about poaching, you're not worried about other people that do s e o I help other people that do s e o for a living. I'm, you do that too, Damon. Mm-hmm. Does that hurt your business at all in any way? Not at all. It helps your business. So we have a lot of clients do that. We do s e o for, and still I'm talking about Damon and I'm sending people to Damon and it doesn't hurt me at all. Yeah. And, and it, it only, it only helps. And, and when Dennis says he, 90% of his posts are about lifting other people up. He, he's very literal. It's. Probably 90% or, or plus. And it's just, you know, it's not necessarily contact creation, but documentation of Yeah. What you're doing and the engagements and the people that you're connecting with. Um, and, and I actually just made a post on LinkedIn this morning about, um, on the same topic, there's somebody who I've been mentoring and. I send them business. Right? Yeah. Because then it helps the the person that I connected them with to finally get somebody that can support them morally and ethically, and then it helps a young aspiring entrepreneur to build their business up and then they're going to reciprocate the other way when, when it's a client that's a little bit outta their league. Yeah, but it's a, it's amazing to watch for, for me, the, the part that I find most fascinating, obviously, yeah, sales is great. Um, growing is great, but the Wild Card is, is always what I find the most fascinating and rewarding, where you get a relationship that you didn't expect or an opportunity to, to meet or do a thing. You know, just like you said, you, you got to go, um, in the locker room, meet Steph Curry, just like those things that. You, you didn't have on your to-do list. But then when it happened, it was such an amazing thing. That's what I find the most rewarding about serving and helping others and, and just being moral and transparent. Yeah, serendipity. And you build these relationships over time and they start to unlock other things. And in finance, this is called a, a real option. So by having the Golden State Warriors as a client, we then were able to work with the N F L. Yeah, and the N B A and all these other sports teams came calling, and I never would've realized. I guess in hindsight it's like, well, yeah, obviously you're promoting how awesome the Golden State Warriors are. Facebook wrote a case study. Mark Zuckerberg mentions you on stage, you know, and how we got a 39 r every dollar got $39 back of what we invested. Of course that would've happened, but you never at, in the moment, you're not thinking about that. Mm-hmm. So really when you, when you have great relationships that for you young s e o people focus on the relationships, focus, make sure your communication is great. The ss e o people have a reputation for being geeks that don't communicate. Be personable. You, you sent me some cookies, Damon. Wow, that was so awesome that that was serendipitous. I enjoyed that. And that that's just building relationship. Checking in on people, clicking like on their posts and delivering great work leads to so much more. The referrals that you get from your existing clients are worth more than any marketing you could ever do. You do a good job of that. You never need to do marketing. Uh, I, I'm 17 years in and this is the first year I've considered spending a dollar on advertising. So the entirety of this multimillion dollar business has built, uh, purely on reputation and results because you've earned it. You have the perceived authority and you have the actual authority. Yeah. Well, Dennis, um, I appreciate, uh, that I, I just love talking to you. You got a good vibe. Um, it's good to be in company with somebody else who's transparent and straightforward. Um, I did not pay Dennis to say kind things about me, but I greatly appreciate them. Are you giving me a commission at all? No, I, because 'cause I believe in you. Yeah. And you've, you've taken the effort and I've taken the effort to build the relationship over years and people can tell. Yep. Yeah. And then once you get in, as you just started talking about with Golden State Warriors and then other professional sports teams, when you get in with somebody, you know, I'm not gonna refer anybody to somebody that I won't put my name behind. And I'm sure you feel the same way, right? Yep. And so when you get in and you establish these relationships with people at high level, they, they have a, a. A, a circle of trust, right. That you get exposed to once you establish your authority and your ability to deliver. So, I mean, there's so many different, to kind of wrap this up on the, the thing of, you know, you can't outrun your reputation and you can't outsell your reputation. You can probably get pretty far in the beginning by focusing on sales and not reputation. Yeah. Uh, but eventually you hit that. Amplifier of, of reputation where it begins to go tenfold times tenfold, times tenfold. That you couldn't spend, I mean, you couldn't have bought your way into a relationship with the Golden State Warriors. No. Because they get three calls a day from people that are offering ss, e o, and P p C and all kinds of magic promises. Yeah. You know, funny. Um, I got to work with, uh, Utah Jazz on their retail division, team store. Same thing. Came from a relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if you're a player in the game, you wanna be here long term, focus on relationships. If you just wanna make some quick money now focus on sales, but you'll, you'll be run out and then whatever the next new thing is, you'll do that in a year or two. But if you wanna be like Damon relationships all day, I know like people say that all day, but I, I promise you that's the thing. It's not sales calls. It's not the cold email. Magic blasting using ai. That's not it. Yeah, Dennis, you blitz metrics. Uh, how can people get ahold of you, learn more about you? They can Google me and they can see a full knowledge panel and whatever your favorite channel is, and I respond to everybody. It's not a va, it's me. It might take me a few days, but I, you know, LinkedIn's probably the best way to reach me from a business standpoint. Well, Dennis, you blitz metrics, Google m Dennis, last name, y u. It's been a pleasure looking forward to meeting up again and doing our thing wherever that is next time. Awesome Damon. Appreciate you

I've long been one to say to someone who's paralyzed about the direction they see their lives going in or goals they want to achieve – experiences they want to have – to say, “Why not “and?” After they look at me kinda funny, I'll explain. “Why can't you be a plumber and a painter? A mother and an ad exec? That's what this week's SelfWork guest has accomplished. She's an internal medicine doctor and she's a comic. A stand-up comic at that. Named by Refinery29 as one of the 50 Female Stand-Up Comedians You Need To Know", Priyanka Wali is a stand-up comic who also believes strongly in mind/body connection and the importance of fear in true transformation. I think you'll love this conversation! She's also the co-host of HypochondriActor with Sean Hayes (yes the guy from Will and Grace…). I know you'll enjoy talking about her story and how you might use it as motivation for your own! After all, why can't life be an “and?” Advertisers' Links: We welcome back BiOptimizers and Magnesium Breakthrough as a returning sponsor to SelfWork and they have a new offer! Just click here! Make sure you use the code "selfwork10" to check out free product Click HERE for the NEW fabulous offer from AG1 - with bonus product with your subscription! Episode Transcript:   Speaker 2: Dr. Margaret This is SelfWork. And I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. At SelfWork, we'll discuss psychological and emotional issues common in today's world and what to do about them. I'm Dr. Margaret and SelfWork is a podcast dedicated to you taking just a few minutes today for your own selfwork. Hello and welcome or welcome back to SelfWork. I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I started this podcast just about seven years ago to extend the walls of my practice to many of you, some of you very interested in therapy or psychological issues, but also perhaps those of you who are a bit skeptical about the whole thing. So, I have a great interview for today and before beginning, here's a message and an offer from AG1, the Greens mix I take every morning to get my day started on the right track. Okay... Occasionally I miss a day, gotta say that, but I try to remember every day 'cause it makes a difference. AG1 Advertisement:  Our next partner is AG1, the daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole body health. I drink it literally every day. I gave AG1 a try because I wanted a single solution that supports my entire body and covers my nutritional bases every day. I wanted better gut health, a boost in energy immune system support. I take it in the morning before starting my day, and I make sure and leave it out for my husband because he tends to forget. I love knowing that I'm starting my day so incredibly well and I wouldn't change a thing because it's really helped me the last two or three years I've taken it. And here's a fact. Since 2010, they've improved their formula 52 times in the pursuit of making this nutrition supplement possible and the best it can be. So if you wanna take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of Vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drinkAG1.com/selfwork, and that's a new link. DrinkAG1.com/selfwork. Check it out. Dr. Margaret I've long been one to say to someone who's paralyzed about the direction they see their lives going in or goals they wanna achieve, experiences they wanna have... They always say, "Well, I've gotta have this or this, but I've gotta make the perfect choice. I've gotta try this or this." And my question to them is, "Why isn't it an "and"? And after they look at me, kind of funny, I'll explain, "wWhy can't you be a plumber AND a painter, a mother AND an ad exec? We don't have to limit ourselves. We can be "AND",  not this or this. And that's what our guest has accomplished. She's an internal medicine doctor and she's a comic, a standup comic, by the way, who was named by Refinery 29 as one of the top female standup comedians that you need to know. Her name is Priyanka Wali. And she's the co-host of HypochondriActor with Sean Hayes, the guy from Will and Grace that probably a lot of you know, It's a great, great podcast and I'm delighted to have her on SelfWork as a true "And" - er . Here's one more sponsor message. This one from BiOptimizers and Magnesium Breakthrough. I use it every night just like I use AG1e in the morning. And that's my own AND,  I guess, Magnesium Breakthrough Advertisement: Hey guys, I wanna share with you that recently I've been working on some very important projects that have very short deadlines, as always, right? It seems everything today is a S A P. Anyway, I have not been able to keep up with all of my self-care routine. I certainly haven't had breaks to have proper meals, and I'm drinking way too much ice tea. I was starting to get really stressed out when I remembered that the magnesium breakthrough I take every night is also a great support for stress management. And I'd kind of forgotten that. In fact, magnesium is responsible for over 300 body reactions. And magnesium breakthrough is the only magnesium formula that delivers all seven different forms of magnesium. I didn't know there were seven forms, one of them being feeling more calm, centered, and in control of our stress. If you are trying to balance life demands, give it a try. Trust me, your mind and your body will thank you for it. What you can do is visit mag breakthrough.com/ self-work and order now. Oh, in addition to the discount you get by using promo code self-work 10. So that's different self-work. 10. They're also amazing gifts with purchase. That's why I love shopping it by optimizers. Again, go to mag breakthrough.com/ self-work to get your magnesium breakthrough and find out this month's gift with purchase. Episode 356 with Priyanka Wali.  Realize you can support self-work by supporting our sponsors. And now, Priyanka Wally, Speaker 2: Dr. Margaret I started off my morning by listening to your comedy routine . Speaker 3: Dr. Priyanka Wali Oh, which one? Which bit did you check out? Speaker 2:  the one on your Website? Speaker 3: The one? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: And I laughed. I just thought, I've known some in and out guys. Speaker 3: . Oh man. Yeah, that takes me back. You know, I haven't, I haven't, you know, after the pandemic hit, you know, obviously comedy changed and performing in person totally changed. And I remember going back on stage in 2021, so, you know, we were kind of used to reentry, we were opening up a little bit, and the vibe was just really different. And so I've, I've slowly been getting my feet Speaker 2: Thought about that. How was it different, Priyanka? Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you know, having, it was an outdoor show and most people were wearing masks. But even if you're doing an indoor show, you, it's hard to see people's facial expressions if they're masked. Right? So that, you know, to me, standup has always been a relationship between the, the performer and the audience. It's a connection. And when you, you know, cover the face for obvious important reasons, safety reasons it, it sort of breaks that connection. And so what I found was that I enjoyed comedy, less enjoyed performing less after the pandemic. And I actually took a break from comedy and I sort of went back to like, "Okay, what does bring me joy? Like, what is this really about?" And I went to France and I actually studied clowning with Philippe Goer, who's a world renowned clowning expert. And I went back to the basics of like, okay, physical comedy, like comedy with your body and not just your neck up mind voice. And then I sort of came into singing parody songs. And that's kind of the new stuff that I'm working on now. Really? Yeah. So I'm taking my comedy and I'm turning it into more parody songs, and I've released a few small clips on Instagram. But I'm planning on releasing a longer video at some point. So that's kind of what I'm working on. And that's like part of the transformation as an artist, which is, it's an incredible journey. Speaker 2: Well, you know and I wanna, I wanna back up and we, we kinda started in the middle, didn't we? Or I did. Yeah. Yeah. And so I wanna back up and, and talk about how you got to be, but you know, I'm a huge advocate of, of, AND kind of lives. I am this AND I'm that, and I'm something else. Mm-Hmm. . So I love that you're living your life that way. Oh, thank you. I also listened to the last podcast that you and Sean did. Mm-Hmm. . And I thought the story about your either great-grandfather or your grandfather was so touching that Wali is actually the Arabic name. Mm-Hmm. healer or helper. Speaker 3: Yeah. Helper. Helper. Or like friend, friend of man, helper of man. Yeah. Yeah. It was a name bestowed upon us. Yeah. Speaker 2: Incredible. Speaker 3: . Yeah. Yeah. When I, when I learned that for the first time, and it sort of changed my relationship with my own name, you know, I always thought I didn't really have a relationship, but then once I realized it was sort of like, gifted, I was like, Wow, that's, that's, there was an identity shift and you know, there's a sense of humility and gratitude as well. Speaker 2: You know, when you hear stories like that. My grandmother was named Emma Clayton Robinson, and I remember asking one time why was, why was her middle name Clayton? And the story was that I'm from the south, I'm from Arkansas, and her mother and father's home was taken over by the Yankees during the Civil War by a General Clayton. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 2: He was so kind to them that they, when my grandmother was born, she was named Emma Clayton Robinson. Speaker 3: Wow. Speaker 2: And Clayton has become one of our family names, which is just so, I don't know, it adds something to your understanding of your family and what has happened, and of course, Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 2: It's just, I don't know, there's something about that kind of tradition or g legacy that's just fascinating to me. Speaker 3: Yeah. And I'm curious, do you know what, what was the name prior to Clayton before that? Speaker 2: Well, no, she had not been. She was born and then, and then they named her Emma Clayton Robinson. Speaker 3: Wow. Wow. Yeah. There's so many complexities to that story, because on one hand, this, this person was the oppressor. They came in and they took, you know, your family home and your land. Right. And yet they were a kind, oppressor, kind enough for us to name them after them. It's like, there's so many nuances to that, that story. It's, it's very complex. It certainly could, would be totally justifiable to bring up a lot of different set of feelings around that. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. So I wanna find out about your journey. You are a physician. Mm-Hmm. , you're an internal medicine physician. Mm-Hmm. . And I think you also have training in OB obesity, is that right? Speaker 3: Correct. Yeah. Double board certified. Mm-Hmm. double board certified. Speaker 2:  And so, and, and then, and you know, you, you've laughed with your co-host Sean, about I really wanna be just a doctor on tv and Yeah. Speaker 3: , I just want a small rule on Grey's Anatomy. Is that too much to ask? I mean, come on. Speaker 2: So I would love to hear you know, there's a lot of doctors in your family and you told that story, but Yeah. How, how did you decide to become a physician? And are you, are, are you American born? Are you, were you born in India or were you born in America? Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. So I was born in the United States, so I'm Kary Pundit. So my family originates from Northern Kashmir, and that region was actually affected by genocide as recent as 1991. And so that led to a diaspora and immigration all over the world. And my family chose the United States. And so I was born in Los Angeles, but I actually spent some early formative years going back and forth between India and the United States up until I was age three. And so, you know, my childhood upbringing you know, my parents were doctors, their siblings are doctors. Their kids are doctors. I mean, and, and the lineage goes further up the chain. So healing was really, we would not have normal dinner discussions. You know, like the, the dinner table discussions were about, like, the cases my dad had and like, you know, all this sort of preventive medicine stuff. And so I joke, you know, like I sort of came out of the womb holding a stethoscope. It was something that I lived, breathed. It wasn't until I went to college that I was like, oh, people can do other things. You know what I mean? And I always had an artistic side to me. And so I always loved performing arts and creative writing, and that's always been a, a very big part of my sort of soul's energy. And at the same time, the science had also would come to me quite easily. And so I found myself you know, going through the pre-med classes and I actually was accepted into a program coming out of high school called a Baccalaureate MD program. It no longer exists, but it was a program where you basically got accepted into medical school coming out of high school. Really? It was a, yeah, it was a very competitive program. They only took, I think like 12 or 15 people all across the United States. And so I knew, I knew out of high school that I was gonna go to med school. Yeah. And I can't say honestly though, that that was what I wanted. I think there was a part of me that really was you know, I loved creative arts. I loved performing. And I couldn't see a path if I were to pursue medicine. But I, I grew up in a very traditional Indian family. Like, I had a tremendous amount of pressure from my parents. Like, no, you have to go to med school. Like, that's gonna happen. Yeah. And so, you know, again, because the science would come to me easily, I decided to, to sort of give it a go and give it a chance. You know, in hindsight I wish I had taken some time off in between undergrad and med school. 'cause I went straight through. And I, I don't necessarily recommend that. I think if I had had more time to sort of develop and simmer as a human being you know, I, I wasn't really a human being by the time I went to HU Med School. I was just this concept, you know, I was so undeveloped as a person. Speaker 2: So you followed the structure that your parents wanted you to follow, and really hadn't had a whole lot of autonomy about Speaker 3: That. Totally. Yeah. And, you know, it would come out in these different ways. Like I, you know, when I was a med student, I joined this local improv troupe in East Los Angeles, you know, and I would have these little pockets of things that I would do to create balance. Sure. And it's funny now because the work that I do as a, as a physician, I, I am very passionate about it now, but I think it's because I've taken much more of a an an identity that this is part of social justice activism in terms of like, what is going on right now with the current medical paradigm and you, what needs to change. I feel like very compelled now to be involved with this and to be a part of this. Because at the end of the day, we're all connected. And I feel like I was given a set of privileges by being born into a family that, you know, was all healthcare providers on some aspect. And I feel like it would really be a, a waste to, to squander those gifts essentially. Mm-Hmm. . And so it's funny 'cause now I, I really love what I do and the way I've sort of built my life. I mean, I'm definitely not working like a traditional medical doctor at like, you know, a major hospital or anything like that. I mean, I have my own private practice and I, the way I think about healing, I would say it's, it's more consistent with like a new paradigm as opposed to the older paradigm. You know, in terms of integrated, Speaker 2: More holistic, Speaker 3: More holistic integrative, you know, thinking about issues from a mind body perspective as opposed to the current, you know, the current paradigm is like, you have a heart problem, you go to a heart doctor, you have a kidney problem, you go to a kidney doctor, you have a mind problem, you go to the mind doctor. It's like that. It's very disconnected and, you know, there's no more like general doctors anymore. I mean, it's like, it's a rare dying breed. And so I am really trying to bring a callback to, Hey, let's look at the whole person. Let's treat the whole person. This is not just a mind issue or a body issue. This is a mind body issue. And essentially we are all mind body spirits. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Couldn't agree more. So I was always interested, and I remember asking my sort of, she's my manager you know, why does Priyanka wanna come on SelfWork? I mean, why does she wanna come on a mental health podcast? And I, I wanna ask you that question. I was so intrigued that, you know, and it sounds like it's very may maybe tied into this, well, one, of course, you're an example of someone who is saying, don't be, don't be governed by, you know, what other people expect of you. But make sure that you're, you're zoning in and really expressing the parts of yourself that bring you joy and, and that kind of thing. Which I think is wonderful. I didn't know if you had any history with depression or anxiety or anything like that, but it also sounds like maybe it's tied in with more of this holistic view of things. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. So, so yeah. I, I actually, I've talked about this publicly. I think there was an article in Women's Health Magazine where I actually was very depressed in medical school. In fact, I didn't realize that I had the signs and symptoms of clinical depression until my psychiatry rotation in medical training Oh. . Where I was interviewing people. Yeah. I was interviewing people who were severely clinically depressed. And I was walking away from these interviews with individuals and I was like, there's really no difference between me and this person that like, probably needs to be hospitalized. And you know, I, it was then that I, yeah. So it was then that I realized that, you know, I had severe clinical depression and I needed to be on antidepressants for a period of time in medical training. And what, what in hindsight coming out of that, what really was going on is that I was in a very difficult situation. The medical system, the medical training system, it's actually a very oppressive system. And I didn't have the best coping skills. I didn't even know what therapy was at the time. And fortunately that's when I learned about treatments, like cognitive behavioral therapy. And I started therapy. I saw a psychiatrist and was able to get the help that I needed. And then when I graduated medical school, my depression symptoms went away and I was able to get off the meds. And I haven't had a relapse of depression to that severity since then. Speaker 2: So it was probably very situational and that kind of thing. It was Speaker 3: Absolutely situational. Yeah. Speaker 2: I have the fancy title of adjunct professor at University of Arkansas Medical School. Mm-Hmm. Medical School of Medical Sciences, I think it's called mm-hmm. . And I laughed and said, I don't even get a parking place with that. So Speaker 3: . Yeah. Yeah. And Speaker 2: I, I teach a course that's, you know, an hour and a half in one semester or so, it's very little about psychotherapy to medical students. Mm-Hmm. who are psych psychiatry rotation. And one of my major questions is, what do y'all think therapy is? And they just kind of stare at me. Oh, yeah. Like, what are you talking about? You know, and Oh yeah, well now we've learned that this is what you do with this person and this is, and I said, you know what? You gotta throw all that out. 'cause That's not really true. Mm-Hmm. mm-hmm. . But it, it's fascinating how that the, unfortunately the medical school schools still don't really incorporate a whole lot of mental health knowledge and understanding to physicians. Speaker 3: You know, I really appreciate you naming this because it's something I talked about. I think on one of the podcast episodes, you know, in medicine we are sort of taught that if you can't objectively identify the cause of someone's issues, like for example, if you can't get lab work Right. That can corroborate or a CAT scan or something like that, you we're, we're literally taught, or at least back when I was in med school, I was taught that you need to conclude that this is a psychosomatic issue. And once you label someone as having a psychosomatic issue, you kind of wash your hands of it and move on. What the deficit in education right now that's happening in the system, I think physicians especially need to be taught the next step. Right. If you're gonna label someone as having a psychosomatic issue, the next training is understanding, okay, well what is the emotion that's linking to that physical symptom? Speaker 2: Well, the trauma or the Yeah, exactly. The, what's going on? Name what's going on with the patient. I, I love it. I did my dissertation yeah, my dissertation on conversion disorders, Speaker 3: So, okay. Sure. Speaker 2: I was, you know, bridging the gap between, for those listeners who don't know what conversion disorders are, they are disorders that are, that are psychologically based, but can can mimic mm-hmm. Speaker 3: Speaker 2: Make true medical problems. And I did mine on Pseudoseizures mm-hmm. , which was someone looks like they're having a seizure, but there's no actual abnormal EEG activity, so, right. Although they can be mixed anyway, enough about that. Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. I'm always I'm so glad that more, at least there's a movement toward physicians moving there's a movement toward moving , Speaker 3:, a lot of movement, a lot Speaker 2: Of movement, lot of movement toward integrative, or that's kind of this kind of medicine. 'cause I just think it's vital. Speaker 3: Oh, not only is it vital, Margaret, I I actually am at the point in my career where I am sort of, if anyone's gonna call themselves a physician or even a healer for that matter. Yeah. and they don't have a basic understanding of this type of education. They actually have an incomplete education of how healing actually works in human beings. And so what I would love to see more of is more education for medical students, especially helping them understand how to name emotions and the effects that that has on the human body. Speaker 2: Sure. Sure. Because isn't there research, in fact, I've read some research that says the brain actually doesn't, can't tell the difference between physical pain and emotional pain. Speaker 3: That's correct. Actually, yes. When we experience emotional pain, it activates the same receptors of the brain. This is through functional MRI studies, it activates the same receptors of the brain as if we were to experience physical pain. Fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all we're naming here again, is this is more and more evidence of how we need to move towards a mind body model, a model in medicine. And I do believe this will be the next paradigm where we start to look at human beings as mind bodies and not just bodies with minds. Speaker 2: Right, right. Bio psychosocial, Speaker 3: Spiritual. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Speaker 2: Okay, so let's switch gears. Okay.  Talk about the clown part of you, or the funny part of you, the comedic part of you. You have a wonderful podcast yourself that's very, very popular. It's called, let me see if I can not This Hypo Dry actor Hypo Speaker 3: Hypochondriac. hypochondria. I'm so Speaker 2: Used to saying the word hypori, called it . Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. We just call it hypo for sure. Speaker 2: And your partner is, your partner in crime, Speaker 3: Is the lovely Sean Hayes, who you may know from a small show called Will and Grace tiny little show. Yeah. Speaker 2: In fact, my trainer, I was working out this morning and I was told him who I was, who I was interviewing. He goes it did you say that her co her cohort, you know, her partner is, is Sean Hayes. And I said, yeah. Oh, I can't wait to tell my girlfriend that you're interviewing someone . Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Sean's darling. I love working with him. It's, it's been a pleasure. And I don't know when this episode's getting released, but he's currently on Broadway at the moment. So I do, I do miss him because he is, he's very, very busy on Broadway. But it has been just an absolute joy working alongside with him. Oh, great. He brings, you're, oh, thank you. Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. It's, it's so easy to work with someone who's so lighthearted as Sean, and he brings just a lot of joy and humor and, you know, in on the podcast we're talking about, we can talk about some pretty serious things, pretty heavy things. And, you know, that that lightness that he brings, it allows us to kind of go to places where maybe we wouldn't necessarily be able to go if this was a more serious kind of heavy podcast. Mm-Hmm. , you know, it's so important when you're interviewing celebrities or anyone who's willing to share something vulnerable about creating a safe space so that people feel like they can share. And so I feel really grateful to be working alongside him. Speaker 2: And you answer questions from listeners about, is it only medical issues that they call in about? Or is it Yes. Speaker 3: Yeah. So people like to call in and share their medical stories. And it's been also, that has been a very, very humbling experience. You know, the, the callers that call in and the, the depths of their shares, you know, as the show has progressed, the shares have been more and more vulnerable, which we so appreciate. And what I love about the shares is that people will many times call in and say, you know, I thought I was the only person that had blah, blah, blah, but after listening to this episode, I realize I'm not, and I have it too. And this is my experience. And that's, to me is what this is really about. You know, connecting us, reminding us that we're all one people. We're one species. We're human beings, and we, we feel the same things and emotions do connect us. And I think that's so important to remember in this time of such divisiveness Speaker 2: On SelfWork. I also love to, to answer questions from listeners. It's one of my most favorite things to do. And so it's your right. I just feel like there's so many, you know, there's this, again, research will say that there's this explosion of loneliness, and it's true and right. Staring at our screens instead of talking right to another. And so there's this sense of, I must be the only one feeling this. So, so since, since the pandemic happened, what are you doing with you? You said you went to France and you, you're doing this clowning and that kind of thing. Tell us about that part of you. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think in order for me to stay balanced, it is very important that I engage in some kind of play. Yeah. And it can be formal play, like going to study clowning with a renowned clowning expert. But on a day-to-day, like every day, you know, I can't fly to France to study clowning . I do spend a, a significant part of my day. Like, I dance every day. I try and do some kind of movement, you know, especially before I start to see individuals in my private practice. You know, I may put on a song and just move my body and I get really funky and really weird, and I'll growl. I love growling and I love putting my yoga mat out and just like rolling on the floor and just like, moving and arching my back and acting like a total fool. I mean, just like completely just like the, just an animal. But to me, I, it, it's important for me to do that every day. You know, I think we forget that we, human beings, we're animals and we're, we're, so we have to engage in somatic practices, otherwise we'll be very disconnected from our bodies. And in my own healing journey, I've noticed that the more I'm in my body, the more present I am, and the more I can give, the more I can share sort of the gifts that I have. And we all have gifts to share. And I've just noticed that the more I engage in somatic practices, it's easier for me to tap into that and play. I also consider rest to be a really important facet. I mean resting, going slow, taking naps, anything that just, again, keeps the body in flow. Mm-Hmm. . And so yeah, I'm, I'm generally a very silly person. and . Speaker 2: You know, people always ask me, well, how do you do something so serious all day long? And I think I laugh all the time with people, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, Speaker 2: There's a lot to not, we're not laughing. I'm not laughing at people. I'm laughing with people that I see. We find things too, to laugh about because it's so important for them to laugh. And it's important for me to laugh. Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Yeah. And laughing is so, you know, there's studies to show that laughter literally will lower cortisol levels in the blood. It'll lower inflammatory markers. I mean, it's, and it's, it's just a, a really great feeling. And I think that's why while I was a resident working 80 hours a week, sure. I gravitated towards standup comedy and performing comedy. 'cause It was this one thing that I could do solo on my own terms. And it, there's an immediate feedback. You make the audience laugh like you've done it. That's the feedback. And it's spontaneous. You can't fake it. Well, maybe you can fake it, but like a real belly laugh. Mm-Hmm. really hard to fake, you know, that big old belly laugh. For those Speaker 2: Listeners who are out there going, how do you, how do you get the courage to stand up there for five or eight minutes and try out these jokes? Because I know from, I've heard enough conversations with, with standup comedians that they, they go to hundreds of these clubs and try material and try out material, and sometimes it dies. I was lucky enough to hear Ellen DeGeneres when she was young. Speaker 3: Oh, nice. Wow. Speaker 2: And, and I can remember thinking, this lady's going somewhere. You know, I was Speaker 3: In . Oh, wow. Speaker 2: And but I know it just must be grueling. And, and I don't know, how did, how did you, how did you rake up or whatever We would say the courage to do it? Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I was a resident and I had just broken up with a long-term relationship. So I was really going through a process where I was really just re trying to figure out who am I at the coming out of this very long relationship. And I, I sort of took some time and I was like, what is it that I really need? What is it that I really want? And I, I, I searched in and the answer was like, I, I want laughter and I want to make people laugh. And, you know, to be completely honest, standup was a morbid fear of mine. You know, it was something that I could have never imagined myself doing, but I sort of wielded it within myself. I was like, you know what, it's just gonna be a one-time thing. It was supposed to be like a bucket list thing. Like, I'm gonna do standup once, and then that's it. And I'm writing it off. But what happened is, I was in San Francisco training, and I Google searched good place to try standup comedy for the first time in San Francisco. And the first hit that came up on Google was a laundromat slash cafe slash open mic place where people, oh, fun. They have a, they have an open mic and people are like folding their laundry while you're like, telling jokes . And yeah, the website said, this is a good place to try standup comedy for the first time in San Francisco. So I go to Brainwash Cafe slash laundromat, and I, there were three minute sets, so I wrote three minutes of jokes. They were, I, they, now, in hindsight, they weren't funny at all, but they were all I could do at the time. Mm-Hmm. and I go to the laundromat, I do a three minute set, it went well. And just, it happened to be that, that afternoon in the audience was a local producer who produced shows locally in the Bay Area. And he came up to me after my set, he is like, you were really funny. Like, do you wanna do my showcase? Which is in a month? No. And I was shocked. And I was like sure. And he is like, I need you to do 10 minutes and it's next month. See you next month. And so I was like, I told him, yeah, absolutely. But in my mind, I was like, 10 minutes, I don't even have 10 seconds of good material . So, you know, what I ended up doing is I started going to other open mics so I could prep for that one showcase. But then what happened is that at those other open mics, other comedians who had shows, they would see me and they were like, Hey, I want you to do my show. And so by the time I had that showcase a month out, I actually had all these other showcases lined up, and the next thing I knew I was, I was in it. I was deep in it. And, and the, the, it really just transformed. And then I, I was like, this is a lot of fun. I'm not gonna stop. And so I just kept doing it. And then years passed and then more opportunities arose, and then I started doing commercials. And that, you know, it turned into this whole other world. But it really originated for me wanting to face this small fear and just like seeing what would happen. I hope, Speaker 2: I hope my listeners are listening to this because, you know, one of the things that I, that I say probably, I mean too many, too many times, is it doesn't matter where you go, it matters that you go, oh Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: It sounds like you just said this is a fear of mine. I wanna confront it. You didn't have plans necessarily to become, you know, a standup comedian, but you just went where, you know, you went, you went in intersection and three minutes Speaker 3: . Yes. And those three minutes literally changed my life. Yeah. And, you know, over the years, my relationship with fear has evolved. You know, it's, it's only years later that I realized, you know, when we experienced fear, and I'm not talking about the, the, the real fear. Like, if there's a tiger about to mall you or you know, a car gonna hit you or something like that, forget about that sort of fear, like actual real fear, but just sort of the existential fear that everyday fear to me. Now, when I experienced that in relation to a specific situation, I actually view that as a sign that I'm getting close to some area of transformation. Fear is a sign that you probably are doing something right. Speaker 2: It's a flare from your unconscious mind going, pay attention, pay attention, Speaker 3: Pay attention. Yeah. And so now when I experience fear, my relationship with it is such that I'm like, oh, it seems like this might be an opportunity for transformation. Speaker 2: I Just love your story.. Speaker 3: Oh, thank you. Speaker 2: What's the next? Speaker 3: You know, yeah. So there's a coup, there's a couple of things in the pipeline. I mean I, I just wanna name to, to piggyback off of what you're saying, you know, again, when I first started doing standup, I never thought it would pivot to doing more social justice activism about better treatment for physicians treat. I never thought it would lead to educating the general public about complex medical issues in the form of a podcast that mixes comedy and medicine. You know standup really are, is kind of the trunk of the tree, but the branches led to other things. And for that, I'm very grateful. And so at this point, you know the, the podcast is taking up quite a bit of time. And we do have, it does butt Speaker 3: it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And like I said earlier, I am working on a show with parody songs and singing. So I love that you sing because singing has, has also been, it's another way of performing that really uses your whole body. And so I, I'm working on that as well. And then a couple of other projects that I can't really talk about yet, but I, I'm excited to release soon. Speaker 2:Oh, that's nice. Well, again, we'll have the link to your podcast, but say it one, because I'll probably crucify again. So , Speaker 3: It's, it's HypochondriActor episodes are released every Wednesday on all of the channels Spotify, iTunes audible, you name it. Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. And way any other ways people can reach out to you. Yeah, Speaker 3: Sure. You know, I'm available on social media, Instagram. You can find me at Wali Priyanka. That's w a l i, Priyanka, P R I Y Y A N K A. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, I, I, like I said, I was up about five 30 this morning and I started, you know, and you made me laugh and you made me laugh hard. Speaker 3: Oh, good. . Speaker 2:That was really a fun way to start my morning. And I have loved our conversation. Likewise. Speaker 2: If You ever wanna have a mental health professional on, just keep me in mind, Speaker 3: . Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to stay in touch. Well, Speaker 2: It's lovely to meet you. Likewise. Speaker 3: Bye. Dr. Margaret Outro I hope you enjoyed that. I could not have been more pleased that Priyanka wanted to be on the episode. In fact, we had quite a bit of schedules and reschedules and reschedules before we could get things planned. I really enjoyed talking with her. I hope I get to meet her in LA one time when I go out to see my son. As of this recording, my TEDx has now had 112,000 views. Please go listen to it or watch it and like it if you do, I'm falling a little short on likes, 'cause I really want those to show that people are agreeing with the idea that we don't have to keep secrets. That we can be transparent even about things that are very, very hard to talk about. I hope that's what SelfWork is showing you, that I and other people can talk about things like depression, anxiety, sexual abuse, anything that happens to you with clarity so that we can act as beacons for each other. So just go to YouTube, TEDx Dr. Margaret Rutherford, and it'll be there. You could watch it, listen to it, and if you do like it or even comment, that's even better. Thanks for being here, guys. It's always a pleasure. Take very good care of yourself, your family, and your community. I'm Margaret, and this has been.  

This episode is available on Spotify and Apple PodcastsIn this "Ask Us Anything" (AUA) session, we answer questions from a Linkedin live about SEO & AI, the state of the economy, careers and more.Topics* Breakfast Routines* Predictions on Economic Recovery* AI and SEO* Preparing for AI and SGE* Eli shares the best career advice he didn't take* The Importance of Working at Big Brands Early in Your Career* Best Practices for Prioritizing and Implementing SEO Initiatives in Companies* Impact of Generative AI on Jobs and Medical Professionals* Building a Nerd Wallet Competitor in 2023* Impressive AI SEO Marketing Tools* Workspace Labs beta and Google's Keyword blog* Eli and Kevin Discuss Marketing Evolution and Tactics in Today's Digital Landscape* Companies Collaborating with Influencers* Discussing AI advancements and future implicationsTranscript[00:00:05] Kevin and Eli Go Live: A Friday Conversation[00:00:05] kevin: We're live.[00:00:06] eli: We're actually live.[00:00:07] kevin: Is this real?[00:00:08] eli: Yes, it is real. We did it. Oh, my God. Eli, what's going on this Friday? How are you?[00:00:14] kevin: Let's enjoy the podcast for the sake of all the people, all the millions of people that are not watching us live.[00:00:20] Contrary Marketing Podcast: Live AMA[00:00:20] eli: All right, sounds good.[00:00:21] kevin: Hello.[00:00:21] eli: Welcome to the Contrary marketing podcast, where we give you ideas you might not be thinking about today. Eli and I are doing a live AMA. Not MMA live. AMA we're beating ourselves up only verbally.[00:00:33] kevin: No, AMU sorry. Aua ask us anything.[00:00:38] eli: Ask us a good point where you can already tell by this highlevel. We ask each other questions, and we want questions from the live crowd that we're going to ask each other as well. Eli, you want to hit it off?[00:00:49] kevin: Yeah, but Kevin, I hate to interrupt the flow here, but I'm not sure that we're live.[00:00:52] eli: I'm pretty sure we have 33 viewers.[00:00:54] kevin: We do. Okay, so they're there on my LinkedIn event. I just see our logo.[00:01:00] eli: It's not a multiverse or what do you call it? Metaverse.[00:01:03] kevin: Can't see myself. Okay, well, we have 33 viewers. Welcome, everyone. Welcome.[00:01:06] Morning Q&A and Discussing Breakfast Routines[00:01:06] eli: Eli, hit me with a question here.[00:01:08] kevin: What do you have for breakfast?[00:01:09] eli: I had egg beaters, cherry cheese, and two slices of bread. Kind of my standard breakfast. I have that almost every morning, and I don't mind it at all. And of course, coffee. Can't forget the coffee shopify, mark. Exclusive for the growth team.[00:01:24] kevin: How about you? So it's a little bit earlier in the morning here on the West Coast, so I had to skip breakfast today. But I did have my coffee, and it's the first thing I do is wake up, think about the coffee, and run to go get it. But let's do a real question here.[00:01:35] eli: Let's do a real question.[00:01:37] kevin: I think we're full of SEO questions. One day we won't have SEO questions. Let's do a non SEO question.[00:01:43] Predictions on Economic Recovery and AI-related Stocks Driving Bull Market[00:01:43] kevin: When do you think the economy will get better?[00:01:45] eli: Man, if I knew that, I would put all my money into the stock market at some point in time. Look, I'm not an economist, but I have very deep insights into a lot of companies right now and some companies who make a lot that make a lot of money. And I don't yet think we have bottomed out. I think we have seen some of the worst B, two B businesses that sell to other companies and that might slowly turn around or at least flatten out, but I think consumer businesses might get hit even harder. And so, again, this is not financial advice, and I cannot see the future. But if I had to make a guess, I think Christmas this year or maybe even summer next year. That's kind of a span where I think the economy will get better. But I can only tell by how good business is going for some of the companies that are working with. And right now, demand is down. Sales cycles are still very long. Revenue is down year over year. So that's my prediction. What do you think?[00:02:44] kevin: I actually think the stock market has probably bottomed out. I don't know if you saw this, but we're in a bull market, which is crazy, because I always tell people, you can't pull your money out of the market because you don't know the bottom until you're months past the bottom. I forget the number, but this financial advisor told me that if you would have invested in the top of the market in 2008, right before the market, like, plummeted. So if you invested in the top of the market in 2008, and then you would have pulled your money out at the bottom of the market in March of 2020, when the market had dropped like 40% or something, you would have still made like 180%. So that's the market, right? So you look at trends and you think everything's terrible, but you have no idea. The only way you can really make money in the market is by keeping your money there. So I didn't realize it, but we're in a bull market. So a bear market is when the market is down 20% overall, and a bull market is when it's up 20%. So somehow within all of this, in 2023, we're actually in a bull market, and the market has turned. So I think the market will probably improve because a lot of the layoffs, a lot of the bad things, things have sort of already been baked in. Whether the bad things continue is a whole different story. So again, the market is psychology of the market is maybe things aren't as bad. So people invest, and there's money being made there. But I do think economically, there's probably a lot more layoffs. There's way too much spending for the amount of bad economic news and the amount of layoffs, unemployed amount of people. I think we're probably still a ways away from there. Maybe things turn around next year when there's an election, because markets are psychology, economics or psychology, and candidates can mess things up, messing around with things and make it look a little bit better. Stimulus might not be a good thing. Creates inflation. It created inflation. But hey, if they stimulate the economy and they start giving that money, people might spend, there might be more jobs. And we go back to those 2021 days, 2022 days, where companies just way overhired. I think around the marketing layoffs in general, there were just too many hires, so companies are just ramping down. I don't think it's necessarily a function of the employees. It's even a function of the companies. They just way overhired, and they need to pull that back. In Google's case, Google had never really fired anybody or laid anybody off. So they each had too many employees over two decades of growing, and they need to pull back. No one knows whether Google will do more layoffs, but they're not talking about it. Facebook continues or Meta continues to talk about doing layouts.[00:05:10] eli: The one thing that you mentioned that's super interesting is that we're in a bull market. And when you look at the stocks that are actually up driving that increase, it's all stocks related to AI. So Nvidia is going absolutely nuts right now. Apple after their announcements, google, Microsoft is really those stocks driving the market, and it's all about AI.[00:05:31] Kevin and Eli Discuss AI and Answer Questions[00:05:31] eli: And that's one topic that we got a lot of questions for, and I.[00:05:34] kevin: Think we have to drink now. Now. You just said AI. Oh.[00:05:37] eli: Every time you say, oh, okay, here we go.[00:05:39] kevin: I forgot.[00:05:39] eli: Here we go. Coffee, a zip of water.[00:05:41] kevin: There you go.[00:05:42] Preparing for AI and SGE: Impact on Search Traffic and the Future of SEO[00:05:42] kevin: All right, we made it five minutes without using the word AI.[00:05:45] eli: It's a new record, I think.[00:05:47] kevin: Yeah, it is a new record here.[00:05:50] eli: The question I have for you is you wrote this series of posts about AI and SGE, google's new search generic experience. Let's cut straight to the chase. Most people tuning in here know what's going on and have heard about AI and Se. What do you tell people or companies who ask you what they can do right now to prepare themselves for SGE when it rolls out to the broader public and for AI in general.[00:06:16] kevin: So I've been preparing for this for many years by focusing on users, by focusing on product led SEO. I was never really algo centric. So this is obviously AI and SGE is an algo adjustment. Well, not an algo, but it's an adjustment in this search layout and it's adjustment of the search page. So my focus has always been on building great things for the search user. So that's just a user that happens to come from a search engine, regardless of whether Google Bing, I don't know, Yandex or whatever. So I think that that is what everyone should continue to do, build for that search user. Now, the makeup of that search user is going to change. And I think the big way that's going to change is that search user is going to move from top of funnel, which is very generic searches, to more mid funnel. And I'll give you an example. I'm in the middle of planning a trip to Europe this summer, and I'm doing a lot of googling most of the queries that I Google, they are bringing up SGE. So obviously that didn't exist a month ago. So if I would have done that Googling, there wouldn't have been any generative responses unless I did it on Chat WT. But so there's now I'm Googling most of the names of hotels. When I Google, there is an SGE response. Now, is the SGE great? I don't think so. When I Google the name of hotel, there's a couple of things that I'm looking for around the hotel. One is where is it located? And two is what are the ratings? So where it's located? Obviously. That's Google. That's a Maps query. And what it's rated? That is TripAdvisor or Booking.com or anybody that's collected a significant mass amount of reviews. Google telling me that it is 176 room hotel built in 1992 and is in some neighborhood which I don't know the name of the neighborhood is not very helpful. However, the fact that that exists, that that content is there does mean that the people that are looking for that information are no longer going to go to TripAdvisor. So I'm still going to TripAdvisor because it has information that I need. But I think this SG is going to disrupt the top of the funnel and that may be a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing that there were so many sites out there before that created aggregated content that didn't give so much helpful information and they just ranked on Google and then captured the click and it wasn't helpful for the user. But by being number one, they got the click and now you won't get the click. So maybe that's a good thing for the users. They just capture that information right away. So I think everything about search is changing and traffic is going to change. And the interesting thing is I keep polling this on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn polls because I get a lot of responses. Most people in my polls have not seen SGE. Another one I did last week is 53% of people are not preparing for anything related to generative in the rest of this year. And then the insight that I took out of this is that many, many marketers don't know what it is and they just assume it's another Google algo change. This is something I just heard from a CMO of a company who reached out and said, hey, our SEO agency says don't worry about this thing. It's another algo change, we'll be fine. And I don't think that's correct. I think this is a fundamental layout change and traffic will absolutely change. And just assuming that it's no big deal is a huge mistake. Now, will it crush most sites? I don't know. Like, depends on the vertical, depends on where Google lands with it. If you're an informational vertical, wikipedia as an example is getting crushed. I think that marketers should be using this, should be paying attention, and things will change. What do you think? Are you in my Pessimistic camp or you're like, this is Google, this is Google being Google. You don't even use Google. You use chat GBT. You tell me this all the time or even this Google.[00:09:50] eli: Yeah, it's funny. I do think things will change. So I'm halfway with 1ft. I'm in your camp.[00:09:57] kevin: I do think don't agree. You're not supposed to agree.[00:10:00] eli: No, it's just 1ft.[00:10:02] kevin: Half agree, half a foot.[00:10:06] eli: I agree with one toe and my other toe. Tell me that. No, it's it's a middle toe. It's a little longer than a piggy toe. I don't see SG going live in its current form. There was this interesting article that the chief Editor of Tom's Hardware published a couple of days ago fundamentally criticizing the accuracy and information in SGE and two, how it's still lacking references and how much it's copying, how borderline plagiarism it is. I do agree with that argument, directionally, but not to the same intensity, if that makes sense. But I think there's something there, it's in beta. It is great that it's in beta and it should stay in beta until Google has found a really good fit. I still also think that Bing AI search answers are much, much better.[00:10:55] kevin: Right?[00:10:55] Consequences of AI Integration in Search Results[00:10:55] eli: So little sneak peek. I'm publishing this article on Monday, but one thing that I did so this article, the chief editor Thomas Pilch last time is Pilch of Tom's Hardware. He calls out one example which is best GPU and in SGE. SGE basically word for word copies a large part articles by Tom's Hardware, PC gamer and other authorities and then links to them like barely maybe the Corroborated results, but doesn't even give a good attribution. And I tried that same query, best GPU in Edge on Bing in the conversational AI search and the results were much, much better. Basically, I got a very quick list, clear attribution and citation and the accuracy was so much more on point. So, long story short, I don't think this train is stoppable, train is moving, AI is going to go in the search results. The question is how? I think the current form of SGE is too aggressive to go live and not have everybody up in arms. I think we'll see a more toned down version of that. But we still need to think about the question of how do we thrive in this world and what can we do to stand out? And there are a bunch of things depending on the vertical you're in, but it's a new game or 50% of the game is new. Let's put it this way.[00:12:14] kevin: Totally agree with that. It's new and I also think it will keep changing. I think you're wrong about when it's going to launch or what form it's going to launch. I think that Google is rushing to launch things like maybe Google wants to wait a little bit and put it out next year. But every time OpenAI launches something new and they launch something new this week where it relates to functionality and they improved the capabilities of Chat GBT, I think that panics Google and someone's fingers hovering over that button that just puts it out onto the whole world, man.[00:12:47] eli: I don't think they can launch like that. I think they said in the blog article they're aiming for December of this year. They already said that they made some improvements to SG. I think Denny Sullivan, the search liaison at Google confirmed that. But I still think it's way off these references. It's a small detail, but it's an important one. I think citations or references need to be an SG and they need to be clearer than where they are right now. But I'm willing to gamble and I'm willing to bet here. But it's a whole new skill set that we have to learn and some things that I've already noticed. Again, we cannot make deterministic statements about how it works before we see the change in traffic, before we see the actual public life version or the final version. But one thing that I've already noticed is that this idea of third party reviews for your products has become so much more important. And it makes sense why Google is launching product review updates for its current algorithm left and right. I mean, every year you see four or five of these and they are all incredibly impactful. I mean, I'm talking to some businesses who see decreases of 30, 40, sometimes 50% of organic traffic due to a product review algorithm, and they suffer because they don't have a clear indication of methodology, clear authorship, clear evaluation system for products. And so it makes sense now because in part, Google leads so hard on third party reviews for its SGE experience when it comes to ecommerce related searches or local business searches. So this whole idea of a review footprint and influencing reviews and getting reviews out there is just so much more important, and I don't see that going away. That's my take.[00:14:23] kevin: Yeah. All right, let's move on to the next one. Let me ask you one. Go ahead. We're totally switching topics here and then we'll come back to SEO.[00:14:31] Eli shares the best career advice he didn't take[00:14:31] kevin: What's the best career advice you ever got and didn't take?[00:14:35] eli: Wow, dude, I got no warning about this one. That comes out left field, so let me see if I can stand up a great answer that doesn't make me lay in bed tonight and think about, oh, I wish I would have said that instead of this. So, look, I'm going to be going to be completely honest here and completely transparent. Someone who I look up to and still do gave me the advice that I wasn't ready enough yet to go out on my own to advise companies at that level. I'm not aiming to toot my own horn here, but I'm catering to executives. I'm catering to CEOs CMO CTOs Coos C suite.[00:15:13] kevin: Right. Head offs.[00:15:15] eli: Somebody gave me the advice to say, you need to do a couple more rounds of years at a company in house, get to a higher rank, broaden your scope to be ready to really advise companies at that level. And I didn't take it. And it worked out for me. There is an alternate universe where I took that advice and where it worked out even better for me. So I cannot A B test it, but I decided to go out on my own. I'm very happy with it, it works really well and I'm learning a ton. So that's advice I didn't take.[00:15:43] The Importance of Working at Big Brands Early in Your Career[00:15:43] eli: Let me ask you that same question because it's a really good question.[00:15:45] kevin: Well, first of all, I told you to go out on your own much earlier, so I'm glad you finally took my advice. You just didn't take it early enough and I'm glad you spent some time at some big companies. The advice I didn't take was I should have spent more time working at big companies. And I'll tell you why. This came from someone it's funny when you talk to like an older person, let's say someone in there, we're not going to go and blame people in their 40s or being old. None of you are old, I'm over 40. But it's more when you talk to an 80 year old and they give you career advice. And recently we interviewed someone on our podcast who is a couple of generations older than us, does not experience digital the way we did, but he was very insightful and we'll talk more about that in future posts and in future podcasts. But early in my career, an older person gave me advice that I should work for big brands. And at the time I wanted to work for startups because startups are cool and startups are how you get rich and all the cool stuff, work at Unicorns and write good things on your LinkedIn and writing your work at some major company and have some not so exciting job and boring title and boring job. Didn't seem exciting to me. But the advice I got was that I should work at big companies because big companies teach you things that you could then bring to smaller companies. I think that's true. And I should have spent more time at big companies. I should have when I got my first job, I took the first one offering a job because they didn't want to not have a job. It was a big ish kind of company, a few hundred employees. Eventually IPOed was not a startup at all. And then from there I went to a startup. I really wish at that point in time I had gone to a major brand, because there's something about being at a major brand where you learn how those things work. Yes, it's boring. Yes, you're probably not in control of a lot of things, but you see how those things work. You can bring those experiences to a smaller company because ultimately small companies want to be big companies. And then there's the brand cachet. So the company I worked at after that first job no one ever heard of, it was a startup got swallowed up by another company that no one ever heard of. And I learned an amazing amount, but it doesn't really make my resume look that exciting. I was fortunate that after that company I went to SurveyMonkey, which was a well known brand, which is more of a well known brand than it deserves because it's not a huge company, didn't have a huge valuation. However, so many people have taken surveys from SurveyMonkey, just in their mind it appeared like a big brand. For all we know, Pepsi or Coke couldn't be that. There might not be massive brands, but you just see it everywhere. Obviously there are big brands, but something you see everywhere, even if it's not huge, it's perception. So I was fortunate that it ended up being at a big brand, but I think I wish I would have stayed more in big brands and gone to companies like that. And I know we talk about Google a lot, a lot of people will say, oh, Googlers are not that smart. In 2023, maybe in 2005 they were very smart, but in 2023 they're not that smart. It doesn't really matter because everyone thinks they're that smart and that's all that matters. So when they go to their next jobs, when they go to do consulting, I wish I could say I'm an ex Googler and then go and try and do SEO consulting, but I can't. So that's advice to anybody listening that's early in your career, if you have a choice between some really sexy startup and Apple, take Apple, do it.[00:18:52] eli: Yeah, it depends on where you are in career and stuff, but I broadly agree, which I shouldn't.[00:18:56] Best Practices for Prioritizing and Implementing SEO Initiatives in Companies[00:18:56] eli: So I'm going to move on to the other question. I did ask some people earlier this week for questions that I can ask you, and I want to bring some of those up. So one of them is from Clay Kramer. Thanks, Clay, for submitting a question. And it is, what are some good practices for prioritizing and implementing SEO initiatives in your company?[00:19:16] kevin: So the best practice is one that's not followed in most companies, but is followed in the companies where SEO is the most successful, which is to think of it as an initiative instead of thinking of it as a thing to do. So in my career, and I'm fortunate that now my job is talking to many companies. Most of them I don't end up working for, but I talk to founders and I talk to C suite executives and learn about how SEO is done. In most companies, SEO is done as a tactic, as a thing to do. It does not elevate up to the level of executives. There's very little revenue reporting related to it. It's very black box. We're like, well, we don't know what's happening here, but it's magic, and we just fund the magic. And I think that's wrong. The approach is not that, it's this big strategic initiative that's tied into other strategic initiatives and it's part of a product plan, and everything we do needs to have some sort of SEO lens on it. Just like, well, there's the SEO person in the corner working their SEO black magic. And this is a tactic. And that is why a lot of the things that are talked about around SEO, they're just kind of considered tactics. And it's unfortunate that in a time like now where there's economic contraction and layoffs, the SEO who couldn't vocalize what they're doing couldn't communicate how all the things they're doing laddered into the broader picture could be on the chopping block. And I had a recent post on LinkedIn where I talked about how laying off an SEO team during a generational change in SEO makes no sense. That post was driven by how many SEO really, really smart SEO thinkers have reached out to me saying, I just found myself without a job. I was working at this big company, I'm doing these important things, and I was just laid off, and there's nobody behind it. There's nobody else doing SEO. I guess from our perspective as SEO consultants, this is good for us because when everything breaks and there's no budget to hire a full time employee, they will seek out a consultant to help them. But I think the first thing any company wants is a full time SEO employee that owns and drives and communicates what's happening with SEO. To me, that's the biggest myth is that it's not a strategic initiative. It's just a tactic, like build some links, like what we what'd you do on SEO this week? I built some links. Or what you do in SEO this week? I changed some title tags. Like, why? Like, how does that ladder into something? I just talked to a chief product officer at I don't know if they're fortune 500, but they're a really, really big public company. I asked them, like, what their roadmap was for SEO, and they're like, what would an SEO roadmap look like? They have like eight SEO people. And I had to talk to this CPO about how SEO should be important. And they're like, well, we're changing title tags. Then we're moving on to updating our XML sitemap. They're just things to do, and it's not an initiative. And they have eight employees, eight full time employees are spending a lot of money on and they have agencies and a bunch of other stuff. So millions of dollars a year, and it doesn't really tie to anything. It's not like we spend millions of dollars a year on SEO, and here's how we spend it on paid, and here's how it all ties together and CRM. No, we just do SEO. So that's my thing. What about you?[00:22:17] eli: I want to offer a different take. Of course. This is a contrary marketing podcast. I have to disagree.[00:22:22] kevin: Yeah, you just think SEO is dead. I'm with you.[00:22:25] eli: Yeah, I'm post SEO. Now. What is the news? Words AI optimization. Who even knows semantic optimization.[00:22:34] kevin: I don't know what's going on.[00:22:35] eli: So look, here's the thing, right? I think you should have both. You should have very clearly prioritized SEO projects. Where I agree with you, we have to agree with you is that most SEO strategies are actually tactics, not strategies. But what I think makes other sense is you have your top three SEO initiatives, and then you have your top three bets. And this is my contrarian stance here. I think SEO is so much of a black box now that you cannot expect everything to be properly projected and estimated. It's just not possible. There are some things that you don't know will work and will work out, but if they do, you get a competitive advantage. So the only way to move these things forward is to actually take bets. And so I've started working with clients, basically. We did that back at g two, and it worked out wonderfully. We had our big bets. Most of them actually worked out, but not all of them were based on perfect data, good logical constructs and argumentation. Of course, it's not just like licking your finger and putting it in the air and see where the wind is coming from, but it doesn't have to be properly projected and estimated by agreeing on a bet. You basically ask people to take a gamble. You get around all of these questions of, oh, how can we test it at a smaller scale? Like, how can we derisk it? How can we polish the stone so much until it's not sharp anymore? Or the knife, right? You tone it down. You tone it down. You tone it down, you launch it, and then it fails. And so instead, again, I'm pushing companies to take bets, not betting the farm, right? Not life or death type of bets, but let's allocate some capacity on things that we don't know will work out, but have good reason to believe that they might and try it. And that has proven to be very effective in my mind when it comes to prioritizing stuff.[00:24:22] kevin: Right.[00:24:22] eli: It's not just the numbers, but you also need to take a few bets.[00:24:25] kevin: I like that.[00:24:26] Impact of Generative AI on Jobs and Medical Professionals[00:24:26] kevin: All right. Yeah. Let me ask you a question related to this. So I got an email from someone, a medical doctor, a urologist. His profile picture had a stethoscope around his neck, and I checked out his LinkedIn, and he went to medical school as a real doctor. He's panicking about generative AI. Says gen of AI is cutting into his business. He didn't follow up yet. I'm curious why he's bothered by gender of AI, but that question generative AI is cutting into his business and is a urologist. It's interesting. What do you think doctors and service providers that don't provide a traditional service that you would think would be disrupted by generative AI should do about generative AI? I mean, ultimately, I think the doctor shouldn't worry is that doctor, and people come in and pay him to get treated physically, get treated. So cares. But I'm curious.[00:25:16] eli: You basically want to look. Out for tasks that you do completely virtually or completely digitally and that are legwork, right? Like, for example, there are some accounting tasks that you can replace with even chat GPT or AI. Want to be careful? You want to double check this, right? Let me tell you before I give any advice here. None of the technology is good enough yet for you to blindly trust it. Anything you do has to be double checked and viewed carefully.[00:25:44] kevin: Read the rest of the disclaimer. We're not medical advisors, lawyers, financial advisors. Thanks. And this has not been tested on animals. Okay?[00:25:52] eli: But in all honesty, for example, my dad is actually a urologist, and I know that he does a lot of work. What do you call this? Where my English is leaving me, where we talk into a machine and then somebody else types it out for you.[00:26:04] kevin: Dictation. Dictation.[00:26:05] eli: Thank you. Dictation. That you can perfectly replace it with AI. There are even tools. There's a tool. I'm giving you a recommendation right now. I'm not affiliated or anything. They're called audio pen. I think the purpose is more on the journalism side, where you can just ramble and speak and speak, and then audio Pen will kind of transcribe it for you and summarize it. Sorry, I mean journaling, not journalism. However, you can use that tool however you want. So if I was a doctor, I would use that for dictation so that there's not a poor soul that has to listen to it and type it down. And the reason doctors do that is because their handwriting is unreadable. And I know for a fact, but no, in all seriousness, I would use it for those kind of mundane tasks. Mundane, legwork, completely digital. That's where AI can already help you right now. I'm convinced that we will get to a point where AI will help you with diagnosis. There are interesting studies where AI can detect cancer and MRIs much more efficiently than doctors. Fun fact, the best results actually come from a combination of doctors and AI. Not just AI or just doctors. I'm not sure if we're there yet for the broader masses, that might take years, maybe decades. But I think right now the application is for very mundane tasks, virtually. And then in the future, I think AI will flow into every profession and into every job and make a lot of things a lot easier. I'm also in the camp of people who truly believe that AI is not going to replace more jobs than it creates. I think it will create a tremendous amount of new jobs. It will be a net positive impact. Do you agree or disagree?[00:27:40] kevin: No, I agree on that last point, that AI is not going to necessarily destroy jobs. It's like saying we don't want to have cashierless checkout at supermarkets because you got rid of the cashier's job. I don't know. Do you use this? There are sort of efficient, but then you have to call over the person, every other thing you check out to help you. So they're not great yet, but once they get a lot better, it's just a different job. I think AI is going to create a lot of new jobs. It's definitely going to take away old jobs. What you were saying around AI, and I think we should be clear about the difference between AI and generative AI. So AI has existed for a really long time. Like, there's AI that goes into cars, right? So like, obviously a Tesla is self driving that uses a lot of AI. I wrote an article about that recently. I think it creates a gigabyte of data every second. That's how much it's incorporating that's AI. It's like putting in all the sensors. But my car, it's not a Tesla. It's not a self driving car, but it has AI. That when I'm getting too close to a car in front of me and I'm driving too fast, it beeps and reminds me that I should hit the brake. So that's AI. It's just like processing information. So AI in general has been around for a really long time. Generative AI is newer, but the generative AI piece is that users can now access it and we can play with it and we can see how AI works. But it is actually not that complex. And we've talked about this before, it's just doing predictive statistics on future words and I think that is actually not that disruptive. It's just creating answers and sometimes it creates answers don't exist. Did you see the story about the lawyers who went to court with a chat chunk?[00:29:14] eli: Yes.[00:29:14] kevin: Those lawyers should be disbarred anyways because they didn't proofread their work. So I don't think all of a sudden it was like AI AI, but this is just generative AI. It's like, obviously uses neural networks and it's AI, but it is not certainly not taking doctors work.[00:29:27] eli: Yeah, I agree a little bit.[00:29:30] Building a Nerd Wallet Competitor in 2023[00:29:30] eli: But anyway, I wanted to take some life questions because we got some really cool life questions. Thank you all for submitting them. So, question for you, Eli Bujal Patel asks, what are your thoughts on building another behemoth like Nerd Wallet starting now? Would you start a Nerd Wallet like site, basically an affiliate on steroids in 2023?[00:29:50] kevin: Absolutely not. So I think that if you look at all the big affiliate sites, they stumbled upon something by accident and then it became massive and it worked out really well. I don't think you can go and look at something somebody else created and then say, I'm going to make a better Nerd Wallet or I'm going to make a better book site than Amazon and I'm going to sell my traffic back to Amazon. I think if you stumble upon something that there's like an open niche for and you create a bunch of content, there's potentially an opportunity. Again, it probably has to be more midfunnel than top of funnel, but I wouldn't go and say, oh, Nerd Wallet's missing this, and I'm going out Nerd Wallet. Nerd Wallet. One interesting stat I heard around the finance space in particular is Motley Fool. So now it's fool.com. I think it's been around for 20 years. They produce upwards of 100 pieces of content per day. So it's not a great content, but it's content. So if you were to create your own competitor to Fool.com today, you have to catch up with 20 years of 100 pieces of content. That's expensive. So don't disrupt something that already exists that is successful, because you have to outdo them. You have to outbrand them and show up in ranking. So I wouldn't go there at all. What do you think?[00:30:59] eli: I kind of agree. I wouldn't build a copy or another Nerd Wallet. I would be much more curious about how can I build a chat bot that replaces Nerd Wallet? We are at the verge of a huge technological shift that opens up a lot of opportunities. And so instead of thinking about these SEO models, which are under severe threat from AI, I would much rather think about what does the next evolution of Nerdwall It look like? What are they working on right now that I can compete with them on? I would wonder, what APIs can I use to train and feed a chat bot to become incredibly good at giving credit card advice?[00:31:34] kevin: Yeah, an interesting thing is I like this space. I like messing around with finance and seeing what's out there. So Google is they're pulling back from some of those queries. There was SGE on it. So if you look for Best credit card, there's no SGE on it anymore. But I think where Google falls, and I like your chatbot idea is Google can't do that next step. So if you did a query and again, it's gone. Right? But let's say it still exists, best Business credit card. And Google had an SGU and list out like, hey, here's this Chase card, and here's this Wells Fargo card, and here's this Discover card. Those aren't clickable results. So they basically replicate Google in an SGE response. It's not fulfilling. So I still think you go down to like, Nerd Wallet and then you click because from Google's little SGE summary, it's not enough to be like, that's it I'm Googling the Chase business card because that's what I want. So maybe that's why Google got rid of it. Maybe they got rid of it because they wanted to put the ads back. But I do think, yeah, chatbot is the way to go. Get more information. You don't need to read a 1500 word article to get a decision. Again, this requires huge behavior change. But you say, here's me, this is what I want. What's best credit card in response? And then there's your affiliate link.[00:32:39] eli: Agreed. Man, let's do a couple more.[00:32:41] Impressive AI SEO Marketing Tools[00:32:41] eli: Igal staultner also asks live thanks for your question. Igal hey guys, if you're already speaking about AI, what's the best use of AI you have seen in SEO marketing tools? To this day, I haven't been that.[00:32:53] kevin: Impressed with any SEO tool. What about you?[00:32:55] eli: There are two that are really interesting, and I'm probably going to get comments from all the other ones that I didn't mention. So I think one that's really impressive is by Word by W-O-R-D. It can first of all create content at scale across many different keywords and it can also find programmatic SEO place just with a URL.[00:33:16] kevin: Pretty impressive.[00:33:17] eli: The other one is write Sonic. They just published their fifth version of their Writer and I tried it out. I threw it into clear scope and I got a B plus out of it. Not saying that clear scope is the ultimate indicator for great content. There's more than that, obviously, but I'm noticing myself changing my mind where I thought for a long time that AI content is always going to be trash. And I'm starting to actually see counter evidence that some AI content is getting really, really good. So I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of days rethinking what the human contribution to content is and what content even means on the web and for SEO in general. So I would mention those too. There are a bunch of really cool other AI tools. We're using Summarize for the podcast. In part it creates really good descriptions and intros and Summaries. And then one app that I also like, based on AI, is called Poised PO. I sed. It gives you live feedback on how you talk, if you use a lot of filler words, if you say a lot, if you ask empathetic questions, if you're confident, assertive, et cetera. There are some really, really good tools sprouting left and right based on AI. And if you think about the fact that it's only been six months since Chat GPT got so popular, I feel like the next six months are going to be wild and I feel like the next twelve months are going to be even wilder.[00:34:37] kevin: So I thought you were going to say that around writing. I'm not impressed with the writing tools because I think most of them again, I haven't used byte words, but I think most of them are driven towards creating spam outside of SEO. Google just launched some new stuff. Did you see this? They improved Google Lens. Again. I use Pixels and use Android. But they improved Google Lens and got Now Google Lens can detect the skin condition. Just really cool. That's AI. And then I'm in the workspace labs. So there's a new thing in Gmail which is write for me so you can say what you're trying to say. It uses you and all the things you've written in the past to write an email for you. I did test it out, and it signed my name the way I wouldn't. Have a great day. Best, Eli. Right? I don't like that, so that's kind of weird. But again, it's kind of cool. Like, if you want to write a really long email, I hereby resign from this job. I hate this company, and all of you should burn in hell, or something like that. It can smooth that out for you. In general, I like Smart Compose, which I think most people use in Gmail already, which is it figures out what you're trying to say and just finishes your sentence. So this is right for me. Is that on steroids? So lots of cool AI stuff out there. When it comes to SEO, I think the approach to SEO has been more about, like, let's create a lot of high quantity content that may be of dubious quality. So not impressed yet, but please reach out if you have a really cool use case of AI and SEO.[00:35:58] Workspace Labs beta and Google's Keyword blog[00:35:58] eli: All right, I just signed up for the Workspace Labs beta while we were talking. Just Google workspace.[00:36:04] kevin: Lab beta.[00:36:05] eli: I thought I would get it automatically by being a customer.[00:36:07] kevin: Anyway, actually, a funny note here on how you could find out about these things. So Google's product blog is called the Keyword. Have you seen this? Of course. Okay, so it's called the keyword. That's the name of it. It's like blog. Google.com. Or actually, it's Blog Google. They don't dot the blog post right there on the homepage is virtually try on clothes with a new AI shopping feature. Like, if Google had a drinking contest for how often they say AI, everyone would be drunk.[00:36:34] Eli and Kevin Discuss Marketing Evolution and Tactics in Today's Digital Landscape[00:36:34] eli: One question comes from Charlie Williams. Actually like this question. I'm curious to know how Eli's approach to marketing has evolved over the years and what he thinks are the most important tactics for success in today's digital landscape.[00:36:47] kevin: I think my marketing has improved because I just learned more marketing, and that would be my advice for anyone new in their career, which is learn from what you're doing. I think that in today's digital landscape, it's just a digital representation of regular marketing. I love looking at old ads. Kevin, you ever go to museums and they show you like, I don't know, this is what it looked like in the 1920s.[00:37:08] eli: I do sometimes, too.[00:37:09] kevin: They were really good. They did good marketing. We're just doing it digitally. Something works on LinkedIn. Like when you have a viral post on LinkedIn, it's copywriting. So they did copywriting back in the day about, like, the invention of a washing machine or a car that had windows that you could roll down. I think marketing is the same. You're appealing to users and you're tracking them, and you're convincing them to trust you and give you money. Digital just allows you more tools. I don't know that tactics necessarily change. You want good copy, a great product, great message that resonates think the thing that many marketers potentially miss and actually working on a new book on this topic is they don't understand their users enough. So they understand themselves, they understand what they think will work, and they understand best practices about marketing, but they don't put themselves in the user's shoes. And sometimes that comes from, like, being a user, and sometimes that comes from good surveys. I had a friend who was he did market research for Skype. Part of his role was he went to all the places where people use Skype. So we went to India and Nepal and Bangladesh. His job was to not interview users, but he went to the users houses and he ate dinner with them. So props to Microsoft for doing that. Ate dinner, and he learned about them and how they were Skype users and how they use Skype to connect to people. Whatever it is you're marketing, understand the users motivations and why they want to pay you, then don't. Just like I watched a video on how to write good copy, and I watched a video on how to use TikTok for messaging. Ultimately, it comes down to humans buying things. So understand those humans. What about you? What's your evolution of marketing, man?[00:38:47] eli: What's the evolution? So my evolution of marketing has become a better understanding of the right playbook for the right business. I grew up in this very Silicon Valley type growth world where everything is highly measured as a strong product lens, the rigidity of testing, validating, and launching. And I think that's mostly applicable for certain types of companies, usually marketplaces, user generated content platforms. But I think there's this whole other cohort of companies who might be even bigger than the first. They're not able to measure most things. One example are enterprise companies who have long sales cycles, right? I'm talking about more than three months, sometimes six months, or even a year, who sell highly priced software to other enterprises. And they just need to play by different playbooks. They're not going to be able to test and validate everything as much as these other companies. For them, it's much more a before and after type of situation. So my lens has become more refined based on the business that I'm working with and picking the right playbook for the right business. I think we're getting really close on time.[00:39:55] Is SEO Dead?[00:39:55] eli: Let's do one more short question. E G live?[00:39:59] kevin: Is SEO dead? Sorry, that's not short. It's a short question. That's the long answer.[00:40:05] eli: It's fair. You caught me on this one.[00:40:07] kevin: You know what?[00:40:08] eli: Yes and no. I know it's not the answer that everybody wants, but SEO in its old form, I think, is going away. And out of it comes a new type of SEO that has maybe that has a core, maybe 50% of it is similar to what we did before, and that 50% is different. And I'm personally very excited. We're basically coming out of an exploit cycle and we're going back into an explore cycle and I'm all here for it. So I would say SEO is dead. 50%. That's my quick answer.[00:40:36] kevin: What do you think? No, it's not dead at all. It just changes. SEO doesn't die until search engines die. And I don't think search engines will die like Chat, GBT and generate. AI doesn't replace search, it just changes outwork. It's like saying SEO is dead because featured Snippets and Knowledge graph, I mean, I think links are going to probably go away in some way or another because links matter less in generative AI. However, brand matters and links and mentions and brand visibility matters. So just change what you're doing and change where you're going. Obviously, all those useless websites with guest posts that don't exist, those were a waste of money to begin with. So that probably have to go in. That's my quick answer. We'll do a whole Is SEO dead episode once it dies. So stay tuned.[00:41:22] Kevin and Eli's Final Conversation Topic[00:41:22] eli: Eli, you got one last one. All right, you did it in this one. Sorry, it's my turn.[00:41:27] kevin: Last one. Quick. Short one.[00:41:29] eli: Short one.[00:41:29] kevin: Now I have to pick.[00:41:30] Fears and Questions Clients Have About the Impact of Generative AI[00:41:30] eli: What is the biggest question that all your clients asking right now? What are some common questions that we haven't covered yet that you see bubbling up amongst your clients?[00:41:41] kevin: Do you have a discount available for startups? No, I don't, because I need to say bandwidth for the people that don't ask for a discount. I'd say a lot of companies are really freaked out by genera AI. I'm hearing it everywhere. If there's any listeners on the podcast that want us to do, like, a deep dive at your company on what we see in genera AI and our predictions, because I don't think anybody really knows we're available for that, we'll put a link in the show notes to how to contact us for that. Everyone's freaked out because there's change on the horizon. It's the same way when presidential elections happen, investment banks put out their statements of like, this is what we think Trump would do as president. This is what we think Biden would do as president. We're just prepared for all eventualities. I think when it comes to generative AI, it's really unpredictable and it's unknowable. So you have pessimists like me saying, everything's changing. You have optimists like Kevin. They say, don't worry, just keep doing what you're doing. And they don't know. They don't know. Do they hire for it? Do they fire for it? How do they plan? How do they message things to investors and board members and all stakeholders? So that's the biggest what about you? What's your biggest question?[00:42:51] eli: Man it's also related to AI, but I'm trying to not make it related because we're talking about this so much and I feel like I'm just going in circles here.[00:42:59] Companies Collaborating with Influencers like Sports Teams[00:42:59] eli: So the other really big question is what should we invest in that we haven't invested in right now? One really cool thing that I'm seeing is companies collaborating with influencers, more like sports teams. They're almost on full time payroll. Influencers, that is, for specific companies, that creates a lot of amazing content and they build real audiences, they build great engagement. And it's this amazing partnership between people who stand out in a space or have a lot of experience and expertise in a space and companies who get a real benefit from them. It's a great win win mix. If I had to tie that back to the whole AI discussion. We've seen this new Perspectives tabs roll out on Google, and I personally have a huge wish and a huge hope that it will be a new ground where influencers or creators, whatever you want to call them, can get a lot more traffic and a stronger voice. And it's kind of a way for companies to find a new playing field and forge these win win situations together with influencers and audiences. So I'm going to keep it to that one.[00:43:59] kevin: Love it.[00:44:00] Discussing AI advancements and future implications[00:44:00] kevin: All right, well, thank you, everyone. This has been epic. First time of recording live. Let us know if you want to do this again. And for everyone else that didn't record Live, well, follow us on LinkedIn and, you'll know, or listen to us live, follow us on LinkedIn, you'll know, next time we do it. That's a wrap.[00:44:15] eli: Thank you, Eli, for being a good thought partner, as always. And thank you all for tuning in. Happy weekend, and we'll hear you next week.[00:44:20] kevin: Thank you.[00:44:21] The Contrarian Marketing Podcast: Exploring Unconventional Business Strategies[00:44:21] eli: And now it's your turn. Head over to Contrarianmarketingpodcast.com and subscribe to the free weekly newsletter to get a summary of today's episode, key takeaways and community content. And while you're there, go to today's episode and leave your opinion in the comments. We'll feature the best thoughts in the newsletter and on the podcast. Also, if you like today's episode, please feel free to leave five stars on Spotify and Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcast. As always. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.contrarianmarketingpodcast.com

