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Show notes below... Join us today in https://ManifestingMasteryCourse.com 1. Joseph Goddard to the Max Routine Mr Twenty Twenty introduces the first daily practice, the Joseph Goddard to the Max routine, which involves imagining specific events of the day going one's way. This practice is not about small versus big events but about being specific in one's imagination. Mr Twenty Twenty shares examples of specific events he imagines, ranging from small tasks like swimming and gym visits to larger ones like buying a car or flying around the world. He mentions that this routine helps in developing a positive mental state and setting the tone for the day. 2. The Walk of Wonder The second daily practice is called the Walk of Wonder, where Mr Twenty Twenty imagines positive outcomes for everyone he meets or encounters. He explains that he imagines yummy outcomes for people he passes by or who pop up unexpectedly, even if he has never met them in person. Mr Twenty Twenty references Neville Goddard's teaching that lifting another's burden lifts one's own, and emphasizes the importance of seeing oneself as a wonder-working power. He clarifies that the Walk of Wonder is not about superficial positivity but about recognizing and embodying one's power to affect positive change. 3. Input and Output of Yummy The third daily practice is called the I-Oh routine, which involves inputting positive information and outputting it in a meaningful way. Mr Twenty Twenty explains that he does not spend hours consuming content but rather selectively inputs information that fascinates and fulfills him. He emphasizes the importance of applying and outputting the information he inputs, rather than just consuming it passively. Mr Twenty Twenty contrasts this approach with mindless consumption of content that does not contribute to personal growth and fulfillment. day with the Joseph Goddard routine to maintain focus and avoid drifting into worry. He also highlights the role of the Walk of Wonder in maintaining a positive mental state and the I-Oh routine in feeding the mind with uplifting content.

Due to overwhelming demand (>15x applications:slots), we are closing CFPs for AI Engineer Summit NYC today. Last call! Thanks, we'll be reaching out to all shortly!The world's top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025. The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon's notes for AI Engineers in his World's Fair Keynote.Timestamp* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome* 01:06 State of AI in 2025* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final ThoughtsTranscript[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00:02:00] can do multimodal.[00:02:01] Simon: is better, right? That's a better model, even if it's not.[00:02:05] Brian: What people were expecting or hoping, maybe not expecting is not the right word, but hoping that we would see another step change, right? Right. From like GPT 2 to 3 to 4, we were expecting or hoping that maybe we were going to see the next evolution in that sort of, yeah.[00:02:21] Brian: We[00:02:21] Simon: did see that, but not in the way we expected. We thought the model was just going to get smarter, and instead we got. Massive drops in, drops in price. We got all of these new capabilities. You can talk to the things now, right? They can do simulated audio input, all of that kind of stuff. And so it's kind of, it's interesting to me that the models improved in all of these ways we weren't necessarily expecting.[00:02:43] Simon: I didn't know it would be able to do an impersonation of Santa Claus, like a, you know, Talked to it through my phone and show it what I was seeing by the end of 2024. But yeah, we didn't get that GPT 5 step. And that's one of the big open questions is, is that actually just around the corner and we'll have a bunch of GPT 5 class models drop in the [00:03:00] next few months?[00:03:00] Simon: Or is there a limit?[00:03:03] Brian: If you were a betting man and wanted to put money on it, do you expect to see a phase change, step change in 2025?[00:03:11] Simon: I don't particularly for that, like, the models, but smarter. I think all of the trends we're seeing right now are going to keep on going, especially the inference time compute, right?[00:03:21] Simon: The trick that O1 and O3 are doing, which means that you can solve harder problems, but they cost more and it churns away for longer. I think that's going to happen because that's already proven to work. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there will be a step change to a GPT 5 level, but honestly, I'd be completely happy if we got what we've got right now.[00:03:41] Simon: But cheaper and faster and more capabilities and longer contexts and so forth. That would be thrilling to me.[00:03:46] Brian: Digging into what you've just said one of the things that, by the way, I hope to link in the show notes to Simon's year end post about what, what things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Look for that in the show notes.[00:03:59] Cost Efficiency in AI[00:03:59] Brian: One of the things that you [00:04:00] did say that you alluded to even right there was that in the last year, you felt like the GPT 4 barrier was broken, like IE. Other models, even open source ones are now regularly matching sort of the state of the art.[00:04:13] Simon: Well, it's interesting, right? So the GPT 4 barrier was a year ago, the best available model was OpenAI's GPT 4 and nobody else had even come close to it.[00:04:22] Simon: And they'd been at the, in the lead for like nine months, right? That thing came out in what, February, March of, of 2023. And for the rest of 2023, nobody else came close. And so at the start of last year, like a year ago, the big question was, Why has nobody beaten them yet? Like, what do they know that the rest of the industry doesn't know?[00:04:40] Simon: And today, that I've counted 18 organizations other than GPT 4 who've put out a model which clearly beats that GPT 4 from a year ago thing. Like, maybe they're not better than GPT 4. 0, but that's, that, that, that barrier got completely smashed. And yeah, a few of those I've run on my laptop, which is wild to me.[00:04:59] Simon: Like, [00:05:00] it was very, very wild. It felt very clear to me a year ago that if you want GPT 4, you need a rack of 40, 000 GPUs just to run the thing. And that turned out not to be true. Like the, the, this is that big trend from last year of the models getting more efficient, cheaper to run, just as capable with smaller weights and so forth.[00:05:20] Simon: And I ran another GPT 4 model on my laptop this morning, right? Microsoft 5. 4 just came out. And that, if you look at the benchmarks, it's definitely, it's up there with GPT 4. 0. It's probably not as good when you actually get into the vibes of the thing, but it, it runs on my, it's a 14 gigabyte download and I can run it on a MacBook Pro.[00:05:38] Simon: Like who saw that coming? The most exciting, like the close of the year on Christmas day, just a few weeks ago, was when DeepSeek dropped their DeepSeek v3 model on Hugging Face without even a readme file. It was just like a giant binary blob that I can't run on my laptop. It's too big. But in all of the benchmarks, it's now by far the best available [00:06:00] open, open weights model.[00:06:01] Simon: Like it's, it's, it's beating the, the metalamas and so forth. And that was trained for five and a half million dollars, which is a tenth of the price that people thought it costs to train these things. So everything's trending smaller and faster and more efficient.[00:06:15] Brian: Well, okay.[00:06:16] Challenges and Competition in AI[00:06:16] Brian: I, I kind of was going to get to that later, but let's, let's combine this with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, you're talking, you know, Also in the piece about the LLM prices crashing, which I've even seen in projects that I'm working on, but explain Explain that to a general audience, because we hear all the time that LLMs are eye wateringly expensive to run, but what we're suggesting, and we'll come back to the cheap Chinese LLM, but first of all, for the end user, what you're suggesting is that we're starting to see the cost come down sort of in the traditional technology way of Of costs coming down over time,[00:06:49] Simon: yes, but very aggressively.[00:06:51] Simon: I mean, my favorite thing, the example here is if you look at GPT-3, so open AI's g, PT three, which was the best, a developed model in [00:07:00] 2022 and through most of 20 2023. That, the models that we have today, the OpenAI models are a hundred times cheaper. So there was a 100x drop in price for OpenAI from their best available model, like two and a half years ago to today.[00:07:13] Simon: And[00:07:14] Brian: just to be clear, not to train the model, but for the use of tokens and things. Exactly,[00:07:20] Simon: for running prompts through them. And then When you look at the, the really, the top tier model providers right now, I think, are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. And there are a bunch of others that I could list there as well.[00:07:32] Simon: Mistral are very good. The, the DeepSeq and Quen models have got great. There's a whole bunch of providers serving really good models. But even if you just look at the sort of big brand name providers, they all offer models now that are A fraction of the price of the, the, of the models we were using last year.[00:07:49] Simon: I think I've got some numbers that I threw into my blog entry here. Yeah. Like Gemini 1. 5 flash, that's Google's fast high quality model is [00:08:00] how much is that? It's 0. 075 dollars per million tokens. Like these numbers are getting, So we just do cents per million now,[00:08:09] swyx (2): cents per million,[00:08:10] Simon: cents per million makes, makes a lot more sense.[00:08:12] Simon: Yeah they have one model 1. 5 flash 8B, the absolute cheapest of the Google models, is 27 times cheaper than GPT 3. 5 turbo was a year ago. That's it. And GPT 3. 5 turbo, that was the cheap model, right? Now we've got something 27 times cheaper, and the Google, this Google one can do image recognition, it can do million token context, all of those tricks.[00:08:36] Simon: But it's, it's, it's very, it's, it really is startling how inexpensive some of this stuff has got.[00:08:41] Brian: Now, are we assuming that this, that happening is directly the result of competition? Because again, you know, OpenAI, and probably they're doing this for their own almost political reasons, strategic reasons, keeps saying, we're losing money on everything, even the 200.[00:08:56] Brian: So they probably wouldn't, the prices wouldn't be [00:09:00] coming down if there wasn't intense competition in this space.[00:09:04] Simon: The competition is absolutely part of it, but I have it on good authority from sources I trust that Google Gemini is not operating at a loss. Like, the amount of electricity to run a prompt is less than they charge you.[00:09:16] Simon: And the same thing for Amazon Nova. Like, somebody found an Amazon executive and got them to say, Yeah, we're not losing money on this. I don't know about Anthropic and OpenAI, but clearly that demonstrates it is possible to run these things at these ludicrously low prices and still not be running at a loss if you discount the Army of PhDs and the, the training costs and all of that kind of stuff.[00:09:36] Brian: One, one more for me before I let Swyx jump in here. To, to come back to DeepSeek and this idea that you could train, you know, a cutting edge model for 6 million. I, I was saying on the show, like six months ago, that if we are getting to the point where each new model It would cost a billion, ten billion, a hundred billion to train that.[00:09:54] Brian: At some point it would almost, only nation states would be able to train the new models. Do you [00:10:00] expect what DeepSeek and maybe others are proving to sort of blow that up? Or is there like some sort of a parallel track here that maybe I'm not technically, I don't have the mouse to understand the difference.[00:10:11] Brian: Is the model, are the models going to go, you know, Up to a hundred billion dollars or can we get them down? Sort of like DeepSeek has proven[00:10:18] Simon: so I'm the wrong person to answer that because I don't work in the lab training these models. So I can give you my completely uninformed opinion, which is, I felt like the DeepSeek thing.[00:10:27] Simon: That was a bomb shell. That was an absolute bombshell when they came out and said, Hey, look, we've trained. One of the best available models and it cost us six, five and a half million dollars to do it. I feel, and they, the reason, one of the reasons it's so efficient is that we put all of these export controls in to stop Chinese companies from giant buying GPUs.[00:10:44] Simon: So they've, were forced to be, go as efficient as possible. And yet the fact that they've demonstrated that that's possible to do. I think it does completely tear apart this, this, this mental model we had before that yeah, the training runs just keep on getting more and more expensive and the number of [00:11:00] organizations that can afford to run these training runs keeps on shrinking.[00:11:03] Simon: That, that's been blown out of the water. So yeah, that's, again, this was our Christmas gift. This was the thing they dropped on Christmas day. Yeah, it makes me really optimistic that we can, there are, It feels like there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of the efficiency of both inference and training and we spent a whole bunch of last year exploring that and getting results from it.[00:11:22] Simon: I think there's probably a lot left. I think there's probably, well, I would not be surprised to see even better models trained spending even less money over the next six months.[00:11:31] swyx (2): Yeah. So I, I think there's a unspoken angle here on what exactly the Chinese labs are trying to do because DeepSea made a lot of noise.[00:11:41] swyx (2): so much for joining us for around the fact that they train their model for six million dollars and nobody quite quite believes them. Like it's very, very rare for a lab to trumpet the fact that they're doing it for so cheap. They're not trying to get anyone to buy them. So why [00:12:00] are they doing this? They make it very, very obvious.[00:12:05] swyx (2): Deepseek is about 150 employees. It's an order of magnitude smaller than at least Anthropic and maybe, maybe more so for OpenAI. And so what's, what's the end game here? Are they, are they just trying to show that the Chinese are better than us?[00:12:21] Simon: So Deepseek, it's the arm of a hedge, it's a, it's a quant fund, right?[00:12:25] Simon: It's an algorithmic quant trading thing. So I, I, I would love to get more insight into how that organization works. My assumption from what I've seen is it looks like they're basically just flexing. They're like, hey, look at how utterly brilliant we are with this amazing thing that we've done. And it's, it's working, right?[00:12:43] Simon: They but, and so is that it? Are they, is this just their kind of like, this is, this is why our company is so amazing. Look at this thing that we've done, or? I don't know. I'd, I'd love to get Some insight from, from within that industry as to, as to how that's all playing out.[00:12:57] swyx (2): The, the prevailing theory among the Local Llama [00:13:00] crew and the Twitter crew that I indexed for my newsletter is that there is some amount of copying going on.[00:13:06] swyx (2): It's like Sam Altman you know, tweet, tweeting about how they're being copied. And then also there's this, there, there are other sort of opening eye employees that have said, Stuff that is similar that DeepSeek's rate of progress is how U. S. intelligence estimates the number of foreign spies embedded in top labs.[00:13:22] swyx (2): Because a lot of these ideas do spread around, but they surprisingly have a very high density of them in the DeepSeek v3 technical report. So it's, it's interesting. We don't know how much, how many, how much tokens. I think that, you know, people have run analysis on how often DeepSeek thinks it is cloud or thinks it is opening GPC 4.[00:13:40] swyx (2): Thanks for watching! And we don't, we don't know. We don't know. I think for me, like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we basically will never know as, as external commentators. I think what's interesting is how, where does this go? Is there a logical floor or bottom by my estimations for the same amount of ELO started last year to the end of last year cost went down by a thousand X for the [00:14:00] GPT, for, for GPT 4 intelligence.[00:14:02] swyx (2): Would, do they go down a thousand X this year?[00:14:04] Simon: That's a fascinating question. Yeah.[00:14:06] swyx (2): Is there a Moore's law going on, or did we just get a one off benefit last year for some weird reason?[00:14:14] Simon: My uninformed hunch is low hanging fruit. I feel like up until a year ago, people haven't been focusing on efficiency at all. You know, it was all about, what can we get these weird shaped things to do?[00:14:24] Simon: And now once we've sort of hit that, okay, we know that we can get them to do what GPT 4 can do, When thousands of researchers around the world all focus on, okay, how do we make this more efficient? What are the most important, like, how do we strip out all of the weights that have stuff in that doesn't really matter?[00:14:39] Simon: All of that kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe 2024 was a freak year of all of the low hanging fruit coming out at once. And we'll actually see a reduction in the, in that rate of improvement in terms of efficiency. I wonder, I mean, I think we'll know for sure in about three months time if that trend's going to continue or not.[00:14:58] swyx (2): I agree. You know, I [00:15:00] think the other thing that you mentioned that DeepSeq v3 was the gift that was given from DeepSeq over Christmas, but I feel like the other thing that might be underrated was DeepSeq R1,[00:15:11] Speaker 4: which is[00:15:13] swyx (2): a reasoning model you can run on your laptop. And I think that's something that a lot of people are looking ahead to this year.[00:15:18] swyx (2): Oh, did they[00:15:18] Simon: release the weights for that one?[00:15:20] swyx (2): Yeah.[00:15:21] Simon: Oh my goodness, I missed that. I've been playing with the quen. So the other great, the other big Chinese AI app is Alibaba's quen. Actually, yeah, I, sorry, R1 is an API available. Yeah. Exactly. When that's really cool. So Alibaba's Quen have released two reasoning models that I've run on my laptop.[00:15:38] Simon: Now there was, the first one was Q, Q, WQ. And then the second one was QVQ because the second one's a vision model. So you can like give it vision puzzles and a prompt that these things, they are so much fun to run. Because they think out loud. It's like the OpenAR 01 sort of hides its thinking process. The Query ones don't.[00:15:59] Simon: They just, they [00:16:00] just churn away. And so you'll give it a problem and it will output literally dozens of paragraphs of text about how it's thinking. My favorite thing that happened with QWQ is I asked it to draw me a pelican on a bicycle in SVG. That's like my standard stupid prompt. And for some reason it thought in Chinese.[00:16:18] Simon: It spat out a whole bunch of like Chinese text onto my terminal on my laptop, and then at the end it gave me quite a good sort of artistic pelican on a bicycle. And I ran it all through Google Translate, and yeah, it was like, it was contemplating the nature of SVG files as a starting point. And the fact that my laptop can think in Chinese now is so delightful.[00:16:40] Simon: It's so much fun watching you do that.[00:16:43] swyx (2): Yeah, I think Andrej Karpathy was saying, you know, we, we know that we have achieved proper reasoning inside of these models when they stop thinking in English, and perhaps the best form of thought is in Chinese. But yeah, for listeners who don't know Simon's blog he always, whenever a new model comes out, you, I don't know how you do it, but [00:17:00] you're always the first to run Pelican Bench on these models.[00:17:02] swyx (2): I just did it for 5.[00:17:05] Simon: Yeah.[00:17:07] swyx (2): So I really appreciate that. You should check it out. These are not theoretical. Simon's blog actually shows them.[00:17:12] Brian: Let me put on the investor hat for a second.[00:17:15] AI Agents and Their Limitations[00:17:15] Brian: Because from the investor side of things, a lot of the, the VCs that I know are really hot on agents, and this is the year of agents, but last year was supposed to be the year of agents as well. Lots of money flowing towards, And Gentic startups.[00:17:32] Brian: But in in your piece that again, we're hopefully going to have linked in the show notes, you sort of suggest there's a fundamental flaw in AI agents as they exist right now. Let me let me quote you. And then I'd love to dive into this. You said, I remain skeptical as to their ability based once again, on the Challenge of gullibility.[00:17:49] Brian: LLMs believe anything you tell them, any systems that attempt to make meaningful decisions on your behalf, will run into the same roadblock. How good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool, if it [00:18:00] can't distinguish truth from fiction? So, essentially, what you're suggesting is that the state of the art now that allows agents is still, it's still that sort of 90 percent problem, the edge problem, getting to the Or, or, or is there a deeper flaw?[00:18:14] Brian: What are you, what are you saying there?[00:18:16] Simon: So this is the fundamental challenge here and honestly my frustration with agents is mainly around definitions Like any if you ask anyone who says they're working on agents to define agents You will get a subtly different definition from each person But everyone always assumes that their definition is the one true one that everyone else understands So I feel like a lot of these agent conversations, people talking past each other because one person's talking about the, the sort of travel agent idea of something that books things on your behalf.[00:18:41] Simon: Somebody else is talking about LLMs with tools running in a loop with a cron job somewhere and all of these different things. You, you ask academics and they'll laugh at you because they've been debating what agents mean for over 30 years at this point. It's like this, this long running, almost sort of an in joke in that community.[00:18:57] Simon: But if we assume that for this purpose of this conversation, an [00:19:00] agent is something that, Which you can give a job and it goes off and it does that thing for you like, like booking travel or things like that. The fundamental challenge is, it's the reliability thing, which comes from this gullibility problem.[00:19:12] Simon: And a lot of my, my interest in this originally came from when I was thinking about prompt injections as a source of this form of attack against LLM systems where you deliberately lay traps out there for this LLM to stumble across,[00:19:24] Brian: and which I should say you have been banging this drum that no one's gotten any far, at least on solving this, that I'm aware of, right.[00:19:31] Brian: Like that's still an open problem. The two years.[00:19:33] Simon: Yeah. Right. We've been talking about this problem and like, a great illustration of this was Claude so Anthropic released Claude computer use a few months ago. Fantastic demo. You could fire up a Docker container and you could literally tell it to do something and watch it open a web browser and navigate to a webpage and click around and so forth.[00:19:51] Simon: Really, really, really interesting and fun to play with. And then, um. One of the first demos somebody tried was, what if you give it a web page that says download and run this [00:20:00] executable, and it did, and the executable was malware that added it to a botnet. So the, the very first most obvious dumb trick that you could play on this thing just worked, right?[00:20:10] Simon: So that's obviously a really big problem. If I'm going to send something out to book travel on my behalf, I mean, it's hard enough for me to figure out which airlines are trying to scam me and which ones aren't. Do I really trust a language model that believes the literal truth of anything that's presented to it to go out and do those things?[00:20:29] swyx (2): Yeah I definitely think there's, it's interesting to see Anthropic doing this because they used to be the safety arm of OpenAI that split out and said, you know, we're worried about letting this thing out in the wild and here they are enabling computer use for agents. Thanks. The, it feels like things have merged.[00:20:49] swyx (2): You know, I'm, I'm also fairly skeptical about, you know, this always being the, the year of Linux on the desktop. And this is the equivalent of this being the year of agents that people [00:21:00] are not predicting so much as wishfully thinking and hoping and praying for their companies and agents to work.[00:21:05] swyx (2): But I, I feel like things are. Coming along a little bit. It's to me, it's kind of like self driving. I remember in 2014 saying that self driving was just around the corner. And I mean, it kind of is, you know, like in, in, in the Bay area. You[00:21:17] Simon: get in a Waymo and you're like, Oh, this works. Yeah, but it's a slow[00:21:21] swyx (2): cook.[00:21:21] swyx (2): It's a slow cook over the next 10 years. We're going to hammer out these things and the cynical people can just point to all the flaws, but like, there are measurable or concrete progress steps that are being made by these builders.[00:21:33] Simon: There is one form of agent that I believe in. I believe, mostly believe in the research assistant form of agents.[00:21:39] Simon: The thing where you've got a difficult problem and, and I've got like, I'm, I'm on the beta for the, the Google Gemini 1. 5 pro with deep research. I think it's called like these names, these names. Right. But. I've been using that. It's good, right? You can give it a difficult problem and it tells you, okay, I'm going to look at 56 different websites [00:22:00] and it goes away and it dumps everything to its context and it comes up with a report for you.[00:22:04] Simon: And it's not, it won't work against adversarial websites, right? If there are websites with deliberate lies in them, it might well get caught out. Most things don't have that as a problem. And so I've had some answers from that which were genuinely really valuable to me. And that feels to me like, I can see how given existing LLM tech, especially with Google Gemini with its like million token contacts and Google with their crawl of the entire web and their, they've got like search, they've got search and cache, they've got a cache of every page and so forth.[00:22:35] Simon: That makes sense to me. And that what they've got right now, I don't think it's, it's not as good as it can be, obviously, but it's, it's, it's, it's a real useful thing, which they're going to start rolling out. So, you know, Perplexity have been building the same thing for a couple of years. That, that I believe in.[00:22:50] Simon: You know, if you tell me that you're going to have an agent that's a research assistant agent, great. The coding agents I mean, chat gpt code interpreter, Nearly two years [00:23:00] ago, that thing started writing Python code, executing the code, getting errors, rewriting it to fix the errors. That pattern obviously works.[00:23:07] Simon: That works really, really well. So, yeah, coding agents that do that sort of error message loop thing, those are proven to work. And they're going to keep on getting better, and that's going to be great. The research assistant agents are just beginning to get there. The things I'm critical of are the ones where you trust, you trust this thing to go out and act autonomously on your behalf, and make decisions on your behalf, especially involving spending money, like that.[00:23:31] Simon: I don't see that working for a very long time. That feels to me like an AGI level problem.[00:23:37] swyx (2): It's it's funny because I think Stripe actually released an agent toolkit which is one of the, the things I featured that is trying to enable these agents each to have a wallet that they can go and spend and have, basically, it's a virtual card.[00:23:49] swyx (2): It's not that, not that difficult with modern infrastructure. can[00:23:51] Simon: stick a 50 cap on it, then at least it's an honor. Can't lose more than 50.[00:23:56] Brian: You know I don't, I don't know if either of you know Rafat Ali [00:24:00] he runs Skift, which is a, a travel news vertical. And he, he, he constantly laughs at the fact that every agent thing is, we're gonna get rid of booking a, a plane flight for you, you know?[00:24:11] Brian: And, and I would point out that, like, historically, when the web started, the first thing everyone talked about is, You can go online and book a trip, right? So it's funny for each generation of like technological advance. The thing they always want to kill is the travel agent. And now they want to kill the webpage travel agent.[00:24:29] Simon: Like it's like I use Google flight search. It's great, right? If you gave me an agent to do that for me, it would save me, I mean, maybe 15 seconds of typing in my things, but I still want to see what my options are and go, yeah, I'm not flying on that airline, no matter how cheap they are.[00:24:44] swyx (2): Yeah. For listeners, go ahead.[00:24:47] swyx (2): For listeners, I think, you know, I think both of you are pretty positive on NotebookLM. And you know, we, we actually interviewed the NotebookLM creators, and there are actually two internal agents going on internally. The reason it takes so long is because they're running an agent loop [00:25:00] inside that is fairly autonomous, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:01] swyx (2): For one,[00:25:02] Simon: for a definition of agent loop, if you picked that particularly well. For one definition. And you're talking about the podcast side of this, right?[00:25:07] swyx (2): Yeah, the podcast side of things. They have a there's, there's going to be a new version coming out that, that we'll be featuring at our, at our conference.[00:25:14] Simon: That one's fascinating to me. Like NotebookLM, I think it's two products, right? On the one hand, it's actually a very good rag product, right? You dump a bunch of things in, you can run searches, that, that, it does a good job of. And then, and then they added the, the podcast thing. It's a bit of a, it's a total gimmick, right?[00:25:30] Simon: But that gimmick got them attention, because they had a great product that nobody paid any attention to at all. And then you add the unfeasibly good voice synthesis of the podcast. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's the lesson.[00:25:43] Brian: It's the lesson of mid journey and stuff like that. If you can create something that people can post on socials, you don't have to lift a finger again to do any marketing for what you're doing.[00:25:53] Brian: Let me dig into Notebook LLM just for a second as a podcaster. As a [00:26:00] gimmick, it makes sense, and then obviously, you know, you dig into it, it sort of has problems around the edges. It's like, it does the thing that all sort of LLMs kind of do, where it's like, oh, we want to Wrap up with a conclusion.[00:26:12] Multimodal AI and Future Prospects[00:26:12] Brian: I always call that like the the eighth grade book report paper problem where it has to have an intro and then, you know But that's sort of a thing where because I think you spoke about this again in your piece at the year end About how things are going multimodal and how things are that you didn't expect like, you know vision and especially audio I think So that's another thing where, at least over the last year, there's been progress made that maybe you, you didn't think was coming as quick as it came.[00:26:43] Simon: I don't know. I mean, a year ago, we had one really good vision model. We had GPT 4 vision, was, was, was very impressive. And Google Gemini had just dropped Gemini 1. 0, which had vision, but nobody had really played with it yet. Like Google hadn't. People weren't taking Gemini [00:27:00] seriously at that point. I feel like it was 1.[00:27:02] Simon: 5 Pro when it became apparent that actually they were, they, they got over their hump and they were building really good models. And yeah, and they, to be honest, the video models are mostly still using the same trick. The thing where you divide the video up into one image per second and you dump that all into the context.[00:27:16] Simon: So maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising to us that long context models plus vision meant that the video was, was starting to be solved. Of course, it didn't. Not being, you, what you really want with videos, you want to be able to do the audio and the images at the same time. And I think the models are beginning to do that now.[00:27:33] Simon: Like, originally, Gemini 1. 5 Pro originally ignored the audio. It just did the, the, like, one frame per second video trick. As far as I can tell, the most recent ones are actually doing pure multimodal. But the things that opens up are just extraordinary. Like, the the ChatGPT iPhone app feature that they shipped as one of their 12 days of, of OpenAI, I really can be having a conversation and just turn on my video camera and go, Hey, what kind of tree is [00:28:00] this?[00:28:00] Simon: And so forth. And it works. And for all I know, that's just snapping a like picture once a second and feeding it into the model. The, the, the things that you can do with that as an end user are extraordinary. Like that, that to me, I don't think most people have cottoned onto the fact that you can now stream video directly into a model because it, it's only a few weeks old.[00:28:22] Simon: Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's Big boost in terms of what kinds of things you can do with this stuff. Yeah. For[00:28:30] swyx (2): people who are not that close I think Gemini Flashes free tier allows you to do something like capture a photo, one photo every second or a minute and leave it on 24, seven, and you can prompt it to do whatever.[00:28:45] swyx (2): And so you can effectively have your own camera app or monitoring app that that you just prompt and it detects where it changes. It detects for, you know, alerts or anything like that, or describes your day. You know, and, and, and the fact that this is free I think [00:29:00] it's also leads into the previous point of it being the prices haven't come down a lot.[00:29:05] Simon: And even if you're paying for this stuff, like a thing that I put in my blog entry is I ran a calculation on what it would cost to process 68, 000 photographs in my photo collection, and for each one just generate a caption, and using Gemini 1. 5 Flash 8B, it would cost me 1. 68 to process 68, 000 images, which is, I mean, that, that doesn't make sense.[00:29:28] Simon: None of that makes sense. Like it's, it's a, for one four hundredth of a cent per image to generate captions now. So you can see why feeding in a day's worth of video just isn't even very expensive to process.[00:29:40] swyx (2): Yeah, I'll tell you what is expensive. It's the other direction. So we're here, we're talking about consuming video.[00:29:46] swyx (2): And this year, we also had a lot of progress, like probably one of the most excited, excited, anticipated launches of the year was Sora. We actually got Sora. And less exciting.[00:29:55] Simon: We did, and then VO2, Google's Sora, came out like three [00:30:00] days later and upstaged it. Like, Sora was exciting until VO2 landed, which was just better.[00:30:05] swyx (2): In general, I feel the media, or the social media, has been very unfair to Sora. Because what was released to the world, generally available, was Sora Lite. It's the distilled version of Sora, right? So you're, I did not[00:30:16] Simon: realize that you're absolutely comparing[00:30:18] swyx (2): the, the most cherry picked version of VO two, the one that they published on the marketing page to the, the most embarrassing version of the soa.[00:30:25] swyx (2): So of course it's gonna look bad, so, well, I got[00:30:27] Simon: access to the VO two I'm in the VO two beta and I've been poking around with it and. Getting it to generate pelicans on bicycles and stuff. I would absolutely[00:30:34] swyx (2): believe that[00:30:35] Simon: VL2 is actually better. Is Sora, so is full fat Sora coming soon? Do you know, when, when do we get to play with that one?[00:30:42] Simon: No one's[00:30:43] swyx (2): mentioned anything. I think basically the strategy is let people play around with Sora Lite and get info there. But the, the, keep developing Sora with the Hollywood studios. That's what they actually care about. Gotcha. Like the rest of us. Don't really know what to do with the video anyway. Right.[00:30:59] Simon: I mean, [00:31:00] that's my thing is I realized that for generative images and images and video like images We've had for a few years and I don't feel like they've broken out into the talented artist community yet Like lots of people are having fun with them and doing and producing stuff. That's kind of cool to look at but what I want you know that that movie everything everywhere all at once, right?[00:31:20] Simon: One, one ton of Oscars, utterly amazing film. The VFX team for that were five people, some of whom were watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do. My big question for, for Sora and and and Midjourney and stuff, what happens when a creative team like that starts using these tools? I want the creative geniuses behind everything, everywhere all at once.[00:31:40] Simon: What are they going to be able to do with this stuff in like a few years time? Because that's really exciting to me. That's where you take artists who are at the very peak of their game. Give them these new capabilities and see, see what they can do with them.[00:31:52] swyx (2): I should, I know a little bit here. So it should mention that, that team actually used RunwayML.[00:31:57] swyx (2): So there was, there was,[00:31:57] Simon: yeah.[00:31:59] swyx (2): I don't know how [00:32:00] much I don't. So, you know, it's possible to overstate this, but there are people integrating it. Generated video within their workflow, even pre SORA. Right, because[00:32:09] Brian: it's not, it's not the thing where it's like, okay, tomorrow we'll be able to do a full two hour movie that you prompt with three sentences.[00:32:15] Brian: It is like, for the very first part of, of, you know video effects in film, it's like, if you can get that three second clip, if you can get that 20 second thing that they did in the matrix that blew everyone's minds and took a million dollars or whatever to do, like, it's the, it's the little bits and pieces that they can fill in now that it's probably already there.[00:32:34] swyx (2): Yeah, it's like, I think actually having a layered view of what assets people need and letting AI fill in the low value assets. Right, like the background video, the background music and, you know, sometimes the sound effects. That, that maybe, maybe more palatable maybe also changes the, the way that you evaluate the stuff that's coming out.[00:32:57] swyx (2): Because people tend to, in social media, try to [00:33:00] emphasize foreground stuff, main character stuff. So you really care about consistency, and you, you really are bothered when, like, for example, Sorad. Botch's image generation of a gymnast doing flips, which is horrible. It's horrible. But for background crowds, like, who cares?[00:33:18] Brian: And by the way, again, I was, I was a film major way, way back in the day, like, that's how it started. Like things like Braveheart, where they filmed 10 people on a field, and then the computer could turn it into 1000 people on a field. Like, that's always been the way it's around the margins and in the background that first comes in.[00:33:36] Brian: The[00:33:36] Simon: Lord of the Rings movies were over 20 years ago. Although they have those giant battle sequences, which were very early, like, I mean, you could almost call it a generative AI approach, right? They were using very sophisticated, like, algorithms to model out those different battles and all of that kind of stuff.[00:33:52] Simon: Yeah, I know very little. I know basically nothing about film production, so I try not to commentate on it. But I am fascinated to [00:34:00] see what happens when, when these tools start being used by the real, the people at the top of their game.[00:34:05] swyx (2): I would say like there's a cultural war that is more that being fought here than a technology war.[00:34:11] swyx (2): Most of the Hollywood people are against any form of AI anyway, so they're busy Fighting that battle instead of thinking about how to adopt it and it's, it's very fringe. I participated here in San Francisco, one generative AI video creative hackathon where the AI positive artists actually met with technologists like myself and then we collaborated together to build short films and that was really nice and I think, you know, I'll be hosting some of those in my events going forward.[00:34:38] swyx (2): One thing that I think like I want to leave it. Give people a sense of it's like this is a recap of last year But then sometimes it's useful to walk away as well with like what can we expect in the future? I don't know if you got anything. I would also call out that the Chinese models here have made a lot of progress Hyde Law and Kling and God knows who like who else in the video arena [00:35:00] Also making a lot of progress like surprising him like I think maybe actually Chinese China is surprisingly ahead with regards to Open8 at least, but also just like specific forms of video generation.[00:35:12] Simon: Wouldn't it be interesting if a film industry sprung up in a country that we don't normally think of having a really strong film industry that was using these tools? Like, that would be a fascinating sort of angle on this. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:35:25] swyx (2): Agreed. I, I, I Oh, sorry. Go ahead.[00:35:29] Exploring Video Avatar Companies[00:35:29] swyx (2): Just for people's Just to put it on people's radar as well, Hey Jen, there's like there's a category of video avatar companies that don't specifically, don't specialize in general video.[00:35:41] swyx (2): They only do talking heads, let's just say. And HeyGen sings very well.[00:35:45] Brian: Swyx, you know that that's what I've been using, right? Like, have, have I, yeah, right. So, if you see some of my recent YouTube videos and things like that, where, because the beauty part of the HeyGen thing is, I, I, I don't want to use the robot voice, so [00:36:00] I record the mp3 file for my computer, And then I put that into HeyGen with the avatar that I've trained it on, and all it does is the lip sync.[00:36:09] Brian: So it looks, it's not 100 percent uncanny valley beatable, but it's good enough that if you weren't looking for it, it's just me sitting there doing one of my clips from the show. And, yeah, so, by the way, HeyGen. Shout out to them.[00:36:24] AI Influencers and Their Future[00:36:24] swyx (2): So I would, you know, in terms of like the look ahead going, like, looking, reviewing 2024, looking at trends for 2025, I would, they basically call this out.[00:36:33] swyx (2): Meta tried to introduce AI influencers and failed horribly because they were just bad at it. But at some point that there will be more and more basically AI influencers Not in a way that Simon is but in a way that they are not human.[00:36:50] Simon: Like the few of those that have done well, I always feel like they're doing well because it's a gimmick, right?[00:36:54] Simon: It's a it's it's novel and fun to like Like that, the AI Seinfeld thing [00:37:00] from last year, the Twitch stream, you know, like those, if you're the only one or one of just a few doing that, you'll get, you'll attract an audience because it's an interesting new thing. But I just, I don't know if that's going to be sustainable longer term or not.[00:37:11] Simon: Like,[00:37:12] Simplifying Content Creation with AI[00:37:12] Brian: I'm going to tell you, Because I've had discussions, I can't name the companies or whatever, but, so think about the workflow for this, like, now we all know that on TikTok and Instagram, like, holding up a phone to your face, and doing like, in my car video, or walking, a walk and talk, you know, that's, that's very common, but also, if you want to do a professional sort of talking head video, you still have to sit in front of a camera, you still have to do the lighting, you still have to do the video editing, versus, if you can just record, what I'm saying right now, the last 30 seconds, If you clip that out as an mp3 and you have a good enough avatar, then you can put that avatar in front of Times Square, on a beach, or whatever.