Mitch And Isi celebrate hitting 100,000 subscribers on YouTube with a recap of the past weeks. They debate bodily mishaps, Rammstein stereotypes and Edgar Allen Poe's Eurovision cameo. They then answer one of your questions on teaching and learning English in their online pub in this episode's Unhelpful Advice section. Interactive Transcript ⭐️ FREE 100,000 SUBSCRIBER GIVEAWAY! ⭐️ Open the Interactive Transcript (https://play.easyenglish.fm/episodes/wpgh2cjtygrucy2) Download transcript as HTML (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wpgh2cjtygrucy2/easyenglishpodcast16_transcript.html?dl=1) Download transcript as PDF (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mmpy0l4wabe6i54/easyenglishpodcast16_transcript.pdf?dl=1) ⭐️ Get the Aftershow and all Video perks with this link - https://bit.ly/3IEM62n ⭐️ Subscribe using your private RSS feed to listen to our bonus content and find the interactive transcript right in your podcast app. Show Notes British vs American English: 20 BRITISH vs AMERICAN English Words (https://youtu.be/oJcI5FzrEE0) (Easy English 158) Transcript Mitch: [0:24] We have got 100,000 subs and we would like 100,000 more. Welcome to the Easy English Podcast. Hopefully by now we have the blue tick of confirmation. What does it mean, the blue tick? Do you know? Is there like a meaning behind it? Isi: [0:51] You are now considered (Responsible.) I mean, we didn't do anything. We didn't send them like a passport or so, to give us like an official thing. But I guess you're considered a bigger creator. (Wow.) I don't know. Mitch: [1:05] We did it. Isi: [1:08] We should know that. I Google it. Mitch: [1:09] We did it. And we wouldn't have done it without the help of our listeners and viewers and members, all of which are amazing people, who have helped us get to this milestone. And we would like to celebrate that in a few ways. I think one, we will do a video podcast, which you'll be able to listen and watch, and we'll put it on our YouTube. (Yep.) But also we will do a special YouTube episode, which will be the next one that comes out that you'll see. Yeah, we'll show you a bit of a behind the scenes thing / Brighton, why we love Brighton, and show you some people of Brighton, why they love Brighton, show you some of our favourite hangouts, but not all of them. Isi: [1:51] And an ode to Brighton. Mitch: [1:52] Yeah, an ode. Or an ode. (Ode.) An ode to Brighton. (Oh, God.) Is that German; ode? Isi: [1:59] Ode. Mitch: [2:00] Ode. Isi: [2:01] Eine Ode. Mitch: [2:01] An ode, ode. Isi: [2:04] Ode could have been right. (Could have been right.) Okay, I'm very sorry. Mitch: [2:07] It's not English anyway, it sounds too nice to be English. We wanted to start off by saying thank you to everyone, because we didn't invent those 100,000 subscribers. They are you. You are the 100,000. Isi: [2:22] Maybe they're not. Maybe they just listen to the podcast and they don't even... have ever seen a video of us. Mitch: [2:27] Oh my God. Isi: [2:27] So if you haven't, we have a YouTube channel, by the way. Mitch: [2:30] What are you doing? Isi: [2:31] No, but thank you so much. It is incredible. It seems a bit unreal, so I cannot really... it's like, not that you really think like, oh, we got 100,000. A bit unreal, isn't it? Mitch: [2:43] Yeah. And yeah, we're still working on things like, just because we have 100,000 doesn't mean that we're a set channel, like we're quite far from it. (Yeah.) Like, you know, we still have quite big ambitions of Easy English. You know, it's a lot of people do like a full-time job and then they're YouTube from the side, but Easy English is quite a demanding beast and does require a lot of... (A lovely beast.) It's a lovely beast that we enjoy doing, but yeah, it's something we'd like to do, both of us, full-time in the future. So this is what we're going to be building towards, and having 100,000 subscribers is definitely a big milestone for us, in getting there. Isi: [3:22] Yeah. Mitch: [3:22] We're still beginning, that's how it feels like. But this is confirmation that we've achieved our first big goal. Isi: [3:29] And we couldn't and can't do it without your support. So we want to thank the ones that that are already a member of Easy English, thank you for supporting us. And if we can once ask for support, it would be great, if you enjoy our content, our podcasts, our videos, if you would consider supporting us, so that we can keep doing this, that we can keep producing regularly, podcasts and videos. We obviously offer even more if you become a member. We've got worksheets for our videos, transcripts for our videos, vocab lists for our videos. We got, an interactive transcript for our podcast, where you can basically translate the transcript while listening into lots of different languages. And what else, Mitch? Mitch: [4:19] We also have a conversation membership where we host people in our online pub and we just get to talk about day-to-day English to help you improve your speaking and listening skills. And finally, we have our donor membership, which is for people who want to really help support us and have a little private Zoom with myself and Isi, right? Isi: [4:40] Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, first of all, thank you, if you support us already, and it would be really, really, really great to see more of you in our community. If you want to become part of it, go to easyenglish.video/membership. And, to show you a bit what we are offering and to say thank you for your support, for listening, for sending us questions and ideas and everything. We want to give you all our perks. Mitch: [5:09] A free giveaway, for this podcast and for our episode that came out on the 24th of May. We'll be giving links in this podcast, on the website, in our show notes. We'll also be posting it on our YouTube, on our community section and on our Instagram and on our Facebook. So, it should be quite easy to find. We'll probably have it in bold, caps lock, underlined, exclamation marked, there'll be a free giveaway link to not only our video perks which is our transcript, our vocabulary list, our worksheets and all of our audio and video downloads, but also for our podcast membership, which is our interactive transcript for the podcast and also the extra bit the aftershow. You'll be able to download all of those bits in our free giveaway to say thank you for helping us reach the 100,000 subscriber milestone. So if you didn't get that before, go to easyenglish.video/membership to get all of those goodies for free. Isi: [6:18] Okay, now to the real topics. Topic of the Week Mitch: [6:32] Recap! Isi: [6:32] Okay, let's start with the coronation. Mitch: [6:34] Katy Perry was there. Isi: [6:37] But not how you said it would happen. Mitch: [6:40] She didn't sing at Westminster Abbey, no. That's what I thought was happening. But she did sing the day after. Isi: [6:46] And did she actually, I didn't see that. Did she actually perform the songs that I thought? Mitch: [6:50] Didn't her tit fall out or something? (What?) Something happened though. There was like controversy with her. I think like her tit fell out, or something happened when she was... Isi: [7:00] She couldn't find her place, or, in the church? Mitch: [7:02] Oh, that happened. Oh yeah, she had a massive hat on and couldn't find her seat. Isi: [7:06] It's not Britney Spears. That was a tit. Mitch: [7:08] No, Janet Jackson was the tit. Isi: [7:09] Oh, wait. That was like... Mitch: [7:11] She kissed Madonna and Janet Jackson's tit fell out. Isi: [7:14] So the coronation, we watched it. Not all of it. Mitch: [7:18] We watched it with your family. Isi: [7:20] With my family. (In the living room.) But no one... actually, none of them watched all of it. We all went in and out, the TV was just on. Mitch: [7:27] It went on for ages. Isi: [7:28] Yeah, it went on for ages, and it was a bit ridiculous. And I made the comparison very early onwards. If any one of you has ever been to Germany and knows German carnival, especially in Cologne and the surrounding, in Dusseldorf and the Rhineland area, I know that Creighton knows that, so this is for you, Creighton. If you look at pictures of... I just wanted to say Prince Charles, King Charles and Queen Camilla, especially him, it looks a bit like carnival. Really, it's all this red and white stuff as well. And you could put him on a carnival stage and he could give a... they do those funny speeches. That could have been happening. Although he didn't smile once. He didn't have fun, did he? Mitch: [8:15] No. Isi: [8:16] It's just really exhausting. I can understand that, actually. It's an exhausting thing. You were there, what, three hours or so? Four hours? Mitch: [8:23] He was basically just a coat rack. There's just lots of people coming to him, putting shit on him, taking it off. Hold this. Hold this, please. Here's a cape. Take that cape off. Put the crown on. Crown off. Isi: [8:34] It's such a huge protocol, which is obviously thousands of years old, but it's a weird thing. I'm sure they were all not really into it. It cannot be that much fun. The party afterwards, the dinner afterwards is probably more fun than just sitting there. And then all the guests, they also just have to sit there, straight and smile and don't move. And then you just sit there on those wooden benches forever, and half of the church didn't even see anything. Do they have monitors? Do they stream it? Mitch: [9:05] They have their phones on BBC News. Isi: [9:09] No, but it's just a long, long, long, long thing. It's kind of impressive too. It's something that you really never ever see. So it is, in a way, although I'm not a fan of the monarchy, it is quite interesting to witness, I would say. Mitch: [9:24] My favorite bit was they played the Champions League theme at one point. Isi: [9:27] You know, it's not the Champions League theme. Mitch: [9:31] And then I saw the meme of people interpreting the songs wrong, because they were all done in Latin or Welsh. And there's one about Camilla having a wide vagina. Isi: [9:42] Can we say vagina in this podcast? Mitch: [9:44] We said tit. (Mmm...) Tit and vagina. Isi: [9:48] What is a good word that like, teenagers would use instead of saying vagina? Mitch: [9:52] Fanny. Isi: [9:55] Is that bad or is it like, just to have a word for it? Mitch: [9:58] No, Fanny is... (Isn't Fanny a name?) Isi: [10:00] Oh, that's bad, isn't it? Mitch: [10:01] Also, yeah. Isi: [10:02] I mean, why wouldn't we be able to say vagina? Vagina's not a bad word. Mitch: [10:06] It's medical. Spending way too much time on fannies. Yeah, fanny... Isi: [10:09] But you see, cultural thing. I didn't know that. Mitch: [10:12] But bum bag, this is in the video I made with Justin, part two, American English versus British English. In British English, it's a bum bag, the little bag you wear down on your waist. And in America, it's called a fanny pack. Isi: [10:23] They're also have fanny? Mitch: [10:25] They don't know what fanny is. I told Justin that fanny means vagina and he freaked out, which is probably the best bit of that episode. Isi: [10:32] Because you normally have it in front of your V. (Eurgh.) Okay, let's stop now. Mitch: [10:38] How did we get on to vaginas from the coronation? We also, whilst in Germany, watched the Eurovision. Woo! Isi: [10:48] Yeah, for the first time in forever. Mitch: [10:52] Which was a delight. I was laughing my head off the whole way through. Isi: [10:56] Yeah, but we only watched it because two German entertainers, who also have a podcast that I listen to and Mitch kind of co-listens to when I listen to it, they did the commenting for Austria. So we watched it on Austrian TV, well, online, but that was just a funny thing. We just wanted to hear the commentating. But the whole show is just so ridiculous. It's such a long, boring thing. I don't know. I'm not a fan. Mitch: [11:23] I'd like to do it. I'd like to... I think it'd be really fun to get drunk and do like a live streaming of the Eurovision if it's possible, on YouTube next time. Isi: [11:33] We could do that next year, but not for four hours. Then let's only, I don't know, it just goes on forever and forever. I didn't even see the end, which you only watch it for. You want to see who wins. And then I slept. Mitch: [11:44] I don't want to see who wins. I don't care. Isi: [11:46] Yeah. But you want to see like who... Mitch: [11:47] And who won? Isi: [11:48] Sweden. Mitch: [11:50] Sweden won. Isi: [11:51] Have not until today. Have ever heard the song because when they did the song, I was washing up in the kitchen. We had dinner with it. Then, when they won, I haven't watched the winner's performance, so I actually have no clue what the winner's song is. Mitch: [12:08] It was scary Billie Eilish Lady with the long nails. Isi: [12:11] Can you sing it? Mitch: [12:13] The only one I can remember of all of them was the first one when I was not drunk, because after that, we'd already started drinking. And it was the Austrian... Austria went first and he did the song about the gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe and it was Edgar Allan Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Edgar Allan, Edgar Allan, Edgar Allan Poe. Isi: [12:34] Well, not bad. Mitch: [12:39] He'd be spinning in his grave, never mind turning, that people used his name for like, Euro pop. It was all terrible. But my favourite was the Boy George guy. Isi: [12:52] Yeah, I liked him too. From Belgium. Mitch: [12:54] Yeah, Belgium. (He was good. He was good.) Isi: [12:56] I liked the song. Mitch: [12:58] There was a Take That kind of, rip off somewhere in there, wasn't there? Isi: [13:02] There was one other, I think, female singer from, I don't know where, but the song was not for me at all. It was a bit ballad-ish, but she was a good singer, which is also not given, that you come that's a good singer there. Mitch: [13:16] Yeah, that's got nothing, singing has nothing to do with it. Isi: [13:19] But where was she from? Lithuania or so? Maybe not, I don't know, but she was good. Do you remember? She had like a pink/purple dress on or so. Maybe also not, maybe she had a blue dress on. I don't remember, but I know that I thought someone was good. Mitch: [13:35] We were just watching because there was basically, a battle as to who would finish last, Brexit Britain or... I don't know why Germany does so bad always. Isi: [13:44] It's always... well, we do send in quite weird things always, but I mean... Mitch: [13:50] Oh yeah, you had the Rammstein band. Isi: [13:52] Yeah, which people outside of Germany and in Germany, sorry for Rammstein fans, a lot of people love that kind of music. What is it actually? Mitch: [14:02] What Rammstein? Isi: [14:04] What metal, kind of metal is that? Entertainment metal? I don't know. Mitch: [14:09] It's not nu-metal, Rammstein, but maybe it is nu-metal. Isi: [14:13] Well, anyway, a lot of people love it. So I actually thought that song does fit what German music is to the outside world, outside of Germany. So actually, I thought people would be like, yay, someone like Rammstein coming from Germany. Let's actually vote for them. It didn't work. Mitch: [14:31] It didn't do German stereotypes any good. Isi: [14:33] I don't listen to too much German music or music coming from Germany. It doesn't have to be particularly German lyrics, but also, there is good music coming from Germany, I would say. Mitch: [14:47] Yeah, I like, who was that 90s band, that did like house music, Shaka Khan. Is Shaka Khan not German? No, no, not Shaka Khan. Isi: [14:56] You mean... Mitch: [14:57] What do I mean? From the 90s house scene. Isi: [15:01] Well, you know Alphaville. Mitch: [15:02] Haddaway?! Are German? Isi: [15:05] Are they? Mitch: [15:06] What is love? Baby don't hurt me no more. Isi: [15:11] Was ist liebe? (Was ist liebe?) Oh God, good that there was never, well there was probably, well Kraftwerk. Mitch: [15:19] Yeah but Kraftwerk made it very clear they were German. But I liked it, it suited it. Isi: [15:24] That's what I mean. (Oh it's nice?) And then, hmm. Mitch: [15:29] Haddaway were German, amazing. Isi: [15:31] Well we do have good music. Mitch: [15:32] H-Blockx. Isi: [15:34] Although I don't listen... do you know H-Blockx? Mitch: [15:37] Of course. Isi: [15:38] How? What? Where? Why? Mitch: [15:39] I had the Kerrang channel and they did the cover version of I Got The Power. Isi: [15:46] Really!? Do you know that they're from Münster? Mitch: [15:48] They're from Münster? Wow. This is gonna sound like a crazy, unbelievable story. It's gonna sound really stupid, but my parents had a back garden. Every summer we did two weeks camping with me and my friends in our back garden. And we'd cook our own food and it was sort of us learning how to look after each other and cope without parents. Isi: [16:09] But the parents were five meters inside and they would actually give you food later. Mitch: [16:13] And we went to the toilet inside as well. Isi: [16:15] Yeah. And then your mom actually gave you some real food later. Mitch: [16:18] Yeah, exactly. And we played like that... my parents had set up these little tasks so we could win nice prizes. (Oh, that's cute.) It was really fun. And we did it with four or five people in my mom and dad's trailer tent, when they didn't want to use it in the summer. And at that time, H-Blockx, I Got the Power was the biggest song on Kerrang! It was number one for ages and we got obsessed with it. We had a competition who could headbang the longest out of the whole song. Like, really headbanging, like, really throwing your head back. And we had a competition of it in the trailer tent. And the next day we all had like, minor whiplash and we all couldn't move our necks. We all pulled our neck muscles out. (Okay.) So H-Blockx lives in my cult memory. Unhelpful Advice Mitch: [17:09] So we have a message that someone left for us um... through our website easyenglish.fm, where you can also if you want, leave us a message or ask us a question through our unhelpful advice section and so we uh... have a message today from James. Let's have a listen. "Hi Easy English my name is James,I'm a native English speaker who very much enjoys watching your videos, because you never really stop learning and it's always interesting learning more about my language. I wanted to ask, I know you've touched on this before, I wanted to ask more about how you became English teachers. Did you have to take the TEFL qualification to TELF or is it TELT qualification? And do you have any advice for anybody who might want to start teaching English as a foreign language? And also, I think I quite enjoy joining your pub, your online pub, to have a chat with others. But as I'm a native English speaker, I don't want to be taking the place of a learner who's trying to learn English. So I don't know if it's okay for me to join the pub? Thank you for all you do. Te-ra. Isi: [18:21] Aw, that's very nice. (Te-ra.) Hi, James. Mitch: [18:24] Hi, James. Isi: [18:25] Really, really nice message. Well, where do we begin? English teachers. Well, I'm certainly not an English teacher. I could be one, obviously, even though I'm German, but I'm not an English teacher. Mitch: [18:36] Yeah, and I'm also certainly not an English teacher. Isi: [18:40] Why certainly? Mitch: [18:41] Well, because there are, not because I can't do it, but it's because there are people who have, for sure trained and put a lot of work in curriculum-wise to become an English teacher. However... and by all means, I think it's good to look for those people. But, I think what's so great about what we do with Easy Languages, is that,this idea of learning from a book or this kind of, I would call it old-school methods, learning through reading or... but, there's nothing quite like being here and, well yeah, just listen to how much I'm mumbling, this is what real English people do. They can't even get their own English words out of their mouth. Isi: [19:27] The thing is you learn it in school or in a course and then you go to a country where that language is spoken. And mostly, if you really only learn in a course and then go to that country... or to any country that speaks that language, you're like, oh, that was different. Mitch: [19:44] One time when I was out filming, I interviewed a German guy and what he said to me, I always now, say to people when I'm asking questions, like, why do you do this? What's this for? And I always say, you know, teaching authentic English. And I always use what he said. And he said that he had been learning officially, through like teachers who had taught, who had learned through this TEFL course. And he'd been studying English for years, and he finally came and he flew in at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, and he said it all went out the window, instantly. Isi: [20:17] Well, that's Liverpool, isn't it? So it's not so easy to start with the Scouse accent. But, yeah. So, we are not teachers. I guess we kind of, you kind of become a teacher in a way, on the way. Mitch: [20:31] Yeah. We're kind of like the middle, like third party, aren't we? Helping you find... Isi: [20:36] Your way through the language. (Yeah, yeah.) Yeah. But, like with the... Mitch: [20:42] Conversation membership. Isi: [20:43] Conversation membership, of course you can be part of it. Mitch: [20:45] Absolutely. (It would be amazing.) I mean, anyone can support us and you don't have to use the perks we give out in the same sense that with the Conversation Membership. If you want to be a Conversation Member, you can come along, you can just listen, you can get involved, you can do what you like! Isi: [21:00] I mean, English learners will be probably very happy about another native speaker joining in and like, making it even more British, so. Mitch: [21:08] Yeah, if you want to just come along just to hang out, you know, if you're a supporter of Easy English and you are a native speaker, you're also very welcome just to come, meet new people, hang out with us for an hour or so, share a drink in our online pub, all are welcome. And you don't feel like you're under pressure to speak, you can just listen along and you know... Isi: [21:29] We just talk for an hour. Mitch: [21:35] We'll just talk for an hour. God forbid. Isi: [21:37] Okay, thank you, James. (Thanks.) What a really nice message and yeah, keep on sending those, James and any other of you listeners, any other person, please send us messages because it's really nice to know who's listening, who you guys are. Yeah, we only hear about you and who you are if you send us a message, or if you leave a review somewhere on the apps that you're listening to, that would be also great, because we sit here on this side, and we know a lot of people are listening, actually, surprisingly more than we thought and we would also like to know who you are. Anyway, write to us, send us messages. We are always really, really happy to hear from you. So, now we have dinner. Mitch: [22:24] Thanks again for your support. (We have dinner.) We have dinner.Yeah, thanks for the 100,000 of you that have subscribed. And if you haven't subscribed, do it now. Why not? Isi: [22:38] Bring us to 101,000. Thank you! (Te-ra!) Te-ra! Support Easy English and get interactive transcripts and bonus content for all our episodes: easyenglish.fm/membership

This week, we're discussing how much we struggle to know who we are, especially through difficult periods of our lives and how who you were yesterday is almost certainly different from who you are today.I Google my name to see who the internet thinks I am,  there is a tale about a furious cow, Martin's late father falls into a river and he (Martin) gets himself a new set of wheelsWe're on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sideways_podcast/We're on TikTok @landiwellbeingYou can email us at info@grahamlandiwellbeing.co.ukThanks again for listening, we really appreciate it.

Jak być efektywnym i skutecznym managerem i jak być w tym dobrym? Można szukać różnych informacji, albo można oprzeć się o coś, co ktoś sprawdził. I Google sprawdził jakiś czas temu, co sprawia, że ich managerowie są efektywni. Wyszło im 10 takich cech. Dziś skupimy się na jednej – jak efektywnie współpracować między działami. Kilka moich doświadczeń – jak to działa w praktyce? Zapraszam! Mariusz Kapusta

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: [Best] Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & MonasticismRelease date: 2022-12-01Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.He explains:* What happened at FTX* How drugs have induced past financial bubbles* How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion* Whether Musk's Twitter takeover will succeed* Where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ* & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination and recognitionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.Timestamps: (0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:  (0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles (0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy (0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids (0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers? (0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?  (0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding (0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover (1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People? (1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism  (1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common (1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers (1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines TranscriptAutogenerated - will not be perfectly accurate.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Bern Hobart again for the second time now, who writes at thediff.co. The way I would describe Bern is every time I have a question about a concept or an event in finance, I Google the name of that event or concept into Google, and then I'd put in Bern Hobart at the end of that search query. And nine times out of 10, it's the best thing I've read about that topic. And it's just so interesting. It's just like the most schizophrenic and galaxy brain it takes about like how, you know, the discourses of, you know, Machiavelli's discourses relate to big tech or like how source of serial reflexivity explains hiring in finance and tech. So just very interesting stuff. I'm glad to have him back on again.Byrne Hobart 0:00:47Yeah, great to be back. Awesome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:50Okay. So first, I really want to jump into the FTX saga. What the hell happened? Let me just like leave an open ended question for you.Byrne Hobart 0:00:59Yeah, so I think the first thing to say is that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we may never know, because so many of the decisions at FTX were made through self like auto deleting encrypted chat. So like there are some holes we will never be able to fill in. The lack of accounting is also going to make it tough. Like basically, I think you can tell a bunch of different stories here. The really obvious one is fraud. And you can debate over exactly when it started, like one version of the story, which is getting some currency is that SPF had this entity Alameda, and it was supposed to be this really hot crypto trading fund, but maybe it was a Ponzi scheme all along. And then maybe at some point that Ponzi scheme started to run short on cash. So he decided to start an exchange and the exchange got more cash, and then he used the cash to pay off previous bachelors, whatever. I think that's one version. And then kind of the maximally exculpatory version, which actually is still really bad is Alameda was a real company. They really made money trading. They took tons of risks. And SPF has talked about why he thinks that's a good thing, that FTX cut some corners when they were raising money and that they had really bad internal accounting. And that basically the extended entity of Alameda and FTX sort of lost track of whose money was where and it ended up with Alameda spending FTX customer money, which I think is like, one way to look at that is like, if you think, okay, fraud is like twice as bad as just incompetently losing money. Well, it's not as if we had a $4 billion fraud instead of $8 billion fraud, everyone would be like, well, that's fine. That's normal. Like, why are you giving sky high time? It's bad no matter what. Running a big company that is systemically important in crypto and then having that company completely vaporize over the course of a couple of days, really, really bad and worth understanding what happened. But it's partly worth understanding what happened because there are just different solutions that present themselves depending on what you think the story is. Like if the story is fraud, it's actually a lot harder to solve because there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to commit fraud and to lie. If the story is bad accounting, then that's actually a lot more solvable because then you could say things like, the solution is make sure you never invest in a crypto exchange that doesn't have a real auditor and make sure that they have their proof of reserves calculation and it's happening consistently and that you can audit that. There are different solution sets. And then I think the actual story is going to be somewhere in the middle of extreme risk tolerance plus extremely poor accounting plus fraud at some point. But I suspect the fraud actually happened pretty late. If it happened, which I think there's like 80, 90% chance that there was some level of fraud versus pure incompetence. But if so, I think may have happened fairly late in the story and as kind of a last desperate move. I think part of what drives the response to what happened with FTX and Alameda is that if you think the story is pure fraud, it's very easy to say you would never do that. I can say very easily, I would definitely never start a Ponzi scheme and then start another bigger Ponzi scheme to pay off the first Ponzi scheme. That's not me. That's not most people. But I think if you draw the scenario where they discover at some point like a couple months ago or even a month ago, they realized, hey, we actually there's a billion dollars plus that was supposed to be customer money, but we thought it was Alameda money and we actually spent it and now it's gone. We've lost it. What would you do in that circumstance? And I think the ideal answer is, well, I'd immediately come clean and step down and commit myself to getting everyone paid back and made whole. And I think there's also the possibility that the realistic answer is more like, well, I would scramble and try to make sure that that didn't cause the company to collapse and try to pick up later. And so at that point, you've sort of backed your way into fraud through earlier episodes of incompetence. But I think like one of the problems with the fraud story is frauds have to be good at accounting because they have to like, you know, there's very rough schematic sense. They have to be twice as good at accounting as everybody else, because not only do they have to have the real books that tell them how much money the business has and whether or not the next check they're at will bounce, but they have to have the fake set of books and they have to have a way to make those tie out with one another. So they actually like frauds, accounting frauds tend to be fairly sophisticated. They tend to really dive into edge cases. I was reading up on MF Global, which was a big futures brokerage that collapsed in part because they were dipping into customer funds and making some investments they shouldn't have. And they did a lot of clever and shady stuff. Like one of the things they would do is there was one point where they were transferring money at the last minute out of their consumer, out of their customer funds in order to make margin calls. And what they would do is they would send the wire from the customer account to a different company account. And they'd send it a couple of minutes before the wires closed for the night. And then they would send this email right after the wires closed saying, Hey, we just realized we set this transfer fraud account got to reverse tomorrow. So that gave them at least one night of enough liquidity to survive. Now, you can only do that kind of fraud if you are actually keeping really close track of where your money is, where it's supposed to be, what the rules are, so that you know exactly how to break those rules. I don't think FDX was in any position to commit that kind of fraud. I think that if they tried to do something like that, like they wire the money from an account that didn't have any money in it or something or send it to the wrong account. There are these stories about them accidentally burning a bunch of USDC by sending it to an address that didn't exist or something like that. The operational slip ups actually make it harder for them to have committed fraud. And it's unquestionable at this point that their record keeping was very bad.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:03Yeah, to your point about the fraud being harder. I mean, it's like a classic story about if you just tell the truth, it's just gonna be much easier for you. You just don't have to keep track with that many things. But the one thing I've been thinking about, I interviewed him for like an hour. And before that, I tried to do quite a bit of research into how FDX worked and what was going on. And I had this impression that this guy was like the most competent genius that had ever graced finance. And this was like a common impression. This wasn't just... And then, but it turns out that, you know, they were like, it just like out of sheer incompetency loses track of billions of dollars, the internal operations, it just like him putting together spreadsheets and throwing them around and putting emojis on slack messages, asking for payments. And I just like, I want to understand how it is that this guy put out the impression out there that he is just hyper competent. And it turns out that it's like the opposite. It's not even that he's mediocre. It's the opposite.Byrne Hobart 0:08:09Right. Yeah. So I think you can tell a couple stories there, like one story. And I know I've been saying a lot, like you can tell multiple stories. There are multiple stories that fit the facts. We have lots of different weird things to explain and therefore many different weird explanations that fit them. So I think one version is, okay, he's never all that smart and decided that he could just play up this weird, you know, eccentric genius thing. And that would be able to get away with it. And there are these anecdotes about how someone told him to cut his hair and he said, no, I have to look kind of crazy for this. And so that fits in. And it is kind of an MIT thing to do that, to play up your eccentricity because you know there are these super brilliant, very eccentric people and you can be like them. It's kind of like, a lot of people, they read about Steve Jobs and they're like, well, the secret to success is be this brilliant perfectionist who can always see the future and also be just a giant a*****e to everyone you meet. And I'm going to try to do both of those things. And it turns out one of those is really, really easy to do. And then one of them is really, really hard and you have to do both to be Steve Jobs. But you can sort of give this surface level impression of Jobsy and this by just being really obnoxious to everyone. So I think some of it is that. But the other is that if you get really good at just very narrow domain specific stuff, you might miss what other stuff people have to be good at for that skill set to be valuable. And so I think thinking about his previous background where he worked at a prop trading firm and seemed to do well there. It's Jane Street. They're very, very selective with who they hire, very hard to get in and they're very profitable. So good to get in. It's entirely possible that part of what happened was just that Jane Street has its operations people, they have their trading people. And it may there may have been enough siloing within that, that if your job is just identify discrepancies in ETF prices and take advantage of them, you don't actually have to know things like how do we figure out which counterparties are credit worthy? How do we make sure we have enough liquidity? How do we have backup plans upon backup plans upon backup plans in case something goes wrong with our liquidity situation? Because part of the Jane Street model seems to be there. They're very, very opaque, but like very opaque in terms of their trading operations. But part of the model seems to be that they want to be the trader who is there and trading and making a market when everything fell apart. And what that means is that like the way you make the most money in trading is when markets are insanely volatile, volume is very, very high, and you're still trading. But the reason that markets get really volatile when prices collapse and there's a lot of trade going on is that other people who would love to be trading can't trade because maybe the broker they use is suddenly insolvent and they can't get to a new broker, their money is frozen. So if you're planning to be there when everybody else is out of the market, then you have to have lots and lots of contingency plans. And it's not enough to buy lots of deep out of the money put options as Jane Street does. You also have to make sure that you're buying those options from counterparty who will actually send you the money when you need it or that you want to structure those things so the actual cash gets to your account at the time that needs to be there. And that maybe is something that a prop trader should not be spending most of their time thinking about. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you own a house and you like if over the last 24 hours, you learned a whole lot about electrical wiring, or you learned a whole lot about how plumbing works or how septic tanks work, like, that's not good. That means something very, very bad happened in your house. And it could be nice to be an expert on those things. But if you suddenly became an expert, it's because somebody else wasn't doing their job. So I think you could you could be a trader like that where they can be very good at the finding little pricing discrepancies thing and have just no awareness of what the operation stuff is, especially because the better the operations team is, the less anyone else needs to be aware of them. Like they like you only email them when something is going wrong. So if nothing is going wrong, you never email them and then you forget they exist.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:23Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. In fact, in the interview I did of him, he mentioned that I asked him what is the difference between Jane Street and FTX. And he mentioned that at Jane Street, there was like this button he could press to like buy. And all that's all the intermediaries, all the servers, it was just taken care of. And what was really funny is then he said, and just getting a bank account and he goes, and let's talk about that. Just getting a bank account is so hard when you're in an infinite. It apparently turns out it's so hard that you might have like commingled funds because you couldn't manage to separate them out. Yeah, no, that's crazy. You had this really interesting take. I think one point we were talking about how every single market crash can be explained by the drug that was common in the industry at the time. And we finally achieved like the hypergrade meth stage of I forgot the name of like that patch you was taking, but it's like stronger than Adderall or whatever.Byrne Hobart 0:13:23So it was, I think it's saying every crash can be explained by the drug they're taking at the time. That takes a little, but I do think that the impact of drugs, of new drugs on financial markets is underrated. And you can have examples of this going back pretty far. Like there is some connection between caffeine consumption and like extroversion and risk taking like you temporarily get a little bit more willing to do deals when you consume caffeine and in Lloyd's of London before it was this insurance consortium, it was a coffee shop. It was Lloyd's coffee shop. So you do have some history of coffee shops being associated with financial centers. And then you have to zoom forward because we just haven't had that many novel stimulants, I guess depressants, deliriums, whatever, like other drug categories probably just don't lead to that much financial activity. Like I don't know how someone would trade differently or invest differently if they had a really strong acid trip or took ecstasy or something. But the stimulants where people can just consistently reuse them, they keep people alert, they make them active and wanting to do things. It seems like stimulants would have a connection to financial markets. So yeah, that theory is like if you look at the 1980s where there were a lot of these hostile takeover deals where someone would find a company that's underperforming and when you look at the spreadsheets and say this company is underperforming, what you're often looking at is a story that is more like this company believes that they have this social obligation to the community where people work and that they have an obligation to give their customers a fairly priced product and maybe they give them really good customer service that doesn't really pay for itself and it's the right thing to do. Well maybe especially if you are a coke head with kind of coke head morality, you decide well that's not the right thing to do at all. You should actually just take the money and we should fire these people and replace them with cheaper employees. So you know levering up a company and then like levering up in order to buy out a bigger company and then firing everyone and you know shutting down the pension plan and distributing the surplus to shareholders like it is just very standard coke head behavior. Whereas if you look at the mortgage backed securities boom and structured products generally in the mid-2000s, the way that people made money in that was just by being very very detail oriented and being able to make these incredibly fine grained distinctions between different products that were basically similar but one of them pays 5.7% and one of them pays 5.75% and if you lever up that difference enough times you're actually making really good money consistently. It's super boring but maybe with enough Adderall it's actually very tolerable work that you can enjoy. So I do think that just like within stimulants the difference between short acting stimulants and long acting stimulants does mean the difference between a hostile takeover boom and a structured products boom. And then yeah there's I think the drug is called M-sem or something which is like a Parkinson's treatment and there's some evidence from pretty small sample size studies that one of the side effects of this drug is compulsive gambling. So yeah and the drug story there have been very very fun tweets about this claim and then there have been these official denials from the company doctor on the other hand if you're a company that has a company doctor maybe that says something about the level of medication you're consuming and maybe the company doctor's job is partly to say as a doctor I can assure you I would never give someone three times the normal dose of Adderall just because their boss hired me to do that specifically. I think dealers don't exactly have patient confidentiality norms, doctors do so maybe you hire a doctor instead of a dealer specifically to get that plausible deniability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:12Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. You wrote a post I think it was like just a couple of weeks before this crash happened where you were pointing out that this idea of a founder who comes in shorts and a t-shirt and a crazy haircut. By the way so FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair it might have been Thursday and that so he could have just like sat in line and gotten his haircut like that was that was completely unnecessary the way he dressed and it was like very purposeful. But yeah so if that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts if that's been priced in and that's beta instead of alpha now what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha?Byrne Hobart 0:17:58Well I guess I would draw the distinction between like the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. Yeah I don't know I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of you know how people public people publicly present that present themselves my guess is that yeah there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal a little bit more boring and these things are somewhat cyclical. Like I think part of you know part of the norm on investing in or you know treating basically treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone and it is true that MBAs at least you know there's it's like a decent market timing signal apparently that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. So there's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity on the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and I guess outside of outside of New York within the US most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you know you're either like you don't know what you're doing you don't know what the right signals are or you know you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. You're not not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details the details are boring and also that you are putting some you're making some kind of financial investment in in that particular appearance. So yeah I would I would guess that there is there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders but I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to gain the system and just say like I'm going to be as much I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing that is that's one thing people are signaling and then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on and maybe that's a good thing but maybe maybe it's a good thing in unregulated domains and then a really really bad thing in regulated domains like if you're investing in a medical devices company you you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules they have to follow and you know norms and things and yeah it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element you know if the hyper focus is like just right perfectly calibrated that's good but then maybe maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyper focus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right like you're going to get things right they're going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter what things don't.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:02Yeah you'll lose track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics you had this really interesting point in that blog post about how you know when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young you're over indexing for parental involvement and I'm curious if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20 what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?Byrne Hobart 0:21:35I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's status like understanding of status or something that is actively low status and it's hard to hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in well should this thing be low status the high status is actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x but I do think that you so basically the origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you if you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s like a lot of like at a high percentile like a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard there's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to starts to wash out hopefully but the younger you go and this is probably just my experience of having kids like if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are you know really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early it's that you push them in that direction and they were able to do it early so like the earlier you go the more you are over indexing on what the parents did what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script and there are anecdotes about this from none of the specifics coming to mind but I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is like a thing they could do it's part of the script now and that wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did and you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something that maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances had a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do so I think like getting getting back to the talent identification problem but part of my thesis there was that it's it's really hard and it's getting harder that you had Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium BC was going after when YC started and then stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger and the younger you get the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to with the exception of prodigies so I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where like even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day they couldn't be that good without talent and maybe something similar with the Polar Sisters where okay if I you know encounter a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I go Google some you know read some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and things like at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent but there's for a lot of other domains there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in and so you won't you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home and you know if if the medium family has more more YouTube and Netflix time and less you know less math practice time that family's just going to assume it's pretty pretty much their behavior is normal.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:25It's a bit confusing because you also want to potentially include parental involvement in your estimate of how good this person will end up being if you think for example that giving somebody a shot to get started programming early is actually a big factor in putting them on that sort of like loop where they get better by practicing and they enjoy it more so on you might expect momentum more than mean reversion in that kind of like early start.Byrne Hobart 0:25:54Sure so I think part of part of what this gets to is the question of what are you optimizing for when you're doing a talent search and I think this is maybe one reason there could be some alpha left in talent search among people who are super young is that a lot of the academic institutions that are doing some form of talent search what they're pretty much optimizing for is how does this person do over the next year so you know if someone is a math prodigy and they get to join the math team at that school the school is not trying to optimize for will this person be proving novel theorems when they're 25 it's really will this seven-year-old be doing you know algebra by the time they're eight and that's that is still very tied to parental involvement especially once you know parents like kids they like structure and if you tell them this is the appropriate next thing to do with your kid then they're more likely to do it so you can post on that momentum for a while but what I think you the trap you can run into is that you identify people who are like 95th percentile talent with 99th percentile just super aggressive parents and that combination gets them to 99th percentile performance until they leave home and then they never do whatever that thing is ever again because they didn't really like it it was just something their parents pressured them into now maybe the ideal would be you get 99 percentile on both so the parents are putting them on this trajectory but the parents are actually aiming you know a very powerful rocket ship and it's going to go right in the right direction which is ideal and I think there's a there's a reasonable possibility that like I think there are there's like some level of just imprinting that young kids have where a lot of kids learn about programming when they're very young and that's something that they do from a very very early age and then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career obviously that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're you know from like anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it like those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school and maybe before that like the earlier you got the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to but there's there's probably some extent to which you can you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring tendency is and I guess one so one interesting example of that I've been reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor he sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone constantly picking up rumors constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else and he's like always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying you're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome so he's like he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process clearly requires enormous working memory requires a very strong basically a very strong poker face like he has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they are at they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature so it requires a lot of the same character traits but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's that's just what he would have done and it would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes those these general skills they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through through deliberate practice in those areas so if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation which in LBJ's case his dad was also a politician so he had this example of this is part of the life script you can't do it but he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while and so he he had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself in addition to his political career yeah yeahDwarkesh Patel 0:30:35I'm glad you brought up the biography I'm reading it right now as well and the other biography by Robert Caro the power broker just for the audience the last episode or the second to last episode in the feed is we go deep into deep into that biography and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects but what is what it is accurate and I think what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great great men about the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries there's many places where I mean I'm sure this is true for you if you understand like the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to care his explanation but the actual like the sort of breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth a reading care for but you know come to think of it so maybe the difference between the cases where you want to price in the parents involvement and the ones where you don't is where in situations like maybe being a politician where it really is about building a network building know-how building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age it might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure you'll like have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where you know everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now you're like a 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far but let me ask you about the care of biography because you had a really interesting comment that I've been warning you about as well in your in your review of the book or in your comment about the book you said it's worth speculating on how many lbg level figures exist today perhaps in domains outside of politics and how many caro level biographers there are who could do them justice so do you have some idea of who these figures are or if not that at least what areas you'd expect them to beByrne Hobart 0:32:34in I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they you know they're they're building a big network they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors you know favors out to them favors they owe to other people and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally want these big big blowups so that's that's one place I would look I think if you try to look at the more you know pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality it's like part of what made lbj's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases could make them more powerful so I'm about a third of the way through master of the senate right now so it's it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the senate more more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone where it's less seniority based so you kind of you need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well that said you could have a really big impact because it is it's another form of leverage so if you are one of a hundred senators or I guess at the point at that point it was 96 senators and you're you're able to exert a lot more influence and be you know be the equivalent to 40 senators for example then you can get a whole lot done because it's it's the us senate but if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the ceo of your company well you're you're already in front of the company like there's only so much extra force you can exert so you you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat and this is another interesting point that is raised early master at the senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians we're we're definitely in a bull market for extremely extremely old politicians in the u.s right now but we've gone through cycles before and one of the things that that tends to cause a reset is the war where wars among other things cause this huge reset in social capital so the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side that is very hard to replicate and so you end up with much younger people in much you know in positions of a lot more power whereas the the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was the 1930s there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but the u.s government was so that's that's how lbj got in and started on his path was that the new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like johnson to to run them so when you look at um you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry where um ambitious people stay away from it like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade for example because um because the industry was like the whatever this institution was was too risk averse you you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens so i think that's that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some some institution some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it so i mean maybe maybe the place to look for the next lbj is um someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's you know 50 percent marvel and says this is disgusting we have to destroy it and i'm going to build something completely different like maybe that person is actually the kind of lbj archetype now the other half of this question is the caro archetype and part of what i found fun about this was that um i felt like caro had this kind of um like he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar his some of his methods were to lbj's because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating iterating just endless patience and then you read about how caro works and he does things like moves to dc for a while talks to everyone in dc befriends people goes to um texas talks you know moves to the hill country and gets to know people there he has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like um it's sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes caro will just narrate it's that he'll he will go from here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while i was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946 and sometimes he he will basically come out and say i waited until the person who paid this bribe had alzheimer's and then i asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it so that's how i know and um there's this line that caro keeps quoting from lbj which i think was from lbj's speech coach days or speech like debate team coach days where his line was if you do everything you will win and caro does everything um so i think probably the population of caros is smaller than the population of lbj's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing a canonical book about one particular person or you know writing two canonical books two canonical works on um two important people but maybe a lot of those people are just doing thingsDwarkesh Patel 0:39:03other than typing man there's so many threads there that i i'm like tempted to just spend the rest of the episode just digesting um and talking about that but one thing that i like there's so many interesting things about caro's story uh and i guess the impact is that one of them is there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact especially in like circles like effective altruism of trying to crunch the numbers and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before the power broker is written where you say i'm going to spend by the way this is he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote the power broker but he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his journalism before the power broker so he's like a top level uh investigative journalist and then you say here's i'm going to spend my talents i'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by robert moses and i'm going to document all this i'm going to write a book where that's like million words or something and but in fact that's he probably didn't think about it this way right but what was the result he probably that book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics uh think about politics think it probably changed how urban governance is done how we think about accountability and transparency for good or ill right depending on your perspective um and just that example alone really makes me suspect the sort of number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just like i don't know i gotta understand how the you know from procurus perspective i gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power he doesn't and it like completely transforms uh you know how urbanByrne Hobart 0:40:41governance has been yeah you know it actually uh kind of looping back to the the parental influence thing i think part of what happened was that the more caro dug into it the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project and there's there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you you you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why and um you know you're picking up information a lot faster you get that that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you what you previously knew and that's just a really intoxicating feeling and i can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources so you know if you're caro you've gone through the new york times archives you've read through all of the all the external coverage of what people said about most time and then you start talking to people and you realize here are things that were we got completely wrong like we thought moses didn't want x to happen and it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make x happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing um you so i think that but what happens is you you build this ongoing motivation and then you can you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before and i think if um if you start out saying i'm going to write a million words about how cities are run um you will probably fail but if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how robert moses operated and what he did and then you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities then then maybe maybe you actually get there and yeah so um and and maybe some of this is like you you want to have an adversary like a lot of these like the carol books do seem partly to be this cross-examination of of who he's writing about and often he he seems to have very mixed feelings like he you know with um i think one of the one of the really interesting things in um in the years of lyndon johnson is the carol's description of um coke stevenson and how they contrast him with lbj because it's really clear that uh carol's politics are completely opposed to stevenson's and that when carol's writing about lbj there's like the good stuff he did which is the great society and his his participation in the new zealand and there's a bad stuff which is anything that wasn't bad and um so he clearly like he likes what lbj accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of coke stevenson and kind of wishes him well but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything and so it's like a you know it's partly partly carol debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly debating with himself and asking these very long-standing questions about whether or not justify the ends and you know would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting lbj steal an election in 1948 and i don't think that like if he's good at his writing he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as as long as the things you want come from powerful ambitious people who will do anything to win hey guysDwarkesh Patel 0:44:14i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far if you are i would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the group chat you have with your friends post it on twitter send it to somebody who you think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation yep yep no and it's worth remembering that it takes him a decade to write each of those volumes and each of that i guess in the case of the power broker or that entire book but in the course of a decade just imagine how many times you would change your mind on a given subject and you really notice this when you read different paragraphs of like for example the power broker where you notice um early on if you just read the first third or the first half the power broker you're like clearly caro is like writing about uh uh robert moses the way he writes about robert linden johnson where it's like yeah this guy had some flaws but like look at the cool s**t he did and the awesome stuff he did for new york um and then the tone completely changes but you gotta remember it's he's just writing this so many years and uh in between i do want to uh talk about the thing about you know young people being able to you know young people i guess a war being a catalyst for young people entering an arena i did an interview of um alexander mikorovitsky i forgot his last name but anyways he wrote a really interesting book about the polyonic wars and this is actually one of the things we talked about um there's a line from war and peace where one of the russian aristocrats is mad that his son is joining uh is joining the war and he goes you know it's is that man napoleon you you've all seen him and now you all want to like go off to war and i'm curious um like filmmaking doesn't seem like we're super quantitative and super smart and super competent like somebody who has thymus and the desire to dominate and the desire to achieve recognition uh i mean do you really think he's making films like where where is he really i mean is he like still trying to start a startup or is that like now a decade too old and now he's trying to dominate some other arena i mean maybe the lame answer is we don'tByrne Hobart 0:46:31actually know because um the way like you know paul graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and i think it's called the power of the marginal and it's all about how the the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them and what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done so you it's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because you your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and you know if it were very easy venture capital would not have such such skewed returns so yeah so maybe maybe it is like harder to harder to optimize for what area do you look for maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit you know quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity and you know it's like good to have that sort of dread list like I I had that mental list of like you know if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list like tons of redundant information and the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through like if someone pinged me it was like we really need someone to fix that can you come and do this I'd be sorely tempted feel the same way about Google Finance like if if if someone emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good I'd be tempted but I think thinking of like what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries you probably find the the the proto successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for well if I were you know if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities which one would I have ended up picking because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for it's looking for so yeah can't quite be done that way yeah yeah yeah I want to go backDwarkesh Patel 0:49:05to that thing you said a moment ago about how you couldn't have written a million words that were as impactful about just you know how cities work but if you just wrote 500 words at a time about how Robert Moses accumulated power did the things he did you can actually have a really interesting and influential piece of work is that how you see the diff that you can't write one million words at a time about where where technology is going what's happening with the productivity slowdown what's happening with all these emerging industries but if you just write 2,000 words a day about what's happening with any particular you know company or industry then you can compile this really interesting overall worldview aboutByrne Hobart 0:49:44finance and tech that's the hope and I might be projecting things about my own attention span on to on to Cairo when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it but I do think you know I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of you know strategy breakdown things like that like and that's that's one of the reasons that I spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just not just the the totally cynical amoral stuff but the other stuff you wrote at the same time which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition and and I think that it contributes a lot to to writing about these individual companies like you know technology changes a lot humans change very slowly so if you if you want to understand technology you do have to study that this specific object level case of what is this thing what does it do differently what is it a substitute for what are the compliments to it etc but if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X like why why did they fire fire this person and not that person and why did they choose to acquire this other business why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it's it doesn't make much sense well you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down sometimes they turn to be right sometimes they turn to be very very wrong but you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history and they're often just a lot more fun to read about whereas like you know if you you can read about things like board spending too much money on the pencil and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and that working out very nicely but you know you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational strictly rational decision making and you know only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for for the attacker and even then maybe not suchDwarkesh Patel 0:52:04great outcome often considered the that particular question about where trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method for I mean if you think about like what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled and pride filled you know completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had like 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible or is it like Elon Musk like 20 years ago where he's like yeah I did PayPal and now let's you know let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles yeah exactly and in each of these cases there's there's like so many analogies to like complete bust and there's so many analogies to oh this is just like part one of this grand plan and how do you figure out what which one is happening like how do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing you know star the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and thenByrne Hobart 0:53:18you write about how it was obvious all along like yeah you you really don't and I mean even there are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous so like Alexander you know conquered most of the known world at least most of the world that that people knew of around where he grew up and and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end right you know there there could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire on the other hand like reading the story battle to battle a lot of it it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough enough to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again and so he's sort of you know was sort of being chased by his his obligations the entire way through until he finally got got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and and a lot of land that could give people instead of just giving money so giving them like bars of silver and things so so yeah even even that story it's very hard to say you know he he rolled the dice a bunch of times and he won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win maybe it was sort of like he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s in terms of how you would figure it out in advance like I think some of it does come down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have have a long-term plan but then lots of like you know there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute you know five-year plan does not have a good connotation Stalin had some of those and didn't turn out well for for a lot of people so even within that there's there's some difficulty in evaluating like I think there's kind of that that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck they keep succeeding on the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're they're planning to do maybe I guess another thing would be is there is there like an end state that they can get to because I think you know someone like Alexander he basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went not all the way home but went to like the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied but you know if if the story if you look at someone if the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits you can say like you go this far and you don't go any farther because you've actually finished your task so something like you know I think like I don't actually know who was who what which generals were on the other side of Napoleon but the ones who chased him out of Russia like for them the master plan was not we're going to conquer all of Europe the master plan was like we're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter so so maybe that's that's another way to constrain it but then then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people it's like one way to one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions so you might and in that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances so so maybe maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have they have their skills they have their opportunities they can they can go after some things maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep keep being bolder until you eventually fail on most particularly I I don't really I don't really understand it I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business it could also just have been fun and seems fun so far and I think like that you know the the pursuit of fun is is not to be discounted like you if you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things varying levels of entertainment but it may be that the only thing that is actually like truly novel thrill seeking fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into you know what it is and it is like there's I think Rostad that at this this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is a it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies so now you know if something if Twitter does something you don't like there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious there's really there's no recourse and you know there's there's nothing lower status than someone like arguing with someone in authority about how serious or they should take your jokes there's like you know it's like a weird component of and it works both ways so like there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged in a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit they're playing a role they know it's funny they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously and then you get to say these people are all like this they're all crazy but it is like it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to you know be able to be like righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they've been serious that would have been an appalling thing to say but they obviously weren't if you if you can get away with saying no I actually don't think it was a joke at all these people are humorless and they must have been totally serious then that's that's actually you know that's cool that's high status makes you impressive but yeah must like must must rule as this more you know personal monarch I think it's a it speaks to this question of legitimacy like why do people trust moderation and why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do and you can either say these are like really high quality institutions so you know

Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.He explains:* What happened at FTX* How drugs have induced past financial bubbles* How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion* Whether Musk's Twitter takeover will succeed* Where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ* & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination and recognitionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.Timestamps: (0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:  (0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles (0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy (0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids (0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers? (0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?  (0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding (0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover (1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People? (1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism  (1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common (1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers (1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines TranscriptAutogenerated - will not be perfectly accurate.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Bern Hobart again for the second time now, who writes at thediff.co. The way I would describe Bern is every time I have a question about a concept or an event in finance, I Google the name of that event or concept into Google, and then I'd put in Bern Hobart at the end of that search query. And nine times out of 10, it's the best thing I've read about that topic. And it's just so interesting. It's just like the most schizophrenic and galaxy brain it takes about like how, you know, the discourses of, you know, Machiavelli's discourses relate to big tech or like how source of serial reflexivity explains hiring in finance and tech. So just very interesting stuff. I'm glad to have him back on again.Byrne Hobart 0:00:47Yeah, great to be back. Awesome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:50Okay. So first, I really want to jump into the FTX saga. What the hell happened? Let me just like leave an open ended question for you.Byrne Hobart 0:00:59Yeah, so I think the first thing to say is that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we may never know, because so many of the decisions at FTX were made through self like auto deleting encrypted chat. So like there are some holes we will never be able to fill in. The lack of accounting is also going to make it tough. Like basically, I think you can tell a bunch of different stories here. The really obvious one is fraud. And you can debate over exactly when it started, like one version of the story, which is getting some currency is that SPF had this entity Alameda, and it was supposed to be this really hot crypto trading fund, but maybe it was a Ponzi scheme all along. And then maybe at some point that Ponzi scheme started to run short on cash. So he decided to start an exchange and the exchange got more cash, and then he used the cash to pay off previous bachelors, whatever. I think that's one version. And then kind of the maximally exculpatory version, which actually is still really bad is Alameda was a real company. They really made money trading. They took tons of risks. And SPF has talked about why he thinks that's a good thing, that FTX cut some corners when they were raising money and that they had really bad internal accounting. And that basically the extended entity of Alameda and FTX sort of lost track of whose money was where and it ended up with Alameda spending FTX customer money, which I think is like, one way to look at that is like, if you think, okay, fraud is like twice as bad as just incompetently losing money. Well, it's not as if we had a $4 billion fraud instead of $8 billion fraud, everyone would be like, well, that's fine. That's normal. Like, why are you giving sky high time? It's bad no matter what. Running a big company that is systemically important in crypto and then having that company completely vaporize over the course of a couple of days, really, really bad and worth understanding what happened. But it's partly worth understanding what happened because there are just different solutions that present themselves depending on what you think the story is. Like if the story is fraud, it's actually a lot harder to solve because there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to commit fraud and to lie. If the story is bad accounting, then that's actually a lot more solvable because then you could say things like, the solution is make sure you never invest in a crypto exchange that doesn't have a real auditor and make sure that they have their proof of reserves calculation and it's happening consistently and that you can audit that. There are different solution sets. And then I think the actual story is going to be somewhere in the middle of extreme risk tolerance plus extremely poor accounting plus fraud at some point. But I suspect the fraud actually happened pretty late. If it happened, which I think there's like 80, 90% chance that there was some level of fraud versus pure incompetence. But if so, I think may have happened fairly late in the story and as kind of a last desperate move. I think part of what drives the response to what happened with FTX and Alameda is that if you think the story is pure fraud, it's very easy to say you would never do that. I can say very easily, I would definitely never start a Ponzi scheme and then start another bigger Ponzi scheme to pay off the first Ponzi scheme. That's not me. That's not most people. But I think if you draw the scenario where they discover at some point like a couple months ago or even a month ago, they realized, hey, we actually there's a billion dollars plus that was supposed to be customer money, but we thought it was Alameda money and we actually spent it and now it's gone. We've lost it. What would you do in that circumstance? And I think the ideal answer is, well, I'd immediately come clean and step down and commit myself to getting everyone paid back and made whole. And I think there's also the possibility that the realistic answer is more like, well, I would scramble and try to make sure that that didn't cause the company to collapse and try to pick up later. And so at that point, you've sort of backed your way into fraud through earlier episodes of incompetence. But I think like one of the problems with the fraud story is frauds have to be good at accounting because they have to like, you know, there's very rough schematic sense. They have to be twice as good at accounting as everybody else, because not only do they have to have the real books that tell them how much money the business has and whether or not the next check they're at will bounce, but they have to have the fake set of books and they have to have a way to make those tie out with one another. So they actually like frauds, accounting frauds tend to be fairly sophisticated. They tend to really dive into edge cases. I was reading up on MF Global, which was a big futures brokerage that collapsed in part because they were dipping into customer funds and making some investments they shouldn't have. And they did a lot of clever and shady stuff. Like one of the things they would do is there was one point where they were transferring money at the last minute out of their consumer, out of their customer funds in order to make margin calls. And what they would do is they would send the wire from the customer account to a different company account. And they'd send it a couple of minutes before the wires closed for the night. And then they would send this email right after the wires closed saying, Hey, we just realized we set this transfer fraud account got to reverse tomorrow. So that gave them at least one night of enough liquidity to survive. Now, you can only do that kind of fraud if you are actually keeping really close track of where your money is, where it's supposed to be, what the rules are, so that you know exactly how to break those rules. I don't think FDX was in any position to commit that kind of fraud. I think that if they tried to do something like that, like they wire the money from an account that didn't have any money in it or something or send it to the wrong account. There are these stories about them accidentally burning a bunch of USDC by sending it to an address that didn't exist or something like that. The operational slip ups actually make it harder for them to have committed fraud. And it's unquestionable at this point that their record keeping was very bad.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:03Yeah, to your point about the fraud being harder. I mean, it's like a classic story about if you just tell the truth, it's just gonna be much easier for you. You just don't have to keep track with that many things. But the one thing I've been thinking about, I interviewed him for like an hour. And before that, I tried to do quite a bit of research into how FDX worked and what was going on. And I had this impression that this guy was like the most competent genius that had ever graced finance. And this was like a common impression. This wasn't just... And then, but it turns out that, you know, they were like, it just like out of sheer incompetency loses track of billions of dollars, the internal operations, it just like him putting together spreadsheets and throwing them around and putting emojis on slack messages, asking for payments. And I just like, I want to understand how it is that this guy put out the impression out there that he is just hyper competent. And it turns out that it's like the opposite. It's not even that he's mediocre. It's the opposite.Byrne Hobart 0:08:09Right. Yeah. So I think you can tell a couple stories there, like one story. And I know I've been saying a lot, like you can tell multiple stories. There are multiple stories that fit the facts. We have lots of different weird things to explain and therefore many different weird explanations that fit them. So I think one version is, okay, he's never all that smart and decided that he could just play up this weird, you know, eccentric genius thing. And that would be able to get away with it. And there are these anecdotes about how someone told him to cut his hair and he said, no, I have to look kind of crazy for this. And so that fits in. And it is kind of an MIT thing to do that, to play up your eccentricity because you know there are these super brilliant, very eccentric people and you can be like them. It's kind of like, a lot of people, they read about Steve Jobs and they're like, well, the secret to success is be this brilliant perfectionist who can always see the future and also be just a giant a*****e to everyone you meet. And I'm going to try to do both of those things. And it turns out one of those is really, really easy to do. And then one of them is really, really hard and you have to do both to be Steve Jobs. But you can sort of give this surface level impression of Jobsy and this by just being really obnoxious to everyone. So I think some of it is that. But the other is that if you get really good at just very narrow domain specific stuff, you might miss what other stuff people have to be good at for that skill set to be valuable. And so I think thinking about his previous background where he worked at a prop trading firm and seemed to do well there. It's Jane Street. They're very, very selective with who they hire, very hard to get in and they're very profitable. So good to get in. It's entirely possible that part of what happened was just that Jane Street has its operations people, they have their trading people. And it may there may have been enough siloing within that, that if your job is just identify discrepancies in ETF prices and take advantage of them, you don't actually have to know things like how do we figure out which counterparties are credit worthy? How do we make sure we have enough liquidity? How do we have backup plans upon backup plans upon backup plans in case something goes wrong with our liquidity situation? Because part of the Jane Street model seems to be there. They're very, very opaque, but like very opaque in terms of their trading operations. But part of the model seems to be that they want to be the trader who is there and trading and making a market when everything fell apart. And what that means is that like the way you make the most money in trading is when markets are insanely volatile, volume is very, very high, and you're still trading. But the reason that markets get really volatile when prices collapse and there's a lot of trade going on is that other people who would love to be trading can't trade because maybe the broker they use is suddenly insolvent and they can't get to a new broker, their money is frozen. So if you're planning to be there when everybody else is out of the market, then you have to have lots and lots of contingency plans. And it's not enough to buy lots of deep out of the money put options as Jane Street does. You also have to make sure that you're buying those options from counterparty who will actually send you the money when you need it or that you want to structure those things so the actual cash gets to your account at the time that needs to be there. And that maybe is something that a prop trader should not be spending most of their time thinking about. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you own a house and you like if over the last 24 hours, you learned a whole lot about electrical wiring, or you learned a whole lot about how plumbing works or how septic tanks work, like, that's not good. That means something very, very bad happened in your house. And it could be nice to be an expert on those things. But if you suddenly became an expert, it's because somebody else wasn't doing their job. So I think you could you could be a trader like that where they can be very good at the finding little pricing discrepancies thing and have just no awareness of what the operation stuff is, especially because the better the operations team is, the less anyone else needs to be aware of them. Like they like you only email them when something is going wrong. So if nothing is going wrong, you never email them and then you forget they exist.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:23Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. In fact, in the interview I did of him, he mentioned that I asked him what is the difference between Jane Street and FTX. And he mentioned that at Jane Street, there was like this button he could press to like buy. And all that's all the intermediaries, all the servers, it was just taken care of. And what was really funny is then he said, and just getting a bank account and he goes, and let's talk about that. Just getting a bank account is so hard when you're in an infinite. It apparently turns out it's so hard that you might have like commingled funds because you couldn't manage to separate them out. Yeah, no, that's crazy. You had this really interesting take. I think one point we were talking about how every single market crash can be explained by the drug that was common in the industry at the time. And we finally achieved like the hypergrade meth stage of I forgot the name of like that patch you was taking, but it's like stronger than Adderall or whatever.Byrne Hobart 0:13:23So it was, I think it's saying every crash can be explained by the drug they're taking at the time. That takes a little, but I do think that the impact of drugs, of new drugs on financial markets is underrated. And you can have examples of this going back pretty far. Like there is some connection between caffeine consumption and like extroversion and risk taking like you temporarily get a little bit more willing to do deals when you consume caffeine and in Lloyd's of London before it was this insurance consortium, it was a coffee shop. It was Lloyd's coffee shop. So you do have some history of coffee shops being associated with financial centers. And then you have to zoom forward because we just haven't had that many novel stimulants, I guess depressants, deliriums, whatever, like other drug categories probably just don't lead to that much financial activity. Like I don't know how someone would trade differently or invest differently if they had a really strong acid trip or took ecstasy or something. But the stimulants where people can just consistently reuse them, they keep people alert, they make them active and wanting to do things. It seems like stimulants would have a connection to financial markets. So yeah, that theory is like if you look at the 1980s where there were a lot of these hostile takeover deals where someone would find a company that's underperforming and when you look at the spreadsheets and say this company is underperforming, what you're often looking at is a story that is more like this company believes that they have this social obligation to the community where people work and that they have an obligation to give their customers a fairly priced product and maybe they give them really good customer service that doesn't really pay for itself and it's the right thing to do. Well maybe especially if you are a coke head with kind of coke head morality, you decide well that's not the right thing to do at all. You should actually just take the money and we should fire these people and replace them with cheaper employees. So you know levering up a company and then like levering up in order to buy out a bigger company and then firing everyone and you know shutting down the pension plan and distributing the surplus to shareholders like it is just very standard coke head behavior. Whereas if you look at the mortgage backed securities boom and structured products generally in the mid-2000s, the way that people made money in that was just by being very very detail oriented and being able to make these incredibly fine grained distinctions between different products that were basically similar but one of them pays 5.7% and one of them pays 5.75% and if you lever up that difference enough times you're actually making really good money consistently. It's super boring but maybe with enough Adderall it's actually very tolerable work that you can enjoy. So I do think that just like within stimulants the difference between short acting stimulants and long acting stimulants does mean the difference between a hostile takeover boom and a structured products boom. And then yeah there's I think the drug is called M-sem or something which is like a Parkinson's treatment and there's some evidence from pretty small sample size studies that one of the side effects of this drug is compulsive gambling. So yeah and the drug story there have been very very fun tweets about this claim and then there have been these official denials from the company doctor on the other hand if you're a company that has a company doctor maybe that says something about the level of medication you're consuming and maybe the company doctor's job is partly to say as a doctor I can assure you I would never give someone three times the normal dose of Adderall just because their boss hired me to do that specifically. I think dealers don't exactly have patient confidentiality norms, doctors do so maybe you hire a doctor instead of a dealer specifically to get that plausible deniability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:12Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. You wrote a post I think it was like just a couple of weeks before this crash happened where you were pointing out that this idea of a founder who comes in shorts and a t-shirt and a crazy haircut. By the way so FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair it might have been Thursday and that so he could have just like sat in line and gotten his haircut like that was that was completely unnecessary the way he dressed and it was like very purposeful. But yeah so if that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts if that's been priced in and that's beta instead of alpha now what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha?Byrne Hobart 0:17:58Well I guess I would draw the distinction between like the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. Yeah I don't know I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of you know how people public people publicly present that present themselves my guess is that yeah there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal a little bit more boring and these things are somewhat cyclical. Like I think part of you know part of the norm on investing in or you know treating basically treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone and it is true that MBAs at least you know there's it's like a decent market timing signal apparently that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. So there's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity on the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and I guess outside of outside of New York within the US most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you know you're either like you don't know what you're doing you don't know what the right signals are or you know you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. You're not not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details the details are boring and also that you are putting some you're making some kind of financial investment in in that particular appearance. So yeah I would I would guess that there is there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders but I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to gain the system and just say like I'm going to be as much I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing that is that's one thing people are signaling and then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on and maybe that's a good thing but maybe maybe it's a good thing in unregulated domains and then a really really bad thing in regulated domains like if you're investing in a medical devices company you you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules they have to follow and you know norms and things and yeah it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element you know if the hyper focus is like just right perfectly calibrated that's good but then maybe maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyper focus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right like you're going to get things right they're going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter what things don't.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:02Yeah you'll lose track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics you had this really interesting point in that blog post about how you know when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young you're over indexing for parental involvement and I'm curious if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20 what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?Byrne Hobart 0:21:35I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's status like understanding of status or something that is actively low status and it's hard to hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in well should this thing be low status the high status is actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x but I do think that you so basically the origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you if you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s like a lot of like at a high percentile like a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard there's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to starts to wash out hopefully but the younger you go and this is probably just my experience of having kids like if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are you know really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early it's that you push them in that direction and they were able to do it early so like the earlier you go the more you are over indexing on what the parents did what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script and there are anecdotes about this from none of the specifics coming to mind but I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is like a thing they could do it's part of the script now and that wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did and you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something that maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances had a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do so I think like getting getting back to the talent identification problem but part of my thesis there was that it's it's really hard and it's getting harder that you had Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium BC was going after when YC started and then stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger and the younger you get the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to with the exception of prodigies so I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where like even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day they couldn't be that good without talent and maybe something similar with the Polar Sisters where okay if I you know encounter a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I go Google some you know read some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and things like at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent but there's for a lot of other domains there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in and so you won't you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home and you know if if the medium family has more more YouTube and Netflix time and less you know less math practice time that family's just going to assume it's pretty pretty much their behavior is normal.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:25It's a bit confusing because you also want to potentially include parental involvement in your estimate of how good this person will end up being if you think for example that giving somebody a shot to get started programming early is actually a big factor in putting them on that sort of like loop where they get better by practicing and they enjoy it more so on you might expect momentum more than mean reversion in that kind of like early start.Byrne Hobart 0:25:54Sure so I think part of part of what this gets to is the question of what are you optimizing for when you're doing a talent search and I think this is maybe one reason there could be some alpha left in talent search among people who are super young is that a lot of the academic institutions that are doing some form of talent search what they're pretty much optimizing for is how does this person do over the next year so you know if someone is a math prodigy and they get to join the math team at that school the school is not trying to optimize for will this person be proving novel theorems when they're 25 it's really will this seven-year-old be doing you know algebra by the time they're eight and that's that is still very tied to parental involvement especially once you know parents like kids they like structure and if you tell them this is the appropriate next thing to do with your kid then they're more likely to do it so you can post on that momentum for a while but what I think you the trap you can run into is that you identify people who are like 95th percentile talent with 99th percentile just super aggressive parents and that combination gets them to 99th percentile performance until they leave home and then they never do whatever that thing is ever again because they didn't really like it it was just something their parents pressured them into now maybe the ideal would be you get 99 percentile on both so the parents are putting them on this trajectory but the parents are actually aiming you know a very powerful rocket ship and it's going to go right in the right direction which is ideal and I think there's a there's a reasonable possibility that like I think there are there's like some level of just imprinting that young kids have where a lot of kids learn about programming when they're very young and that's something that they do from a very very early age and then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career obviously that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're you know from like anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it like those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school and maybe before that like the earlier you got the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to but there's there's probably some extent to which you can you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring tendency is and I guess one so one interesting example of that I've been reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor he sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone constantly picking up rumors constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else and he's like always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying you're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome so he's like he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process clearly requires enormous working memory requires a very strong basically a very strong poker face like he has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they are at they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature so it requires a lot of the same character traits but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's that's just what he would have done and it would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes those these general skills they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through through deliberate practice in those areas so if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation which in LBJ's case his dad was also a politician so he had this example of this is part of the life script you can't do it but he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while and so he he had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself in addition to his political career yeah yeahDwarkesh Patel 0:30:35I'm glad you brought up the biography I'm reading it right now as well and the other biography by Robert Caro the power broker just for the audience the last episode or the second to last episode in the feed is we go deep into deep into that biography and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects but what is what it is accurate and I think what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great great men about the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries there's many places where I mean I'm sure this is true for you if you understand like the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to care his explanation but the actual like the sort of breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth a reading care for but you know come to think of it so maybe the difference between the cases where you want to price in the parents involvement and the ones where you don't is where in situations like maybe being a politician where it really is about building a network building know-how building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age it might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure you'll like have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where you know everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now you're like a 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far but let me ask you about the care of biography because you had a really interesting comment that I've been warning you about as well in your in your review of the book or in your comment about the book you said it's worth speculating on how many lbg level figures exist today perhaps in domains outside of politics and how many caro level biographers there are who could do them justice so do you have some idea of who these figures are or if not that at least what areas you'd expect them to beByrne Hobart 0:32:34in I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they you know they're they're building a big network they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors you know favors out to them favors they owe to other people and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally want these big big blowups so that's that's one place I would look I think if you try to look at the more you know pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality it's like part of what made lbj's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases could make them more powerful so I'm about a third of the way through master of the senate right now so it's it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the senate more more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone where it's less seniority based so you kind of you need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well that said you could have a really big impact because it is it's another form of leverage so if you are one of a hundred senators or I guess at the point at that point it was 96 senators and you're you're able to exert a lot more influence and be you know be the equivalent to 40 senators for example then you can get a whole lot done because it's it's the us senate but if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the ceo of your company well you're you're already in front of the company like there's only so much extra force you can exert so you you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat and this is another interesting point that is raised early master at the senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians we're we're definitely in a bull market for extremely extremely old politicians in the u.s right now but we've gone through cycles before and one of the things that that tends to cause a reset is the war where wars among other things cause this huge reset in social capital so the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side that is very hard to replicate and so you end up with much younger people in much you know in positions of a lot more power whereas the the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was the 1930s there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but the u.s government was so that's that's how lbj got in and started on his path was that the new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like johnson to to run them so when you look at um you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry where um ambitious people stay away from it like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade for example because um because the industry was like the whatever this institution was was too risk averse you you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens so i think that's that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some some institution some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it so i mean maybe maybe the place to look for the next lbj is um someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's you know 50 percent marvel and says this is disgusting we have to destroy it and i'm going to build something completely different like maybe that person is actually the kind of lbj archetype now the other half of this question is the caro archetype and part of what i found fun about this was that um i felt like caro had this kind of um like he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar his some of his methods were to lbj's because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating iterating just endless patience and then you read about how caro works and he does things like moves to dc for a while talks to everyone in dc befriends people goes to um texas talks you know moves to the hill country and gets to know people there he has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like um it's sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes caro will just narrate it's that he'll he will go from here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while i was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946 and sometimes he he will basically come out and say i waited until the person who paid this bribe had alzheimer's and then i asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it so that's how i know and um there's this line that caro keeps quoting from lbj which i think was from lbj's speech coach days or speech like debate team coach days where his line was if you do everything you will win and caro does everything um so i think probably the population of caros is smaller than the population of lbj's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing a canonical book about one particular person or you know writing two canonical books two canonical works on um two important people but maybe a lot of those people are just doing thingsDwarkesh Patel 0:39:03other than typing man there's so many threads there that i i'm like tempted to just spend the rest of the episode just digesting um and talking about that but one thing that i like there's so many interesting things about caro's story uh and i guess the impact is that one of them is there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact especially in like circles like effective altruism of trying to crunch the numbers and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before the power broker is written where you say i'm going to spend by the way this is he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote the power broker but he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his journalism before the power broker so he's like a top level uh investigative journalist and then you say here's i'm going to spend my talents i'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by robert moses and i'm going to document all this i'm going to write a book where that's like million words or something and but in fact that's he probably didn't think about it this way right but what was the result he probably that book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics uh think about politics think it probably changed how urban governance is done how we think about accountability and transparency for good or ill right depending on your perspective um and just that example alone really makes me suspect the sort of number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just like i don't know i gotta understand how the you know from procurus perspective i gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power he doesn't and it like completely transforms uh you know how urbanByrne Hobart 0:40:41governance has been yeah you know it actually uh kind of looping back to the the parental influence thing i think part of what happened was that the more caro dug into it the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project and there's there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you you you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why and um you know you're picking up information a lot faster you get that that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you what you previously knew and that's just a really intoxicating feeling and i can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources so you know if you're caro you've gone through the new york times archives you've read through all of the all the external coverage of what people said about most time and then you start talking to people and you realize here are things that were we got completely wrong like we thought moses didn't want x to happen and it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make x happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing um you so i think that but what happens is you you build this ongoing motivation and then you can you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before and i think if um if you start out saying i'm going to write a million words about how cities are run um you will probably fail but if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how robert moses operated and what he did and then you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities then then maybe maybe you actually get there and yeah so um and and maybe some of this is like you you want to have an adversary like a lot of these like the carol books do seem partly to be this cross-examination of of who he's writing about and often he he seems to have very mixed feelings like he you know with um i think one of the one of the really interesting things in um in the years of lyndon johnson is the carol's description of um coke stevenson and how they contrast him with lbj because it's really clear that uh carol's politics are completely opposed to stevenson's and that when carol's writing about lbj there's like the good stuff he did which is the great society and his his participation in the new zealand and there's a bad stuff which is anything that wasn't bad and um so he clearly like he likes what lbj accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of coke stevenson and kind of wishes him well but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything and so it's like a you know it's partly partly carol debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly debating with himself and asking these very long-standing questions about whether or not justify the ends and you know would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting lbj steal an election in 1948 and i don't think that like if he's good at his writing he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as as long as the things you want come from powerful ambitious people who will do anything to win hey guysDwarkesh Patel 0:44:14i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far if you are i would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the group chat you have with your friends post it on twitter send it to somebody who you think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation yep yep no and it's worth remembering that it takes him a decade to write each of those volumes and each of that i guess in the case of the power broker or that entire book but in the course of a decade just imagine how many times you would change your mind on a given subject and you really notice this when you read different paragraphs of like for example the power broker where you notice um early on if you just read the first third or the first half the power broker you're like clearly caro is like writing about uh uh robert moses the way he writes about robert linden johnson where it's like yeah this guy had some flaws but like look at the cool s**t he did and the awesome stuff he did for new york um and then the tone completely changes but you gotta remember it's he's just writing this so many years and uh in between i do want to uh talk about the thing about you know young people being able to you know young people i guess a war being a catalyst for young people entering an arena i did an interview of um alexander mikorovitsky i forgot his last name but anyways he wrote a really interesting book about the polyonic wars and this is actually one of the things we talked about um there's a line from war and peace where one of the russian aristocrats is mad that his son is joining uh is joining the war and he goes you know it's is that man napoleon you you've all seen him and now you all want to like go off to war and i'm curious um like filmmaking doesn't seem like we're super quantitative and super smart and super competent like somebody who has thymus and the desire to dominate and the desire to achieve recognition uh i mean do you really think he's making films like where where is he really i mean is he like still trying to start a startup or is that like now a decade too old and now he's trying to dominate some other arena i mean maybe the lame answer is we don'tByrne Hobart 0:46:31actually know because um the way like you know paul graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and i think it's called the power of the marginal and it's all about how the the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them and what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done so you it's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because you your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and you know if it were very easy venture capital would not have such such skewed returns so yeah so maybe maybe it is like harder to harder to optimize for what area do you look for maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit you know quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity and you know it's like good to have that sort of dread list like I I had that mental list of like you know if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list like tons of redundant information and the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through like if someone pinged me it was like we really need someone to fix that can you come and do this I'd be sorely tempted feel the same way about Google Finance like if if if someone emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good I'd be tempted but I think thinking of like what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries you probably find the the the proto successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for well if I were you know if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities which one would I have ended up picking because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for it's looking for so yeah can't quite be done that way yeah yeah yeah I want to go backDwarkesh Patel 0:49:05to that thing you said a moment ago about how you couldn't have written a million words that were as impactful about just you know how cities work but if you just wrote 500 words at a time about how Robert Moses accumulated power did the things he did you can actually have a really interesting and influential piece of work is that how you see the diff that you can't write one million words at a time about where where technology is going what's happening with the productivity slowdown what's happening with all these emerging industries but if you just write 2,000 words a day about what's happening with any particular you know company or industry then you can compile this really interesting overall worldview aboutByrne Hobart 0:49:44finance and tech that's the hope and I might be projecting things about my own attention span on to on to Cairo when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it but I do think you know I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of you know strategy breakdown things like that like and that's that's one of the reasons that I spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just not just the the totally cynical amoral stuff but the other stuff you wrote at the same time which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition and and I think that it contributes a lot to to writing about these individual companies like you know technology changes a lot humans change very slowly so if you if you want to understand technology you do have to study that this specific object level case of what is this thing what does it do differently what is it a substitute for what are the compliments to it etc but if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X like why why did they fire fire this person and not that person and why did they choose to acquire this other business why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it's it doesn't make much sense well you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down sometimes they turn to be right sometimes they turn to be very very wrong but you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history and they're often just a lot more fun to read about whereas like you know if you you can read about things like board spending too much money on the pencil and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and that working out very nicely but you know you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational strictly rational decision making and you know only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for for the attacker and even then maybe not suchDwarkesh Patel 0:52:04great outcome often considered the that particular question about where trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method for I mean if you think about like what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled and pride filled you know completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had like 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible or is it like Elon Musk like 20 years ago where he's like yeah I did PayPal and now let's you know let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles yeah exactly and in each of these cases there's there's like so many analogies to like complete bust and there's so many analogies to oh this is just like part one of this grand plan and how do you figure out what which one is happening like how do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing you know star the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and thenByrne Hobart 0:53:18you write about how it was obvious all along like yeah you you really don't and I mean even there are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous so like Alexander you know conquered most of the known world at least most of the world that that people knew of around where he grew up and and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end right you know there there could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire on the other hand like reading the story battle to battle a lot of it it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough enough to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again and so he's sort of you know was sort of being chased by his his obligations the entire way through until he finally got got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and and a lot of land that could give people instead of just giving money so giving them like bars of silver and things so so yeah even even that story it's very hard to say you know he he rolled the dice a bunch of times and he won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win maybe it was sort of like he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s in terms of how you would figure it out in advance like I think some of it does come down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have have a long-term plan but then lots of like you know there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute you know five-year plan does not have a good connotation Stalin had some of those and didn't turn out well for for a lot of people so even within that there's there's some difficulty in evaluating like I think there's kind of that that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck they keep succeeding on the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're they're planning to do maybe I guess another thing would be is there is there like an end state that they can get to because I think you know someone like Alexander he basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went not all the way home but went to like the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied but you know if if the story if you look at someone if the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits you can say like you go this far and you don't go any farther because you've actually finished your task so something like you know I think like I don't actually know who was who what which generals were on the other side of Napoleon but the ones who chased him out of Russia like for them the master plan was not we're going to conquer all of Europe the master plan was like we're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter so so maybe that's that's another way to constrain it but then then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people it's like one way to one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions so you might and in that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances so so maybe maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have they have their skills they have their opportunities they can they can go after some things maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep keep being bolder until you eventually fail on most particularly I I don't really I don't really understand it I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business it could also just have been fun and seems fun so far and I think like that you know the the pursuit of fun is is not to be discounted like you if you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things varying levels of entertainment but it may be that the only thing that is actually like truly novel thrill seeking fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into you know what it is and it is like there's I think Rostad that at this this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is a it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies so now you know if something if Twitter does something you don't like there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious there's really there's no recourse and you know there's there's nothing lower status than someone like arguing with someone in authority about how serious or they should take your jokes there's like you know it's like a weird component of and it works both ways so like there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged in a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit they're playing a role they know it's funny they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously and then you get to say these people are all like this they're all crazy but it is like it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to you know be able to be like righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they've been serious that would have been an appalling thing to say but they obviously weren't if you if you can get away with saying no I actually don't think it was a joke at all these people are humorless and they must have been totally serious then that's that's actually you know that's cool that's high status makes you impressive but yeah must like must must rule as this more you know personal monarch I think it's a it speaks to this question of legitimacy like why do people trust moderation and why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do and you can either say these are like really high quality institutions so you know you can take the discourse as the oblivion approach and say we built these systems such that anyone can be dropped in and can do a reasonably good job

WHAT DO SELLERS HAVE TO FOCUS ON TODAY?If you are still selling by spitting made-up facts to your prospects, you are living under a rock. Aaron is back to discuss what sellers should focus on nowadays, which is helping prospects find the right solutions and making the right buying decisions because they have access to information, and your facts don't matter anymore. Tune in and discover what really matters in selling today with the latest episode of Sales Transformation. Want to book more meetings and close more deals? Start selling the way your buyers want to buy with Humantic AI! Stop sending boring sales e-mails and start sending personalized GIFs and Memes with VIDU.io!TRANSFORMING MOMENTSProspects today have so much informationSellers are dealing with the flipsideEveryone can google and check the facts you presentHelp people find solutions and make the best decisions, not talk about facts“I think there was this stereotype of salespeople back from the movies in the 70s, 80s, and the 90s, about hardcore selling. You get the car salesman stereotype all the time. You can't do that anymore. You can't just make up facts. You can't just sell someone on things. Because if I'm a buyer, you leave the room, I Google everything you just said to fact-check it.” - AARON: You can't just make up facts anymore these days Connect with AaronAaron Bock | Opkalla | Opkalla.comConnect with CollinLinkedIn | YouTube | Newsletter | Twitter | IG | TikTok

Gökçen Şahin, M.Sc., who successfully completed her master's degree in Genetics, has just registered for the PhD program to start her education this fall. Technological advances in the field of genetics in the last 20 years have brought with it a large pile of data waiting to be made sense of. Gökçen will do her PhD in bioinformatics in order to learn how to draw meaningful conclusions from these data and to find solutions for this purpose. Gökçen, who loves to learn new things and is curious, developed a machine learning model in her thesis that can predict the muscle heteroplasmy ratio of patients with given demographic features, family history, and clinical table caused by a mitochondrial DNA point mutation causing mitochondrial diseases. She made these by learning everything herself. She reviewed more than 450 publications fastidiously and worked with doctors to generate her data. Gokcen, who wants to improve herself in this field, wants to have a solid foundation. Therefore, she decided to take her education in this field. Gökçen actually qualified to enter another PhD program last year for the same purpose and started her education. During this period, she was diagnosed with ADHD in December and in January, she learned that she is autistic. While the diagnoses were a great shock at first, she shared her diagnoses with her supervisor in order to pass this period in a healthy way. Afterwards, she was exposed to various mobbing by this supervisor. The severity of mobbing had increased over time. And in February, she was fired by him from the PhD program in an e-mail. Not long after, her ex-boyfriend's family, who learned that she is autistic and ADHDer, did not want them to get married, and they broke up after a 2-year relationship, which was a first for Gökçen. She had many reasons to lose hope. But the opposite happened. The diagnoses resulted in her accepting herself. She faced many challenges throughout her life and she saw that the challenges she experienced was the result of not being accepted as she was. Realizing this, she wanted to go on further and apply for a new program, but she also had fears. She explained everything to her new supervisor before application. And she was encouraged by new supervisor to apply for the program. Now she's telling people that “Being autistic and ADHD is part of the diversity in nature and being able to live as ourselves, to be free of masks is what we have a right to do. The only thing that can hinder this view is when we begin to look at ourselves as people who do not accept us as we are. When we come back from this mistake, we start living a healthy life. Because not being able to be what we are, not being accepted is ignoring us and it hurts. Nobody has the right to this. We are a part of nature, just like everything else." This is a great one- enjoy!   In this episode Peter and Gökçen discuss:   00:40 - Thank you so much for listening and for subscribing! 00:50 - Apologies for the near horrid audio- Peter is still in a hotel. 00:56 - Intro and welcome Gökçen Şahin! 02:45 - Your story is incredible; and it's frustrating professors would still be so ignorant! 03:21 - So you said that you wrote something out that you wanted to share with us, feel free!  03:35 - On being accepted for PhD programs 04:03 - On the first meeting with her supervisor/professor 04:51 - On the 2nd meeting with her supervisor 05:50 - What happened next? 08:16 - A little while later… 08:45 - Studying about ADHD 10:00 - On being diagnosed by a child psychologist and then given meds 10:19 - Her professor's reaction 11:05 - Back to the psychologist 11:51 - On being made a study and the discovery of Autism 13:00 - Amazing. A couple of questions… 13:15 - The fallout and heartbreak 14:00 - Did you go back to your former professor? 15:05 - What types of things that you used to think were negatives, do you now understand to be positives? 15:56 - Fun fact: Your subconscious mind controls about 80percent of what you think; be mindful in your self-talk/inner dialogue.  16:24 - On being happy inside and being kind to yourself! 17:44 - What advice would you give to someone who has been told that they are broken? 17:55 - THIS PART.  RIGHT HERE. 19:56 - What happened with her new supervisor? 21:30 - How can people find more about you? @GKCNSHN on Twitter 21:30 - Guys, as always thanks so much for subscribing! Do you have a cool friend with a great story? We'd love to hear. I'm www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via email at peter@shankman.com or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  21:40 - Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits  — TRANSCRIPT via Descript and then corrected.. somewhat:  [00:00:40] Hey guys, Peter, Shankman welcome to another episode of Faster Than Normal. Unfortunately, again, I'm still recording from a hotel. Uh, we should be back in my apartment within a week or so, but oh my God, has it been not fun? Anyway, I do wanna talk about something fun today. I have an amazing story here I was on Twitter and someone tagged me in a post and said, you've gotta read what's going on here. And I was introduced to a one whose name. Uh I'm I'm despite my best efforts, I'm probably gonna screw up and I wanna say it's Gokcen shine and I'm pretty, I'm sure I'm relatively close there, but lemme tell you something about Gokcen was in a. PhD program. And, uh, she was doing her PhD in bioinformatics in order to learn how to draw meaningful conclusions from data and find solutions. She was, she loved new things; she's very curious. She discovered a machine learning model and her thesis that could predict the muscle hetero PLAs ratio of patients with given demographic features basically stuff way beyond my pay grade. Right. She's dealing with Mitocondrial DNA, uh, point mutation. I mean, incredible stuff. So what happens. She gets into another PhD program and gets diagnosed with ADHD in January. She learns that she has ADHD and learns that she's autistic. And while this diagnosis works a great shock to her, she shared a diagnosis with a supervisor, and guess what happened with her supervisor? Her supervisor fired her from her PhD program via email! Okay. That's like breaking up with someone over a text message, not cool! Okay. And then after that, her ex-boyfriend's family or her boyfriend at the time who learned that she was a autistic and ADHD, did not want them to get married and they broke up a over a 2 year relationship. Unbelievable. But despite having many reasons to lose hope the opposite happened and the diagnosis resulted in G accepting herself and saw these challenges for what they were through her life, realizing that she applied for a new program. Got in. And now she tells everyone that being autistic and ADHD is part of the diversity in nature. And being able to live as ourselves to be free of masks is what we have a right to do. I am so excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here today Gokcen.  [00:02:41] Gokcen: Uh, thank you so much for inviting me, Peter,  [00:02:44] Peter: uh, an amazing, an amazing story. I, I, I, I, I remember reading it on Twitter and just being blown away that, that, that, you know, of, of all things, professors could still be that, uh, closed mind truly, truly just incredible. [00:02:58] Gokcen: Actually leaving it was very hard, but eventually I just, uh, get something at you get new thing at you then .Right now I'm totally okay.  [00:03:10] Peter: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like you took this, you know, as, as, as difficult as it was, you saw this as an opportunity and, and, you know, used it to your, to your advantage. [00:03:20] Gokcen: Sure, sure.  [00:03:21] Peter: So, so you said that you wrote something out that you wanted to share with us, feel free.  [00:03:25] Gokcen: Yes. Okay. Uh, you can just, uh, cut me if I exceed the time.  [00:03:29] Peter: really not a problem. Go ahead. Okay, go ahead. [00:03:32] Gokcen: Uh, just let me mention about myself a bit. I completed my master on genetics in 2021. I am accepted to PhD program and I will, uh, start my education in the field of bioformatics and system biology in this semester. I was actually accepted to PhD program last year, too. Uh, three acceptance. Actually, I got three acceptance last year from three different universities. In the one that I choose I was fired after six months by my supervisor. Uh, I met with him on 6th of July, 2021. In the meeting I mentioned about my background, about my thesis, about my current knowledge in this field and I, um, What I want to do, et cetera. And he spoke very positively about my answers. Uh, and he said, a few people at your level can answer these questions so well, you know why you did what you did. Um, so I said to him that I didn't get any education on this topic. I. In my thesis, uh, I just did something learning on internet, et cetera, but I didn't get any, um, base education on this topic so I need someone to guide me. I'm looking for, um, my master and he said, okay.  In the second meeting, uh, he wanted me to prepare a project, uh, based on my performance. I will get a chance to apply. I finished my project and email, but he was kind of person that don't answer emails. Meanwhile, I was accepted by two other universities. I dunno why, but I see him as someone that I can trust, but I was totally wrong. Anyway, uh, I sent so many emails to myself, to him. Eventually he wrote something like this. Uh, you are a person who tries to do a given test properly. Is determined by technically needs to move forward. However, I think it will not cause any problems with study. So then I, I applied, accepted government accepted me, a university accepted me in the interview. Supervisor accepted me. So, um, let's start . Our courses was removed. Uh, however, I went to Institute for a journal club and was going meet with my friends, uh, my team friends. Uh, we were supposed to meet with each other. I expected that they will introduce themselves. Ask my name, myth[?] With me, ask about my background, et cetera. Just some friendly talking, but it didn't happen. They were really cold people. After journal club I went our teams room supervisor came too. Uh, he started to talk with his students. They got along very well in a kind of manner that I don't have any idea. Supervisor, um, open potato chips package. He offered to everyone in the room. I politely said that I didn't want, um, he asked why; I said that I have a high intolerance to lactose and I cannot eat packaged foods. Then very interestingly, he got very closer to my ear, very closer and started to eat potato chips there. It was not nice at all, but I thought that probably this was how they make jokes. Um, because I can't understand jokes most of the time. And I. even can't understand why they are made. Um, while he was eating chips. I, he wanted me to ask a question to him. I asked, uh, why he put advanced statistics in the first term while introductory statistics in the second term, he started to laugh again and with his students and said, oh, did I really do this? Oh my God. And last lovely. Um, In the period of this course choice he didn't say anything to me. Um, so these two courses actually was his own courses, but he didn't warn me. He accepted my course choices and not surprisingly, I couldn't succeed because I was almost your own statistics. And this course what was advanced, I said to him, I wish you would inform me at the beginning, but I will, uh, I said that I will fail in this course and take first of all the introductory course and take this course again later. He said, OK. Uh, one day he called me to his room, uh, take a white paper in front of him, asked me, do you know this topic. I said, no, he wrote the paper. Do you know, this topic. I said, no; he wrote the paper. Uh, he wrote so many topics that I didn't know about. And he said, okay, go and study them. You should be ready because you are here to do my job. I will do my job. Uh, you will do my job, then I will be able to look something else. Um, I didn't like this attitude at all. I didn't study, I couldn't study what he gave me because this is not the way that I can study. Uh, But eventually he started to get angry with me. Uh, these times I was wondering so much about ADHD, uh, because my psychologist thought that I have. She was, um, nervous because uh, she also got a diagnosis for a while ago and she told me about the common traits that we share. And then I started to study so deeply on ADHD in a kind of manner that hyperfocus . I was collecting my traits to tell all of them to my psychiatrist. Uh, the hospital that I'm going is a medical hospital of Istanbul for, of medicine of Istanbul university. So doctors are working there with rotation, for education. Each doctor see patients for just one month. Uh, when I went to hospital for ADHD evauation , this was maybe the only chance that I have got in my whole life because doctor was a child psychiatrist She evaluated me. It was the 24th of December 2021 I diagnosed with ADHD . Gave me a drug after this session. She said she wanted to see again, very soon. I thought that she will probably ask me whether the drugs work or not.  I told, um, my diagnosis to my supervisor, I was waiting some understanding, but instead he said that, um, a man without hands cannot be a Shoemaker and no matter how much he wants. But if he works hard, he can become a marathon runner. Maybe he [you] should try another sector. I. Trying to explain that ADHD is not a kind of attention deficit, actually. It's a problem of regularizing of pay attention wherever we can focus, whatever we do more than neurotypicals. But he didn't seem to understand at all. And maybe didn't listen at all. Um, it was 12th of January. I went to a hospital again, I told my psychiatrist that, um, about this, uh, supervisor's unpleasant behavior. And she told me to relax because she said no one had right to kick me out of the schools. I informed her about the effect of drug. Then she asked me tons of questions I didn't understand because these questions was not related with medicine or ADHD. After this session she just said that she wanted to invite me to their department community meeting with the justification of I was their patient for long and she wanted, uh, her professor also evaluate me. Then I said, okay, but this wasn't seem normal to me after going home. I checked each, each question and still didn't understand and what is them about? I Google check [unintelligible] five, watch videos, one thing, but I got shocked. Me? Autism? Is that possible? Then the face to face community meeting the professor who is the head of the psychiatric department of the hospital, and almost all psychs of the hospital was there approximately 20, 30 doctors. And this time professor asked me so many questions and all of them evaluated. I shared my bad language too, because I sit to someone, uh, after the meeting, my own psych took me her room and explained that I'm autistic. Uh, it was 26th of January this year. Uh, so, and my age is 29. It's surprising.  [00:12:55] Peter: So, uh, it it's, let me, let me interrupt just, just for a minute, because I, I, I am, I am grateful to you for telling your story. I have, I have a couple of questions that I, I think my audience would wanna know are on the answer to as well. What, what did you, when you were told by your professor that a Shoemaker cannot make shoes, if he doesn't have hands, how did that make you feel?  [00:13:15] Gokcen: Terrible because you feel like you don't have an ability to think, have an ability, don't have an ability to do something. Uh, you don't have a brain. You cannot think, you cannot be a scientist. Uh, these are, these are incredibly bad things. And, uh, you know what happens in after he said all this to me, I started to cry very deeply and he just look at me with a cold face and it was really horrible.  [00:13:54] Peter: When you let's fast forward to when you were accepted into your new program? Um, I'm I was curious, you didn't mention this. Did you at all, at any point, go back to this professor and tell him that you were, that you made into this new program?  [00:14:08] Gokcen: Uh, no, I didn't. I didn't.  [00:14:11] Peter: Do you have any desire to do that?  [00:14:14] Gokcen: Uh, actually, I have a really big desire to tell him, um, in a, in maybe I know government education department or something. I really don't want to see him again anymore. [00:14:30] Peter: Right. I understand that. It just seems to me that, that I think there's, you know, for what he's done and had the way he did it, uh, there should be some consequences for him. Um, you know, that's a, obviously a bigger story, but I do think that that's something you shouldn't, shouldn't just let go.  [00:14:45] Gokcen: Um, and I will tell, um, more about what he did. Actually. There is so much bad things too, and it's coming.  [00:14:55] Peter: Well, let's focus. Let's focus on the positives for a second. So let's fast forward to the point where you were accepted into the new program. Yes. What have you noticed? What have you noticed about yourself since your diagnosis? What types of things that you used to think were negatives are, do you now understand to be positives and things like that? [00:15:14] Gokcen: Uh, could you repeat the question again, please?  [00:15:17] Peter: Um, now that you're diagnosed, you know, for instance, I'll give you an example. My, uh, my ability to, to multitask I realize is a, is a positive, but when I was in school, uh, it was framed as not being able to pay attention. And so I thought it was a negative. Yes. Right. Once I was diagnosed with ADHD, I realized that it could be a positive. So I'm, I'm curious as to what sort of things that, that you might have thought of as bad things, um, have you since maybe sort of rethought of as possibly good things now that you understand sort of where your, how your brain works.  [00:15:53] Gokcen: Um, actually, there are lots of things like that until to the diagnosis I always thought that I am weird because everybody in your environment say that you are weird. And when they say until that age, when everybody say this, eventually you also believe them. Um, but I actually, without thinking them, I was already happy in my inside. I couldn't show it to the people, but I was happy too inside because I was, um, I love, uh, in, in a way that what makes me Gokcen and everything. Every trait of autism or ADHD, give me that they are my traits and this is, these are my parts. And I love myself. Uh, but after diagnosis, I can say it loudly that I love myself.  [00:16:54] Peter: I think that that in itself is an amazing story right there. The fact that you've been able to; understanding sort of how your brain works has allowed you to be kinder to yourself, right?  [00:17:04] Gokcen: Sure. Because I able to make this master thesis, which is very, uh, hard actually in that time, I didn't know any knowledge about machine learning and I apply and even I created my own data set. Uh, examining more than, uh, 450 articles. This was a huge job. And needs a really strong attention. So this is why ADHD is my superpower and autism, my superpower. Um, yes.  [00:17:44] Peter: What would you tell, what would you tell students or people who were in your position who might have been told that they were broken as well? What would you, what advice would you give to them?  [00:17:55] Gokcen: Um, the thing that really saved my life is, um, just accept yourself as you are, because you are incredible, whatever other people say. Um, And be always kind. This is for everyone. Uh, as Robin Williams said, this, the quote that I love so much: Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know, nothing about. Be kind, always. Because until the time of the diagnosis, I had so many tons of psychological problems. I even stay one month in mental health hospital, like a prison. I suicide twice, uh, heavy drugs. Therapies, tons of therapies. None of them worked. Everybody thought that you are not normal. You just want, don't want to be alive. But, um, but this is not true. Because if you can discover yourself, this is a gift, not a curse. Yeah. And after diagnosing all of the psychological problems just gone away. And I just right now use just one drug and this is for, to, to make it gradually decrease. Uh, and very soon that I will give up all the medicines I will take none of them.  [00:19:26] Peter: That is wonderful. What a great, what a great story. I love that, you know, when I saw your original tweet, I was sort of blown away about how anyone could be that sort of close-minded, um, especially in education where you're supposed to have an open mind, you're supposed to, uh, embrace that. But, um, it seems to me Gokcen that you've definitely come out on top of this, that you have, you have come out the winner in this story, and I hope that you keep writing and I hope that you keep tweeting and keep sharing your story with the world because you're an inspiration.  [00:19:54] Gokcen: Thank you so much. Uh, what happened lastly, I wanna share with you. I told my new supervisor about a bit about my situation, and she said; uh, you have had a bad experience, but, uh, don't be discouraged. I'm sure that, uh, you will be much more happier in here. Uh, there are bad peoples in the world, but fortunately they're good ones too. I am grateful to her. Uh, but when I said that I'm grateful she to accepted me, she said that I didn't do anything. You deserve it. We evaluated you as we did to all students. And you deserve it. This is so precious because people pity you uh, about your autism about your ADHD, and this is especially so in my country. But my dear supervisor treated me like she tries to everyone and she didn't show sympathy because I'm autistic. She said I was accepted because I deserved; this is so precious. [00:21:00] Peter: I love that. I love that. What a wonderful story. Gokcen, Thank you so much for taking the time. My pleasure. Give us your, give us your Twitter account so people can follow you.  [00:21:09] Gokcen: Uh, sure. Um, my, my, uh, name with, uh, letters, uh, G K C N S H N. This is my Twitter. Thank you so much.  [00:21:21] Peter: This. Awesome. Thank, thank you so much for taking the time. We're definitely gonna have you back in several months to talk about, to give us an update on what's going on.  [00:21:28] Gokcen: Thank you so much. You can.  [00:21:30] Peter: All right guys, as always, thanks for listening to fast than normal. We will see you next week with a brand new episode. Hopefully I'll be back in my office and not in our hotel room and we will talk to you soon. Stay safe, stay well.    Credits: You've been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We're available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I'm your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at shankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you've heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week!

In this podcast episode, I go into the mind of someone looking for bookkeeping services. I Google search bookkeeping services, review what pops up, and check out a well known competitor to small bookkeeping businesses…Bench.What are they doing right on their website and how can we make adjustments to provide our viewers with an even better experience?Resources:ProAdvisor Marketinghttps://proadvisor-marketing.com Facebook Group - The Meeting Roomhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/proadvisorsandaccountants

Want to know how you can deploy a smart warehouse for your business? Today's guest is Dan Gilmore of Softeon, a company that provides a full suite of flexible and robust end-to-end supply chain software solutions to deliver success. He joins Joe Lynch to talk about the idea and technology behind their system. They discuss some of the big trends impacting warehouses, e-commerce, and retail. From labor shortages to automation, Dan enlightens on the benefits of WMS and WES for any business. Tune in to better understand the perks of this new smart technology for optimizing your business! The Smart Warehouse With Dan Gilmore Our topic is the smart warehouse with my friend Dan Gilmore. How's it going, Dan? It's great. I'm happy to be here. I'm glad I'm finally getting to interview you. Please introduce yourself, your company, and where you are calling from. I'm a Chief Marketing Officer of a supply chain software company called Softeon. Our company is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, outside of Dallas Airport. I happen to be in the Dayton/Cincinnati, Ohio area. What does Softeon do? It's a supply chain software company, primarily a supply chain execution. The company was founded in 1999. Our first customer all the way back then was the L'Oreal, and we proceeded to build out a suite of solutions that were brought in deep capability. That includes warehouse management systems, and all the stuff that goes around warehouse management systems including labor and resource management, slotting optimization, and yard management. A newer thing which we will get into because it's critical to what's happening in terms of the smart warehouse is something called warehouse execution systems, which have been around for a while but gained prominence in the last couple of years as a way to optimize and orchestrate order fulfillment level at a capability that's beyond even very good tier ones. This category of stuff is called distributed order management, which has to do with the optimal sourcing of products based on customer commitments as well as network capacities constraints in how do I get the lowest cost alternative that meets the customer needs? It's a very prominent in omnichannel commerce. It is almost essential in retail but we are having a lot of B2B type of successes in distributed order management as well. There are some other things that could give a flavor to what we do. You started well before eCommerce was a thing. Do you still support stores and that kind of warehousing? Traditional WMS type of capabilities for retailers, would largely be store replenishment. Now, we are moving into eCommerce fulfillment. Many retailers are also looking to have a lot of activity at the store level, whether that's buying online, pick up in-store, curbside pickup or store fulfillment. We've got some solutions there, both in terms of the distributed order management that I referenced. It is the tool going that says, “The best place to fulfill this order from based on the time commitments as well as inventory availability, labor availability, etc. is store 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,” and then have the ability to first identify where it's the right location. That could be obviously a DC, a third-party facility or something like that. The first word is the best place to source it from, and if it's a store, we have a store module that facilitates the inventory transactions, picking transactions, and shipping at a store level. That became a thing. Target is one of those companies that if you buy something online from them, they are more likely to ship from their stores these days. I have seen and the figure keeps rising. The whole market has changed. The more high-tech feel and touch, the less back-breaking work and less bending over and lifting heavy cases. It's like 80% or 90%. Let's say 90%. That's the number I had in my mind too. They are doing them from the store, which is incredible. Before we get into all that, tell us a little bit about you. Where did you grow up and go to school? Give us some career highlights and bullet points before you join Softeon. I'm an Ohio guy. My whole life, I grew up in Akron, Cleveland area, and then got a job with NCR after grad school. I got an MBA from the University of Akron. I got a job at NCR that was here in Dayton. I was a Product Manager in charge of barcode and data collection. The way serendipity works, I moved from barcode data collection systems to wireless systems and then got into WMS. I was into consulting for a while. I have done a lot of marketing in the space. I was also Chief Marketing Officer at the Red Prairie before it got acquired by JDA and became ultimately Blue Yonder. Earlier in my life, I spent a couple of years implementing WMS, a couple of major projects down here in the Cincinnati area that helped me learn a lot about how the technology works and what's good and less good. Notably, in 2003, I started a publication called Supply Chain Digest, which changed the face of online supply chain and logistics, news, and coverage. I still keep a light hand on it. I still write a column once a week still for Supply Chain Digest. I have read that. I wrote a lot of blog posts in the past. When you are a writer, I have joked that “My research is a little different than a professor's research, I Google.” You start to realize which publications have good content when you are a blogger. The bar is a little lower for a blogger than it is for somebody who is writing in a publication. I would say, “Supply Chain Digest always had good stuff.” When and why did you join Softeon? It has been a few years now. I had done a little bit of side consulting with Softeon before joining, and I was impressed with the breadth and depth of the software and the number of innovative capabilities, but as important as that is, lots of companies have good software. We think we've got leading-edge software but the approach to customers and success - I have never seen a company that consistently puts its own interests behind its customers on a regular basis. We are not going to let anything get in the way of a successful implementation. That's a direct record that's unequal in the marketplace. It's the care and concern for success at the customer level and not looking at everything through a lens of only professional services hours if I can sell or something like that. It was a different attitude. It intrigued me, and plus, the company needed some help in the marketing area to get that message out. The combination of those factors led me to join Softeon. Our topic is the smart warehouse. Obviously, things have changed quite a bit in this business. Talk about some of the big trends that are out there that are impacting warehousing, eCommerce, and retail. It impacts everybody. Most of the audience is going to say they are living this or these are big surprises but it's nice to still put it all in context, the growing distribution labor shortage and there's a shortage of manufacturing. It's very acute. Everywhere you go, that's what you hear about the turnover levels, retention, and even with the greatest rising substantially. That's everyone's concern. After about a decade of very flat wage growth in warehousing and distribution until a few years ago, now, all of a sudden, the costs are taken off. Amazon has over $20 an hour with attractive signing bonuses in many parts of the country. They now offer parental leave for twenty weeks. I saw it on TV. That would be a very attractive benefit. That's the advantage. Target announced that they were raising their wage in both stores and distribution centers, not all markets but in some markets, by $24 an hour. That's $48,000 a year, and assume there's probably some overtime in there, whatever husband and wife are making up, for example. They are working at a Target DC in those markets, you could be pulling in $100,000 a year for a family, which is not bad money. [caption id="attachment_7940" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: With the e-commerce-driven cycle time pressure, it's unbelievable how fast you can get products these days.[/caption]   This has come up on my show a few times. I'm getting too old for that kind of work, and I can't walk 10 miles a day but if I had a choice, we need to make that job easier. We are going to get to that because this is what technology does. It also makes the job more attractive when they can say, “I go to that job, and I'm learning all this cool technology.” If you can bring somebody in, there's a different feeling when I get to wear all that high-tech gear and use high-tech systems and say, “I'm part of the supply chain,” as opposed to, “I'm a strong back, walk 5 miles a day and nobody gives a crap about me.” There are no questions about that. It's going to be both in terms of the shortage of labor and, second, building to attract people into this career. Now the whole market has changed, that more high-tech feel and touch, less back-breaking work, less bending over and lifting heavy cases, and all the kinds of things to go on and work for a long time. You are spot-on on that dynamic. If we have a shortage, that means the people we do have to be more efficient. The way they can be more efficient is with tech. That's one big trend going on. What's another big trend? There's a bunch in there that interrelated as well. Obviously, the eCommerce-driven cycle time pressure. If you look ay Amazon over your tablet, it's unbelievable how fast you can get products these days, even somewhat obscure products not that long ago, I need a new power cord for my HP computer. Somehow Amazon was able to deliver that the next day. I'm like, “Probably, they have this cable in someplace that they can get it to me one day.” Think of all the thousands of cables that are out there, and they've got mine. The cycle time pressure in that both are in terms of getting the order process from when it drops into the DC and out the door. Obviously, companies are also moving distribution facilities closer to the customer, so the transportation part of the journey is cut down as well. They will remember the specific numbers. It's Home Depot that is building 170 or 180 different local fulfillment centers that are being the largely cross-dock type of facilities that bring bulky items in and get them right to the customer in addition to the big giant warehouses that they already have. It's a fact of life. Eventually, we will teleport or whatever the product from the warehouse because it seems like we are reaching the Laws of Physics there that it can't be here any faster but maybe we will find a way. I remember, many years ago, I was working on a digital marketing project. I was helping this distribution center, nice, concise in Chicago land Peoria. They said we are one-day shipping to 65% of the population of the US. That was always what Indiana, Illinois, and there are so many DCs down in Ohio can always make that claim, and that was good enough. If you said, “I have a DC in the Midwest that can get me to the Eastern Coast, and I have one out West, that was good enough.” We are not seeing that anymore. We are going to get increasingly where same-day delivery becomes a fact of life rather incredible. Amazon and others talk about getting it down to 2 hours or 30 minutes. That's what Target is doing, not with those DCs. We think we will get to Walmart doing some of the same. What's another trend? Obviously, because we are calling the session, we are going to talk about the smart and also the future but it's largely here nowadays. We've got smart everything. We've got smart houses, cars, refrigerators, and toothbrushes even. I saw that a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if it's exactly taken off the map but to monitor how often you brush your teeth. What does it mean? Primarily, it's talked about internet connectivity and some analytics around that. The least examples are John Deere, Caterpillar or companies of that kind, putting sensors and other IoT types of devices on their equipment out in the field so they can get a sense of how people are actually using it. They can do predictive maintenance on it. They could say, “Your guys aren't using the equipment as effectively as they could if they changed their techniques.” It's certainly timely. If we are going to almost start things where it's time for the smart warehouse too but we will get into for the rest of the broadcast era left different than more internet connectivity, sensors, and things like that. That can be part of it but it is a small part of it. The bottom line of it is we are entering a new era of where all soccer technologies that are, in fact, much smarter than we have ever had before. I have argued publicly for a couple of years now that we had about twenty years of relatively incremental progress in WMS technology. I used this in speeches before but a few years ago, I was cleaning up my office and running the holidays as I often do when I found an RFP from a major food company for a WMS circuit in 2003. I looked through that and I thought, “This doesn't look all that different than the RFPs we are seeing in 2019, 2020 or whatever year we are looking at that.” I looked at it and said, “The big difference is not in the functionality being asked for. It's that now, a lot of that functionality is, in fact, core product, configurable product than maybe a lot of it had to be achieved through customizations.” That's probably true. Same-day delivery has just become a fact of life. The fundamental way of where WMS operates didn't change all that much give or take from 2000 to 2020 or somewhere in that range. Now, with the smart technologies that we are talking about, they are brought by the world's execution systems in working with WMS, I talked about before. This is a new ball game, and it was going to be fun for the rest of the people here to talk about this. You throw in a new term there. You said warehouse execution system. Those have been around for a while but they are now becoming the norm. It's becoming very prominent, and then the value is starting to be recognized. What is it? A couple of three companies had the belief and correctly, for most of the WMS systems did not care enough about equipment throughput and utilization. We wound up with big peaks and valleys, and anybody have been in a district distribution center, even a busy one. You have seen it where there are all kinds of activity at the beginning and the middle of the wave, then as the wave starts to dissipate even on a big, expensive, huge sortation system, you've got a relatively small number of boxes moving around, waiting for that wave and everything to close out. You said wave. Does that mean the orders come in waves? Yeah. The work is released in what is called pick waves. That's based on any number of different attributes. It could be the carrier schedule, value-added processing that needs to be done or workload balancing across the different pick areas of the company. You organize the work against various attributes that constitute a block of work that's typically referred to as a wave. I know I've got all these trucks that are going to show up and they are taking different orders, so maybe I'm working to that order that's going to fill up that truck. The problem, to your point, is we've got already may be a shortage of headcount in there. Now when we have waves, I'm not being efficient because I've got too much work at one moment and then not enough at another. The whole goal of WMS of what we're talking about with the smart warehouse is overcoming, I mean, obviously, you've got to plan and execute based on the workforce that you have here, and we will talk about that. Having a warehouse management system that gives me stuff was great in the past but you are saying, “I will help you with a WES or Warehouse Execution System. I'm going to help you manage the flow.” Manage the flow work and the resource utilization, and then new ways. Part of that still ties into that interest in level loading or making the flow of goods across an automation system more smooth and consistent because if you can do that, there are a couple of things. First off, the total throughput of the system is likely to be better. Second, if it's a new facility, you could probably get by with a smaller sorter because you are going to be able to utilize it more consistently over a block of time, a shift or over what you want to look at it there. The other breakthrough that Softeon said is that the WES tends its roots and level loading of the automation and better utilization there. The WES works extremely well, even in non-automated facilities or lightly automated facilities. [caption id="attachment_7941" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: The fundamental way a warehouse operates didn't change all that much from 2000 to 2020. But now, with smart technologies, this is a new ball game.[/caption]   As a matter of fact, one of our leading customers did a press release a couple of years back that talked about 50% productivity gain from implementing WES or Warehouse Execution Systems on top of existing Softeon WMS, and doing that in a totally manual environment. Everything is part of a system. You can have a sortation system, goods to person system or put wall system or whatever. It's got a certain capacity, throughputs, inputs, and outputs. Twenty workers walked around on a three-level case pick module. There are systems too. They have inputs, outputs, throughput, and expectations. The one big difference is that with a more manual system, you can throw more bodies at it up to the point of diminishing returns and gain through the port from that area, whereas a heavily automated system is rate as its rating. You are not going to do a whole lot to affect that. Throughput is everything, whether you are a plant, a freight broker or a warehouse. The stuff that goes out the door and that we can charge for is what we want to do. Having a warehouse management system is great. I know there are certain warehouses. Probably the old ones still don't even have that. You are saying to be as efficient and effective as you need to be in the market, you need a warehouse execution system that gets me the flow and that throughput. It may not be for everybody, and there are certain things you can do. We could take your core WMS and add some select capabilities from a full-blown WES if a modest level of that kind of automation is necessary. It's not necessarily for one, and I don't want to position it that way but it's certainly something that you want to take a look at as you get to where you've got a significant number of workers. Even smaller operations, things like the automated release of work to the floor without the human being need needing to be involved, that's going to be attractive even for a mid-size operation. The first thing we need is we need to get into this. WMS is given. You said that there was an incremental improvement for many years. Now, you are starting to see big improvements that may be driven by the market that needed big improvements in recent years. Part of that is this WES. What else is there that's part of that smart warehouse? There's a whole bunch of stuff. First, as a reminder, the automation because automation is tied to the labor shortage. Even a couple of years ago, it was very common to talk to DC managers or logistics executives, and automation wasn't necessarily very high on the radar. Nowadays, almost close to 100% of the companies we talked to, even smaller companies, are looking at automation of some kind. That could be big automation where you've got traditional sortation systems but can be very large, goods to person systems, those kinds of things. There's also a lot of interest in lighter, more flexible, and less expensive technology things like what are called put walls. What's a put wall? In great simplicity, it is a technique or a structure, which is a module with a series of cubby holes or slots. In one of these modules, we have 1 customer that has 80 of these modules. What you do is you pick the orders, then when you come to the put wall, you distribute the order to the different orders that need that product. I batch pick the product. I bring it either mechanically or manually to the put wall. Typically, a series of lights says, “This company wall number 3 here and needs 1 of the skews. Put wall in. This one needs 2 that skew you put two in. This one needs 1 put 1 in.” That process repeats itself until all of the items for a given order are complete within that cubbyhole. That's called putting. That's why it's called a put wall because you are taking the order in back, and then you are putting it into the put wall. Around the backside, lights will turn on that indicate, “This cubbyhole is now complete.” The operator comes up and touches a button typically. That starts the printing of the label in any shipping documentation that's required in the orders packed, shipped, and off you go. It provides a tremendous amount of productivity. It's very flexible. You can start small. We had one customer that started with a 1-foot wall module, then added 8 or 9 more because they liked it, then they added 20 more because they really liked it, and did this all over a couple of three-year types of the period there. For any kind of piece picking, especially of soft goods but other types of products as well but often driven not only by eCommerce with any kind of heavy piece picking operation can be a great solution but you've got to have the right software to do it. You've got that big like almost a shelf you said like cubbies on that I'm putting a product through it. Maybe I walked over, and I got 10 different sweaters, 10 sweaters that are all the same, and this cubby gets one. As I do that, I'm scanning it or it recognizes that it's in there. It's informing the other side of the cubby when the order is complete. It needs two sweaters and a pair of shoes. That's just one more way. What do you call this? Technology is only part of it. The other piece of the cubby that walking up to that, I could be putting those in bins in the old days but this is putting that on steroids. The bottom line is we are entering a new era where all technologies are, in fact, much smarter than we've ever had before. It was just a new way of doing it. There are a lot of people who talk about this in terms of optimizing materials and handling systems because getting this right is not a trivial task. I don't want to steal all my thunder from later on but the ability to rapidly turn these put walls and cubbyholes are the whole key to the success. If it's taking you a long time to do that, you are not getting the throughput that you required and probably wasting your time and money but if you can rapidly turn those by making sure the inventory gets there on time and efficient execution on both sides of the wall, then you've got something that can drive a lot of productivity. I don't know what the number is. There are quite a few customers now that are using put walls. When we would go out to some new customers, we've got some videos to show them an operation, and they are interested in seeing how this works. It's the technology along with mobile robots that you are going to see, any eCommerce but any kind of piece picking as well, you are going to see a lot of adoption. I'm an automotive guy originally. When you used to go through a plant, you would see people doing lifting heavy things when I first started, crouching down and doing functions that were hard on the body. Maybe it's not hard on 1 day, 1 week or 1 month but over 1 year, you are going to have a bad back, shoulders or knees. The same thing happens in these DCS or the warehousing. This automation you are talking about is making it easier on the workers, which means, “Hopefully, I will be able to keep my workers healthy and make that job again more attractive.” One time, I talked to a VP of logistics at Sherwin-Williams, the paint company. He noted that on the manufacturing side of the operation, they were always having people retire, and during retirement, little parties were almost taken. He said, “There was no one that ever retired from the distribution side.” That's because the heavy worker is picking cases of paint as a young man's job. As people got older, they couldn't do that work anymore. People are obviously rethinking that for the aging factor, and then there's another factor, “How do I make the work easier so I can have somebody in their 50s and 60s continuing to do this at distribution center job?” If you gave me a choice to go work in an old school warehouse, go deliver food or deliver groceries, I'm going to do the grocery delivery. I can make decent money, sit in my car, and I don't have to hurt my back, or knees or walk 5 miles a day. We have to make these jobs more attractive or we are not going to be able to keep and get good people. This automation is of such interest to the jobs now that we become more technicians and less of an order pickers. Besides a put wall, what's some other automation you are seeing out there? The automated mobile robots, economists mobile robots or AMRs. There's a huge interest in that. One of the interesting things is that in both put walls and mobile robots, you are seeing a lot of adoption and interest by a third-party logistics companies. This makes the point. In the past, 3PLs were very reluctant to do any kind of heavy automation because they couldn't sync the return on investment with the contracts that they had from the shipper. If the shipper can pay off that equipment, it's going to take 5, 7 or whatever years, and the shippers only keep you where 2 or 3-year contract, the risk of automation is too great in these other kinds of systems. It includes things like voice, picks the lights, and smart cards. They are all connected in some ways. Those kinds of systems can be put in for much less expense, much lower risk, and be incrementally adapted. You can start with three mobile robots and see how you like it, then we have seven more later on or whatever until you get to the optimal point for your operation. The fact that 3PLs are making this kind of investment as a whole new phenomenon and it speaks to the way you can incrementally get into the technology and the high level of payback that they are seeing because we were very strong in the third-party logistics arena, as an aside, so we are seeing it very closely. The number of 3PLs that are interested in this mid-range of lighter picking systems, not heavy automation but it's often somewhat newer technologies. It speaks to the changes we are seeing out there in the marketplace. Those are robots. Depending on the facility, they are not necessarily always replacing people. I talked to the CEO or president of DHL. He says, “We thought we would be replacing people with robots. The more robots we add to a facility, the more work we end up getting for that facility. We ended up hiring more people.” Everyone has a shortage. Job is going unfilled. If the robots are taking some of that slack but very few case studies of people that are adopting these technologies, they are still looking for people who have been able to be on. [caption id="attachment_7942" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: WES (Warehouse Execution System) will help manage the flow of work and resource utilization.[/caption]   What's another thing we need for that smart warehouse? Let's get into it in some more detail. We talked about some of the core software components, things like warehouse management systems and warehouse execution systems. A platform for integrating this automation with both heavy and/or traditional and newer age capabilities. There are some enabling technologies, things like rules engines, simulation and some other things. The core world's operations excellence is still the foundation. How do I get that right? That typically involves traditional WMS-type capabilities. What does that mean? What defines a warehouse management system versus an inventory system is the pervasive use of mobile terminals, barcode scanning, wireless RF devices or whatever term you want to use there, and then a lot of system directed activity, this whole notion of task management and task monitoring, where the system is orchestrating the different traditional paths of put away, receiving put away, picking replenishment, etc., and support for multiple strategies around that. We have lots of different picking method options, different replenishment strategies that I can use, and things that have been around for a while like slotting optimization, detailed labor management, labor reporting, and things like that. The foundation is core operations excellence. That's what everyone should strive to get to but nowadays, there's no ability to take that even further in terms of different types of capabilities that we think are defining what we are calling the smart warehouse. You used a term there that was an integration platform. What am I integrating? You were integrating primarily different materials handling technologies. That can be things we have had for a wall that conveyor transport and sortation. It can be some of these newer technologies like robots and put walls. The key is, “How do I optimize the flow so I don't have these islands of automation that are all doing their own thing.” I talked to somebody in the apparel industry. They have a very large and highly automated facility somewhere down in the Atlanta area. It's 1 million or 2 million square feet. They are seeing their throughput from that building after huge investments over the years and over time. They are seeing the throughput decline. What's happening, he believed, is that the business keeps changing. They keep having all these new requirements in terms of how an order needs to be processed. What they do is they keep building new wave types. We talked about wave planning before. Now they are up to like 70 or 80 different wave types. Every time there's another problem, wave fight number 82 if that solves our problem, it's not solving the problem. Part of the reason is that the system is not looking holistically across the facility and seeing how I can optimize the flow of work as a whole, not as an individual subsystem. That's part of what we are talking about here with the smart warehouse. That's the thing that traditional WMS has not done. That integration platform means I can connect all the tools and all the different systems I'm using all connect easily through that integration as opposed to the old way, which is a standalone $100,000 integration with expensive people who have to code. That's certainly part of it. It's managing the flow of work across that. I'm getting hit myself again but for example, you can have some scenarios where I have different paths for an order to be fulfilled. One of the paths and the most efficient for certain orders is maybe a group of put wall models. Let's say put wall area, for whatever reason, starts to be congested. All of a sudden, there's a big backup on the conveyor feeding into the put wall area. The system is going to automatically recognize that. For some time, route orders away from the put wall into manual cart picking, which takes them to the packing station, the same packing area where the put wall automotive leads. When the congestion is clear, then the system automatically reroutes that work back to the put walls again. Now you are looking at only the plain integration but in monitoring the flow of work that's happening and making real-time decisions accordingly. I'm an automotive guy, and we had all of those years. We used the term smart factories, and it was the same thing. How do we increase throughput? What can happen is you can end up with a local optimum where some guys are building a big stack of inventory and does nobody any good? What does all that excess inventory doing for me? What makes more sense is to say, “We are going to get this, so there's a flow to it. We are not building up too much inventory. There are no bottlenecks.” This is the same thing. What you are talking about here is, “How do I arrange my people so I don't have these guys sitting around because they already finished while these guys are in a congested area?” The core world's operations excellence is still the foundation. The term flow manufacturing came out of exactly what you are talking about there and was largely developed initially in the automotive industry. We are talking about the same thing. Now we are talking about flow distribution instead of flow manufacturing but the fundamental concepts, more of a pull-based system were being worked on capacities and constraints, more concerned with the total flow of goods and not what's happening in one individual area. All those are very consistent, whether you're looking at the principles that were established earlier in manufacturing or what's being applied here in distribution. I'm going to assume that at one time, the WMS, a big selling point would be, “We will tell you where your inventory is at,” That was probably a big step up. You go, “It does that. Now I'm going to tell you how that inventory moves off of your shelves and out the door and how you bring new inventory.” It's amazing. We still see quite a few every week, we see somebody that's a calling or emailing in, and then we talked to him. It turns out they don't have that real-time visibility of the inventory because they are using some kind of paper-based system or something, and sometimes these are even good size companies. In general, anybody that's implemented a tier-1 or tier-2 level, even WMS shouldn't have that real-time inventory visibility in doing that. It gets into that operations excellence and problem but that's the foundation, “I got to know what I got and where it is by lot, batch, serial number or whatever attribute is important for your operation or combination of attributes.” That's the foundation, but now, we are saying, “How do we optimize on top of that and get more product out the door and lower cost?” It requires investment. Having a WMS tell me, “Here is the information but it's not enough anymore.” To your point, we need all of this to get there. You asked me about some of the components of the smart warehouse, and I talked about it from a product category perspective, but now, I'm talking about it more from a philosophical or a functional view. One of the key foundations is constraining condition awareness, “What's happening in my building? What's happening with the flow of goods?” One of the things that first got me to understand WES in a deeper way is this notion that it's always-on listening and monitoring the environment. If you think about a traditional WMS, it's more sequential-oriented, “I receive the product. I put it away. I replenished pick sites. I do the picking. I take it to pack or evaluated services. I put it in this receiving staging. I get it shipping staging. I get it out the door all very good then the delivered.” A lot of companies don't have that. Organizing and automating all of that are big steps forward but we need to take it to the next level. If you think about this notion, the system is always on monitoring throughput and flow. There are certain rates and throughput that I'm expecting. I need to be able to have a flexible set of dashboards supported by event alerts and notifications. If there's a problem that says, “Here's what's happening across.” However, I wanted to find it in the area, I can define an area as a case picking module or as a whole three-level case pick module. I see that as one unit, and I want to know what the throughput is there. Maybe I want to see it at each level of that pick module. I can see it more gradually. What's nifty about this is that new level of visibility, the activity, throughput, bottlenecks, alerts, and corrective action automated, increasingly automated, if there are bottlenecks. That provides a nice set of real-time dashboards of looking stuff where people can see what's happening, “I have these many orders pending here that's already been completed. Here's how many are in picking,” or all of that level of detail. To understand what's going on here with the smart warehouse is, the system is using that same data that's being exposed to managers and supervisors that's what it's using to make decisions as well. I decided that example of being aware of the backup that's happening in the put wall and automatically, for some time, routing work around that until the congestion is cleared. That's what's different now about this visibility and activity monitoring. Being able to flexibly do that however you want to define a processing area could be evaluated services. It could be peace picking and all these things. Obviously, now the design is at these different flows throughout the facility are in sync. I'm not getting old backed up and packing, which is causing problems way back, picking and replenishment because I haven't automated the visibility and the flow, release in a way that's going to be cognizant and aware that I've got a problem here and, “Here's what I need to do about it for some time until we are adjusting. We are just taking action to solve the problem.” You sent me a PowerPoint and I have this here. It's got that real-time configurable dashboard. It's been a while since I have seen somebody had me a piece of paper but somebody handed me a piece of paper that had 40 columns. It was like an Excel spreadsheet or something, maybe a spin out of a system. It had so much, I looked at it and I was like, “What am I supposed to do with this?” I liked the idea of being able to configure it for those KPIs that I care about. [caption id="attachment_7943" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: One of the things that got me to understand WES in a deeper way is this notion that it's always on, listening and monitoring the environment.[/caption]   I don't want to measure everything. That's just me. Tell me the 4, 5 or 7 things that matter that tells me my warehouse is moving in the right direction, and that things are working well. It says, “Orders with issues.” I also love the idea that I don't find out about the issues in next week's report. I find out about them in real-time. The point that you made is a nice transition to this notion of another component. We talked about the real-time visibility of capacities, constraints, the conditions up there, and the always-on nature of the WES. Now, we have talked about looking at a table of 40 rows of information or whatever. It's all in the past. It brings up a point there, which is even with higher-end WMS, this is one of the learnings and insights that we have. There's still a tremendous amount of decision-making that is being done by human beings. As the manager, whoever you were talking about there in your example, staring at a 40-row spreadsheet or whatever, you see the same thing nowadays of managers and supervisors staring at computer screens, trying to figure out what the right thing to do next. Here's the reality. Every time you do that, first off, you introduce some latency into the system because it takes time to look at those different screens, think about it, make decisions, and scribble some things down on a piece of paper to remind you this needs to be taken care of or whatever. In most cases, there's no way a human being can make the optimal decision in the same way that a computer can. Even if you are a smart guy or girl, there's just too much data and too much to try to process at one time. Part of the capabilities of the smart WMS is the much more advanced software-based decision-making. Things like order batch optimization, given block of orders, “What's the best way to most effectively execute that on the software floor?” What we think is absolutely huge is this notion of the autonomous warehouse, as a term of Gartner is used, and others have used it as well but it talks about being able to automatically release work without the need for a wave planner, inventory expediters or all the kind of people that you see often involved in these decisions about what work to do when. Work relation on a variety of attributes, things like the order of priority, the inventory and resource availability, what kind of optimization opportunities are there? The bigger the order pool and more optimization opportunities you have because they are more data or conditions to be optimized but you can't hold on so long. You are not getting the throughput out through your cutoff time. This is a huge one. It's sophisticated. Whereas now, at 4:00 or 5:00, when the UPS, FedEx or whatever truck is leaving, you often see, and we have made commitments to the eCommerce is going to ship, you see a certain amount of chaos going around, trying to figure out all the orders that need to go on that truck, have been on the trucking and what to do about it. What we are talking about here is we are saying, “This is the work. We know how long it's going to take to pick and transport those orders to the shipping dock.” The work is going to automatically release itself. At the beginning of the day, we are more concerned about optimization. We still got a lot of decent amount of time, so we can focus on doing it the most efficient we can but as you go throughout the day, that needle starts to change from the focus on efficiency and cost to efficiency on customer service and making sure that those items are on there. The system does that automatically. It's configured to take those into consideration. Now those orders are getting on the trucks automatically without the chaos and the difficulty that's going on out there. This is a step-change capability here. We are talking about a system that is self-learning and in optimal how releases work. This is another concept we have had in distribution software before, and this is what defines what works on the smart warehouse. I had a boss in the past when I was young, I remember I sent an Excel spreadsheet to him, and it told a story. He's pulled me into his office and said, “This is a great Excel spreadsheet. I have to go through here and come to the same conclusion you did.” I go, “It's easy.” He goes, “No. When you send me this Excel spreadsheet, send me a recommendation. I don't want to have to come to a conclusion. That's your job. Show me that you attach the data back up but give me a recommendation.” I feel the same take way about running a warehouse, “Don't make me figure it out myself. Give me an alert that says, ‘This is a problem. This is how many orders are at risk. This is how many orders need to get on that truck that isn't done yet.'” To show you a simple example. Still, a lot of people, especially for eCommerce, are doing manual cart picking. I may have a cart that's got a certain configuration 3x3 or 4x4. What I mean by a 3x3 would be 3 shelves that each have room for 3 cartons each. I have nine total orders that I'm working on there. Most companies that we see do that are doing it with paper picking or pick by label or something. There's some attempt to do that more efficiently but something as simple as cart picking. The smart warehouse can take it to a whole new level. First off, you've got to get this order pool that's out there and at any one period. I'm probably going to have done some cartonization logic there to determine what should go in what box, especially with a multi carton order. In most cases, there's no way a human being can make the optimal decision in the same way that a computer can. Even if you're really smart, there's just too much data to process at one time. If you are shipping, for example, you don't want to put perfume in the same carton as payroll because of the obvious contamination that can happen there. When a picker comes up and scans a barcode on that cart, the system is going to automatically know it's this configuration, 3x3, 4x4 or whatever. It will have done some optimization typically in terms of what's called cluster picking were, “I'm going to take that cart to one location. I will put as many orders as I can on the cart that is signed to that cart that has the same set of skews so I can minimize my travel distance. Hopefully, I'm being clear on what that means.” Now I get to that location that can be done with lights or it can be done with barcode scanning. It says, “Take one of these from this location, put it in the carton slot 3'1, which is the 3rd shelf and the first location. The next one is 3'2. 2'3, 2'1 or whatever that sequence. I'm doing that in a way that makes it very efficient but we can take it even still beyond that. What if a high-priority order comes on? The pickers walk along as long as there's a location on that cart, whether it's a carton or a tote they are picking into. If it hasn't been started, we can remove automatically a lower priority order and insert a higher priority order that has come down onto that card as long as we would typically do it. The picker doesn't have to turn around and go backward as long as it picks for the new order or ahead of that picker. We do that without the picker, even being aware that it happened. You can expedite automatically like, “I got a truck that's going to be here one hour. We haven't even started yet. Let's get this going.” We say, “If you get an order in by 2:00, we will ship it that day. If it's 1: 58, all of a sudden, an order drops. I got two minutes.” This isn't going to automatically insert a higher priority order possible. I like something you said in there that we talked about the labor problem with these guys walking around maybe 5 or 10 miles in a day. One of the reasons we are going to quit, especially if you are me, is I don't want that many steps. When I walk over there, all my orders are in the same area, then I walk over here, and all my orders are there, as opposed to one side of the warehouse, and another order on the other side or I'm walking and go, “What has my life become where I walk back and like this?” Order pool optimization as well because the bigger the batch that I'm working with, the more opportunities I have to gain those picks together. On a given card, I'm maybe walking a very few feet. To your point, and this is where you get into the whole notion of mobile robots because now, perhaps that, “I go to the pick location, I pick the order but I'm putting it on a pick card. I'm putting it on a mobile robot, and the mobile robots can move on to the next location or on the packing of the orders completed. I'm walking very little at that point or comparatively little, which is one of the attractiveness of mobile robot technology.” Hopefully, it's becoming clearer. The nature of the warehouse is changing, and a part of that's going to have to be to not only be more cost-efficient and get more out the door with the staff that I've got but it's making sure that people have a less miserable work experience and hence hopefully going to stay with this a lot longer. This is not your grandpa's warehouse anymore. To be competitive, it used to be like, “These guys are high tech because they have a WMS.” Now we are starting to spin out the automation, the warehouse execution, and the integration platform. This is all getting really high-tech. Do you think this is probably the lowest-tech business there was many years ago? House is all going to play out. It's going to be interesting to see but the lighter automation techniques, including the robots and the put walls, are so attractive in terms of their flexibility and expandability. There are machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all kinds of things going to be involved here. The warehouses are becoming technology centers. If you see the private equity money that's flowing into robotics firms, AI firms, and others, in a lot of the smart money, it's the work that they do. Companies, retailers, and other eCommerce companies are starting to realize the importance of a well-run warehouse. Was this guy's quiet logistics? They've got bought by American Eagle. That was American Eagle recognizing the traditional retailer, the same thing we're going to buy ourselves a warehousing company because that's how important this business is. The force behind what has become locus robots. We will move our vendors that happened because Amazon had bought key assist systems right before that and left a quiet without a partner for automation they were building the business on. They invented their own robot. [caption id="attachment_7944" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: What's really different now about this kind of visibility and activity monitoring is being able to flexibly do that however you want to define a processing area.[/caption]   Bruce Welty was at my show. He's the Founder of Quiet. He said he got a phone call saying, “Are you guys using those Locus robots?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like them?” “We like them a lot. Can we come to visit?” “Sure.” It was Amazon. Amazon looked around and said, “We love this.” They bought Locus. A couple of other things I would like to bring up. First, broader use of some automation ideas or IoT type devices. RFID is starting to make something of a comeback years after Walmart tried back in 2003 or 2004. Generally, you are going to see many manual scanning activities that are going to disappear or if I need to move this way back now from being implemented at the store level by customers concerned with the eCommerce fulfillment for inventory equity purposes, you are going to see a move back up into the distribution operations. That will certainly be a big part of it. We were already doing things like, for example, we are a broker with a pick cart. Picker with a pick cart can walk up to a fixed zone. The IoT automatically recognizes that this person is on. It automatically turns on the pick lights that are on those four pick locations. It's a minor thing there but that's an advancement we are going to see. We have even done some stuff with congestion management and COVID, where we can tell exactly where somebody is in the I or using IoT and being able to assign work based on real-time visibility to who's closest to that work, but also when the COVID area being able to space people apart so that they don't get to say within 8 feet of each other, whatever that happens to be, whatever your metric you want to use, therefore that group constraint. There are some various things that can happen there. This is still slow going. It hasn't taken off as fast as many people think but you are going to see RFID and IoT start to make some mural inroads over the next years. We have this follow the notion of Gartner and what's considered to be called a conversational voice. The transactional voice is doing the picking, pallet build or something using voice technologies. Typically, reading in a location check digit and doing a hands-free pick, replenishment or whatever the task might be but we're starting to get now into more of a dialogue. We are all ready to the point now where we can have a supervisor take a smartphone and say, “Show me how I'm doing on wave number 235,” over a smartphone. That's going to bring back exactly what's happening now or, “Where's the replenishment for location on 3652?” We are still early in this game here but certainly, we will move to more of a dialogue going on with the WMS and WES than just playing transactional voice-type of technology. We ended with a very exciting where the future interface of the software is going to had. This is where that integration platform you talked about comes in handy. I can connect to all this stuff. The new killer app that comes out, I can get it. We have been left there. Automation and optimization of materials handling systems is certainly a key part of this. We refer to it, not just as a smart warehouse's the future but as the smart automated across to the future due to the interest in the technologies we have talked about several times already. We can directly connect with these picking assistance, like walls, pick the light or voice without the need for third-party software. Everyone else uses some kind of software from the put wall vendor, pixelate vendor or voice vendor, which adds another layer of integration and costs. It often results in people operating silos. We can directly control a lot of these materials handling technologies. It allows you to operate and optimize those in the context of everything that's happening in the world and all the information that's available, which provides you a lot of benefits over time because you are not just trying to operate in silos. I talked to somebody that was using a pick-to-light system. They talked about how at the end of every week, they've got to go in and clean up all these pics that some of them never were executed in the pick-to-light system. I'm not quite sure why that is but it wouldn't happen with the way we are approaching things because we would be aware of that. It probably has to wait on a real punishment. The problem is the pixelate vendor doesn't do replenishment the documents. You've got these silos going on here and there are a lot of opportunities. In terms of that integration platform, we think this is especially true for mobile robots, people are using the mobile software of the mobile robots. What that does is it limits the total optimization that can be achieved but more importantly, you are now totally dependent on that robot software. What if you want to add different robots or change horses three years from now? There's a better mousetrap that works faster or whatever that happens to be. Now you have become locked in. We refer to it not just as smart but the smart automated across to the future. We think the market needs a mobile robot and a broader automation integration platform. It's almost like an operating system for automation in the warehouse that's going to allow you to have visibility to optimization of robots of different kinds from the same manufacturer of different types for different manufacturers. You are not locked in. It's like a plug-and-play type of environment here three years from now. You can keep the robots or keep dependent you bought, but now, you want to add five more from a different vendor, plug them into this operating system, and have instant connectivity and the ability to optimize the performance. We think that's a much more low-risk approach going forward than locking yourself into a vendor that's coming to the software that's coming from the robot vendor. Get back to the idea of a smart warehouse. It's all about throughput. If I have different systems that are connecting, that are doing local optimums, that's a problem because it's not supporting throughput. I always need that one source of truth. That's the main system that says, “This is all about getting stuff out the door here.” I wanted to bring up one. Earlier, I talked about wanting to give an example of what the put wall. I referenced that as the cubbyholes in put walls. Here's the scenario we are seeing. Let's say there are three line items eCommerce order. Two of those line items in the order come from a carton flow rec area, that's very close to packing. I mean those orders are efficient to pick, in short distance to transport. The third line item is actually coming from a slow-moving mezzanine pick area that's farther away and is less efficient to pick. If you don't do anything, otherwise what's going to happen in those first two items from that order are going to show up rather quickly, then they are going to sit and wait for 10, 15, 20, 45 minutes or whatever it happens to be for that third item on the pick, the order to finally show up. The cubbyhole has been tied up that entire time. What's the smarter warehouse way of doing it? What's the WES way of doing it? Let's say it's 25% slower to go through the mezzanine or whatever the number you want to use it. We would release that third line item in effect 25% or 30% earlier. After the time it takes to pick and transport that as it's on its way to the pack station, now we release the other two orders line items in the carton flow rack. They show up at the put wall for processing at relatively the same time, and now I'm able to turn that wall without the latency that would occur if you didn't have smart software to do that. Hopefully, that's an example that makes it somewhat clearer as to how the optimization can affect operational performance. You would never be able to get that done manually. It doesn't happen. This is like drinking from a fire hose. There is so much going on in this. Put a bow on this. Give us your final thoughts on this. What do I need to get to have that smart warehouse? First of all, the benefit is it is going to reduce labor costs, have higher and more consistent DC throughput, you are going to reduce your need for automation in terms of things like the number of diverse or get more throughput out of the automation you have there. We didn't talk much about labor planning but that's a big part of it. We can dynamically assign workers throughout the course of a shift from 1 to 8 to 9, 9 to 10, or 10 to 11 hours where are they needed motion and in what quantities, improved automated decision-making. It's an assessment. Certainly, if you are heavily automated, there are a lot of opportunities for you. As I tried to make the point earlier, even if you're only modestly automated or not automated at all, these capabilities can have some real benefit for your operations there. The important thing to note with Softeon is these can be implemented very incrementally. I could implement a traditional WMS. Let's say I want the labor planning and allocation part of it. We can take that capability from WES and attach it to the WMS. To give you a solution, conversely, if you want to implement WES and leave your existing WMS in place, we didn't talk too much about that but that's a key dynamic. You need cartonization, which is a warehouse management function and even attach cartonization to that WES implementation. Flexibility is key. That's what we try to design. We call it a shirt component library, where the applications can borrow components, functionality, and services from each other. We are pretty confident that it gives us a chance to understand what you are trying to accomplish, what your operations are like or whatever that some combination of these technologies is going to have a pretty good fit and take your world to a whole new level than we have seen over the last many years. What's new over at Softeon?. What conferences do you go into? We have done with the motor show, and it was a big success for us. We not only showed the smart warehouse, we presented the smart warehouse capabilities. We had a lot of equipment pick the light, other packing stations, etc., right on our routes. At the bottom of every hour, we did a presentation. We had consistently good traffic the whole time. We did a bit of an educational track and a session on the smart warehouse of the future available on Softeon. It was very well attended. That was good. We will be at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium down in Orlando and then break after that. [caption id="attachment_7945" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: Even if you're just modestly automated, these capabilities can have some real benefits on your operations. These can be implemented very incrementally.[/caption]   We finished up a series of educational broadcasts called the WMS Bootcamp, six different sessions on everything from building the business case to how to implement it successfully. It was a huge success, but all of that's now available on-demand. If they go up to Softeon.com. You will be able to find some links to that. If you have any interest in WMS, they're not commercial, educational sessions. You will find they have a lot of value. The feedback we got on it was outstanding. I would like to watch myself because we went over this and it is gone from simple to more complex over time. I know you are simplifying it but to understand what's required requires a Bootcamp. We learned a lot of lessons. I brought in some consultants and people that I knew and knew what they were talking about in terms of building the business case. We had some folks from Invista that came on and did that. I had some experience or exposure. I knew they knew what they were talking about. Some of that applies to some other consultants as well. It's a real nice series. It's non-commercial. If you want to learn some tips about how to get WMS selection and implementation, you'll find the Bootcamp serves you well. How do we reach out and talk to you over at Softeon? The way to get me is via email. My email address is DGilmore@TheSofteon.com. You can also use Contact@Softeon.com for the general inquiry box. I love to hear from you. Hopefully, we came across, so at least you know a little bit about what I'm talking about and discuss your problems as well. Anyone who wants to reach out can reach out and talk to you about the smart warehouse. Thanks, Joe. I enjoyed it. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank all of you for reading. Your supports are very much appreciated, until next time and more network.   Important Links Softeon Supply Chain Digest WMS Bootcamp DGilmore@TheSofteon.com Contact@Softeon.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/softeon The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

This week has been hard I probably take a break from the podcast to keep focusing on healing we will see right now im taking it one day out of time. I Google the stages of breaking up and found this article https://www.domesticshelters.org/articles/taking-care-of-you/5-stages-of-recovery-after-a-breakup and I guess im in the denial stage. Long story short I left Puerto Rico when I was 15 years old first lived with mom then moved with my biological father and well boyfriend was my first person after my parents he was a huge part of my life. I got ghosted but it was needed because I didn't have the strength to leave him for real real I broke up with him all the time but I Kew I would always come back. Anyways right now focusing on learning about what im going through, looking for tools to help me survive and surrounding myself with friends I consider family. If you like to stay in touch, check out my linktree profile where I have all my social media https://linktr.ee/Lifewithfrancy. Hope everybody have a blessed day. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/francelyn-devarie/support

In Episode 4 of Almost Every Month Podcast, our guest is Yena from Moonlit Planning (@moonlitplanning). Yena talks about the perfect layout and discusses with me all of her tools and tricks for organizing her life with her planner. I spend some time outlining the pros and cons of digital versus paper planning, and provide my best advice to newbies just entering the realm of planning. Plus, I Google the difference between a journal and a diary, and give you a special Hobonichi entry translation just for 4/20 day! If your life could use a bit of organization, I provide some of the inspiration you will need to get started and keep going in this episode! In his Whiskered Scribe segment, Mike Quest (IG: mikequestst) faces another side to the conundrum of using paper--that planning perfectionism that prevents us from starting to use a new journal or planner because it is too precious and we don't want to wreck it! Welcome to Almost Every Month--(Hobo maitsuki no poddokyasuto)--A podcast about all things ephemera—journals, planners, pens, paper, ink and more. In this first series, I delve deeply into the wildly popular Hobonichi planners and all the culture that surrounds them—from the storied history of its founder Shigesato Itoi to the cottage industries and influencers that have sprung up around it. Special guests from the planner, pen and journal world will make appearances in each episode. The name Almost Every Month was chosen as a play on the meaning of Hobonichi (the 'almost every day' blog) Tune in almost every month for the next Almost Every Month Podcast, and please consider supporting this podcast if you love it by becoming a Patreon member-which is also where the extensive show notes live. Stickers and shoutouts and more await our members!

-For the “who are your 3 dream dinner guests?” question, I feel like every person should choose Jesus as their first overall pick. Because even if you're not religious and you don't believe in God, I think you just gotta the lowdown. See what he's all about. Is he really the son of God or was he just a random dude? Test him. Make him turn water into wine at the table. And if he really is a miracle worker and all this stuff is true, then you will probably be handsomely rewarded in Heaven. Otherwise, there might be a little hold up at the gate where he says like “Hey remember when you could've invited me to dinner but you picked Will Smith instead?” Straight to Hell. -I don't like the “clap police” who thinks it's their job to decide when it is and isn't acceptable to clap. People get so mad when people clap after a movie ends or when a plane lands? Why? That seems like a great time to clap. You just survived the miracle of flight. You should clap. You should celebrate. you should go bow down to the pilot and kiss his feet and it would all be justified. -I think I'm out on HIPAA. I went to the dentist last week and we were talking about work and he mentioned he'd seen a few other Barstool employees in the past and when I asked who, he said “Oh sorry I can't. That's a HIPAA violation.” What? That's not some private thing that needs to be protected. I'm not going to think less of someone for going to the dentist. It should be a positive thing. HIPAA needs a little more sense. -Whenever I'm the first person in my party to arrive at a bar or restaurant, I always do everything in my power to make sure people know I'm not alone when I get to the table. I'll start filling up multiple water glasses. Throw my jacket on a different seat. I want it to look like someone's in the bathroom or something so people don't think “Oh there's Tommy Smokes by himself being a pathetic loser.” -Anytime I have a tech problem with a phone, laptop, TV, whatever it may be, I'm always convinced that no simple update or online solution will help. I always think I'm the first person that has ever had that problem and that I'll need to buy an entirely new device but then pretty much every time I Google it, I find someone describing the same problem essentially word for word. -Whenever I'm on a long line, and it's finally my turn to go up, I feel so much pressure to be the hero that goes quicker than everyone else did. Maybe it's the Target self checkout line, I'll sort of give everyone a look back like, “Don't worry boys, I got this.” And I want everyone to appreciate how fast I am but I feel like most of the time nobody notices or cares.