[00:37:50] Brian: So, like, again for creators, the reason I think Simon, we're on the verge of something, it, it just, it's not going to, I think it's not, oh, we're going to have [00:38:00] AI avatars take over, it'll be one of those things where it takes another piece of the workflow out and simplifies it. I'm all[00:38:07] Simon: for that. I, I always love this stuff.[00:38:08] Simon: I like tools. Tools that help human beings do more. Do more ambitious things. I'm always in favor of, like, that, that, that's what excites me about this entire field.[00:38:17] swyx (2): Yeah. We're, we're looking into basically creating one for my podcast. We have this guy Charlie, he's Australian. He's, he's not real, but he pre, he opens every show and we are gonna have him present all the shorts.[00:38:29] Simon: Yeah, go ahead.[00:38:30] The Importance of Credibility in AI[00:38:30] Simon: The thing that I keep coming back to is this idea of credibility like in a world that is full of like AI generated everything and so forth It becomes even more important that people find the sources of information that they trust and find people and find Sources that are credible and I feel like that's the one thing that LLMs and AI can never have is credibility, right?[00:38:49] Simon: ChatGPT can never stake its reputation on telling you something useful and interesting because That means nothing, right? It's a matrix multiplication. It depends on who prompted it and so forth. So [00:39:00] I'm always, and this is when I'm blogging as well, I'm always looking for, okay, who are the reliable people who will tell me useful, interesting information who aren't just going to tell me whatever somebody's paying them to tell, tell them, who aren't going to, like, type a one sentence prompt into an LLM and spit out an essay and stick it online.[00:39:16] Simon: And that, that to me, Like, earning that credibility is really important. That's why a lot of my ethics around the way that I publish are based on the idea that I want people to trust me. I want to do things that, that gain credibility in people's eyes so they will come to me for information as a trustworthy source.[00:39:32] Simon: And it's the same for the sources that I'm, I'm consulting as well. So that's something I've, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of credibility focus on this thing for a while now.[00:39:40] swyx (2): Yeah, you can layer or structure credibility or decompose it like so one thing I would put in front of you I'm not saying that you should Agree with this or accept this at all is that you can use AI to generate different Variations and then and you pick you as the final sort of last mile person that you pick The last output and [00:40:00] you put your stamp of credibility behind that like that everything's human reviewed instead of human origin[00:40:04] Simon: Yeah, if you publish something you need to be able to put it on the ground Publishing it.[00:40:08] Simon: You need to say, I will put my name to this. I will attach my credibility to this thing. And if you're willing to do that, then, then that's great.[00:40:16] swyx (2): For creators, this is huge because there's a fundamental asymmetry between starting with a blank slate versus choosing from five different variations.[00:40:23] Brian: Right.[00:40:24] Brian: And also the key thing that you just said is like, if everything that I do, if all of the words were generated by an LLM, if the voice is generated by an LLM. If the video is also generated by the LLM, then I haven't done anything, right? But if, if one or two of those, you take a shortcut, but it's still, I'm willing to sign off on it.[00:40:47] Brian: Like, I feel like that's where I feel like people are coming around to like, this is maybe acceptable, sort of.[00:40:53] Simon: This is where I've been pushing the definition. I love the term slop. Where I've been pushing the definition of slop as AI generated [00:41:00] content that is both unrequested and unreviewed and the unreviewed thing is really important like that's the thing that elevates something from slop to not slop is if A human being has reviewed it and said, you know what, this is actually worth other people's time.[00:41:12] Simon: And again, I'm willing to attach my credibility to it and say, hey, this is worthwhile.[00:41:16] Brian: It's, it's, it's the cura curational, curatorial and editorial part of it that no matter what the tools are to do shortcuts, to do, as, as Swyx is saying choose between different edits or different cuts, but in the end, if there's a curatorial mind, Or editorial mind behind it.[00:41:32] Brian: Let me I want to wedge this in before we start to close.[00:41:36] The Future of LLM User Interfaces[00:41:36] Brian: One of the things coming back to your year end piece that has been a something that I've been banging the drum about is when you're talking about LLMs. Getting harder to use. You said most users are thrown in at the deep end.[00:41:48] Brian: The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out. I mean, it's, it's literally going back to the command line. The command line was defeated [00:42:00] by the GUI interface. And this is what I've been banging the drum about is like, this cannot be.[00:42:05] Brian: The user interface, what we have now cannot be the end result. Do you see any hints or seeds of a GUI moment for LLM interfaces?[00:42:17] Simon: I mean, it has to happen. It absolutely has to happen. The the, the, the, the usability of these things is turning into a bit of a crisis. And we are at least seeing some really interesting innovation in little directions.[00:42:28] Simon: Just like OpenAI's chat GPT canvas thing that they just launched. That is at least. Going a little bit more interesting than just chat, chats and responses. You know, you can, they're exploring that space where you're collaborating with an LLM. You're both working in the, on the same document. That makes a lot of sense to me.[00:42:44] Simon: Like that, that feels really smart. The one of the best things is still who was it who did the, the UI where you could, they had a drawing UI where you draw an interface and click a button. TL draw would then make it real thing. That was spectacular, [00:43:00] absolutely spectacular, like, alternative vision of how you'd interact with these models.[00:43:05] Simon: Because yeah, the and that's, you know, so I feel like there is so much scope for innovation there and it is beginning to happen. Like, like, I, I feel like most people do understand that we need to do better in terms of interfaces that both help explain what's going on and give people better tools for working with models.[00:43:23] Simon: I was going to say, I want to[00:43:25] Brian: dig a little deeper into this because think of the conceptual idea behind the GUI, which is instead of typing into a command line open word. exe, it's, you, you click an icon, right? So that's abstracting away sort of the, again, the programming stuff that like, you know, it's, it's a, a, a child can tap on an iPad and, and make a program open, right?[00:43:47] Brian: The problem it seems to me right now with how we're interacting with LLMs is it's sort of like you know a dumb robot where it's like you poke it and it goes over here, but no, I want it, I want to go over here so you poke it this way and you can't get it exactly [00:44:00] right, like, what can we abstract away from the From the current, what's going on that, that makes it more fine tuned and easier to get more precise.[00:44:12] Brian: You see what I'm saying?[00:44:13] Simon: Yes. And the this is the other trend that I've been following from the last year, which I think is super interesting. It's the, the prompt driven UI development thing. Basically, this is the pattern where Claude Artifacts was the first thing to do this really well. You type in a prompt and it goes, Oh, I should answer that by writing a custom HTML and JavaScript application for you that does a certain thing.[00:44:35] Simon: And when you think about that take and since then it turns out This is easy, right? Every decent LLM can produce HTML and JavaScript that does something useful. So we've actually got this alternative way of interacting where they can respond to your prompt with an interactive custom interface that you can work with.[00:44:54] Simon: People haven't quite wired those back up again. Like, ideally, I'd want the LLM ask me a [00:45:00] question where it builds me a custom little UI, For that question, and then it gets to see how I interacted with that. I don't know why, but that's like just such a small step from where we are right now. But that feels like such an obvious next step.[00:45:12] Simon: Like an LLM, why should it, why should you just be communicating with, with text when it can build interfaces on the fly that let you select a point on a map or or move like sliders up and down. It's gonna create knobs and dials. I keep saying knobs and dials. right. We can do that. And the LLMs can build, and Claude artifacts will build you a knobs and dials interface.[00:45:34] Simon: But at the moment they haven't closed the loop. When you twiddle those knobs, Claude doesn't see what you were doing. They're going to close that loop. I'm, I'm shocked that they haven't done it yet. So yeah, I think there's so much scope for innovation and there's so much scope for doing interesting stuff with that model where the LLM, anything you can represent in SVG, which is almost everything, can now be part of that ongoing conversation.[00:45:59] swyx (2): Yeah, [00:46:00] I would say the best executed version of this I've seen so far is Bolt where you can literally type in, make a Spotify clone, make an Airbnb clone, and it actually just does that for you zero shot with a nice design.[00:46:14] Simon: There's a benchmark for that now. The LMRena people now have a benchmark that is zero shot app, app generation, because all of the models can do it.[00:46:22] Simon: Like it's, it's, I've started figuring out. I'm building my own version of this for my own project, because I think within six months. I think it'll just be an expected feature. Like if you have a web application, why don't you have a thing where, oh, look, the, you can add a custom, like, so for my dataset data exploration project, I want you to be able to do things like conjure up a dashboard, just via a prompt.[00:46:43] Simon: You say, oh, I need a pie chart and a bar chart and put them next to each other, and then have a form where submitting the form inserts a row into my database table. And this is all suddenly feasible. It's, it's, it's not even particularly difficult to do, which is great. Utterly bizarre that these things are now easy.[00:47:00][00:47:00] swyx (2): I think for a general audience, that is what I would highlight, that software creation is becoming easier and easier. Gemini is now available in Gmail and Google Sheets. I don't write my own Google Sheets formulas anymore, I just tell Gemini to do it. And so I think those are, I almost wanted to basically somewhat disagree with, with your assertion that LMS got harder to use.[00:47:22] swyx (2): Like, yes, we, we expose more capabilities, but they're, they're in minor forms, like using canvas, like web search in, in in chat GPT and like Gemini being in, in Excel sheets or in Google sheets, like, yeah, we're getting, no,[00:47:37] Simon: no, no, no. Those are the things that make it harder, because the problem is that for each of those features, they're amazing.[00:47:43] Simon: If you understand the edges of the feature, if you're like, okay, so in Google, Gemini, Excel formulas, I can get it to do a certain amount of things, but I can't get it to go and read a web. You probably can't get it to read a webpage, right? But you know, there are, there are things that it can do and things that it can't do, which are completely undocumented.[00:47:58] Simon: If you ask it what it [00:48:00] can and can't do, they're terrible at answering questions about that. So like my favorite example is Claude artifacts. You can't build a Claude artifact that can hit an API somewhere else. Because the cause headers on that iframe prevents accessing anything outside of CDNJS. So, good luck learning cause headers as an end user in order to understand why Like, I've seen people saying, oh, this is rubbish.[00:48:26] Simon: I tried building an artifact that would run a prompt and it couldn't because Claude didn't expose an API with cause headers that all of this stuff is so weird and complicated. And yeah, like that, that, the more that with the more tools we add, the more expertise you need to really, To understand the full scope of what you can do.[00:48:44] Simon: And so it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's, it's, it's, it's like, the question really comes down to what does it take to understand the full extent of what's possible? And honestly, that, that's just getting more and more involved over time.[00:48:58] Local LLMs: A Growing Interest[00:48:58] swyx (2): I have one more topic that I, I [00:49:00] think you, you're kind of a champion of and we've touched on it a little bit, which is local LLMs.[00:49:05] swyx (2): And running AI applications on your desktop, I feel like you are an early adopter of many, many things.[00:49:12] Simon: I had an interesting experience with that over the past year. Six months ago, I almost completely lost interest. And the reason is that six months ago, the best local models you could run, There was no point in using them at all, because the best hosted models were so much better.[00:49:26] Simon: Like, there was no point at which I'd choose to run a model on my laptop if I had API access to Cloud 3. 5 SONNET. They just, they weren't even comparable. And that changed, basically, in the past three months, as the local models had this step changing capability, where now I can run some of these local models, and they're not as good as Cloud 3.[00:49:45] Simon: 5 SONNET, but they're not so far away that It's not worth me even using them. The other, the, the, the, the continuing problem is I've only got 64 gigabytes of RAM, and if you run, like, LLAMA370B, it's not going to work. Most of my RAM is gone. So now I have to shut down my Firefox tabs [00:50:00] and, and my Chrome and my VS Code windows in order to run it.[00:50:03] Simon: But it's got me interested again. Like, like the, the efficiency improvements are such that now, if you were to like stick me on a desert island with my laptop, I'd be very productive using those local models. And that's, that's pretty exciting. And if those trends continue, and also, like, I think my next laptop, if when I buy one is going to have twice the amount of RAM, At which point, maybe I can run the, almost the top tier, like open weights models and still be able to use it as a computer as well.[00:50:32] Simon: NVIDIA just announced their 3, 000 128 gigabyte monstrosity. That's pretty good price. You know, that's that's, if you're going to buy it,[00:50:42] swyx (2): custom OS and all.[00:50:46] Simon: If I get a job, if I, if, if, if I have enough of an income that I can justify blowing $3,000 on it, then yes.[00:50:52] swyx (2): Okay, let's do a GoFundMe to get Simon one it.[00:50:54] swyx (2): Come on. You know, you can get a job anytime you want. Is this, this is just purely discretionary .[00:50:59] Simon: I want, [00:51:00] I want a job that pays me to do exactly what I'm doing already and doesn't tell me what else to do. That's, thats the challenge.[00:51:06] swyx (2): I think Ethan Molik does pretty well. Whatever, whatever it is he's doing.[00:51:11] swyx (2): But yeah, basically I was trying to bring in also, you know, not just local models, but Apple intelligence is on every Mac machine. You're, you're, you seem skeptical. It's rubbish.[00:51:21] Simon: Apple intelligence is so bad. It's like, it does one thing well.[00:51:25] swyx (2): Oh yeah, what's that? It summarizes notifications. And sometimes it's humorous.[00:51:29] Brian: Are you sure it does that well? And also, by the way, the other, again, from a sort of a normie point of view. There's no indication from Apple of when to use it. Like, everybody upgrades their thing and it's like, okay, now you have Apple Intelligence, and you never know when to use it ever again.[00:51:47] swyx (2): Oh, yeah, you consult the Apple docs, which is MKBHD.[00:51:49] swyx (2): The[00:51:51] Simon: one thing, the one thing I'll say about Apple Intelligence is, One of the reasons it's so disappointing is that the models are just weak, but now, like, Llama 3b [00:52:00] is Such a good model in a 2 gigabyte file I think give Apple six months and hopefully they'll catch up to the state of the art on the small models And then maybe it'll start being a lot more interesting.[00:52:10] swyx (2): Yeah. Anyway, I like This was year one And and you know just like our first year of iPhone maybe maybe not that much of a hit and then year three They had the App Store so Hey I would say give it some time, and you know, I think Chrome also shipping Gemini Nano I think this year in Chrome, which means that every app, every web app will have for free access to a local model that just ships in the browser, which is kind of interesting.[00:52:38] swyx (2): And then I, I think I also wanted to just open the floor for any, like, you know, any of us what are the apps that, you know, AI applications that we've adopted that have, that we really recommend because these are all, you know, apps that are running on our browser that like, or apps that are running locally that we should be, that, that other people should be trying.[00:52:55] swyx (2): Right? Like, I, I feel like that's, that's one always one thing that is helpful at the start of the [00:53:00] year.[00:53:00] Simon: Okay. So for running local models. My top picks, firstly, on the iPhone, there's this thing called MLC Chat, which works, and it's easy to install, and it runs Llama 3B, and it's so much fun. Like, it's not necessarily a capable enough novel that I use it for real things, but my party trick right now is I get my phone to write a Netflix Christmas movie plot outline where, like, a bunch of Jeweller falls in love with the King of Sweden or whatever.[00:53:25] Simon: And it does a good job and it comes up with pun names for the movies. And that's, that's deeply entertaining. On my laptop, most recently, I've been getting heavy into, into Olama because the Olama team are very, very good at finding the good models and patching them up and making them work well. It gives you an API.[00:53:42] Simon: My little LLM command line tool that has a plugin that talks to Olama, which works really well. So that's my, my Olama is. I think the easiest on ramp to to running models locally, if you want a nice user interface, LMStudio is, I think, the best user interface [00:54:00] thing at that. It's not open source. It's good.[00:54:02] Simon: It's worth playing with. The other one that I've been trying with recently, there's a thing called, what's it called? Open web UI or something. Yeah. The UI is fantastic. It, if you've got Olama running and you fire this thing up, it spots Olama and it gives you an interface onto your Olama models. And t

YOU SAY by Lauren DaigleI keep fighting voices in my mind that say I'm not enoughEvery single lie that tells me I will never measure upAm I more than just the sum of every high and every lowRemind me once again just who I am because I need to knowOoh-ohYou say I am loved when I can't feel a thingYou say I am strong when I think I am weakAnd you say I am held when I am falling shortAnd when I don't belong, oh You say I am YoursAnd I believe (I)Oh, I believe (I)What You say of me (I)I believeThe only thing that matters now is everything You think of meIn You I find my worth, in You I find my identityOoh-ohYou say I am loved when I can't feel a thingYou say I am strong when I think I am weakAnd you say I am held when I am falling shortWhen I don't belong, oh You say I am YoursAnd I believe (I)Oh, I believe (I)What You say of me (I)Oh, I believeTaking all I have, and now I'm laying it at Your feetYou have every failure, God, You have every victoryOoh-ohYou say I am loved when I can't feel a thingYou say I am strong when I think I am weakYou say I am held when I am falling shortWhen I don't belong, oh You say I am YoursAnd I believe (I)Oh, I believe (I)What You say of me (I)I believeOh, I believe (I)Yes, I believe (I)What You say of me (I)I believeI'VE BEEN SEARCHIN SO LONGby Chicago--sung by Leonid and Friends… As my life goes on, I believeSomehow something's changedSomething deep insideOoh, a part of meThere's a strange new light in my eyes (there's a strange new light)Things I've never knownChanging my lifeChanging me… I've been searching so longTo find an answerNow I know my life has meaning, oh yeah… Now I see myself as I amFeeling very freeLife is everythingOoh, it's meant to beWhen my tears have come to an endI will understand (yes I will)What I left behindPart of me… I've been searching so longTo find an answerNow I know my life has meaning… Wait a minuteSearching (don't you know I'm searching?)For an answerTo the questionOh, yeahWho am I? (Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah)(Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah)Baby (baby)It's trueIt's only natural (it's only natural, baby)… Good thingsIn lifeTake a long time

This week, The Reel Drunks bring you an amazing, yet underrated picture! Fury! Starring Brad Pitt, Shai LaBeouf, Jon Bernthall, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jason Isaacs and more! Prepare yourself for 3 hours of Jake, Matt & Danial breaking down the tremendous acting, behind the scenes etc. I Oh and drink up as they provide a fare share of WWII knowledge. This is Fury Part 1! Part 2 is available 1/20! What would you Do0o0o for a chocolate bar??!?

In this week's episode, I invited Eric Tivers, host of the popular ADHD ReWired Podcast, to join me on Focus Forward and we talked about the common feelings of shame experienced by individuals with ADHD. We explored the benefits of finding connection and support within the ADHD community and discussed some aspects of living a strategy-based life and take a little detour to talk about tennis and pickle ball scoring, classic ADHD tangent. Stick around to the end of our conversation to learn more about how to get in touch with Eric and about the high-quality services he and his team provide. Because of some timing and our Focus Forward hiatus, this episode was actually recorded back in May of this year, coinciding with my official ADHD diagnosis, and despite the time that has passed, the insights remain relevant. I'm delighted it's now October and ADHD awareness month so we can share this conversation with you all! Here are the show notes from today's episode:Hannah's guest appearance on ADHD ReWiredADHD ReWired Podcast2023 Annual International Conference on ADHDADHD Support Group SearchMy podcast episode with Dr. Jan WillerBeyond BookSmartHow to Keep Score in Pickle BallHow to Keep Score in TennisADHD ResourcesAdult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1)CHADDBeyond BookSmart's ADHD Success KitHow to Thrive with ADHD After a DiagnosisEp 13: How to Unlock the Superpowers of ADHDWomen's ADHD Wellbeing PodcastContact us!Reach out to us at podcast@beyondbooksmart.comIG/FB/TikTok @beyondbooksmartcoachingTranscriptHannah Choi 00:04Hi everyone and welcome to Focus Forward, an executive function podcast where we explore the challenges and celebrate the wins you'll experience as you change your life through working on improving your executive function skills. I'm your host, Hannah Choi. Hannah Choi 00:18Before I dive into this episode, I wanted to share a correction from our last episode, I mistakenly said that I had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Jan, who I interviewed caught this when she listened to the episode and helped me realize that I actually have an appointment with a licensed professional clinician, who in Connecticut anyway is qualified to evaluate people for ADHD. I don't know about you, but I find all of these titles quite confusing. But I am so glad I get to learn all about this and share it with you. Anyway, I wanted to share again what Jan taught me that psychiatrists are great for testing people with more complex brain issues. And people with master's levels degrees, who are qualified can diagnose ADHD even without a full neuro Psych Exam. I'm still going to pursue the test. Because you know me brain nerd. I'm super curious to learn more about how my own brain works. But please know that you absolutely don't have to do the same to get the help you need. Hannah Choi 01:22Okay, so it is still ADHD Awareness Month and I've got some exciting news to share. I will be attending the upcoming 2023 annual International Conference on ADHD in Baltimore at the end of November. I am headed there with three of my wise colleagues, Sean Potts, Justice Abbott, and Wendy Craven. We will have a Beyond Booksmart table in the exhibit hall. And we'll also be learning from some of the presenters who will be sharing their knowledge and experience with attendees. If you want to find out more about the conference, check out the show notes. There's a link down there. Hannah Choi 02:00And besides being all about ADHD, this conference has a special connection to today's guest. We are back with another ADHD themed episode for this month of ADHD awareness. At the end of the summer, I had the absolute pleasure of being a guest on the ADHD rewired podcast. It is hosted by the very funny and very smart Eric Tivers. We talked about finding success in college when you struggle with executive functioning skills. And when we spoke not only did Eric convince me that I had to go to the ADHD conference, okay, wait a second, convinced his way too strong of a verb. He just kind of mentioned it with enthusiasm. And of course, I was totally sold. So let's try that again. Not only did Eric inspire me to go to the conference, but he also shared that he'll be presenting at it on the topic of technology. Bonus. Okay, so, back to the meat of this episode, I invited Eric to join me on Focus Forward, and we talked about the common feelings of shame experienced by individuals with ADHD. We also explored the benefits of finding connection and support within the ADHD community. So keep listening to hear Eric share about the coaching groups and the adult study halls he offers to provide that essential support and community we discuss some aspects of living a strategy based life and take a little detour to talk about tennis and pickleball scoring, you know, classic ADHD tangent, and stick around to the end of our conversation to learn more about how to get in touch with Eric, and about the high quality services that he and his coaches provide. I really encourage you to check out the good work that he and his team are doing. You can also find links to his website in the show notes. Because of some timing and our Focus Forward hiatus, this episode was actually recorded back in May of this year, coinciding with my official ADHD diagnosis. And despite the time that has passed, the insights do remain relevant. I am delighted that it is now October so we can share this conversation with you all. Okay, on to the show. Hannah Choi 04:12So, hi, everyone. I'm here today with Eric Tivers, who is the host of the ADHD ReWired podcast and you do a lot of other stuff. So could you introduce yourself and maybe share what you do and short a brief explanation of how you even got to where you are today?Eric Tivers 04:36Sure, so I'll thank you for having me on. My name is Eric Tivers. I host the ADHD ReWired podcast. And, you know, we, I am a licensed clinical social worker. And I started ADHD ReWired back in 2014. When it was, you know, I didn't even know what I was really going to be dealing with it. It was sort of like I I know I have thoughts and ideas that I want to share. I don't really like to write, it's a struggle for me. So like podcast, and like when I was in grad school, I was really actually struggling with my ADHD. And I discovered podcasts around that. And I discovered this old, like, not even good quality podcast, but it was like raw and authentic. And I wanted you that one day, like that kind of stuck with me for a long time. Yeah. And, and then I mentioned, we launched the podcast, it first started as just a solo show. And then I sort of stumbled into an interview. And I was like, Oh, I like this way better. Because, you know, it's as trained as a therapist, like, I'm just a curious conversationalist, I guess. And it was, I just really enjoyed helping other people tell their story. And then sort of through that, I launched my first online coaching group and, and that wasn't even like a grand plan, either. That was sort of a, I had this idea. And it was, the idea came out of actually, like I was in therapy at the time. And I would like go to try to get to my therapist office, like about 20 minutes early, just so I can do the homework that I supposed to be working on. This is silly. You know, it's like I'm my clients, this whole working man, wish there something working just to have like, regular like check ins kind of touch points, just to kind of keep me on track throughout my week. And so I started looking online for stuff and like, there was nothing. There was no one doing anything like that. So I created that. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it was like, where it is now to where it was when I first heard the very first version of it. I don't know if you ever heard the idea that a few are not kind of you don't cringe at your like earliest stuff you put out there, like you waited too long to start. I definitely cringe at some of the first stuff like we did, like, we didn't even have like a concrete schedule for the first season of coaching group that we did. Like it was like every week, like alright, what's good for me, I Oh, my God, that's an awful idea.Hannah Choi 06:55But you know what I love I love that, that you cannot wait for perfection to start, just just start and then it will evolve into what it's supposed to be. Eric Tivers 07:06Yeah, so you know, now here I am. You know, we're recording this on May 5, I'll happy Cinco Demayo. And, you know, we're, I think I, we just released episode 480 something. And you know, and I have experimented, and I've done different iterations of stuff on the podcast, and it's been super fun. You know, and there's no way I would have been doing a podcast from 10 years. Now, if I didn't love what I'm doing, right. It's amazing. So these coaching groups, they just kind of they almost kind of life of themselves, like they know, they were feeling really fast. And then I started doing two coaching groups at a time the manager didn't three coaching groups at a time. And then I was burning out a little bit. So I scaled back at two. I closed my clinical practice to focus exclusively on the coaching groups. So we've had over 1000 people go through the program. We're on our, we just started at registration for our summer season will be our 33rd season.Hannah Choi 08:04Oh my goodness, congratulations. Eric Tivers 08:07Thank you. Thanks. Hannah Choi 08:07That is awesome.Eric Tivers 08:08Yeah. And so we've been we've been growing, I got a couple of coaches that work with me, and, you know, learning all the kind of the leadership stuff there, which is, it's way harder than I ever imagined it would be like, I gotta figure it out, then I'm like, no, no, no more to learn. So it's it is like, I'm going back for seconds and thirds of humble pie on a regular basis.Hannah Choi 08:33I have a colleague who always says, always learning and growing and I love that. That's so true.Eric Tivers 08:39Yeah. I mean, as soon as you think you, you know everything, then that's where you get into trouble.Hannah Choi 08:43Yes, that's right. So I love thinking about all the people in your that that you have encountered that are now probably so much more confident, and so much more sure of their own abilities, despite their executive function challenges, despite their ADHD, so congrats to you and everyone that works for you for creating that space for people.Eric Tivers 09:10Well, I definitely didn't do it. I'm I mean, I've had lots of lots of help lots of other people who do a lot of stuff sort of on the back end. And, you know, we have we have a very active alumni community too. And a lot of our a lot we have. And when I open up the alumni community, it's because people will kept like re signing up for the group to do it again. And and so people were asking, was there anything else we could do after this? And like, maybe, and so maybe three or four years ago, we started this, the alumni community, and it's been wonderful. We have a bunch of different of our alumni who are leading peer based sessions each week. And so it's really cool because it's like, I tell people, one of the best things I do for my own ADHD is this work because it kind of makes me think about it all the time after like, I can't go into autopilot. I think a lot of other people feel that same way. It's like when they and sort of give back and be in some kind of leadership role in the community, it helps them stay on top of their own stuff.Hannah Choi 10:06Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I find that as a coach, you know, just talking about it all the time with my clients, and, you know, trying to think of news, like help them come up with new solutions for whatever challenge that they're dealing with it, that kind of thinking becomes a habit, and then you just kind of do it for yourself or, yeah.Eric Tivers 10:27So yeah, so that's kind of when we have our we have an adult study hall, it's a co-working community, which, so that's, that's another thing we have been working on. So yeah, lots of lots of things in the fire and, you know, experimenting with different things. And you know, one thing that is that is constant is that things are always changing.Hannah Choi 10:47So something that you and I had talked about before we recorded was the idea of community. And I really think that, that you are creating that community with the work that you're doing. And I just, we just dropped an episode the other day, I interviewed two social workers and their coach. And we talked a lot about how important validation is, and how important finding your flock is. And so I'm sure through that experience, you are creating that in a way for people.Eric Tivers 11:28Yeah, you know, one of the things because people always ask me, like, Well, how do I know if I should do group? Or if I should do one on one? And, you know, I would I, I tell them, I have a strong bias towards group. Because there's, you know, I and I've done intensive one on one coaching with people. And, you know, I tell them that I'm kind of a sucker for, like, positive reinforcement. And when I see people doing like, like, profoundly better. To me, that's like, my big shiny gold star. Right. And with group there's, there's just something that's, you know, it's funny, I'm very science based person, but like, it's, I think it's just magic, what happens in group, I, because it is, you know, we see ourselves in each other, and we are so much more generous and compassionate towards others, others are having the same struggles. And then, you know, when we see that kind of what they're doing and where they're coming out, they're they're doing all these great things. And yet, they're being so hard on themselves. And then there's that recognition of like, oh, wait a minute. Like you have these these mirrors that are reflecting you, back to you. Right, except now there's no judgment being Hannah Choi 12:35Yeah. That's awesome. That's powerful. Eric Tivers 12:39that that me too, is super, super powerful. Yeah, and I always tell people to I'm like, I just want to be really clear before we, there's any, like, ideas, that I have all my stuff together, because I don't, I am working on all the same stuff, too. I mean, being consistent, you know, it's like, I get the planning and then I stop looking at the planning, right, I gotta come back to it. And so really, what I think what community has really done one of the strengths of, of community is resilience. It is a sort of a resilience incubator. Yeah, because we're kind of be inconsistent with ADHD, it's just, you know, it's and I'm not saying that, like, it's just is what it is, you know, but it's part of it's part of ADHD, the consistency. So what we can do is skip the part, when we've fallen off what we want to be doing, we can skip the part of beating ourselves up, and we can reach out for help as a ham struggling here. Yeah, well, we get when we can say it, when we can speak the thing that we're instead of like being silenced in silent and shame. I mean, that because that that shame piece it is it's significant, it is really significant. And when you're in a community of people who get it because they also live it and your non judgmental support. It's, it's really profound, you know, it's, it's kind of like a rabid onion pillar, right? If people come in for white, like, I just want to get my planning and time management stuff figured out. It's like, work on that. But keep keep an open mind, because there's a way like, you can't not deal with the shame stuff when you're dealing planning. And anything that at the planning of time management when you have ADHD. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's not just the planning. It's not just the time now.Hannah Choi 14:24Yeah, yeah. And that's something that we talked about in that conversation was how tightly wrapped our executive function skills are with our emotions, and how and how the context in which we are talking about is how coaching sessions can can often sometimes feel like therapy, and it's because you cannot, you just can't separate that. And so being able to, like you said, you have that mirror to reflect yourself back to yourself without that judgment is such a nice way of of dealing with those emotions. I'm not sure how to explain what I'm saying. And I'm sure you know what I mean. I just I love that. I love that. Eric Tivers 15:07Well, your executive, its executive functions are self. It's about self regulation. Yeah.Hannah Choi 15:13Right. Yeah. And it comes down to it, you know,Eric Tivers 15:16I mean, it's, it's the self regulatory stuff that we have intentions of doing. And that impacts, like the things we're trying to do. I think like, like Russell Barkley talks about an executive functions, any goal oriented behavior that you sort of put out to the world, and it comes back to you in some way. So it's like, even if it's like, it's as simple as getting dressed, right? Like, your intention is, you gotta get up before you get dressed. Right. And, yeah, if you are successful with it, you got clothes on your body, right? Hannah Choi 15:42That's so funny. That's the example I always use. Like, you have some executive function skills, because you're wearing clothes. Eric Tivers 15:49Yeah, you know, are looking at like emotional self regulation, if you are employed. And you think that your boss is a jerk, and you let them know that and your goal is to get a promotion. And instead, you're actually shutting the door, because you can get yourself fired because you mouthed off to your boss, right? That ability to take a deep breath when you're in that that space. Like, you know, it's, it's hard. It's hard to do. Yeah.Hannah Choi 16:15Well, I, I haven't shared this yet on the podcast, but by the time people listen to this episode, they will know, I just got diagnosed with ADHD, which I am so happy about, because it has answered everything. And I'm sure this is the story that you've heard from so many people. And all of that has, over the past few weeks when I've been thinking about it, and I feel like I am calming my, I'm like giving my self a hug my past self. And like, you know, just and so and, and that whole shame piece. And the whole inner narrative really comes up a lot for people with ADHD or for people just who are struggling with anything, really, because there's this sort of this message that we receive from society that we're supposed to be just like, amazingly successful at everything all the time. And you have to like, especially as a mom, like you're supposed to do all these things plus, like have a really beautiful Instagram feed and be like selling cookies on the side or whatever.Eric Tivers 17:24And make it all look easy, right? Hannah Choi 17:26Yeah, yeah. And it's just not easy for anybody. And if you're additionally, you know, dealing with executive function challenges, if, because of any diagnosis, and it just makes everything a lot harder. So, yeah, so being able to being able to talk about it and to, and to address it in a really safe and encouraging and warm way is is really wonderful. So I'm really glad you're able to provide that for to your, to your coaching groups.Eric Tivers 18:02 It's so it's so interesting. First of all, congratulations on this.Hannah Choi 18:05Thanks. Thank you.Eric Tivers 18:07And you're in it's so interesting, too, because so many people who have such a wide variety of responses to Yeah, that diagnosis. And it's, it's really kind of striking, like how many people I've spoken with throughout the years who who've been professionals in the ADHD space, didn't think they had ADHD going. And then like, years and years later realize, I actually do, and it's so funny, because I have always like, was like, just thought that was a really like, Ha, what what would that be like to experience that? And I see it, because right now, and I have not gotten an official diagnosis. But I did recently take an online evaluation for autism. And I had a highly what I didn't mention is that part of my clinical practice, before I closed my clinical practice was specializing in autism. Okay, and so, you know, my, I have a 11 year old son who has has autism and ADHD. So it's like, you know, I used to speak and present on this stuff. And yeah, you know, in part of, and I was, I was mentioning at the top of the show, about, like, how, you know, leadership has been serving me some humble pie. And it because part of it's like some of the social stuff that I think I've been Miss reading and I'm like, right, and so like, I'm always someone who's always trying to do better. And it's like, if, and so what I'm sort of seeing a certain pattern, I'm like, okay, like, this is something other than like this than ADHD, like, I really tried to cultivate a culture of feedback in my community, with my team and yeah, I've gotten some little some hearts of your feedback, but like, thank goodness that some of my team has felt safe to Yeah, sure that I know. You know, it's sort of that that the only way I can sort of think about it as being like the the realization that maybe sometime Sam's coming off as an accidental a hole. And I'm just like, Oh my God. Yeah. And so it's been very humbling, recently something I'm still kind of working through. But you know, it's like, yeah, when we gain that self awareness, that that like, entry into a new space of awareness, that hurts like it. It is it is, you know, but I, you know, from the time I got diagnosed when I was 20 years old, I've been like, I'm this this sort of mission to keep uncovering blind spots. Because it's like, and I'm just understanding the concept that we all have blind spots. Yeah, right. Yeah. And knowing that, you know, that sort of like idea like, so if someone is not self aware, how do they know? Hannah Choi 20:49Yeah, I felt, and I don't know, maybe you feel this? It's almost freeing. I, as soon as she told me, you know, the results, I just felt this like, huge. Ah, okay. Now, I get it. And like you said, you're discovering things over the time, I have also been discovering things. And it's like, oh, that's why that happened. That's why I did that. And then I'm able to release myself of that burden of shame that I have been carrying for feeling so bad about that thing, whatever it was. It's kind of been like Christmas the past few weeks, I've just like opening up all these things. I hope you experienced the same thing with the air or maybe you already are with that. Eric Tivers 21:40Oh, I think I'll get I'll yeah, it's definitely a, it's like, hot, it's definitely been a little bit of a, it's like, I don't know, it's not like shocking, but it's, it's, I don't know, it's like, it's just humbling, it's what it's telling me where I can describe to describe her. And I was like, this feels very, very humbling. And just interesting. You know, it's, it's, if we are on, if we have that growth mindset, and we are open to feedback, you know, it's, I always tell people helping you to think that, like, the growth journey is a fun one. No, no, no, this is hard. This is our critical timeout for a little while. I tell you, you know, when anytime I have had big discoveries about myself, it has led to huge growth. And so I've always been open to trying to find those blind spots, even though I know it's gonna suck emotionally for a while. It has never, I've never not been grateful, in hindsight, for those discoveries. Hannah Choi 22:47And I see that a lot in my clients too. And I work with a lot of college kids and a lot, and what I've noticed is that a lot of them are still learning to be self aware. And they're still discovering aspects of themselves that they didn't know. And, and, and executive function coaching is such a great place to explore that it's such like a nice, safe, safe place, and so many different things that we can kind of test out and figure out and, and so much of my coaching comes back to asking why and so much of answering the question, why is becoming is by, you have to become self aware to answer that, why. And it can be really hard, like you said, it can be really hard to to admit, whatever the Y is, and, but that is the key to open the door to allow for that growth. And to, to be able to let go of whatever that shame is that you've been carrying around because of that challenge or limitation.Eric Tivers 23:45Yeah, it's I always tell my group members, like if you're not uncomfortable, like, lean in more. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, you know, you're not, you don't have to be sort of in that state forever. And it doesn't last forever. It's, it's sort of it's episodic, you know, it's, you go through periods, and then you, you know, at least for me, it's like, figuring these things out. And then spending years on on like, honing in the skills and the pieces around that, that I need to and then it's like, as you develop mastery around different things, then you kind of the process repeats like, oh, new discoveries. Oh, again,Hannah Choi 24:21Yep. Or, Oh, I just got I found mastery, but I'm sliding because of whatever and now let's discover a new way to get myself back back in the game and and to be okay with that.Eric Tivers 24:32You know, it's funny too, because, like, one of the things that that I'm that I'm actually trying to work on now is being treated less sarcastic in different interactions. I guess it's funny, I was I was talking to my partner yesterday about this cuz she's been kind of helping me through through some of this. And like, when she kind of gave me this feedback about my sarcasm, and I found myself wanting to hold on to like, like gripping. But start I love beings. It's funny. Yeah, but not it's not always received as well as I think you think it is like, yeah. All right. I'm gonna sit with that for a while. And you know, it's it's having that courage to ask others like, hey, like, is this been your experience that like in our conversations? Yeah, so it's having those those courageous conversations. I mean, that's really what it's, it's about. Yep.Hannah Choi 25:21And I don't know if you've experienced this as hosting a podcast, but I feel like I experienced that every time I listened to a new episode or listened to anything that I've ever recorded. Like I, I go through that, like, Oh, God, why did I say that? Or why didn't I say it this other way? And then But then I always go back and say no, okay, now you have a chance to, to learn from that and to grow from that and to step even more outside your comfort zone and to challenge maybe challenge what you how you did something before and yeah,Eric Tivers 25:55Yeah, you know, to me, like, I love absurdity. Like, that's just like, absurdity is my sense of humor. Or it was probably where I like sarcasm, but I just, you know, I'm learning to be more careful about that. But like, when I think about just like, brains are funny, glitchy and they are, like, you know, if we can, instead of being so hard on ourselves, like, why can't I do this, like, drive, we were talking before I hit record, like, I love playing pickleball I cannot remember the score during the game. For me, it is like to be in like one of those like baseball pitch counters and just like holding my other hand, butHannah Choi 26:35then you'd have to remember to use it.Eric Tivers 26:40And I always feel really at home when everybody else I'm playing with also can't remember the score. I'm just like, I think it'll be like, Well, what's your excuse? Because, you know, one of the younger ones there? And it's like, yeah, it's called ADHD.Hannah Choi 26:55It's not my age. Yeah. Oh, man.Eric Tivers 26:58It's it's funny. I'll, I'll say the score my head over and over again. And then one for one moment, I'm thinking about something else. And I forgot score. Hannah Choi 27:05Oh, my God, I feel you I just like relate to that so much. I just started, I started playing tennis and this a year ago, with my sister who's actually quite good at keeping track of the score, and I'm always like, I think I just need to play with her all the time. I'm the same way. I'm like, Alright, I got it. And I don't I actually and I don't even know which side of the court I'm supposed to be on right now.Eric Tivers 27:31With tennis is like the funny scoring it like, right?Hannah Choi 27:34Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah. And then if you play doubles in pickleball, it's even weirder, because then you have to say, like, if you're serving first or second, right?Eric Tivers 27:44Well, I typically only played doubles have, like, I don't, I don't want singles. I mean, it's a it's an amazing workout to play singles, because it's like, oh, my god, she has to be everywhere. I like doubles. So I don't know. It's but you're right. Because you have to say which, which, which serve it is.Hannah Choi 28:01It's too confusing for me. And we just play we just hit the ball around and be like, Yeah, we both won. Or we all win. Yeah, Everyone's a winner. Yes. What were we talking about? Speaking of forgetting things.Eric Tivers 28:22Brains are funny.Hannah Choi 28:23Brains. Brains. Yes, I love the brain. And I love helping people understand why they do what they do, because of their brains. And helping people learn strategies that can help them use their brains to their advantage instead of being sort of taken over by their brain. So like a lot of that emotional regulation is a huge part of my coaching. And, and I love just learning about it and teaching people about it.Eric Tivers 28:54You know, within that frame. There's this idea that I that I talk about my groups that, you know, if you're wanting to be successful, and you have ADHD, you have to learn how to bend the world to you. Because like, the world is not bending the other way. Like the world's not reaching out to say, Hey, how can I accommodate you? Right? Like, yeah, we get all this paperwork is really hard. Like, it's like planning this, you get it with paper, and it's, you know, your teacher tells you about it, you know, in the first day class never mentioned it again, like, right, we have to develop these strategies to really scaffold the things that we need around us. And be you being okay with that too. And that's such an important and I think for a lot of people a really hard thing because, you know, I always said who I am, we are not trying to get you to learn how to be normal. Like that is not our goal. Right? Like that is like that is our goal to make sure that that like you don't want that to be your goal, because that is like that will be a goal that you'll you're not going to achieveHannah Choi 29:57And we want to preserve your uniqueness, right. Yes. See?Eric Tivers 30:00Yes, yeah, you know, so whatever, like, whatever you need, like, just kind of figure out how to, you know how to advocate for it, how to ask for it, you know, when something that kind of informs a lot of the work that I do, and even my personal life was based on some work that I did when I was in grad school. And so it was around my dissertation, and it was looking at, what does it take for students with invisible disabilities and ADHD, learning disabilities, dyslexia, etc, to be successful in adulthood. And what they found is that it is not the diagnosis that is preventing people from having the same sort of measures of success compared to their peers, it's if they have high levels of self awareness, if they have self determination, and good self advocacy skills, like, if you look just at the sort of the outcome measures, whether it's income, educational attainment, just overall life satisfaction, you got those three things, when you have ADHD or something like it, right, you're going to do just as well, like, that doesn't mean that things aren't going to be sometimes harder, like they will be. But like, You got to be willing to do the stuff and make sure that you love what you're doing. Because that's another thing our ADHD, it's like, we don't really have that, that, you know, the luxury of doing work that we don't loveHannah Choi 31:22Right. Yes, yes. It's very hard to keep that going. Eric Tivers 31:27Right, right. I know for a little while, but youHannah Choi 31:31Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So much of that, that those those aspects that you named are part of figuring out, or you it's, you can find those when you have that opportunity to learn about yourself and ask those questions and discover the different aspects of you that yeah, they don't fit into this system of the world that is out there. And that, but then, like you said, That's okay. So let's figure out how we can just just embrace that and use it as a as a benefit and use it as a, you know, something that can take you to places that you might not go if you're more of a linear thinker, or if you are more of like a round peg in a round hole?Eric Tivers 32:19For sure, for sure. Yeah. Cuz it's, you know, managing life and you have ADHD requires coming up with 1001 Little strategies, like it really is. It's, and it's this idea of living a strategy based life. Right? It's like, when we were kids, okay, I'm struggling with that, right? What can I do? That didn't work? What else could I do? Alright, that worked for like two weeks, that's not working anymore. What else can I try? Right? It's, and if we can stay open to, you know, just being curious of what works, what's getting in the way, we'll get there. Maybe it's, I think one of the things that I think is helpful for us to remember with ADHD is that, you know, we want progress yesterday. You know, stick with it, like, you look back and serious of yours, and you'll see the growth. But if you're just like in the moment, like week to week, it can be really hard to see the growth. And if you're really doing the work, it can actually sometimes feel like you're doing worse, when you're actually doing better. And that's called a self awareness that is growing self awareness makes us feel like we're doing worse, even though we're not Hannah Choi 33:21Yeah, you know, something, how you mentioned this strategy based life. I remember when I told my colleague who is also the, the editor and producer of our podcast, Sean, who also has ADHD was diagnosed when he was 12. He said to me, I'm so surprised to hear that you have ADHD and I and he said, You have such good executive function skills. And that and I said, I think it's because I am exhausted from using strategies all the time. Like, all the time, I keep my shit together, for the most part, because I am constantly using strategies, which is, frankly, completely exhausting. And, and, and so often I find myself or have found myself saying, why can't I just do this without fill in the blank? And, and now I can say it's okay. At least you're doing it with that thing. You're not just like not doing it?Eric Tivers 34:21Yeah, and you know, and one of the things too, is is like, find me strategies, but then you got to adopt them are destined for to make them work for you. Yeah, you know, like, in our in our groups, we you know, we have a lot of these frameworks, but we really try to explain this as they think about everything we're sharing as sort of this is the sandbox for you, right? Like play with it and make it your own like you have this this worksheet for planning like you don't like the way that it's laid out, like, recreate it for yourself. So it like resonates with your brain, like break what we're doing. If we're telling you something that is different than what you do You want to do what's currently working? Ignore what we're telling you. Don't try to fix what's not broken. Yes, right.Hannah Choi 35:07Yes. Well, this has been so great talking to you. And, and thank you so much. You're actually the first person that I've told outside of my family, that I have ADHD but and it's not because of a shame place. It's just because I haven't. I haven't really said ADHD episode yet. And so I just kind of saving it for that. But it it's talking about community and, and, and hearing yourself in someone else's voice. I experienced the benefit of that today in our conversations. So I just like I said before, I'll say it again, I'm so glad that you're creating those spaces for people because I know that it's highly needed.Eric Tivers 35:54Well, congratulations. And it's it's it's super exciting. You know, it's it's just knowing that we have like, a hole that just opens up so many, like opportunities and things to explore that we can learn about when we have like, Oh, this is why we're, we're struggling, you know, yeah, great. Thanks. Because it really, you know, out of all out of all the disorders, really, I mean, it's, I think ADHD is one of the most manageable, but it could also be one of the biggest, you know, pains in the butt if you're not managing it, right, because it will remind you on a regular basis, you have ADHD, if you're not like paying attention to it. I tell people that we don't have the luxury to do left on autopilot. Like we will crash and burn. And if we think yeah, do like autopilot.Hannah Choi 36:40Yeah, I'm so glad there's that the stigma around being neurodivergent is really starting to break down and that more people are having these really important conversations. And I'm so glad that you have so many listeners, and I hope I start to have more listeners, because these conversations people need to hear them, they need to get that validation that it's okay to struggle. And there are there are options, there are questions that you can ask and answers that you can find.Eric Tivers 37:12You don't need to struggle alone, you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah.Hannah Choi 37:15So could you share your contact information and where people can find you, because I'm sure people are going to be really curious about learning more.Eric Tivers 37:24Yeah, best best place to reach me would be at my website, which is ADHDrewired.com. Since you are listening to this, you listen to podcasts. So you can also use whatever podcast app you're listening to and search for ADHD ReWired. And, you know, when we have our coaching groups, you know, our, I don't know, when this episode's gonna come out, but we we do them a couple times a year. In the end, they're intense, if you're looking for, like, if you're someone who does, well look almost like that boot camp style of like, Alright, I'm going to full immersion. Like, it's, you know, it's like a six to sometimes up to 10 hours a week, we do three sessions a week, you have a four person accountability team that you meet with twice a week where you do masterminds with, and then all the other stuff that we have available in our alumni community. So it's really designed to not just help you learn some skills, but to really, it's about, you know, the shame, resilience is about getting self awareness, and then, you know, having a safe space to practice learning skills.Hannah Choi 38:23I love that. And I have to put a plug in for your podcast. It's great. It's I love, I listened to a bunch of episodes and, and they're long, but the conversations are so interesting, and so relatable. And I love how many wide variety of topics you have. There's kind of something for everybody in there. Eric Tivers 38:43Well, thank you for doing the work that you're doing. This is wonderful. And thanks for letting me be on the other side of the mic. It's fun.Hannah Choi 38:49Yeah. Great. And I look forward to being on the other side of the mic with you as well, later on in the year.Eric Tivers 38:57Whenever that's on the calendar, whatever. Right now, so we have no idea when.Hannah Choi 39:03We have no idea. But it's happening. We know that yes, yes. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Eric. Take care. You too. Hannah Choi 39:12And that is our show for today. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. And if you know anyone who might relate to any of it, please share this episode with them. I hope we get to see you at the ADHD Conference in Baltimore. If you go stop by our booth number 112 in the exhibit hall and say hi. Until then you can reach out to me at podcast@beyondbooksmart.com. Please subscribe to focus forward on Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. If you listen on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can give us a boost by giving us a five star rating will love you for it. Sign up for our newsletter at beyond booksmart.com/podcast and we'll let you know when new episodes drop and we will share information related to the topic. Thanks for listening

“Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—” “Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!” Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I—” “Oh, don't bother me,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide figures!” 생략된 이야기: 공작부인이 세상이 더 빠르게 돌아갈 거라고 말하자, 앨리스는 지식을 뽐내고 싶어졌습니다. --- "그러면 낮과 밤이 어떻게 될지 생각해 보세요! 지구는 축을 따라 도는 데 이십 사 시간이 걸리잖아요." "도끼 얘기가 나왔으니 말인데." 공작부인이 말했다. "저 요리사 목을 쳐!" 앨리스는 요리사가 이 말을 진심으로 받아들였을까 봐 걱정스럽게 돌아보았다. 하지만 요리사는 바쁘게 수프를 저을 뿐, 대화를 듣지 않는 것 같았다. 그래서 앨리스는 다시 말을 이었다. "이십 사 시간이 맞을 거예요. 아니면 열두 시간인가?" "아유, 됐어." 공작부인이 말했다. "숫자는 질색이야!" from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [목소리] Narrator: David Goldfarb Alice: Miss Avarice Duchess: Heather Phillips https://librivox.org/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-dramatic-reading-by-lewis-carroll/ Peter Yearsley https://librivox.org/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-by-lewis-carroll-3/ 그 외의 영어 및 우리말 목소리는 인공지능 목소리입니다. 에피소드 이미지는 인공지능으로 생성했습니다.

Will Page returns to the show for a “state of the industry” episode. In last year's appearance he correctly called out the slowdown in streaming subscriptions, bubbles in web3, and more.Will believes the value of copyrighted music could hit $45 billion annually when the 2022 numbers are calculated — up $5 billion from 2021, which is already an all-time high for the industry.  Another massive shift is glocalisation”: the trend of local music dominating the domestic charts, as opposed to Western artists. This phenomenon isn't just being felt in music, but across every industry, from film to education.We covered both these trends, plus many more. Here's all our talking points: 1:33 Why the music industry is actually worth $40+ billion annually7:03 Physical music sales on the up and up10:47 How publisher and labels split up copyright value16:59 The rise of “glocalisation” will impact every industry34:39 DSP carnivores vs. herbivores 40:23 Why video vs. music streaming isn't a perfect comparison 46:31 Music as a premium offering in the marketplace 51:38 How to improve streaming royalties  1:06:05 AI music benefits that goes overlooked 1:10:07 Will's latest mix pays homage to Carole KingGlocalisation report: https://www.lse.ac.uk/european-institute/Assets/Documents/LEQS-Discussion-Papers/EIQPaper182.pdfWill Page's 2023 Believe in Humanity:https://www.mixcloud.com/willpagesnc/2023-believe-in-humanity/Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuest: Will Page, @willpageauthorThis episode is sponsored by DICE. Learn more about why artists, venues, and promoters love to partner with DICE for their ticketing needs. Visit dice.fmTrapital is home for the business of hip-hop. Gain the latest insights from hip-hop's biggest players by reading Trapital's free weekly memo. TRANSCRIPT[00:00:00] Will Page: I put so much emotional time and effort into making these mixes happen and going out for free.They get your DJ slots, but more importantly, it goes back to what makes me wanna work in music, which was a lyric from Mike G and the Jungle Brothers from that famous album done by the forties of Nature, where he said, it's about getting the music across. It's about getting the message across. It's about getting it across without crossing over.How can I get art across an audience without delegating its integrity? And it's such an honor to have this mixed drop in this Friday I mean, that's, made my year and we're not even into June yet.[00:00:30] Dan Runcie Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.[00:00:56] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: Today's episode is all about the state of the music industry, and we're joined by the One and Only, Will Page. He is a fellow at the London School of Economics. He's an author of Tarzan Economics and Pivot, and he is the former chief economist at Spotify. Will's second time on the podcast. Now, the first time we talked all about the future of streaming and where things are going in music, and we picked that conversation, backed up.We talked about a bunch of trends including the glocalisation of music, which is from a new report that Will had recently put out. We also talked about why he values the music industry to be close to a 40 billion industry, which is much higher than a lot of the reports about recorded music itself.And we also talk about a bunch of the topics that are happening right now, whether it's ai, how streaming should be priced, the dynamic between record labels and streaming services, and a whole lot more love. This conversation will always brings it with these conversations, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here's our chat.[00:02:00] Dan Runcie: All right, today we have the one and only Will Page with us who is recording from a beautiful location. I don't know if you're listening to the pod you can't see, but will tell us where you are right now.[00:02:09] Will Page: So great to be back like a boomerang on Trapital. Dan, and I'm coming to you from the Platoon Studios. Part of the Apple Company Platoon is our label services company, which is owned by Apple. They're doing great stuff with the artists like Amapiano music from South Africa. And the best place I can describe to you here, it's like a Tardus.Have you've ever seen Dr. Who? There's a tiny door in this tall yard music complex in North London just behind Kings Cross. When you enter that tiny door, you enter this maze of the well class spatial audio recording studios of Apple. And it's an honor they've given me this location to come to Trapital today.[00:02:41] Dan Runcie: Well we're gonna make the best of it here and it's always great to have you on, cuz Last year, last year's episode felt like a state of the industry episode, and that's where I wanna start things off this year with this episode.A couple months ago, you put out your post in your Tarzan economics where you said that this industry is not a 2020 5 billion industry, the way others say. Mm-hmm. You say, no, this is almost a 40 billion industry. So let's break it down. How did you arrive there and what's the backstory?[00:03:12] Will Page: I get goosebumps when you say that you think like 10 years ago we were talking about a 14 billion business and now it's a 40, you know, skews a slurred Scottish pronunciation, but let's just be clear from one four to four zero, how did that happen?Well the origins of that work, and you've been a great champion of it, Dan, is for me to go into a cave around about October, November and calculate the global value of copyright and copyright is not just what the record labels publish, that famous IFPIGMR report that everyone refers to, but it's what collecting studies like ask F and BMI collect what publishers generates through direct licensing.You have to add A plus B plus C labels, plus collecting societies plus publishers together. Then the complex part, ripping out the double counting and doing all the add-backs, and you get to this figure of 39.6 billion, which as you say, you round it up, it begins with a four. And I think there's a few things that we can kind of get into on this front.I think firstly we should discuss the figure. I'll you a few insights there. Secondly, I think we should discuss the division. And then thirdly, I want to cover the physical aspect as well. So if you think about the figure, we've got 39.6 billion. We know it's growing. I think what's gonna be interesting when I go back into that cave later this year to redo that number, it's gonna be a lot bigger.Dan, I'll see it here on Trapital First. I think a 40 billion business in 2021 is gonna be closer to a 45 billion business in 2022. And one of the reasons why it's not labels and streaming, it's a combination of publishers are reporting record collections, essentially they're playing catch up with labels, booking deals that perhaps labels booked a year earlier.And collecting studies are gonna get back to normal after all the damage of the pandemic. And when you drive those factors in where you have a much bigger business than we had before. So for the people listening to your podcast who are investing in copyright, this party's got a waiter run. You know, don't jump off the train yet cause this thing is growing[00:05:18] Dan Runcie: And the piece I want to talk about there is the publishing side of this. If you look at the breakdown of the numbers you have, the publishing is nearly, publishing plus is nearly 13 billion itself. The major record labels own most of the largest publishers right now. Why isn't this number just automatically included? Wouldn't it be in everyone's advantage to include the fact that yes, Universal Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group are together, part of the entity that make this, whether it's them, it's Warner Chapel, it's others. Why isn't this just the top line number that's shared in all of the other reports?[00:05:56] Will Page: It would be nice if it was, and indeed, I think the publishing industry around about 2001 used to do this. They haven't done it since. But it's like spaghetti. It's the best way I can describe it. I mean, how do you measure publisher income? You know, is it gross receipts by the publisher? Is it the publisher plus the collecting Saudi? That is money that went straight to the songwriter and didn't touch the publisher. So what the publisher holds onto what we call an industry, a net publisher, shares all these weird ways of measuring this industry that we have to be clear on.And it's, not easy. but I think what we do in the report is we try and make it bite size. We try and make it digestible to work out how much of that publisher's business came through, CMOs, the S gaps and BMIs this X over here PS music and how much do they bring in directly? And that allows you to understand a couple of things.Firstly, how do they compare vi to vis labels in terms of their overall income? And secondly, how do they compare when they go out to market directly, let's say putting a sync and a TV commercial or movie versus generating money through collective licensing that is radio or TV via ASCAP or bmr. So you get an interpretation of how these publishers are making those numbers work as well.[00:07:03] Dan Runcie: That makes sense. And then when we are able to break it down, we see a few numbers that roll up into it. So from a high level, at least what you shared from 2021, we have that 25.8 billion number from the recorded side. So that does fall in line with what we see from what the IPIs and others share. 10 billion Sure.From the publishing. And then you do have, the next 3.5 and then a little sliver there for royalty free and for the publishers' direct revenue that doesn't come from the songwriters. The next piece though, within the elements of how all of the revenue flows into that. We've talked a lot about streaming and we've talked, we'll get into streaming in a little bit, but I wanna talk about the physical side cause that was the second piece that you mentioned.We've all talked about vinyl, but it's not just vinyl. So could you talk a bit about where the trends are right now with physical sales and why this is such a huge factor for this number?[00:07:56] Will Page: Who would've thought on a Trapital podcast in May, 2023. We'll be talking about physical as a second topic on the agenda, but it's worth it. I mean, it's not a rounding era anymore. It's not chump change. in America, physical revenues largely vinyl outpaced the growth of streaming for the second year straight. It's not as big as streaming, but it's growing faster and it has been growing faster for two years now. That's crazy. Here in the uk the value of physical revenues to the UK music industry has overtaken the value of physical to Germany.Quick bit of history. For years, decades, Germans used to buy CDs. that's fallen off a cliff. They've given up on CDs. Whereas over here in Britain, we've all started buying vinyl again. So the value of vinyl in Britain is worth more than the value of CDs to Germans, that type of stuff you didn't expect to see.And if you go out to Asia, you see the CD market still strong. You've still got people who buy more than one copy of the same cd, of the same band. Don't ask me to explain the rationale for that, but it happens and it moves numbers. But after all this, when the dust settles, I mean a couple of observations, all the data to me is suggesting that 55, 60% of vinyl buyers don't actually own a record player.So I think it was Peter Drucker who said, the seller really knows what they're selling, and I don't think you're selling intellectual property or music cop right here. What we're actually selling is merchandise, you know, Taylor Swift, I got an email from Taylor Swift team saying they've got a marble blue vinyl coming out this week.Now we're talking about vinyl in the same way we used to talk about stone wash jeans, marble blue. This is like the fourth version of the same 11 songs priced at 29 99. Let's just figure that out for a second. I'm willing to give you 10 bucks a month to, access a hundred million songs on streaming services, but I'm also, it's the same person.I'm also willing to give you 30 bucks to buy just 10 of them. This is expensive music and I might not even be listening to it cause I don't even have a record player.[00:09:55] Dan Runcie: This is the fascinating piece about how we're calculating this stuff because the vinyl sales and all of that has been reported widely as a great boom to the industry and it has been.We've seen the numbers and in a lot of ways it brings people back to the era of being able to sell the hard copy of the thing itself, but it's much closer to selling a t-shirt or selling a sweatshirt or selling some type of concert merchant. It actually is the actual physical medium itself. So it'll be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve, how that embraces as well. On your side though, as a personal listener, do you buy any vinyls yourself that you don't listen to, that you just keep on display or?[00:10:34] Will Page: It's like your shoe collection, isn't it? Yes, right. Is the answer to that. But no, I mean, I will say that I got 3000 fi funk records in the house and they're all in alphabetical chronological order.So if they haven't been listened to, at least I know where to find them.[00:10:48] Dan Runcie: That's fair. That makes sense. So let's talk about the third piece of this, and that's the division of this. So you have the B2C side and you have the B2B side. Can we dig into that?[00:10:59] Will Page: Sure. this is, I think the backdrop for a lot more of the sort of thorny conversations happening in the music industry is now, you may have heard that in the UK we've had a three year long government inquiry into our business.We had the regulator turn over the coals, and so there's a lot of interest in how you split up this 40 billion dollar piece of pie. who gets what? And the division I'm gonna talk about here is labels an artist on one side. Songwriters and publishers on the other side as it currently stands, I would keep it simple and say two thirds of that 40 billion dollars goes to the record label and the artist, one third goes to the publisher and the songwriter.Now, when I first did this exercise back in 2014, it was pretty much 50 50, and when you see things which are not 50 50 in life, you're entitled to say, is that fair? Is it fair that when a streaming service pays a record label a dollar, it pays the publisher and the songwriter around 29 cents? If you're a publisher, a songwriter, you might say, that's unfair, cuz I'm getting less than them.I have preferences, issues, and I have any issues with this division. Well, let's flip it around. If you look at how B2B world works, licensing at the wholesale level, let's say you're licensing the bbc, for example, if your song's played on the bbc, you're gonna get 150 pounds for a play. 90 pounds goes to the songwriter and the publisher, 60 pounds goes to the artist and a record label.Now, is that fair? Why does the publisher win in the B2B market? By the record, label wins in the B2C market. And the one, the lesson I want to give your listeners is one from economics, and it's rarely taught university these days, but back in 1938, 1939, in a small Polish town called la. Now part of the Ukraine, ironically, free Polish mathematicians sat in a place called a Scottish Cafe, ironic for me, and invented a concept called Fair Division.And the question they posed was, let's imagine there's a cake and there's two people looking at that cake getting hungry. There's Dan Runcie over in the Bay Area and there's Will page back in Edinburgh. What's the best way to divide that cake up? And the conclusion they came up with is you give Will page, the knife.Aha, I've got the power to cut the cake. But you give Dan Runcie the right to choose which half. Damn, I've gotta make that cut really even otherwise, Dan's gonna pick the bigger half and I'll lose out. And this divider two model gave birth to the subject of fair Division and it simply asked, what makes a fair division fairer?How can I solve a preference? How can I solve for envy? I want that slice, not that slice. I'm unhappy cause Dan got that slice and not that slice. There's a whole bunch of maths in this. We had a third person that gets more complex. But I just wanna sow that seed for your listeners, which is when we ask questions like, why is it the label gets a dollar and the publisher gets 29 cents?There's gotta be some rationale why you know who bets first? Is it the label that bets first or the publisher who commits most? Is it label that commits most marketing spend or the publisher? These types of questions do with risk, often help answer questions of fair division, or to quote the famous Gangstar song, who's gonna take the weight?Somebody's gotta take a risk when you play this game, and perhaps there's a risk reward trade off, which is telling us who gets what Share of the spoils.[00:14:15] Dan Runcie: Let's unpack this a little bit because it's easy to see. May not be fair, but it's easy to see why the record labels get preference on the B2C side because as I mentioned before, the record labels have acquired a lot of the publishers, and especially in the streaming era, they were prioritizing that slice of the pie, their top line, as opposed to what essentially is the subsid subsidiary of their business, the publishing side.Why is it flipped with sync? Well, how did that dynamic end up being that way?[00:14:47] Will Page: That's an anomaly, which is actually blatantly obvious. You just don't think about it. And the way it was taught to me is anyone can record a song, but only one person can own a song. So I think, let's give an example of, I don't know, a Beach Boy song where I could ask for the original recording of that Beach Boy song to be used in the sync.Or I could get a cover band. So let's say I got a hundred thousand dollars to clear the rights of that song, and the initial split should be 50 50. If a band is willing to do a version of it for 10,000, the publisher can claim 90,000 of the budget and get the option. If the record label objects and says, well, I wish you used a master.Well, you got a price under the 10,000 to get the master in. So this kind of weird thing of bargaining power, if you ever hear. Let me scratch that again. Let me start from the top. Let me give you a quick example, Dan, to show how this works. One of my favorite sort of movies to watch when you're Bored and killing Time is The Devil's Swear, Prada great film.And then that film is a song by Seal called Crazy, incredible song, timeless. That guy has, you know, timeless hits to his name, but it's not him recording it. Now, what might have happened in that instance is the film producer's got a hundred thousand to get the song in the movie, and he's looking to negotiate how much you pay for publishing, how much you pay for label.Now the label is getting, you know, argumentative, wanting more and more, and the publisher is happy with a certain fee. Well, the film producer's got an option. Pay the publisher of the a hundred thousand, pay him 90,000, given the lion share of the deal. And then just turn the label and say, screw you. I'm gonna get a covers bant and knock me out.A decent version of it. And this happens all the time in TV films, in commercials, you'll hear covers of famous songs. And quite often what's happening there is you gotta pay the publisher the lion share of your budget and then just cough up some small chains to the covers bant to knock out a version.And then, so just a great reminder, Dan of anyone can record a song, but only one person can own the song that is the author. And that's why negotiating and bargaining power favors publishes in sync over the record labels.[00:16:59] Dan Runcie: That makes sense. And as you're saying that, I was thinking through five, six other examples of cover songs I've seen in many popular TV shows and movies.And this is exactly why?[00:17:08] Will Page: It's always car commercials. For some reason, every car commercial's got cover in a famous song. You think, remember that weird Scottish guy down Ronie Trapital? Yeah. That's what's happened. The publishers pool the rug from under the record label's feet at negotiation table.Another super important observation about the glocalisation trend, Dan, is I'm gonna take one of those 10 countries as our spotlight, Poland. Now the top 10 in Polands or Polish, the top 20 in Poland, or Polish. In fact, if you go to the top 40, it's pretty much all Polish bands performing in Polish, and you could say that's localization.But stop the bus. Most of those acts are performing hip hop, which is by itself a US genre. So perhaps we've got glocalisation of genre, but localization of language and artist. And that's a very important distinction for us to dissect. And perhaps it's for the anthropologist, the sociologist, to work out what's going on here.But it's not as straightforward as it's just local music. It's local music, but it's global genres, which is driving us forward.[00:18:08] Dan Runcie: And that's a great point for the people that work at record labels and other companies making decisions too, because there's been so much talk about hip hop's decline. But so much of that is focused on how this music is categorized and a lot of it's categorized solely on.What is considered American hip hop. But if you look at the rise of music in Latin America, which has been one of the fastest growing regions in the world, most of that music is hip hop. Bad Bunny considers himself a hip hop artist. You just brought up this example of Polish hip hop being one of the most popular genres there.So when we think about. How different genres get categorized, which genres get funding. Let's remember that key piece because hip hop is this culture and it's global, and that's gonna continue. So let's make sure that we are not taking away from a genre that is really one of the most impactful and still puts up numbers if we're categorizing it in the right way.[00:19:04] Will Page: Damn straight. I mean, I think genres are often like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and in a paper published by London School of Economics, I was honored to use that line that I think I said on trap last time, which is rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live. Rap could be the genre, hip hop could be the lifestyle.Maybe what those Polish acts getting to the top of the charts of doing is representing a lifestyle, but they're doing it in their mother tongue.[00:19:28] Dan Runcie: Well said. Agreed. Well, let's switch gears a bit. One topic that I wanna talk about, and I actually gave a talk recently, and I referenced you from this term, and its of music, was the glocalisation of music and why this is happening and what it means for Western music specifically in the us. But first, if you could define that term and explain why this is so important in music right now.[00:19:53] Will Page: Well, I'm so excited to be on Trapital talking about this because we are now officially published by London School of Economics, so I'm gonna make my mom and dad proud of me. At last Backstory, paperback of my book, guitars in Economics, retitled to Pivot. Apparently WH Smith's Travel and Hudson Travel said books with economics in their titles Don't sell an airport.So we've rebranded the whole book to Pivot and it's in airports, which is a result. that book, that paperback came out on the 6th of February and that night I was on the BBC one show and they had this great happy, clappy family friendly story. They wanted to bounce off me. They said, Hey, will, Isn't it great that the top 10 songs in Britain last year were all British ex?For the first time in 60 years, Britain got a clean sweep of the top 10 in the music charts. And I said, curb your enthusiasm because we're seeing it elsewhere. The top 10 in Germany, were all German. Top 10 in Italy, all Italian, ditto France, deto Poland. And if you go to Spain, the top 10, there were all Spanish language, but largely Latin American.So it's not just a British thing that we've seen this rise of local music on global streaming platforms. We're seeing it everywhere, cue some gulps and embarrassments live in the TV studio. But I made my point and I came out of that interview thinking. Well that stunned them. It's gonna stu more people.And I said about working on a paper called glocalisation, which with a Scottish accent, it's hard to pronounce. Let's see how you get on with it. Not localization and not glocalisation. Emerging to by definition and by practice glocalisation. I teamed up with this wonderful author, Chris Riva, who'd be a great guest on your show.He did a wonderful blog piece you may have read, called Why is There No Key Changes in Music anymore? It's a really beautiful piece of music writing and there isn't. Nobody uses key changes in the conclusion of songs. And we set out to do this academic study to explain to the world what's been happening in music and why it's relevant to everyone else.And what we saw across 10 European countries was strong evidence of local music dominating the top of the charts in these local markets on global platforms. Now history matters here. We didn't see this with local High street retailers, America, British, Canadian music dominated those charts. We still don't see it in linear broadcast models like radio and television, you know, it's still English language repertoire dominating those charts. But when it comes to global streaming, unregulated free market, global streaming, we see this phenomenal effect where local music is topping the charts. And you know, you look at what does it mean for us English language countries like ourselves?It means things get a little bit tough. It means exporting English language repertoire into Europe becomes harder and harder. Maybe I'll just close off with this quite frightening thought, which is Britain is one of only three net exporters of music in the world. The other two being your country, United States and Sweden.Thanks to a phenomenal list of Swedish songwriters and artists. And I can't think of the last time this country's broken a global superstar act since Dua Lipa in 2017. Dan, we used to knock them out one, two a year. 2017 was a long time ago, and it's been pretty dry since.[00:23:13] Dan Runcie: And that's a great point for the people that work at record labels and other companies making decisions too, because there's been so much talk about hip hop's decline. But so much of that is focused on how this music is categorized and a lot of it's categorized solely on.What is considered American hip hop. But if you look at the rise of music in Latin America, which has been one of the fastest growing regions in the world, most of that music is hip hop. Bad Bunny considers himself a hip hop artist, you just brought up this example of Polish hip hop being one of the most popular genres there.So when we think about, how different genres get categorized, which genres get funding. Let's remember that key piece because hip hop is this culture and it's global, and that's gonna continue. So let's make sure that we are not taking away from a genre that is really one of the most impactful and still puts up numbers if we're categorizing it in the right way.[00:24:07] Will Page: Damn straight. I mean, I think genres are often like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and in a paper published by London School of Economics, I was honored to use that line that I think I said on trap last time, which is rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live. Rap could be the genre, hip hop could be the lifestyle.Maybe what those Polish acts getting to the top of the charts of doing is representing a lifestyle, but they're doing it in their mother tongue.