Today we are continuing what I am now calling the “New Kids on the Blockchain” series with a little episode about Web3 and what the hell it even is. The fun part about this episode is that I am joined by my wonderful cousin Hannah Dudley, who is basically my sister and best friend all wrapped up in one. The best part is that she studied symbolic systems at Stanford University and actually has some credibility when talking about this stuff, as opposed to my knowledge of the top three articles that come up when I Google “web3”Sources Referenced: https://www.wired.com/story/web3-gavin-wood-interview/https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/01/24/what-is-web3-all-about-an-easy-explanation-with-examples/?sh=5afbae122255

Dr. Melissa Bird is a clairvoyant coach, author and fiery public speaker. Melissa has traveled around the world, talking to audiences at universities, conferences and churches. Her combination of education, real life experience and practical advice, makes her a powerful force of change in the lives of the people she speaks to. Past audience members have described her as fierce, revelatory, life-changing, enthusiastic and inspirational.   Learn more about Melissa. Learn more about The Passionistas Project.   Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and today we're talking with Dr. Melissa Bird. As a clairvoyant coach, author and fiery public speaker, Melissa has traveled around the world, talking to audiences at universities, conferences, and churches. Her combination of education, real life experience, and practical advice, makes her a powerful force of change in the lives of the people she speaks to. Past audience members have described her as fierce, revelatory, life-changing, enthusiastic and inspirational. So please welcome to the show Dr. Melissa Bird. Hi Melissa, we're so glad you're here. What's the one thing you're most passionate about? Melissa: It's evolved over time. Right? So it used to be that I was the most passionate about helping women and girls use their voice. Right? Like that was sort of the foundation from which I operated for a long time. And lately, like in the last two years, I think it's really turned into helping people really learn how to harness the power of their rebellion for good. And really healing the shame and wounding we have around rebellious, honest, and helping people really identify what it is that they feel deeply passionate about so that they can go out and do that thing. And usually it is an act of rebellion to be able to go out and do that thing. Why is that so important and what exactly do you mean by. Well, I think we get sent this very powerful message from internalized misogyny and externalized patriarchy that says, you know, if you speak out, if you, if you have an opinion that is different than what we think is appropriate, which is often steeped in white supremacy and racism, by the way, like if you speak against anything that is outside of that normal. Then you are a rebel. And for so long, we have been taught that we're not allowed to say what's on our mind. And yet we all have a different opinion and we all have feelings and we all have things that are on our minds. And I think that it is time for us to judge. Screw it like, forget about it. I just say it and I can easily say that from my little, you know, beautiful corner of the world. And sometimes it's, it's deadly for people to say that. And in fact, right before this, I was in a mastermind group with a bunch of other people that I'm participating in and I was sobbing and I was like, I am terrified. To peel off this next layer of who I am and speak this truth about dismantling empire Christianity. And here, I'm just going to come out on the podcast right now about dismantling empire Christianity as someone who believes deeply in God, like, and I preach it, my Episcopal church and thinking about how do we heal the pain of years of patriarchal. You know, internalized messaging and how do we start to engage in absolute rebellion around those things so that it's no longer dangerous for everybody to speak because we're all speaking. Passionistas: Why does that scare you so much? Melissa: I'm just really afraid of being killed for it. Like honestly, like whether I get eviscerated, you know, trolled taken down, shut down, literally killed, you know, When I was doing LGBT activism in Utah, before I went to get my PhD, I was born and raised in Utah. Like I'd grown up there. And I remember I had been with my wife, my ex-wife and, um, you know, we never held hands in public cause we couldn't, it was dangerous to do that. And I remember when. She left. And I ended up dating men again because I'm bisexual. And I remember when my now husband held my hand for the first time in public and I pulled my hand away and he's like, what's wrong? And I was like, we can't, that's dangerous. And he's like, looking at me like, what is wrong with you? And I was like, I had that, I started crying and I was like, I had this moment where I realized I haven't touched in the human being in public and. Because when you do you get attacked and physically and emotionally abused, right? So here I am on this edge of this next expansion in my life. And like, this is what I love about the work that you all are doing is the stories you highlight and the work that you all are doing brings us to the next level. You're showing how we evolve over time. The woman I was when I was in my twenties is not the woman that I am now. Like my whole. The things I focus on, the things I'm passionate about has evolved over time and we have to allow for that as women supporting other women. And I think oftentimes we think we're only allowed to be passionate about that thing. We were still passionate about 15, 20 years ago. No. And really honing in on what does light us up and what does make us feel passionate and being willing to honor that and in each other.   Instead of trying to destroy that in each other. I think that's why I'm afraid. I think that the point that it all evolves and that we need to keep evolving. Somehow we expect ourselves to like, be fully evolved by the time we're like 27. Like I see it in my daughter, who's 19. She's like, she's like, I feel like I'm totally behind. And I'm like, what are you behind? Like behind what Jesus did. And she's like, and she always refers back to. Instagram and Snapchat. And you know, these, these people that she's watching who have made it by like 23 and I'm out, but that's not real. And, and how to help her still be excited and ambitious and support her and like, I don't want to say that young people are diluted because I think they can do whatever they want, but sometimes these delusions of being behind and somehow they're supposed to be catching up to something that's not that doesn't exist. I think it's just, we're in such a fascinating time. I think I really do believe we're on the precipice of really major change. I mean, if there's anything we've learned from COVID-19 at this. Everything is different. And, and so I love how people keep trying to tell us we're going to get back to normal. I'm like, no, we're not because your normal, my normal are not the same. And what you thought was normal was actually called white supremacy and racism and heteronormativity and sexism. And that's not, you know, that's falling. Passionistas: Let's take a step back. You mentioned that you grew up in Utah. Tell us a little bit about your childhood, your family background, your heritage, and what impact that has on your life today. Melissa: I did grow up in Utah, but I'm okay. I'm just kidding. I grew up in park city, Utah before Sundance became a thing. So we lived in salt lake and then we moved to park city. I did not grow up in a traditional LDS household. So, um, part of that was because my dad committed suicide when I was. And my mother was basically forcibly pushed out of, um, our local ward by our Bishop. And so she lost her faith. I don't know that my mom, my mom was funny. Cause I don't know that she'd ever say she had a strong faith, but you know, she did what she was supposed to be doing. So this was 1980, which even though we like to pretend that Utah's like, you know, this goody two-shoes state, it was also the height of the cocaine epidemic. Right. So mama started partying and she started. Her heart was broken. Like my dad broke her heart. And, um, I didn't realize that at the time, of course, cause I was a kid, I was six years old and we ended up in a lot of chaos growing up. My dad is Southern Paiute and so I was also cut off from my indigenous native American heritage. And that was a very complicated relationship anyway, because. My grandparents are not the kindest people on the planet, on his side of the family. And so what happened was I ended up being mostly raised by my aunts, my aunt Nancy, and my grandma Mary. So my grandma and my aunt basically raised me and my sister. And they were both very involved in the junior league and the league of women voters. And so I learned that it wasn't rude to talk about politics at the time. And I learned how to volunteer, because say what you will about you. I actually feel like the, the strong service component of the LDS church is really beautiful. And I learned a lot about serving others and talking about politics. And so, as I was growing up, I always just assumed that women were involved in. Because of my aunt and my, my grandma. And so I staged my first protest when I was 17. I was a senior in high school and I found Ms. Magazine. And I could not believe that there were all these atrocities happening in the world. And so I staged my first, it was a one-woman protest cause no one else would go with me, but you know, they didn't want to get in trouble, but I liked discovered that there's this whole world out there. And really started getting involved in action and activism. Then I think that was really the birth of it. And it was not a very good student. The only reason I have a PhD was to just prove myself, I'm really smart, but like I was in and out of college and just really struggled and really struggled with my sexual orientation and really, really struggled with religion because I was told my whole life through messaging that I was not worthy of. God. And love. And at the same time I was hearing from my grandma, my aunt, how fabulous and wonderful and beautiful and worthy I was of all these things. And so it's been a hell of a ride. I've always wanted Angelina Jolie to play me for my made for television movie on lifetime television networks. I really like, that's always Angelina Jolie is going to play me in my movie, but, you know, I, I like to say I've been married almost as much as Liz Taylor. I've been through a lot of marriages to men and. And, you know, here I am living in Corvallis, Oregon with three kids and this husband and running three businesses actually, cause you know, one just wasn't enough and I'm coaching these women to like heal their rebel, shame and wounding and, and really like engaging in tapping into their intuition and their magic to make a difference in their lives and their community. It's really awesome. So had this really chaotic bananas childhood, and it was partially homeless, like technically like couch surfing and didn't know what I was doing. And now here I am, who knew. Passionistas: At what point, if at all, did you reconnect with the indigenous side of your family? Melissa: Because I was cut off from that part of my family. I actually was trying to figure out more about my dad, but I couldn't really ask my mom because it's too painful for her and I didn't want to bug her with it. So back in 2006, I Google searched my dad, his name, cause I wanted to find his obituary. Cause I didn't, I don't think I'd ever seen it. And so in 2006, I Google search my dad and my uncle Arval popped up because my uncle Arval is a music. And I remember my uncle Arville because he used to play, the devil goes down to Georgia on the fiddle for me when I was little kid by before I was six. And I remembered that and he played the fiddle for Alabama back in the day. And he had become this, you know, native American musical award-winning artist with his flute and his fiddle. And I had no idea, like I had no idea. And so he had a phone number on his website and so. And I thought I was going to die. Like I was like, why am I even doing this? It's so scary. And his wife, Kimberly picked up the phone and I said, hi, you know, is our hole there? And she said, who's this? And I said, this is his niece, Melissa Bird, Vern's oldest daughter. And she just started crying in any way. And we ended up talking and he actually reconnected me with the Vernon, my grandmother, and we talked and wrote letters back and forth. She was very disappointed. I wasn't a member of the LDS church because she was a very staunch LDS woman. And so there was a lot of pretty hurtful rhetoric there. But through her, I connected with actually through our role. I think I connected with my cousin, Vanessa and my cousin, Steven, and my cousin Steven lives on the Navajo nation. And then my cousin Vanessa lives here in Oregon. And so it was through them that I started really putting the pieces of our lives back together and learning more about, you know, our native American, who we are and our client that should what clan and, and really learning about that indigenous identity. And it's been a really fascinating process because we complicate it so much. You know, I started learning about what it would mean to enroll and I can't enroll because my great grandmother. Opted not to in 1936, she started the process, but she opted not to because they wanted her to move to live on the reservation and she didn't want to. And so there's a lot of complication when it comes to that identification and it wasn't until I met one of my really good friends here in Oregon. And she looked at me and she's like, you know that this is in your blood. Like your ancestry is in your blood. It's who you are. And it doesn't matter if you are enrolled or not. You are a Shivwit Paiute. And yet at the same time, there was all of the stuff coming out about pretending there's this horrible term. So often. And there's this list that's been put out of academics who are supposedly not really quote unquote Indians, like they're not native American, except for they all totally are. And there is this idea of what it means to be an indigenous native American person in the United States. That varies depending on who people are. And it's because of colonialization and it's because of white supremacy. And it's because of. And this is something I like to tell, like really explain to people historically, when you think about the one drop rule for blood, the one drop rule for Africans was to create a workforce, right? Of people, the One Drop Rule for native Americans for indigenous people on this land was to annihilate them completely and eliminate them from the face of. So we're doing that pretty effectively here, you know, in the, in north America and in other parts of the world. And it's so complicated. And yet we, we drill it down to enrollment, which by the way, is a very separatists construct that people don't understand. And so reconnecting with my cousins and the people who understand. Language and our history and who want to reconnect me to those things has been a really emotional journey. It's a lot, it's a lot. And finding those letters from my great grandma, like my cousin, send them to me and just reading that story of her, trying to figure out who our great, great grandparents were and confirming who our great-great-grandparents were and when they died and how they died is really it's amazing. And it's also that until I think those are the stories we don't talk about. Passionistas: You're listening to The Passionistas ProjectProject Podcast in our interview with Dr. Melissa Bird. To learn more about her Misfit Magic Hour one-on-one coaching and masterclass series, visit NaturalBornRebel.com. If you're enjoying this interview and would like to help us continue to create inspiring, please consider becoming a patron by visiting ThePassionistasProject.com/podcast and clicking on the patron button. Even $1 a month can help us continue our mission of inspiring women to follow their passions. Now here's more of our interview with Melissa. In 2017, you found it Natural Born Rebel. So what is the mission of Natural Born Rebel and how did you get started? Melissa: I didn't want to go into academia. I mean, let's be real. I will not go work for a research, one institution on a tenure track position. Like I was like, I was not having it. I just wrapped all the things. So I did not want to do that. And I happened to go on a retreat with the coach. Susan Hyatt was my. And I went on this retreat and she's like, we need to get you up on stages and you need to be talking to people and you know, you've got this vision and this mission of helping women really find their voice. And we've got to figure that out. I was like, okay, whatever. Like I'm just in Scotland, like peeling apart, all the layers of what the heck am I doing next? And two things happened on that trip. One was that I decided that I was going to become a coach and really start to create programs where I could. Take, I taught social justice and advocacy and schools of social work for like 15 years. And I wanted to bring all that to the masses. Like I wanted to really help people learn how they can engage in advocacy on their own terms. And so I did that. And then the other thing that happened was that I had the vision for the Mermaid's Garden, which we'll get to in a second. I'm sure. But I met a woman named Susie while I was there and we didn't talk after. After we left Scotland, basically. Like we talk every once in a while, but you know, we lost touch and then randomly, she called me a couple of years later and she's like, I just got this divine download for you. And you're supposed to start this thing called Natural Born Rebel. And I just bought you the URL and you need to teach this thing called Rebel School. And these are all the components you need to put into Rebel School. And we need you to write a book. And in that book, we want you to talk about these things. And so I'll send you the URL. And did you take notes because I've got to go back into a meeting and I just want to make sure you're going to follow through with this. And I was in a Lyft going to the airport cause I'd been flown to San Bernardino to teach a class on social justice. Right. Does this happen to you often? And I was like, well kind of, not that directly. So I get on the plane and I've got all this stuff from Susie. And I just started writing and I outlined and wrote like half the book on the plane from San Bernardino to Portland, Oregon. Right. And then I get home and I just start, like, all this stuff just starts flooding out of me. I called the person who did my original website for Bird Girl Industries. And I said, I'm transitioning to Natural Born Rebel and I need you to build me a website. And these are the things that have to be on it. Here's the lesson like when you get the messages that seem totally random and out there, they're not because what has happened is that rebel school has evolved into this. I can't even explain. It's so old school. It is so beautiful. And it's gone from being the 16 week. I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. Have a couple of one-on-one coaching sessions to this 18 week program. Is the most gorgeous, amazing thing that I have ever had the privilege of facilitating. And the book is free on my website, Natural Born Rebel, and there's journal prompts in it that are amazing. And I'm actually just getting ready to do the second edition of it, because now that I've been doing Rebel School for so long, I just say there's so much, that's not in there that I want people to know. And I would not be here teaching, doing this work coaching because I do one-on-one coaching. And then I do clairvoyant reading, where someone comes and brings me up a problem. They want clarity on what their business or their life. And we do a reading and it's amazing. And I just never thought that I'd be sitting here having this conversation with y'all about how, like I'm a lay preacher and a clairvoyant where to like, you know, I mean, no, this was, this was not the grand plan. When I got a PhD four years ago. I couldn't, I didn't know what would, how Natural Born Rebel would happen. Passionistas: Tell us about Misfit Magic Hour and how those sessions work.   Melissa: Oh, my gosh. They're so fun. I had no idea. Again, this is me listening. So my amazing virtual assist, assistant Emma. She was like, I told her, I was like, I, I finished clairvoyant training cause I did this huge year long clairvoyance training. That's what I did independent because I was like, I'm going to totally figure out how to channel dead people. Like he doesn't want to be able to do that. I was like, okay. So I finished my clairvoyance training and Emma was like, you need to start doing readings. And I was like, oh no, I know I do this and this and this. And it was like, no, we're going to call it Misfit Magic Hour. And you're going to just, you're going to give people clarity and confidence in one hour, and then people will learn what it's like to work with you. And I was like, oh no, no, no, I'm not going to publicly. Like, what are you talking about? She's like, don't worry. I've got all the copy done. We're just going to make it happen. And we're launching in two weeks. And I was like, oh no. Now I have to start telling people that I want to do, like channeling and clairvoyance and coaching with them. And Emma was like, yeah. And I was like, oh my God. She's like, it's, you're going to be flying. And I'm like, I don't know what if people hate me. It's like, what if I say something stupid? What is the ghost? Don't come in. Like, what if I can come in with spirit and I've made this promise. So the coolest part about magic hour, it's so good. So it's like 20 minutes of coaching. So people come in, I tell people, come in with two or three things that you really want clarity on, whether it's in your life. And then the last, like 25 minutes or a card reading where I either use Oracle cards or tarot cards, depending on my mood and the person. And we do a reading to talk about their current situation, what they need to know, and then their, their future situate. Like if you do these things, this is what could happen. Never in a million years. Y'all did I think I was going to have so much fun doing this? Cause I was like all serious. I was like, well now. So incredible. The things that I see visually like amazing what spirit can do to get the message across the ad. Because I leaned, my teacher gave me all these tools and, and so now I have this framework to go on, but I've turned it into my own, which is the point. Cause we can't all do things the same. And I'm like, oh my gosh. And everyone who does them, it's like, oh my God, I feel so clear. I'm going to sign up again. You know, like it's just, it's, it's so hard to explain it, but all I can say is that I get the best visuals. I had one client whose heritage is all Russian and I spirit ended up giving me all of her grandma's as these Russian nesting dolls. And they kept pulling out messages. And like I had one rating where everyone was in a spiral moving out and it was just like hundreds and hundreds. Of just spirit, just there to hold her. Cause she was in a crisis and they were like, we're right here. And we're holding you. Like, I see like spirit doing this. Like we're holding you, like, we're rocking you. Like we are holding you. And like, I have like this whole reading where, um, people were like frolicking naked through a field and they were like, just be free, just be free. And I was like, all of a sudden your spirit guides are a bunch of hippies. I don't know. I get these visual. That are never the same. And they're so unique to the person that I'm reading for. And if I'm like, what is happening, you don't have to carry this for me to even admit this because I'm like, you know, I got the whole witch wound getting burned at the stake thing. Like, you know, I literally in a dream the other night I was talking to my friend, Stephanie, I need to call her and tell her about this. She picked me up in a limit. And she's like telling me this message that was being given to me in my dream. And I was like, people are gonna think I'm mad because this is what we do to women who are healers and prophets and preachers. There's that beautiful song. The High Women sing "The High Women's Song," it's an archetype from throughout history of like a witch and a preacher and a freedom writer and somewhat. It's beautiful, but the context of the song is that we come back over and over and over again, and that you will never eliminate us, even when you try, it's a beautiful song. And it's the fact that I'm able to even have this conversation with you, Amy and Nancy, you would have, you could have knocked me over with a feather. If you would've told me, this is my last five years ago. I would've been like, uh, no. Did you always have an ability to see things? What triggered you going to take these lessons? I've always been magic, always. Like I've always been able to like the first dead person I actually saw was my dad. He came and told me to take care of my mom and, and I very distinctly remember. And so I've always had the feeling or the vision that I could, I used to make little magic birds nest out of grass in the backyard, like all over the place. And then all of a sudden birds would just come and nest in them. Like, you know, I was like, I didn't think that was actually going to work, you know, and the quail would come and get him. My nest was awesome. Not my expectation, but there was so I've always felt magic. I have my. I can connect people. Like I, when I listened to people speak, I go, oh, okay, you need this person and this person and this person and this person. And that is one of the magical things that I do is I connect people to that, to other people I'm a web Weaver. But what spurred me to go work with Eileen and, and be taught was that I had some very large intuitive hits about some really big things that happens. And it scared me. And I had had a friend of mine say, you know, you really, you need to understand this more and you, what you're what's happening is you're being called into. Understanding your own particular brand of magic and what you do and listening to your intuition because you see things very differently. And the other thing she said to me is that back in the early days of Christianity like tenth, we're talking 10th, 11th century days, there were groups of women that would navigate between the pagans and the Christians. So they were the bridge between the two. There wasn't such a separation. And she said, that's just, you, you are the bridge builder. You go back and forth and that's who you are. And that's who you're meant to be. And stop thinking. You have to be one thing or the other. And that was actually a huge part of my coaching with Susan was I was like, if people find out that I am both a Christian, I love Jesus. Social Justice Jesus is my favorite Jesus. And like that I love Jesus. That I do magic and I read taro and I channeled dead people. Either the witches are going to hate me because I love Jesus. And I believe deeply in the. Or they're going to kick me off the pulpit at church, and I'm not going to be able to preach anymore because I'm a woman. And in fact, my priest, at one point, he's like, can you stop with the witchcraft thing? And I was like, no, not really. And then I started telling him about how the pagans used to be bridge builders and all this stuff. And he found a paper like a booklet that he had from a researcher in Scotland who had researched those with. Yeah, thank you Jesus. Right after I told them about this and he's like, you're not, I was like, see, I told you, like, there's nothing wrong with me. And I thought, for sure, no, one's gonna hire me. No, one's gonna want to learn from me. And all of a sudden y'all like, these women are coming to me and they're like, I love Jesus too. And on totally. Which I'm like. Here. I thought I was coming up with this innovative hashtag Christian, which no, I was not, no, you can follow hashtag Krisha, which on Instagram. And I was like, oh my gosh, we're everywhere. I was like, whoa. Cause you know, trained by misogyny and patriarchy that you have to pick a thing. And actually when I did my dissertation, my dissertation was about how women in rural California navigate religious stigma to get contracept. And it's, uh, you know, I did all these interviews with women to ask them how they navigated religious stigma and slut-shaming to get contraception. And it was all based on the Madonna-Whore binary that you are supposed to be a Virgin until you are married and then you are supposed to be a whore. We have a psychotomy that we live with that Virgin whore dichotomy that of course started in the Bible with Eve. And that binary is what keeps us in our place as women. And so it's that same binary that says you can be this, or you can be this, but you can never be both of those things. It's why there's this huge joke in the gay community by now gay later. Right? It's why it was so hard for me to sit. I had to pick, right? Like, oh, if I'm with women, I'm a lesbian. But if I men with men, I'm straight, which I'm not. And you know, like we put people in these boxes and we categorize everyone. It's the thing I was talking about with being Native American. Like either you're native, you got to know what percentage you are of Native American. And I'm sitting here going, but I know these things. That I have found out only in the last six months or prep spiritual practices that were handed down by my tribe, that I just know that I didn't know that I knew until like I read a paper on it. Like we put ourselves in these categories and say, this is who you are and you have to be this way, your whole life. And we're not, I mean, look at all this work you all are doing with Passionistas. Yeah. The stories you all are telling and the diversity of thinking that you are tapping it. It's amazing. Passionistas: Talk about the importance of leading with intuition and just following your feelings. Melissa: I think it goes beyond knowing what you want. Cause most of my clients actually don't have a clue what they want, right? Like they're like, I don't know what I'm doing, but here I am. Most people who join rebel sport are like, I don't know what this is exactly, but I just. Like, I don't know what I'm doing here, but here I just felt compelled and I was like, oh, good. You fit. Perfect. So I think some of it is thinking about we all this externalized information about who we're supposed to be. I remember when I was getting divorced from my ex-wife and I kept calling my psychic, like I, like, I was text messenger. I was like, what's going to happen next. What's going to happen next. What's next. And she's like, you already know. And I'm like, I don't like that, man. I need you to tell me, right? So we go to other people to get information. And what I do when I'm working with my clients is I'm like, here's the information. Now you have to take it and decide what resonates with you and what you're going to leave behind, because we could go to other people all day long to try and get more information. But if we don't listen to our hearts and we don't listen, not just our intuition, but our hearts that say, Hey, How about, we just love ourselves more today. If we don't have more self-compassion for ourselves and the things we want to do, then we're not going to go out and do the things we are here to do. I was listening to Meghan Waterson is an author. She wrote a really great book called Mary Magdalen revealed about the gospels. If Mary Magdalen, the lost gospels of Mary Magdalene. It's so amazing, y'all. She talks about how the body is the soul's reason for being here. So without the body, the soul can't come in. Right. And if each one of us in these bodies, as I'm looking at my little kiddos, they're two completely different souls, right? Three, actually, because I have an older one, but I'm not looking at her right now because she's in college. Thank God. As I look at my kids, as I look at the kids, when I used to teach preschool, as I look at each one of these little individual humans and us as adults. We are each here with a purpose. We are each here with a purpose on purpose and we have to listen to that purpose, no matter how bananas, it sounds, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel. No matter how mundane we think it is, it's still our purpose. And that's why we're here. And we can avoid it, which makes us sick a lot of the time. Right? Whether it makes us this buyer, body, mind, spirit, this concept of reconnecting to ourselves because we get disconnected after we're about six and we start going to public school, we start going to school, we get disconnected from our intuition. Cause you know, we gotta, you gotta sit in that chair. You gotta listen to the teacher who knows everything. And that's when we stopped. To everything around us. And so if we get back to this idea that we know what it is, it was me when I was six and building bird's nest in the backyard and just laying there and just humming along and singing and, you know, just whatever come on in little birds. Cause I really loved the birds. I mean, I'm Dr. Melissa Bird who doesn't love the birds. So really thinking about those things that before they were yelled out of us, beaten out of us, taken away from us. Patriarchal you were removed from us. What was that thing? We all have it and it's still there. Sometimes it's just a little more distant than we'd like it to be. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Project Podcast and our interview with Dr. Melissa Bird. To learn more about her Misfit Magic Hour, one-on-one coaching and masterclass series, visit NaturalBornRebel.com. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Get $45 worth of free goodies with a one-year subscription using the code WINTERGOODIES. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast. So you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time, stay well and stay passionate.  

The following is my conversation with Adam Argyle, CSS Developer Advocate for Google Chrome.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xEyJ6LY7DKIThe conversation covers a quite a few topics that are relevant in the webdev and web design industries: UI complexity cliffs, DX vs UX, Self Disruption, and what Web Design Tooling could be.Along the way we touch on what OpenUI is, Adam's Deferred Inputs proposal, the 4 Jobs of Developer Experience, Thoughtleading for Good from Emily Freeman, Ilya Grigorik, and Dion Almaier, and Adobe vs Figma vs Webflow!Links:  Button tweet https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1450333133300064259 https://open-ui.org/ https://jasonformat.com/application-holotypes/ https://siliconangle.com/2021/09/29/devops-dummies-author-emily-freeman-introduces-revolutionary-model-modern-software-development-awsq3/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar Ilya Grigorik Perf.now talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIfVPtN6io Visbug https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/visbug/cdockenadnadldjbbgcallicgledbeoc?hl=en https://web.dev/learn/ Timestamps:00:00:00 Cold open00:01:05 Complexity Cliffs and the Reusable Button Problem00:03:28 OpenUI00:04:32 DevRel vs Personal work00:05:52 DRY vs Design Systems00:07:10 Building in Phases00:08:04 Thought Leading for Good00:10:33 Learning00:14:13 The Surprising Complexity of Tabs00:17:12 What is Open UI?00:19:59 Hot Take: Deferred Inputs00:23:40 Cathedral vs Bazaar00:28:01 Illya Grigorik: Head/Torso/Tail00:32:45 UX vs DX00:45:51 4 Jobs of DX00:50:33 Self Disruption00:54:50 Adobe vs Figma vs Webflow01:01:04 VisBug01:05:05 Shameless PlugsTranscript swyx: Alright So the first thing we're talking about is ui complexity cliffs what's on your mind what was his first on your on your list. Adam Argyle: yeah you had a tweet the other day that was i'm at my fourth startup or something like this and we're pressing buttons again like, how s it 2021. swyx: And by guys Adam Argyle: Are popping up i needing refactoring or something like How are they not solved and. Adam Argyle: i'm sure you had threads of people that have their ideas there and mine was it's a omplexity cliff it's the first introduction, where you as a front end ui person who actually. Adam Argyle: is like goingto go build out all this matrix of states that a button needs that it lands on you it's like you've been in the car using a shifter this whole time using a steering wheel this whole time and then someone said hey. Adam Argyle: Go change the steering wheel out and you're like oh that's just a component just a single use like that things totally only got like one attachment right, and then you walk up to it and you start working on it you'd like. Adam Argyle: To see just like really integrated into the system. Adam Argyle: And or whatever right, you have these like discovery moments with it and you realize it's much more complex than it is in a button just does that buttons like yeah well let's allow an icon to be on our button and you're like okay left and right. Adam Argyle: sides can be I can have both sides because you could have a shopping cart with a little drop down arrow. Adam Argyle: Oh man Okay, and you have to have dark mode you better have this and that and that the matrix like i've seen the of states, is what I mean by this complexity cliff like it's just not visible from the surface, it looks all innocent. Adam Argyle: And then you go map it like if you mapped out everything you need it's it's a lot, like the CSS alone that it takes to have like a custom button and the design system is absurd it's absurd, but at the same time I love it anyway. swyx: So this is the tweet and question and honestly like this is this is genuine because. swyx: yeah I had that to Sigma away, where I had my first front end job and then modify and now it's immoral same stuff again and all did you handle disabled Oh, is it a link, or is it a button. swyx: And it was interesting was also just the replies like Nicole from Google So what does she do she like. Adam Argyle: beats I worry record directly. Adam Argyle: These days, she was on frameworks and she's now shifted to ui and sort of like how did she empower people to build flexible and fluid interfaces on the web. Adam Argyle: And that's why she points to open your eyes it's like a community for that, but anyway that i'm part of her team because i'm I work on similar things. swyx: Okay yeah and so like you know, first of all I didn't I didn't expect this to reach anyone in Google. swyx: But then also like the Web components people reached out to me and they're like how come work a foreign service officer for you and i'm like it's not about the tech. swyx: it's more about like understanding the specs of what people wanted people not agreeing what a button should do. Adam Argyle: yeah. Adam Argyle: yeah Google cloud had had too many. Adam Argyle: They had them in multiple frameworks in the same. Adam Argyle: repo right being like just because they grew so fast or whatever like your project always gets out of hand and all of a sudden yeah you have more than one button. Adam Argyle: which some people have enough time or England one, how are they going to wrinkle two or three and built in different frameworks right you could your islands architecture with buttons you're just like oh snap touch mean any button from any framework just shows up in an island. swyx: that's an interesting discussion is that a big. swyx: Is the islands architecture, a big discussion within Google, or because I always have hard I have trouble separating Jason from Jason Miller, who wrote the article architecture markers. swyx: When is he talking in his own personal capacity, or when is he saying like No, this is something we're tight with thinking about a Google. Adam Argyle: Oh, in my opinion Jason and I are pretty straight shooters about our own stuff like we work for Google and chrome and we love our job, and we want to represent chrome well and do all the things our job want us to do, but we have this like I don't know where our own personal opinion like. swyx: jake Archibald as to he. Adam Argyle: he's working on a lot of his own stuff we kind of balance, both I mean Jason definitely does things internally that he might not have chosen to go do if he just could choose whatever he wants to do. Adam Argyle: But that doesn't mean that's what he's going to go pitch outside of Google and the islands architectures. Adam Argyle: yeah This is just sort of the micro friends evolution into let's eventually docker eyes every component and then manage them with communities in the front end right we'll get there, I don't know. Adam Argyle: yeah. swyx: Well, so the this discussion of the reusable button and the ui complexity cliff makes me wonder because there's a lot of discussion about how dry is overrated you know. swyx: We should we should write everything twice and sometimes if you're just customizing it so often you're reusing it so much maybe just don't reuse code just just copy and paste and then that makes it easy to the really easy to modify the only thing that. swyx: That goes wrong with that so whenever you need to do a global update then you'd run into trouble, but how often do you really need to do that. Adam Argyle: Right isn't that what the super RAD typescript refactor button is for like that's why you typed your whole thing, so that you could refactor across something globally, I mean this is a value prop of typescript right. Adam Argyle: If you are, you know, employing it that way, on your project but yeah I think that's a really good point, though, is that sometimes you don't need to build a mega button yeah. Adam Argyle: yeah mega buttons get built and then mega buttons fall down. swyx: And also wonder if it's like. swyx: If it should be gated by number of people working on the project, so we had at my first company. swyx: Three front end developers and we were building both the design system and the APP. swyx: And I was just like maybe we should build the APP and forget the design system. Adam Argyle: Okay, this is actually something i've said multiple times is that. Adam Argyle: projects and people are in phases, a startup is in a phase. Adam Argyle: And in your first phase where you're in the creation state, you should not be in typescript you should not be hardening all of your stuff with hundred percent test coverage and you should be not be making a design system which you need to do. Adam Argyle: Is build a really good experience that's messy and expressive. Adam Argyle: And then go hard and all the things that are tried and. Adam Argyle: True, because you can't predict it all, and if you try to sit down and predict it all and. Adam Argyle: and build this like perfect thing from the start you'll just never going to get to the point at which it should have as fast as you can it's weird we think we move faster with all of these rules, and all this stuff but we end up moving way slower. Adam Argyle: And so yeah i'd say phase two of your company. Adam Argyle: let's say you have success in your sustainable and it's time to like rethink something, because you can need to grow, the team by 10 or 15 or whatever. Adam Argyle: Go ahead and spend a few months and and refactor and harden and create the components that are obvious like and don't go micromanager design system okay wait i'm getting wrapped up sorry okay anyway. swyx: No, I think, look like you have this i've seen you do this rant a couple times. swyx: I think he needs to slap a fancy label on it and then put it put into a nice graphic and go like this is the way that you should do things because I have you seen i'm Emily freeman. swyx: At aws she did she basically had some issues with the software, the traditional software development lifecycle where it's like a very waterfall approach and shows you V shaped it into like a. swyx: Like a circular concentric circle grid with the six dimensions and it made a lot of sense for some people. swyx: But that at least encoded her opinion and she could give it a name and and she she said, like this is the way you do things now, and she had whole spiel on it, but like. swyx: Sometimes it's better to sell an idea or like a workflow if you give it a name and you put some put some diagrams on it and make it a thing, rather than repeating the rent every time. Adam Argyle: yeah and so yeah, this is the phases ranger mentioning like yeah. swyx: yeah catchy acronym or like you know, whatever. swyx: And and yeah I mean you know sea islands architecture was a catchy catchy name for it, you know. swyx: It was yeah was your last name, he had for. Adam Argyle: A holiday types right, it was holotype. swyx: hollow times, I never heard that word before. Adam Argyle: So cool yeah. Adam Argyle: that's what that's what Jason called it in an article, he was, oh no he was saying, your APP is one of these holiday types. Adam Argyle: And if you were yes certain holotype he could lead well to you know, an islands architectural river. swyx: yeah very good so Basically, this is like part of my long running a study on how the thought leader or thought leading for fun and profit, you know there's like sort of the cynical thought leading, which is like hey I want you to buy my ebook. swyx: But then there you can also follow me for for benefit if, like you really have a cause that you just really want to align people on, you have to package, it in a message that that people can spread for you, instead of you, having to do all the work. Adam Argyle: Totally yeah I think you're doing a good job with that being a thought leader, by the way, I very much enjoy your thoughts. swyx: I don't know what i'm meeting people to. Adam Argyle: I mean, I think that's what's fun as you're on an exploration constantly digging. Adam Argyle: And going to these archives and you're just kind of shooting it out, as it happens, and honestly that's kind of all, I do with my CSS tips i'm building stuff every day, almost all day and so i'm like here's it I just did this thing this is cool I think anyway. Adam Argyle: Yes, what else will and. swyx: I will say, like the thing about CSS like no one ever feels like you know all of it. swyx: Do you think that's a problem. Adam Argyle: No, I think that's how every language feels. swyx: So i've been trying to. swyx: push back on this little because I think being able to say, this is the entire map like Okay, you know, there is a spec right. swyx: And it's not an infinite list it's a finite list, and you can you can at least kind of draw like here's the world map, you will never visit. swyx: The entire world, but at least you know, like okay here's a comment here there's a comment there I haven't gone there yet, but it's there when I need it. swyx: At least like having boundaries around like Okay, the world ends ends here and. swyx: I think that's an interesting way to think about like learning or evangelizing something, and this is relevant for me, because at my job. swyx: We have a fairly complex system, and no one had ever enumerated the features until I went through and just went like Okay, we have 30 features and once you know these 30 features that's about it for the system. swyx: and being able to say that's it. swyx: And, and having an end to your learning I think it's a really interesting concept to have. Adam Argyle: yeah docs kind of give you that sense right you land on docs and you're like I have the world in my hands every API call and every function is. Adam Argyle: articulated here with every parameter yeah and I definitely see where you're going, I think that can help someone. Adam Argyle: Get perspective of the language that they're jumping into but there's like surprises right like you learn javascript for who cares how long and then all of a sudden someone goes, you heard of functional programming you. Adam Argyle: Like what and then you go look at you like, what are you doing with javascript and then it will. swyx: Stop. Adam Argyle: you're bringing it to infinity right and then like typescripts the same way you're like I thought I was like I liked were new like javascript and. Adam Argyle: In typescript just tells me all day that I have no idea what I know, and you know, like. Adam Argyle: CSS is the same way i've been studying and building things in it for a long time and I I also am a human, you know some of these things are so big that I can't memorize every map and territory. swyx: So I revisit in and. Adam Argyle: So I think what happens with experience is that you know, like okay every programming language has a moment where you're banging your head against it, you know whether it's FLEX box or it's. Adam Argyle: You know, some extends in typescript or something that's extending extend extend and you're just like lost in the extension world like in these scenarios you eventually emerge. Adam Argyle: Right you bust out. Adam Argyle: In your head comes popping out and you get a breath of air and you're like. Adam Argyle: I have defeated it like and what I think professional developers are they're just seasoned at defeating all the little things in so much that they're now in a perspective, where they expect things to pop up that they're not going to know. Adam Argyle: But be they've if they run into things that they run into before. Adam Argyle: They don't have the same hour or four hours or two days that it takes to solve it, they just walk right over it, because they're like oh that was in that territory over here. Adam Argyle: I remember like two years ago, when I had to go there, like i'll just go there, I don't remember everything about it. Adam Argyle: But i'll go read it and study and be like oh yeah that was it okay and i'll put that back in the 70s, like every time he's intersection observer i'm like I know in your section observer and then i'm like I don't remember the syntax I gotta go look it up so. Adam Argyle: Anyway, yeah. swyx: And they basically, I just want to copy and paste intersection observer code and just give me like the three or four design patterns that work and that's about it that's that's all people want out of it. Adam Argyle: Section observer, I mean I think people want the matrix I think they want to stick a thing in the back of their neck. Adam Argyle: And, just like CSS I know it, I will now command every box in the way that i've ever desired. swyx: yeah. Adam Argyle: Briefly, though, before we get off of complexity cliffs well the first components that reminded me of complexity cliffs was the tabs component. Adam Argyle: And we've been talking about that, so we talked about Nicole already, and so one of the things we're trying to do is make tabs on the web. Adam Argyle: easier and in my studies, I have found that it's a massive complexity cliff like there's 100 variants of what tabs are more than that, over the years we've seen thousands of variants of tabs. Adam Argyle: And they all have little niche features some little niche features, make a tabs feel like a carousel some tabs kind of feel like an accordion. Adam Argyle: Some tabs feel like those paper tabs you had in a binder and they all have this like little thing and they all have different accessibility implications and usually. Adam Argyle: that's like the deciding factor, at least, like open ui they're like okay here's what tabs are tabs are basically this accessibility ux as a foundation, like the skeleton of the thing works like this, but I go look in the wild. Adam Argyle: And I see all of these different tabs and i'm excited by it and it kind of frustrates other people, because they want to go harden the pattern right, this is what. Adam Argyle: The button is trying to do it's like hard and a pattern and so people want to harden these patterns, they they look so obvious to harden and then I go research and I basically called him Kara tabs now i'm like oh tablet cells you mean oh CARA tabs. Adam Argyle: you're like no tabs. Adam Argyle: i'm like care tabs. Adam Argyle: Because the variations are so fun and exciting and I actually think that's what the web is excelling at is this weirdness is that. Adam Argyle: Anyway, so, but the complexity cliff is very clear in tabs where there is really no single way to build one that would fulfill every tabs component needs that's out there. Adam Argyle: Like a lot of tabs have nothing to do with swiping when I think that's mandatory on like mobile you gotta be able to swipe between tabs. Adam Argyle: we've been trained that way for like five years but they would disagree, like the open ui organization because that's just not part of the. Adam Argyle: float anyway, so what i'm getting at is these complexity cliffs make it really hard to harden things and i'm at a point where i'm trying to study which ones are on which side of the cliff Sean that's what I want to know. Adam Argyle: Because the ones that are on the side that it just goes steep downhill I think it's okay to let those be free ship primitives and let people be weird. Adam Argyle: Let people build all these fun different exciting tabs like I don't i'm not that interested in that, but we could move into different inputs, if you want as that that next topic. swyx: I have a two things to ask you, before you do this so one thing you seem to have a image in your head about complexity cliffs have you visualize this because I feel like it's an analogy, that is right for visualization. Adam Argyle: know I mean it'd be an iceberg you looking at a button and it looks like a simple button on top, and then you look under the water and you're like holding this thing has like request animation frame loops in it, or something you're like I just did not predict that. swyx: yeah I think I think some visuals will be nice to for people to really is totally get it. swyx: And then, secondly, could you introduce for those who would like i've dug around open ui it seems like a basically it tries to be a browser vendor agnostic. swyx: spec have you here's how here's extensions to standard html well how about you do, how about you help me define like what is open ui who runs it, what is the near term like should people pay attention is now is it's just an r&d phase like what what's uh what phases it isn't it. Adam Argyle: Sure yeah and you know you should have unit on because she's a member of the open ui. Adam Argyle: cabinet, I have no idea anyway it's a Community group it operates like a Community group. Adam Argyle: it's led by I think Greg whitworth maybe Brian cartel also. Adam Argyle: Dave Rupert is on it also he does a lot of presentations Dave Rupert is a he's pro tabs not pro tab excel he has a spicy accordion that he's made that is basically tabs but it's. Adam Argyle: Not tabs it's a spicy accordion anyway okay so that's the sort of things that sometimes get talked about it open your eyes, but their goal is to. Adam Argyle: move faster as an agnostic implementation team, then what browsers would do and how can they operate like how the community groups do for CSS but do it for components. Adam Argyle: And so they have one that's like a recent success, I think, and it's taken a long time to get there, which is the POP over component, if you heard about the POP over component. swyx: know if I can pull it up, you can tell me about it. Adam Argyle: awesome it's cool it's classic you mouse or you focus into a link and you get a pop up right. swyx: This is it, this one. Adam Argyle: yeah. Adam Argyle: And so, this took a long time to get through it has tons of you can see that they are very look it's an editor's draft Oh, they have three and editors draft interesting, so the select element is also there, I know that my working on that one so something that's sustainable select. Adam Argyle: And I bet you that dependent on the pop up. Adam Argyle: Anyway, so i'm not a super pro hear about how they operate, but I do know that their goals are to make accessible well defined open source community group driven web components, I think their web components. Adam Argyle: And yeah and eventually I think their goal is to have those things accepted into browser specs and how browsers implement them natively maybe i'm not really sure. Adam Argyle: Where that goes from there, oh look, you can see mason freed on there for pop up he's the Google or who's doing a lot of implementation and he's on the group there to Melanie richards awesome. Adam Argyle: yeah it's got a great crew of cats that are like hacking on it, they they're diligent they seem passionate and i'm not a Member. Adam Argyle: Because i'm kind of. Adam Argyle: I don't know if we need more primitives. Adam Argyle: Sean. Adam Argyle: I want to, it is a heartache and i've talked to Brian and a couple other people about what look like i'm actually. Adam Argyle: So this is why the fruit inputs as an interesting conversation. Adam Argyle: I like to swing for the fences i'd like to swing a lot bigger. Adam Argyle: Okay, so, for example, let's say open ui or someone else and open you I seriously, I admire them so much, I think there is a really important and impressive thing that they're doing so I think i'm also just intimidated, but anyway. Adam Argyle: What I would like to suggest is okay consider the calendar so maybe a calendar component gets you know standardized so you could customize it you don't just get the 20 year old dinky one it's in your browser I. Adam Argyle: hate that one it drives me nuts and like she's the leads there's No one. Adam Argyle: else and. swyx: there's one that's worse than that it's the number number input. swyx: You know, with a small. swyx: tiny arrows. swyx: Oh, my. Adam Argyle: God seriously I don't know someone on a netbook with like one of those. Adam Argyle: mini mouse's or something anyway. Adam Argyle: Okay, so imagine this Sean This is my crazy idea called deferred inputs you put an input in there type equals date and you put an attribute called deferred on it, and what the browser does when they user temps that input. Adam Argyle: Is they broker a relationship between that webpage and a third party widget. Adam Argyle: And a third party experience, because what I want when I click on a calendar widget is not just a stupid calendar Sean I want my events on there. Adam Argyle: I want to know if what i'm picking is going to interrupt or something if i'm booking dinner I need to know. Adam Argyle: All of these different cases I want to know my stuff in there, but I don't want the webpage to know anything about it so imagine for a second that we went to the APP store MAC os and we installed. Adam Argyle: A calendar component called Google calendar who cares or maybe it's icon right account makes sense for safari to prompt. Adam Argyle: So you get these different inputs, with a broker, since the request to this APP and says this user is requesting a date All we want is a string format it like this, give them an experience that's rich and set and has a session and you're logged into. Adam Argyle: And let them pick a date and then we'll just get the date back so the date input is still just a static text input, but the browser brokered a relationship to third party. Adam Argyle: developers who can create specific and robust experiences for these inputs so i'm not talking we just, you know as a group. Adam Argyle: come up with a cool date picker that people can pass custom properties to to silent, I think that's a great stopgap but i'd love to see us like make a rich. Adam Argyle: Do picking a date is a rich experience moment it's something that people can excel at and show you how beautiful, it is like imagine sunrise like that APP they made the calendar thing that just like disrupted every time they made one and then imagine someone else. Adam Argyle: Now you had choices Sean you had choices for your date input as a user that's what I want to see, I want to see users, having the ability and I want developers to build a compete for the. Adam Argyle: Creation of those widget experiences I think browsers have been sitting on it and it drives me NUTS they're crappy and it looks like they don't care so just open it up. Adam Argyle: Just broker the relationship to a bunch of developers that want to get a $2 components, so that you can have a session logged in calendar picker like. Adam Argyle: in any way, so a lot of these inputs that are a lot of these components that we're waiting for. Adam Argyle: that are more robust that we need more out of like some of our primitives i'm like don't just give us some new crappy primitive that looks like crap. Adam Argyle: I just i'm tired of those like give us an opportunity and an open up the open up the industry to a new monetization flow like you're basically creating third party developer anyway, whatever Sean I think i've pitched it enough what, what do you think is that crazy. swyx: So I need to clarify one more thing so first of all, have you written this up anywhere. Adam Argyle: This is a slides I have like a little presentation and i'm giving it to people it's just it's pretty much can we find it somewhere. swyx: Just just so people can follow up if they want. Adam Argyle: I think it's just a random idea I have songs and like you know. swyx: I mean I if you know if you you believe this so. swyx: What this this kind of conversation always reminds me of the cathedral versus the bizarre. swyx: You know that Nice that a Fred brooks this is this is old school software development right like, how do you design it ecosystem, do you want, do you want to say, like I do it for you, because I know best, or do you want to say I don't know best, and that everyone just have it out. swyx: And so open your eyes kind of the cathedral and they're like Okay, a little research everything and then we'll we'll pick the best way, that is, the superset of everything and then. swyx: The bizarre it's kind of like this different input approach where it's just like I don't know and i'll just give you a single extension point and you guys go nuts. Adam Argyle: yep that's exactly what it's basically just be what I call them. Adam Argyle: Because they have an android or an intent the. Adam Argyle: input basically admitted intent. Adam Argyle: And it says, who can handle the intent right. Adam Argyle: And all these developers now have Apps living on your operating system that the browser can broker the intent, was it says. Adam Argyle: it's just like how intense it's actually extremely modeled after, then the mobile experience of. swyx: Intense. Adam Argyle: Because I love that experience it's really nice you're just like yeah look at all my fun custom stuff I have they can handle where my image goes like that's really nice. Adam Argyle: And yeah we should have a color picker like that, like give me the opportunity to click on a color and put in I bring my own color picker to the table chrome. swyx: You know so. swyx: I don't know yours yeah. swyx: Is this the user so. Adam Argyle: there's a few personas yeah there's user. swyx: APP developer, and then the user viewing the site so each viewer has like their own experience of this thing okay. Adam Argyle: They got. Adam Argyle: A utility built of personalized widgets in their browser so anywhere their browsers logged in and. swyx: How many of these are there. Adam Argyle: I mean a perfect kind of labeled a few here. Adam Argyle: yeah calendar auto fill payment. Adam Argyle: photo picker and file picker oh photo picker and file picker already done, is what this says in my deck I haven't looked at my deck and like a year. Adam Argyle: Because yeah if you think about photo picker. Adam Argyle: Well, I guess, on mobile it's different but on desktop it's not right on mobile when you click on a file uploader you click on some things allows you to upload you get to fulfill it with your own choice of an APP your phone. Adam Argyle: Your personal stuff just needs to return an image right, and then the browser doesn't have to know to care about the whole experience that it took you to find it because you went back three years on June 24. Adam Argyle: To find the hamburger that you were looking for right like anyway yeah so auto fill would be an awesome one and payment like why can't I just install a third party payment installation thing and. swyx: When I so i'm. Adam Argyle: Pay yeah invokes my own experience. swyx: Well, what about security like if it's a third party widget and it's payment like i'm giving you my card details. Adam Argyle: User installed it, and so there, hopefully they're trusting what they installed and that the page itself is only getting results back so it's like the same static results they would have got before. Adam Argyle: So the page doesn't get to know anything about the third party experience there's like a very it's just a message that's going to get passed back and forth him. swyx: And do you think so, one example of this, that is done in user land is essentially password managers. swyx: Like a right they they override all the password fields and then they've given their own little things why can't it just be done like that. Adam Argyle: Oh so like an extension model. Adam Argyle: sounds good to me so yeah you could as a developer go build a whole bunch of really awesome you know extensions built on the extension version three manifest and deploy them across all the browsers and. Adam Argyle: deliver a unique logged in experience for color picking and sure yeah maybe you could intercept those clicks and invoke your own overlay ui actually makes sense to me. swyx: Okay got it so it sounds like you know of those things that you missed it those are inputs. swyx: There are a lot of things there a lot of components that are not inputs. swyx: And I guess open you I would be involved. Adam Argyle: Like tabs carousels pop overs yeah. swyx: So you're not in conflicts, you know. Adam Argyle: I don't think so yeah. Adam Argyle: yeah Okay, and both can coexist, they could create a new date picker and that should be the default, we need better date pickers so better default components anyway so yeah i'm like this isn't me trying to stop them it's like I just think there's a whole opportunity for competition, like. Adam Argyle: yeah and it could be cool yeah. swyx: One one last thing that comes up when when we talk about image speakers. swyx: Did you ever see that talk by ilya regard about. swyx: The image picker up like file size optimizer. Adam Argyle: I don't think so tell me all about it. swyx: So he had a fantastic talk, which, like really shaped the way I think about so okay oh God, I can give me a SEC to pull this up Okay, because. swyx: I don't I don't think i'm gonna do this justice. swyx: Unless I literally have it up. swyx: What is his Twitter handle he's not super active on Twitter. Adam Argyle: it'll yet some. swyx: I Google org. Adam Argyle: Oh, I was wrong. swyx: Okay, all right. swyx: All right, here we go so. swyx: This is where this is where I shouted it out, he had this concept of the. swyx: The head the torso and the tail. swyx: and swyx: It was like, how do we solve. swyx: How do you solve image performance forever right like you can do some fancy stuff with like. swyx: Your image optimizing cdn you can do all these like source set things no one's going to do it, it just is too complex like yeah it's cool and you should feel bad if you don't do it right, but also there's just too much to learn. Adam Argyle: Serving images is very hard yeah it's hard. swyx: So, like he was fee fantastically broke it down to like okay so he's he's at this performance now conference right and he said. swyx: Okay yeah here we go. swyx: I like I just I just love how clearly stated this if you want to solve the image problem once and for all the cost should be free, the number of choices should be zero the tools must do the work not require work. swyx: Right now, the tools that we're being given require more work hey the default sucks but just to be backward compatible here's a source at thing with like five different options and hey you got to do image processing on your own good that. swyx: That requires work, so people don't do it right, so the kind of person that goes to a performance now conference that watches performance videos in their free time, that is what he calls the head. swyx: That and i'm not finding a slide but essentially like there's a there's an adoption curve right there's there's the really like performance oriented performance minded people. swyx: who are going to adopt all the best practices they're going to listen to your target have read your blog posts, then the torso they're like they're just you know, following whatever the. swyx: Body says, and then and then there's a long tail that just will never read anything they'll just do whatever this is easiest So you see, if you want real impact, you have to address the torso under the tail not just the head, because the head. swyx: Has the time to this to learn all your stuff but that's not the problem, the problem is the rest of it, like everyone else. swyx: Sorry, I think i'm like doing doing things the job of. Adam Argyle: Now I think i'm following yeah. swyx: So so his proposal by the end of his talk, and this is like in 2019 was that okay all right image optimizing cdn too complicated set too complicated. swyx: Never just never upload a giant file that you never giant photo that you never need so he was like let's introduce an image uploaded a component that has image optimization built into that that point of upload so all points down the chain just never get there. swyx: I thought that was like that this I thought that was where you were going I don't know if you talk to them before about this. swyx: Okay. Adam Argyle: I have not. Adam Argyle: That kind of reminds me of ink ink uploader which I used I don't know, five years ago, or so it was kind of like early image X server but yeah you upload the biggest image, you had and then request it with one URL. Adam Argyle: And maybe some parameters on the URL and you get you could get a whole dynamics of the images back yes. Adam Argyle: And only had to deal with the one image tag and yeah yeah well that's the way forward motion. swyx: that's an image optimizing cdn. swyx: So you have to pay money for that and, of course, like you know that that. swyx: Costs of engineering resources, so he wanted to go a little bit more than that, I don't know how practical it was, but it was very convincing at the time. swyx: And you know I hope he I don't know if he's still a Google or not, but you know. Adam Argyle: He is yeah. swyx: He gets some sway in the design of this thing. Adam Argyle: Nice yeah I like that analogy, though, I think that works really good. swyx: Which is I mean it's so in a broader context of Dev developer tools and like designing for us versus the exercise next topic. swyx: yeah. swyx: I think about this a lot, which is that whenever we appear at conferences and we like dropping you blog posts and new feature and we just expect people to like. swyx: know about it and learn about it and adopt it like within a year, otherwise it's their fault not yours and i'm just like no people don't have time. swyx: Most people just want to know, like what the best practices they're going to do that and then they'll they'll move on with their day and that's about all the time that they have for you. swyx: And, and so, if we want to you know, improve user experience like we have to make it basically bring this for people to adopt the best practice. Adam Argyle: yeah so we can yeah do you want to start there like. Adam Argyle: yeah that's The goal of the phrase, or like that's like the. Adam Argyle: The the heartfelt meaningful good side of the phrase that dx can lead to good ux is the intent is there, which is that people want to deliver good ux and they're not wrong that good dx can deliver a portion or maybe a lot of ux. Adam Argyle: But I think that the phrase is kind of not doing itself a favor like it's it's kind of a short sighted view of what dx is versus a short sighted view of ux and i'm like. Adam Argyle: I don't even know why we're so okay so first off let's just say that to have dx it even could facilitate good ux someone had to teach the dx what good ux was like ux had to start it. Adam Argyle: In order, like be the initial cause for dx to exist, that it was knowledgeable to give you good ux so i'm like. Adam Argyle: wow is people think the dx just magically gives good you actually had to be written by somebody like the good ux was created and someone spent valuable time thinking about good ux. Adam Argyle: In order to bake it into something that could be shared better that then helped facilitate a workflow which is just like how like a bakery it would work right you just got like okay we've got all these processes they're working like this. Adam Argyle: And now we're going to always use this flower instead of have random flowers and we're always going to use this scoop or something like that, and you just start to like. Adam Argyle: harden these things over time, so that when new people join they don't have to go learn there's three scoops there's just one scoop now to choose from, and every time those decisions get made like they're made in a good faith that, like us, like the bakers, are trying to make more. Adam Argyle: You know muffins or something for everybody, like the ux is eating a muffin. Okay. Adam Argyle: That. Adam Argyle: Essentially you can. Adam Argyle: overdo it, just like in a design system, you can overdo it so where eventually maybe you make a factory maybe you've got you know, and this happens all the time and code we build tons of factories to stamp out web pages to stamp this out to stand we'd love our automation. Adam Argyle: And sometimes automation. Adam Argyle: All it does is harden one good ux choice and it might make subsequent ux choices harder. Adam Argyle: in any way so okay so then here i'm going to go back to like the like dx is so much more than providing good ux like there's so much more to it, like you can have an entire. Adam Argyle: day's worth of dx that never touches ux and that should be fine like you should be happy with that, because what you're trying to do is empower everyone after you. Adam Argyle: or whatever it is like I think it's valuable time so basically I think it's short sighted dx to think that it can only be valuable if it's affecting ux I don't think that even needs to. Adam Argyle: go away. Adam Argyle: And then. Adam Argyle: Right, I think dx it's like you could do anyway so dx can be entirely in a whole other sector of the organization and never changed the ux and I don't think that's bad. Adam Argyle: I think sometimes it can in consequently change ux and that's awesome sometimes it can intentionally do it, you know, maybe data, the data Center team over here. Adam Argyle: They switch to a different cluster system and now they're you know shaped 50 milliseconds off a request or whatever you're like cool the user might feel that or whatever. Adam Argyle: But then also ux it's short citing what ux is if you've ever met a ux designer. Adam Argyle: To them, the user experiences and how fast the milliseconds went down the wire, even though this is part of the user experiences how fast you got it to them. Adam Argyle: They spend weeks and months researching users to make informed decisions about ux. Adam Argyle: it's so to think that dx can just magically have all of that, I mean unless the designers are baking and they're the ones, creating the dx maybe dx is directly affecting us. Adam Argyle: But really I think ux starts with research it doesn't start with good dx you have to you have to know what good ux is spend time on it. Adam Argyle: and actually create it before you can then go harden it and make it like repeatable and shareable or whatever it is, and also ux is just so much more than. Adam Argyle: That moment the button downloaded and you pressed it so it's like belittling. Adam Argyle: The whole concept of ux and dx at the same time it's a comparison that doesn't even really matter like here's another thing too. Adam Argyle: Is you can have the worst dx in the world let's say you can only ssh into this one server you have no tools you're just with vim and it's like an. Adam Argyle: insane react project you don't even have web pack, you have to go edit the output of a bundle let's say that who knows. Adam Argyle: dude a determined ux person will do whatever it takes to make the ux good they'll go hack that code it doesn't matter the dx will matter, what matters is the desire that someone had. Adam Argyle: And you know, conversely, you could have like the best dx the entire world and deliver a button that says fart. Adam Argyle: Because the text in a button bro. Adam Argyle: is part of ux man there's ux writers that's All they do is provide text so maybe if you're dx or your button was so RAD that you could like. Adam Argyle: A new button and then you drop it in, and it has a whole suggestion of ux written content in it like I don't think you're really getting the full fledge. Adam Argyle: Delivery of ux because it's so contextual it's so subjective it's so human that. Adam Argyle: All you get from dx in terms of ux is anything that's on rails and anything you get from dx that can lead to good ux usually can because good ux sourced into the dx that then change the ux so I just don't. Adam Argyle: it's just like i'm like i'm not sure everyone's trying to say other than I think you know, which is, I said at the beginning i'm like I see the initial goal here, which is like hey if you have. Adam Argyle: really great tools, it can make it easier to slice some bread and put butter on it and then now you have slice butter way faster, you know, like look at us and we made a process for it, and now we can do 10 breads and 10 butters. Adam Argyle: In a parallel right we're gatsby and now we're doing parallel bread's buttered. Adam Argyle: Right until the designer says oh we're not using butter or new new butter and peanut butter and everyone's like Oh, we made a factory for that last process you're like dude users want peanut butter now too so. Adam Argyle: Are you have to update all the dx to match the new ux. Adam Argyle: So that's kind of what I see I think it's almost like ux is equal to dx which could trickle down to ux again early that's the intent, and so I just don't. Adam Argyle: know why we. Adam Argyle: don't talk about the full cycle and I don't know why we want to belittle the two concepts like ux is more than just developers. Adam Argyle: Building buttons and forms and flows and stuff like that there's a whole team of ux designers that they are literally fighting your company to have good ux. Adam Argyle: And I just that's why I think a lot of designers don't retweet the dx is better than us, or that dx will lead to good ux designers just know that they're at the table every day. Adam Argyle: arguing with somebody that they need to refactor this because it's not good user experience and the person over there is going move I see all your research, and I see you did user studies. Adam Argyle: I just can't allocate the resources and meanwhile they've got a team of 10 people increasing the dx of the backend system over here right and they're just not funding. Adam Argyle: The ux so anyway, I can just see like all these different sides to it and i'm. Adam Argyle: i'm just not it just doesn't do anyone to favor it's not doing dx a favor like it's not it, if anything, it kind of like makes dx look like the hero to I think that's my biggest issue with it, it makes dx look like it's The thing that lead to good ux i'm like. Adam Argyle: No, it doesn't it. Adam Argyle: Never anyway so i'm like it's not the hero. Adam Argyle: The hero here is. Adam Argyle: Having good ux like that's what everyone wants is, could you X dx steals the show and that freezing. Adam Argyle: And it's just so anyway i'm mostly annoyed with it and i'm like it's just it's based on like these couple of paths like people we look at this dx lead do that, like that's one path of 1000 that you'll take and building a product that has good ux. Adam Argyle: sure your dx lead to good ux there congratulations just don't praise that phrase like it's going to solve all of your ux problems. swyx: It is not. Adam Argyle: The responsible party for good choices ux focused individuals are the ones that make the good ux choices. Adam Argyle: and get funnel those through dx and background or whatever. Adam Argyle: So I just think it's missing the point and always. Adam Argyle: How do you feel. swyx: know why you know why we hear so much about it. swyx: it's because the ux people have nothing to sell you where's the dx people have something to sell you. swyx: there's a there's an economic incentive to drive things. Adam Argyle: yeah dx is the hottest phrase to get your product recognized right now that's for sure how. swyx: Do you think so, do you think the term is tarnished now you think it's so. No. swyx: No it's. Adam Argyle: tarnished to me, but no it's still hot, as ever, you kidding. swyx: it's my it's my it's my fault either mentally so my job titles literally had to develop experience. swyx: And I don't know if I want to. swyx: associate myself so closely with this thing. Adam Argyle: Oh, really, oh dear, I mean hey dude I associate myself with CSS how many people want to do that. swyx: I think it's amazing that would you that I think that una una or like my like I idolize you guys so much because. swyx: Oh no way be able to advocate for CSS Hello like. swyx: it's just it's just so first of all, you have to be good at, you have to be like really good at both of you are actually really great. swyx: But also just you're advocating for something that everyone can use so there's nothing to sell you it's just like you already have this and. swyx: Like 90% of you are terrible at it, or like you could be better, you know let's put it politically correctly, so I mean I think it's great I CSS will be around longer than both of us will be around, and I think it's. swyx: No one I don't know every everyone can always use a bit more CSS and their life. swyx: I need a CSS shirt, by the way. Adam Argyle: I could probably figure that out i'll send you a link later. swyx: it's just funny right like you know they're they're like 100 different js cons and like maybe I don't know if i've ever seen the CSS COM. Adam Argyle: There is yeah and I think. Adam Argyle: There was one of really popular one for five years and Europe and it's spread there was like once happening in other. Adam Argyle: continents, but it's I think kind of I don't know the conferencing is shaken up recently but yes. Adam Argyle: Yes, she's definitely underdog, and all this stuff. swyx: I mean I yeah so I mean I was really encouraged when he joins and then you started putting out a really good stuff and I just I think Google does something right when you when you hire developer relations, I don't know what it is, but. swyx: Every every person I see it's just stellar. Adam Argyle: To Dr Mayer dion has. swyx: I have. Adam Argyle: An emotion is he responsible addiction yeah he's the one who saw me. Adam Argyle: Like I anyway yeah he pretty much pulled me out of the team, I was at and Google and was like hey you want to do this over here and chrome and I was like I idolize you all I couldn't do that he's like you're one of us would you like to be like. Adam Argyle: Okay, and he totally believed in me and. Adam Argyle: gave me lots of chances and was and yeah i'm and I think there's lots of so he left recently a couple months. swyx: yeah shopify. Adam Argyle: shopify and you could tell he shattered people like there were people that were like dion was like. swyx: A. Adam Argyle: Different person he was someone I was emotionally. Adam Argyle: engaged with he has this amazing ability to listen and anyway, what what a great leader and manager, he was and he had he has some sort of skill I don't you know you'd have to ask him how he. swyx: knows asking. Adam Argyle: Someone and how we can judge people but yeah he's got a talent there. swyx: I you know I had so I went to boulder recently, and I think he is like just just outside builder or something and. swyx: I had lunch with him and he never he's so humble he never brings this up he's just like yeah I like I like tech like you know I think shopify school, you know he never talks about like how he runs. swyx: His Oregon how he how he thinks about hiring. swyx: Interesting guy interesting. Adam Argyle: Interesting guy and he just curious his candor so well. Adam Argyle: yeah but hey back to the dx says, like a job title, I do think it's still important, I just a and that's what i'm saying I don't think the phrase does your job, justice, like it's making dx sound like it's only valuable if it is impacting ux and i'm like that's not the case. Adam Argyle: You can integrate our developers to save hundreds of hours a week and and maybe never touches the ux and who cares you just still saved hundreds of ours, like, why is the value of dx somehow hinting. Adam Argyle: on its ability to hang on so we're getting more ranchi again why is yeah just doesn't like it's not doing it justice like it wants dx to be respected, and like it already is. Adam Argyle: So why push. Adam Argyle: This is like it's best moment to like. swyx: yeah whatever, so I think you know just just because you're you're interested in this i've been defining it in. swyx: In maybe like four ways, so the first this API design because. swyx: That is that every everything is downstream of like did you did you design the right abstraction right like the same thing that you're doing with different inputs and stuff like that. swyx: And then second of all docs for for that API right, you have to. swyx: be able to find it first of all, it needs to have full coverage everything that is in your API should be locatable and then it should be anticipatory like tell me what i'm going to need before I know about it, which is a high bar. swyx: But like. Adam Argyle: No, I like that's like visiting a docs page and it's already got my keys in it like I don't have to go find my keys it knows i'm writing. Adam Argyle: and looking at the docks and it. Adam Argyle: But yeah. swyx: To me that's just like template this template of docs I mean everyone can do that, you know, like it's. swyx: It is, it is, it is good people do do enjoy that but I always want to have an opinion, like Okay, you know you have like two required options and five not required options, but this is recommended in these situations, and this is only for power users tell me that. swyx: In the docs before before letting me go on configure it on my own so that's what i'm trying to do with our docs and then the last part is, if I have a done for you, the last word is. swyx: Three yeah right. swyx: Okay, so so there's there's developer relations, which is like traditional. swyx: Content creation is like teach me how to do stuff. swyx: Do tutorials do beaten, I mean. Adam Argyle: hype man. swyx: hype it up hype man yeah and then the last part is community which basically like do you have a place to go to ask questions and how how much you know. swyx: Like can you get a job in this is there, like a training is there, like career progression do I see myself identifying with this technology as a career like. swyx: There are lots of technologies in our lives there's only a certain technologies that we choose to call to like say like I am a developer, I am a reactor developer that that means something that's over and above just the the particular library and framework that you use. swyx: I don't know if I should do that I don't know if I should be so expensive and say like oh yeah communities part of this, too, but also it kind of is. Adam Argyle: It definitely is it's something that I tried and I still try to focus on by having open office hours doing the AMA is. Adam Argyle: I try to reach out and yeah that's why I do conferences, I like to do I don't think I can effectively do my job. Adam Argyle: If i'm not connecting to the Community, because otherwise i'm living in a bubble and i'm not putting my shoes on that are uncomfortable for me like I need to be constantly putting on shoes of other people to have my own perspective. Adam Argyle: shaped well and then it makes me a better educator It makes me better at all these other roles yeah. Adam Argyle: it's that it's included. swyx: it's my that's my map of developer experience so far and i'm trying to implement that. Adam Argyle: awesome that sounds very amicable and it sounds like you have four pillars and everything at Google ends up being in four pillars. Adam Argyle: So, congratulations on. swyx: Google the coming. swyx: weeks to come in threes I don't know. Adam Argyle: Three is a little more catchy huh yeah. swyx: Wait so what's an example of the thing is that that's four pillars at Google. Adam Argyle: let's see if I can I don't know if I could remember one right now but it's like anytime a leader is presenting like. swyx: there's always. Adam Argyle: One slide that's got like four pillars of our beliefs or whatever and you're like come on this is just a template slide everyone slaps and they go. Adam Argyle: Oh, this was some crap. Adam Argyle: Anyway, so we tease it every time we see it we're like there's the pillars. swyx: I mean it, this is the whole thing about draw the map right like like I want to know, like where do I end, because if you just say it's all the things I don't have to. swyx: do with that, but if I have covered like the big macro is kind of like your your meal right like when you're when you're eating you want to make sure you're taking care of your big macros and in you you're roughly like you're going to survive. swyx: So. swyx: Nice yeah it's kind of how I think about should we talk about self disruption. Adam Argyle: yeah. swyx: Alright, so tell me about what this what this is and what prompted it actually. Adam Argyle: Okay, and let's see what prompted it. swyx: was just something like not innovating or was it. Adam Argyle: That was just me making a comparison yeah I was apple and their new machines. Adam Argyle: It was. Adam Argyle: Chris cormier sharing a CSS tricks article about alternative browsers based on chromium that are offering unique can express of experiences. Adam Argyle: It was me reflecting on opera when they tried to do this with opera next as like a self disrupted browser implementation, it was really cool it's like bubbles every town was pretty neat. Adam Argyle: And I just was like started I just started thinking about it, I was like in tech okay it's like as a naive implemented right because i'm pretty much swinging the hammer on the engine every day like i'm constantly. Adam Argyle: In the House, making sure the door handles are shiny and open easy like this is what I mean by like being a ux developer like i'm just going around and making sure. Adam Argyle: That it all flows and i'm like in my head i'm like if we had tons of money and this thing was just so successful you know what I would do is I would roll that all into like a labs team. Adam Argyle: That made it so that I made the next generation of house like let's quit hacking on these same houses, we have it up, we have a great process and it's all hunky dory but at the same time, like we're out putting a factory looking thing. Adam Argyle: And, and we seem to be happy and proud about it, we are but i'm like okay So for me I got really confused i'm like I would, if I had all this money and success. Adam Argyle: Roll it entirely into disrupting myself into the next coolest thing, because now I don't have to have the same stresses, I did the first time, the first time, when I made my product, I was fighting right and you were pushing you had this ideal in this mentality. Adam Argyle: And i'd want to live that again, and what I don't see happening is companies do that I see chrome browser what is it 10 or 15 years old. Adam Argyle: It looks kind of the same has a ton of new features under the hood but i'm like this is a very unexciting user experience but that's probably fine that's fine for mainstream application and yeah you don't want to go to so anyway, I like I understand why. Adam Argyle: it's risky to try to self disrupt but at the same time, I made the adobe comparison with you i'm like 20 years of success of photoshop. Adam Argyle: And yet there's still like every three years, a new design tool popping up that. Adam Argyle: turns everyone's head away and is almost it always feels next gen when it shows up sketch showed up everyone freaked out three years later we'll freaked out over Sigma three years later we freak out over xd. Adam Argyle: And and yeah they're like they're disrupting photoshop but photoshop not disrupting itself like why can't they just sit back and be like we've got hundreds of thousands of dollars and lots of. Adam Argyle: developers let's pivot everything until like V2 of this thing and just rocket into the future, you know, like let's do what everyone actually wants, instead of just repeating. Adam Argyle: Anyway, so that that was the thought process and I was like why. Adam Argyle: Like Sean why don't more people roll their success Okay, because they do this in business right if you get a big fat success in your bitcoin output, or what I don't know like you roll your money back into a bigger investment and you roll it again. Adam Argyle: But they don't seem to do that with their products it's almost like it gets big they get. Adam Argyle: Rich they get not inspired anymore, and their focus has changed and they're no longer in that mindset of. Adam Argyle: Building the best product there now and then they're just in a new phase right and i'm like yeah, but you can be in the new face and invest in like another disruptive face right like now, you have the funds for it and that's what. it's all coming from yeah. swyx: A lot of thoughts on that. swyx: First of all, wasn't so wasn't xd doesn't actually count because it's also from adobe. Adam Argyle: I would argue it's of this is so rude of me to say is pretty much a fig macloan. Adam Argyle: yeah and it's great I love xd In fact I like it better than figure you. swyx: want them to innovate, the end of the day, I want them to. Adam Argyle: here's what I want photoshop to do with all their money and all their fantastic developers is make an actual web design tool like a real. Adam Argyle: represent tool and stop messing around with 20 year old style gradient makers and all this old crap that you've been carrying around like shed all that baggage go something straight up web focused and just. Adam Argyle: chew that crap off and just spec centric design tool, something that actually like has html elements in it, it helps designers facilitate something that is like more oriented towards a real thing instead of continuing to yeah. swyx: So we're flow like I mean. Adam Argyle: Yes, sure yeah so they so web flow chart it does disrupt the design market right big building like a web centric and web focused and spec focused design tool. Adam Argyle: And yeah i'm like why doesn't adobe look at that and go Okay, we need to do the same, we need to have. Adam Argyle: Our own version of this with our name on it we've got the funds we've got the people like they. Adam Argyle: See like from the outside, they have everything they need to do it like I look at Google, the same way i'm like look at chrome like they have all the money and all the people they need to make another version that's just incredible. Adam Argyle: And just does something fresh. Adam Argyle: But yet they're not and so yeah I was mentioning to you it's like ego it's just like to Polish turds apparently, so I think that's just kind of what happens is your ego grows. Adam Argyle: And you're like you, your smuggle I think I think what happens, this is success turns a lot of teams into some eagles and they sit and go my. swyx: Precious. Adam Argyle: yeah and they just. Adam Argyle: They just stroke, the ring and don't do anything new, with it, or whatever, and I guess that doesn't make sense, because they're. Adam Argyle: Not sitting on a pile of money, but anyway, you get what i'm saying. swyx: What adobe sitting on a pile of money, I definitely vouch for them for doing that, if they're like a 200 when I last looked at them like five years ago there, like a 60 billion like like decent size and now they're like 240 billion and. i'm just. swyx: To create like this, you think you think you know these companies, and then they they just blow past any form of expectation. swyx: Okay, so a couple couple things on this, so one is you know I had, I had a APP that I updated you know there's a I have 200 Apps probably on my phone, they do not update. swyx: You know why I don't update them because they may they may change and i'm scared of change, they work fine for me right now. swyx: And I updated one of them and yeah now like the old ux is gone and I can't get it back yeah so sometimes like don't fix what he broke, you know, like if I rely on this from a living in my business tools like. swyx: It just makes sense to just keep it for the others who will a very you have it, that that means something you know what I mean like that. swyx: That lack of change actually is a feature sometimes but yeah I mean obviously innovation is helpful, he did not want them to produce a Sigma clone I get it. swyx: they're probably looking at building a workflow or by workflow is both they're both totally possible but I don't think it's proven itself, yet I don't think like designers have like flocked to web flow like they have to figure. Adam Argyle: they've been distracted with yeah design systems and components third. Adam Argyle: Design tools are competing competing in that space to you know, make an API for all your tokens if you make your art boards like this put your squares like this and give them a name and you'll output, an API blah blah blah. Adam Argyle: yeah they're over there, turning their wheels hard. Adam Argyle: digging holes yeah my opinion yeah. swyx: Well, so Okay, and then there's also the fact that, like. swyx: It I think it takes a few years for a product to season. Adam Argyle: yeah. swyx: And, and like photoshop just you know I think it's not like there's like the Web version or creative cloud or whatever like that hasn't been that been around that long and it takes. swyx: A long time to reach like the mass population again, this is the whole concept of like you're in the head you evaluated all these tools and they came out you're like you know the difference between them, most people don't. swyx: Most people like hear about them like five years after they're out because, like that's what that's how long it takes to like hear about things you know from your friends and stuff. swyx: So you're you're wanting innovation at a pace that, like most of the country, your most the most of the industry doesn't operate on so I just want you to norm yourself. Like. swyx: Because you're at the cutting edge of a lot of things. swyx: Like and maybe it feels like the companies are not kee

Do you struggle to overcome adversity as you strive for success?You might believe your humble beginnings mean you'll never be able to achieve anything great…You might believe failure in business is too difficult to overcome or that it's an indication that you're just not cut out for entrepreneurship…If you find yourself struggling with those limiting beliefs, this episode is for you!In this episode, I interview Eric Toz and discuss what he has learned through his entrepreneurial journey, taking what some might consider failure and turning it into lessons that have helped to take him from struggling entrepreneur to multi-million-dollar CEO! In this episode, Eric and I cover:How his childhood influenced his determination for success What timeless principles and skills can be applied to your personal and professional interactions Why what seems like a loss can be an opportunity for future successHow to build stronger relationships with customers and employeesHow seemingly insignificant decisions can create massive change in outcomes If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;) — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW — Subscribe to Dan's YouTube ChannelSubscribe to Dan's How To Think YouTube ChannelFollow Dan on FacebookFollow Dan on InstagramFollow Dan on Twitter— TRANSCRIPT — Dan Henry (00:00:09):So welcome everyone to the inaugural episode of the, how to think podcast, the show where we break down the inner workings of the human mind and learn how to think like successful people so that we can achieve anything in business or in life by changing the way we think, Eric, how you doing, man?Eric Toz (00:00:30):So good. I'm so happy to be here. Been waiting for a couple months now for this.Dan Henry (00:00:33):So it'd be honest if it were friends. So if it wasn't you, that was here for the first episode, I'd probably be, you know, pretty nervous right now, because last night I did this Instagram story and I was like, I'm gonna research, like all these world-class like podcasters and interviewers and try to try to be a good podcast or in the next two hours.Eric Toz (00:00:55):I think by the end of it will, you'll be doing good. Dan Henry (00:00:58):Yeah. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. But I'm glad I'm, I'm glad I have a good friend on to start out.Eric Toz (00:01:02):Take it easy, slow and steady.Dan Henry (00:01:04):I'm not much for intros, but you built $66 million business. You've done about a hundred million in sales, selling customizable jewelry online, and you started it by sleeping. You were sleeping and you were in Brooklyn, sleeping on a mattress. A whole bunch of crazy stuff went down and, and now you're here. And before we get into that, I just, I just want to say, like how, how would your parents describe what you do?Eric Toz (00:01:32):I think they would describe me as somebody who is always willing to burn all of the ships for me, like, you know, I had a pretty tough childhood. I think a lot of entrepreneurs did that provides an initial chip for them. They're off at whatever their circumstance or their parents, or just something bad happened to their health. And so they have this huge chip and for me, like there was never a plan B, like I was, I felt like I was going to be successful no matter what, if it wasn't like this thing that I'm currently doing, it was going to be something else. And so maybe not even about the money so much, but just such a strong desire to be successful in whateverDan Henry (00:02:16):It was. What gave you that chip? Because I know it gave me the chip that I had. I had a bunch of people who I would, I was delivering pizza and I would be like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to build a business one day and they'd be like, shut up, like the delivery, you know? I mean, what, what was, what gave you that chip on your shoulder?Eric Toz (00:02:32):Well, a big part of it was my family has been very entrepreneurial. Like my grandfather, he actually, he had a factory in Massachusetts, literally called package machinery. This is like your old school factory, literally making like boxes and like packaging and stuff like that. And he, he sold that business. He was pretty successful. And then my dad growing up, we had a power sports business. So we were a family business. We sold jet-skis, we sold, we sold ATVs, like all these toys we had, like each of us three kids had our own everything. And then we had a few bad winters in a row where there was no snow up in New Hampshire where I'm from. And the business ended up going bankrupt. And so bankruptcy, you know, 30 years ago it was a lot different than now. Yeah, it was a true like seven years to repair your credit.Eric Toz (00:03:22):And so, you know, my dad, he went from being this entrepreneur to being like a Knight Security Watchman. Like I literally remember him coming home with like, you know, eggs and breakfast for us all after he was working all night at like a hotel. So I had no idea what was going on at the time. Had no idea what happened, how old were you? I was like five, like five, six, and all three of us. We were me and my brother, sister. We were like three, four or five, something like that. So yeah, that was really difficult. I was the poor kid at school. I was on free lunch. You know, I remember Christmas, like three Christmases in a row. I got like the same thing, which was this little, like a Hot Wheels set. And I'm like, oh, another Hot Wheels again, but we couldn't like afford anything.Eric Toz (00:04:07):So for me you know, going through puberty in high school at that point, I kind of wanted to latch onto something I could feel good about. And for me, it was sports at the time. So I threw myself into that completely. I would train for football, like during the summers, literally till like two, three in the morning, I'd be doing suicides and doing squats and stuff like that. And I had very good influences at the time. Like I had really, really great mentors. I had my football coach. I still can hear him yelling in my ear to this day saying, you know, stop feeling, sorry for yourself, stuff like that. So those were really good motivators at the beginning. And I had been influenced a number of times by some very important people not just in sports, but like later in business too.Dan Henry (00:04:55):So, so let me ask you this when you, cause I've seen, you've taken me to your warehouse in it's within the St. Petersburg city limits. And you, you took me there and it was super impressive. I mean, it's this gigantic it's like, you wouldn't even know it was there. You would not know it was there. You would not know that this building randomly in this industrial part of town is on a hundred million dollars in fricking e-commerce you know, and so you take me there and you've got these machines, let's see if we can get it, maybe Brandon can get a picture of your, of your thing up. And I can hear myself like a delay in, in my headphones a little bit, Brandon, I don't know if you've got the live stream going or not, but there's a picture of, of your, and how many people do you have working there?Eric Toz (00:05:53):Currently, we have 70 full-time employees. Yeah. Seven zero, I think during, during peak Q4, we'll have about 200 in the US and then we have an Amsterdam factoryDan Henry (00:06:05):Setting up now. So, so this right here is your, this is your warehouse. Okay. And I mean, that's, that's pretty big and it's actually bigger than that. That's just one section of it. And then you have another one where you do media, but I remember being in there, it was just like last week and yeah, zoom in a little bit, Brandon, like, look at that, look at all those people. So I want to understand the business model, because as far as I know it, you, you, you know, you have this company called shine on. Yup. And you, and you got to correct me if I'm wrong. Cause we've, we've been pretty stoned sometimes when we were talking about this, actually funny before I get into this funny story we met at this, this mastermind it was founders mastermind in downtown St. Pete. And we you had this you, you had this little segue thing that you were riding around on all, all through St.Dan Henry (00:07:00):Pete, that little, the one wheel, the one wheel. Yeah. And I remember I think you wrote it over to my penthouse here in downtown, and we got stone and just talk business for like three, four hours. It was amazing my condo. And it was a great conversation. And you told me and I definitely want to talk about this. Cause you, you told me about, you know, a lot of people say, oh, read this book and read that book. And you told me about the book, how to win friends and influence people, which I think a lot of people I think a lot of people say, Hey, read this book and people go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I'll read that book, but they don't actually read it. And they don't actually put it into practice. And I re I noticed some things when we were, we were talking like, you would be like, oh, I'm sorry for interrupting. And you, you just said certain things. And I'm like, I really like this guy, like what the, what the, what is going on? You know? And I said to you, I was like, why are you so fricking likable? And you told me, you cheater that you read the book, how to win friends and influence people. And you like went hardcore on it. And you just, you, how much does that help you network and get through business and, and, and just in progress in your career.Eric Toz (00:08:12):Yeah. So I think, I think there are certain things you can learn that are timeless, right? There are certain principles that are timeless. And I think to be a good business person in the 1930s, when that book, how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie was written you know, you couldn't hide behind email, then you couldn't hide behind social media. Like if you, if you wanted to conduct business, you had to like, look people in the eye, you had to shake their hand. You had to like, keep your word. You know, these are like old-school fundamentals. And so I think it actually be really helpful if entrepreneurs more entrepreneurs read that book today because it's really head-slappingly simple. Lee's simple things that he says where you're like, oh my God, I shouldn't have, I should have been doing this my whole, my whole life, like simple stuff. Like the sweetest, the sweetest word to somebody as their first name. So try to use their first name as much as possible because they immediately perk up. Right. You know,Dan Henry (00:09:06):Eric. Yeah. It makes me feel good. It does. And you know, when I read that, but I literally, because when you told me that it, it stuck with me and I've, I've read a little bit of the book, but I actually went out, I bought the book and I read it and I read it all the way through. And then I listened to the whole audiobook all the way through it. And then I downloaded the cheat sheet and I might've had one. I'm not going to lie. It's hard. It is super hard. Like some of this stuff is just hard to remember and hard to implement, and it's sort of like, you have to take. And when you first read it, you really feel like a Dick. At least I did, I read this and I'm like, well, I'm missing a lot of this. Like my first reaction was I must be a total Dick because I'm just reading all these things that we forget on a daily basis, you know, like not interrupting people, using their first names, smiling, you know, just, just, just something as simple as smilingEric Toz (00:09:58):With a pleasant tone. Dan Henry (00:10:01):That's the whole chapter on that, the whole chapter on that. And you dive deep into it. And I think in business and, and not even business, but in life, you, I mean, I'll give you an example. I was downtown. And I ran into somebody who was had actually followed me for some time and bought some of my products and stuff. And he had a friend who's this like high, high level, you know, manages billions of dollars in real estate. And I was just, you know, very nice to them. And I, I mean, anybody could have been any, any one of a thousand ways with their personality. And I was just trying to be very nice. And I noticed that his, his wife was a super, super sweet woman. And I remembered the book where it said, you know, think about what appeals to them, you know, think about w what brings value to them and how to appeal to them.Dan Henry (00:10:50):And I noticed that she wanted to talk about like cooking and making food for people. And that was like really important to her. And so I had a conversation with her about that, and I learned a lot about a lot of food that I didn't know. And then we ended up getting invited to their penthouse, which is actually four penthouses that they bought at the top of I forget which building, but it's, I think it's park shore. And they combined all four penthouses into one mega penthouse. Jesus. Yeah. It was you. And I learned so much about real estate and all that, and that was just, IEric Toz (00:11:23):Think it was from the, you conducted because of the cookingDan Henry (00:11:26):Conversations, because she invited, she invited us over for breakfast. She wanted to cook for us. So, yeah. So like, I mean, we didn't get an invite before that. And then, I mean, or maybe he, he would have invited us anyway, but it doesn't matter. The point is, is that, you know, sometimes I think we, we get wrapped up in all the problems in life. And so we're so focused on those problems and thinking about those problems, that when we go and all these differences in life, our problems are on our mind. And it's not that we're not, not nice people, but we don't take the time to articulate how nice and how genuine we are, because we're just so drowning in our own world of negativity and all the stuff we have to do. And I think that that book just gives it a great reminder to how to bring that to the surface.Eric Toz (00:12:11):Yeah, totally. And there's a whole chapter, literally just on listening. And at the end, he tells a story about how he had like an hour-long conversation with a woman on a couch. And he may be said like five words. And he was just asking questions, maybe like five or six questions. And she was talking the whole time, like, blah, blah, blah. I mean, he was into it. But at, at the end she was like, oh, you're such a good conversationalist. And he was like, I haven't said anything, but he just allowed her to sort of that. And just being there, like just holding space, I think for people can be really beneficial because everybody, especially in our business, our line of business, they just want to talk about what they're doing, like all the time and what they're currently up to.Dan Henry (00:12:58):Right. I, I do notice how did, and how do you think those tactics and that paradigm shift of how to interact with other humans? How do you think that differs between dealing with employees and dealing with just like other entrepreneurs, other, other people in your life that, that you don't pay?Eric Toz (00:13:17):I think the principles are, are the same, right? Like a mentor of mine, he's the co-founder of Zappos. His name is Fred Mossler and he, he treats his vendors the exact same way that he treats his employees and he treats people in the Las Vegas community the same way he treats vendors and, and they'll actually have vendor parties. They'll fly in their vendors once a year and have like a huge mega blowout party and something awesome that he told me was like friends, this concept of friends first. Like literally if you, if you just try to become friends first, all right. You know what they're doing a little bit, maybe not a hundred percent, but just focus on being friends first and really solidifying that. And then the business will come naturally. If, you know, if what they're doing is, is good. But you should be able to kind of know that ahead of time. So you don't have to worry so much about the business. Just kind of relax and see how you connect on different things.Dan Henry (00:14:15):And a lot of people, they try to create opportunities and that that's sort of, I mean, it's cool, but when you're networking and you're trying to make connections, a lot of times you just have to let opportunities come to you. And I think that if you try to create opportunities, you will go into meeting people in a disingenuous way. Cause you always have an agenda going in. I mean, if you meet somebody that is a player, right. Something is at, at some point is going to come of that. Something, at some point you don't know what it is right now, but at someEric Toz (00:14:49):Point and be like an A-player. Yeah. I mean,Dan Henry (00:14:52):I mean, it could be, it could be somebody that becomes an, a player. It could be somebody that's already an a player. It could be somebody that has done something that you respect. It could be a huge person in the industry. It doesn't matter. But the point is is if you try to go into that relationship thinking, what am I going to get out of this from the beginning, it's just going to, it's not going to be genuine. And if you go in and you just become friends and let the opportunity come to you, I think it's a lot better. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:15:16):Yeah. I have a firsthand example of this recently. I think we did a little bit of that also, my friend will, who, you know, who lives downtown here? He's just a really interesting guy. I just like him a lot. He does some cool things in skincare and in like NFTs. Right. And so I knew, I knew when I first started getting to know him, like there immediately there wasn't going to be any way where we do business together. And I was okay with that. Cause I didn't care. I just loved what he was doing on his own stuff. And I just wanted to be friends with them, but you know, over the past week or so, I've had an idea where I was like, holy will, would actually be like the perfect partner on this. And so you can't like expect those things to happen. It's just sort of, you know the way is of the universe sometimes if you have if you established friends first. Yeah,Dan Henry (00:16:05):Absolutely. I, I totally, totally, totally agree. So let me, let me just go back to this mattress that you were sleeping on. And you don't have to go deep on mattress pizza boy. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:16:17):My office is your pizza.Dan Henry (00:16:18):I see, I, you know, I actually I'm a mattress sleeper, every time I move into a new place, doesn't matter what my financial situation is. I always end up sleeping on a mattress for two months. Cause I can't find, I can't pick out what bed I want, you know, but I do like sleeping on a mattress, surrounded by nice walls versus the walls I used to have around, which were crumbling. But you know, let me ask you this. You had some stuff happen, you know, you, you, you took on some venture capital. You don't have, I mean, you can get into as much in this as you want, but you had some, some bad stuff happen and you basically had to sort of start over. Would that beEric Toz (00:17:00):With on yeah. So you know, starting, excuse me one second. Dan Henry (00:17:11):So polite. Is that in the book too?Eric Toz (00:17:15):I'm doing it for the listeners.Dan Henry (00:17:16):That's awesome, man. So, so, so what, what happened? They're like, well, whatever you want do.Eric Toz (00:17:22):Yeah. So I like to say I'm a two-time venture capital refugee. So the, for the first time was when I was at CustomMade.Com. We ended up raising about $25 million. Google was our investor, like all the top Silicon Valley investors. And we were basically you know, we were basically a high-end Etsy average order value, like a thousand bucks. But that it was a great idea. The business, it didn't work. At scale, we were burning a million dollars a month. And so it was just a reallyDan Henry (00:17:56):Burning a million dollars a month, whatever. I mean,Eric Toz (00:17:58):We were losing a million dollars a month just because of our overhead. And when you raise that much money, you're actually encouraged by all of your investors. Like, dude, we gotta, we gotta spend this as fast as possible because they either want it to pop in two to four years or they want you to, they don't want you to be the walking dead indefinitely. They would rather have you die or, or crush it quickly time value of money. But yeah, so I saw, you know, some of the advantages and pitfalls of raising that much money. You know, you lose a lot of control of your company, you have bored. And so when I started Shine On, you know, I didn't have any money either. So when I couldn't even pay myself, really, I actually started it on unemployment, which is honestly, that's the best trick.Eric Toz (00:18:45):If you want to start a company, try to get fired, ask your company, Hey, can you please fire me instead of leaving? Cause then you can get unemployment and you can get it for like nine months. So I was actually like, I went to Germany, I was like doing my unemployment forms from Germany. And the whole time I was taking literally all the money from the unemployment and putting it into shine on at the very beginning. Wow. Then that money ran out. And then I was, I was selling motorcycle rings to motorcycle clubs because I had this jewelry production knowledge. And I was like, how can I sell to a lot of people very quickly? So I made rings for like six or seven motorcycle clubs and that's how I paid my rent after the unemployment money ran out.Dan Henry (00:19:24):Did you have a machine for that or did you see all the machines you have right now, but what did you, what did you have that?Eric Toz (00:19:30):So at that time, so I had a friend who had a massive factory in Thailand in Bangkok. And so the first version of shine on was, you know, we would, us a, a marketer would give us their idea for a piece of jewelry, like a ring or a necklace. We would actually do a 3d render. It looked like an, a photo. It looked realistic. Can you give me an example? Yeah, if you actually just Google scooter ring, like on on Google something I designed it's like, it looks like a Vesper. Okay. So like Vespas scooteringDan Henry (00:20:01):Now. I feel like an idiot, cause I don't know what a VestaEric Toz (00:20:03):Is. Just like a stallion scooter.Dan Henry (00:20:06):Oh, okay. Okay. Actually, do you want, [inaudible] we'll talk about funny scooter story in a few minutes. You reminded me, do you remember what happened to me when I met Maura?Eric Toz (00:20:17):No.Dan Henry (00:20:17):You all, you don't remember that. I'll just tell it real quick. Cause Brandon's going to bring up, Brandon's gonna bring up a picture of this example, but you introduced me to Mara Glazer, who I ended up hiring to do some copywriting for how to think. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I remember I got that segue to go downtown and so I, I Google like how to change, make it go faster. Cause it was only going 15 miles an hour. And I got it to to a different mode where it went 25 miles an hour and right. So, but here's just a crazy thing about how, how, how thoughts can create reality is I'm driving down the road or scooting or whatever. And I think to myself, how bad would this suck if I totally wiped out right now? And five seconds later, I went to scratch my head, which I don't know why I did that. And I went over the top of it, wiped out. My knee was bloody. My hand was all messed up. I was goingEric Toz (00:21:10):25Dan Henry (00:21:11):Fast. Yeah. And I don't even know how I, and so I, I literally like the scooters all bent and I end up scooting down to beach drive and meeting Maura for the first time and right after, and I'm full of blood. And my, my stuff's ripped, like my jeans are ripped up and I sit down and I'm like, instead of saying, hi, how you doing? I'm Dan Henry. I had to explain to her why it looked like I just got to fight.Eric Toz (00:21:34):And she probably liked it like, well, this guy's edgy.Dan Henry (00:21:39):He still showed up, you know? But that just reminded me about how, like when you think of something you can like create the situation to happen. But Brandon, do you have that? Do you have that? There it is. Okay. So, so click on this.Eric Toz (00:21:53):This was the first, the first thing I ever designed for Shine On. So I was the first seller. I was the first, I was the first CS agent website, designer, jewelry designer, marketer. I was packing the jewelry myself like the whole first year. But anyway, what happened was yeah, this is how I kind of got started with it. I would, I would work with a marketer. I would make something custom and then I, they would actually put that on their store that just a render. So there's no inventory. And then we would take all the orders each week and I would put it in an Excel sheet and then I would send it to my friend in Thailand who ran a factory there. He makes all of David Yurmans jewelry. If you've heard of that brand high-quality men's men's jewelry. And so, yeah, that was great.Dan Henry (00:22:39):I'm going to stay silent. So I don't have to admit that I don't know what that is, butEric Toz (00:22:42):There's not a lot of guys do. But yeah, that was the first version of shine on. So I went from this like a motorcycle rings to actually designing some stuff myself. And then what happened was you know, Teespring came out, Teespring is like print on demand t-shirts and it was one of the first things Facebook marketers sold. There, I know a ton of guys who were millionaires a couple of guys, even in this area who made millions selling t-shirts there. And I had this jewelry knowledge. And so I was like, man, I, I love working with these marketers. We could really scale, I could scale this up much more quickly if I started working with Facebook marketers. And so luckily, you know, I had the prior experience from custom made which was, you know, it was still a success. Like it didn't work out, but we still raised a lot of money. We made a lot of noise and there was some trust there just from me being around that environment. And so I raised about a million bucks in venture capital and then immediately after actually hired Teespring's head of sales and Teespring's head of marketing. And that's how the initial Shine On got started. Wow. And they, then they brought all the sellers overDan Henry (00:23:47):Now, did you, I know that you raise capital and then something went wrong, and then did you have to raise capital again?Eric Toz (00:23:55):What happened? Was it wasn't that anything went wrong per se? It's just that we're kept pretty capital intensive business. A million bucks is not that much money if you want to build something large-scale. But what happened was we were it took four to five weeks for these items to be made in Thailand and then sent back to us where we would repackage it and then ship it to the customer. So these items sold super well. And we did over 5,000 various 3d designs and we did about five, 6 million in sales that first year. But what happened was we were getting a lot of chargebacks because of the weight. People didn't want to wait that long. They didn't trust it, even though the quality was super good. But no matter how many did it take, it took like four to five weeks after your purchase. So buyers are, you know, I think their limits around two, three weeks for reordering, they get pissy, they get antsy. So we started getting a lot of chargebacks and because we, we pay the sellers out like next day on their commissions or when it chips we would get these chargebacks after the fact.Dan Henry (00:25:03):So, so Jay, just to get the business model, right, you partner with people who want to sell their own personalized jewelry and you make the jewelry, and you ship. So it's like drop shipping and I believe you also give them the education on how to promote their products and get it out, get it out into the,Eric Toz (00:25:22):Yeah. So fast forward to today. I mean anyway, we, we, there was, we were running out of cash and at one point I said, never again, am I going to not make something myself? Okay. So I was like, I want the, I want to own the entire supply chain. Right, right.Dan Henry (00:25:38):And just so I'm clear, I just want to be sure I'm clear. That was because they were, it took too long. Right.Eric Toz (00:25:42):Just cause it took too long. That was okay. Got it. You literally the only reward to interrupt. And then there's, and then there's another thing about, you know, having more control of your margins, right. Being able to provide better customer service for everybody. But yeah, fast forward to today, I mean, we started in jewelry but we're, you know, we're an on-demand factory that we, we prototype, we develop and we sell ourselves viral gift products. So jewelry, wallets, watches, all personalized. And then what we do is we launched them through what we call an IPO process, initial product offering. So we'll say, Hey sellers, we got this new like wallet. That's personalized. You know, we, we sold like 500 grand in our initial tasks. And then we literally give away the farm. Like, here's exactly how we're doing it. And boom, now it's live in your app and it's free. Just go click, click, click, and you can add it to your store. And now you can sell this product. So we're almost becoming a little product agnostic. We're adding like metal wall art. Like that could go up here. I'll I'll have something for you. Oh,Dan Henry (00:26:44):Oh, okay. Yeah. I can, I could use some more, some more brains around this Personalized man. Yeah, yeah. You might have to, you might have to get me selling some products because I'm going to be honest with you. I'm gonna be honest with you. E-Commerce physical products is super difficult. And I told you this when I was at your, your warehouse, I doEric Toz (00:27:07):Hear like, oh no, I don't know if IDan Henry (00:27:09):Can, I couldn't do it. I could not do it. I mean, I'm looking at all these machines just to break down the thought process here. Right? I'm standing in this warehouse. I know that you guys have hundreds, you know, you've got, you've sold almost a hundred total, almost a hundred million dollars worth of stuff. You have machines that are like, w w what's your most expensive machine?Eric Toz (00:27:30):Ooh. we have we have auto pack machines that are about a quarter-million-dollar.Dan Henry (00:27:36):So $250,000 machines. And in my mind, here's what I'm thinking. What happens when something breaks, you got to call somebody, they got to come out, they got to get a part, and then you got orders. And like all this stuff going on, it's just, I gotta ask you this. How do you deal with the stress of going to bed every night and knowing that at any point, something like that could happen that could massively derail your business. Like, how do you deal with that? And how do you cope with that?Eric Toz (00:28:06):E-Commerce is complex because, you know, not only are you doing the marketing, sometimes you're also doing the training, but you're also if you're doing it right. I mean, you're also doing your own supply chain. You're buying inventory, you're storing it, you're shipping it out. So sometimes what we do because we're moving fast and we actually forget how many potential points of failure there could be, but we'll actually just write out a list. I'm like, you know, what, if, if, if any of these things fail, are we, are we screwed? Like, is this going to ruin the whole thing? And so a lot of times we're like, wow, yeah. If we ran out of X, Y, Z, that would shut down like everything. And so I'm constantly making lists constantly. If there's a new thing, that's a super imperative, making sure there's ownership of it.Dan Henry (00:28:54):But what do you mean by making sureEric Toz (00:28:56):There's ownership that somebody owns that it's like, Hey, if you have one job to do, it's making sure that we never run out of these like 50 different things. You know, we have an inventory manager too. Yeah. a lot of it is automated now. So like all our inventory management's automated their software to do it too. But you had to build, we built, we built our own. Yeah. So we'll kind of get a heads up of something running out, but look, honestly, stuff just happens to like, it's guaranteed, that stuff will happen. Major stuff. Whether it's a flood here or like a hurricane, or like, there's, there's a crazy cargo ship backup right now, like are all around the world. There are like crazy logistics problems. And so the number one thing for your customers is to just be a good communicator with them.Eric Toz (00:29:49):And that's honestly, it's a lot harder said than done. So that's where some of these Dale Carnegie principles come into play, just like thinking about them and their feelings being proactive, saying like, Hey, there's an issue. There's an issue here. You, you probably won't receive this in this time, but then give them some options. Like, I can do this for you. I can do this for you, or I can do this for you and just make them feel like they're the decision-maker next. And usually when you allow them to make decisions on what they want to do with their order, then a lot of the time they're, they're more cooperative and they actually will want to work with you. And sometimes you build stronger bonds with people and with customers when you screw up and then you, you like something detrimental happens. And then yeah, the redemption and you like go through this like thing with them. And they actually like, you have a tighter bond because they're like, then they're like the next time Eric screws up. Like, I know he'll, he'll be in my corner and he'll like, figure it out. So the same thing with employees too.Dan Henry (00:30:51):Do you feel that, cause I don't know if you've ever read the psychology behind likability and being imperfect, like, you know, what a Mary Sue is. So in, in film, Mary Sue is a character that is basically perfect and has no flaws. And so like imagine Superman, but there was no kryptonite. Like he wouldn't be that interesting. You know? And like when, when the star wars movies came out, a lot of people were saying that Ray was like a Mary Sue and that's why people were interested in her. And then so like later in the movies, they reallyEric Toz (00:31:24):Didn't know she had no flaws, she hadDan Henry (00:31:26):No flaws. And so you'll notice it in the second and third movie, they really dived into her like flaws around you know, her parents and things like that. And, and some other things. But, but the concept is that if you have a character in a movie that is perfect and has no flaws, then there's nothing to be interested in. There's nothing to be likable. There's nothing to, to bond with that because you can't relate to somebody. That's perfect. And I think a lot of times people strive to be perfect and they let perfection get in the way of the thing that makes them human. It makes them relate to other humans. And that in, in of itself is having flown.Eric Toz (00:32:03):Yeah, I think you know, we have our seller group on Facebook and so we're always analyzing what's what gets the most engagement and it's, it's usually two things it's posting about success. And then it's posting about like the hard times that you went through or like stories, hard stories, like redemption stories. Like people are so into that because we can all relate. Yeah. We can all relate to that.Dan Henry (00:32:28):Do you feel entrepreneurs have an ex an unrealistic expectation that things won't, that nothing will go wrong, and that if something does go wrong, that means they did something like there they failed or they're a bad person or they were wrong this whole time in their dreams. You know, like I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs really have that expectation going in that everything is going to go right. And they don't know how to mentally deal with it when things go wrong.Eric Toz (00:32:54):Yeah. I think that entrepreneurs understand that things are going to go wrong, but every entrepreneur is different in, in there how much they're willing to deal with. Like a lot of people will throw in the towel on something where somebody else won't. And I have two really good examples from my, from my life about not throwing in the towel. And this is not, I'm not saying I'm right by or right or wrong by throwing in the towel or not throwing in the towel. Right. But I'll give you an example of custom made.com where, you know, we, we raised that, all that money. And then I ended up leaving the CEO ended up leaving, but the sort of the third guy in our gang mentor of mine, Seth Rosen, he said, no, I'm going to stick with it. And so he made a deal with the bank wrote off all of the debt and he just went into this incubation period.Eric Toz (00:33:49):And now custommade.com is like 20 million, $30 million a year business. And he brought it back to life solely because he had a high tolerance for going through that. And he was so obsessed with it that he wanted to continue working on it. And same thing with me, I got to a point where after I burned all this, this seed capital that we raised and at one point I actually had to let go of almost all the company, like 90% of the company had to let go of like 15, 20 people in one day, once 15, 20 people in one day in one day. Yeah. We called it the red wedding. Like fromDan Henry (00:34:28):Game of Thrones, you have to be a game of Thrones nerdEric Toz (00:34:31):Joke, but not in a mean, not in a mean way, but it was just like, no, like, and everybody was like, Eric, give the investors like the rest of the money back. And there was maybe like, like a hundred grand left in the bank account. And I was just like, no, I'm not going to because like, I still have this vision for it. I need more time. And so I literally went from the super high and there's actually, if you Google the entrepreneur's journey, there's a graph of this where there's like this initial excitement. And then there's this period called the trough of sorrow. And then if you keep continuing going through the trough of sorrow, you get to experimentation and pivoting and new ideas. And then eventually you get product-market fit. And then when you get product-market fit, then you can scale.Eric Toz (00:35:21):And so how, how much are you willing to tolerate going through that trough? Because I'm not going to lie. I was, at that point, I cut my salary to like 40 grand a year. And I wouldn't say I was a loser. It's just that I kind of went into like hibernation mode. We're actually had to, my mind was going crazy. And if I didn't turn to meditation to help me calm down and just get refocused, like, all right, how am I going to pull this off? I would tell myself every day, this is going to be a book in a book someday. So yeah, we were down to like 20 grand bank account,Dan Henry (00:35:54):A book someday, dude, that's a roast on that for a second. This is going to be in a book someday. Yeah. That's that is that's deep, man. I mean, if you think about it, like, that's some internal motivation.Eric Toz (00:36:11):Yeah. I mean, I would tell people I'm like, you don't understand like there's no, I'm not going back. There's no plan B like I'm, I'm in this thing, you can't kill me basically. And I don't care if I make $0 for like four years like I'm going to make this work. And so there's, and then I kind of learned that there's always something that you can do. I had another, I hired another mentor who helped me out with some financing and I actually bought the company back from the investors. Cause I believed in it so much. So I was literally taking out like per personally guaranteed loans to buy back the rest of the company. So not only was I going from $0, then I even put myself in debt, like to get the company back because I was like, no, you don't get it.Eric Toz (00:36:56):Like I still see this path forward. I just need time. And so I actually have never raised money again since then. So we went from having 20 grand in the bank account to, we did, we did a hail Mary, we bought one machine and I moved out from Brooklyn to New Jersey and we started tinkering in a 1000 square foot garage with machinery and we built, then we built our first Shopify app in 2017. And we were the first people to do print on demand jewelry. And so then just incrementally building, building, building, building, building, come up with some new products, keep promoting keep doing what you say. You're going to do, build trust with the seller, with your customers. And yeah, now we're doing like 66 million a year in product sales, all bootstrapped. Yeah.Dan Henry (00:37:43):So if you were to like, imagine that on a graph, right. Where how much money did you raise at the, at the height of that?Eric Toz (00:37:50):At the beginning, we raised 1 million and then we ran out of that and we got down to 20 grand and thenDan Henry (00:37:55):Here at 1 million. Right. And imagine the, imagine it's a plane, right. And the plane starts nose-diving and it's heading towards the ground. And it literally goes so close to the ground before it pulls up that hits like 2200 feet off the ground. And it, you know, if you're on the ground, it literally blows your hat off as it scoops up. And then sky rack skyrockets up to, you know, from its original elevation of, of, you know, a million up to 66 million. That's insane. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:38:29):So when I went through the whole range of emotions, like you could possibly imagine like an idea raising money. Oh, other people believe in me, like this feels good. Like everyone thinks I'm smart. I have a great idea. And then reality sets in and just being like a total loser, firing everybody going. I had to learn accounting because I had to fire my accountant. I had to get rid of all the insurances. I'm like, what am I in? What am I protecting here? Something that's like worth nothing. So I was like, it, no insurance, no nothing. And so, but that was like the best lesson I ever learned because I had to learn, I had to learn a little bit about everything in the company, all the operations efficiencies. And so that going through that experience actually is really helpful today when I'm seeing all the pieces from a high level, because I've done all those jobs myself to a certain extent, I know enough about everything.Eric Toz (00:39:23):So I'm very grateful for that experience. But I'm also grateful for capitalism. I'll be honest because it allows you to go through that whole adventure and like that whole journey. And it is you against yourself. You're not really like competing against other people, even though you think you are, it's just like, you have to like, it's you in the mirror. So how can you, how disciplined can you be? Right? Like how disciplined can you be? How can you calm your mind? Can you get over your old? Because a lot of people, they, they bring their old life's experiences into their current business and they'll actually project some times. So if they are very needy, if they're a very needy person, cause you know, someone left them or whatever in the past, then they're just going to be attention-seeking in their business. So these can be, these are bad habits that could kind of take you down. So you really have to quiet your mind and try to get over your old and not project. A lot of people to, you might hire people from outside the company coming in and they're in a position of power and you don't see their bad habits in an interview and you would never know. But then after six months of working there, you're like this person's horrible. Like just like they're projecting because they're in this position of power now,Dan Henry (00:40:41):How did you, did you identify anything about yourself, old baggage that you were starting to bring in to your company and then you, you like identified it, you acknowledge it and you got rid of it. Did you ever go through anything like that?Eric Toz (00:40:59):Hmm.Dan Henry (00:41:04):You couldn't have always been the super nice guy that you are, that you are now. Eric. I refuse to believe that cause it'll make me feel even worse though. I'm just kidding.Eric Toz (00:41:14):Well, I'll be honest. Like when I had to let the whole company go I had somebody that really pushed me into doing that because I was like so nervous to do that. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But going through that experience made me a very strong person. Right. I think me probably wouldn't have done it and I would've taken, taken it down, and gone down with the ship with everybody, but I got the sort of push from a friend, and he kind of helped me plan letting go of the whole company. And so yes, like the entrepreneurial journey, it helps you grow as a person too in many, in many, many ways. So I'm very grateful.Dan Henry (00:41:56):Do you think the unwillingness to let somebody go or let people go because it's a good business decision. That was a potential thing that was kind of brought in. That was a detriment. And you had to learn how to get over that was that, would that be one of the things that I guess as you called it earlier I think you call it baggage. Would that be something that you think was baggage that you brought in, that you had to, you had to get over? That was like a major thing?Eric Toz (00:42:22):Oh yeah, for sure. Like I think, you know, Inex inexperienced in younger entrepreneurs, they have trouble doing that. Like letting people go, but then I started seeing things through a different lens with running a business. Now I actually see it as we're working, we're here together. We're working on this project for like a finite amount of time. So instead of thinking about like, there's an owner and there's an employee and they're basically like slaves to the company, like they own you. I don't, I don't think that way. I think, and I'm open with my employees, like, Hey, we're, this is a project we're working on for two to three years. So let's go get committed to this thing and let's go crush it and let's see what happens. Right. And then, you know, provide the right incentive for them to, for us to crush it together. So having that sort of, we're working on a project mindset, it's helpful in letting people go because everything is finite and I'm not even going to be there in five, 10 years either. And I tell people that this is a project, so we're not going to be doing this forever. It's not like we're married. So, you know,Dan Henry (00:43:34):Okay. Like Michael Jordan was not always going to play in the Chicago bulls, but while he was there. Yeah. And while his teammates were there, they did the best, they could to win as many championships as they could. But ultimately that entity, that, that concept, that project will live on. Right. Is that how you view it? Yeah.Eric Toz (00:43:54):Actually so the term I use is let's go out and like get this Superbowl ring if we can, if we can go. And that might be we go public or we get acquired or something that experience that all the employees had. They can look at the Subaru warring and be like, yeah, I was part of that. I did that. And then what they can do is parlay that experience and go off and do their own thing and their com and their next company. And then maybe I'll even invest in it or there'll be able to get investment because people are like, wow, they worked at shine on. So that's what I'm trying to do with this whole Shannon thing is employees. If they can get a Superbowl ring sellers, there's a lot of sellers started with selling our product and e-commerce, and now I know two dozen guys that I'm friends with who started selling our product, and now they're doing $10 million a year on their store selling something else. But, you know, we all got, we all got wins like early out of it and that's, what's important is getting wins together.Dan Henry (00:44:49):So if I was going to read between the lines here, I would say that one of the biggest things to keep in mind with everything that you said is before all this, you have to really get clear on what, why you're doing it, where, where you want to end, because, you know, if you were, I'm just giving an example, right? Like Tony Robbins, Tony Robinson's, Tony Robbins, you know what I mean? That's his brand is his name. So, you know, the whole, like maybe the concept of I'll be here, you know, for a temporary amount of time. And then eventually I'll be gone. Maybe that still applies to his company. I'm sure he has an exit or I'm sure he has a death strategy, you know, cause nobody lives for other, I'm sure he's not just going to die in his company. That's it. I'm sure he's going to live. He's going to somehow has a plan of action in there. But you know, I think if you were to say, well, my goal is to exit or my goal is to build something great. Or my goal is to change the world. Or my goal is to, to, to do this. I mean, would you say that you have to get super, super clear on what that is before you can start, as you said, going after the Superbowl rings because you got to know what game you're playing.Eric Toz (00:46:01):Yeah. 100%, a hundred percent like people ask me, how is my vision change? I'm like, no, my vision has literally been the same thing for five years ago. Like where we're at now is where I thought we could eventually be. And so I need to keep going, but wouldDan Henry (00:46:17):You articulate that vision?Eric Toz (00:46:20):So five years ago I said I wanted to be the Teespring of jewelry. So I was just looking at that model and I want to build something just as big as them. And they're at the time they were doing a hundred million a year in sales. And so you're almost there. Yeah. Now we're getting, we're getting close to there. I actually, in two weeks we'll hit a hundred million in sales all time. So yeah, like if you don't have that, if you don't have that vision and you're not committed to it, if you go through hard, like, like I went through, if I didn't have that that level of commitment, then I would have totally thrown in the towel. It might be different though, if you're, if you're making good cash, if you're cash flowing and then suddenly it starts hitting bumps. I could see getting out then because you've made all this cash already. But for me it was kind of like instill like most of my personal like all my assets, like most of my wealth is actually in the business. So I'm thinking like longterm and it's, it's definitely risky. It's, it's a huge risk. And that's my personalityDan Henry (00:47:28):Condo that that's being built right now. Saltaire in downtown. It's a littleEric Toz (00:47:34):Sexy start my podcast there.Dan Henry (00:47:38):You got to invite me over, man. That place looks, looks like it's going to be sick. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:47:42):I think we're going to do some events there, some mastermindsDan Henry (00:47:45):And it's going to be awesome. Let me ask you a question. And I know that you're not your company is a little bit different than say mine where I'm a little bit more like the face of it kind of thing. And you're you're, I mean, you are, but like e-comm, it's about the products and all that and, and you know, so I'm sure a lot of people, as somebody who built this, they have a way they view you probably a lot of different ways. They view you. What would you say is something that people misunderstand about you?Eric Toz (00:48:19):Hmm. That's a good question. Misunderstand. Well,Eric Toz (00:48:34):You know, even when I throw these figures out, like a hundred million, 66 million I try to not make it about me. I try to say, we sold this together. Right? Like we did this together. And so I, people might see me as, I dunno being selfish because maybe on my Instagram, I promote like all this personal stuff. But at the end of the day, like I want, I want everybody to win. Like I truly do. And one thing is if you make other people money, they'll always invest in you and your next thing, they hit,Dan Henry (00:49:14):They stay with you on the ride. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at, look how a lot of these funds have been built. Like you got guys that they run a certain type of business. They make people money and then they start like a real estate fund or a, or this, and then they're investing in that so that, you know, that's totally makes sense. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:49:31):Yeah. If you were, if I was your client and you know, I made a lot of money from your trainings right. Or teachings, and then you were like, you said to me, Hey, I'm going to go start this other thing. Do you want to invest in it? I'm like, hell yeah, you made me so much money, dude. Like literally here's like, you know, here's a million bucks or whatever investment, like no brainer. I, I trust you. You made me money here. Let's do it again.Dan Henry (00:49:56):No, I think people underestimate the value of creating a great product. I think there's a lot of people out there that do it for a cash grab and they do it for clout and they do it for a lot of the wrong reasons. And they don't really care or not. It's not that they care, but they don't put the effort into making a great product because at the end of the day, a great product will, you know, it will transcend a lot of mistakes, you know? And that's the thing that you're going to make mistakes you're going. And you know, when it comes to a lot of people in life, not just entrepreneurs, but a lot of people in life, they lack confidence. And I always say that you cannot build confidence. Does anybody tells you, you can build confidence full of. You build competence.Dan Henry (00:50:40):And as a by-product of that competence, you are granted confidence. Let me ask you this. I like that. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I, you know, I want to resist the urge to ask you a classic question. Like what, if you could go back to your 18 year old self and tell them something, what would you tell them? But what I'd like to ask is, you know, how did you in the ups and downs, it's easy to feel confident, have faith and stay the course when things are up. But when things are down, that's where people break and they fall off. What did you do specifically in your brain, in your mind that helped you get through those dips and maintain the course and maintain the faith and keep the confidence. Even when things look bleak, especially when that plane was right, the bottom, you know, 20 grand left in the bank or whatever other challenges you've had. How did you maintain, what did you tell yourself every day to maintain that level of dedication? Mm,Eric Toz (00:51:53):Well, I think, I think that you have to take the pressure off yourself. And so I'm in the process of writing this book. It's going to be called the entrepreneur survival guide, 20 things you can do when you're totally AFT, oh God, I loveDan Henry (00:52:12):That title. I really, oh, that's a great titleEric Toz (00:52:16):Too. So it's kind of like, imagine like how you would equip yourself for the zombie apocalypse. It's like that before, like business for business, I've been through like 20 of these things already. And at some point though, like once you're like, I'm doing this, no matter what you, at some point you have to take the pressure off of yourself in the day to day. So you have to say, all right, like, look, man, I still have to sleep eight hours and I can work like a maximum of 16 hours. And so, you know, you just have to be as efficient with your time, because if you literally do everything like perfect. And when you have no money left in the bank, you have to like, watch literally everything. Like watch every dollar spent every, every hour you have to be doing the right things. I remember literally going to like open certain tabs in Chrome and I'm like, no, like you can't do that. Right. I didn't know what the are you doing? Like, stay focused here. We don't have time for this right now. ItDan Henry (00:53:14):Was, it, was it porn hub you were trying to open or it was just likeEric Toz (00:53:18):It could be anything like ESPN. It could be like news, you know, I've been in, I've been addicted to news before. And so newsDan Henry (00:53:26):Sports. So, so have you ever got addicted to looking at things that you didn't have yet? Houses, cars?Eric Toz (00:53:34):Ooh, that's a good question. Like fantasizing about cars and stuff.Dan Henry (00:53:41):Yeah. Like, like imagine you're sitting there and you're working and you're like, if I just work hard enough, I'll be able to buy X or Y or Z. So then you go and you look up that car, you look at the features, you look at the you know, you look at how much it costs. I mean, I'll be honest. One thing I used to do is I used to put real estate up that I liked and I'd say, okay, this is called a vision board, like a vision board. And I would leave the tab up on my computer and every like two hours or so I would just flip over and I'd look at the house. And I remember I did that with I don't think I knew you then, but when I had that 8,000 square foot house on the water in Gulf port, I was looking at, yeah, I sold it and I bought the penthouse because I just living on the water, man.Dan Henry (00:54:21):It's like, dude, there's always a contractor at your house every single day or something. Well, no, just fixing stuff because the salt water blows with the Florida winds, they blow against the house and I'm in you're right on the water. So stuff, Russ, I had to replace my outdoor fans. Like every three months we would just go get completely rusted, no matter what you did. And just all kinds of crazy stuff that doc, you know, just so much stuff. And I just didn't want, I wanted to focus on all my business and I wanted, I wanted to stop leaving my phone around. And then not finding it for six hours because it was on the, you know, it was on the third floor and this and that. So when I bought the penthouse downtown, I just liked it a lot. It was actually more expensive than the house I owned, but it was smaller and it was just, I don't know, I liked the lifestyle more, but what I did was I would, I would put up a house that was very, very similar to that house.Dan Henry (00:55:18):And I would leave it up in my tabs and every two or three hours, I would just take a break and I would look at it and I'd be like, all right, I got to get to this much money. You know, obviously after taxes that dah, dah, dah. And so I would look and I'd say, okay, I need to sell this many units of my consulting or whatever. And I would, I would basically make that sort of like my, because you know, goals are weird, you know, like what are goals? You know, people have goals, but goals change. I just knew that I wanted to have a really nice house and I wanted to invite my family over and I wanted my family to experience being in a nice place. Cause they didn't really get, get to do that. And so I would leave it up. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:55:57):So my opinion on it is are you familiar with lead and lag measures?Dan Henry (00:56:03):No. I would love you toEric Toz (00:56:04):Explain it to me. Lead and lag measures would be like, so lag measure would be how much revenue your company didn't last month. Okay. But that's lead measures are more activity-based so here are the things I'm measuring each day for things I can control. Cause you can't, you literally can't control somebody else buying your stuff. I mean, you can't take their hand and force them to click and put type in their credit card. But I think you'd get arrested it's to me it sounds fun. It's like, oh, open daddy's wallet,Dan Henry (00:56:36):Dude. We should film. You should film an ad where you like break into somebody's house and make them buy a little customized pendant under their heads that would not get approved.Eric Toz (00:56:46):Yeah. So if you think about lead and lag measures, like a lag measure would be revenue. You can't literally control somebody opening their wallet and buying them. They still have to do that on their own, but something you can control every day is I'm going to go live two times today, I'm going to set 40 appointments. I'm going to try to close X amount of sales. So these are the things that you can control. Like I've always looked at houses and cars and stuff as like a lag measure. It's like I would rather set a goal of like doing X, Y, Z for the things I can control, because if I do everything I can control, most likely I'm going to get, get those other, those, those prizes. So my goal would be like only the things I can control, which would be maybe orders made or on whatever metric, because then my taste might also change. I might also want to drive a car or something later on.Dan Henry (00:57:38):Could I present to you a different way to think about it and maybe mate, this how to think, bro. Yeah. It's how to think. Right. And, and, and get your perspective on it. W so I have this crazy concept that I've really started to delve into recently the idea of not having goals now, before I that's hyper bowl right now. Right? So a lot of people like that, but let's, let's, let's dive into it. So if you have a goal, like, let's say you want to go to the gym. Okay. And you want to get Jack. And the only reason you're going to the gym is because you want to get checked. So you go to the gym and when you get there, you realize you're kind of fat and out of shape, you don't have abs, but you look around the gym and you see all these people with abs big muscles and you say, well, they're jacked and I'm not jacked.Dan Henry (00:58:18):That's why I'm here. So now I feel out of place, I feel like I don't belong. And it gives you this sense of automatically right off the bat, you feel unaccomplished, you feel less, you feel like you don't belong, right? Because you're setting this expectation that there's the reason you're there is for a goal. When instead, if you simply fall in love with the process, you fall in love with working out. You just, it doesn't matter what you look like. You love working out. You're going there because you love working out. And you love that process. It's sorta like when you Jitsu, right? If I like, I love jujitsu, I love it. I don't go to jujitsu class and say, I'm only going, because I want to win worlds. Or I want to win ATDC or I want to be a black belt. I go because I love it. And I noticed that when you love a process and you don't necessarily have a goal, you end up getting, so you end up getting rapidly good at that thing. And you blow past any goals that you could have achieved, or you could have made for yourself by falling in love with the process. I'd love to know your take on that.Eric Toz (00:59:21):So I think, I think more people should set goals around how they want to feel. Right. Because ultimately isn't it all about having a feeling of happiness. So it's like, I envision, I envision a world where I wake up everyday and I feel this way. Right? It's like, that's not something that's tangible. That's a feeling, but it's also inarguable, right? Like if you feel a certain way, there's no metric that can dictate whether that's a success or not, because it's about how you feel. So I think people should focus more on that because they can literally get to that goal, like a lot faster than any other like metric based.Dan Henry (00:59:59):Well, what do you think creates happiness? Do you think happiness is created by feeling like you've made progress, feeling like you've. So I heard a Jordan Peterson talks about this. He was saying that a lot of times we feel happy because we solve problems. Cause if you think about it, right, what is the human mind? It's the computer. What is it? So forget the human mind for a second. W what, what does a computer do? What does it really do on a fundamental level? It solves it crunches numbers, and it solves problems. One after the other that's its purpose. And then one day the motherboard goes out and the computer stops working and it stops solving problems. And it dies. The human brain is basically a computer. And it, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, like what happens if everything was perfect in your life? You'd almost go crazy.Eric Toz (01:00:43):Well, actually we see this with super rich people and celebrities. They're like super depressed because the mind, even when, even when you saw everything, the mind will look for new things to solve. So it might actually drag you down. It might actually cause chaos in your life so that you can solve them. Like a lot of people, they bring themselves down from from success because their mind is just needs a new problem to create and solve. Oh yeah. I can feel that. And that's another thing. There's this amazing book called the big leap by gay Hendricks. And basically it's like you know, success for a lot of people is foreign and the, their subconscious it's almost scary to be successful because their subconscious is not used to that. So they would rather, almost subconsciously self-sabotage to bring themselves down to what they're used to.Eric Toz (01:01:38):So I've seen it with a lot of people and alcoholics too that runs in my family. Like people will get a certain taste of success and then there'll