[00:24:32] Dan Runcie: Well said. Agreed. This is something that's been top of mind for me as well because technology in general has a way of making regions and making people in particular regions closer together than it does making the world bigger. It's like in, in a sense, technology can make the world seem bigger, but it actually makes it seem smaller, right? And I think that algorithms and bubbles that come from that are another symptom of this.But this is going to have huge implications for Western music. You mentioned it yourself. All of these markets that are used to being export markets, when they no longer have the strength to be able to have those exports, how does that then change the underlying product? How does that then change the budgets, the expectations of what you're able to make? Because if you're still trying to maintain that same top line revenue, you're still trying to maintain those airwaves you have, it's gonna cost you more money to do that, because you can't rely on the few Western superstars that you have to get, that you have to have equivalent of a superstar or at least a middle tier star in every region that you once had strong market share that you could export in.And it's gonna change cost structures. It's gonna change focus. And a lot of these expansions that we've seen of record labels, especially Western record labels, having strong footprints in different regions across the world, they're not just gonna need to have presence, they're gonna need to have strong results.And in many ways, try to rival the own companies that are in those comp, in those regions, the homegrown record labels, because every country is trying to do their own version of this and it's gonna be tight. This is one of the challenges that I think is only gonna continue to happen.[00:26:14] Will Page: You're opening up a real can of worms. I get it. Pardon to your listeners, we're getting excited here. Day of publication, first time we've been able to discuss it on air, but I know I'm onto something huge here and you've just illustrated why just a few remarks. One, some of the quotes that we have in the paper were just phenomenal. We have Apple included in the paper. We have Amazon, Steve Boom, the head of that media for Amazon in charge of not just music, but Twitch audio books, the whole thing. He's looking at all these media verticals. He makes this point where he says, as the world becomes more globalized, we become more tribal. Stop right there, as he just nailed it.What's happening here? It's The Economist can only explain so much. This is what's so deep about this topic. I wanna toss it to the anthropologist of sociologists to make sense of what I've uncovered, but it's massive. Now let's take a look at what's happening down on the street level with the record labels and the consumers. You know, the record labels are making more money and they're devolving more power to the local off seats. You know the headcount in the major labels, local off season, Germany, France, and Vietnam or wherever is doubled in the past five years. It hasn't doubled in the global headquarters. That's telling you something.If you look at how labels do their global priority list, maybe every month, here's 10 songs we want you to prioritize globally. So I had a look at how this is done, and across the year I saw maybe 8, 10, 12 artists in total, and there's 120 songs. There's not that many artists. You think about how many local artists are coming out the gate every week hitting their local labels or local streaming staff, up with ideas, with showcases and so on.Not a lot of global priority. Then you flip it and you think about the consumer, you know, they've had linear broadcast models for 70 years where you get what you're given. I'm gonna play this song at this time and you're gonna have to listen to it. FM radio, TV shows now they're empowered with choice and they don't want that anymore.They want what's familiar. What comforts them. They want their own stars performing in their own mother tongue topping those charts. So this has got way to go. Now, a couple of flips on this. Firstly, what does this mean for artists? And then I'm gonna take it out of media, but let's deal with artists.Let's imagine a huge festival in Germany. 80,000 people now festival can now sell out with just German X, no problem at all. So when the big American X or British X commanded like a million dollars a headlining fee, you wanna go play that festival. That promoter can turn around and say, sorry man, I can't generate any more money by having you on my bill.How much are you gonna pay me to get on stage? Price maker, price taker? You see what happens. And then the last thing, and there's so much more in this paper for your listeners to get to, and let's please link to it and you'll take, I'll take questions live on your blog about it as well, but. There's a great guy called Chris Deering, the father of the Sony PlayStation. Did you play the Sony PlayStation back in the day? Were you're a fan of the PlayStation.[00:29:08] Dan Runcie: Oh, yeah. PS one and PS two. Yeah. Okay.[00:29:11] Will Page: You, oh, so you, you're an OG PlayStation fella. So he's the father of the PlayStation and launching the PlayStation in the nineties and into the nineties. He offered us observation, which is when they launched a SingStar, which was karaoke challenge.In the PlayStation, he says, we always discussed why the Swedish version of SingStar was more popular in Sweden than the English version Science. Intuitive enough. Let me break it down. Gaming back then was interactive music was not, you interacted with your PlayStation, that's why you killed so much time with it. Music was just a CD and a plastic case that broke your fingernails when you tried to open it. That's how the world worked back then and gaming offered you choice. I could try and do karaoke with those huge global English language hits where I could go further down the chart and buy the Swedish version and sing along to less well known Swedish hits. And the consumer always picked the Swedish version. So as a bellwether, as a microcosm, what I think Chris Ding was teaching us was we saw this happening in gaming long before you started seeing it happen with music. 20 years ago when there was interactive content, which gaming was, music wasn't, and consumers had a choice, which gaming offered a music didn't.They went local. Today, Dan, we're dealing with music lists, A interactive, and B offers choice. And what we're seeing is local cream is rising to the top of the charts.[00:30:33] Dan Runcie: And we're seeing this across multimedia as well. We're seeing it in the film industry too. Even as recent as five, 10 years ago, you release any of the blockbuster movies that were successful in the us, almost all of them had some overseas footprint.Some of them definitely vary based on the genre, but they were always there. But now China specifically had been such a huge market for the Hollywood and Box office specifically, but now they're starting to release more of their own high ed movies and those are attracting much more audiences than our export content can one.Two, the Chinese government in general is just being very selective about what they allow and what they don't allow. And then three, with that, that's really only leaving certain fast and furious movies and Avatar. That's it. The Marvel movies are hit and missed depending on what they allow, what they don't allow, and how, and it's just crazy to see the implications that has had for Marvel Studios for everyone else in Hollywood as well.When you think about it, and we're seeing this across multimedia, I think there's a few trends here that makes me think about, one is. Population growth in general and just where those trends are and how different corporations can approach the opportunity. Because I look at Nigeria, you look at Ethiopia, these are some of the fastest growing countries in the world.And you look at the music that is rising more popular than ever, whether it's Amapiano or it's Afrobeats, that's only going to continue to grow. And that's only from a few regions in the huge continent of Africa. So when we're thinking about where success is gonna come from, where that lines up with infrastructure, people have been seeing it for years.But the reason that we're seeing the growth in Africa, the growth in Latin America, the growth in a lot of these markets is this trend of glocalisation and it's only going to increase. So if we're thinking about where we wanna invest dollars, where we wanna build infrastructure in the future, we not just being folks that live in the western world, but also elsewhere in the world, this is where things are heading.[00:32:37] Will Page: Let me come in down the middle and then throw it out to the side. So, Ralph Simon, a longtime mentor of mine, is quoted in the paper and where he's actually gonna moderate the address here at the Mad Festival here in London, which is for the marketing and advertising community here, where he says, what you've uncovered here that headwind of glocalisation is gonna affect the world of marketing and advertising this time next year.That's what will be the buzzword in their head. So if you think about, I don't know, a drinks company like Diagio, maybe they've got a globalized strategy and a globalized marketing budget. When they start seeing that you gotta go fishing where the fish are and the fish are localized, they're gonna devolve that budget and devolve that autonomy down to local offices. So the wheels of localization, this rise of local, over global, they've only just got started, if I've called it right. We're onto something way bigger than a 20 minute read LSE discussion paper. This goes deep, deep and far beyond economics. But then you mentioned as well China, I mean just one offshoot observation there, which is to look at education.If you look at the UK university system, about a third, if not more, of it is subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese students here. Great for business, slightly dubious in its business, besties, charging one student more than another student for the same product. But that's what we do over here.And I recently, we made a fellow of Edmar University's Futures Institute, which is an honor to me, you know, gets me back home more often. Fine. And I was learning from them that. The quality of students coming from China to study here in Britain and across Europe is getting worse and worse. Why? Cuz the best students have got the best universities in China.They no longer need to travel. So there's a classic export import dilemma of, for the past 10, 15 years, universities have built a complete treasury coffer base of cash around selling higher education to the Chinese. And now the tables are turning. I don't need to send my students to you universities anymore.I'll educate them here. Thank you very much. So, like I say, this stuff is a microcosm. It's got a can of worms that can open in many different directions[00:34:39] Dan Runcie: And it's gonna touch every industry that we know of to some extent, especially as every industry watches to be global to some extent. This is going to be a big topic moving forward.Let's shift gears a bit. One of the terms that was really big for us. That came from our podcast we did last year. We talked about herbivores and we talked about carnivores, and we talked about them in relation to streaming. We haven't touched on streaming yet, and this will be our opportunity to dig down into it, but mm-hmm.For the listeners, can we revisit where that came from, what that means, and also where this is heading? What does this mean for music streaming right now as it relates to the services and competition?[00:35:24] Will Page: Well, when I first came on Trapital, that was in a small Spanish village of Cayo De Suria and I didn't think I'd come up with an expression that would go viral from a small village in Spain to be, you know, quoted from in Canada, in America.And Dan, this is quite hilarious. we have a new secretary of state of culture here in the UK. The right Honorable MP, Lucy Fraser KG, Smart as a whip. Brilliant. And when I first met her, you know what the first thing she said was, I listened to you on Trapital. I wanted to ask you about this thing you've got going called herbivores and carnivores.So right the way through to the corridors of power, this expression seems to have traveled. What are we talking about? Well, the way I framed it was for 20 years we've had these streaming services, which essentially grow without damaging anyone else. Amazon is up. Bigger subscriber numbers. Apple's got bigger subscriber numbers.YouTube and Nancy's bigger subscriber numbers. And then Spotify. Nancy's bigger subscriber numbers. Everyone's growing each other's gardens. That's fine. That's herbivores. What happens when you reach that saturation point where there's no more room to grow? The only way I can grow my business is stealing some of yours.That's carnivores. And the greatest example is simply telcos. We're all familiar with telcos. We all pay our broadband bills. How do telcos compete? Everybody in your town's got a broadband account, so the only way you can compete is by stealing someone else's business. The only way here in Britain Virgin Media can compete is by stealing some of skies.The only way that at and t competes is by stealing some of com. So that's carnival competition. Now, the key point for Trapital listeners is we don't know what this chapter is gonna read like cuz we've never had carus pronounce that word correctly. Carus behavior before. We've never seen a headline that said, Spotify's down 2 million subs and apple's up 2 million, or Amazon's up 3 million and you know, YouTube is down 3 million.We don't know what that looks like. So I think it's important for Trapital to start thinking about logical, plausible scenarios. You kick a one obvious one, which is again, a lesson from the telcos. When we do become carnivores, do we compete on price or do we compete on features? Let me wheel this back a second, you know, we'll get into pricing in more depth later. But downward competition on price tends to be how carnivores compete, and that'll be a fascinating development given that we've not seen much change in price in 22 years in counting or as we saw with Apple, they roll out spatial audio, they charge more for it, they've got a new feature, and they charge more for that feature.So do we see downward competition blood on the carpet price competition, or do we see. Upward competition based on features. I don't know which one it's gonna be. It's not for me to call it. I don't work for any of these companies. I've worked with these companies, but I don't work for any of them directly.But we have to start discussing these scenarios. How's this chapter gonna read when we start learning of net churn amongst the four horseman streaming services that's out there. It's gonna be a fascinating twist, and I'm beginning, Dan, I'm beginning to see signs of con behavior happening right now, to be honest with you.I can see switchers happening across the four, so I think we're getting there in the US and the UK. What are those signs you see? I'm just seeing that in terms of subscriber growth, it's a lot bumpier than before. Before it is just a clear trajectory. The intelligence I was getting was, everyone's up, no one needs to bother.Now I flag, you know, I signed the siren. I'm beginning to see, you know, turbulence in that subscriber growth. Someone could be down one month, up the next month. Maybe that's just a little bit of churn. The ending of a trial period, you don't know. But now for me, the smoke signals are some of those services are seeing their gross stutter.Others are growing, which means we could start having some switching. I can add to that as well. Cross usage is key here. I really hammered this home during my 10 years at Spotify, which is to start plotting grids saying, who's using your service? This person, that person, and next person now ask what other services are they using?And some data from America suggests that one in four people using Apple music are also using Spotify. And one in four people using Spotify are also using Apple Music. Cross usage confirmed. So if that was true, what do you make of that? With a public spending squeeze? With inflation, with people becoming more cost conscious in the economy with less disposable income, maybe they wanna wheel back from that and use just one, not two. And that's where we could start seeing some net churn effects taking place as well. So, you know, imagine a cross usage grid in whatever business you're working on. If your Trapital listeners and ask that question, I know who's using my stuff, what else are they using? Um, that's a really, really important question to ask to work out how this carnivore scenario is gonna play out.How are we gonna write this chapter?[00:40:23] Dan Runcie: This is interesting because it reminds me of the comparisons that people often make to video streaming and some of the dynamics there where prices have increased over the years. I know we've talked about it before to tend to a 12 years ago Netflix was cheaper than Spotify was from a monthly, US price group subscription.And now tough, tough. It's right. And now it's nearly twice the price of the current price point. That it is. The difference though, when we're talking about when you are in that carnival, when you're in that carnival market, what do you compete on? Features or price? Video streaming, you can compete on features essentially because the content is differentiated.If you want to watch Wednesday, that Netflix series is only one platform that you can watch it on. Yeah, you need to have that Netflix subscription, but in music it's different because if you wanna listen to SZA's SOS album, that's been dominating the charts. You can listen to it on any of these services.So because there are fewer and fewer limitations, at least, if your goal, main goal from a consumption perspective is to listen to the music, how do you then differentiate, which I do think can put more pressure on price, which is very interesting because there is this broader pricing debate that's happening right now about why prices should be higher.And we've seen in the past six plus months that Apple has at least raised its prices. Amazon has done the same, at least for new subscribers. Spotify has announced that it will but hasn't yet and this is part of that dynamic because on one hand you have these broader economic trends as you're calling them out, but on the other hand you do have the rights holders and others pushing on prices to increase.And then you have the dynamic between the rights holders and then the streaming services about who would then get the increased revenue that comes. So there's all of these fascinating dynamics that are intersecting with this her before shift to carnivores[00:42:23] Will Page: For sure. Let me just go around the block of those observations you offered us. All relevant, all valid and just, you know, pick off a few of them. If we go back to Netflix, I think Netflix has a, not a herbivore. I'm gonna talk about alcohol here cause it's late in the day in the UK. A gin and tonic relationship with its competitors. That is, if Dan Runcie doesn't pay for any video streaming service, and let's say Netflix gets you in and I'm the head of Disney plus, I say, well, thank you Netflix.That makes it easier for me to get Dan to pay for Disney Plus too. They compliment each other. They are genuine complimentary goods. They might compete for attention. You know who's got the best exclusive content, who's gonna renew the friends deal, whatever, you know, who's gonna get Fresh Prince of Bel Air on?That could be a switch or piece of content too, but when you step back from it, it's gin and tonic. It's not different brands of gin, that's really important technology, which is they've grown this market of video streaming. They've increased their prices and the same person's paying for 2, 3, 4 different packages.If I added up, I'm giving video streaming about 60 quid a month, and I'm giving music streaming 10 and the sixties going up and the music's staying flat. So it's bizarre what's happened in video streaming because the content is exclusive. Back to, how do music carnivores play out again? Could we see it play out in features?I listen to airport cause they've got classical and I listen to Spotify because it got discovered weekly. Is that plausible? Personally, I don't buy it, but you can sow that seed and see if it takes root, as well. I think just quick pause and Apple as well. I think two things there. They've launched Apple Classical. That's a very, very good example of differentiating a product because it's a standalone app like podcast as a standalone app. The way I look at that is you can go to the supermarket and buy all your shopping. You can get your Tropicana orange juice, you can get your bread, get your eggs, get your meat, get your fish or you could go to a specialist butcher and buy your meat there instead. Apple Classical for me is the specialist butcher as opposed to the supermarket, and they're offering both in the same ecosystem. It'd be incredible if they preload out the next iOS update and give 850 million people an Apple classical app.Imagine if they did that for Jazz, my friend. Imagine if they did that for jazz. Just if Apple's listening, repeat, do that for jazz. So there's one example. The other example from Apple is to go back to bundling. You know we talk about 9.99 a month. I chewed your ear off about this topic last time I was on your show.Just to remind your listeners, where did it come from? This price point in pound Sterling, in Euro in dollar that we still pay for on the 20th of May, 2023. It came from a Blockbuster video rental card that is when reps, he got its license on the 3rd of December, 2001. Not long after nine 11, a record label exec said if it cost nine 90 nines, rent movies from Blockbuster.That's what it should cost to rent music. And 22 years plus on, we're still there, ran over. But what does this mean for bumbling strategies? How much does Apple really charge? If I give $30 a month for Apple One, which is tv, music, gaming news, storage and fitness, all wrapped up into one price. Now, there's a famous Silicon Valley investi called James Barksdale.Dunno if you've heard of him from the Bay Area where you're based. And he had this famous quote where he said, gentlemen, there's only two ways to make money in business. Bundling and unbundling. What we've had for the past 10 years is herbivores. Unbundling. Pay for Netflix, don't pay for Comcast. Pay for Spotify. Don't pay for your CDs, fine. What we might have in the next 10 years is carnivores bundling, which is a pendulum, swings back towards convenience of the bundle and away from the individual items. So Apple, take 30 bucks a month off my bank balance. Please take 40. All I want is one direct debit. I don't care about the money, I just want the bundle.And I don't want to see 15 direct debits every month. I just wanna see one. I think that's a very plausible scenario for how the next 10 years it's gonna play out as we shift from herbivores to carnivores[00:46:31] Dan Runcie: And the bundle benefits, the companies that have the ability to do that, right? You can do that through Amazon Prime and get your video, your music, your free shipping or whatever is under that umbrella. You could do that through Apple. You mentioned all the elements under Apple one. Spotify has some element of this as well, whether it's exclusive podcasting and things like that. So you're starting to see these things happen, one thing that you mentioned though earlier, you're talking about going through the supermarket and all of the items that you could get there versus going to the specialty butcher.One of the unique aspects of the supermarket thing though, is that. You go into the supermarket, yes, you can get your high-end Tropicana, or you can get the generic store brand, but you're gonna pay more for that high-end Tropicana because you're paying for the brand, you're paying for everything else that isn't gonna necessarily be the same as the generic one.That may not necessarily be the same quality or the same taste. We're seeing this a bit in the streaming landscape now and some of the debates that were happening. You've heard the major record label executives talk about how they don't necessarily want their premium music. They see their content as HBO level and it's being in a playlist next to rain music, or it's next to your uncle that is playing some random song on the banjo and they're getting essentially the same price going to the rights holders for that song.And in the supermarket that's obviously very different, each item has its own differentiator there, or econ has its own price point there and its own cost, but that isn't necessarily the same thing in music. Of course, the cost of each of those tracks may be different, but the revenue isn't. So that's gonna be, or that already is a whole debate that's going on right now. Do you have thoughts on that?[00:48:21] Will Page: Well, you tossed top Tropicana, let me go grab that carton for a second. It's one of the best economic lessons I ever learned was visiting a supermarket in America cuz it's true to say that when you go into one of your American supermarkets, an entire aisle of that precious shelf space, it's dedicated to selling inferior brands of orange juice next to Tropicana.Just very quickly what's happening there, the undercover economist, if you want, is a bargaining power game. Tropicana knows The reason Dan Runcie pulled the car over, got the trolley, went into that supermarket is to get a staple item of Tropicana and other stuff. By the time it gets to the till, Tropicana could be $5.By the time he gets to till he spent $50. So here, subscriber acquisition cost contribution is really high. They're getting you into the mall. What you do once you're in the mall is anyone's business, but they got you in. Otherwise you would've gone to the deli across the street. So they could say to the supermarket, I'm gonna charge you $7 to sell that Tropicana for $5 in my supermarket.Supermarket knows this, they know that Tropicana's got the bargaining paris. They counter by saying, here's an entire shell space of awful brands of orange juice to curb your bargaining power to see if the consumer wants something different. Now is this Will Page taking a stupid pill and digressing down Tropicana Alley. No. Let's think about this for a second today, Dan, there's a hundred thousand songs being onboarded onto streaming services. Is there anybody what? Marching up and down Capitol Hill saying We want a hundred thousand songs. No, the floodgates have opened them. It's all this content. Two new podcasts being launched every minute.All this content, all of these alternative brands to Tropicana. But you just wanted one. And I think the record labels argument here is that one Cardinal Tropicana is worth more than everything else you're offering by its side. So we wanna rebalance the scales. Now this gets really tricky and very contentious, but what is interesting, if you wanna take a cool head on this topic, it's to learn from the collecting studies, which is not the sexiest thing to say on a Trapital podcast, but it's to look at your Scaps and your BMIs and understand how they distribute the value of money for music.Since their foundation in the 1930s, scap has never, ever treated music to have the same value. They have rules, qualifications, distribution, allocation practices, which change the value of music. And they don't have data scientists then. And to be honest, I don't think they have data scientists now, but they always have treated the value of music differently.When they were founded, they had a classical music distribution pot and a distribution pot for music that wasn't classical music. Ironically, their board was full of classical composers, and I think that's called embezzlement, but we'll leave that to the side. What we have here is a story of recognizing music as different value in the world of collecting Saudi.I call that Jurassic Park, but in the world of music streaming with all those software developers and engineers and data scientists, 22 years of 9.99 money coming in and the Prorata model, which means every song is worth the same for money going out, and that's your tension. That's your tension. How do you get off that?Tension is anyone's business. We got some ideas we can discuss. User-centric is one, autocentric is another. I've got a few ideas for my own, but I want your audience to appreciate. In straight no chaser language we call it. That's the undercurrent of what's going on here. How do you introduce Trapitalism to communism?[00:51:38] Dan Runcie: You mentioned there's artist centric, user-centric, but you mentioned some ideas you had of your own. What are those ideas?[00:51:44] Will Page: Can I bounce it off? Use my intellectual punch bag for a quick second. Yes, and I've worked 'em all. I've worked on the artist centric model. I've worked on artist growth models. That's up on YouTube. I've worked on user centric, but I'm just, I'm worried that these models, these propositions could collapse the royalty systems that these streaming services work under. The introduction of user centric or artist centric could become so complex, so burdensome, the royalty systems could break down.That's a genuine concern I have. It's not one you discuss when you talk about your aspirations and the land of milk and honey of our new streaming model that you envisage. Back in the engine room when you see how royalties are allocated and calculated and distributed out to right holders, I mean they're under stress anyway.Any more stress could snap it. So I come at this model, my proposition from the one that's least likely to break the system. I'm not saying it's the best model, but it's the least like least likely to have adverse impact on the system. And it came from my DCMS Select Committee performance in the UK Parliament, which your listeners can watch, we can give the link out, which is I said to the committee in terms of how you could change the model.What about thinking about duration? This wheel back since 1980s when B BBC radio plays, let's say Bohemian Rhapsody, it will pay for that song twice what it would pay for. You're my best friend, members of Queen wrote both songs, both released within three, four years of each other, but one lasts twice as long as another.So duration is not new. We factor in duration a lot in our music industry. We just never thought about it. If you look at Mexico, the Mexican collecting Saudi, which is so corrupt as an inside an army barracks, if you look there, they have sliding scales, duration. They factor in time, but they say the second minute is what?Less than the first. But I'm giving you more for more time just adding, decreasing scale. Germany, they have ranges in your country. America, mechanical licensing collective, the MLC in Nashville, they have overtime songs that last more than six minutes get a 1.2 multiplier. So I've been thinking about how could you introduce duration to this business?And the idea I've come up with is not to measure time. That'd be too complex, too burdensome. Every single song, measuring every second of consumption. How do you audit there? If you're an artist manager, but I wanna measure completion, then I think this is the answer. I want songs that are completed in full to receive a bonus and songs that are skipped before they end to receive a penalty.Not a huge bonus, not a huge penalty, but a tweak. A nudge that says, I value your attention. I value great songs, and you listen to these great songs and it captures my entire attention. You deserve something more. But if I skipped out after the first chorus, you deserve something less. I think that small nudge is a nudge in the right direction for this industry, and it wouldn't break the systems.So there it is. Tell me now, have I taken a stupid pill?[00:54:42] Dan Runcie: What I like about it, and I've heard other people in the industry mention this too, you're able to get something closer to what we do see in video streaming. I forget which app is specifically, but their threshold is 75%. So they acknowledge that yes, if you don't wanna watch the credits, you don't wanna listen to the closeout, that's fine.But if we at least get you for 75%, then we are gonna count that, and then that then can get used internally. That can then get used in different areas. But I think it provides everyone better data and analysis, much better data to be able to break down than. Whether or not you listen to the first 30 seconds, that's such a low threshold, but that's essentially where we are today.I think the biggest thing, regardless of what path is chosen, because as you and I both know, there's trade-offs to everyone. So instead of going through all the negative parts about it, I think it's probably more helpful to talk about it collectively, you accept the fact that there are trade-offs. You accept the fact that people are gonna try to game the system regardless of how you go about it.Because we have seen duration work elsewhere and it does get at that particular thing that we're trying to get at there is help there. And you mentioned other things such as, yes, if you're listening to the Bohemian Rhapsody, you, which I think is at least seven minutes and 15 seconds, most likely longer versus two minute song that is clearly idealized for the streaming era.There still should be maybe some slight difference there because listening to a minute and 30 seconds is very different than listening to five minute and 45 seconds to be able to hit that 75% threshold. So between that and then I've heard other topics such as which artists you start your session with should have some type of multiplier on there, and as opposed to someone that gets algorithmically recommended to you to be able to put some more onus on the on-demand nature of music streaming.The tough thing is that these things do get tough in general. Anytime there's any type of multiplier or factor in, there still is a zero sum pot that we're taking the money out of. So accepting the trade-offs, I like the direction, I think that there's a few ways to go about it that could make it more interesting, but in general, I do think that any of the proposed options I've seen at least, allow a bit more of a true economic reflection of where the reality is as opposed to where things are today.And I understand where things are today. It's easy. It's easy to report, it's easy to collect on and pay people out, relatively speaking. But like anything, there's trade offs.[00:57:14] Will Page: Yeah, it's really easy today. Even drummers can work out their royalties and no offense to drummers, but that's telling you something.But two points on my dura

In the four episodes that preceded this one, during the Civil War, Annie Franklin, a nineteen-year-old woman who happens to have psychic gifts, had come to Virginia to take her brother, Daniel, a badly wounded Union soldier, back home to Connecticut for care. It had been a difficult and trying time. After attempting to take advantage of her, an unscrupulous Union captain angrily refused to give her the furlough she needed. Then, when she went back to the field hospital to see what she could do for her brother, she found that it was basically deserted, and along with a few hundred other soldiers, he had been left there to die.   Overwhelmed by their desperate situation, she had gone out into the field to try to think, but broke into tears and ended up sobbing into her lap. Unexpectedly, a man dressed in buckskin riding clothes came over and offered to help her. He took her by the arm and started walking her towards a table where some soldiers had gathered. But she was still shaken by the terrible experience she had when the army captain had tried to molest her, and she pulled her arm away, refusing to move until the stranger told her his intentions. The man assured her that he was acting in her best interests and as the episode ended, the two of them stood facing each other as she tried to decide if she could trust him. And now, the story continues…                                    *             *             *   He took her by the arm again. She intuitively felt her body relax and began to walk along with him before she had consciously made up her mind to do it, which surprised her. As they approached the table, the soldiers immediately looked up with attention.           “Do you happen to have a paper with your brother's name on it?” he asked Annie.           “Why yes, I do. I have his enlistment certificate,” she said.           “Oh perfect,” he responded and held out his hand “Give it to me.”           She couldn't tell if he had given her an order or made a statement of assistance, but he spoke with total authority and complete confidence. She handed him the paper, and when he took it, she felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders.           “Fred, we still have a few furloughs left in the pack, don't we?” he asked one of the men at the table.           “I think we have a few left,” the man replied.           “Good,” he said, putting the enlistment certificate on the table.  “Fill one out for this young lady's brother, will ya?”           “Sure thing,” the man said, rifling through the certificates that were neatly filed in a leather saddlebag. “Be happy to.”           “A furlough?” Annie asked, hardly believing her ears. “I thought you could only get them at the War Department.”            “Well, things are not always the way they seem,” the man responded.  As the clerk at the table filled out the papers, the man in buckskin motioned to two other soldiers who joined them.           “This girl's brother is in the infirmary tent. I want you to get them to Georgetown right away,” he said quietly. “Go tell Serling to dress up as a doctor and dress Willoughby up as another wounded soldier.  Take the two snipers and dress them up as orderlies. They'll all travel along as one party.           “Georgetown is a great place for them to lay low for a few days. They'll know where to go. Tell them that once we get things set up, I'll get their orders to them.”           He looked over at Annie, who was clearly amazed by what was happening.  “This really came along at just the right time,” he said, smiling at her. “It's perfect.”           “All done, Charlie,” the man at the table reported to the man in buckskin. He walked over and read the papers.  After a moment he signed the furlough and handed it to Annie. “Here you go,” he said to her with a smile.           “So that's it?” she asked him. “I don't need to go to another doctor and I don't need to get an army officer to authorize this? This is all we need?”           “That's right,” the man replied. “We just took care of all that here. You don't need to do anything further. Just get your poor brother some care and bring him back to health.  A military escort will transport you to your friends' house.”           He then walked over to the table and started talking to the soldiers. After a moment Annie walked over to them.           “Um, pardon me, but when do you think we'll be able to go?” Annie asked tentatively. “I don't think Daniel can last here more than a few more days, maybe a week at most. Longer than that, I - ”           “Oh, I'm sorry,” he interrupted her. “I wasn't clear. You're going today. I put a rush on it. They'll probably have you both on the road within an hour. Two at the most.” “Oh my God!” Annie said quietly, almost to herself. “Oh my God,” she repeated as she breathed in a deep sigh of relief. “Everything will be taken care of for you from here,” the man continued. “Now you just do what the soldiers tell you to do and you and your brother will be in Georgetown before nightfall.” “Oh my God!” Annie quietly repeated again. It seemed to be all she could express, the unexpected change in their fate had happened so suddenly, she could hardly think straight. The air was cold and still reeked of death, but now she was filled with gratitude, and everything was different. She held out her hand to the noble stranger. He shook it and held it in his and said, “Miss, it's been an honor to meet you. You came at just the right time.” He paused for a moment and added soberly, “Good luck to you and your family in this bitter time of trial for us all.”           “Sir,” she responded.  “I just want to say, really from the bottom of my heart, I just want to say,” she stopped and looked him squarely in the eyes. “I just want to say… thank you.”           “You're most welcome,” he replied. He patted her on the hand, then buttoned up his buckskin jacket. He gave her one last look, then turned and walked toward his horse, a huge golden stallion with a bright white mane.           He put on his brown leather riding hat and mounted the massive steed that seemed to welcome him into the saddle. It eagerly shook its head and snorted, like it couldn't wait to run. He turned the horse away from Annie and sat in the saddle for a few moments, gazing out at the field. He seemed to be deciding which way to go. The day had brightened, the sun was shining, and the stinging rawness had gone out of the air.  He continued to survey the scene as Annie watched him from behind the horse.  With this simple act of kindness, he had ended her horrible ordeal and saved her brother's life. It was far beyond anything she could have hoped for. But who was this mysterious stranger? He was clearly in charge of the soldiers at the table, but he seemed kind of young for that.  Obviously, he was deeply involved with the brutality of the escalating war. Yet there was a steely kind of optimism about him…a sense of confidence in that ultimately - the power of good would prevail. As she looked up at him, she became overwhelmed, not only by what had he had just done for her, but also by the man in the saddle, himself. He muttered something to his horse, it turned around and, he was face to face with Annie once again. On horseback he certainly cut a striking figure. But she suddenly realized how handsome he actually was, and she stared up at him like he was a gift from above. They looked at each other for what seemed like a very long moment. Then with a warm, yet slightly coy smile he said, “Well, I'll tell you one thing, Miss Annie Franklin, your brother is certainly one lucky soldier!”           No man had ever looked at her quite like that before. There was something endearing in his eyes, but there was also something more than that. A thrill rippled through her and she felt the blood rush into her head. Even though she was already nineteen, she came from a small town, had been sickly as a child and had no experience with men at all.  Her breath quickened and she blushed as red as a beet.           “Who knows?” he finally said, “Maybe our paths will cross again someday. You take care of yourself ‘til then, okay?' “I will,” she said with a subtle smile as her face lit up like a budding rose.  “I'll take that as a promise,” he said with a knowing look and turned the horse around. Giving it a slight nudge, it lunged forward and then galloped away. She stared at him for a few moments until he finally disappeared over the horizon.            “Is this really real?” Annie asked abstractedly. “I mean this is real, isn't it?”           “Pardon me, Miss?” asked the soldier who was sitting at the table near her. She turned to him and put the paper on the table.           “Oh. I mean the furlough,” she said, quickly changing her focus. “It's real, isn't it?  I mean, that man wasn't even in uniform. Can he really do what he just did?” she asked.           “Well, his kind never dress in uniform. They run undercover. But that furlough is as good as gold.  You see his signature there?” the man pointed at the paper. “You see that - Charles Keane – BDF.”           “Yes,” Annie said. “Does that mean something?”           “You bet it does. BDF stands for the Baker Detective Force and that means a hell of a lot. They're a top-secret group, the Bakers. Nobody really knows that much about them.  I think there's only about 12 of them in the whole army. But you see that signature there? That can only be overruled by a four star General.”             She stared at Keane's signature on the furlough. The soldier gave her a kind pat on the hand, then added reassuringly, “You're safe now, Miss. You can relax.”   *        *        *             It was dusk when Annie stood and watched as two soldiers carried the stretcher holding her semi-conscious brother into the parlor of the Harrison's home. Just a few hours earlier, on the hospital grounds, she had been staring into the pits of hell, only inches away from having to make a vulgar deal with the devil. Then unexpectedly within minutes, the dark scene had suddenly filled with light, her troubles had vanished, and now she could see a clear pathway home.           Filled with gratitude, she lit a candle on a nearby table and heaved a deep sigh of relief. Finally able to relax, she sat down and stared at Daniel's peaceful face, glowing in the warm, flickering candlelight. He had fallen asleep and was snoring softly. Smiling, she gazed contentedly at his chest, rising and falling with the steady flow of his rhythmic breath.             And so ends the story of when the psychic met the spy. And this is also the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let's get together in the next one.            