Episode NotesPublished on October 11, 2021Our Hosts:Mike Ercolano's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mike_ercolano/Kelly Krauss' Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kkrauss76/John Espodito's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_esposito15/Next Generation Training Center: https://nextgenerationtrainingcenter.com/NextGen Radio Podcast: https://nextgenerationtrainingcenter.com/nextgenradio/Mike Ercolano (00:00):What's up, everybody. Thank you for listening to NextGen Radio. This is a podcast for those of you who want the truth and nothing but the truth when it comes to diet, exercise, and all things health. This is episode number 35 and I'm Mike Ercolano. I'm here with my co-hosts Kelly Krauss and John Esposito, and we are about to fill the next 30 minutes or so of your time with some super exciting health and fitness stuff. So, if that's what you're interested in, welcome.Transcript and Show Notes:Mike Ercolano (00:34):I don't know, I'm trying to extend the intro to keep the listener's attention, but I don't know. It's not working.Kelly Krauss (00:41):All right. We're here, we're here.John Esposito (00:42): We're all here.Mike Ercolano (00:43):I don't think I have either one of yours attention either because you're looking down at your phone and...Kelly Krauss (00:48):I was just trying to find something.John Esposito (00:48):I'm trying to find good quality information.Kelly Krauss (00:50): Yeah, I was too.Mike Ercolano (00:50): Ah, cramming last minute.John Esposito (00:52):Yeah, of course. That's how I got through college. Last-minute cramming.Mike Ercolano (00:55): Yeah, I understand that.Kelly Krauss (00:57):I'm a planner, so I've let myself down with today.Mike Ercolano (01:00):You didn't plan beforehand?Kelly Krauss (01:02): Not really.John Esposito (01:03):But you were saying you were trying to.Kelly Krauss (01:04):I put thought into it, but I came up with nothing. That's not acceptable. I have to come up with something.Mike Ercolano (01:10):You're right. Yeah, that was not acceptable.Kelly Krauss (01:12): Right.Mike Ercolano (01:14):No. That's right, I didn't plan anything either, but I never do. I mean, that's not true. Sometimes I do.John Esposito (01:20): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (01:21):Yeah, we just got to get better with that.John Esposito (01:23): Yeah, we do.Kelly Krauss (01:24):Because you need time to think about it. You need time to research.John Esposito (01:28):Absolutely. Mike, you did queue a little interest in some topics I was reading on when you were asking about how our workouts are going.Mike Ercolano (01:33): Yeah?John Esposito (01:33):Yeah. So, I was reading up on a new training... I guess, science behind some training. It's the idea of 90 degree eccentric training. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's just-Mike Ercolano (01:46):No, I don't think so. 90 degree eccentric training? Is that what you said?John Esposito (01:50):Yep. 90 degree eccentric isometrics is the full name.Mike Ercolano (01:54): Okay.John Esposito (01:54):So, there is a good amount of new research out and a lot by one specific, I guess, performance coach, but he's also a doctorate. He's a physical therapist, doctor in kinesiology as well as everything else.Mike Ercolano (02:10):Remix. Sorry. That didn't help either.John Esposito (02:13):For the life of me can't remember his name, but a lot of his research and lot of the research that he based his training off of is about joint angles and about how musculature affects those joint angles and vice versa. How the joint affects... My God. English. How joint angles affect musculature. There's been a lot of research in the past couple of years saying that that 90 degree angle, which we normally say is a baseline to get to, I would say, with a squat or most movements is actually the ideal positioning for most joints muscles and actually for majority of the body, for spinal alignment as well.John Esposito (02:50):Now, a lot of his training with high-end athletes... He trains a lot of quarterbacks, he trains a lot of sprinters, even bodybuilders. So, he's got a lot of variety going into there. Are finding huge results just by real simple movements. Like a goblet squat, going down into a 90 degree angles, setting that in position, keeping constant tension throughout that, and then exploding out of that movement. But you get after isometric, which it allows the muscles to secure the joint, getting into that isometric at the bottom, after the eccentric. Which we know it's forcing your muscles to squeeze, it keeps everything in position. But that is also helping to relieve injury, to treat injury, and to also prevent injury. So, there's now about 250 studies included in his website.Mike Ercolano (03:40):Hm. What's this guy's name?John Esposito (03:42):It's something Seedman. Or Joel Seedman, I believe. And a lot of his training has been going off of that, and he's been finding results that have been supporting all the research as well. It's not just lab-based, it was practice-based as well.Mike Ercolano (03:58):Right.John Esposito (03:59):These athletes that you're seeing are some of the best of the best. You have, I can't remember who thequarterback was. Is it Heinicke or Heinky?Mike Ercolano (04:11): I don't know.John Esposito (04:12):He just had a good week, put up three touchdowns.Kelly Krauss (04:16): Who is he with?Mike Ercolano (04:16):Oh, a current quarterback?John Esposito (04:17): Yeah, current quarterbacks.Kelly Krauss (04:18): Okay. So-Mike Ercolano (04:20): So, bodybuilders-Kelly Krauss (04:21):... these are the people he's trained and this is part of his study.John Esposito (04:22): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (04:22): Okay.John Esposito (04:23):So, this is all part of his practice and-Mike Ercolano (04:26): I'll look him up later.John Esposito (04:26):... I was looking into it and it's proven. Actually those angles support the right muscle activation of both glutes, quads, hamstrings, and a squat. Works the same for upper body movements as well. So, doing overhead press is coming down to a 90 degree, locking in that form, locking in that positioning, exploding out of that will work the same way. Prevents the joints from going past their quote-unquote end range of their limit, but you also still work into those end ranges. But getting to that 90 degree angle allows the muscles to secure the joint, building around that, and then you can actually bulletproof the joints to work better in bigger ranges after that.Mike Ercolano (05:04): Hm.John Esposito (05:06):I don't know if I'm explaining it right, but-Kelly Krauss (05:07): Oh, yeah.Mike Ercolano (05:08):Yeah, no, I'm following you. So, now I've never heard of this guy. And so, I'd like to look into a lot more of it.Kelly Krauss (05:15): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (05:16):It's interesting, because I use a lot of isometric stuff with either during stability work with athletes or with people who have pain.Mike Ercolano (05:25):So, for example, Vinny. You just stretched Vinny, he just walked out of here. He's got two torn ACLs MCLs. Both his knees are banged up, but he obviously continues to train hard. So, a lot of stuff we do, especially when we're not in a camp right now like we are... When he's just general training, we do a lot of isometric work and we do a lot of isometric work during his warmup and during his, excuse me, prep and prime work, and it helps alleviate his knee pain.Mike Ercolano (05:55):And I found that isometric, I mean, without any studies or anything, just by doing it and anecdotally. So, it's cool to hear that there's some studies that back that up because I've just done it because we'd do it for a little while and he says his knee feels better and we trained.John Esposito (06:10):And it was just about... I think it was 250 plus articles that he has included on his website that support this idea of 90 degree eccentric isometrics. So, lowering phase of about four or five seconds, really getting the most muscular feel out of that, coming down to that 90 degree angle, and then supporting that trains those joints into their best position, trains those joints to stay secure in those positions, but it also translates to going past those positions as well when you go into less loaded-Mike Ercolano (06:40):Interesting. And I guess maybe once you go past those it's more into the mobility training side of things,right?John Esposito (06:46): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (06:47):Well, we could talk about the kid you had in sports performance this week with his squat. That was trulyass to grass, right?Mike Ercolano (06:53): Yeah, it was terrible though.Kelly Krauss (06:54): It was so, so low.Mike Ercolano (06:55):Not terrible. And because, he didn't really know what he was doing, it was just terrible that it was actually better than what most people would be able to do naturally. Because that's closer to what we're naturally supposed to be doing than how we are now.Mike Ercolano (07:12):But the problem is, he, along with many of us, lack the stability to go that far down. He was going that far down, but his ankles were rolling in and his hip flexors. His knees were folding. He didn't have the hip strength, the stability through his hips and the mobility in his feet and ankles to be able to go that low.Mike Ercolano (07:31):But naturally we should be able to sit in that position. In fact, we should be able to... That's like if you goto third world countries, that's how they-Kelly Krauss (07:40): How they hang out.Mike Ercolano (07:41):How they hang out, how they shit, how they take a break. They sit into that position.John Esposito (07:47):It's actually, speaking of that you're saying that's how they shit, that's actually the body's naturalpositioning for-Kelly Krauss (07:52):Like the-Mike Ercolano (07:52): The Squatty Potty.John Esposito (07:53): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (07:53):The Squatty Potty. Exactly.John Esposito (07:55):I mean, about five or six years ago before I even saw the Squatty Potty, I used to be putting somethingunderneath my feet when I would go-Kelly Krauss (08:00):Well, it helps. It supposed to help the flow.John Esposito (08:03):Yeah, I had no clue about it and I was just like, "You know what?"Mike Ercolano (08:06):That's how I get my calf work in.John Esposito (08:08): Yeah?Kelly Krauss (08:08): Really?Mike Ercolano (08:08):When I'm sitting on the john, yeah.Kelly Krauss (08:10): Ah, interesting.John Esposito (08:10): Push it up there?Mike Ercolano (08:11):No, I don't do reps. No. I'm not sitting there doing calf raises while... I do read a book though.John Esposito (08:19):Yeah?Kelly Krauss (08:19): That's good.John Esposito (08:21):It is good. Yeah. It's good that you [crosstalk 00:08:22]Kelly Krauss (08:22):I have all kinds of reading the bathroom too. In fact-John Esposito (08:23): Absolutely.Kelly Krauss (08:24):... I've invoked the rule no more phones in the bathroom.John Esposito (08:26):Mm-hmm (affirmative). You get sucked in.Kelly Krauss (08:26):Because they're in there forever.Mike Ercolano (08:29): Yeah, you get sucked in.John Esposito (08:31): Oh, absolutely.Kelly Krauss (08:31): It's not okay.Mike Ercolano (08:31): No.John Esposito (08:31): You get sucked in.Kelly Krauss (08:31):Reader's Digest is the perfect thing to have in your bathroom because their articles [crosstalk 00:08:35]John Esposito (08:34):Yeah, it's just interesting enough, but then it gets boring after a while.Mike Ercolano (08:37): They still make that?John Esposito (08:37): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (08:37): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (08:37): Really? I had idea.Kelly Krauss (08:37):I love Reader's Digest.John Esposito (08:39): Oh, yeah.Kelly Krauss (08:40): I'm a big fan.John Esposito (08:40): See-Mike Ercolano (08:41):I'm surprised it's not just a virtual one now.John Esposito (08:42):My issue is I have Popular Science, a couple of the car ones in the bathroom. So, even if I don't have myphone, I'll be sitting there for hours.Kelly Krauss (08:50):Yeah, I have nutrition magazines in there.John Esposito (08:51): Yep.Mike Ercolano (08:52):I use my... Remember when I used to use that Pomodoro for doing work? That little timer thing. Is thatwhat it's called? The little Italian tomato timer thing.Kelly Krauss (08:59):Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes.Mike Ercolano (09:00):Yeah, I use that in the bathroom when I'm reading.Kelly Krauss (09:05): A tomato timer?Mike Ercolano (09:05):Mm-hmm (affirmative). Or else I'll be there forever.John Esposito (09:08): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (09:09):It depends on what I'm reading or especially if I'm on my phone, but I'm very, I don't know, regimented right now. So, I'm in a pretty good routine that I'm in there for 10 minutes. Set it for 10 minutes. Boom. I get my 10 minutes of reading done every morning.Kelly Krauss (09:23):Thank you. Maybe I'll get a tomato timer for my bathroom at home.John Esposito (09:25): Yeah, pop it in there.Mike Ercolano (09:26): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (09:26): This is all you got.John Esposito (09:28):You see one of them walk in, give it a little twist real quick.Kelly Krauss (09:30):And I'll keep it outside the bathroom so they can't adjust it.John Esposito (09:32): I like that.Mike Ercolano (09:33): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (09:33):Right?John Esposito (09:34):Yeah, because you can always push those things five minutes.Kelly Krauss (09:36): Uh, yeah.Mike Ercolano (09:37):Oh, yeah. I mean, it comes along with the discipline of not doing that.John Esposito (09:42): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (09:42): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (09:44):But that's why I like that instead of my phone, because if I'm on my phone I... Besides having the normal amount of ADD that we all have now with our phones, I think I have even worse ADHD. Well, I know I do because I'm taking freaking medication for it.Mike Ercolano (09:59):But I'll go in and I'm like, "No, I'm doing one task." And then all of a sudden two minutes later, I'm in a rabbit hole of something else. I'm like, "Fuck. I just told myself I wouldn't." Literally. So, if I have a timer on my phone, I'm screwed because I'll snooze it and then I'll just start Googling something or whatever. So, the little old school kitchen timer works perfectly.Kelly Krauss (10:25): I like that idea.Mike Ercolano (10:26):And there's something about the ticking.Kelly Krauss (10:29):It's soothing? Like white noise?Mike Ercolano (10:32):It's more... I mean, I guess you have meditative. It gets you more in the zone, especially when I'm reading or doing work. Well, I haven't done it doing work. But reading, it gets you in the zone, it blanks out any outside noise. Even though it's not very loud, it gives you that tempo to follow. So, I like it. Yeah.Mike Ercolano (10:50):So, if you are walking by my house at... Usually it's about 5:00 AM, 4:45 AM, and you hear a little ticking coming from the bathroom.Kelly Krauss (11:00): That's what's happening.Mike Ercolano (11:01): That's me in there reading.Kelly Krauss (11:02): Okay.John Esposito (11:03): All right.Mike Ercolano (11:03): That's me in there reading.John Esposito (11:04):Good to know next time we pass by Mike's house.Kelly Krauss (11:06): That's right.Mike Ercolano (11:07): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (11:09):We can't get in. We can't get past your gate.Mike Ercolano (11:11):You can't, you can't. So, you have to tell me if you do, because if not, I'm pulling my gun out if somebodycoming through my door at 4:00 AM.Kelly Krauss (11:16): Yeah, right?Mike Ercolano (11:17):That's for sure. But yeah. So, going back to squatting, right?Kelly Krauss (11:22): Yes.Mike Ercolano (11:22):That's where this all came from?Kelly Krauss (11:23):This was all from John's article.John Esposito (11:23): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (11:26):Or actually, isometric holds. Yeah. So, I mean, I said anecdotally. But yes, I have read, maybe not studies, but other performance coaches and trainers talk about using isometric holds and physical therapists using isometric holds to help with injury. So, that's where... I didn't just come up with a one [inaudible 00:11:49]. So, it's interesting that someone's actually taking that even further and doing a ton of studies into it.Kelly Krauss (11:54):I think we should incorporate it.John Esposito (11:55):He's going full force. I mean, most of his training that I've seen on his page, on his website, is solely 90degree eccentric isometrics. And the occasional full range of motion movement.Mike Ercolano (12:07): Right.John Esposito (12:08):But it's just to keep them secure, because high-end athletes are very injury prone, even though they aretrained not to be.Mike Ercolano (12:15): Right.Kelly Krauss (12:16):Well, one of my favorites, the one and a half of a hold.John Esposito (12:19): Yeah?Kelly Krauss (12:19): A squat, yeah.John Esposito (12:20):Oh, yeah.Kelly Krauss (12:21):I really enjoy them. And you have to watch the clock. You can't count by yourself, because if you countby yourself it's one, two, three.Mike Ercolano (12:26): Right.John Esposito (12:27):Now, a lot of the benefit comes from both the amount of blood flow that goes into the muscles with those isometrics, with the eccentrics. That was one big part of his research that the blood flow increases significantly, which one-Mike Ercolano (12:38):More blood flow, more oxygen, more nutrients.John Esposito (12:40):Yep, less injury in there because-Mike Ercolano (12:41): More recovery.John Esposito (12:42):... everything's a little bit more pliable. But also at the same time, the nervous system fires up a little bitharder as well.Mike Ercolano (12:46): Nice. Right.John Esposito (12:47):To get into those eccentric, get into that isometric specifically, fires the nervous system 10 fold.Mike Ercolano (12:52):And I'm sure, I mean, I don't know if it was part of the study, but I'm sure it fires up the cardiovascularsystem too.John Esposito (12:58): Oh, absolutely.Mike Ercolano (12:59):How many times do we have an isometric hold in our programming and it doesn't look that-John Esposito (13:04):Difficult.Mike Ercolano (13:04):... hard. People don't really think until they're halfway through-John Esposito (13:07): I mean, today.Mike Ercolano (13:07):... and their heart rate's up and they're... So, I like that. Isometric holds.John Esposito (13:12): Yeah [crosstalk 00:13:13].Kelly Krauss (13:12):I think it should be in our next program.Mike Ercolano (13:14): Send it over, yeah.Kelly Krauss (13:15): Yeah, let's do it.John Esposito (13:15): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (13:15):I'd like to follow him. I'd like to look more into him too. That's pretty cool. And look, even just the basic principles of strength training, putting on muscle and muscle mass, time under tension is one of the key, if not the most important factor, for it. So-John Esposito (13:32):Absolutely. It's a very-well rounded system.Mike Ercolano (13:33):... that isometric hold adds right into that. So, cool. Good stuff. What was his name again?John Esposito (13:39): Joel Seedman.Mike Ercolano (13:40): Joel Seedman.Kelly Krauss (13:43):Joel Olsteen.Mike Ercolano (13:44): Joel Olsteen.John Esposito (13:44):He's going to start preaching to us.Mike Ercolano (13:45):Yeah. Well, he could maybe isometrically hold his body off the ground, floating a foot off the ground.And then I'll believe all the shit he talks about and may get very, very rich off of.Kelly Krauss (14:00):Haven't we learned from all of those guys when they live in their mansions and they drive these cars?People are still following him and listening to him and believing in it?Mike Ercolano (14:09):Obviously enough to support that lifestyle.Kelly Krauss (14:11):And how... That's not worth talking about, but it just amazes me.Mike Ercolano (14:15):We can't get enough people to support us to live that lifestyle. We got to do something. Let's start lyingto people. All we have to do is manipulate people and take their money. That's what they do, right?John Esposito (14:27): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (14:27): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (14:27):That's what all these rich people do.John Esposito (14:29):That's a new business [inaudible 00:14:31].Mike Ercolano (14:31): Yeah.John Esposito (14:32):Yeah.Mike Ercolano (14:32):All right. We guarantee everyone's going to have a six pack abs and ass like J-Lo, if you're a female. Andass like John, if you're a guy.John Esposito (14:42): I was going to say...Kelly Krauss (14:45): Both of you. Or Vinny?John Esposito (14:46): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (14:46): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (14:46): Yeah, Vinny.Kelly Krauss (14:47): We could sell that one.John Esposito (14:48):I got told I can't complain about my ass anymore because Vinny's got a bigger one, so...Kelly Krauss (14:51):Well, we definitely can't put him in a lineup. He's in a league of his own.Mike Ercolano (14:54): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (14:54): Between you two-Mike Ercolano (14:56): He's pretty ridiculous.John Esposito (14:57): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (15:00):I don't know. Where were we going? Oh, we're lying about what we're going to provide people. We'regoing to do all that for you in a week, but you got to pay 50 grand up front.Kelly Krauss (15:07): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (15:08): I think it's fair.John Esposito (15:09): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (15:09): I think that's fair.Mike Ercolano (15:10):I mean, it's life-changing.Kelly Krauss (15:11): Of course.Mike Ercolano (15:12): Legit life-changing.Kelly Krauss (15:13): You'll never go back.Mike Ercolano (15:13): You'll get relieved.John Esposito (15:14):You'll never be the same afterwards.Kelly Krauss (15:15):Right. You don't want to be.John Esposito (15:17): No.Mike Ercolano (15:18): All right. So...John Esposito (15:19):Sold.Mike Ercolano (15:20):Joel Olsteen, make some room next door because we're moving in.Kelly Krauss (15:23): Yeah, we're coming by.Mike Ercolano (15:25):No, but I'd like to follow that guy Joel. Maybe if he's not too big for us, we can have him on the showand talk a little bit about it.John Esposito (15:32):That'd be interesting. That'd be a good time to do.Mike Ercolano (15:33):All right, John, you're on it. Reach out to him.John Esposito (15:35):All right. I'm going to give it a try. Ain't direct enough on the page.Mike Ercolano (15:38):Speaking of big enough, have you guys seen the average weight gain of Americans during COVID?Kelly Krauss (15:45): No, tell me.Mike Ercolano (15:46):Because it's actually been all over the place a little bit. But-John Esposito (15:48): Really?Mike Ercolano (15:48):No, no. I'm just trying to segue into what I've read, but it's not working. It's actually not all over the placebecause the news will probably not cover that because they'll just say, "Take a shot."Mike Ercolano (15:59):But anyway, so the average American gained 29 pounds over the pandemic. I guess it's still going on or whatever, but so 29 pounds. So, figure over 18 months, right? So, how many pounds is that per month? 1.6 pounds per month.Kelly Krauss (16:22): Okay.Mike Ercolano (16:23):All right. If we're looking at 18 months. Now, the average normal rate for weight gain, because theaverage American does gain weight every single year, is between 1.1 and 2.2 pounds per year.Mike Ercolano (16:38):So, during the pandemic... If it's over yet, I don't think it's over. I don't know if there's going to-Kelly Krauss (16:46):They don't want it to be over.Mike Ercolano (16:46):No, but I don't know what-Kelly Krauss (16:46): So, yes but no.Mike Ercolano (16:48):... constitutes a pandemic starting and ending. When is it over? Is it just when they're like, "All right, it's done." Or does it have to fall below a certain amount of case numbers? Anyway, that's for a different conversation. So, the average person, an American. An American. A-N. The average American. The average American.Kelly Krauss (17:13):You really worked that out.Mike Ercolano (17:14):I had to get it right. I had to get it right. It's only fair.Mike Ercolano (17:20):The average American gained a year's worth of weight, essentially, every month during the pandemic. So, just put that in... I mean, if we already had an obesity factor beforehand or an obesity issue beforehand, you imagine where we're going to be at now or five years from now, or 10 years from now, if things don't change? If the culture and the message and the society and the focus on health doesn't change...Mike Ercolano (17:52):Just look at how fast the obesity rates have grown. I mean, in the past, I don't know, 30 years, 40 years, they've quadrupled and probably more than that. Then what's going on is not a natural progression, right? It's all lifestyle. It's a lifestyle change. It's pretty clear. It's very clear. It's science, right? You got to follow the science. It's a lifestyle change that's causing this issue.Mike Ercolano (18:17):So, think about how much that has just been accelerated over the past 18 months now, right? Of how many people fall into that category. And that's the average. So, obviously there's a lot higher and a lot lower. I think median is usually a better way to look at it, to get a more fair perspective of what the middle looks like. But still, that's a number that we could go off of. So, I don't know. That's just a staggering number, and it's a sad number and a scary number because-John Esposito (18:51):A year's worth in a month.Mike Ercolano (18:51):Yeah, essentially. So, I mean, what is the... I got this little BMI calculator thing, which I used to carry around with me all the time thinking I would use it, but I never used it. But it was from a... What is this? From a vagina doctor? What are they called?Kelly Krauss (19:09): What? A gyno?Mike Ercolano (19:10): It's from a gyno, yeah.Kelly Krauss (19:12): Why do you have that?Mike Ercolano (19:14):I took it from my former business partner years ago. Yeah.Kelly Krauss (19:18):Oh, he could have used that.Mike Ercolano (19:18): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (19:21):Was he using it for himself?Mike Ercolano (19:21):But I would assume maybe there was a client of his or something that had these. He had them in theoffice, so I took one to use. But anyway, so-John Esposito (19:30):What is the average BMI? Between 25 and 30? Or is that the healthy range is 25 and 30.Kelly Krauss (19:35): Ah, yeah. Well, you got to talk women or male.Mike Ercolano (19:36): Let's go.John Esposito (19:36): I believe male is-Mike Ercolano (19:37):Let's go on here. A healthy range, according to this, is, I guess, between 20-Kelly Krauss (19:47): 18.5 to 25.Mike Ercolano (19:47): 18.5 to 25.John Esposito (19:48): Oh, wow. Okay.Mike Ercolano (19:49):Or 20 to 25. Yeah, 18.5 To 25.John Esposito (19:51):So, I mean, the average is probably between 25 and 35.Kelly Krauss (19:54): Yeah. Oh, yeah. Easy.John Esposito (19:56): At least.Mike Ercolano (19:56):Right. So, let's just take the average female. Average American female. Female height and weight.John Esposito (20:18): Let's say 5'6".Mike Ercolano (20:21):Sorry. This is all really good airtime right now while I Google this. All right, well this is as of 2016, but whatever. Close enough. A woman 20 years old and up, just under 5'4" and 170. So, that's the average female.Kelly Krauss (20:38):5'4", 170? Above 20?Mike Ercolano (20:40):That's what healthline.com says.Kelly Krauss (20:43): Wow, okay.Mike Ercolano (20:44): The average female-John Esposito (20:45): Surprised about that number.Mike Ercolano (20:46):Yeah. The average female weighs-Kelly Krauss (20:48): 5'4" is little.John Esposito (20:49): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (20:49): I'm 5'6".Mike Ercolano (20:52):This is a... Oh, that's the same website.John Esposito (20:57):170 was where I was at when I started with NextGen.Mike Ercolano (20:59):Women are generally considered tall in the United States. Yeah.John Esposito (21:01): I was-Mike Ercolano (21:01):Women are generally considered tall in the United States at 5'7", and the average height for women inthe United States is 5'4". It's another website saying that.35 (Final) - Isometric Training for Pain Managem... (Completed 10/07/21) Page 23 of 44 Transcript by Rev.comThis transcript was exported on Oct 10, 2021 - view latest version here. Kelly Krauss (21:06):Okay.Mike Ercolano (21:07):All right. So, 5'4", 170. Let's see if I can figure this thing out. Let's go to 170 and-Kelly Krauss (21:16):And the height's 5'4". This is exciting.Mike Ercolano (21:23): 5'4". It's right here.John Esposito (21:27):What, is that going to be 33, 34?Kelly Krauss (21:30):It's going to be up there.Mike Ercolano (21:30):It's in between, yeah. It's about 30. So-John Esposito (21:33): Oh, 30. Okay, yeah.Mike Ercolano (21:34):I mean, I guess I could just have Googled the average BMI of...Kelly Krauss (21:38):No, it's more to fun to watch you use this thing.Mike Ercolano (21:40):No, but my point of viewing this was because... So, the average, right, is right here. 5'4", 170. Boom.John Esposito (21:48): Yep.Mike Ercolano (21:48):All right, so now if every year it just creeps up by one pound. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Whatever. Allright, but the average person gained 29 pounds. So, that brings it up close to 190.John Esposito (22:01): [crosstalk 00:22:01] 190.Mike Ercolano (22:02):Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All the way to 190, which now puts them close to the obese range. All right, so the average female, the average American female, was already on the borderline of being overweight and was probably going to get there according to the statistics.Kelly Krauss (22:19): Right.Mike Ercolano (22:21):But they accelerated how many? 29, 28 times or whatever it is in one year, right? In one year. And the issue with that is, and we've talked about it a gazillion times and we're going to continue to talk about it until things change, is that that right there is probably the biggest concern and cause, or the biggest concern we should have in this country, right? In terms of health, anyway. Because that is going to... If we look at economically, that's going to put the biggest strain on our system, which is also starting to wane because nurses are quitting and being fired. But that's a different topic.Mike Ercolano (23:08):But how many... If the average person is now going to be obese or close to obese after this pandemic, what's going to happen when the next generation catches up to this and, essentially, 80% of the country is obese? 70% of the country is obese. What's going to happen then? Where are we going to be at as a society, right?Mike Ercolano (23:34):And, I mean, in my opinion, that's where they want us to be. They want us to be reliant on drugs and healthcare and that's where the money's at. But what's going to change? If this past year didn't change your mind about your health, what's going to change?Kelly Krauss (23:52):Well, that's what I've said. If this didn't scare the shit out of you to get you thinking about your healthand being more serious about it nothing-John Esposito (24:00): Nothing's going to.Kelly Krauss (24:01): ... nothing will.Mike Ercolano (24:02): No.Kelly Krauss (24:03):I think, and then when people started hearing that even healthy people... Because you assume those people on ventilators were people who were heavy, who smoked, who didn't exercise, who didn't eatright. But then you were also hearing about those that were physically fit and stuff. That was like, "Oh,crap."John Esposito (24:20): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (24:20):But even more so... You definitely heard more so of the ones who were unhealthy.John Esposito (24:27): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (24:27):Of course. And those are just sensationalized cases that unfortunately do happen. And it doesn't... Thathappens with every disease and virus and issue. Yes, it happens, and it's sad. And I'm sorry it happens.Mike Ercolano (24:43):A friend of mine's friend... A friend of mine's good friend who I met died from a heart issue. He was probably late thirties, early forties. He got COVID, went to the hospital, came home, then died of a heart issue. They called it a widowmaker. They said that it was due to COVID.Mike Ercolano (25:00):Now, he already had that issue. It's not like he had a healthy heart and COVID came in and killed him. He had that heart issue that COVID exposed and probably accelerated it. That would have happened when he was maybe 65 or 60 or... Yes, that sucks. It's really, really sad. It's really... But the fact is, the average person who, or the person who died of COVID, was overweight, obese. 80%.Kelly Krauss (25:29):Or had other underlying conditions.Mike Ercolano (25:31):Almost three. Or I think it's over three now. I think they pushed it up over three. I'm trying to find... I'mon the... The CDC's website is very a pain in the ass.John Esposito (25:42): To navigate? Yeah.Mike Ercolano (25:44):Yeah. But anyway, I think it's over three the last time I saw. So, the average person who died of COVID ordied with COVID was 80 years old and had three-John Esposito (25:59): Underlying health condition?Mike Ercolano (26:01):Comorbidities. These issues that will kill them. So, we got to understand the numbers that we're looking at. And we got to understand the facts and the statistics. And I only say this because I know I have to say this right now. This is not an anti-vax rant. I'm not trying to say don't take the vaccine. If you feel like it's going to make you safe, then take it. If you don't feel like it's going to make you safe, then don't take it. That is your choice. And you don't have to tell me, I don't want to know. I don't care.Mike Ercolano (26:30):All right, this is not about that. All right? This is about the fact that this is an issue that is completely in our control, right? This is a lifestyle issue. It's completely in our control as a society. And no matter how you look at it, like I've started to say before, whether it's economically, it's going to put a huge strain on it. Whether it's socially, think about the amount of depression, the amount of...Mike Ercolano (26:52):I mean, we see suicides going up every year. That's not changing, that's not ending. We see drug use going up every year. That's not changing, that's not ending. These are all symptoms of a failing society, or of a dying society, and these are all symptoms that could be cured through a little bit of exercise and a little bit of-John Esposito (27:20): Proper nutrition?Mike Ercolano (27:21):Well... Right. I mean, that's not even that hard, right? I wasn't even going to say proper nutrition, I wasjust going to say paying a little bit closer attention to what you eat. Not eating the super-size meal.Kelly Krauss (27:33): Right.John Esposito (27:33): Yeah, go for the small.Mike Ercolano (27:35):One of my clients who has Asperger's. He's a functioning, great adult. He's a great guy. He's got Asperger's and so sometimes you have to talk to him on a different level and keep it more simple. And so, we're talking about his diet and he goes to a sandwich shop every day at lunch and gets his extra large sandwich. So we said, "Let's cut it down to the medium sandwich."Mike Ercolano (28:06):Go every day, I don't care. They have that medium sandwich. I talked to his mom the other day and his mom said he was going three days a week. He's on his own, and now he's eating protein and veggies only at night with his meal. This is not anything I talked to him about, but it-Kelly Krauss (28:24):That's so great.Mike Ercolano (28:24):Just because we kept it simple. We kept it simple, and it doesn't have to be complicated, right? It doesn't have to be this scary thing. Weight loss doesn't have to be a scary thing, getting healthier. But the solution isn't in whatever drug comes out next to fix whatever the next problem is. That is not the solution.Mike Ercolano (28:44):I know we go there almost all the time on the show, but I think it's our duty to do that because there's not enough real information being spewed. And I say spewed because it's all garbage. It's all propaganda bullshit. There's not enough people talking about the real truth about how to be healthy and how to not die from COVID, statistically speaking.John Esposito (29:11):It's just a whole bunch of small steps. Not really... Just you don't have to make any big leaps, no bigstrides.Kelly Krauss (29:16):Right, right, right. Right, exactly.John Esposito (29:16):It's just one little tiny thing at a time. Go out for a walk more than you would a week.Kelly Krauss (29:21):And also pay attention to yourself. Why are you overeating? You have to address those issues because they're not going to go away. You can take a magic pill, sure. But once you stop taking that magic pill, you haven't addressed the issue as to why you have the habits you have.Kelly Krauss (29:35):And, sure, it's uncomfortable, it's scary. But I think you feel better about yourself once you start making these changes and start identifying with yourself and saying, "Hey, I had a stressful day at work. Let me go for a walk instead of sit down and eat dinner right away." Or...Mike Ercolano (29:49):Well, it's proven. I mean, it's a fact that it changes your chemistry. Your depression is lessened, anxiety is lessened. It never goes away, especially if you're someone who's diagnosed with it who actually has a chemical thing, it doesn't go away. But exercise does lessen all of that.Kelly Krauss (30:08): Absolutely.Mike Ercolano (30:09):Exercise makes you a more productive human being in life. If you want to talk about protecting the people around you... All right, no, you can't spread fat to somebody else, of course, but you could absolutely spread your unhealthy lifestyle around to other people. You could definitely spread your own depression and your own-Kelly Krauss (30:34): Negativity.Mike Ercolano (30:34):... negativity to other people. You could be a burden in people's lives. And as blunt as that is, we could allbe that. We could all fall into that. You're either a burden or you're...Mike Ercolano (30:50):I don't know what the opposite of burden is. You're helping somebody or-Kelly Krauss (30:53): Part of the solution?Mike Ercolano (30:53):Part of their life. We all have those people. They're either negative energy or positive energy in our life. And unfortunately, sometimes those negative energies are family. We can't do anything about that, but I know I'm doing everything I can to cut out negative energy in my life that I can, that I could choose to cut out.John Esposito (31:13): Of course.Mike Ercolano (31:14):I have people who are drains on me I'm not necessarily associating with any more. And it's not because I dislike them as people, but they're a drain on me.John Esposito (31:26): It's for your own sake.Mike Ercolano (31:27):And someone who doesn't take care of their health and someone who doesn't pay attention to what their role is as a human being and actually puts themselves or puts their health as a precedent, doesn't really have the same values as I do.Mike Ercolano (31:45):And again, I have people who I'm really good friends with who are overweight, but they're trying really hard, right? They're working. It's not like I'm fat shaming anybody here, I'm just trying to draw a conclusion to... How many people who are miserable would be helped if they put exercise in their life?Kelly Krauss (32:10):Absolutely.Mike Ercolano (32:11): And healthy eating.John Esposito (32:13):And it's proven scientifically and practically.Mike Ercolano (32:16):Right. You want to follow the science? There's the science. The science is there. The science has beenthere for a long time, all right.John Esposito (32:22):Research has proven it time and time again, that it lowers symptoms of depression, lowers symptoms ofanxiety.Kelly Krauss (32:27):Right, so follow the science, right? Hasn't that been the saying over the past 18 months? Well, there it is.Mike Ercolano (32:32):Right, well that's become a cult thing.Kelly Krauss (32:34): Too lazy.Mike Ercolano (32:35):That's become a cult thing now in my opinion. Follow the science. That's like an identity almost. A lot of people who like to use that, it's almost like their whole being has been bought into that image. Or that it's like a religion in my view, as science is now religion. Science is... Not science itself, but the concept of science is used as religion now. And I think it's become very politicized, and science can't be really trusted anymore either. But that's neither here nor there, I guess. I don't know.Kelly Krauss (33:16): Mm-hmm (affirmative).John Esposito (33:22):I agree. There's too many benefits to not include some fitness into your life, whether it's something simple like a walk, or whether it's getting into a gym once a week. It's better than nothing. It's better than not moving. It's better than not going out and doing something. Even just getting sunlight helps with all those mental symptoms. And that's proven as well. That's proven through practice.Mike Ercolano (33:44):Well, yeah. I mean, that's, again, another proven way to lessen the symptoms of COVID is D3, right? Orat least they tie together, vitamin D3 and the symptoms of COVID.Mike Ercolano (34:02):So, I don't know. I don't know how I got off that rant again, talking about this shit. It's just frustrating. It's frustrating because there's a lot of fingers being pointed in a lot of directions that they shouldn't be pointed at. And in the past, I don't think they would have.Mike Ercolano (34:24):Just think back to 2018, 2019. Just think if in 2018 or '19 places were stopping people from eating at their restaurant because they didn't have a certain vaccine? In the name of health, right? That would never be going on back then. It would never be going on back then. Never. Right? We would think it's crazy. If another country was doing that?Kelly Krauss (34:50): Right.Mike Ercolano (34:53):We don't even see the shit that's happening in Australia and Canada right now. That shit's crazy. But if in 2018, if another country was banning people from eating at their restaurants because they didn't have a vaccine... Anyway, they'd be holding fucking rallies and having GoFundMes for the people with vaccine discrimination in Australia or something like that. Right? It would be completely different thing. But anyway.Kelly Krauss (35:27):It'd be a different time for sure.John Esposito (35:28): Absolutely.Mike Ercolano (35:29):Anyway. One thing you can control is, obviously, your health and that's where we were going with this,so...John Esposito (35:37):Yeah, take control of your health. Get some ownership of it. Make a change, even if it's a small change.One step at a time.Kelly Krauss (35:43): Yep.John Esposito (35:44):And it's just only going to better you, not worsen your life.Kelly Krauss (35:48):And nobody's ever said I've regretted doing that workout or that walk. Nobody's ever said that, so force yourself to go outside and go for that walk. It'll be worth it.John Esposito (35:58):Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you can commit to it and you keep yourself consistent with it, there's notgoing to be any regrets. It's going to be all benefit.Mike Ercolano (36:04): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (36:06):Mike, you're going to get your flu shot?Mike Ercolano (36:07):No. I have never gotten it. I've never gotten it before, and I don't see why I'll get it now.John Esposito (36:14):I haven't gotten it the past few years. I don't know if that's fitness-related, but I've just been feelinghealthier.Kelly Krauss (36:21):Oh, you haven't gotten the flu?Mike Ercolano (36:22): Oh, the flu.John Esposito (36:22):Yeah, I haven't gotten the flu shot either a few years.Kelly Krauss (36:24): Oh, yeah?John Esposito (36:24):Yeah, just because I haven't had any flu symptoms past couple of years.Mike Ercolano (36:28):Yeah, I got sick last year. I think it was COVID though. It was last-Kelly Krauss (36:31):That was February, I think. Right?Mike Ercolano (36:32):February. It was right before everything. So, I think that was COVID. But I don't know, I just...Kelly Krauss (36:39):But let me ask you this. Have you guys had the flu?John Esposito (36:42): Yeah in the past.Kelly Krauss (36:43): So, how bad was it?Mike Ercolano (36:44):I had it once in the past five year.John Esposito (36:47):I mean, I had the flu for four day spanned. It wasn't terrible. Obviously, it didn't feel good. My body feltlike it was achy, but it wasn't anything past that.Kelly Krauss (36:57): Right.Mike Ercolano (36:58):Yeah. From what I can remember, the flu kicked my ass last time, but-Kelly Krauss (37:00): Oh, it sucks.John Esposito (37:01): Oh, absolutely.Mike Ercolano (37:02): I didn't die.John Esposito (37:03): No.Mike Ercolano (37:03): I'm still here.Kelly Krauss (37:03):But it's putting your body through that, I think, is a win on the side of immunity and the side of health.Mike Ercolano (37:11):Well, I mean, here's the thing about immunity is that there's... Once you're exposed to a virus, your body has the memory cells of that immunity to that. So even if your antibodies are quote-unquote not there anymore, as soon as you're exposed to the virus again, right? Those antibodies will kick back in. Now, obviously there's different variants, just like we know all the shit, the Delta or whatever, and the different strands of flu every year and all this stuff. But once you've been exposed to it, your body has a memory to be able to fight that off again, even if you don't have the antibodies anymore. Even then.Mike Ercolano (37:51):So, there's a lot of misinformation about that. And all you have to do is look at the studies that have come out of Israel right now on COVID that show that it's significantly higher immunity to it if you've already had it versus having the vaccine.Kelly Krauss (38:09): Right.John Esposito (38:10): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (38:10):And that's science. That is science. That is proven science, but yet you're still not allowed to be exempt from the vaccine even if you show that you've had it. Because they're using antibodies as a way, which is just not scientifically and factually true. Because, yes, antibodies are there after you're exposed, but your body has cells in that remember, and when you're exposed again you have a lesser reaction to it. Right? Even if it is a different strain. Which is why they talk about the flu shot and, yes, you should get it because it might lessen your symptoms even if it is a different strain. It's the same shit. It's all the same shit. But if you're not healthy, it's going to suck anyway, right?Kelly Krauss (38:57):Yeah, it's going to be even worse.Mike Ercolano (38:58):It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If you're overweight and obese and if it's... Again, we said it the lastpodcast, we'll say it again.Mike Ercolano (39:05):If it's not COVID, if it's not the flu, if it's not whatever other shit has wiped out people in this world... If it's not one of those, it's going to be the next thing, because your health is the center stone for everything. And that's something you can control. We're just going the wrong direction as society.Kelly Krauss (39:28):Yep, totally. Well, we're good.John Esposito (39:31): Yes, we are.Kelly Krauss (39:32):My family's good.Mike Ercolano (39:32):Yeah, yeah. And, like you said, there's always those extremes. Point at the finger of look at the guywho's out running marathons every day and he died of a heart attack and whatever. Yeah.John Esposito (39:45): There's outliers in everything.Mike Ercolano (39:46): Right. We're all going to die.John Esposito (39:47): You can't just go off on-Mike Ercolano (39:47): We're all going to die.John Esposito (39:47): Right. Exactly, exactly.Mike Ercolano (39:50):So, we want to live our lives fighting, and we want to live our lives trying to be the best we can. Or wewant to live our lives-Kelly Krauss (39:57):And feeling the best you can, right?Mike Ercolano (39:58):And even more importantly, feeling the best you can.John Esposito (40:00): Absolutely.Mike Ercolano (40:01):So, if you're on that scale, unfortunately, of the 29 pound increase, do something about it now. Don't wait. It's going to suck the longer you wait, it's going to get harder and it's going to get harder and then eventually you're not going to do it. Don't put it off. Start tomorrow. Start tonight. Start as soon as you get done listening to this show. Go out for a walk or do some jumping jacks or do something and start today. Start immediately. Don't wait till Monday, because Monday will always be pushed back to the following Monday.John Esposito (40:40):Make that commitment to yourself.Mike Ercolano (40:42):Right. If you dangle that carrot, you'll always chase that carrot. But you got to take a bite of it right now. I don't know. I don't know how to change that analogy to make it get it. But yeah, get it. Do something. Start moving.John Esposito (41:00): I like that.Mike Ercolano (41:01): Do you?John Esposito (41:02): [crosstalk 00:41:02] culture.Mike Ercolano (41:02): Do you like that?John Esposito (41:03):Chase the carrot. Get a bit of it.Kelly Krauss (41:05):Yeah. Let's stick with that one.Mike Ercolano (41:08):All right, yeah. So, if you're over... Well, I mean, don't bite the carrot though, because we're trying tomake you lose weight. So...John Esposito (41:14): True.Mike Ercolano (41:15):If you're... Well, no, a carrot's healthy though.Kelly Krauss (41:16):Well, what are you talking about?Mike Ercolano (41:16):We're not telling you not to eat.Kelly Krauss (41:16):Carrots are good.Mike Ercolano (41:16): Yeah, all right.Kelly Krauss (41:16):It's the candy bar. You don't want to eat the candy bar.Mike Ercolano (41:21):Oh, yeah. Halloween coming up.John Esposito (41:23): Don't chase the candy bar.Mike Ercolano (41:24):My [crosstalk 00:41:24] really show on that.Kelly Krauss (41:24):What's your favorite candy?John Esposito (41:27): Oh.Mike Ercolano (41:28): Probably Reese's, I guess.Kelly Krauss (41:30): Peanut Butter Cups?Mike Ercolano (41:31): Yeah, probably.Kelly Krauss (41:31): Little or the full one?John Esposito (41:31): Boring.Mike Ercolano (41:33):No, I actually like the dark chocolate thins.Kelly Krauss (41:36):Oh, yes, I'll give you that.John Esposito (41:37):Oh, yeah.Mike Ercolano (41:38):I could pop those like fucking candy.Kelly Krauss (41:39): Are they frozen?Mike Ercolano (41:40):No, I don't like them frozen.John Esposito (41:42):I'm a Sour Patch Kid sort of guy.Kelly Krauss (41:45):I tell my kids that's such cancer candy.John Esposito (41:46):I know it is, but it's just so good.Kelly Krauss (41:49): Are you serious?John Esposito (41:50): I love Sour Patch Kids.Kelly Krauss (41:50):I really thought people grew out of the Sour Patch phase.John Esposito (41:54): Nope.Mike Ercolano (41:54):I like the Sour Patch weed gummies.Kelly Krauss (41:55): Oh.John Esposito (41:58): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (41:59): Yeah. We get those.John Esposito (42:02):That's interesting. Yeah, I like my Sour Patch.Kelly Krauss (42:03):Are you a gummy type person? Gummy bears, gummy worms.John Esposito (42:07):Yeah, gummy bears used to be my favorite thing when I was younger.Kelly Krauss (42:09): Really?John Esposito (42:09): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (42:11): [crosstalk 00:42:11].Mike Ercolano (42:11): I'm a chocolate guy.Kelly Krauss (42:11): Yeah, me too.John Esposito (42:12):If it was chocolate, it would have to be a Baby Ruth bar. I love my Baby Ruths.Mike Ercolano (42:15): With all the nuts in it?Kelly Krauss (42:16):You know what that looks like.Mike Ercolano (42:18):Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, on that note, I guess we should end the show considering we just rantedfor 30 minutes about losing weight and now we're going to talk about candy Kelly Krauss (42:27):Mike Ercolano (42:31):No, that's true. Because we can in moderation right.Kelly Krauss (42:34):Balance. It's all about balance.John Esposito (42:34):At least we talked about 90 degree eccentrics at one point too.Mike Ercolano (42:36): That is true.Kelly Krauss (42:38):We could dangle... You're at the 90 degree squat, right? And then you're dangling the Reese's Pieces infront of your face. Don't bite the-Mike Ercolano (42:44): The Reese's Pieces?Kelly Krauss (42:45):Don't bite... Oh, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.Mike Ercolano (42:47):Just dangling one Reese's. How are you going to thread that up? You going to wrap it around?Kelly Krauss (42:52):I don't know. I might have to take out the glue gun.Mike Ercolano (42:54): Mm.John Esposito (42:54): Mm.Kelly Krauss (42:55): To make that happen.Mike Ercolano (42:55):Make sure it's a non-toxic glue.Mike Ercolano (43:00): Perfect.Kelly Krauss (43:01): That's what I'll do.Mike Ercolano (43:02): Melt down one of mine.Kelly Krauss (43:03): Yeah, okay. Even better.Mike Ercolano (43:06):All right. Well, I am officially out of time, so-John Esposito (43:08): Ending that rant.Mike Ercolano (43:09): Yeah, we're ending it there.Kelly Krauss (43:11): That was fun.Mike Ercolano (43:11):But thank you again, guys, for listening to this episode. Episode number 35. Please do us a favor. Sharethe show, like it, comment, leave a review. I don't know why-John Esposito (43:25): Give us suggestions.Mike Ercolano (43:27):... I don't ever talk about in the beginning of the show... Planning ahead. I don't ever why I don't plan to-Kelly Krauss (43:32): The closing?Mike Ercolano (43:33):... know what to actually say because I don't even know what you're supposed to do. But help us out alittle bit. We appreciate it.Bye, guys.Kelly Krauss (43:42): I don't-Mike Ercolano (43:42):You have something to say?Kelly Krauss (43:43):No, I'm just saying I don't think you have to tell people all that stuff. When you listen to podcasts, areyou listening to them rant and rave? Rant at the end about liking us?Mike Ercolano (43:52): Yeah.John Esposito (43:52): I think most times-Kelly Krauss (43:53): The whole thing?John Esposito (43:53):I think most times they hear it in the beginning.Mike Ercolano (43:55):Most times in the beginning-Kelly Krauss (43:56): It's usually scripted.Mike Ercolano (43:56): ... and/or at the end.John Esposito (43:57): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (43:57): Yeah.Kelly Krauss (43:58):And you listen to that every time you listen to the same podcast? You listen to that every time?Yeah.John Esposito (44:02):You get this, "Thank you to our promoters," or "Thank you to our sponsors."Mike Ercolano (44:08):Yeah, I listen to it. Or I just skip past 30 seconds.John Esposito (44:10): Yeah.Mike Ercolano (44:12): So...Kelly Krauss (44:13): All right.Mike Ercolano (44:13):And, supposedly, it helps significantly. Asking people to do it significantly helps.Kelly Krauss (44:19):Right. I'm just saying it could be a quick, "Like our podcast. Comment. We always love to hear from you."Mike Ercolano (44:25):Well, yeah. Well, that's what I mean. I never know what to say, so I always drag it on. That's my wholepoint of this is that I don't know how to end it. But man, I should really do a better-Kelly Krauss (44:34):Okay. I guess my point was it should be short and sweet.Mike Ercolano (44:35):Well, right. And I should do a better job of it. That was the point of what I was saying is that I got to do abetter job of the closing.Kelly Krauss (44:42): Okay.Mike Ercolano (44:43): Yes. All right, so now-Kelly Krauss (44:45):Well, now that we've cleared that up.This transcript was exported on Oct 10, 2021 - view latest version here. Mike Ercolano (44:46):Now that we've... Yes. Like the show. Bye.

Trash Box is back after a week hiatus (it was a family wedding, give me a goddamn break!), and I missed you. I did. Three really strong eps of Housewives to recap/snark on this week, but first I talk a bit about the new LA Times interview with Garcelle, Sutton, and Crystal. Worth a read, very entertaining! First up is the finale of Beverly Hills, where I Google everybody's net worth, fawn over Crystal's Chinese New Year party, champion Sutton, and wish bad things on the Fox Force Five (I guess we're still including the Ghost of Teddi Mellencamp?). Then it's over to Potomac where Candiace gets so, so mean! Then Salt Lake City, where we witness the extremely satisfying takedown of Lisa Barlow, via new girl Angie.   Next week it's Part One of the BH Reunion! Eeeee!   Follow us on Twitter @thetrashboxpod and on Instagram @trashboxhousewives. Like, subscribe, (positively, PLEASE, I'm so sensitive) review us on all the apps you have on your phone. Thanks for listening!

Content expert Marna Palmer works with nurse writers frequently in her role at studioID. Learn what she seeks in a “unicorn” freelance writer. Episode Summary Marna Palmer is the Director of Operations at studioID, a major content marketing agency and brand studio. Every day she works with clinician writers and has some great insights into how nurses can differentiate themselves in LOIs, what studioID looks for in a nurse writer, and exactly what you should do when following up on an LOI to rise to the top of the list. About Marna Palmer: If Marna could create her own business card it would say "Professional Cat Herder," as that has been the most consistent theme of her career; from celebrities to creatives, she finds talent, helps it grow and assists in keeping everyone organized while making money in the process. She spent the first 10 years of her career as a talent agent in Los Angeles negotiating commercial endorsements for her celebrity clients. She then went to the other side of the desk and joined a marketing startup, where she led the publishing team's B2C digital marketing efforts and thus began her work with freelance writers. Since then, she has worked with content creators of all kinds around the world; at companies in Los Angeles, Oslo, Norway and now at studioID in Washington, DC. Host Elizabeth Hanes BSN RN built a six-figure writing business in her spare time. Today, she coaches other nurses how to become freelance writers through the RN2writer project. Topics discussed in this episode Here's a sampling of what you can learn in this episode: - The huge role that clips and a portfolio play in whether or not an agency brings you on as a writer [6:06] - Why showcasing your subject matter expertise as a nurse can win you a role with an agency [8:20] - How studioID built such an amazing culture by seeking input from their freelance writers [9:59] - What is the distinction between B2C and B2B marketing? [11:01] - What are the top three attributes of the “unicorn” freelancer? [14:58] - How nurses can use content marketing to elevate their own brand [20:02] - The importance of having an online presence [21:14] - What is the real future of healthcare content marketing? Is this a bad time to jump in as a nurse writer? [24:06] - Should aspiring content marketing writers develop their journalism skills? [26:16] - The best way to follow up on LOIs without being annoying [27:45] Quotable “As someone who's looking for freelance writers, if I go onto someone's LinkedIn profile and I don't see anything, I'm like, ‘Ooh.' Or if I Google them, and I can't find a website, I have no idea if I should take a chance on them.” – Marna Palmer, studioID “There are so many non-writing skills that are equally or more important to editors and clients: being easygoing, being flexible, being fun to work with, meeting the deadline. Writing skill – while you need it, and you should continue to hone it – is not at the top of the list of what clients value necessarily in a nurse who writes.” – Elizabeth Hanes “Prospective clients are not going to look at your blog to see how well you write. They're going to look to see if you're up on the industry trends, and do you know what's going on in the industry, and then how are you explaining that through your prose.” – Elizabeth Hanes “I think the content marketing industry in healthcare is just going to constantly expand. I don't think there's every going to be a shortage of [writing opportunities].” – Marna Palmer, studioID “If you're showing up in my inbox at a reasonable cadence with relevant content so that I don't have to go [searching] on LinkedIn, you're making my life easier.” – Marna Palmer, studioID Resources mentioned in this episode studioID: https://www.studioid.com/ Industry Dive: https://www.industrydive.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com Next steps Download and listen to the podcast of this episode at RN2writer Start your journey from nursing to writing with the ebook Design Your Dream Career as a Nurse Writer Follow RN2writer on social media: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Why Satellite Internet Providers Tell us Where to Send Mail (LA 1584) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from The Valley of the Sun. You like that? Steven Butala: I like it. Today, Jill and I talk about why satellite internet providers are continuously telling us where to send mail. This is a good thing. Jill DeWit: I wrote down a different reason as to why we care about this. And I'll share that when we get into the meat of the show, but I got to tell you, I was struggling, "Do I say Scottsdale? Do I say Phoenix? Where do I say we are?" And I forgot that this was always called The Valley of the Sun. Isn't that interesting? Steven Butala: I think there's more than one Valley of the Sun. Everybody thinks they're The Valley of the Sun. Jill DeWit: When you Google Valley of the Sun, though, Phoenix comes up. Steven Butala: Really? Jill DeWit: I made sure. I'm like, seriously. Steven Butala: Do you Google stuff, Jill? Jill DeWit: All the time. I Google you. I Google... I'm just kidding. Of course. Steven Butala: I read recently that Google, as a product, it is the single most used product for a consumer in the history of all products. Jill DeWit: Really? What did you say Google was supposed to be? Remember you said that- Steven Butala: It's misspelled. It's supposed to be G-O-O G-E-L. And it's some type of cipher God. It's some type of scientific something. Jill DeWit: Really G-E-L and then- Steven Butala: Scientific measurement or something. Jill DeWit: But it didn't look right. Somebody just like- Steven Butala: They misspelled it right from the beginning and it just stuck, which is probably kind of cool because now it's obviously an incredible brand. Jill DeWit: It's a verb. It's a noun. It's all kinds of things. Okay. Steven Butala: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the Land Investors.com online community. It's free and don't forget to subscribe on The Land Academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows that you like. You don't have to comment on the shows that you hate. If you comment on the shows that you like, then we do more content about stuff you like. Jill DeWit: That's really good. The shows you love, please just go for it. Steven Butala: All kidding aside, it really does help us develop an algorithm to create content that people want to hear about. Like, maybe you're not interested in hearing me rant about California. Jill DeWit: Or this show at all. That's so funny. I couldn't tell you the day... Since now we're off topic... We're on Clubhouse [crosstalk 00:02:32]. So, we're on Clubhouse the other day and there was that guy... I can't tell if he was trying to break into our show. Steven Butala: Yeah. He totally was. Jill DeWit: Oh, was he? Okay. Or if he was like yelling at somebody on the street. Steven Butala: No, no. I think he was breaking in. He broke into our show. Jill DeWit: And just was cussing. Steven Butala: This is the world now. Jill DeWit: That was funny. So, my team got him off there, to quote you, "Lickedy split." Steven Butala: I just read a thing about this whole thing about the internet culture, how it's developing. I'm old enough to know when there was no internet at all. And so... Jill DeWit: You're older than me. Steven Butala: Right. And my parents would say stuff like, "Keep your opinions to yourself." That was just the world that I grew up in. And that's just not the way it is now. Everybody's really encouraged to have an opinion and be real loud about it with filthy language and everything. That's just like a norm. That's a normal state of the internet. Jill DeWit: I don't get it. Steven Butala: I don't either. Jill DeWit: Anyway, let's get back to the show. Ty wrote, "Anyone else getting first mailer jitters?" Oh,

I Google if there were any more stimulus checks and the answer was no --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/j-w54/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/j-w54/support

Support the Show. Get the NEW AudioBook! AudioBook: Audible| Kobo| Authors Direct | Google Play | Apple  SummaryHey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I'll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening. Now on to my guest today, Niall Murphy, CEO, and founder of EVRYTHNG Product Cloud.  Niall is a serial entrepreneur in the technology and communications space. He's Irish-born but grew up in South Africa and trained as a computer scientist. He was an advisor under the transition to the African National Congress in the early 90s and learned to plan by going backward from what would be needed in the future. His other ventures have included one of the first ISP companies in South Africa and a wifi company in Europe in the early 2000s.  Niall came up with the idea for EVRYTHNG after hearing someone ask, “Why can't I Google my shoes?” The mission of EVRYTHNG is to provide data and information on products all around the world, providing insight into where a product comes from, what it's made of, where it ends up, and much more. He sees this mission as inextricably tied to the project of sustainability as, for example, we can better understand what's in a piece of clothing so that it can be recycled instead of incinerated. It can also be used for tracing food at a time when people are increasingly wanting to know exactly where their food comes from and how it was grown or made. Niall also talks about the challenges in starting a business whose market hasn't been found yet, and what to do to ensure you're ready to jump in when demand hits.  Now let's get better together. Actionable Insights “Just get out there and get on with it,” Murphy says. “Don't wait for permission.”  Murphy also advises that you stick with your vision, but be ready to adapt. You might need to change your strategy or product but keep your vision always in mind.  Try to be a pioneer, but be careful not to overcapitalize too soon. Read the market, and make sure you have enough to keep you going until the market opens up.  Links to Explore Further EVRYTHNG Website  Niall Murphy on LinkedIn Productive AI Podcast Gartner Hype Curve Keep In TouchBook or Blog or Twitter or LinkedIn or JSYPR or Story Funnel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 ‍

Welcome to the one and only IT in the D show. This is episode three 55, happy Canada day happy 4th of July. Um, on behalf of all of us, we hope that a multi Claus brought you your syrup into quality using the States. We hope that kid rock brought you your fireworks and Bush light, 30 packs. Um, we are broadcasting live from our homes, actually have all of our fingers. Um, this is Bob, the sales guy that is David geek. Randy, I do the Twitters is doing the Twitters.       Oh, by the way, breaking news, uh, Trey Parker is still going to be the voice of mr. Hankey, even though he is not a piece of shit. Yeah. I mean, it depends on who you ask, I guess, Find us online it in the D dot comma. Do us a favor, give us a like on the socials and subscribe to us everywhere or I guess our soul. Uh, yeah. And so, you know, again, uh, just in case you’ve missed the last couple episodes, we’ve decided we’re holding off until August for any of our events. I actually just killed off the, uh, the, the one for July for Anarbor. Uh, and so yeah, you know, when things get nice and safe and mellowed out again, uh, we’ll, we’ll be more than happy to get everybody back together. Cause God knows we miss people. Um, but yeah, such is life. It is what it is. We’re trying to stay safe. I looked at my calendar for this week, just from Google and Friday was supposed to be the ministry came at DM concert and I’m like, Hey, good. It got postponed and good. Cause I’m, can’t walk still. So a double good. Um, but yeah, April next year. But then, uh, I found Judas priest. It’s kind of weird. Uh, went on sale for the Fox Lasar um, like in September. So I’m like, cool. I like a good heavy metal show. Um, tickets are like a hundred bucks. So I’m like, okay. You know, for like early, like, and there’s nothing sold. Like if you go to Ticketmaster right now, you can get like fifth row seats, um, all the way around the box, Dude. Well, I mean that that’s too early. I like, I’m sorry. That’s that’s what three months from now? Ish. Wait. No. Yeah, no two months from now. Um, and so, I mean, looking at it, looking at what’s going through with, um, you know, Miami just shut down all their bars, restaurants, beaches, gyms, yada, yada, you got Arizona in the midst of all this guy, did it like it’s no, this isn’t going to be cleaned up in two months at all. Who knows? That’s what I like. Yeah. Cause I’m thinking like, Hey, I want to buy the tickets. Nope, no sight, no Bob science knows. It’s not going to know. Let’s be clear. Science knows it’s not going to be done. Well, you know, you know, you don’t, you don’t never know it could be a vaccine come out. It could just go away. Who knows, or it could be, or a, you know, it could be a world mass hysteria for the next three months. And you know, more people turn into HOA presidents, you know, This is true. Well, and so I do, I love the meme. That’s been floating around that said, uh, if nothing else, 2020 has proven to me that time travel is real because they keep going back and trying to fix things. But then they just wind up making it worse, like the premise of every time travel movie ever known to mankind. And so, you know, that’s why the murder Hornets, uh, disappeared. Uh, but now we have the bubonic. Plague is back in China. Is that B O O B or No? It’d be, you know, there, there are no boobs on people’s necks. It, it is, it is bubonic, No plague. And I’m like, Ooh, is that good? No, it’s no, it’s not your girl standing behind you while you’re sitting down. It’s that’s not, that’s not what this is. Damn it, There are plenty of cases of bubonic plague in the American Southwest over years. It’s dry and true. A so it’s not an unusual thing. Yeah. But Hey, uh, real quick, America’s uh, getting ready big, get back to work with the win, the new economy. You need to take advantage of every advantage to succeed. 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And the deep Oracle’s always here Super like no pun intended because it’s NetSuite, but they’ve always had super sweet products like Oracle. Like they went through, um, their little down stock and they’re little downturn. Um, but I mean like even back in, you know, I remember when eight I came out and it was like, and that was shit 25, 20 years ago now. Um, you know, and that basically like revolutionize the way like database systems work in the enterprise. So I mean it’s, and I’ve kept tabs on them. They do good stuff. Yeah. I was an early adopter of NetSuite actually when I was working, uh, um, doing the international trade thing back in like, Oh three. So yeah, I’ve been a big user, big proponent of them. Yeah. Um, so, uh, my, my new show I had binged through and I don’t know if you’ve got a, got a chance to watch it, um, was called upload. I don’t know. Did you get a chance to Not going to lie? I couldn’t understand. Cause all you sent across was upload on Amazon prime and I’m like, did Amazon just enable an upload feature where I can put my shit up there. It’s a show and here’s the pitch meeting and I’ll get into my next hotness after this. Um, so the pitch meeting is okay, so it’s a total recall, but you’re dead and that’s the show. So it’s the black mirror episode of San Jacinto. So here’s the We’re sending you to pero, sorry, I don’t remember that one, but here’s the, um, the premise. So like right before you die, you’re basically they take your consciousness. Basically they take your head and then they upload it into like a second city. You choose like, Hey, I want to be in this world. I want to be in that world. I want to do this. I want to be in Vegas. I want to be on the, on the Lake. And then there’s other people. The funny thing is they kind of trash on microtransactions, which is the funniest part of the show. Like while the guys walking in the hotel, like the guy who like, would you like some gum from truly is, it’s a delicious treat. And then there’s like, he grabs one and it charges 99 cents to his ex wife or ex-girlfriend because it’s owned by Verizon. They call it horizon. So it’s horizon presents. And so like the guy’s dead, but you can like call the living. So it’s got this weird, uh, you know, you can like, like as long as she’s paying the bill, like your, your, your conscience is living through this avatar. So then there’s like the tech support people are called angels. And so like, they can make you whatever. So like she was messing with the guy who was being a jerk. So she like, he flipped her off. So she raised his middle finger, you know what I mean? Like, so like you can make people, they can make people look however they want to look, if that makes sense. Gotcha. Um, I don’t know if it’s funny or not, but it was definitely worth it. I enjoyed all like the technology jokes and like the, the kind of trashing and microtransactions that they made it funny to me. My dad probably would think it’s stupid. I’ll give it a watch. Sounds interesting. But I just finished, you know, burning through a couple of shows. So yeah. Why not? Well, the funniest part, I guess the funniest part was the people that couldn’t afford, like to be in the good land they’re in like the two gig capital land, which is like prison, pretty much prison. And if you, if you like use up too much energy, you use up all your gigs. You basically just freeze until the, it started the next month. And then you get your two gig back. Um, so like, like don’t you can’t like you used up a gig and a half. You can’t move now for the next three weeks. Anyway. It’s like I said, it’s, it’s a, I thought it was great. Um, so speaking, speaking of pitch meetings, that’s the other one that was that I caught onto it’s they’ve been going on for a couple of years. I don’t know how I just missed it, but it’s that it’s a guy talking to himself pitching movies. And if you saw like, like I saw episode seven, eight, nine, he did, he did all the star Wars. You have any does like the joker. So he’s like, so you’re telling me as taxi driver and he’s like, yeah, reboots are hot. So like, they go back and, but man, I got down a wormhole with pitch meetings. They had, he has them for like, there’s like a hundred of them literally. So you can do like really any movie you’ve ever watched in the last avatar, like any destroys, any movie you liked or you thought it was like, destroys him, like the plot hole, you know what I mean? Like, like, wait a minute. What about this part where he did that? Like, we don’t forget about that. You know, like It’s a continuity issue. We’ll just, we’ll we’ll skip over it. They’ll never notice it. What about at the beginning when they said, you know, yeah. Was just like, no, no, no, that that’s not important. Right. I finished burning through, um, uh, the Mandalorian documentary, uh, uh, and I forgot what it was called. Um, but it’s the eight part documentary about the Mandalorian and like, and they talked about like the effects, both special and practical. Um, and one of the things they talked about was, and this is how petty star Wars fans are. Um, which another good story segue coming up momentarily. Uh, but like apparently they caught a lot of crap at Lucasfilm and ILM because there’s like one scene that you can’t even see in real time where they just didn’t put Soboba in his racer in episode one, um, for like a second. Cause it was like a pan shot. And apparently though, Oh my God, we’ve got so much, you know, fan hate mail. And yet I’m like, y’all are y’all are petty. Which, which brings me to, they are not erasing episode nine, Bob. They’re not, it’s not gonna happen. Yeah. There’s there’s no, that was from butthurt fan boy news.com and that it ain’t happening Well, it’s, it’s a, it’s a rumor, um, by the future ruler of earth, the doom cock overlord, DVD, YouTube channel. Right. So you’re telling me that That’s not legit. Yeah. That’s bullshit. He’s not star Wars deep throat. No, he’s not. He’s really not The thing that pisses me off. Did we talk about, um, scene 38 revisited? Did we talk about this already? Um, there’s a YouTube video where a guy or a team of people read did scene 38 of episode four, which is basically where obiwan gets killed. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we’ve, yeah. We’ve talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. And they turned it into this whole like, like the chorus, like the dark blue music and they actually make a, uh, uh, Obi wan Kenobi not suck as with a lightsaber. Um, but yeah, if you haven’t checked that out, definitely look, I think it’s yeah. 38 and 36 seem to revisit it. Yeah. Then there was the other fan cut of the ending of a riser Skywalker, um, where like basically, uh, uh, antiquing Luke Yoda, uh, I think it’s quite gone, um, are all, uh, force goes behind Ray as she’s fighting Palpatine. That was, that was pretty intense. And that was good. Yeah. That was actually pretty sweet. Well, my favorite, well, the, one of the best one was when they redid the dialogue in episode four, when Vader first gets on the ship and he’s like run a diplomatic mission, whatever. And he’s like, no, I just saw you leave my ship from, With the secret plans with them. Yeah. Yeah. I just want, and he’s like, I just saw that happen Again. Continuity we’ll yeah. We’ll fix it in post. That’ll be fine. Yes, exactly. But it actually makes sense now with the new dialogue, but go figure, But now was, I mean, it it’s, it is. I mean, and I do I get it, there were a lot of butthurt fan boys, um, about the final trilogy, but I mean, it is what it is, you know? And that’s honestly, that was one of the things that I thought was really good about that Mandalorian documentary is dude, Filoni hammered the point home over and over and over again without basically shaking his finger at the screen, but still shaking his finger at the screen saying it’s for kids. Like it’s like star Wars has always been about it’s it’s movies for kids. That’s, that’s what it’s about. And so if you, as an adult, don’t like it, that’s fine. And you know, and I know, I know I’ve said it on the, on the, you know, on the show before where like I always go, you know, so like the guys, we all go opening night, Thursday night at 80 out and we’re there. And then I take the kids either Saturday or Sunday and I always hold off judgment until I’ve seen it with them because like our take on it is almost always completely different from their take It’s an a D it’s a different experience. Well, yeah, so, I mean like, like rogue squadron, like we all thought, you know, that was one of the net rogue squadron. Um, yeah, no, it looks right. Uh, you know, we all thought that was the rogue one. We all thought that was like, you know, one of the best things ever, whereas like, they were confused from the get go because it didn’t have the stereotypical star Wars opening. And it was more of a, you know, a war movie, like black Hawk down and that kind of stuff. So, yeah. Well dude, it’s like watching Godzilla as a 12 year old then as a 40 year old going, God damn it. I can see the lines on Gordon, Right? Yeah. I could see. Yeah. Clearly they’re holding them up with cables is what it is. Enjoy the movie, by the way. I never, I don’t celebrate this enough, but I think I start, I need to, um, July 1st was also Bobby Day. Did you, did you read about this or? Oh, I D I read about it every year. He’s a, so if you don’t know who he is, I got his baseball cards. He played for the Mets. He played for the pirates. It was a pretty good ball player. Um, he’s 57 years old right now. And on July 1st, He hasn’t played in what, 10 years? 10 years he hasn’t played. Um, I’m trying to look it up right now. Um, I think in round two, is it 2000 that he hasn’t, but it was, um, you know, when you played last, played for the Mets in 99 and last played in the majors in 2001. Um, but he’s going to be paid through 2035 when he he’ll be 72 years. And he gets like 1.7 million a year, 1.19, 3 million from the Mets, um, every July 1st from yeah. Till, um, cause they had to prorate his, his, his salary structure and he signed that deal. Good. Good for him for getting that back a loaded contract? Well, yeah, I mean, I guess like measures are signed when that’s going to pay them through 20, 28. Oh dude. Zetterberg did Datsyuk did a lot of the wings did when they were trying to deal with salary cap issues and all that shit. Well, I remember like a one grind boss or assigned to a Seahawks deal. This was what, 91. And it was like 10 years, $10 million. And we’re like, Oh my God, that guy’s brilliant. And uh, you know, he only played a year and a half, so yeah, he was brilliant, but you know, for the most part, um, but yeah, what else, what else is going on now that, uh, also There were two short, those are the two things, you know, one, I mean, one of the reasons we’re not having events, uh, is all the bars just shut down again or at least they were supposed to be. Um, but then, you know, I, and this is like I said, this is the part that confuses me is it’s supposed to be, if you have over 70% of your revenue is alcohol-based know, you’re supposed to be shut down and watching the mental gymnastics happen on my Facebook wall from places that I’ve been to. And I’ve never seen themselves so much as a mozzarella stick or a chicken finger the entire time, I’m there saying, Oh, they’ve got enough food sales to justify staying open, or everybody will be outside nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Um, I just, I Crack a better mate, isn’t it? Doesn’t, isn’t 30 bucks. Exactly. And so dude, like I just, I don’t get it. And, and I mean, I do, and this was part of the conversation I got into. I truly do. I undo, you know, we’ve, we’ve got the studios that have been sitting closed for, you know, coming up on four months now. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s a real concern. It’s a real issue. It’s a, it’s a real problem. And I get it, but we are not doing ourselves any favors by trying to find a loophole in this shit. We’re not like it’s just gonna keep getting worse. Please reference Miami, Arizona, everywhere else. That’s going through a huge spike right now. You know, you watch all the, you know, the 4th of July videos that came out from, you know, the lakes in Michigan that were like just nuts to butts and thousands of people and all that. We’re just, I give, yeah, It’s just, you know, they’re rolling the dice on, uh, you know, paying the mortgage versus, uh, you know, being another student. Like I said, I, I, I absolutely, and it’s not that I’m uncaring. It’s not that I wasn’t feeling. It’s not that I don’t understand it. Cause you know, I would go through the same shit, you know, but it’s, you know, yeah. I just, it’s one of those things that I’m just, I’m not, I’m not a fan of, of places that are trying to, you know, find the loopholes to keep themselves open when, when they know damn well and good, they really should be shut down. Well, it didn’t you go to one of those like last week. So that was two weeks ago before they got shut down again. Um, and the two places I went to, so like I said, you know, temple had plexiglass bar top to ceiling and everybody was totally locked away and they have like a little cutout that they could their drinks through in that kind of stuff. You know? And when we talked to Augie, you know, last week from whiskey where, you know, they’ve got the tea, they’ve got the high top tables pushed up against the bar. So like, you know, you’ve got to keep your distance away from the bartender. And, and they were being, you know, even then they were being really strict about masks and that kind of stuff. So, I mean, it’s either one of those two looked remotely excited about having to be there. No, no. And it’s, you know, but like, but so like whiskey does have, and honestly, and this is the other part that, and again, I get it and I feel bad for them. Like, you know, whiskey. Yep. They’ve got a back patio and temple yet. They’ve got a back patio. Cause that was the other way to stay open. Um, was if you could keep everybody outside. Um, but dude, who wants to be outside drinking when it’s 90 effing degrees outside, like that’s, you’re talking to a guy that, um, on the July 1st, his AC went out. So this is a, and it just fired back up three hours ago. Oh dude, what the hell happened? Uh, we had, uh, contractors over the house, uh, looking at, um, siting on the side of the house that needs to replace because of the AC, write it out some boards. Okay. And what they do, they, they trip a switch, they tripped the switch. And as soon as they left, it went out. I go, I bet you, they did something, but I it’s a handyman, you know what I mean? So we had to call DTE cause we bought or whatever, their insurance and they had to wait for them to come out. Soon. He goes to the side of the house. I feel cold air I’m like you son of a bitch. Oh yeah. So for future reference, those keeping score at home, there is there’s literally almost every air conditioning unit has a trip switch, um, on like on it or near it. Um, that’s designed, it’s almost like a GFI, like it’s, it’s designed to blow in case, um, the units overheating or that kind of stuff. Cause I’ve had that happen before. Um, where, and it’s literally as simple as flip switch and it comes back on, see, now my idea for temple bar and for whiskey in the jar, I think they need to bring back an old nineties tradition. Um, if you’ve ever been to Florida Daytona, whatever, and it was a, basically a, a tide soap party, their, their phone parties let’s let’s let’s get the terminology. Correct. They were always called foam parties. They called them foam parties, but it was so, um, if you ever did a senior prank in high school and a dump box to tied into the fountain, it’s pretty much the same effect. Oh yeah. They would dump the, the soap and they were always, you know, super gropey, rapey, terrible events. Let’s be honest. I’m not saying they weren’t, but I mean It out, I guess. Yeah. Like, you know, not getting the Rona, but you get, you know, you can go get a drink and it’s going to taste a little, little soapy, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Cause that shit got everywhere. Cause it would like, you know, the fans would catch it and it would blow up, but it would wind up in drinks and all that crap. Randy, I’ve never been to one. I’ve never been to one now. Oh, I, I, I absolutely thought they were disgusting. They’re terrible. They’re there, there was nothing, there, there was nothing good about them. But as a resort in Mexico, we went that had them and I’m like, let’s, let’s debate on where we’re going to go. Cause it’s like between the nice place or the party place. And then I saw a video of it and it was so contrived and forced and like ill and I’m like, yeah, no, that was an easy choice to have to go to that place. Well, I mean, so if only a, I mean, I feel like if Playhouse strip club or Playhouse club or whatever the hell it’s called, um, maybe if they would have been doing, uh, you know, foam parties with their dancers, uh, they wouldn’t be having an outbreak of COVID from there. That’s soy. Hey, by the way, why? Cause I had it all set up, speaking of boobs on a plague and you tell that story, I ruined your segue. Sorry. Um, but yeah. So what it was it a it’s yeah. Playhouse and I think checkers, uh, they said if you’ve been at either location in Romulus, um, self quarantine, go get yourself checked yet. Eddie yada uh, I don’t know. I feel like, you know, if you leave a strip club, probably go get yourself checked. Um, but yeah, But I mean, if you look at the picture from channel seven article like the Playhouse, you know, the Google street view, it looks like a clean, classy, Very fine. Upstanding establishment. Yeah. It doesn’t look like a converted old mom and pop diner at all. Uh, yeah, no. Yeah. It’s got the Valley overhead. Oh yeah. It’s it’s the it’s the Ritz is what it is. Let’s be clear, Right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, I’ll go ahead. No, I was going to say so, but then the other, you know, the other bar topic is, uh, so I guess BFD is undergoing, like we we’ve had events at clubhouse BFD before Dude, don’t talk to me. Sorry. I know that was one of your fans. If you follow the story, BFD was a really cool place that was unemployed 89 and crooks in Rochester Hills. Um, it’s been there for probably 10 years and it was rated one of the top 50 beer bars in the U S and I was lucky enough to live a mile from it. And I was also lucky enough. Uh, me and Joe foodie, uh, Joe Hakim are the tag team champions of drinking the millions of beer there. So I got a big wrestling belt and uh, you know, I was really good friends with Jason manager who since started his own place and we all knew it was owned by Griffin claw. Oh yeah. And we were praying for the day that it wouldn’t switch to a Griffin claw bar and sure shit, they go on social media and change it to Griffin claw clubhouse, and down goes another one of the great, so here was the Not carrying anybody else’s beer anymore. Nope. That was the beauty of it. They had like 80 things on tap. The bartenders knew everything, Dude. So well-educated Holy crap. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone was assistant Rhone and you know, sorry, whatever you call it, Cicerones where they, you know, if you’re Italian. Um, but the, you know, now the place is like, and you just read the comments and they’re, whoever’s managing their social media. Wasn’t doing them any favors. They were just like, you know, like, you’ll be BLB here. You’ll be back. Or like, they’re kind of playing like, you know, how you’re you can’t miss this place. Like, yeah. I kind of can like, here’s thing where I live, Griffin claw in Birmingham is 15, 20 minutes away. Yep. You don’t need this here. Um, you know, they changed all the signs and it’s like, like not saying I’m angry, but it’s like, whatever, we’ll find another place. Yeah. You already had that in Birmingham. Why do you need to have that there? Why not let it? I mean, I can’t imagine. I mean, granted, I mean, I know a business across the board is, is nasty. I mean maybe, you know, maybe they were having issues with distributors. Cause I mean, they did, they carried a lot of did that place, had a huge variety and backstock, it was 40 taps or something like that. Or 80 taps, 40 bottles. Brilliant. But then their fridges were stocked with Kansas shit and it was so good. The one thing I always said that were brilliant was they have an analytic analytics on 2 million pints of beer sold. Right. So now they can look and say, and they could tell how fast and what they put on and what styles and what works. So now as a brewery, like I can say, Hey, it’s kind of like the Coke machine at five guys. Yup. Like Coke uses that analytical data. They need to make like vanilla orange. And they’ll like saying, Hey, we’re the movie theaters. Yeah. Yeah. You we’re selling a shit ton of that one let’s can it? Yeah. Why aren’t we making that? Yeah. Right. So like Griffin call, I had all this analytical data to make their own beer and now they just completely just shit on all the relationships and they just lost all that data. Um, I guess they don’t care anymore because they’ve, you know, sold a couple million pints of beer there and whatever they got their data. Yeah. It is what it is. So I mean, I guess, yeah. Boo. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I, I did like this one, um, and I think it’s gonna be interesting cause I mean, I do, I know a lot of people that are job hunting and I, and I think the big, and this is very accurate. I think the big question that you really should be prepared for, if you start interviewing for a gig, whether it’s now a year from now or whatever, is what’d you learn during the quarantine? Like what, what did you do? What did you learn? What did you do to grow your skills, that kind of stuff. And we’ve said this a million times, you know, whether it’s the, you know, the 10 commandments of job search, that kind of stuff. Cause we’ve always said, you know, okay, great. If you have a gap on your resume, don’t worry about it. No big deal. You know what other, you know, volunteer work you’re doing, you rewired your home network. You did, you know, this, that, and the other thing, you know, just show that you were growing and improving skills, same kind of thing here. Yeah. That’s one, it’s funny. I’ve had five interviews over the last two working days and I didn’t ask it and I’m kind of mad at myself. I always ask the, you know, the, the behavioral stuff. And then the one question is, you know, what do you do to keep up up to date? You know? But like, yeah, what are you doing during this mess? Like a lot of people like, Oh, I’ve been furloughed for four months. So it’s a it’s, that’s like the quintessential question. Well, what have you been doing? You know, watching upload on Amazon prime, probably isn’t the best answer we always talked about. We dude, we talked about them for years that people had posted on Facebook, like I’ve binge-watched blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, wait, aren’t you unemployed. Do you really want that on your social? Um, shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t you be looking for a gig right about Now. Yeah. Um, but no, that’s, uh, you know, that’s, it’s a great point. Like, you know, Hey, I spent, you know, 40 hours a week learning whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I learned a new language. I did this idea of eight and shit, even if it’s, Hey, I learned how to cook, you know, just show that you were doing something for the love of God to make yourself better. You know? And I guess just speaking of the quarantine, we didn’t touch on this one, dude. I, and I, every time I think I’ve hit the lowest point that I think society can reach when it comes to surprising me, then something else happens. Like for example, uh, kids in Alabama, uh, are throwing coronavirus parties where everybody pitches in a cover charge at the door. And then, uh, they deliberately invite people that they know are infected. And first person to pop positive gets the pot from the door. That’s not true. They’ll cover their medical expenses. It’s 10 CNN. It’s not true. Oh, shut up. No, like for like, I’ve heard of stupid things, man. I mean, like I get like our kids, Our parents used to do that to us with chicken pox. So it’d be like, it’s not like it’s an unproven methodology, but right. I mean, I mean, I don’t think they took bets on it. Who would get it first or, you know, it wasn’t potentially like chicken pox. It wasn’t potentially life threatening. No, you had zits for a month. And then you went back to school a couple of weeks. Um, yeah. Cause you’re like, I actually, Alabama’s not hit that bad, but like, I dunno, man, like, it’s stupid. Like at this point you gotta have the country like, you know, doing what they need to do and whatever. Then you have the other half of the country like LA, did you see the fireworks in LA? Um, after the governor said, you know, like, Hey no, uh, no fireworks on banning them. Then someone went up on top of the inch, shot the Valley and it looked like the biggest fireworks show you’ve ever seen in your entire lifetime 10. It was just Nice. Did you, uh, did you catch the one out of San Diego all went off at one point, apparently somebody’s wired shit wrong. And the entire fireworks does the entire city fireworks, display all went off at once. I was in the middle of my cynical. Like, no one’s going to watch your video ever. You jackass phase. And I was trying to like, like Matt Thompson had a video and I’m like ready to post the meme. And then I see that when I watch it, I go, Holy shit. I’d watch that every night. Watch that one. Yeah, that’d be fair. That was from their 20, 2012 show. So not really. Oh, I didn’t know. Okay. It wasn’t this year buzzkill. Uh, but Hey, um, founded in 2010, our friends at private internet access is an award winning VPN provider with over a million customers all over the world. Private internet is VP and allows you to encrypt your connection so you can keep anything you do online, confidential, and secure your ISP, the government or hackers will no longer have access to your data. Right now, they have unlimited access to 3,200 VPN servers in 46 countries. 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Had to private internet access.com/it and easy to get started, protecting herself. That’s www private internet, xs.com/it and the D for 76% discount. Thank you. So speaking of being proven out in court, uh, what’s the over-under on, uh, Galane Maxwell’s death have we has, has there been one set yet? I already lost. Yeah, I’m lost. And now there’s a, there’s talk of, um, there’s videos. Cause you know, you were talking last week about, um, there’s cameras in every room and there was like, that will creep up. It is New York house. Yep. Apparently she’s got the home videos. I forget what, who, who just released that? I think I was, I always watch YouTube, just random videos. And that was one of them from some news source and I’m like that, um, you know, that one’s going to be a doozy. Um, you know, We should burn them all down. We should get a side bit together. And then I see all this other crap about like Chris Cornell and Anthony Bordain, how they had inroads on this stuff. And that’s why they, and it’s all speculation. Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Yeah. This sounds like it almost like, Oh shit, this one’s a little like little reel. It’s a little close to the surface. Yeah. Um, you know what I got to start doing too, by the way, like we haven’t said that one of these stories in probably two years where all those companies came out at once, where you can send people like bag beg index and like all that stuff. Well now some genius capitalist, um, started anonymous potato.com where you can buy, send somebody a potato with, With a phrase or, or, or a face or a picture on it. Yeah. Yeah. You can do a photo full photo, a gift bundle. Um, and you could do it and they actually sell the burrito blanket too, which I totally need. Um, but yeah, that’s, you know, they’ll, they’ll draw those all marker on a potato and send it to you and you know what, I bet you they’ve sold dozens. Like I’m not gonna lie. It wouldn’t surprise me because again, people are bored and need something do so why not? Right. And then you’re going to send me the potato and then I want to put it in my AirFryer with a middle finger to you. And I want to text that back to you because that’s what people do. Um, but yeah, potato that’s a honestly, yeah, Go, go, go get you a potato Or the bag of dicks company still away are there by the way. Oh, I’m sure. I know the, I don’t, I think the, the glitter as a service guy, I believe he sold, uh, yeah, it was. Yeah. Cause it was yeah, the glitter bomb dude. Um, but no. So two, two tech stories real quick. So one, um, cause we’ve talked about this over and over and over again. Uh, basically DPD Detroit police came out and said, yeah, facial technique, facial recognition, software. It’s wrong? About 97% of the time. Oh wait, the one they use. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. They use for project green light. Yeah. Go ahead and let that sink in. Yeah, go ahead. But like, but like Facebook can tag someone. I met like four years ago on some random picture. It’s blurry as shit I go, is this butthole McGee, Hayley. Oh my God. It actually is. I forgot. I knew that. What are they using? What are they? What software? Yeah. Uh, clearly not. Facebook’s quick. It’s a software only. We would not solve 95 to 97% of the crime. Then wife having have it, like, that’s the dumbest thing like, Yeah. Why are we paying for this? And I can say we, cause I pasted the Texas. Yeah. Well, no. I mean, and that’s the city taxes for Detroit. I work in Detroit. Yeah. I mean it’s, it’s not yeah. For the love of God stop And you should bitch Randy, I would I’ll support you. So, and then the other one was that, uh, so again, another frequent topic of conversation, HBO has finally made the groundbreaking announcement that all the other apps are going to go away and, and, and there can be only one and HBO, max will be the Highlander app. Like that’s, that’s one, that’ll be the one app to rule them all. And in the darkness bind them. That’s fine. I said, I remember when I said I had it. Cause I had extensity and then I didn’t have it logged back into my own mobile app. And then I had it again and now I don’t have it. So it can honestly go F itself at this point. Like I, I give no shits about it. Like I got hooked, done. I got my kid. I’ll hook them Looney tunes. And she’s like, Papa does not work. And I go to log in my phone and then it says, you need to pay 1595 a month. And I’m like 1595 a month. You can up stick it at your ass. Um, so used to be what? Three apps there is HBO go. HBO paid for HBO by itself. There was HBO now, which if you no, no, no. HBO. No, no, no. HBO go was the one you got with cable HBO now was the, the one off with Roku and that kind of stuff. And then max. So, So I have Cinemax and HBO and I’m like, screw you like seriously? I’m I’m done. Well, if you have a Xfinity, I don’t think you have, I don’t think you have max anymore. Cause they dropped out. I have Cinemax. I can. I just watched it the other night. Yeah. I ate all, I pared it all down. I just got HBO and cinema. They bring it back. Yeah. Cause I was getting dude. Yeah. Whatever that other dumb service was. Yeah. Make up your mind. It was the hits channel they gave me. Then they took that away and they gave me Cinemax back. Do it. I don’t know what’s going on with that shit anymore. I just whatever’s on TV. I watch it. It’s not, I don’t care. I’m still confused. Why there’s no HBO max app for Roku? Like is there a service where you can basically like build a Roku? Oh no. So honestly it’s so every, every story that I’ve read said, it just comes down to licensing yet. It’s just on a licensing. Like they haven’t figured out the licensing deal with Roku as a platform for the app yet. So they would rather exclude Roku customers and yet, yeah. And yet you had HBO now, but I guess I, so Bob, I guess the part I’m like, I’m confused. I thought HBO max was going to be like HBO, go in that. If you were an HBO subscriber, you got it. That’s what I thought you can log into the max app with your HBO go credential and then, you know, and you don’t get the full content unless you pay for more. Yeah. And I’m not getting this super special secret underground content I’m not getting, which, uh, it’s the Apple pie. I’m not buying the Apple pie for and they got nothing. That’s good. You know, what is good though? Um, did you see, uh, the boys, uh, the new trailer that came out? I did. That looks awesome. Um, it doesn’t matter. I’ve been spending more time on prime lately, so yeah. It’s um, Oh, it’s really good to know, by the way. Um, congratulations to mr. David Hayes and mr. Travis McIntyre. Um, Intel, right. Intel got put up on, uh, uh, Amazon prime. So I got, uh, I got to actually watched it the other day. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a classic Easter beef film of a, of a deranged, uh, doctor gone mad of a, with a rabbit. Um, so yeah, it’s a, Yeah. I actually sat down and watched, um, uh, both Westworld and future world, like the old movie. Um, and I, I forgot for the, cause I think Westworld was 73 and future world was 75. Um, and future world, I believe was the first movie that truly used, um, computer generated imagery in it, uh, overall at all was Westworld. Uh, you know, honestly it, I, it’s funny because if you watch them, cause I mean, I, I probably haven’t seen those in 30 years. Um, and if you watch them, it, they really did a good job tying in the HBO series. It’s literally a continuation. Um, you know, the company name, you know, it’s all the Delos Corp, it’s all this, it’s all that. Um, it’s, you know, and they do, they make, and they make right. There’s a lot of throwback references having just gone back and watched them again. There’s a lot of throwback references, especially with Anthony Hopkins character when he’s hanging out with the older models, um, that are throwbacks to those two movies. Okay. Now I was a, I flipped by it 50 times. I never actually clicked play. I might just, uh, I might just have, do you know how this stuff is in the seventies? I watched a death wish with Charles Bryan. I want to pilot turd. That was, and why was he an action star? Because it was the seventies. It was dude. Why was Starsky and Hutch a thing who Dude Bronson was like some old man with like a 45. He found in a fricking alley. Like he wasn’t some bad-ass like, like he’s still here. He’s looked upon as one of the great bad-ass asses of our time. Watch that movie. It’s a turd. Oh, by the way, I had to share a story. Um, so I’m hungry last night I ordered door dash. Right. Okay. And I see a thing on there for it’s just wings and I’m like, Oh wait Dude, I love, let me just, I gotta stop you for a sec. I love that. You said this story across and with the caveat that you had no idea. We have literally talked about this three times on this show. Go ahead. I don’t remember that being, we absolutely. That’s one of your company. Anyway, I order my wings and then I’m like, where the hell are these just wings? No, it was like eight bucks for this two boxes of it would have been like 30 bucks at beat ups. Right? Like beat ups right now is like, they might as well charge a filet. You get, you get a filet for the same price. They charge for a six piece that I get two boxes. One of the fries, one with chicken, the chicken is delicious, you know? And then I Google it and it’s freaking chilies. And then, cause it’s got the bag and it’s got the logo. It’s got, it looks like a, it looks like a thing. And uh, yeah, I’m gonna order again. Cause it was really good. Um, but like I wouldn’t have cared if it was. Yeah. Cause it was uh, but, but you would have never thought to order from them. If you saw Chile, you probably cruised past Chili’s on your way to find that It was no, because they sponsored it. It’s right up on top. Like I even, uh, like if it was Applebee’s Toby’s like simply wings or whatever that was Applebee’s his neighborhood. Yeah. Oh see, I would have been angry. So it was Applebee’s wings, chilies. I never hated. So like Chili’s I was fine with, I did so and then the other one that I thought was interesting. Uh, so Marvel now owns a predator and alien. So like, does that mean that the alien queen from aliens is now a Disney princess? Alright. So do they own all of it? They had the movie rights already when they bought Fox. Now they own the comments. So yeah, they own it end to end now. Yeah. Oh my God. Now that Wolverine was, well, they already did Wolverine verse predator and that fan fan film, um, which lasted 15 seconds. Right. Cause predator can’t heal himself. Um, you know, I, to be honest, am I one of the few people that actually liked the alien vs predator movies? I was like, I’ve seen it. I didn’t mind, like to me, they were just pure brain candy. Like they were like, yeah, they weren’t like a deep, meaningful film. No, I like, I didn’t understand people that were trying to deconstruct them at all. Like, dude, it’s a stupid film. Just watch the movie and enjoy the movie and, and have fun with things getting ripped apart like that. Randy, it was basically, um, there, it was an Antarctica and the predator, two of them right there, predators were growing the aliens to guide them. And I’m thinking of Promethean To then no, they were growing the aliens to then hunt them and then hog them. Right, right. Right. And then there was the other plot where they were competing against each. Yeah. The dumb part was there’s a slide going down and you would think like, do I go down the slide? And they’re like, yeah, screw it. Let’s go down. Like not knowing if it goes to the core of the earth and you’re going to get fried alive. Yeah. It was yeah. There was like some sort of like, it was a, it was a laser cut hole. Oh yeah. Like I said, it just went down through the Antarctic shelf and they were like at the perfect angle. So like, yeah, let’s go ahead and slide down. This what’s the worst that can possibly happen. Maybe Xenos down there, this random hot like, yeah. I’m sorry. Like, like the new, the newly discovered caves and all that crap that keep popping up on my feet every week or to stop. This is not the year to mess with that stuff. Like not in 2022, there was one in London. There was one in, I want to say Kentucky. Uh, there was another one somewhere in Israel and I’m like, would you just like stop looking for shit? Like just, this is not the year to be doing that crap at all. Open them up. No, no, my, um, can I, can I, uh, do you have dibs on this? Cause you sent it over, but I want to my favorite lawsuit. Yeah. Oh my God. So amazing. Go for it. Do you want, okay, so someone’s doing Twitch, you know, everyone knows that Twitch is right where kids stream games and like everyone’s streams nowadays. Um, and I guess, um, there’s a guy that is suing Twitch because women are too sexy and I’m going to go through this and this is not me talking, do not isolate this. I’m reading from like, you know, nowadays. Right. They’re going to clip my words and are gonna go. Bob said, um, okay. So the plaintiff had purchased a Fleshlight previously Just to make sure it let’s see. So this is the a 43 52 Mark. Okay, go ahead. Go. So he purchased a Fleshlight and then they have to, they have, which went largely unused until Twitch. Um, mr. SDVO began using this device while he watches female Twitch streamers and ends up chafing his Wiener every day. You didn’t say Wiener is a penis bikes, like say Wiener. Instead with this device making it extremely painful and constant, which ends up causing redness and mild infections at the tip. Um, it doesn’t say if he’s, uh, which religion he is. So I don’t know what that, um, since the Fleshlight is electrical and also vibrates, you know, the plaintiff therefore often has to use Neosporin on the tip of his way to the cross Guys. This is in a legal document just to be absolutely clear. Yeah. I tried to say like eight 10 to this, but it doesn’t matter. A B to deplete often stays up for hours, staring at the breasts of girls’ streamers gross, which ends up damaging his retina and making his eyes bloodshot. For days, I dropped to nothing to do that. I can’t do his eye drops, do nothing to hide his shame from his parents. And he’s often questioned by people. He comes into contact with why his eyes are so bloodshot and red. It’s got nothing to do with we eat. Yeah, dude. Do you, are you smoking a lot of weed? Nah, just jerking off too late at night. That’s yeah, I can you have bloodshot eyes, mr. Have you been hearing, Are you smoking the pot? You’ve been staring at Toby’s again, which leads to further embarrassment. And lastly, this is real quick. The plaintiff I’m not, how do you want to say this? The short circuit and keyboard. You got to go there. Got it. Once a or on his PC monitor causing a short circuit and small fire within the electrical system was gaming rig it, causing his apartment to blackout too rarely. And so he’s going to suit switch. Yeah. That’s that’s yeah. That’s one of those ones where like I ended up in Supreme court. I did, I’ve said this a budget times. Like there really needs to be a common sense panel where you have like at least one ultra conservative, at least one ultra liberal. And then like at least a couple like middle of the road, normal people like with that. And then if you can’t get a, like an overwhelming majority of those people to say, yes, your lawsuit gets to go forward. Your shit goes nowhere at all. This is going to go for like years and get appealed and they’re going to settle out of court and give them like, God, I hope they don’t because that’s just a terrible precedent to set. Do not do, Do you want a lawsuit or you got to where you admit to put Neosporin on your Wiener? Oh dude. I exactly, exactly. Like I would almost just let it go to court just to get dude, I get all of the court, TV cameras and like local stations and all that shit in there to have him on camera as he’s relaying this story, he’d be like the God of every in cell and in their mom’s basements. Like for eternity, The leader of the dipshits hold up the underpants Exactly. Be like the patron Saint of four Chan. How much, how much pop do you need as a human being? This is water. Are you sure? Yeah. Like, is that like, it’s like 10 pounds when that thing’s full. It’s a half gallon. It’s just Christmas got thick insulation. Hey, Hey Dave, Did you, uh, why have you been microwaving Your books Do, and this has been floating around Facebook for a couple of weeks now and now at grand Rapids library actually had to put out a statement that said for the love of God, stop microwaving books because you’re destroying them. Why? So like people where did this? I never saw like, people like talking, you know, like I subscribed to everything. Right. And I read everyone Do there were people microwaving money and destroying the bills and trying to bring it to the bank Because they thought it would get rid of the Rona yesterday, come out with it. It’s six, six on paper anyway. Cause cause dumb like that. What do you, what do you, what do you like? We’re not talking about like the cream of the crop here. I’m I’m quite sure this is, these are not, these are not people that are like in line for the net for like Nobel prizes or anything like that. That’s Do you know people that wouldn’t get delivery pizza because they thought the Rona was on the box. Like that type of shit. Like, uh, so now the commercials are saying we don’t touch Once it comes out the oven, like the usage Corona, they put their hands on our pizzas. No. Well I think they have to, to cut it. No, actually they don’t. They just put it in the box. The selling point is we don’t touch your pizza once it comes out of there. Like they used to. Yeah. I was happier not knowing that you did before. Thanks Ruth microwave in this house is Easter peeps. Everything else goes in the air fryer now microwave and they’re great. Oh yeah. Yeah. I do. And I still, I haven’t caved on the air fire thing yet. Um, you know what the best is for? Remember when I, when really he’s always talking about fast food going cold and then the fries, you can never do any, anything with the fries, um, cold fries into AirFryer back out are better than regular fries, hot out of the McDonald’s sexually. Yeah. Like it’s, they’re that good? Like that’s right now it’s the only thing that’s like total hotness of the AirFryer and it, my AirFryer is not like it’s, um, toaster oven with inner fire setting. Okay. Um, but I was gonna say Anything you can do with an air fryer, you can do it with a toaster oven. Yeah. This one’s like the mix. Yeah. Um, but Oh my God, like I put cold, like we had the, uh, it’s just wings, the leftover fries. And I told my kid, put them in the AirFryer for like three minutes. I know they are glorious. Like, you know, um, and by the way, um, I always, uh, you know, like my friend, our friend, Rick Viv, he’s a bass geek. I’m kind of amped to, um, in, in episode two fashion, I guess a massive, uh, star has disappeared without a trace. Um, and I don’t know how that happened. So there’s still Because I did it, I read the whole story and I guess they’re still not sure if it’s disappeared or if something is interfering with the view, um, or you know, or what could have happened. Cause they said, you know, it was, it was a pretty bright star. And usually if something like that disappears, it goes supernova, you know, or it compresses down into a black hole and you’ll see the other stars then effected by it. Um, but neither of those from the archives. Right. But yeah. So neither of, neither of those two things have happened. So like, and they are like, they’re trying to figure out still, you know? Yeah. Is it really gone or is there just an, I don’t know, maybe there’s a UFO between us and it that’s blocking the view. Who knows where? Yeah. Oh, what is, um, I don’t know the year I, I would like to know. Um, so it’s 75 million light years away. What, how long does it take for us to see it? Is it like 10 years? Like if it goes out, how long before we know, like, you know what I’m saying? Um, Oh, a long time. Is it more than 10 years? I don’t know. I would assume so. Alright. I mean, it’s not 75 million years otherwise. Um, but yeah, I know there’s a there, I used to know that conversion. I don’t, I don’t remember enough to have my interview. Good thing. You don’t, you know, if you would know that I would get mad more mad at you, then what else, what else has been on TV? What else? Um, Not since I, you know, just talking about cooking, I finally went ahead and uh, I, I don’t use my smoker enough. Um, and so I loaded, uh, loaded that bastard up. Uh, I did a 12 pound brisket. I did four slabs of baby back ribs. Um, and then just for shits and giggles, I decided I was gonna go ahead and do some salmon, dude. I’m not gonna lie. Like, so like the, the neighbor kids, like the, the mom, that’s a couple of houses down. She was like, I don’t know what you did to these ribs, but the kids will never eat ribs when I make them. And like, they all, all went through like, like her four kids probably like killed off a slab by themselves. Um, and she’s like, so if you see me walk over to your house with like a tray of ribs, all the tapping is that I’m going to walk over to your house and then come back and say that you made them. And we’re going to see if that See a big portion of it though, is how the meat you buy. You know what I mean? If you’re in Iraq, if you buy rock like meat, What’s a shots. Uh, dude, I still love shots market there. They’re phenomenal. And uh, yeah, the brisket came out. Perfect. Uh, and then, like I said, dude, let’s like, yeah, that the salmon, I, I was surprised that I think I’m going to have to do that more. Like it’s one of those things where it’s, it’s like, I’m never going to fire up the smoker just to do salmon. Cause it literally, you know, you got all that prep time just to basically smoke it for 20 minutes. Um, but damn, that was good. Like, I, I was, I was pretty impressed with myself. I’m not gonna lie. Say I grew up on smoked fish. Like that was a, you know, we had the house on the, in the water when my uncle had a hut. So like literally just like we, we, and he would bring a bag of it, you know, lived off that stuff. Like literally, you know, you’d get a saltine Cracker and some of that, like, I’ll do it, Keep me, I do it. I keep meaning to take a picture and send it to you. And I keep forgetting the liquor store by my house. Uh that’s at 16 in gross back when you are back up and around, you need to walk in there, they have an entire huge ass shelving rack full of all the crap that you say you can never find anywhere, shut up, like all due to like there’s, there’s like 14, 15 different favorite flavors of that. Slivovitz crap that you keep around a day. But like all of the pair and the ass Bach and the caraway seed and this and that dude, they got, I mean, it’s probably, I think it’s six or seven shelves. Um, and just like, and it’s, and I’m like, I’m like, Oh my God, like this, this entire shelving unit deserves to be in Bob’s basement. Well, the sleeve of it’s is all until you get sloppy and stuff. That’s where, you know, where my folks were born. That’s kind of where we got that tradition from. Um, we actually, my wife brought it out to the pool this week and gave some to the neighbors and they’re like, Oh, it’s pretty good. And I’m like, man, do not be polite to my wife. Do not encourage this behavior. Like, you know, the, the, the, what you call it though, the caraway seed in the raspberry is what I’m looking for. Um, that stuff I got in Chicago, if I could find it, if they had that, I’ll take a look. Yeah, it’s a him beer. H I M B E Uh, pretty sure that’s a brand I saw. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll take a look. Oh no, that’s that’s raspberry and Germans have that. There’ll be my friend for life. Okay. I’ll take a look. Uh, but actually the only, the only other story that we didn’t get to, because I didn’t, I didn’t write it down was, uh, so for those of you who use Stitcher, um, apparently Stitcher is now being acquired by Sirius XM. So I guess they’re getting serious at no pun intended, uh, about the, uh, the podcast game. I, um, you know, I that’s the thing, are they going to separate it? Like how I say I haven’t checked like subscriber numbers for satellite? Cause here’s the thing like every truck driver in America probably has Sirius XM. Like how many other people pay for it? Like I still do. I do see, I haven’t, since I stopped traveling, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. We’ll do it. Yeah. Well, shit. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been at, I mean the nice, honestly, the nice thing about it is, so now even with just the basic script script that’s subscription, um, like you see like it integrates with your Amazon Alexa, it integrate, you know, the app on your phone. So no matter where you are, like, I can say, you know, Hey Alexa, play, you know, first wave and up comes channel 33. And it’s all the music that I wanted to listen to in my car. Anyway, See now Spotify replaced that for me because all my playlist gotcha. You know, that’s, that’s kinda why. And the only thing was stern and I kind of got old with stern and, uh, and that’s when I was, you know, that’s when I was doing my, um, left radio political left radio for half an hour, then write radio for a half an hour and then I’d get angry and then angrier than angriest. And then, um, yeah, Now that you’ve only got a four minute commute, it’s a little different. Yeah. As of two 2017, they had 32 million subscribers. It it’s a lot. And there’s only like 3 million truck drivers. That’s that’s more than I would’ve thought. Don’t forget. Two years ago they bought Pandora. He did. Wow. Yeah. See, I don’t like Pandora anymore. You tell it like play new order. And like three out of four songs are going to be new order. Like they think they have some, the whatever algorithm is it pick other music that people liked. Like it’s just shit. Like they, I dunno. They don’t know how to mix music anyway. Their algorithm used to be really great. Um, So, so you said that was 2017, Randy. Yeah. So their, uh, end of year, their first quarter for this year, end of year 2019 report, 2020 projection, um, total paid subscriber base, uh, of 34.9 million as of the end of 2019. Okay. Yeah. More than I thought. What do you think about BMW? What they’re doing? Um, apparently they’re doing, um, in car microtransactions. What do they EA now pretty much Like, they’re just going to build all the cars with seat warmers, but you don’t get to use it unless you pay for a three month subscription to unlucky seat warmer. Well, we talked about, remember we talked about that with the, uh, No, go ahead. No, I’m like, would you like to go 65 miles an hour? That’ll be $20 for the next 30, Right. Well, I mean, we talked about that with the, um, that Tesla that the guy bought at auction that, uh, basically Tesla turned off all of the extra features in the car because he wasn’t the original purchaser. And I haven’t looked to see a follow up on that lawsuit. Um, so I mean, it’s, it’s, I don’t know. See, and again, it’s, it’s getting to that weird. Do you really own the things you own like that? Like, that’s the, like, that’s the weird question that keeps coming up with stuff like, you know, with all the stuff about, you know, if you, if you take your car to a neighborhood mechanic, it voids the warranty. Instead of going back to the dealership, if you overclock your computer, it voids the warranty. If you, Mr. Fender of that is a John Deere with the farmer tractors. You’ve been reading about that. So they, they backed down real hard. They backed off on that one because they were like, they were facing like, apparently I think I forgot. I think it was a Kubota started making like huge inroads in like the American farm tractor business. Um, and so John Deere was like, okay, psych, nevermind, please go ahead. Buy bye shit again that, sorry, sorry, green and yellow. No, but it’s going to be, this is going to be a 10 year slow roll. Whereas I, I almost, I want to, if I’m going to be a betting man in 2030, like if you want to do like, would you like extra turbo? That’ll be like, and you’ll have to subscribe. Like, it’ll be like, if they’re toying with this now, where are they going to stop? And they’re going to do a little, Are you evading the police? Would you like to accelerate for the next 30 days? Remember video games was, you just bought the goddamn game. And then they said, okay, if you want, we want to, you got to earn all this shit, but if you want it now, the first one was all the cheat codes. You can slide it into the bottom controller, the name shark. Yes. Um, and then, you know, then you want all the characters for star Wars and you know, there’s going to be this. Yeah. You can play it for the next three months or you can give us 50 bucks. Yeah. And then, so now we’re like, all right, I’ll buy the super secret gold version for $89. Right. Instead of going through all the bullshit and up, and, uh, w how soon before cars do it, you know, Not, not a, not a fan of where that’s going at all, not gonna lie. That’s why I got my 76 in the, in the garage. Exactly. You cannot hack into that. Good luck hacking into that one. But that brings up a question. Like if you buy the car, can you modify the software on it? We can’t, if you’ve got the heater Seats in there, can you turn it on yourself without paying for this Decryption? If you jailbreak your ph

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