Hi! Today, I… Oh, excuse me… "Hello. Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm very busy. Bye." Sorry, I just had a phone call. Speaking of phone calls, let me tell you all about the world's first "drone call". 不好意思，我剛剛在講電話。說到電話，讓我告訴你世界上第一個用無人機打電話的故事。 Drones are small machines that fly. Some drones have cameras. A man called Casey lives in Oregon. It snows there in the winter. One day, he drove his car into the mountains. There was so much snow, his car couldn't move. Casey: Oh no! Casey 住在奧勒岡州，那裏冬天會下雪。有一天，他在山上開車的時候，被積雪困住了。 Casey tried to use his cellphone. He wanted to send a text message. But his cellphone wouldn't work! There was too much snow! Casey 想要用手機傳簡訊，但是發不出去。 Casey is a photographer. His job is taking pictures. This means he has a camera drone in his car. He tied his cellphone to the drone. Casey 是專業攝影師，他的車上有一台空拍機。他把手機綁在空拍機上。 His drone flew high into the sky! Casey's plan worked! His cellphone was sending texts again! 結果成功了！他的空拍機飛上天空，發出了簡訊。 People quickly came to help him. Casey was saved. 不久後就有人來幫忙了，Casey 就得救了！ ________________________________ Vocabulary 手機簡訊被積雪擋住發不出去，把手機送上天就解決了這個問題。 1. message 訊息 Did you read my message? 你有看我的簡訊嗎？ No, I don't think I got any messages from you. 沒有，我好像沒收到你的簡訊。 2. send 發送 But I sent it to you last night. 但是我昨晚發送的。 It should be in your cellphone.應該在你的手機裡。 My cellphone was out of power for a while. 我的手機有一段時間沒電。 3. tell 告訴 What did you want to tell me, anyway? 不管怎樣，你想跟我講什麼？ Don't drive up the mountain. 不要開車上山。 There'll be snow on the road. 路上會有積雪。 4. snow 下雪 I'd love to see the snow! 我很想看到雪！ Don't worry, I'll drive carefully. 別擔心，我會小心開車。 今天學到哪些單字？ message 訊息 send 發送 tell 告訴 snow 下雪 ________________________________ Quiz 1. What is a drone? A: A new cellphone B: A kind of car C: A machine that can fly 2. Where does Casey live? A: Origin B: Oregon C: Oregano 3. What is Casey's job? A: Mountain climber B: Driver C: Photographer Answers 1. C 2. B 3. C

Tune in as Michael Jamin talks with his good friend, actor Rick Negron who plays King George in Hamilton. Discover what he has to say about being the first Latino King George, doing his first show in his home country of Puerto Rico alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda who was acting as Hamilton, and his overall Hamilton touring and acting career experience.Show NotesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rick_negron/?hl=enIMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0624508/?ref_=nmmi_mi_nmIBDB: https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/rick-negron-107348The Spokesman-Review: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/apr/28/youll-be-back-in-playing-king-george-iii-in-hamilt/Michael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Watchlist - https://michaeljamin.com/watchlistAutomated Transcript:Rick Negron (00:00:00):That's still the case nowadays for a lot of young dancers and, and musical theater types. They go to New York and they take dance classes and they take voice lessons, and they take acting classes, and they get that picture and resume ready, and they go to open calls. And if you're talented and you're lucky sometimes you, you get an equity show, a, a union show from an open call. It's tough. And you have to, you have to hit that pavement. And sometimes, you know, getting to know, being in the right place at the right time. I, I, I was mentioning to you before that I, I booked this H B O commercial and I met more a dancer on that show who said, Hey, you'd be right for the show. And one of the guys is leaving the show and they're having auditions at the theater, and you should go. And that's how I got my first Broadway show.Michael Jamin (00:00:50):You're listening to Screenwriters. Need to hear this with Michael Jamin.Michael Jamin (00:00:58):Hey everyone, it's Michael Jamin. Welcome to Screenwriters. Need to hear this. If you are an aspiring theatrical actor, I got a present for you and we're gonna unwrap him right now. And his name is Rick Negron. And he's been my buddy for many years. He's at my wedding. We go back, Rick. Now Rick is most famous for probably, he's done a ton of stuff though, but he's probably most famous for playing the role of king George in the touring company of Hamilton, which he's been doing for four years. But he's done a ton of Broadway stuff. We're gonna talk about him. He's also done voices. I didn't know this, but he was also he does vo he did some voices in Red Dead Redemption as well as grand Theft Auto, which I wanna know all about that as well. But mostly I wanna talk about his incredible theatrical acting career. Rick, thank you so much. Thank you so much for . ForRick Negron (00:01:47):What? Michael Jamin? I'm in the room. I'm, I'm in the room where it happens, man.Michael Jamin (00:01:52):, this is the room. This, what people don't realize is that I recorded some of this and I bone, I didn't, I didn't record, so, yeah. And this is, this is part two of our interview. I had a record over cuz I wasn't recording. StuffRick Negron (00:02:03):Happens. And you know what, Michael, you, you and I can talk till the cows come home. This is not a problem.Michael Jamin (00:02:09):This Rick's great guy, and he's gonna tell us all about. I, I, I had, so there's so much I wanted to get outta you, but first of all, what I, we were talking about is, you've been doing Hamilton, you've been King George and Hamilton, the first Latino King George, I might say, which is a big deal. And so yeah, you've been touring the country from city to city, and I kind of really wanted to talk to you about like, what is your, what is your day like when you go up on stage, you know, what are you doing before, what you're doing all before that, before you got on stage, because it's a, you've been done. How many performances have you said you're done? This,Rick Negron (00:02:44):I'm over 900 easily. I'm close to like nine 50. I, I, I don't count 'em, but every time the, the company management has like, oh, this is our 900th performance, I just kind of go, well, I've only missed maybe about between vacations and days that I've been sick. Maybe I've missed 30 at the most over a four year period. , that's, I've, I've done a lot of performancesMichael Jamin (00:03:11):And, and we were talking about this and your character, like I, I've, I hate to make you repeat it, but how do you get, like, how do you get psyched up before each show when you do that many shows? How are you, what's your process before you, you run on stage?Rick Negron (00:03:27):Well, this, this character is a real gift in the sense that it's beautifully written. Mm-Hmm. , it's just three songs. honestly, Uhhuh . I'm on stage for a little over 10 minutes, but it's so well written that if I just hook into the words of, of the songs, I got 'em. Uhhuh you. I, I, I can, I can hook my myself into that myself, into that character very easily, just with the words. But the other gift is that I have time to get ready. So when every, when the show, when we are at places and the show starts, that's when I get my wig on. Mm-Hmm. I still have 15 minutes to do some vocal warmups and get dressed. And are youMichael Jamin (00:04:12):To being like tea with lemon? What are you sit, what are you doing that day?Rick Negron (00:04:16):Nah, nah. I, I mean, I'm not a huge tea guy unless, unless I'm having some vocal distress. And then I do like a nice warm tea with honey and lemon if I'm, if, if my voice is a little wonky or my throat's a little sore. But the main thing for me for vocal capacity is sleep. If I get less than seven hours, my voice suffers. If I eat a lot of cheese and dairy, that's gonna be a lot of gunk on the vocal courts.Michael Jamin (00:04:45):But if you're nervous the nightRick Negron (00:04:46):BeforeMichael Jamin (00:04:47):Hmm. But if you're nervous, if you have, if you get stage nerves and you can't sleep the night before , right? I mean, no. Are you, are you beyond that?Rick Negron (00:04:55):Yeah, I'm beyond that. I mean, I've been in the business long enough that, that I, I get nervous. Uhhuh and God knows, I was nervous the first time I did the show in front of an audience in Puerto Rico of all places. Right. That's where we opened, right. With Lynn Manuel Miranda back in the role of Hamilton after being a away from it for a few years. That was a dream job because I'm from Puerto Rico and I literally went back homeMichael Jamin (00:05:23):To a heroRick Negron (00:05:23):Welcome star and one of the biggest shows on Broadway with Lynn Manuel Miranda and me playing the king. Yeah. I was born like four blocks away from the theater that we were at. It was just crazy sauce. So yes, I was incredibly nervous opening night. And there was my wife, my sister-in-law, in the audience you know, yes. Really nervous. But did I lose sleep the night before? No. I slept like a baby. No, really? My nerves don't really hit me until I start putting on that costumeMichael Jamin (00:05:51):. Really? Yeah. I see. I would imagine to me, I mean, I know it's a big deal to be star of a movie, but to me this to me seems like a bigger deal. What you, what you're doing in terms of, it seems like a you are lead in this giant freaking play that, I mean, one of the biggest plays, you know, of our, of our time on. Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And you are these, you play this character who the minute he walks on stage, the place goes nuts cuz you hit a home run and then you walk out, you're the home run guy. Exactly. Bye. Hello. No. ExpectRick Negron (00:06:21):Bye. And by the way, no expectation. I'd literally walk on stage and the place goes bananas. And I haven't saidMichael Jamin (00:06:26):A word. Right. They love you before. You haven't even said anything. I mean, what a huge, I don't know. I just think this is like, I don't know, if I were an aspiring actors, that would be the part. I don't see how you, I don't know how, where you go from here, Rick Rick Negron (00:06:41):. It's all downhillMichael Jamin (00:06:43):.Rick Negron (00:06:45):No, I guess listen, it, the beauty of it is also that I've had this really long career mm-hmm. and, you know, I started out as a chorus boy on Broadway and then worked myself into understudy and then did some roles. And then finally at, at a ripe old age. I've gotten this great job and I've really, I'm at the point in my life where I'm really enjoying it. Yeah. I'm enjoying the process. I'm enjoying the traveling cuz I, I, I've toured some, but I haven't toured a lot. And this tour has been to some really great cities all on the west coast up and down the west coast. Yeah, the mountain west. In the winter I got some snowboarding in, in Salt Lake City, Denver. I,Michael Jamin (00:07:33):Where are you supposed to do that with you if you break your leg?Rick Negron (00:07:36):Yeah, I'm not supposed to do that. Can we delete that from the podcast? ? We can take that out. . It's in the past. I don't care. Okay. I, I stayed on the bunny slopes. I Right. I really took it easy. But then we spent summer in Canada, which was amazing. I was up in Calgary in the summer and went up to band for the first time in my life. And my wife, Leslie, who you know well, came up to visit and we stayed on Emerald Lake and I just spent two months in Hawaii. So this tour has just been amazing. Well, it started out in Puerto Rico, as I said, right. For a month with Manuel Miranda. And then we went to San Francisco and sat for a, a year in San Francisco. So I got to live in San Francisco Right. For a year and experienced that incredible city until the pandemic. And then we shut down for a year and four months before we started up again.Michael Jamin (00:08:27):And then, and then So how did you start? We, how did you start? Like, you know, take me back. I know you, I know you were, take me back to when you were a child. Did you, I mean, this is, did you dream of being a Broadway star like this? Like, what happened? Who, who dreams of that? Like who, how, I mean, you all dream of that, but who achieves it, I guess?Rick Negron (00:08:46):Well, a lot of people do. A lot of people do. And, and, and not everybody has the path that I had, but some of us get bitten by the bug early on. And I got bitten by the bug when I was 10. Right. And my mom was the drama teacher at school. And I guess I blame her for everything. But this mustMichael Jamin (00:09:06):Be the be like, you must be the, the crowning achievement in her, in her in her life.Rick Negron (00:09:12):Yeah. She's, but I did, she's pretty proud. And I have ano another sister who also went in into theater and and so the whole family kind of w it was the family thing we all sang. Right. we all did mu mu musicals in the local community theater and children's theater. So it was a family thing for us growing up. But I'm the one that sort of got bitten hard. And then I got involved, like at 14 mm-hmm. a choreographer. I was doing a, a mu a children's theater show, said, Hey, you've got some talent as a dancer. Come take, I'll give you a scholarship at my little dance school. And so after school at 14, I would go take ballet, jazz, tap and acrobatics after school with Susan Cable, who luckily was a great dance teacher. She had been a, a chorus person on Broadway.(00:10:05):Wow. And, and, and that's what, how I started in my dance career. And then it kind of took off. And by the time I got to college I thought I was gonna be a, a concert dancer. I was in college, I was sort of groomed to, to, to possibly go into the Paul Taylor Dance company. And I actually was not on scholarship. I was a intern with a Paul Taylor dance company for a while until I realized I'm making no money. I'm working super hard and I've always wanted to be on Broadway. That was my realMichael Jamin (00:10:42):Dream. So those people don't interchange those concert dancers. Don't, they don't.Rick Negron (00:10:46):Some do it. Usually the concert dancers, if they can sing.Michael Jamin (00:10:52):Right.Rick Negron (00:10:54):Will, will sort of move into the musical theater world and sometimes move back into the concert dance world. One of the great concert dancers of all time who I met when he was super young, Desmond Richardson mm-hmm. he was a lead dancer with the Alban AI company for many, many, many years. I mean a God in the dance world. And now he owns his own owns, he runs his own dance company, complexions. And he's a great choreographer. And he was in the bad video with me back in the day with Michael Jackson. Right.Michael Jamin (00:11:30):So Rick was in the, I should say for the, I don't wanna gloss over this. Rick. Rick was in the a dance for, in the Michael Jackson's bad video directed by Martin Scorsese. Yeah. Was Quincy Jones produced?Rick Negron (00:11:41):Yeah, 1985. I was, I was a chorus dancer at the time. I was in I was doing my second Broadway show. The mystery of Evan, Dr. My dance captain was Rob Marshall. went on to direct Chicago, the movie and many other movies since then. And, and while I was doing the show, there was this audition for the bad video and yeah, it was, it was really surreal. I took vacation from, from the Broadway show to do the video and, and, and got to meet Michael who was really sort of like, it was two people in that body. I mean, he was super shy and, and sort of very reserved, but the minute the cameras went on it, he was, he became somebody else. Right. And he was a perfectionist. 25 takes sometimes e every setup. And Scorsese was famous for just burning through film. Easy 20 Takes the video was supposed to shoot for two weeks, and I think it went for four. And this is a music video. It was the first SAG music video at the time, by the way.Michael Jamin (00:12:44):Really?Rick Negron (00:12:45):Anyway, Desmond Richardson was a young dancer at the time. There were a lot of young New York dancers in, in that show. And he famously went into the Avid Ailey company, but then he also worked on Fosse the Musical. And he also worked on Chicago. The, the movie with me. I, I got to work on Chicago, the movie cuz I had this great relationship with Rob Marshall and, and I was invited to audition. I didn't get, the dancers don't usually just get the job. You still have to come in and audition. Right. But even though, you know, the people involved it just is the way it is. And, and there was, and, and Desmond and, and I, we bump into each other all the time and we have so many memories. You know, going back 20, what is that, 85? 1985 was the bad video.(00:13:35):And I, I still bump into 'em. I I've been into 'em at the opening of the new USC school a few years ago. The School of Dance there at usc, the Kaufman School of Dance, I think it's called. But anyway yeah, people go in in from the dance world into musical theater and they go back and forth. Not a lot. Actually. We have one member of our, our of our of our Hamilton company, Andrew who was a modern dancer in the dance world and then moved into musical theater. And,Michael Jamin (00:14:04):But you were telling me how, and this is kind of important cause people are gonna be like, well, how do I break in? And you were, I mean, what, as you were explaining, it's like, it's basically you had this, you were just, you were in the circle, you were just there, and then things le one thing leads to enough simply because you put yourself there. Right. So how did you, what was your first break? How did you get that? I mean,Rick Negron (00:14:24):Every, everybody, everybody has a, a different story about first breaks. And when I was starting out, it was really different. Things have changed, you know, in all these years. Now, if you go to the right school, you can get into the right you know casting director workshop. And they see, oh, really? You, and, and maybe you get an agent out of that workshop and, and you know, it's, it, when I started out it, that wasn't the case when I started out. You go to New York, you start taking dance class at all the big dance studios where all the other Broadway dancers are taking dance class mm-hmm. . And then you pick up Backstage. Mm-Hmm. newspaper, and you go to the open equity calls for every show. I remember my first open equity call was for cats, the national tour, right after Cats had opened on Broadway.(00:15:14):And I, I had four callbacks. I got really close to booking cats, but I didn't. And and I just kept going to open calls. And that's still the case nowadays for a lot of young dancers and, and musical theater types. They go to New York and they take dance classes and they take voice lessons and they take acting classes and they get that picture and resume ready and they go to open calls. And if you're talented and you're lucky sometimes you, you get an equity show, a a union show from an open call. It's tough. And you have to, you have to hit that pavement. And sometimes, you know, getting to know, being in the right place at the right time. I, I, I was mentioning to you before that I, I booked this H B O commercial and I met one, a dancer on that show who said, Hey, you'd be right for the show. And one of the guys is leaving the show and they're having auditions at the theater and you should go. And that's how I got my first Broadway show by somebody suggesting that I go audition and I showed up at the theater and auditioned. And that night I got the job. And that's how I got my first Broadway show. The moreMichael Jamin (00:16:24):People, you know, the more you work, the more you hear andRick Negron (00:16:27):The more you Exactly. Yeah. You're in the mix. You have to in be in the mix and you have to network. And nowadays that involves, as you know social media and getting, getting followers and, and and, and putting out videos of yourself, singing and putting out videos of yourself, dancing and putting out videos of yourself, acting. I mean there's all that stuff that's going on now that wasn't going on when I started. But is, is is the new reality of how do you get into the business really. Okay. And, and when young, when young people ask me how, you know, how do I get started? And I say, well, in your hometown, get involved. Do the, do the school musicals, but get involved with the community theater. In any way you can. If, if you want to be an actor, but you know, there isn't a role for you do the work on the sets.(00:17:19):I worked on sets in community theater. Mm-Hmm. , I helped my mom. She, she was makeup artist too. And so I helped with makeup and I, I did lights. I, you know, I did all kinds of stuff just to be in the room. Right. Just to see other people work, to, to network, to meet people. And and I'm glad I did because I kind of know my way around all the different elements of theater. You know, I know what Alico is. I know, you know what all the different microphones are that they use in theater. And I, I always, I always befriend the crew. I think , as an actor, we can tend to be insular andMichael Jamin (00:17:57):Oh reallyRick Negron (00:17:58):Hang out with just the actors. I hang out with the crew. The crew knows what's up. Uhhuh , the crew knows where the good, the good bars are in town. They, you know, the crew is, and, and they're the ones that watch your back. When you're on the road.Michael Jamin (00:18:13):Now you were explaining to me the, and I didn't know the difference between, cuz you as the king, king, king George, you have two understudies, but there's also swing actors. Explain to me how that all works.Rick Negron (00:18:24):So in the show, you usually, you have the ensemble, which is what we used to call the chorus. Yeah. And then you have the leads. And in the ensemble you usually have two male swings and two female swings. So those individuals are not in the show nightly, but they literally understudy all the f the, the females understudy, all the females and the males understudy. All the males. And that's usually a case. They have two male and two female. In Hamilton, we have four female swings and four male swings. I think I'm right. Three or four. We have a lot. And that's because Hamilton is such a, a beast of a show. It's so hard. Physically. People get injured, people get tired.Michael Jamin (00:19:06):It's like being a professional athlete. It's no different.Rick Negron (00:19:08):Yeah. Yeah. And you're doing it eight times a week. And after a year it's repetitive motion for a lot of dancers. Oh. So I always tell those dancers, don't just do the show. Go, go and do yoga. Go do a dance class cuz you have to work your muscles a different way. Otherwise you're gonna get repetitive motion injuries. Wow. You know, like the same person that that screws on the, you know, back in the day when they screwed down the, the toothpaste cap every day that those muscles every day, all day long are gonna get messed up.Michael Jamin (00:19:37):But do they have like a trainer or doctor on set at all times?Rick Negron (00:19:40):We have a personal train PT, physical therapist right on tour with us. Most heavy dance shows will have that on tour. Because they need, they need the upkeep. The dancers, especially in this show work so hard. They, they need somebody to help them recover from injury. And, and just keep their bodies tuned up.Michael Jamin (00:20:04):And so let's say you get, you're in Hamilton, let's say you're, you're a swing or whatever, but, and then you're on tour, they what, give you a per diem? Or do they put you up in housing? How, like what is the, what is that really like to be?Rick Negron (00:20:15):So let me I'm, I'm gonna finish the whole understudy thing because Oh yeah. You have the swings and then you have the understudies, which are people in the chorus who understudy the leads. But then you also have standbys. And the standbys aren't in the show. Right. But they're backstage and they understudy anywhere between 2, 3, 4, 4 different characters. And so at the drop of the hat, they can say, Hey, you're on tonight for Burr, or you're on tonight for Hamilton. It, it can happen five minutes before the show. You can know way in advance cuz you know that character's going on vacation and stage management has told you, oh, you're gonna do the first five of, of, of the, of the vacation or the first four and somebody else is gonna do the other four. So you may know ahead of time and you can ask or tell your friends and family to come see you do that role. Right. Cause you know, ahead of time. But many times you, you find out last minute that somebody is sick or, or doesn't fe or hurt their knee or whatever. Or even in the middle of the show, sometimes somebody will twist an ankle and boom, we have a new bur in act two. It, it's, it's happened not a lot, but it's happened often enough that the understudies come in, warmed up and ready to go.Michael Jamin (00:21:26):But you explained to me even before every performance, even though you've done the same freaking songs for 900 times, you still mentally prepare yourself. You go through, you rehearse each, each song that you go through. So you walk yourself through it. But I can't even imagine if, like, if you, how do you prepare yourself for four different roles possibly. You know, like how do you do that? It's like you, it'sRick Negron (00:21:49):Crazy. Yeah. They, they, I know some of them will go over like difficult passages in the show because there's, there's moments in the show, like for Lafayette he's got in guns and ships. He's got some, some rap that are so fast. Yeah. That I, I know the understudies will go over those, what, what we called the, the, the moments when you can trip up. You go over those moments before you go on, but the rest of you can't go through the entire show. Right. Just pick and choose those moments where you can like go backstage and just go over your words and make sure they're, they're, you know, under your belt. I go over my words because I sing the same tune three times, but with different lyrics. Right. And the, and the trap is to sing the wrong lyric in the wrong song, which I had done. And it's, there's nothing more embarrassing and gut wrenching than to sing the wrong lyric in the wrong song. And you just have to find your way back. And it, they call it walking into the white room. And because literally what does that will happen and your mind will, your mind will explode, your armpits will explode with sweat. Your eyeballs will get this big, your throat will dry. It is flight or flight or flight moment.Michael Jamin (00:23:07):Yeah. AndRick Negron (00:23:08):It's so hard to, to like try to grasp the right lyric. And, and you're in, you're literally in a white room. Yeah. And you're going, oh shit. How, how do I get back?Michael Jamin (00:23:20):Right.Rick Negron (00:23:21):And for me it's a little easier cuz my song is nice and slow, but can you imagine being Hamilton and you're rapping a mile a minute and you go into the white roomMichael Jamin (00:23:29):And do you guys talk about that? OhRick Negron (00:23:32):Yeah. Yeah. Famously on Broadway, there, there, there was a something called Burst Corner. Uhhuh which was, I, I forget who started it, but I think , they, they told 'em not to do it anymore. It was something where they post on Instagram or Facebook. Oh. so-and-so, you know, said this instead of what they should have said, you know, basically coming out and, and owning your faux PAs during a live show. Right. I remember when I did Manda La Mancha with Robert Gole on tour. He used to make up lyrics sometimes. And we, and one of the guys in the show started jotting them down. And at the end of the tour, they basically roasted him at a, at the closing night party with all the lyrics that he made up throughout, throughout the entire thing. And he was not amused.Michael Jamin (00:24:20):He was not amused. I was gonna say, IRick Negron (00:24:23):Was not amused with that one. Okay. But my favorite faux pod of his was we were in Nashville and he started singing Impossible Dream. And he's sang to dream the Impossible Dream to fight the unat of a fo to carry Moonbeams home in a jar.Michael Jamin (00:24:41):And there was like, what?Rick Negron (00:24:44):That's a big Crosby song. Oh, funny. Carry Moon Beams Home in a Jar. It's an old Bing Cosby song. And he just pulled that lyric outta nowhere and inserted it into the impossible dream. And everybody backstage just went,Michael Jamin (00:24:59):What do he say? Oh my God. That's hilarious.Rick Negron (00:25:03):But you know, I I'm, I'm, I might be roasting Robert Gole at the moment, but everybody's had those moments. Yeah. Especially in Hamilton, it happens cuz the, the words are coming fast and furious and boy, if you miss that train or you screw up, oh, it's hard to get back on.Michael Jamin (00:25:18):And I imagine ifRick Negron (00:25:20):You do, everybody does. Everybody, if youMichael Jamin (00:25:21):Do it one too many times, are you looking at unemployment?Rick Negron (00:25:24):Mm-Hmm. ? No. Really? No. Yeah. I mean, nobody does it one too many times. Uhhuh, . I mean, some understudies have more bumps in the road than others. Uhhuh. . But you, you, you know, we give them a lot of grace because being an understudy is really hard. Yeah. And so when somebody's honest and understudy you, everybody has their, their, their side view mm-hmm. just because they, they might be in the wrong spot in a certain moment or cross a little differently than the usual guy. So you just have to have some grace. Don't get upset if they're in the wrong spot. You know, just maybe nudge them a little bit or pull them or, or, or just watch out for them and don't bump into them because, you know, somebody is on. I, because I've understudied so many in so many shows, I have a lot of empathy for, for understudies and swings and, but I, I, I don't, in my experience, and I've been in a ton of shows, I haven't been around somebody who's messed up so much that they've got gotten fired. Usually when somebody's not up for the task creatives know during rehearsals that they're not cutting it. Uhhuh . And then so somebody will get, will get let go. Right. the only other time I, I remember somebody lost their voice and, and took time off and came back and lost their voice again. And it was just a situation where they couldn't do the job. Their voice just, wow. Their voice just couldn't ha hack it. And so, you know, those are tough and difficult moments. They don't happen often, but it happens.Michael Jamin (00:27:09):Wow. Yeah. And now you were also telling me, which I thought was fascinating, is that your character, because he's the king, you were talking, you know, how, how your character has evolved, you playing the same exact part has evolved over, over all these years of you playing it.Rick Negron (00:27:24):Yeah. It's, it's been a gift. I'm, I'm, you know, I've realized early on that theater really is my thing. Even though I did some TV and film when I moved to la I, I didn't, I didn't really love the work. Right. It sort of felt a little bit empty just in the sense that, you know, you sit in a trailer for hours and hours and then you get a couple of rehearsals and you shoot and you're done. And that's it. You know, and it's on, it's out there for posterity and you walk away from the, from the gig going, oh, I could have done this, I could have done that. But in theater, you get to redeem yourself every night. You know, if you screwed up the night before, you, you make it better the next night. And I love that about theater.(00:28:07):And and so for, for me I just get better over time and people say, oh, but don't you get tired eight times a week a year. I don't. I I like to, I like to tell people that it's, it's almost like being a potter. You have the same, you know, square block of clay and you're making that same pot. But every time you're doing something a little bit different and you're learning from the, the, the, yesterday when you made that pot, today you're making the same pot, but you learn something new, you discovered something new, making this pot, it's still the same pot, but you're, you may be doing a little filigree or a little curve here, or a little something different. So every night you get to shape this pot a little bit differently. And that's, for me, that's the, the beauty of it.(00:28:59):That's the challenge. I remember early on with, with this, with this character, I was in rehearsals and the the associate director Patrick Vassell said, you know, Rick, this is interesting. Most guys come in with a really large, over the top take on the king. Mm-Hmm. , you're coming in with a very spare low-key take on it. I mean, we're gonna build you up, which is usually not the case with this character. And build, build him up. Not make him bigger, but just give him more depth. Okay. And that was the rehearsal process for me. And then when I started working with Thomas Kale the, the director of Hamilton right before we opened in Puerto Rico, he said, the trick to this guy is to make him, make him as simple and as small as possible because the king can, with one finger kill a whole community. Right. Know, he just has to say, those people are gone and they're gone. So he doesn't have to do much. He has all this power. So that, that was like the best bit of information for me. And so the challenge is over time is to do less.Michael Jamin (00:30:14):Right. AndRick Negron (00:30:14):Still with all the homework that you've done and the character work that you've done, but do less. And I, and I was telling you this before, that you walk out on stage Yeah. And the audience goes crazy. And, you know, there's all this expectation and sometimes you get suckered in by this adoring audience to do more. Right. But you have to fight that feeling and do less. And that's,Michael Jamin (00:30:38):It sounds like though you got conflicting notes though. No. They directed the eight. Well,Rick Negron (00:30:43):I think because in rehearsal I was still sort of finding my way with him. Uhhuh . And instead of making this broad fabish character, which is how somebody who starts with King George and thinks, oh, I'm just gonna do this and make him big and fabish. Right. that's sort of a two-dimensional view of, of the king. And I came in with a lot of research about the guy and thinking, I, I, I don't wanna make him this two-dimensional caricature. Right. I really wanna make him a, a guy who is number one dangerousMichael Jamin (00:31:21):Uhhuh ,Rick Negron (00:31:21):Who has a lot of power and who, who is feeling jilted, but won't allow you, you can't break up with me. Right. I'm breaking up with you. You know, that kind, that kind of dynamic in this, in the first song specifically. And so I came in with that and he said, that's great. Now we're gonna just work and put more layers on him, but not necessarily make him bigger, but just give him more layers.Michael Jamin (00:31:52):Let me ask you the, because when you're in, when you say, you know, you're the analogy of making a pot, are you going into the performance thinking, I wanna try this today? Or are you so into character you forget and, and somehow it it organically arises?Rick Negron (00:32:10):I try to stay in, in the more organic realm.Michael Jamin (00:32:13):Uhhuh, ,Rick Negron (00:32:14):Because I think that's where the really good stuff is. The stuff that just pops out of you.Michael Jamin (00:32:20):But you can't make that happen. That's the problem. Yeah.Rick Negron (00:32:23):If, if, if I plan somethingMichael Jamin (00:32:26):Mm-Hmm.Rick Negron (00:32:26):, I, I feel like it, it feels fabricated a little bit. Right. And so I, I try not to, but sometimes I'll get a note from, we have a resident director that travels with us, and also sometimes the director or the associate director will show up to whatever city we're in and will watch the show and give us notes and say, you know, in this moment, maybe try this or try that. And so I really pay attention to those notes and I try to implement them, but I try not to I try not to quote unquote fabricate them or, or, or think too much on it. I try to, maybe, maybe the best thing that I can say is I'll tr I'll try on my own four or five different ways to achieve that note. Mm-Hmm. . Okay. I can, I can, I can make it more dangerous in this section if I lean into this word or if I, you know, take a pause or whatever it is. I'll come up with four or five different ways to get the note across and then let whatever which one pops out pops out when it, when I do the performance. So I give myself some choices. So I don't, so I don't get, I don't pigeonhole myself into a specific choice, which then feels fabricated and fake.Michael Jamin (00:33:51):Right. But do you ever get into the part and then n notice, oh, I, I just slipped out of it. I, I'm, I'm, I'm observing myself now. I'm not in the partRick Negron (00:34:00):Happens all the time.Michael Jamin (00:34:02):And what do you do? How do you get back inRick Negron (00:34:04):The words the text will save you for every writer out there. Thank you. Because the text will save you. You have to get back into, into what it is you're saying. When, whenMichael Jamin (00:34:16):You, but the words are in your head that you don't, you're not reading something, they're in your head.Rick Negron (00:34:19):You're in your head, but in your head. I've been doing this so long that I can be in the middle of my performance and going, Hmm. That wasn't good. Right. Like, I'll be criticizing myself while I'm doing it,Michael Jamin (00:34:31):But that's not good. Now you're out of character.Rick Negron (00:34:33):Now I'm out of character. Now I'm in my head. Right. And the first thing that I'll do is I'll, I'll bite something. I'll bite a word or I'll, I'll make a gesture. Or basically I'll snapped my myself out of that.Michael Jamin (00:34:47):Do it.Rick Negron (00:34:48):I guess. I didn't silence my phone.Michael Jamin (00:34:51):That's okay. So,Rick Negron (00:34:52):Interesting enough. That's, that's the resident director of Hamilton just texted me.Michael Jamin (00:34:57):. He can wait. It's not important.Rick Negron (00:34:59):No. She, she, luckily this is she. Yes. Better. Sherry Barber. Amazing director.Michael Jamin (00:35:05):So we that's my next question though. I wanna talk about that. But, so, all right. So you snap so you, you, you get back into it with a physical, something physical, a gesture or something.Rick Negron (00:35:14):Physical or, or, or, or vocal. Yeah. Or some different intention. Yeah. Just mix it up. Right. Mix it up. Yeah. Do something different that, that's gonna get you outta your head.Michael Jamin (00:35:27):Right. I mean, I mean, I would think that we, that way my fear is going up, going up, forgetting, oh, what, what's my line? Line? Oh,Rick Negron (00:35:34):It is, that's every actor's fear. And, and, and if anything keeps me nervous, it's that, it's the fear of, of messing up. But the, and people say, oh, how do you get over being nervous? And I always say, you, how, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Yeah. Practice, practice, practice. Confidence comes from being, I can sing that song with another song, playing over a loud speaker. That's how well I know that song.Michael Jamin (00:36:04):Really. With another song playing. There'sRick Negron (00:36:05):Another song playing over the loud speaker. And I can sing my song while that song is playing. That's how much in the bones in my cell that song is. See, I just have to, I, I rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.Michael Jamin (00:36:18):Do you think it's possible to over rehearse?Rick Negron (00:36:21):Yeah.Michael Jamin (00:36:22):Uhhuh. . Yeah.Rick Negron (00:36:24):But I mean, for me, you know, every actor's different. For me, my comfort, what gives me my comfort zone is, and, and gives me confidence, is feeling like I, I know this inside out, left, right. I, I know ev Yeah, I know this. I got this Uhhuh . That's how I getMichael Jamin (00:36:46):There. But, but you don't feel that way in opening night cuz you haven't done it 900Rick Negron (00:36:49):Times. No, no, no. You haven't done it 900 times. So you just, you you, I go back to my yoga and I, I I do some deep breathing mm-hmm. and I try to focus on the intentions of the character. What is he trying to do?Michael Jamin (00:37:05):Do you, do you sometimes kick yourself? Like, do you feel like, oh, I wasn't in the Tonight Show. I was, I tried. I wasn't in it. I wasn't in it. OhRick Negron (00:37:14):Yeah. I walked out, I walk off stage sometimes and go, Ooh, that was terrible. Or whatev, you know, I'm, I'm my worst critic. Right. And sometimes I walk away and go, oh, that was good.Michael Jamin (00:37:26):Right. Because you're justRick Negron (00:37:27):Lost. I don't pat myself on the back as often as I should. Uhhuh , I'm usually more critical of myself. And, you know, and now I try, I try to not beat myself up as much as I used to. I try to be a little kinder to myself, but yeah, I totally walk away sometimes going, oh, that was, that was not your best.Michael Jamin (00:37:46): . And, and so these, these directors, like, what do they, what's their job? Because they didn't direct the show. The show has been choreographed. It's been directed. Now they're just jo they're just there every night to make sure it doesn't go off the rails.Rick Negron (00:37:59):Yeah. PrettyMichael Jamin (00:38:00):Much tune things.Rick Negron (00:38:01):Yeah. And the really good ones, like, like sh like our our resident director Sherry they're there to keep it fresh. And so she's constantly feeding you ideas. Hey, what, what if we do this? What if we do that? How about, how about, you know, and, and that's, she, she's great at bringing new ideas to something that we've been doing for four years,Michael Jamin (00:38:27):But I'm not sure how much I would wanna hear that if I were you. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, oh, I love it. This is what I You love that.Rick Negron (00:38:34):I love it. I love trying new stuff. I love messing about with that pot that I'm creating. Oh, what about, why, why don't you do a lip on, on, on the top? Oh, yeah, yeah. Do it. We'll curl out the lip on the top. I've never done that before. Right. Why don't we do that? You know, I did something a few months ago at the end of the song, the song I famously go, famously I should say the, the king famous famously says, and no, don't change the subject. And he points at somebody in the audience and he gets, he, it's a rare moment where he gets upset. Uhhuh . And that's, and, and if you've seen the Disney Plus, Jonathan Gruff famously just spits all over the place. It just is, it's, it's an explosion of saliva. And it's, it's a brilliant moment. I think. I think his take on the king is, is wonderful and he sings it so well. And and I usually point, they want you to usually point in sort of the same area of the, you can point anywhere, but they, they usually take point over here. And I always point over there, and one night, man, this is maybe about four or five months ago, one night at the end of the song, I went, I went,Michael Jamin (00:39:45):I'm watching youRick Negron (00:39:46):Uhhuh . Like, I pointed to my eyes and I pointed to that person who I had pointed to earlier in the song. And no, don't change the subject as if that's my one nemesis in the room. And I'm just saying, I'm watching you . And it got such a reaction, right. That I kept it, it's been my new little bit until I, until I decide I don't want to, or until, you know, the associate director walks in and goes, you know what? I don't like that thing that you do at the end, cut it. And I'm like, okay, it's gone. Right. Well, think of something else. You know, unless there, there's always, there's always something right. That I can think of. And that's, that's the fun part that I can always improve it, I can always make it better. I can always have fun with it.Michael Jamin (00:40:29):Hey, it's Michael Jamin. If you like my videos and you want me to email them to you for free, join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos. These are for writers, actors, creative types. You could unsubscribe whenever you want. I'm not gonna spam you and it's absolutely free. Just go to michaeljamin.com/watchlist.Michael Jamin (00:40:53):I'm surprised you, I mean, I, I would wa I'm curious like, but you allowing yourself to watch, you know, Jonathan Grots version as opposed, you know, is that, are you, do you, you know, what's that like, you know, cause character yoursRick Negron (00:41:08):Now. Yeah. I saw him do it originally on Broadway when I saw the show in previews. And then of course I saw him do the Disney Plus version. And then when we were in rehearsals in 2018 for our company, we were the third national tour to go out when we were in rehearsals, they said, oh, you you know, you can go stand back in the, at the back of the house at the Richard Rogers and watch the Broadway company. And at that point, the king was Ian I'm forgetting Ian's last name, but he's, I think he's still the king right now. He's been there for a long time. He's brilliant. Uhhuh as the king. And I watched him play the King while I'm in rehearsals for the King. Right. And for me, I wish I could see all the kings really? Because really they all do something different. And, and you, and, and the stuff that's really good. You wanna steal it, man. You wanna, but can you, I mean, love that,Michael Jamin (00:42:00):But can youRick Negron (00:42:00):Take it from the best baby steal from theMichael Jamin (00:42:02):Best stuff from the best.Rick Negron (00:42:04):Interesting. Yes. I mean, you gotta make it your own. You can't do the exact same thing. Right. But, but it, for me, it feeds me as an actor. I'm like, oh, what a cool idea. I should, I can do a version of that or Right. Or so. Oh, that makes me think of something else. You know, I, I I, yeah. I I love it. DoMichael Jamin (00:42:20):You get together and talk with the other kings at all? Yeah.Rick Negron (00:42:23):I've met the king that's on on Zoom, actually. I haven't met him in person, but the guy Peter Matthews who, who does the Angelica tour and he's been doing it for a while. Most of the Kings. It's a, it's a nice gig. So yeah, you stick around right. As long as you, you know, want to, or as long as they'll have you. Right. And Hamilton's been really great about, you know, letting us stay. But Peter Peter's really a funny guy and I haven't gotten to see his king because obviously I'm doing it at another part of the country while he's doing it. But I would love to see him play the King. Really. yeah. And Rory O'Malley, who played it here in la, he did the first national, he I think Tony Winter for book of Mormon. Fantastic guy. I met him in San Francisco when he came to see our company. I'd love to see his cane cuz he's a great singer and, you know, everybody's got their, their their take on him. And I, I find it fascinating to see what somebody does with, with this character.Michael Jamin (00:43:25):Right. Cuz there's so much, there's so much. Yeah. That's so much how much constantly reinvented fun,Rick Negron (00:43:29):Fun role and,Michael Jamin (00:43:30):But by still, but you still gotta remain true to what the words are and what the intention of the words. But it still can be interpreted while still being true to thoseRick Negron (00:43:38):Words. Which, which is the beauty of, of, of, of Hamilton and, and I give a lot of credit to the creative team, is that yes, you have to sing the words and sing the melody, but you get a lot of creative license to, to make it your own Uhhuh . And so if you see our company of Hamilton and then you see the Broadway company of Hamilton, it's almost like two different shows. Right. It's the same show. But because you have different actors in those roles, it's pretty remarkable the difference in the companies.Michael Jamin (00:44:10):And tell me a little bit more about some of the other Broadway and traveling, because you've had such a resume, man, such a resume.Rick Negron (00:44:17):. Well, you know, I, I started back in the eighties as a, as a Chorus Boy and, and doing some really cool shows. Man La Mancha, the Goodbye Girl, theMichael Jamin (00:44:27):GoodbyeRick Negron (00:44:27):Girl leader of the Pack. I, I did, I did In The Heights on Broadway Right. For a couple of years. That's when I, I actually did a workshop of In the Heights in 2005 with Li Manuel Miranda and the whole gang, and I got to meet them back then. So they've been good loyal friends since then. Yeah. And, and have kept me employed for many years. I hand, you know, hats off to them . Oh, I do have hair by the way, but it was kinda messy. So I put on my, my hat. YouMichael Jamin (00:44:58):Could have worn your wig, your powdered wigRick Negron (00:45:01):. Oh yeah. IMichael Jamin (00:45:02):Used to wear, Hey, I'm always in characterRick Negron (00:45:04):. Yeah, A actually I have I'm, I have a few weeks off right now, which is why I'm home in la Right. Because we just did Hawaii and, and the show had to pack up and, and be put on the ship to come back to the us So they shipped, the show changed and that's how we, how it got to Puerto Rico too, which is why it makes it kind of difficult to send those shows to the, the Islandss because they have to ship it.Michael Jamin (00:45:29):But even still, how long does it take to set up for them to build, you know, build the set?Rick Negron (00:45:36):Well the shipping of it took a, takes about two weeks.Michael Jamin (00:45:40):All right. But once you're,Rick Negron (00:45:41):But then once it all gets there, our crew can, can put the set up in day and a half.Michael Jamin (00:45:47):Wow. Okay.Rick Negron (00:45:48):It's, it's like, it's all been carefully crafted. It's like Lincoln Logs, everything fits together, butMichael Jamin (00:45:54):Stages are different sizes. That's what I don't understand.Rick Negron (00:45:57):Well, they ahead of time, the, the production management and, and, and, and company management, they sit together and they go, okay, these are the cities that we're doing, which is the smallest theater we're in Uhhuh , that, those are our dimensions. We can't, we can't get bigger than that.Michael Jamin (00:46:15):But you can put a smaller on a bigger, on a stage, you can put a small,Rick Negron (00:46:19):Yeah, yeah. And the show, I mean, the show was made for the Richard Rogers, which is a pretty small theater. I mean, it's an old 1920s Broadway theater, Uhhuh , that seats about 1300. So it's pretty small. And the stage backstage is kind of small too. So most of the theaters that we do on, that we go to on the road are much bigger than the Richer Rogers. Okay. So they just, you know, they just do black baffling on the sides and just make it more of a letter box. And it works. It works. As long as we're not in a place that's smaller than our set. And some shows have what they call a jump set, which means that while we're in one city, we have a, a second set that goes to the next city and gets built. And so that we close in, in Boise on a Sunday and we open in Salt Lake City on a, on a Tuesday, you know, but let's say one day.Michael Jamin (00:47:13):But let's say that you're doing a dance number and the stage is this big and your's, the dancer, you know. Okay. Six pace steps to get my next mark on a bigger stage. It's, isn't it more steps or No,Rick Negron (00:47:23):No, no, because you're, you're, regardless of the size of the stage you are set. It remains the same.Michael Jamin (00:47:30):Okay. So no one will go out of that.Rick Negron (00:47:32):Yeah, no. Yeah. We'll, we'll we'll never stretch it. Right. The set itself never gets stretched. If anything, the, the theater will come in with, with black you know what the, what they call the legs, those are, you know, a break a leg comes fromMichael Jamin (00:47:48):No,Rick Negron (00:47:48):Literally they, you know, break a leg is good luck. But it literally means the legs are those black drapes that come down in the front and also in each wing.Michael Jamin (00:47:59):Okay. SoRick Negron (00:47:59):When you, when you, when you go on stage, sometimes you have to move that drapery to get on stage or to, if you're gonna go in front of the, the, the in front of the curtain, you, you, you move it with your arm, you break the leg.Michael Jamin (00:48:15):So you're not, so you're not literally break. Okay. So you're,Rick Negron (00:48:18):You're not literally breaking the leg, you're not breaking anything. Parting, parting the drapery to go on stage.Michael Jamin (00:48:23):Oh. So this is very interesting. This is gonna be, yeah.Rick Negron (00:48:25):Yeah. It's a little theater trivia for Yeah. The, the folks out there.Michael Jamin (00:48:30):Fascinating. Now. Okay, so on a regular day, you go to a town, your new, your your new city or whatever, and they give you a per diem to Yeah. Goodbye lunch and get out apartmentRick Negron (00:48:42):Diem. The union sets a weekly per diem. And that is for you to spend as you wish. Uhhuh, . And then also company management way ahead of time will say we have three or four different hotels that we've negotiated a special deal for and choose which one you want to stay in. And these are the prices and these are the amenities and people choose from that list of hotels. But a lot of people nowadays are doing Airbnb, especially on a tour where you sit in a city for four weeks, five weeks, six weeks. The shortest stays we've ever had have been two weeks. But we've, we've done six weeks. And so a lot of people do Airbnbs cuz you have a kitchen and you have a washer dryer and more, you know. But isMichael Jamin (00:49:26):It, is staying in a hotel more fun? Is that dorm living, is that more fun for the cast?Rick Negron (00:49:31):Some, no, I don't think it's more fun for them. Some stay in the hotel cuz it'll be right next to the theater. And that's convenient. Yeah. Especially if we are in Denver and it's seven degrees outside. Being, you know, li living right near the theater is really cool when it's, when the weather's bad. But most people, a lot of people nowadays, they're getting Airbnbs and they're rooming together. So three or four people can get a really cool house.Michael Jamin (00:49:57):But I'm picturing Rick Negron (00:50:00):And, and they save money because they're rooming together. Right. So, you know, the rent, their ability to pay rent, I mean now they can use their per diem to live on, not just for their place to stay. They canMichael Jamin (00:50:12):Have you shared, have you shared apartments or No. Does the king, does the king have his own place now?Rick Negron (00:50:16):, I'm too old to have roommates. You're tooMichael Jamin (00:50:18):That crap.Rick Negron (00:50:18):I had roommates in my twenties and thirties. I'm done. But the only roommate I have is my wife. And CauseMichael Jamin (00:50:24):You're right.Rick Negron (00:50:24):But she's not really my roommate. SoMichael Jamin (00:50:26):My like, my naive opinion of what it must be like is like in high school when you're in the play it's like, you know, or even at a high school, you know, community, you are like, Hey, it's the, we're all the, it's the group, we're the gang, we're doing everything together. But once you become a pro, that's not the way it is. Huh? It's not likeRick Negron (00:50:45):It is at first it is, it's the honeymoon phaseMichael Jamin (00:50:49):Real. Okay. Where you're like hanging out togetherRick Negron (00:50:51):Where we all just meet and Oh, I know that person. We did a show together a long time ago. And so we become a little bit of a clique and then the, the cliques start happening early on. But we're one big happy family. Right. And we have opening night parties and you know, and all that occurs early on. But then the clicks really start creating Right. You know, the, the peop certain people start to hang out together. We had the, an our, our company's called an Peggy cuz each separate tour has a different name. There's the Angelica tour, the Philip Tour. These are characters in the show. Right. And Peggy is the third Skylar sister. So we became the third company. So we are called the An Peggy tour and we're, and there's a group of us we're called the, an Peggy Alpine Club. And literally, literally a bunch of us who like to hike and, and do outdoorsy stuff. We went snowboarding and skiing a lot in the winter. We, a lot of us got scuba cert certified for our Hawaii stay. Wow. And we've done incredible hikes all over the place. So that's our little clique. But also, you know, people that have, are married and right on tour together or have ki there's a few people that have kids on tour. They get together a lot.Michael Jamin (00:52:07):So and they bring their fam, they bring their kids on onto tour with them.Rick Negron (00:52:10):Yes. There's some people that do that. Yes. But some, some, someMichael Jamin (00:52:16):Like little kids are like high school age. Like you can't be like a high school-aged kid.Rick Negron (00:52:20):No. Most, most of 'em have young kids. You gotta understand. I, I'm working with a bunch of 20 and 30 year olds. Right. And I'm the oldest guy by far in, in, in, in, in the, in the company.Michael Jamin (00:52:30):What's that like being the oldest guy in the company?Rick Negron (00:52:33):Oh, I love it. Love. I used to be the youngest guy then I was, you know, in the same age as everybody. I love it because I as a king too. I, I have plenty of time to sort of mentor everybody. Yeah. And so I've become a little bit of, I, I'm the cheerleader. I check in on everyone and say, how you doing? I'm, I used to be a ma massage, massage therapist. So a anytime peop people are having issues. I, I'm close friends with our, our physical therapist that tours with us. So we work on people sometimes together in tandem.Michael Jamin (00:53:03):What is it they're worried? What is it they want mentoring at the, the career strategy? Like what, youRick Negron (00:53:08):Know, that this career strategy, sometimes it's just dealing with personalities in theater sometimes there's some, some headbutting. Um-Huh. sometimes people are just having problems with a, a particular, an understudies having a problem with a new character that they're understudying or, you know, there's issues on stage with somebody who doesn't quite know where they're supposed to stand at a certain point. Right. And all that is internal stuff that should be worked out with the dance captains and the stage management and, and the resident director. But you know, unfortunately, actors, you know, we have huge egos and, and they're also very fragile egos. And so there's a, a, a bit of nuance involved and people get their, their panties in a twist. And I'm, I'm usually the guy that comes around and, and talks people off the ledge sometimes. AndMichael Jamin (00:54:02):I would imagine we be very hard even, especially for the new guy or the new woman coming in, youRick Negron (00:54:06):Know? Yeah. And I, I I, I, I tend to be the welcome wagon too. Right. You're the new ones. Come on, I'm the king. You know, I'll show you the ropes.Michael Jamin (00:54:13):Wow.Rick Negron (00:54:14):So, so that's, I, I like taking that mantle, not just because I'm the king, but also because I'm sort of the senior member of the Right. And I've been around the block and people have asked me, you know, I'm sick and tired of show business. I want to do something else. And I'm like, you know, that's, I hear that I've, I've had that conversation many, many times in my career.Michael Jamin (00:54:34):Interesting. So why, yeah. I would think, see, right, you've made the touring company of Hamilton, it's pretty much the peak, you know, like, you know, forRick Negron (00:54:41):A lot of 'em want to do Broadway. So they're, you know, they're still focused on doing that Broadway show. And some of them have done Broadway, have done the tour, and, you know, they wanna settle down and meet somebody and have a Right.Michael Jamin (00:54:53):So they want to, is that, is that what the problem is? They, you know, they're done with the business. What, what's the problem?Rick Negron (00:55:00):Well, I mean, you know, you, we've got the new kids who are just starting out who wanna know about, you know, how do I get my, my foot in Broadway? You know, and there's those kids, and then they're the ones that have been around for a while who wanna maybe transition out of, out of the business and, and want some there was one girl who was interested in massage therapy. Oh, wow. And I said, you wanna become ao? Okay. Well, this is what you need to do. And matter of fact the union has something called what is it called? Career Transition for Dancers, which is a, a, a program where you can get grants to do some further education. So if you wanna learn how to be a massage coach, wow. Get a grant through the union. And, you know, I know some of this stuff so I can impart some of that knowledge. And for the young kids who, you know, I wanna get on Broadway, I'm like, okay, well, to get on Broadway, you have to be in New York. And while you're on tour, you know, can't do that. It's hard to get into that audition for that Broadway show. ButMichael Jamin (00:55:57):Are you still in those circles? I mean, it seems like you, I don't know. It seems like you must know. I don't know. You're, I, I guess I'm completely wrong. If you were you know, a dancer on the touring company, Hamilton seems like it wouldn't be that hard to, to find out about an audition on Broadway. And certainly wouldn't be that hard to get a job, because you're obviously really good.Rick Negron (00:56:18):Yeah. and we've had a few people leave our tour to go do a Broadway, Broadway show. I mean, actually, we just lost like two or three people to, one Girl is doing Bad Cinderella. She left our show to Do Bad Cinderella, which is a new Broadway show, a new Andrew League Webber show. Mm-Hmm. . Another guy just left our show to do the, the Candor Nbb, New York, New York that's opening on Broadway soon. So that does happen luckily with the advent of auditioning remotely via video that's helped things out a lot nowadays, so that if you're in Portland on tour, you can send in an audition via video for something back in New York.Michael Jamin (00:57:02):Even dancing. You can, like, you pull the camera back and you do some dance steps. I mean,Rick Negron (00:57:06):Is that what you do? Yeah. Or sing a song or, or, or, or read a scene. Okay. depending on what's needed. And sometimes you, you are able to take a personal day and fly back to New York and audition for something. Right? Yeah. Michael Jamin (00:57:23):Cause I would think, and I, I don't know. Obviously, I don't know it, I would think that if you're in Ham, the touring company of Hamilton, you're practically on Broadway and it's like, it's almost the same circles, except this is where the job is, you know?Rick Negron (00:57:34):True. But if you've been on tour for a year, you'd like to settle down and stop living out of a suitcase. I It'sMichael Jamin (00:57:39):Hard to be on the road.Rick Negron (00:57:40):Yeah. Or you've been doing Hamilton for a while and you just wanna do something different. Yeah. There's those, those kids, you know, they're hungry, they wanna do different stuff. Yeah. They don't wanna be on tour on Hamilton for four years like I have, but I've done a lot of stuff andMichael Jamin (00:57:53):Yeah. What, let's talk about what other, what, yeah, let's talk about some other, we, we, I think we got off track of your other Broadway shows and, and Off Broadway and not touring shows, rather.Rick Negron (00:58:01):Well, you know, I started, I started out young in the biz at 10 cuz my mom was a drama teacher. And then I sort of worked my way through community theater and children's theater and all that. And, and then I was a concert dancer in college and studied for who? Well, I, in college I studied modern dance in, in ballet. But when I got outta college, I, I was an

Io and Margaret go through the Star Wars narratives, Andor, and Rogue One, and talk about where they overlap historically with real resistance movements, what the narratives are commentating on about current resistance movements, where the representation falls short and generally why the Mon Calamari are the downest people in the universe to have on your side and why they should hangout with Roger Casement. Host Info Io can be found on Twitter @Bum_lung or on Instagram @Bum.Lung or you can find shirts and patches that they make on Etsy at https://www.etsy.com/shop/BumLung Guest Info Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. She is also the host of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff and Live Like the World is Dying Publisher This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript AGPH 1 Mon, Jan 23, 2023 10:18PM • 1:01:05 SUMMARY KEYWORDS fucking, people, revolution, rogue, empire, revolutionary, anarchists, star wars, insurrection, rebellion, shit, kill, big, irish, revolutionary movements, watch, doomed, sergey, throwing, character SPEAKERS Margaret, Io Io 00:45 Star Wars talking about Star Wars Margaret and I Oh, here we are podcast. Hello. Welcome to the anarcho geek Power Hour. It's a it's it's a podcast.We are just trying to do trying to do a fun, fun, fun little podcast for us. Come on this journey. Well, you are we talk about nerd bullshit with all and I got a pal right here and you just heard her and it's Margaret killjoy. Margaret. How's it going? Good. Hello. Um, thanks for having me on as a guest on your show. I'll probably be trying to talk my way into being on this particular show a lot because it's pretty cool premise. Oh, yeah. Cats. Yeah. And anytime door doors always open because we, cuz we're all living on the same fortified mountain compound. So yeah, the general premise of the show is just we're going to talk about nerd bullshit and Ooh, we got one right out right out the gate something. I'm just just over the moon about we got and or That's no moon. Yeah, no, it's a television show. And a fairly good one. Mark. Margaret, what's your what's your background with Star Wars? Margaret 02:07 I grew up not liking it as much as Star Trek to be real. But now that I'm older well actually both both franchises are really hit or miss. But I like a lot of the newer Star Wars stuff. And I particularly like Rogue One. So I was particularly excited about andorre Samah you well. Yeah, more more or less. Same though. Io 02:30 You know what, let's scale that back. I am captured by Star Wars. Star Wars has my ass for life because I like it for the same reasons. I like like the Ramones, like because I grew up with it and it's stupid and it's stupid and simple and it's easy and that's why I liked it. I'll watch I'll watch all that garbage. And would you believe they made a good they made a good Star War not just a good Star War but a good show about my favorite shit which is morally complicated resistance movements. It really is kind of a a gift specifically to you but to probably half the people listening to this too. Yeah, if you haven't well if you haven't seen Andora highly recommended pause pause this podcast and and returned to it. Maybe someday but go watch and because we are going to talk about spoilers Io 03:27 Yeah, the whole premise basically it's in a star war. You got your you got your Jedi you got your space lasers. Between all the all the Banthas and the R two D tos and the GES music you forget that the plot is about a rebellion and finally they're fucking doing something with it. I grew up really into Star Wars it was like my first it was my first fantasy sci fi anything and I read a lot of the extended universe which is no longer canon. Chewbacca is no longer canonically killed by a planet which is a real shame Margaret 04:06 when did they when did they retcon at all when did they take the extended universe out Io 04:11 when Mickey Mouse got his hands all over this franchise? None of that no, we're not dealing with any of that shit. So they just pick and choose the stuff from the extended universe they want to fuck with and some of it stays some of it when it's all it's all Calvin Ball in in the galaxy now but um yeah, even in the extended universe before though there were a few like really great like the Han Solo trilogy it's been you know, like a decade but I remember it really, really fucking whipping and these Margaret 04:48 are the books right? Yes, the books Io 04:53 and a couple of others deal with like, the rebellion but not not like not like This not and we're not going to. Well, Margaret, I don't know about you. I'm not here to argue that Rogue One is anarchists propaganda. Margaret 05:10 No one might argue that Andorra's bar anarchists propaganda. Io 05:13 Oh, yeah. Okay, well, I'm not here to argue and endorse anarchists propaganda made by made by the Mickey Mouse Corporation, but me as an anarchist and I'm really fucking enjoying it. And I just, I was trying to get everybody into this for so long because it's like, obviously coming from this place of knowledge of the continuum of revolutionary movements the writer said he was influenced by like Palestine and the Russian Revolution and the Haitian revolution. We watched Rogue one the other day, and you pointed out why does everyone have the slightest Irish Burr? I think because they were also influenced, especially in the funding about, especially in like the Mon Mothma funding of like, the Irish revolution, but okay, but yeah, let's, let's, let's get into it, get into it. We both recently finished. And or what do you think overall, Margaret 06:12 I liked it. And I'm kind of, I mean, I'll watch junk TV, you know, because life is short, and why not spend my short life watching it. Okay, I don't have a really good excuse for why I watch drunk TV. But I will happily watch drunk TV, if, you know when I need to turn my brain off or whatever. And so I kind of like go into almost any TV show sort of expecting that. And then instead, I found like, actual depth and like, a less one or two dimensional resistance movement than I see. Basically, anytime I watch, especially TV, but movies as well, like resistance movements are so always clearly painted by people who've never either read history or threw a rock at a cop. You know, and like, I don't want to make any criminal accusations towards anyone involved in writing this, but I will guess they've at least read history. If not throwing a rock at a cop. Yeah, there's toxic cops, kids. It's I'll do whatever you want. Io 07:13 I'll say it I got I got less the loose. Go empire. Yeah, yeah, fight the Empire. Everybody. Subscribe to our Patreon so you can see the video of me doing hand quotes Io 07:32 Yeah, it is a there's dimension in it that I was not expecting from Star Wars. I was and I didn't really expect from, from anything. It's like writing writing is a hard job being able to like Express, like the moral complexity of a of a gorilla. What a gorilla sell who's gonna go rob go rob a big bank on some on some fucking planet. But they did it they pull they pull it off really? Well. Margaret 08:10 Yeah. Tell me about tell me about the how this relates to the funding of the Irish revolution. I don't know if the other direction they want to take this but like, I'd be really interested in like, some of the more obvious or some of the historical parallels that we've picked up on. And I I would love to hear more about that. Io 08:31 I was noticing the fact that they had Mon Mothma up in the mix who is a character from the original Star Wars who's the one who's sort of she says many Bothans died bring in this as these plans and she's always given the given the spiel and bringing her back as like someone who's down for like she's not she's not involved, obviously. But she's like, doing whatever she can to like get the money to these people who are off fucking Killing cops across the galaxy. While still like sitting pretty in high society and like working in parliament in this in this very like subdued liberal way that is like toeing the line in a way that a lot of especially like Irish representation in England was and even in some English representation in England was and like it's definitely like No, there's nothing that's a one to one on on Pandora and I wouldn't say that but like the way the IRA and the like pre Ira revolutionary movements funded themselves with a lot from the Irish diaspora who like made it big in Boston and New York sending money back or, or straight up sending boats full of guns back. Okay, to see, to see not only the like the scrappy people in the woods, ready to do whatever For and the shadowy Stellan Skarsgard who I would love to get into because I I love the whole Skarsgard brood but still and especially to see not only the like the cloak and dagger part of things but the be able to have some fuckin Game of Thrones political intrigue was Yeah, was very fun. Margaret 10:27 Okay well and to go and continue with the Irish fundraising thing I'm sure someone out there fortunately I don't live in the parts of the Internet where people complain about the shit is like complaining that like two of our primary revolutionaries are in a gay relationship right? And you know two women who are who are dating and you know the tension in their relationship based on which one prioritizes love and which one prioritizes revolution but someone somewhere is like, Oh, they're making all these people gay or whatever it is no gay revolutionaries in history. First of all, it's like, obviously bullshit. But in terms of the Irish revolution, one of these such a good example of a character who does actually feel kind of a an and or Star Wars characters to some you heard of Roger Casement, the gay Irish night. If anyone's listening, there's this guy named Roger Casement, who was a big part of bringing down King Leopold from Belgium, the fucking monster who murdered millions and whatever is one of the worst on all of history of historical ghoul. Yeah, and there's just so there was this like, colonial Irish guy who was like part of the English colonization of Africa. And he was like, Oh, I'm on the wrong team, like absolutely on the wrong team. And he got like, really into Irish nationalism, as well as working really hard to fight against the exploitation of Africa and South America, actually. And then he like, went and spent his life and lost his life smuggling guns into Ireland for the for the Easter Rising, and he was so fucking gay. Just so completely, tragically gay. And I don't know, he feels like a very Star Wars character. I guess he's not again, he's not one for one. But yeah, these but he was part of the English establishment. He was a fucking Knight, you know? Io 12:15 Yeah. And there was plenty of those. I mean, in every, in every movement, you know, death to the bourgeoisie, whatever, whatever. But who you can get a lot done if you if you know it, if you know in your heart, what's right and your positions. And just as an as an aside, because I it because it wouldn't, it wouldn't do to zero in on this, but maybe on a later episode. Definitely on a later episode. But there Yeah, yeah, the queers have been in every revolutionary movement in the early in the 19th century, there's a quote from somebody from some open, openly queer person that says, if you want to be yourself, you go find the anarchists. Margaret 12:57 Yeah, I can't remember whose that quote is from. Yeah, no, totally. And, and so it makes sense that I really liked that we've entered a stage of gay representation in Hollywood or whatever, mainstream TV where it's not like the shocker. I mean, there's a little bit they play a little bit on the leg, oh, they're gay, but only like, the tiniest little bit, and no one is upset by it, you know, and that's nice. Io 13:23 Yeah, and I it's a little bit of a hobby horse of mine that I the great meaty, the big media establishment knows that. By and large, the people consuming things like liberal culture is very ascendant in, in media, we'll see how long that lasts, but they know that, you know, representation or whatever, like cells, you can sell a terrible movie on the concept of representation when you put a diverse cast that they're like, the right mushroom and, and the, and the people making the decisions are still Lily whites and straight, but they all they'll sell it to you with whatever. And Star Wars very famously was like, we got a gay kiss in this one. And it's like two women kissing in the background, very easy to edit out for whatever international audiences wouldn't allow something like that. They're like, dogshit this one where they don't, it's not a big deal. It's just a fact. It's not Yeah, it's just a fact of it, that they that they are lovers in a, in a struggle together and the tension being that like you said, one is market is not more committed to the cause, but like the relationship is is eclipsed by the cause certainly. Yeah. Is like like a great a great tension to play with and I'm excited to see like they at least have a season to play around with. Margaret 14:58 Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny watching this because Just like well, you know how the characters end up? Like, yeah, you know, you know that andorre isn't ending up with Beck's in any way that like, at least like in any way that is worth note in, in Rogue One, you know? And then also, spoiler, they're all going to die. Well, at least at least Cassie and Endor is okay, well, my other historical parallel that I want to draw that I've been like thinking about a whole bunch since I saw it, there's this whole trope within it, and I really am curious to see what they'll do with it. I'm afraid they'll do it badly. But so far, they've kind of earned my trust more than most things. There's this thing about authoritarianism on the rebel side, right? There's this tension. I am incapable of remembering names. You've got your head honcho. Revolutionary guy, right. Who is the doomed revolutionary? What's his name? Skarsgard. luthan. Yeah, that's the actor's name. Io 15:59 The one who's who's a antique seller. Margaret 16:03 Yeah, you don't remember his name either. luthan. Something? Okay. luthan. So, you've got Lutheran and he is the tragic leader. And he specifically refers to himself as doomed at one point. And I think that this is probably consciously a reference to Catechism of the revolutionary bias organic net chef. And so again, that chef was this. This Russian revolutionary nihilist who actually if you want to hear me and I would talk about search, Sergey net, you have listened to my episode of cool people that have cool stuff on the Russian nihilists. Io 16:39 Find it anywhere you find podcasts, folks. Margaret 16:43 Yeah. And I fucking hate this guy, historical guy, Sergey, like he is trash. And he is absolutely the kind of guy who will get his friends arrested on purpose in order to advance the cause without asking their permission or telling them what's happening, right. And I think he has like, lost his ethics in what he's doing. And his whole thing he writes this book called Catechism of the revolutionary that is the revolutionary is a doomed man is one of the main concepts of this book, in which basically like, you don't have friends, you don't have lovers. You have the revolution and you will die. And it has like a romance to it has like a beauty to it. Right? I think fundamentally, it's a flawed concept. But what's really interesting to me is that in in andorre, you have a character who I believe is a conscious reflection of the Sergey model, although Sergey was not actually the leader of revolution he wanted to be but he was a fucking whatever he was also tried guy who fucking killed his own side more than he killed the other side and all around sucked. And so So luthan is almost this like, the positive incarnation of a Skynet ship so far, in that he's doomed. And he makes the hard calls and stuff. But he's not quite a fully authoritarian leader. You know, there's a couple points where he gives people full information and lets them make their own decisions. His assistant whose name I also don't remember clearly has a can exert a certain amount of power over him. He's not quite a dictator. And he's clearly tormented by the fact that in some ways, he is a dictator of, of the revolution. And the thing that I find interesting, almost some of his rant, and I'm really curious are your thoughts about it? The thing I find really interesting about it is how it compares to the manifesto that were being presented by the dead kid. Io 18:35 And he made the mix the fucking hot the hot space, the space twink the crime the crime think loving little revolution, the crime Margaret 18:44 prank. Yeah, the crime twink. Who rules and I love his character, because he's like, afraid, but he like does it anyway, even though it literally kills him. Like that is something to aspire to. I mean, I want to survive. Io 18:59 It's I aspire to be crushed by a metaphor for galactic capital myself. Yeah, Margaret 19:06 exactly. And in his manifesto, that we start exploring right at the end of the season, he talks about the enemy specifically as authority in a way that like, this is why earlier I was like, I will go to bat a little bit about andorre being anarchists propaganda, but only a little bit, right. But it's not the enemy isn't the Empire. The enemy has authority in what he what he is writing. And I'm wondering whether this will cause conflict in future episodes, or whether they kind of in this case mean authority mean like biggle authority like the Empire, not like scars, scars character, but I I'm really excited about that tension. I'm really excited to see what they do with it. Io 19:51 Yeah, me too. I love that he has his little his little monologue that beautiful, beautiful monologue. I've made my mind into a Unless place and I I work for a sunrise that I will never see and again for what I do and I'll and all that shit as he's talking to this this guy who infiltrated the the Empire to give them all information and he's prepared to preparing to sacrifice a squad of like nine people on his team just so the Empire doesn't get wise. Margaret 20:26 It's like 30 people I think it's a bunch of people up Io 20:31 to too many people. I'll I'll go ahead and say it. But yeah, he he does represent that very, like the revolutionary isn't doomed man. thing in a more competent braver way than, than that fucker. Yeah. But I love it. It's more, it's really, I mean, revolutions are morally complex, you're not going to get out of them with your hands clean. And I like that they're not like the original theory of the original Star Wars. Is, is Past is past the point where there's nothing you where the Rebellion has been built up. But to organize something at that scale in a galaxy of apathetic, or unorganized or unmotivated people is, is going to be a fucked process, especially when he's like, Yeah, we want, we want the Empire reacting, we want them. We want them cracking down and making people's lives miserable, like OB like, yeah, like, obviously, fuck that. And but acts of insurrection are going to make your enemy crack down in that way. And he's, he's preparing for that eventuality. Margaret 21:58 Yeah. So he once again, is presenting this like, like, there's a version of him that he could be like, full on accelerationist, right. accelerationism being the concept of like, kind of making things worse, so that people realize they're bad, and then try and make things better or whatever. Right. And, and he absolutely, he makes several statements about how like, look, it's going to get worse, right? But he's not quite so far. It's not like he's quite making things bad on purpose, so much as he's not stopping them from getting bad. And to me, and maybe I'm just like, I want to like him. Talk about luthan here. Yeah. But to me, this is a really big important difference, right? Like, people have been making the claim that you shouldn't do anything disruptive, because it'll like look bad. Or even more than that, it'll cause the police to crack down, right. And that claim stops people from resisting quite often, because realistically, people don't want bad things to happen. That's why we're interested in fictitional representations of revolution, is because we want a better world for our Star Wars characters. And since we want a better world, we want to take certain actions to try and get a better world. But when you turn it into a fight, the other side's gonna fight to. And so, you know, I don't think that it is ethically on the person who throws a brick at a window. I don't believe it is on them, the police crackdown on to resistance movements that could result from that write ethically, there's all kinds of arguments that people can make different ways about this. I think throwing the brick to make things worse, is fucked up. But I think throwing the brick, because it is the best expression in the best way that you are able to choose what to do when the Empire puts that moral weight on us as potential rebels and says it's your fault that we are hitting you. That is like, I mean, it's abuse of logic, and it's a real fucked up thing. And like, you know, you get into this like the very the climax of the entire season. Is that this kid who I have a shitty memory I think maybe his dad got killed by the Empire throws a bomb at the very end. And they did a what's good? Yeah, he does a hey, market for anyone who wants to listen to that episode about the market. And so first episode ever of cool people do cool stuff in which someone throws a bomb at some cops when the cops had been really fucked up and the cops opened fire and it causes this whole big fucking thing. Right? And, and I'm not mad at that kid. Was it the right move? I've literally no idea. Right and the world will never know whether or not it was the right idea because we only get the one thing that we saw happen. Yeah, I'm always Io 24:48 I'm almost 100% of the time on people who have the bravery to try. Try some shit and the others side, like the fascist playbook is to use our conscience against us for for in a in a Stop hitting yourself type of way. Margaret 25:12 Yeah. Io 25:14 That is not. Yeah, you can't. Like I can't imagine somebody even having the foresight to being like, Oh, I'm going to do this because it'll make it worse. But the argument of just like, what will the news say if this happened, or that this that and you're not going to get you're going to turn people off from our side is this is has, has failed for has failed for centuries? Now. Margaret 25:42 I will say, though, I don't sorry, look, Io 25:44 I just don't want to fuck with it anymore. Margaret 25:49 But I think of as an ethical argument, it is like a, I think it is a bad ethical argument to say like that that kid should have thrown the bomb, right in, in this fictional Star War that we're talking about. I don't care about the ethical argument against that. But if you're throwing a bomb at the oppressive force that is busy oppressing you, your conscience is clear. From my point of view, right? The strategic question is where it gets really interesting. And is it a good idea? Is a very different question from is it? justifiable? You know? And that's where it gets into, like, really messy stuff where it's like, well, that's just hard to know. I mean, the history of people killing tyrants in on Earth is a real mixed bag. Right, in terms of its efficacy, Io 26:43 it tends to assassinations do tend to have a tendency to get messy. Margaret 26:48 Yeah. And often, they make everything worse. And not just in a like, everything has to get worse before it gets better way. But sometimes it's like, no, everything just sucks now. And everything. Io 27:00 But but the extent situation was analysis was like unsustainable something. Yeah. Like, no one, no one can predict how things will play out. But there was a chance that they could have could have gone well, and if, if nothing else, you sure you've shown power to be vulnerable? Yeah. Which, which echoes through history? And I don't know, I guess the I guess that's a bigger question that we can keep getting into, but to bring it back into, into and or a little bit. Uh huh. As as for numix Little manifesto, every act of insurrection pushes our lines forward? Margaret 27:51 Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. No, go on. Yeah, and they even use the term insurrection there. Right. Yeah. Which is like, Io 28:01 they got there. They get so explicit. I didn't expect them to. Margaret 28:04 I know, a manifesto for pure Io 28:07 rocks. Margaret 28:09 I know and like, and it's specifically like, I'm with I think it's Kropotkin I don't know I actually just mostly, I don't always read all of the, the old books by the people. I used to read books about the people. But you know, dead anarchists. Pokken I think it was him who was like, why do we have this like dichotomy between insurrection and revolution? It might have been Malatesta one of these fucking dead anarchists was like, What a useless dichotomy between insurrection revolution, like revolutions are made up of like, insurrections, that's what you know, as compared to this legging. You know, the traditional way presenting the dichotomy is that you need to have, you know, on a purely insurrection aside, like all that matters is the insurrection the larger overarching goal is not worth attempting to accomplish, or setting your sights on, right. And then on the purely revolutionary side, it's like, Oh, don't do the insurrections because they'll diffuse our energy or the wake the sleeping dragon or they'll, you know, cause the cops to crack down on us or whatever, right? All that matters is building up the mass to have the one big, glorious revolution. And like, history, at least the history of revolution is like no, no, no insurrections or that manifesto is right, like an andorre. They want to have a revolution. What that revolution should look like there is not a agreement upon which kind of rules Io 29:34 Oh, that's the bet that's the best part of the show when he when he goes to me. Saga reira mine yeah, man. The cool yeah, the cool guy. He's talking about so anarchist. Yeah, I don't, I don't I'm I'm not gonna fuck with that guy. He's a he's a human supremacist, and those guys are separatists for et cetera, et cetera. And they're there. I'm the only one Just think pure ideology here. Yeah. And I'm like, Yeah, I've been in a room with him. Margaret 30:06 Yeah, totally. But his, but then they say his ideologies like, well, anarchy is not an ideology or I don't remember the actual quote. Io 30:15 Yeah. And his response is just a shrug because like, Whatever dude, I'm not, I'm not here to convince you. I'm off. He's on. Maybe Maybe I'm just projecting what I want to see. But he's on the like, yeah, you know, there's there's action and then there's whatever other useless surrounds what, what action is being taken? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, he's right. Yeah. Well, this is all like laying this ideological bedrock that eventually morphs into the same neoliberal government that easily falls to Deathstar. Three and Force Awakens. Like you've got we can keep on this but maybe we should talk about Rogue One and in a second because we just watched that a few nights ago, like the early days of a revolution are ya so spicy? Margaret 31:15 Yeah, that's when I like everything is still possible. And but to use Sagar era to tie us into Rogue One, you know, by the time Rogue One comes around saga gara is basically just like the terrorist who's still like, who's still just been like, No, I know where the Empire is. So I'm gonna fuck them up. You know? He's not like trying to think like fourth dimensional chess or whatever he's just trying to fuck up the Empire and like I think that fucking rules and I think that yeah, I I like him. I mean, obviously by the time Rogue One comes around he's like his neuro divergence has continued in a way that makes him probably unsuitable to be a leader have Io 32:02 a bit of a Chase had a hard he's had a hard go of it. Margaret 32:05 Yeah, he is. He does not mind revolutionary suicide. He is perfectly content with revolutionary suicide. By the time he gets his chance. Io 32:15 Yeah, how Yeah, how could you not and they the plot of Rogue One is they need to get close to Sagar era they so they break. I forget her. I forget her name. The main the main character of the movie. Yeah. To get her close to saw because they want they just want to kill sock cats there. Because he's making them look bad, essentially. Yeah. And because they're developing into Yeah, like liberal revolutionaries hmm And so and saw is still is still out there on Jetta. Just just like stealing shit from the Empire blow blowing shit up. They can't get to him. Margaret 33:00 When I thought they were there to kill him. They thought they were there to kill protagonist, dad. And they just needed to get to saw in order to find out what protagonist dad was. Io 33:10 Like, right before they and or gets on the ship. There. They're just like, Alright, remember that thing that we told her? Fuck that no kit when you see saw Calum? Oh, I think that though, I think maybe they do the same thing with Matt's Matt's Mickelson's character. Margaret 33:27 Okay, so that ties into what you're talking about, about. You've got into like, hard choices guy luthan. Right. And he's presented as like, the real radical in in andorre. But it's the same attitude of kill people who are making us look bad because you're thinking about the big picture that leads us into the liberal state stage of revolution that you're talking about right where they you know, are just going to end up being like the sort of like less interested in revolution revolutionary movement and I think that those are related I think that the cold hard calculating leader is absolutely the person who's going to be like alright kill saw All right, kill protagonists dad. Because because they think they're thinking about strategy instead of ethics. And I know ethics is like a word that people have a million different thoughts and feelings about but like what I mean like doing what's right, rather than like, what is believed to be the most strategic I think is and that's what I like about saw is he does what's right which is fight the Empire. Yeah, Io 34:35 I see him as an ideological insurrectionary anarchist and luthan as just a straight up insurrectionary who, like a like an insurrectionary who wants to get extremely Sun Tzu about it all. Margaret 34:51 Yeah. So if I can, I mean a nihilist in like the Russian sense not in the like anarchist sense, you know? Because It's not a coincidence that most of the Russian nihilists were like Social Democrats at heart. Maybe that's getting a little too off. So, Io 35:08 yeah, like I don't I do see I see a lot of people trying to square this to as like Disney published like anarchists propaganda that's like this and that and I'm like, I don't think they did that it's it's in its set in outer space. It's it's a thing, but it's obviously made by people who like, give a shit about these things like and like you and me care about, like the historical stories and context of revolutionary movements. Yeah. And it's from its from that perspective of people who like who are interested in also think it's just think that fighting cops is the coolest thing you can do with your life? Yeah, and making a show about cool people fighting cops, and that is cool to me. Yeah. But uh, do you want to do you want to talk a little bit about about Rogue One? Sure. So well, I guess we were I guess we were already kind of kind of on it. Saw he lives in the holy holy city of Jeddah where the Jedi began as a society of monks and they were guardians against galactic tyranny and fascism, but eventually became a liberal military arm of the Republic or whatever the fuck, and a bunch of other shit happens, but where I think, oh, where this movie really starts screaming is you get to this fucking this stupid. General Assembly is suddenly ready to pack it up. Because suddenly they're up against these overwhelming odds and like, you remember that? That nerd? This fucking nerd shouts What is she proposing? And everyone's just like, oh gosh, crumbs? Well, I guess I guess we're done for packet in everybody. But luckily we plucky heroes. This platoon of doomed men who say fuck this they go rogue because a man with nothing to lose in a sharp stick can take the day and they're the last chance to to save the galaxy to do some overwhelming violence against the Empire against and go against all this bureaucratic cowardice is just a big they all pack into one shitty spaceship. Huddled bunch of cuddle puddle revolutionary saying fuck it life sucks book the Empire. Let's do a cool suicide. And do they Margaret 37:42 wanted to get out? I'm sure they did. Yeah, Io 37:46 they do. It was not. It was not likely. And yeah, it wasn't for this. This is a part of canon. This is the part of the Extended Universe candidate that has transferred over the Mon Calamari you all know Admiral Ackbar it's a trap, etc. Um, that that planets and and race of like people involved in the rebellion are like the most ready to throw down. And I'm glad that that transferred over a Rogue One. Everyone else is just like, beans. Well, I guess the Empire wins. And Mon Calamari was like, Oh, we've got Rogue One. Awesome. Love those guys. Margaret 38:30 Totally. I mean, and that's why I like Rogue One so much right? Yeah. As because you have your doomed revolutionary cuddle puddle that goes off to go do massive violence and steal some plans. And then the like, solidarity that it will kill you is like what breaks my heart more than anything else. If you want to see me cry in a movie, like the second Lord of the Rings movie when the right of the row Hyrum went Rohan shows up to support condor is a safe space for nerd for being a nerd. So when when they roll up, and they yell a red day, a blood day and it's actually this Norse maybe not Norse is the Scandinavian poem. That's the Tolkien's ripping off but it's fucking beautiful. And then they like scream like death death death and then like run charging into the forces of Mordor. Right? To have the backs of Condor that's when I start crying the most consistently in in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And so Rogue One operates on the similar principle of the like, Well fuck it, I guess will show up like like sometimes when all your friends are jumping off a bridge like you should probably show up to support them anyway. You know? And like, Io 39:48 would you rather die all at once rather than piece by piece? Margaret 39:52 Yeah, yeah, totally. Which is you know from and or, and then there's also a quote from Blackhawks speaks, which I haven't read in a long time and so I Um, I apologize for possibly paraphrasing this badly but in the war against the colonization of what later became the United States or whatever, right? You know, a bunch of people are sitting around being like, well, we should go to war against these fucking white invaders. And someone is like, No, we shouldn't write because it's useless. If we do it, we'll die. It's like killing mosquitoes. You can kill them, but they keep coming in. There's, there's no point to it. And then the rest of the council is like, alright, well, we're doing it. And this isn't fiction. This is a nonfiction piece. And, and the same guy who was like, well, we shouldn't do this as like, well, I'm coming with you. Because I'm not a coward. You know, and I, I really like that concept within Rogue One. The like, well, this isn't how we wish it had gone. This wasn't what we planned. But we're not going to fucking just let you go out and do there. On your own. We're not cowards. Obviously, some of the people in that council chamber were cowards. Yeah, a Io 40:59 lot of people didn't show up. And I think a lot of other people were invested in the in the assembly or didn't invested in the in building an army against the Empire, rather than we can get we can really get a lot done with some sabotage. We can get a lot done with with a plucky group of fuckers. Yeah, just plop it plopping down and, and putting on some weird uniforms. Margaret 41:31 Yeah. And it, it was considered right. Like, I think a lot of what we're talking about about like, insurrections are what pushed us forward. You know, it wasn't like, like, let's just, I know, where we can go throw a bomb, let's just go throw a bomb randomly. They were like, What are we going to do? You know, like, the first big action and AND, OR is like, we're gonna steal all this money because we need it. Right. And so all of the actions have a purpose, they tie into a strategy and I love. That's one of the things I love about Rogue One, right? It's like, you know, all right, well, against all odds, we're gonna go get the Deathstar plans. You know, rather than just we're gonna go explode a thing, because the Empire has lots of things. You know, Io 42:22 I got a lot, they got lots of things. And I'm, I think that I think that there's a, there's a poetry in an affirmation of life in attacking something symbolically. But yeah, what you've got, you got a symbol and a rush of adrenaline and a, and a huge danger to yourself and everyone else around you, if you're going to put some danger out there. Be sure of it. And I don't know, maybe, maybe have some maybe have a little bit more more payoff? Yeah. Yeah, like, in Minecraft? Margaret 43:00 It's totally like, in Star Wars, you should, you know, think about like, if you're gonna gamble at all, you should wait till the pot is sweet. I don't know, whatever. Yeah, no, it's Io 43:15 go bigger, go big, and then go home. Margaret 43:18 Yeah. Through your safe house. I do think that the Star Wars rebellion in general, does relate to a style of revolution that is less the style of revolution that I would guess the average person listening to this, like, thinks about, like, the history that they're drawing from, at least based on what you were saying is like, national rebellions for against an oppressive outside force, right. You know, we haven't seen we've seen revolutionaries on the capital planet, but we haven't seen them being like, here's how we're going to take the Capitol planet, you know, as ours, right, because we're from here, whatever. Instead, you see all of these colonized forces, these colonized people, being like, we don't want to be colonized anymore. So we're now in this alliance of all these colonized people to fight against this oppressive force. Io 44:12 Oh, that's just another thing that I like. I like a lot about andorre in that the end of the end of row of not row one of A New Hope is just this like, Lily, this this Dyess of of lily white heroes of the rebellion that might as well be out of like Triumph of the Will and like cheering and Chewbacca doesn't get a medal. I know that's well trod territory, but like, justice for my man AND and OR has very few white characters making up the the core of the rebellion. Margaret 44:57 Yeah, yeah. And just under this funny problem that we're running into, from a cultural point of view that all of a sudden we're watching all these prequels, right? Or at least like I watched the game of thrones show, the new one house of dragons. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked it possibly more than I like Game of Thrones. I've literally no idea what that's a statement that drew everyone mad at me or not. Io 45:20 And dragons. You can't argue with that. Margaret 45:23 Yeah, and it's less white. It's still majority white. But it is like markedly less white. And there's something kind of depressing about watching these prequels that are less white. Io 45:35 Something very, something very bad must have happened between then and then. Margaret 45:40 Yeah, even though what we're actually watching of course, is that, you know, the media that better choices getting made. Yeah, exactly. I don't know just something I think about when I watch that kind of shit. Io 45:55 This one This one sort of maps to my, you know, my, my, my headcanon of like, obviously, it's just the casting choices are better now. But it also maps to like successful revolutions. And especially like the one that installs like Princess Leia, Princess into like, royalty into positions of power in like a new Neo lib chorus on seated government eventually were like the people who did the dirty work saga Pereira and Andorra and whoever else are long forgotten, we're just we're all just cannon fodder for this respectable and hard they they fought hard, but they but they were put in an impossible position but like let the let the lower castes get their hands dirty in a way that every successful revolution winds up winds up doing which is why like, like, you know, I'm obviously interested in in a in massive change but the thing that really interests me is not the end result but the the process the affirmation of life of being able to resist in your modern day and live for Me and artistically. But just live rebelliously in the time you are in not for some far off future not what am I supposed to do put put all my put all my fucking plans and morals on hold because I hope that the the proletarian revolution is going to come off some way. Come on, come around. If I if I just joined enough DSA chapters. Here's your sign. Margaret 47:52 I mean, I feel like andorre gets into this kind of stuff in a useful way with the whole prison sequence, right? Where they're in prison or Prison Break. I know and so they're all in prison and they're all doing prison labor. And, you know, is a brutal regime very controlled, it does the thing where like, part of the systems of control it's very panopticon ish, like, part of the systems that control is also that the, I guess in that Fukui way or whatever, right where like people are controlling themselves because they, you know, the prisoners are in charge of the prisoners on some level. Right. Io 48:32 And you got Gollum is the boss. Margaret 48:37 Yeah, and oh, I thought you were telling me we watch this together. I thought you were telling me that the really old guy was Gollum. Io 48:47 The no Andy Serkis. The other prisoners the guy who did mocap for for the one who literally literally call them I wasn't making I wasn't being ageist. Margaret 49:02 But I thought you were saying the old man was the person who did the motion capture for Gollum. Io 49:06 Oh, he used to be very spry. Margaret 49:10 Okay, okay. I mean, so, so go we all you know and and so, you know, so you have Gollum who is the sergeant essentially, he was telling everyone what to do on the cellblock. And then as soon as they know that they're doomed men. They're able to be free. Right? And as a very literal metaphor in this particular context, that as soon as and then the fact that they're like, What is freedom mean? Freedom means jumping into the water even if you can't swim and trying. Right? Is a very non subtle, and they just express it as beautiful. They just have this beautiful scene of everyone jumping in the water. They don't have a grandeur. land they don't hold the guards hostage in order to get I mean to be clear might have been smarter if they had held the gods hostage in order to get like an escape vehicle but whatever Io 50:09 oh they would they would they would have just bought bombed the planet. Margaret 50:13 I know mainly but yeah, that's true. That's you know, like, Io 50:16 like modern you know, a modern prison uprising will hold Guards, guards hostages for the sake of like the people who are holding the guards hostage hostage are going to get extra years on their mobile a ton of extra time on their sentence, if not outright killed by it, but could win could wind up winning better conditions for people inside I don't have I don't have faith that prison officials were uphold their end of the bargain. But yeah, a resistant resistance is is beautiful, no matter. The end result somebody somebody slipped Andy Serkis a copy of blesses the flame. And they're all like, fuck it. Let's go. Yeah, no, let's go for a dive. Margaret 51:06 Totally. And like the ones who die immediately while throwing a wrench at the second armed guard are just as like beautiful and free as the people who swim to safety, you know? And like? No, I really like that whole long extended metaphor that they did around what it means to just actually be free. Which is why I do hold that. The I don't know. I mean, I guess the real question would be to know the writers and you know, because like, people talk about, oh, Disney made this like, no, no, Disney didn't make this Disney put their name on it. It was made by people in the same way that like workers make all value. You know, the the writers and the actors and the directors and all of these people like made and or? And yeah, exactly. So I don't know I don't know where I'm going with that. But Io 52:08 we'll I had a if you want to if you want to think about it a bit I had. I wish I could remember who said this so I would credit them but somebody put out that when Disney was making was making the Lion King and Pocahontas at the same time, they put all their stock into Pocahontas and really micromanage the entire project. I've never seen Pocahontas it sounds like it's a decent movie. But Lion King undoubtedly turned out awesome. Because the because all the writers and artists involved got creative control of it because they didn't have they didn't have Walt over their shoulder the whole time. Same thing happened with Star Wars because Andorra was being developed at the same time that Obi Wan Kenobi, A, A and nobody, and nobody asked me, but the show was good. I did not have a good time watching goon McGregor do his thing again. But yeah, they really micromanage that and they were just like a thing that's like rogue wants share proceed and makes me a little nervous about season two because they'll see that this is is like it and I read I don't really know much about the writers I know that they were interested in like Palestinian resistance and the Haitian Revolution and things like that, which you can see in the show and that the next season is going to get more into like the the ship that I was so excited about, which was like the internal politics of rebellions like I would love I would love to see saw Guerrera talk some more shit about about space to Kunis or whatever. But yeah, yeah, fingers fingers crossed, they'll they'll realize that it was successful because they didn't get their fucking fingerprints all over it. Margaret 54:02 Well, maybe next year, we'll be sitting down to do another episode and we'll be we'll know whether or not everything went to hell or whether it pulled it off. Io 54:12 You'd be like No, they weren't they brought a AR two d two is there for some reason. That's another that's another great thing about this. Like it was like I think it's great because the rebellion never really got its do it's like the entire plot of Star Wars and nobody ever really like fucks with it. It's just like the just like the scenery. But also we don't have we don't have to hear anything about space lasers and the Jedi and Mother I guess there is a wisecracking droid, but I love that little guy. Margaret 54:48 Yeah, nice. And he's, I don't know. I mean, you need the wisecrack. Enjoy in the same way that you need. The animal who sits around and tells jokes or you know, whatever like that is a good is a good character that gets added to TV and movies. Yeah, bring up at Ewoks. But it still was like, way more. I mean, it's essentially it's it's more proletarian than like, we're working class or whatever jargon word I supposed to use here. Instead of like space nights and space princesses and space royalty and you know, all that shit. It's just like, fucking people in the muck getting it done. Io 55:28 Yeah the space the space serfs out there, perfectly capable of braiding a stormtrooper? Yeah. As good as Luke Luke Skywalker. Yeah. Well, I think we did it. We talked about everything AND and OR. But, Margaret, any final thoughts? Margaret 55:46 I'm just, I'm excited for the quality of the storytelling that we like now have available to us as we go forward, because the world is in very dire conditions right now. And we need better stories are so little Gwen has the story of is the quote about like, we need authors who can remember freedom, you know, and I think that we're like, we're starting to see those stories. And we're starting to see him, including in mainstream places. And I think that's like one of the most promising things that I've ever seen as a radical or whatever. So I'm excited. Who knows, maybe it'll all go off the rails, but for now, is good. Io 56:28 There will always be small examples and whether it erupts soon. Being that freedom as a pure idea, or we just have to keep settling for these little diamonds in the rough. I don't know. I'm excited. Yeah, there does seem to be a lot more good stuff recently. But that's us. That's the anarcho geek review. We did it folks. Margaret 56:52 In our cooking, or our Io 56:54 that's the one. That's what Margaret 56:58 this is where anyone is listening. We used to have a blog called a narco geek review. And that's not what this show is called. Io 57:07 No, not related to the anarcho geek review. We disavow we Margaret 57:12 know that Reza vacco splitters they're split out yeah, we've Io 57:17 split we split off from them. They were ideologically unserious. Yeah. Margaret, you want to tell people where where they can find you? Margaret 57:27 Yeah, I've got some podcast once called cool people did cool stuff. I referenced it like three times this article, I asked to talk about individual and community preparedness on another podcast by the same strangers network called live like the world is dying. And until well, by the time you listen to this, I might not be on Twitter anymore, but I'm currently on Twitter at Magpie killjoy Instagram at Margaret killjoy all that shit. I Oh, what about you? Io 57:53 I'm, as of this recording, still still on Twitter, at bum lung. And I'm also on Instagram at bum lung. And if I get on any other social media fingers crossed, they won't have to. It'll probably be under that as well. And before we go, I would I would love to thank we have a Patreon patreon.com/strangers In a tangled wilderness and I would love to thank some of our Patreon supporters. Right now. Hoss the dog. That's a good boy. Mike, aka mkhaya Kaya, thank you. Like I Margaret 58:33 say yeah. Oh, actually. Actually, that's funny. That's right MC. Mikayla, actually my a veteran, right. Make Io 58:42 that McCain or mkhaya. Please settle this bet and whichever one wins I was the other a coke. Chris Sam Kirk. Eleanor. Jennifer Starr Oh, cat J. Chelsea. Dana. David. Nicole. Mickey. Paige, S J. Shawn Hunter, Theo. Boise. Mutual Aid. Milica and Papa Runa. Hope I got that one. Right. Thank you. Thank you all for your support. Big hugs and kisses out to all of you. And thank you everyone who listened. And yeah, to tune in next time when we'll talk about some other nerd bullshit and I'll see you at the movies. 59:40 The times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. And then, I'm sure both by the scale of the enemy. Remember this? Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random Acts of insurrection. are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy, there are a whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the course. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this imperial need for control is so desperate because it's so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort, it breaks, it leaks. Authorities brittle oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that and know this. The day will come when all the skirmishes and battles has moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege remember this try

INTRODUCTION: David Hernandez is the founder of Body By Purpose, creator of the Elite Champion Fitness Academy and host of the podcast, Listen, You're Not Defeated.  He is passionate, inspiring, andmotivated. He believes that each of us was designed to live a life of purpose. He believes in one core component in everything he teaches... providing VALUE. So that men and women can learn the principles needed to achieve a healthy, fit and fulfilling life. His life's mission is to empower OVER 1MILLION people to live a better life, healthy, fit and free! After losing hischildhood best friend to obesity at the age of 21, David promised himself thatno one he loved or cared about was ever going to die of obesity if he couldhelp it.  INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to): ·      Super Sickening Health Advice·      Male Self Esteem Issues·      Obesity Concerns·      Emotional Eating·      Our Relationship With Food·      Fitness Industry Tea·      Lagging Indication Of Lab Tests·      The Benefits Of Weight Loss·      The Stress Of Weight On Internal Organs·      The Mental Effect On Exercise  CONNECT WITH DAVID: Website: http://www.DavidHernandez.coWebsite: http://www.EmotionalEatingSupport.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3k6mW3tFacebook: www.facebook.com/davekhernandezTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/davekhernandezInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/davekhernandezLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davekhernandez/  DIETICIAN RECOMMENDED INFO: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/weight-management/adult-overweight-obesity/health-riskshttps://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comWebsite: https://www.DownUnderApparel.comTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sexdrugsandjesusYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook:   https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonPinterest: https://www.pinterest.es/SexDrugsAndJesus/_saved/Email: DeVannon@SDJPodcast.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      OverviewBible (Jeffrey Kranz)o  https://overviewbible.como  https://www.youtube.com/c/OverviewBible ·      Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed (Documentary)o  https://press.discoveryplus.com/lifestyle/discovery-announces-key-participants-featured-in-upcoming-expose-of-the-hillsong-church-controversy-hillsong-a-megachurch-exposed/ ·      Leaving Hillsong Podcast With Tanya Levino  https://leavinghillsong.podbean.com  ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net VETERAN'S SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS ·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org ·      What The World Needs Now (Dionne Warwick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg  INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: David Hernandez[00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Good morning everybody, and welcome to the Sex Drugs in Jesus podcast. So glad to have you with me today. David Hernandez is the founder of Body by Purpose, creator of the Elite Champion Fitness Academy and host of the podcast. Listen, you're not defeated. Join David and I today as we get deep and heavy about obesity, our relationship with food, mental health, self-esteem, and so much more.David [00:01:00] lost a friend to obesity and had a near death experience himself,and so this episode is quite emotional.Please listen and share. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Sex Drugs in Jesus podcast. I love having all of you. I love having sex with all of you. I love doing drugs with all of you, and I love talking about Jesus with all of you. David, how are you? David: I'm doing fantastic. My man's doing, doing a, a great morning here and excited to be here with you.Thanks for having me. De'Vannon: Hells fuck yeah. So y'all, David Hernandez is in Florida. He's the founder of Body By Purpose. He's gonna tell you what that is in just a moment. He's the creator of the Elite Champion Fitness Academy. He's gonna tell you what that is in just a moment. He's a certified personal trainer, a certified nutrition specialist, the member of the International Sports and Science [00:02:00]Association.He's gonna tell me what that is in a moment, cause I'm most curious about it. He's the host of. Of of the podcast called Listen, you're Not Defeated, and he's gonna give us some tea about that too. So I'll walk you, I'll walk you through everything that you gotta tell us. So first, what is Body by Purpose?David: Yeah. Awesome. And look, I believe our body was designed with the specific purpose, and each one of our purposes are unique. And if our body isn't aligned to our purpose, to our desire, to our lifestyle, to the things that we desire to achieve and do in life, well, we may fall short of that because our body is the instrument that takes us there.right? It's what makes us travel to that destination in life. And so I believe that when we align our body to that purpose, we can truly become unstoppable and ultimately able to achieve whatever we desire to achieve. So that was critical with me. I was, I was kind of thinking about what name do I wanna [00:03:00] give?Because I believe that health is bigger than us, right? And if we can include purpose in all that we do, well, then we can make our body achieve that as well. De'Vannon: So is this like a nonprofit? Is it, you know, like your fitness organization? What is it? David: Yeah, it's my company where I run all of my fitness through.But primarily it's also A, a kind of like a, like a motto that I, that I want people to adopt in their own life, so to speak, because it's a message, right? And I think that when we put a message or a meaning to everything that we do, then we can enhance the value of what we're doing. And I believe that our body is a critical tool.It's an instrument that oftentimes we ignore. We're now starting to talk a lot about, a lot about the mind, and we talk a lot about our emotions and we talk a lot about many things, and the body's also talked about, [00:04:00] however, I believe the body is not presented in the correct. I believed oftentimes when we look at the media, when we look at how we should look, there's a specific stigma.There's a specific style. Right now we're getting back into the really, really skinny look, and oftentimes if the look or the body, again, isn't specifically aligned to your purpose, then it doesn't matter what body you have, it's gonna ultimately keep us from achieving our ultimate desires in.De'Vannon: Okay. All right, cool.So what is the Elite Champion Fitness Academy? David: That's the academy that I put together where I utilize to train all my students. So instead of me telling you what to do, I believe in educating you to take control of your own health. So it's a platform that I have. All of the years that I've been in fitness, 15 plus [00:05:00] years, all of the education that I've acquired, I've condensed it to a very specific core component system, so to speak.And in that academy, I put all of the principles that I believe are necessary for one to achieve the ultimate health that they desire in one place. And so that's basically my coaching platform that I put together, and it's what I utilize with all of my students. De'Vannon: Fabulous. Now, what is the International Sports and Science Association?David: That's where I got my certification from. It's a certification education company or a certification company where you can get your nutrition certification, your personal trainer, asso certification and all things related to health basically. De'Vannon: All right. Now they had me atk. I was like, okay,So the podcast, listen, you're not defeated. What is its premise? David: The premise is really to tell [00:06:00] people that doesn't matter what situation that you're in, you're really not defeated. And oftentimes as humans, we have one area or a few areas where we might feel defeated in, and that might be nutrition, that might be in health.I can't release weight. That might be in mindset. I don't know how to take control of certain negative thoughts to get me there. So it's a lifestyle show where we basically cover many areas to ultimately help you live a not defeated life. De'Vannon: Now, when I was researching that on your website it's the verbiage kind of makes it seem like it's geared toward women.Is that still the case or has it expanded to include. David: It's expanded to include everyone, and it's really now to the place of, well, what is your ultimate desire, right? In life, which initially when we started it, it was geared very specifically towards only health. But I realize that in that [00:07:00] health is covering all areas, right?It's not just a physical health, it's also a mental health. It's also emotional health. It's also spiritual health. And health is bigger than us because it does impact everything that we do. So through our development and kind of going episode to episode, we've now been able to diversified and expand it to anyone that wants to basically just live a freedom lifestyle or a lifestyle of freedom.for proper English, De'Vannon: oh, fuck, proper English . One thing, one thing I despise about this country. Is that we don't have like an actual language of our own. That's right. You know, we speak English well, that came from fucking England and fuck the king off with his head. Yeah. . You know, may I think that, I think that Mad Queen might've had a few Few.Hmm. A few, few, few good points there. [00:08:00] I don't know. I just it would be, I just love it that every other, basically every other country has its own fucking language. Yeah. You know, Australia at least has a goddamn accent, you know, and at least they have an accent, you know, over there in the uk, but pretty much every other country, you know, they have and in that their own language and that language really unites them, you know?Yeah. And everything like that. It's like, it's like, it's like when you're on a job, but you learn to speak that occupation's language and it bonds you. Mm-hmm. , you know, David: I feel like, I mean, it's an essence, right? I believe it's, it's an essence that makes up a country and it makes up an identity type. And look, I, I think holding onto that, that conversation there, I think it's the same thing for all language in terms of who we are as people, right?Because when we look at language, it, it's the, it's an essence that, that identifies something or someone, a country. [00:09:00] And I believe that in America, oftentimes we don't have our own unique language, meaning we strive to sometimes be like somebody else, to copy somebody else, right? To, to, to, to live the life that somebody else has.And we sometimes forget about, well, what is our core essence that we can adopt to live our own life and set our own standard, so to speak, in what we want in our life? So I just thought De'Vannon: I'd throw that in. Feel free to throw in anything you want, man. So I love, I love how how deep of a thinker you are. And the reason why I really wanted to have you on my show is that that passion, you, you talk like a preacher, like you have like one of the good preachers, y'all, not one of the rapy ones or one of the molesters , not one of the grif ones.Good one. So you have like that certain fire and intensity and passion and I could tell that you're living, like you're calling [00:10:00] and you even fused that into health and fitness and so Right. Thought it would be a unique take. I could have gotten anybody on here to talk about health and fitness, but I, I was, I was needing that, you know, I was looking for that, that.And so, which you have that spark. And so I'm curious when I Oh, you're welcome. And so when I was read, you know, researching you and everything I saw where you in the beginning of your fitness journey, you would go to the gym and you, you start up like the big muscley guys or whatever like that and mm-hmm.and I read where you were able to extract insight and wisdom and tips that you said that you felt like the personal trainers and things like that either didn't know or they weren't sharing. So I would like you to share with us some sweet ass David: secret. Yeah. Look, it really, what I've learned through I guess, looking at many bodybuilders life is that they've got [00:11:00] two to three things very clear for the.They've given meaning to everything that they're doing in the gym. Like it has a certain value and it has a certain standard of meaning for them. It's what drives them. It's what gets them up. It's what keeps them on diets for months and years on end. It's what keeps them committed to a specific outcome.So much so that even if they don't get it, they live satisfied because they know that the process and the journey has gotten them close to it or to achieving it. Right? And when I look at health, I look at, well, I started asking questions and saying, well, why is it that people don't stick to the journey?Why is it that people fall off? Why is it that they have, they're able to commit to other things, but yet they fall off? When we're talking about health, and I really come back to this piece, they've either not given health the value. That is necessary for them [00:12:00] to continue, or they've put other things at greater value that are overvalued or have greater value than they've put on health.And then the second component is really looking at, well, they haven't given value or they don't find value in themselves. They don't feel that they might be worth it. They feel that they might not be worthy enough. They might feel that they're not deserving of having the health or the life that they desire.So that was a big one. And I said, okay, so if this bodybuilder is living in this way and he's given this meaning to them, that's keeping them stuck, well, why can't we incorporate that to just any average person? To help them in their own health and fitness journey. Right? So that was one. The second, the second thing that I learned, the second sort of secret, right, which is really not a secret, but is their commitment to process, meaning their determination and dedication to the [00:13:00] sport, right?Or to their body or to their life. Because we look at, well, what does it take to get a body so greatly proportioned, so immaculate, right? So precise in a sense that it comes down to a science they're determined to achieve, that they're dedicated to that process. And oftentimes when we're looking at an average person, right, or, or, or a, a person that is on their own journey, sometimes that might be lacking the dedication, the determination, and it help, it doesn't allow them to get to their ultimate goal and destination.Right. And then thirdly, a lot of it was learning how they actually work out some of the methodologies in terms of how they're sculpting the bodies, how they're actually doing certain movement patterns and taking that muscle to failure and making the muscle grow through increasing the blood flow in that body part, right?And [00:14:00] ultimately reducing down to as little body fat as possible. So it, it brought a lot of insight that I was able to incorporate and look at, okay, if I'm not training a bodybuilder, how can I still incorporate some of these principles or some of these things that they do to a average person that is looking to maybe release 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 10 pounds, 50 pounds, a hundred pounds?Right. And it was some, some of the core essences that I believe have really impacted many people in their, in their own journey. De'Vannon: You know what I'm curious about? I don't really think like a male. I identify more with feminine energy, so I think more like a woman on mills dating. Okay. Right. And so I'm curious cuz all of this, everything that you said is like, so like meaningful and deep in terms of physique and stuff like that.So from talking to other guys and within yourself, like what are some of the things that motivate men to go, [00:15:00] you know, to work out, to get, you know, really, really defined bodies? We're gonna talk about like the obesity and everything. Yeah. You know, in just a second. weight loss goals can be different, you know?Absolutely. Going from 300 pounds to one 90 is like a huge deal, but you may not be like chiseled and well defined, but you are in super great shape, especially relative to what you were mm-hmm. . And I know that once you get like a six pack and eight pack, a nine pack or whatever, every guy I know who has that, the, if he gets out of the gym for like a month, that damn thing goes away.Mm-hmm. . And so so whenever, so they don't go more than like a week out of the gym and whenever they travel, they take their asses over the Gold Gym, fitness or whatever, like, like religion. So when I look at a man like that, I think, okay, he's hot. This is like a sexual thing. Mm-hmm. . But the, but from hearing you describe this, and from the way I have [00:16:00] observed other guys, I don't know that it's like a sexual thing.And so I don't, so how, how do men look at, how do y'all look at your own David: body? A lot of it is driven by ego in a sense that because we as men are achievers, right, strivers, we want to be in that place of, of chasing after things, achieving the provider at the home or whatever that might be for you.It really is driven oftentimes by. How can I be the best version of myself or how can I be better than him? Or how can I be better than myself to become better? Or oftentimes it's, I used to be this type of person that kept me in a low self-esteem state that wasn't who I wanted to be, for example. I can really identify to that.Growing up, I was super. [00:17:00] I was given a nickname, skinny. My dad used to call me that he didn't know. He thought it was a good thing for him, but for me, it would affect my self-esteem. It would affect the way I would view myself because I did not like the way I looked. I was excessively for my standard skinny.I would be made fun of because I wasn't able to possibly perform, be good at sports because I was a specific physique type, right? And I always found myself having to prove myself, proving myself that I was able to play football, proving myself that I could become the best athlete, proving myself that I was much more than what my body said.And so that took me into, okay, so how can I change that? I started reading magazines. I started looking at these bodybuilders and these physiques and saying, oh my gosh, who is this? Can I possibly achieve that? Then I look at their back stories, and many of these bodybuilders were the same way. They were skinny.They were very thin, they were bullied, they were made fun of. [00:18:00] And then that drove them to change that. So oftentimes it, it really comes down to each person's unique story, but I believe deep down inside there is something of that nature that is driving them, either growing up excessively skinny, low self-esteem, maybe being bullied, or it can ultimately come down to an ego-based drive that's just like, I wanna be the best.How can I achieve that wall? Let me be intimidating. Let me have these muscles because it's gonna give me a certain look or a certain presence, right? Wherever I go, that when I walk into a room, I can change or capture the environment based on how I look.Okay. No, I can't speak for every male. Right? But that's what oftentimes I've, I, I believe is, is the reasons. De'Vannon: I mean I think you might speak for quite a [00:19:00] lot of them, especially men who, who are more on the masculine side, you know, and you know, cause even like the gay world mm-hmm. , you know, your tops and everything.You know, you, you have your tops, your bottom tops are like, the dudes bottoms are like the girls, you know, for lack of better. Right. References. Even them, they get like this thing about being too thin. Mm-hmm. , you know, for me, I've always been able to keep a weight on, so I've always been like, okay, how can I get this shit offYeah. But I, but I didn't wanna be muscley or nothing like that. I wanted it like a nice, you know, curvy like, you know, womanly physique and stuff like that. And I, I guess it's just, and I guess it's just because I don't think like a guy like it, it was, it, it has been absolutely perplexing to me in my existence.Why somebody who's not overweight. Who's like super skinny has a problem with that. Yeah. You know, [00:20:00] I, you know, hearing you explain it helps me to digest that better, because all my life I'm like, okay, how can I get down to, to being, you know, skinny mm-hmm. , you know, and and then the skinny guys are like, I'm not enough.You know, I want to be more. And, and I'm all like, boy, don't you know, you fine as hell. What do you want? Like, what more do you want? So, and then perspective. Perspective, right? And then the relationships. That I've had, you know, the, the, the, the dude, he's all like, he thinks he's too thin. I'm all like, okay, whatever you need to do.I'm not judging your body, but they have it in their head. So much likes saying like, I can't, I just can't be thin. I need to like, have muscle or whatever. And so I don't know if that's like the xy chromosome primal. If I need to defend myself, I need to be bigger than the other person too. Maybe some of that's getting worked in there.I believe David: so. Yeah. And, and oftentimes it can become a coping mechanism [00:21:00] to something like when we're talking about life experiences, right? We're talking about emotional triggers, emotional pain, trauma, right? Something in experience that causes some type of impact to us emotionally or psychologically will produce a stimulant to search for a coping mechanism.And as humans, we all need them to survive to allow us to release whatever emotional impact we've received by X situation or X circumstance, right? And oftentimes, if it's body dysmorphia, right, which we can kind of label that as as well. I see myself skinny. I see myself skinny, but dude, you're not right.In our head, we create that dysmorphia type where we may never be satisfied or we just see ourselves at something else. And oftentimes when we're chasing after this and we fall into this coping action physique wise, [00:22:00] it can become a trap because again, we're never satisfied. I remember on my body building journey, it didn't matter how big I was.I wanted to be bigger. It didn't matter how good I looked, I wanted to look better. It didn't matter how many compliments I received of, dude, you have a great physique. No, no, no, but this, but that, right? We have a tendency of finding the flaws of not being satisfied, and that ultimately is caused in my belief by finding a coping action in the wrong things or releasing our set circumstances that we're feeling emotionally satisfying them or trying to satisfy them with the wrong things.if that makes sense. Oh, it De'Vannon: makes perfect sense. And that's a huge reason why I do all the work that I do to try to, to get people to understand themselves. Because so often we don't. And we think we do. Yeah. Yeah. So you hear me say all the time, people, why do you think, what do you think? Why do you feel [00:23:00] what you feel?Where do you get that belief and value system from? I love that. Is it valid? I love that. Yeah. I, I went the opposite direction. No matter how thin I got back in the day. It wasn't thin enough. I lost so much weight that I couldn't fit the men's jeans in the store that I would go to. So I had to start wearing wow jeans as I was down like a 26th waistline.And I was like, I need to be thinner, you know? And so so I guess that's like how the girls, that's how we do. And thin enough, the boys, you're not big enough. Oh my God, help us to just figure this shit out, , . David: But look, if we are doing things for the wrong reasons, that can quickly spiral to that. So that's why every time I'm doing a consultation, right, and I'm talking to a potential client, it's why do you wanna release weight?Why do you wanna build muscle? Because if the reason why you're doing it is an incorrect reason, right? Just to give it a, a name, to give it a [00:24:00] category. If it's placed for the wrong reasons or it's placed on the wrong things, that is when things can quickly become destructive. Mm-hmm. . It's why sometimes I even ask myself, right?And now, now we're get, I'm getting hypocritical because this is me and this is how I tend to look at things based on my understanding and knowledge. I become hypercritical about certain things, and it's okay, I wanna have this whole pizza. Why do I wanna have this whole pizza? I wanna have this cake. Why do I wanna have this cake?Right. And it might be, I don't sit there and ask myself this question. It happens here now because of the practice that I've had. But if we can get into a place to, to, like you said, ask ourselves questions. Why is it that I want this? Why is it that I wanna do that? Why do then we can stop and really think, is this really necessary?Is this what I want? Which is why [00:25:00] one of the questions that I teach my students to ask them is, is this choice that I'm, I'm about to do in line with who I wanna be in line with, who I wanna become? Mm-hmm. in line with the life that I desire. If we can practice, like you said, to ask ourselves these questions, I believe that we can really get good at taking control of our impulses, of our reactions, of our emotions, right.That sometimes drive us or lead us to making choices that later we can regret. . Mm-hmm. De'Vannon: you preaching now. Amen. And amen. . So, so you mentioned consultation. So tell, tell us about exactly the, so what, what kind of, so you have clients, are they seeing you in person? Is it virtual? Clearly they're coming because they want to change their physique.So kind of walk us through what that looks like and if people would reach out to you through your website. Like how does a, what exactly are you offering here? David: Yeah. Before, [00:26:00] before Covid, a lot of it was in person and it was very exclusive, right? It was like only a certain type of people. Only certain, certain instances would I take them.And after Covid I realized, look, I, I, I could be impacting more, right? And really the reason why I do everything that I do, it was to be able to help people avoid. Going through what my best friend went through, and we can touch on that story story a little later, but it was to support and to help people.And when this epidemic happened, it was a great opportunity for me to then make that expansion. So now everything is virtual. Everything is now online based, right through the academy, and we've got several different types of formats. We have a one-on-one type coaching, and then we have a group type model.And it's to accommodate people at different levels based on their commitment and also based on their finances. But it's really [00:27:00] just, we make it unique and personal to you because we're that type, right? As humans, we're all unique. We're all different types of people, so no program should ever be the same for.Because we're different, right? We have different desires. We have different lifestyles. And that's really the big key, because I believe if whatever you're doing today doesn't align to your lifestyle, meaning who you are as a person, the type of career you have, the type of of schedule you have, the type of time that you have, the commitment that you have, if it doesn't align to that, at some point or another, you will quit or you will fail, you'll give up, right?Because it just becomes unstable. It's not sustainable. So my approach in every consultation is really getting down to the root and to the desires of each person's life. Why do you wanna do it? What is your motivation? What is the driving force, right? What are the desires? What do you wanna achieve? And then from there, it's really getting to the person's commitment level, [00:28:00] right?So how much time are you willing to invest? What is your life like, right? How can we make this align or come together with your life? Because. If you're, if you're chasing health in a f in a program mindset, meaning I have an exercise program, I have a, a nutrition program, that means it's not necessarily a part of your life.You're just following a specific program. And at some point, if you don't like that program anymore, you are gonna stop doing it. But if I can now introduce health to become a part of your life, now I marry it. I bring it together with your life. It's gonna be a lot easier for you to sustain, and you're more likely to hold onto it.Why? Because now it becomes a part of you, a part of your essence, a part of your d n a, a part of your makeup as a human and as your life. [00:29:00] So that's a very critical component for me. When we're doing consultations and we're, we're working closely with any student because I wanna ensure that. You keep it lifelong.So De'Vannon: then give me an example of the sort of help you would offer. Is it meal plans? Is it workout plans? Is it helping someone see like, like, like, like what, like what, what would it actually David: be? Yeah. Again, it's customized for everyone's need, right? So it would include all those things. If let's say, no, I only need help with the exercise part.Okay, we'll tailor it to that. No, I need help with a lot of things, right? I need help with my nutrition, my, my exercise. And then I'm also battling some type of unhealthy relationship somewhere. That might be with sugar, that might be with, with alcohol, right? That might be with another controlled substance type form.There's all types of. [00:30:00] Of needs, so to speak, and we tailor it to what you are needing from mindset, the psychological side, because a lot of what we do stems from there. A lot of the choices that we're making stem from there. And my object or or my process is I wanna help you identify why you're doing what you're doing.If we can get to the core root of what is driving you to make these food choices of what is driving you to have this relationship with food, this relationship with yourself, this relationship with exercise, it might be non-existent. You might hate doing exercise, but if I can change your relationship to exercise, you're gonna have a different psychological understanding of what that is.Therefore, then you're going to be more likely prone to holding onto it and doing it long term if we can make the relationship healthy and your understanding to that is a healthy understanding. , [00:31:00]right? So we work with emotional people that deal with emotional eating, stress, eating, binge eating, right?Unhealthy, toxic relationships with their body, with themselves, with all sorts of, of, of relationship issues in that format, De'Vannon: as it says in the, in the book of Proverbs, in the, in the, in the Bible. In all, in all that I get and get understanding . That's right. So, that's right. So we're gonna, so we've talked about some of the some of the skinny boy issues.Now we're gonna talk about some of the some of the obesity issues. Mm-hmm. . And before we get into Eric, Eric is his best friend's name and he's gonna tell us Eric's story. And but I, I wanted to read some of the statistics that we had discussed before because I feel like it leads into that. So I'll read this, you can talk about that, then you can tell us about Eric.Cool. And so it says emotional stress eating is something that affects between 83 and 88% of [00:32:00] Americans, and it produces 75, 70 5% of all overeating. A recent article by C N B C revealed that 11 million people die each year due to non-communicable diseases caused by poor eating habits. And I pulled this from David's website.He has two emotional eating support.com, and then David hernandez.co. Of course, all that will go in the show notes. So just speak to us about those statistics and then tell us about Eric. David: Look, these statistics are meant. Not to alienate or not to bring shame or bring judgment to anybody. They're simply to bring awareness to help us recognize that this is a potential threat to many people's lives.And if there's a threat, the threat is to let us know while, let's avoid falling into that, or let's avoid being impacted by that threat. Or if I'm in that threatful situation, right, [00:33:00] being impacted by this, let's do something about it. Let's change because I believe we can do something about everything. If we're still breathing, we can impact it and bring change.Right. And my best friend was one of these individuals. He was part of this sort of of, of group, of people growing up. He was that kid that just. Kind of never fit in. He was husky, he was slow. He wasn't good at sports. He was he w he didn't, he wasn't coordinated, right? So he always felt like this outcast, and I was the opposite.I was skinny athletic, into fitness, into sports, super coordinated. So we had this really unique dynamic of a relationship that I loved him for who he was, but I [00:34:00] ultimately also wanted better for him because he desired it for himself. And so, through the years, we'd work out together, we'd do things together.I'd, I talked to him as much as I could about health because he was overweight and he always battled with being overweight. And his, his, his battle was, I wanna release weight, but I don't know how. I don't know what to do. And that's where I would come in. Right? I'd give him as much as I could at the time to help him.18 years after high school, we split. I moved to Miami to study nutrition and culinary arts, and he stayed in Texas and we kind of lost, we went our separate ways, so to speak. We lost communication for several years, and at the age of 21, I got a phone call, you know, that he had passed away and I couldn't believe it.I said, what happened? How did this happen? So he got so obese and he became so desperate to get the weight off that he went to get a gastric bypass surgery. Two days later, he got an infection [00:35:00]and he died. Right? And that tore me apart because I started blaming myself. I started to feel guilty. I started to.Blame. Why didn't I do more? Why wasn't I there? Why didn't I support him more? Why didn't I help him get that weight off? So after about eight months of this self sabotaging guilt and shame, I finally had to come to a place and realize, well, there was really not much more I could have done. There had to be something within him that really ignited to do whatever it took to fight for his own health.But after that, I looked at, well, what were the reasons that kept him stuck in that it was his relationship with food, even though he wanted to release weight, his relationship with food was so specific. Eating, [00:36:00] eating processed. Right, eating junk food all the time. He would love chips with cheese and hot sauce, right?He would eat that as a snack. He would love burgers. He would love pizza. He would love all of these foods that were leading him to this path. And so his relationship with food and his own psychological understanding of food was what kept him trapped. He was an emotional eater. He loved sugar, right? And it didn't matter how much he worked out.It didn't matter how, how, how he tried to change his food choices. He just could not give up what he already knew. And so when we look at people that are in this place, right, according to the statistics, it's we're using food for the wrong reasons. Our relationship with food is an unhealthy relationship.Therefore, our psychological view of food or [00:37:00] understanding of food is also an unhealthy one. And if we do not fix this or get to the core of these reasons as to why a person is making these choices, to get 'em to become obese and stay obese. Doesn't matter what diet you do, doesn't matter what exercise program you follow.It doesn't matter what ills you take, what supplements you take. The root, the core of what makes you up is your relationship with food and your psych, psychology of food. Therefore, if we do not change that identity piece, you're gonna stay stuck and you're gonna continue to go back to these habits. Right?Go back to these choices. That's why these statistics are so alarming and so eye-opening that if we don't do something about it, somebody in that state can become one of those 11 million. Right? And it's a staggering number. Hmm. [00:38:00] because of this poor relationship with food. Right. Meaning the poor habits that we have with food.De'Vannon: And you know, if when people go out and get these surgeries and everything, if their relationship with food doesn't change, they're just getting the weight back. Anyway. That's David: That's right. That's it. That's what I'm getting to. A hundred percent. Right. And we see that through many stories. But here's the thing.People go to that place because they're desperate. Mm-hmm. , right? And oftentimes people are just desperate. Give me a quick fix. Give me something. Just, that's why trends and the fitness industry makes so much money off of this. I have news for many people out there. The fitness industry doesn't care about your life.They care about your. , which is why they take out new supplements every year, new trends, every six months, right? Because they're playing off of your emotions because they know you're vulnerable. They know, a, as humans, we become very vulnerable [00:39:00] and become desperate for answers. So therefore they go, oh, now it's this.Ha ha, we just made several billion dollars. Okay, now it's this. Ah, we just made more million dollars off of this. And supplement companies know this, right? And that is where a lot of this toxic relationship starts to happen. But if we can pull back for a moment and say, okay, let's stop chasing these quick fix, let's stop going to just a quick, simple solution.Let's stop doing that and let's simply focus on this component. It's a small piece, but it is a large makeup of who we are. If I can teach you, That your relationship with food happened at a certain time in your life. And if I can help you change your relationship with food, therefore impacting your psychological understanding of food, your own psychology of food, we're gonna be able to [00:40:00]rewire your brain, which is now going to make sure that you don't go back to these unhealthy choices.You don't change you, you change those issues. Now you change you as a person. Now you don't need a diet program now. You don't need supplements right now. You don't need these quick fixes because now you've changed your core essence. And if we can change you and your makeup, you're gonna be able to stick to it.De'Vannon: It's been a long time coming, but change is going to come, so. So in your coaching, do you have like coaches that work under you? Do you deal with everyone yourself? How does that work? David: Right now everyone is myself. I do have, you know, other people within my business that help me with the management that help me with different of the technical side of things.But right now it's really just oversee by me because I've set it up in a way where I can manage it through group [00:41:00] trainings. If it's a larger base format through one-on-one type coaching. I only take a certain amount of students at a time to ensure that I'm bringing the best coaching to every individual.And then we also work with corporations helping them create corporate wellness programs for their own employees. De'Vannon: Marvelous. Now I wanna talk about, like, get a little bit more granular about some of like the the, the the health implications of becoming overweight. So it's not really about like looking fat so much as what it is doing internally.Yes, we buried somebody who was. In their mid twenties, you know, and he, because he was overweight, he, he, he was like, like his, he couldn't breathe. Mm-hmm. . And so before he, when as he was dying, he was in the hospital on a breathing machine and they had to induce a coma. Mm. You know, to just basically [00:42:00] let him pass, because what, what a lot of weight does it, it like, it strains everything.So That's Right. If you're, if you have like extra as they call it in the, in the, in the health world, Addie, post tissue, that's the scientific way of saying fat. That's right. That's right. I learned that in massage therapy school. Yeah. So if, if you have extra weight hanging on you, then it takes strain on the body.So that means your organs have to work harder to do what they're doing. They're less efficient. Your blood doesn't flow as well, because it has all this. added post tissue. In fact, to move around. It's like it's like if you feel a car full of just a whole bunch of junk and weights, it's gonna drain the gas faster, it's gonna grind the gears faster.The brakes are gonna wear out quicker of the extra weight. If you pick up a 50 pound weight and then you put it down, you feel lighter. Yeah. And so when you lose weight, you can move about easier, you sleep better, your whole quality of [00:43:00] life. Hell, for me, when I've been, like, when I've had a extra weight on me, it was hard for me to reach down and like time my shoes and shit like that.Like absolutely little simple like that, that simply get, like, that goes a really long way for like mental health and emotional wellbeing. Just That's right. Being able to, and then, then, you know, you know, sexually too, sex drive goes up when the weight goes down. That's right. So diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea, which is kind of what I was talking about earlier.But tell us about, you know, your take on how this affects people in their daily lives and internally in their organs. David: Well, think of, think of a Python or a serpent that com contracts and compresses, right, and strangulate. When we have an excess amount on our body of this tissue, it's literally doing that.It's compressing our organs together. It's compressing our heart, it's compressing our veins, it's [00:44:00] compressing our tissues, it's compressing our lungs, a lot of it, and it literally starts to impact us in ways psychologically, emotionally, physically, right in bed to sleep, to have sex, to have relationships with people, to communicate.Most people that become overweight or become. In any of the levels of obesity also become very introverted, right? They're shamed. They don't wanna go out, they wanna stay inside, they get depressed. There's a lot of impact that happens to our life, and it's not so much about simply living, it really comes down to what is your quality of life like, what type of life, what quality of life would you like to have?So if we're in this state of being overweight and possibly OB obesity, your quality of life [00:45:00]isn't at a good standard. It's not a good quality. And when it's not at a good quality, it starts to really do a lot of damage, not only health-wise, but emotionally, psychologically, right? Which tears us down even faster.That is why health is a responsibility that we have to give to ourself and it's bigger than us because it doesn't only impact you, but it impacts everybody around you. It impacts your relationships, it impacts your mood, it impacts the way you speak. It impacts your energy levels. It impacts your relationship with your kids, with your spouse, with your boss.It impacts your performance. And so that is why I'm such an advocate of understanding that health is a [00:46:00] part of my life, my makeup. If we can take the view of it, our perspective of it in that way, which is why I'm really on a mission to change the scope of how people view health, right? And how people view healthy living a lifestyle of healthy.Freedom versus simply wanting to lose weight, simply wanting to look better. That's part of it, but it's not the makeup that really is the impactful part that should be impactful for many people's lives. Mm-hmm. . De'Vannon: Mm-hmm. , very well stated man. Very well stated. And I, and I also wanna point out like, you know, obesity in younger people.Yeah. It's like, it's like, just because you don't have like negative health problems specifically today mm-hmm. , sometimes it, it's like a [00:47:00] lagging indicator. It's like if you keep that weight on you for too long it can. That's right. Cause you to have problems later. Because, you know, sometimes some people go, well, you know, I feel fine.All my labs look good. I'm able to mm-hmm. , you know, but the thing is, Is that is that shit is sneaky, you know, it catches up. That's right. And lab, lab results and tests only things have to get bad enough for the lab results to the lab tests to be able to pick up on it. That's right. You know, it's like if you don't have enough of a problem, you know, those, those tests are not that thorough where they can just pick up on a little bit of an issue.It has to be enough of it. Yeah. For it to manifest on a test, and then by the, sometimes by the time that shows up, then it's too late to really deal with it. Yeah. So what I'm saying is don't think because you are young and you know, and you, you, you're, you're eating all of this. You what, how you know you're [00:48:00] overweight, that your health won't like suddenly fail you one day.Yeah. Like, I don't want people to fall into this trap of thinking like, well, everything looks good. So That's right. David: Yeah. Yeah. Because in the same way, it, it's just one moment, one. One consistent choice away from making all of that flip. Right. And look, and it's the same for skinny people. Did you know that skinny people are, have the highest heart attack rates than anyone out there?No, because they believe, because their metabolism, right. Is keeping them in this state of being thin. They believe that, oh, I can eat all this. I can eat this food, I can eat this, this burger, I can eat all this. So their intake of fatty food, of sugary foods are at a higher rate oftentimes that then causes that heart attack to happen.Right. And so it, it's, it's, it goes back to what is our [00:49:00] relationship with food like, what is our psychology of food like? Because if it's unhealthy at some point or another, it is going to break. It's going to blow up. In the same way, when we look at a relationship with a partner at the beginning, there might be some arguments, there might be some fighting.Then comes a push. Then that push becomes a slap. If the relationship is unhealthy, it starts to get unhealthy. If we don't address it, it's just a matter of time for it to blow up, right? Which is why a lot of what we do when we're even talking about obesity, I believe obesity is learned. Because when we look at, well, what makes up a person to become obese, if we're talking about the relationship with food and their psychologic psychology of food, well, we learn that at some point we were taught to eat this way.Food was introduced to us [00:50:00] from our young age. Therefore, in those moments of us learning how to become a human, how to eat, how to react, how to act, it stemmed from home. So if growing up all we were given was frozen food, ramen noodles, fast food, right? , as you grow up, you're gonna stay with that same relationship and sometimes it's gonna magnify to go from ramen noodles to eating, I don't know, one cup to five cups or whatever it is, to another type of food.Very similar to that. To salty foods. Right? To sugary foods. And that is why it's important parents, right? Or those that are adopting kids. We've got to learn for ourselves how to develop a healthy relationship and a healthy psychology psychology of food so that then we can teach that to our young kids so that then they can grow up with a healthy relationship the same way.[00:51:00]De'Vannon: Yeah. And I feel like marginalized and a lot of like ethnic. Communities are impacted more by this sort of thing because, you know, when you growing up in the hood and in poverty like I did mm-hmm. You know, you know, you too, the parents and everything are too focused on keeping a roof over the head or keeping you from getting murdered or shot or whatever.Yeah. So we never talked about like, okay, this is you gonna balance this plate. Like I have a dietician now, and so, you know, through the Department of Veterans Affairs and awesome. So they're like, and nobody's ever explained to me before. Okay, so if you're going to eat, say, boiled eggs, you just need two of those per day.And then you be sure that the most of your plate is vegetables and not proteins. You don't actually need that much protein. That's right. Like actually laying up re reading the back of a food label, paying attention to mm-hmm. , the amount of servings not being all quick Oh, a hundred calories. But it's Tenten servings in the [00:52:00] Yeah, that's right.That's exactly thousand calories. Yeah. Yeah. And so, So I just really David: wanted to, and how much is the serving? 10 chips? 14 chips, right? And we're eating the entire bag saying, oh, okay, great. There's no problem with this. Right? And look, we're responsible for our own, for our own body, for our own health, right?It's our responsibility. But we also have to look at, look, our environment may not be helping us, right? Let's look at the American standard diet, right? It's not the best. So it's very quick to sometimes say, well, this is the reason. Well, our boss is the one that brought these, these things. My friend is the one that brought my coworker, brought these donuts here.But just because things are like that in our environment doesn't mean we have to give into our environment. Doesn't mean we have to conform to these things. It doesn't mean we have to say yes every time they invite us to go get ice cream or to go do this. Right. It really ultimately, like you said, is educating ourselves [00:53:00] and taking this as our own responsibility.Because if I can be responsible for my own health and I can teach those around me as an example piece of how to be responsible the same way, then we can start to really take control of this thing that has just really spiraled from us, right? Mm-hmm. . De'Vannon: Absolutely. And so we just have a few minutes left here.I want to So we, so we, you know, we, we, we've given people some very, very heavy Yes. Information right now. And so I wanna lighten it up for a little bit. it takes back heavy again because I'm gonna have you close us out towards the end with your near death experience. So let's talk about some ways that people can maybe implement this.So for me, what I found is that I'm, I'm, I'm from Wakanda, so I like it hot. I don't do Yeah. Temperatures below like 70 degrees. I'm like, bitch, it's cold. I'm [00:54:00] putting my teeth David: up, and running. I'm inside the house with the sweater and the, the, the ACS off , De'Vannon: right? I'm like, I, so I, I observed within myself. I work out when I w used to try to go to the gym, come like October, I'm like, fuck all that.I'll see y'all again in April. Yeah. And so my weight would go up in the winter. Right. So what worked for me was I had an empty room in my house and then I put a treadmill in there, which you can get them from like Walmart at Target. Yeah. A weight bench. I got adjustable weights so that they take up less.Beautiful. That's right. And then my dad gave me one of those multi-function machine thingies and so, so that I had to bring the gym to me, so that's perfect. Yeah. That's what worked for me. So what suggestions do you have for people to, to make it work for them or anything like David: that? Look, that's one example of a great way we can do that, but might, some people might say, well, I don't like working out in that format.Okay, great. It's [00:55:00] how can we keep things simple? If one thing you take away, I want you to take away this is asking ourselves, how can I make health or healthy living? Simple meaning, what's one thing I can do? That is simple that I can achieve, but that I can make it fun. We forget that healthy, a healthy life should be fun.And when we get to these states, they're darn well fun because you're able to do more. So in today, if we look at, well, all I can do is walk. Okay, great. How can we make walking freaking fun? Can we find a, a partner that we could do with? Can I listen to some awesome music? Can I watch a video while I walk?Right? Can I, can I skip? Oh, what are people gonna think? Who gives a rats? [00:56:00] What can you do that is fun? You like to. Put on a freaking show in your living room. You like to sing, freaking sing your heart out in the living room while you dance. That is part of exercise that is part of fun. I had a student a lady, she, she loved to country line dance.What would she do? She'd go dancing as many times as she wanted, as she could line dancing, and that was her exercise, right? Get some pool noodles and freaking sword. Fight with your partner, get some Nerf guns and play outside, right? Like, it really is about how can I make it simple and how can I make it fun finding something today that you can do?What is one thing? Oh, well, I don't have time for this. Oh, well, I don't have time for that. What can you do? Let's stop being negative and look at what's One thing I can do. Another thing that I tell my students is every time you go pee, when before or after you're done, do five squats. Do 10 squats. [00:57:00] How much does that take you?That literally takes you five seconds to do that takes you 10 seconds to do. You go pee 10 times. How many, how many squats did you already do in one day? 50 to a hundred squats in a matter of seconds. Right? So it's really about how can I simplify this thing? Because if it, anything that we do in life is overwhelming and complicated, look, oftentimes we overcomplicate it, right?But if we can simply keep it down to, to the core essence, what is health? Health is being active, okay? What's one thing I can do to be active? Go up and downstairs while you listen to some cool music. Go walking, go punch, get a punching bag, put somebody's face that you hate and punch the snot out of it. I don't know.Let's get creative because it's so able, it, it, it's accessible and it's so achievable, but it really just comes down [00:58:00] to us.I De'Vannon: just love to hear you speak and y'all, he has a, a book that he's working on that'll be out eventually and I can't wait to get my fucking hands on it. To, to, to, to devour the written version of this artistic poetry that you weave with your vernacular. And so Yes, yes. But where, where are you? The book anyway, David: we are, first draft is done.We're going. Making tweaks and adjustments and we should be working on that second draft here pretty soon and hopefully becomes the final draft and then we can send it off to, to printing. So we're excited. De'Vannon: Oh, oh my God. If you could get a book edited in three drafts, I would be impressed. It took me 10, I believe it mine.My, David: what helps is my wife is she's like a, a, a really strong, she [00:59:00] didn't get her English major, but she got her psychology major, but she is one of her strengths if she could go back to school, would be to become an English major. So she's helping me make sure that that thing could be ready as soon as possible.So we're excited. And what's the De'Vannon: premise of the book or the, or David: it's, the premise is really to introduce this concept, this understanding of the root causes of why we stay stuck in certain behavior patterns. And it's really to shine insight on, it's not just that. There's a flaw in you or that you can't be healthy, you can't release weight.No, no, no. We all can. If we can really simplify it to the core principles that makes up this, which is really our choices and our behavior patterns, right? So we're really breaking this down into a very simple, digestible understanding for people to learn this, this side of of health, because I believe it's gonna really be groundbreaking for people to [01:00:00] start changing their choices that yet then changing their behavior patterns to become healthier.De'Vannon: Okay. I can't wait to have you back on the show to discuss that. So, before you talk about your near death experience, it just occurred to me, I'd like you to, to address some, some people may say, well the healthy foods only at places like Whole Foods, and I can't afford that shit. , you know, what, what would you say to people who may have like, budgetary concerns or believe that Great question.The healthy food is, is super expensive. David: Yeah. Great question. Great question. I believe we can all be healthy in any budget, right? Because we don't ha we don't have to eat all foods, we don't have to eat everything in a grocery store, right? There are core principles that if we can adopt and understand, we can make good food choices.And that starts with understanding, well, what is a lean protein? There's, there's four makeups, right? In the way we should be eating. There should be [01:01:00] some type of protein in every meal. There should be some type of fiber, right? There should be a small amount of carb, right? To give us energy. Our, our primary food, our primary energy source from our body comes from carbohydrates, right?And then there should be some sort of essential fat. That is the key essential fat, right? Not just fat of all, of any kind. Right. So it really, if we can simplify it and look at, okay, what lean, what protein can I get that is inexpensive right now? Prices have gone through the roof. Okay. Can we get canned chicken, right?Can we get tuna? Can we get things that are proteins that are fairly inexpensive? We don't have to have the high processed foods. When we're talking about carbohydrates, there's low glycemic carbohydrates, meaning they have some type of fibroid substance that allows it to be [01:02:00] slowly dispersed in our body to turn into sugar, right?We don't need the chips, we don't need the ramen noodles, we don't need the pasta. We can find a list of low glycemic foods. Carbohydrates that help us find good sustainable energy. Right. We got our brown rice, which is very inexpensive, right. There is couscous, which is also fairly inexpensive, right? We have whole grain foods that we can find that are fairly inexpensive vegetables.Oh, well I don't like vegetables. Okay, well why don't we start with one that you do like that we can eat, right? And then, like you said, is having a vegetable with every food choice, with every meal, as many as we can. Right? So it's, again, it's about the education piece. It's about the knowledge piece. Can I understand what good or healthy relationship with food is so that I can then start to implement it?Right? So it's find these three cores. [01:03:00] If we can have a protein in every meal, if we can have a carbohydrate that is a low glycemic carb with every food, and if I can have a vegetable. More than likely we're already cooking within essential fat anyways, like an olive oil or some type of, of avocado oil, which is a, a essential fat.That's really all we need. Hope that's helpful. De'Vannon: Very fucking helpful. So tell us about your near death experience and then that'll pretty much wrap us up. David: Fantastic. I'd love to. 2018, I went on a mission trip to Haiti. Went to go work with a lot of help and support kids, orphanages. We have a close friend who's out there who has a, a men's kids, young men's orphanage, and a w and a young girl's orphanage.So we went to support him in what he was doing. I got back five days later. I was rushed to the hospital, what seemed to be a cold, but I had very high fever, about 110, 109. They [01:04:00] couldn't take it down with anything. Two days in there I was misdiagnosed six times. They couldn't figure out what w what I had.The third day there, there was a doctor from Puerto Rico who happened to be there. He overheard a conversation. He comes in and he says, I know exactly what you have. You have dengue fever and two other tropical viruses, and you're gonna feel like you're gonna die and you just might because there's nothing else that we can do.It's up to your body if it wants to survive. And he walked out. So, to give you a kind of a, a of a picture of this, I was at my strongest and biggest in terms of physique in size. I was actually training to compete the following year in body building. So I was about 245 pounds. I had about 25% body fat, a lot of muscle on me.I was the biggest I'd ever been. And after telling me this, I wanted to die. What we know about the dengue fever is that it's called the bone [01:05:00] crushing virus. It literally breaks up your bones from the inside, and it starts to shut down and eat your organs from the inside, right? It eats the muscle fibers, the muscle tissues, everything from the inside.My left lungs shut down, my organs were starting to shut down. My kidneys were about to shut down. I was one step away from hemorrhage and I wanted to die. That was it. I didn't wanna fight anymore. And so I just stayed there, literally unconscious for 10 days. And on the 10th day, the doctor came in and he said, well, we've got good news for you.You've beat this ding. And he said, had it not been because you were so healthy and you had so much muscle on you, you would not be here today. There's no reason you should be alive. And I said, well, if it wasn't because I was healthy and I had that muscle mass and because of God, I wouldn't be here today, right.Based on my faith. And so that experience turned everything around for me because [01:06:00] after I got out of the hospital, there was like this little internal, small voice that said, now that you've been given a second chance of life, what are you gonna do with it? What are you gonna do about it? And I woke up, I was like, wait, what do you mean?I thought I'm doing my best. I thought I could be more. I, I, I thought I, I am doing a lot with my life. But that really brought me into the turning point of what I was doing with my business, right? I was only, like I said, working with very exclusive clients. And at that point it was like, well, I'm not doing enough to impact as many people as I can with what I know.And that's what really put together body by purpose. That's what changed my whole concept, my whole value of life, my whole appreciation to people. Because when I, I, I made a commitment with my best friend that as long as I knew of somebody, I wanted to help them avoid what my best friend went through.But I really wasn't holding myself to that fully right? And so that's why I say that this experience, near death experience was the best [01:07:00] thing that could have happened to me. It changed my perspective on life. It changed my perspective on so many things. And obviously I don't take life for granted ever, but also the way I live life has also changed for me.How, De'Vannon: how in the hell does somebody catch UE fever? Is that from, so did something bite you? Is it air, mosquito bite?Well, , I'm glad That's right. I'm glad that your body decided to just, you know, everything happens for a reason. Yeah. And and it seems like the, the lower, you know, God takes us knowing he's gonna pull us back up. It's like we're stronger. That's right. For it. Yeah. I was devastated when I got H I V and I thought I was gonna die and I had this whole nervous breakdown, but now I'm like, you know what?I'm glad everything happened the way it did because it refined me, you know? Very well said. Yeah. So many different ways. And so, yeah. Alright. Yeah. So his website is [01:08:00] David hernandez.co emotion. His other website is emotional eating support.com. They click through to each other, and I will put all of this in the show notes with David's social media.Yeah. Well do you have any closing words forDavid: you're incredible. I mean, if y if I can get you to understand that and what that really means, that I don't know what life situation you might be in. There is still a makeup and a creation inside of you that is far greater than

Jason Tangalin and Pono Matthews and the Foil Fever Ohana organized the Foilers of Aloha Classic foil contest on Kauai, held on Nov. 26th, 2022. The event was blessed with great conditions, a stoked community of foilers and next level performance in the waves. This interview contains drone footage of the contest, the second half also has footage documenting our 3 day trip with the crew from Oahu, we scored good wing foiling conditions on the Friday before the event. If you can, watch it at high resolution on a big screen, enjoy! Watch the foil surf contest highlights video here: https://youtu.be/BUQSkESvnjg We hope you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the blueplanetsurf YouTube channel, we post a new video every Saturday morning, Aloha! Please come visit one of our shops on Oahu: Hale'iwa shop and rental location: Blue Planet Hale'iwa 62-620F Kamehameha Highway Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712 Tel (808) 888 0786 Open daily, 9 am to 5 pm http://www.blueplanetadventure.com Honolulu store- - Hawaii's SUP and Foil HQ: Blue Planet Surf 1221 Kona St Honolulu, Hi 96814 Tel (808) 596 7755 open 10 am to 5 pm Hawaii Time, closed Wednesdays and Sundays http://www.blueplanetsurf.com Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bpsurf/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blueplanetsurf Find Paradise Aloha! Transcript: Aloha friends, it's Robert Stehlik. Welcome to another episode of the Blue Planet Show. I know it's been a while since I posted the last show, but today's show is awesome. You don't wanna miss it if you love foiling. And I also have two more interviews scheduled. I'm really excited about those. One is with Mike's lab, Mike and Stefano, they make some of the fastest foils available. I just got one after waiting for many months for it, and I'm excited to try it and talk about it on that show. And then also I have an interview scheduled with Ken Winter, who I've been get trying to get for a very long time. He's a former windsurfing world champion and the designer of the wings at Duo Tone. So I'm really excited to talk to him about wing design and so on. So stay tuned for those two episodes. And today's show is all about the Foil Fever Ohana, Jason Tangalin and Pono Matthews, the organizers of the Foyers of Aloha Classic event, which was held last weekend at Kalapaki Beach, which had some of the most amazing performance and conditions in any foil contest to date. So you don't wanna miss it. And if you have a high speed internet connection, You are gonna want to watch it at full resolution on a big screen cuz the footage is amazing. But of course you can also listen to it as a podcast on your favorite podcast app. During the interview, I only played the footage from the contest, which is of the first half of the interview. And then we just kept talking story for a long time. So I also included footage from our first day on Kauai, where we had two really good wing foil sessions, some really good footage from of wing foiling on Kauai in the second half. And then also the day after the contest, some surf foiling mark Surf foiling at Kak Beach. So I really hope you enjoy this episode of the Foyers of Aloha Classic. And without further ado, please welcome Jason and Pono from the Foil Fever Ohana. Welcome Jason and Pono to the Blue Planet Show. Thanks so much for being my guest today. Yeah, no problem. Right on. So yeah, I just got back last weekend you guys had that awesome contest at KAK Beach and the conditions were amazing. I was just telling Jason, I think it was, probably the best foil contest yet, in terms of the performance to a whole nother level and then the conditions and everything. Just an amazing event. And yeah, congratulations on putting together this awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah. And then also, just the whole community that you put together, all the people that are involved in it and the, the party afterwards with food and everything. And it was, it is just a, it was just a great experience for everybody. And myself and a few others from Oahu we went over there to actually to do the, do wind race. And then unfortunately that the wind just died. Like we had super strong wind the whole week before, and then the week of the contest had just died off. Yeah. God, that's God telling us. Okay. One day's good enough for you, . Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, talk a little bit maybe about all the work that's involved in putting together contest like this. It starts with the big thing is trying to get the permits and we can't really do anything put anything out on social media to receives the authorization from Koi for us to get to put on a contest. But this year we tried to put out a little bit more social media than usual. We knew it was gonna come to be a lot of hard work cause of the first year we did it, it was a lot of hard work. But I don't know. It worked out making the shirts, getting all the sponsors. Initially on our first contest, we made it work. So Koi was the host. We made it where 60% of the competitors was from Koi, their hometown. And then 40% is spread it all over the state in California and Texas to give the local boys their an opportunity to join. And there was a lot of 'em that did the first contest that wanted, they wanted to just watch on this one. So it allowed me to invite a lot more from the state, which was good. And I try to, we try to invite invite the best of the best, and from the first contest to now, three years later the progression has gone on a whole nother level that we never thought it would ever be, because on our first one we're like, oh, I can't wait for next year. Yeah. I was like, but three years later it's a whole new world, that's for sure. Yeah. So the first one the first inaugural event was in 2019. And then basically, Whole pandemic came in the way. And then, so you this is really the second contest you guys are holding and Yeah, like you said the whole yeah, the performance just went through the roof, it seemed it just yeah, it's like crazy how exciting it was to watch the whole thing. Yeah. But, okay and I have a whole bunch of video. I posted that video with the highlights and then I made a longer video for this interview that we, we can show it and talk about it, but we still want to make it fun to listen to as a podcast as well. But I'm gonna actually just start screen sharing while we're talking. So that way welcome to comment on the video or just talk about the, your, whatever we're talking about. But I'm just gonna play this in the background. So this was the contest events item I'm just gonna play versus that video of the highlights. And can you guys see the video? Okay? Yes, you can. That's JD Irons. Okay. . So yeah, just actually let's talk a little bit about the conditions, cuz it, like the day before and the day after, it was just normal small waves and then this day was just yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, for sure. The day before we were all there doing the, we had the beach. On Friday. So we saw some other guys out there practicing and we were like, oh, there's some waves. It's like normal cak waves kinda slow. Me and my uncle and some of the other guys were talking and we were we hope there's waves tomorrow. Cause we weren't too sure. Like we never anticipated this swell to hit. Some of us were talking about it like, oh, okay, there's a big north swell and we know kak will get it if we have that trade winds also. And then Friday, I think we're talking about how the the soil is actually gonna switch directions for more northeast well, so we're like, oh, okay, we're definitely gonna have waves. But the trippy part about, its when we got there at 30 in the morning, I believe to set up the canoe club and then all we see is just water, covering water and boulder's big, huge rocks just covering up the road and we can hear the waves breaking over the brick wall. And we're like, we look at each other and we're like, oh my goodness, it's bombing it. It's gotta be really good. So that , I think that was the most exciting part, was just seeing that sunrise come over the mountain and just seeing the sets just rolling. And it was just definitely un unbelievable for all of us. I think we never anticipated it. It all worked out in the end, swallow all day long. Good waves. Yeah, and kak too. It's like the whole place is a little bit almost like an am amphitheater where like everyone's sitting around watching and and just the crowd, the, like the whole, the audio from the crowd. I wish I had recorded that to put with the video cuz it was just like cool to , hear all the comments and the cheers and whatever, it was just, yeah, it was just an experience to, to everyone was super excited about, the whole contest and watching every ride and like cheering everyone on. So that was definitely a good part of it. And a lot lot of good white pods, like this one . Yeah. That was me. Yeah. Yeah. That was, yeah, that was a good one. So a lot of, there was like a lot of kinda sick double ups Yeah. Where the thing just like would drop out from underneath you, it seemed right? Yeah. That's from the lower tide. Huh? So it's crazy because the last time we had a swell, like this was hurricane in Wow. It was never this big, and we didn't anticipate how glassy it would. Because the first contest, it was as big as this, but it wasn't glassy. It was really windy, very stormy. So all the really good guys got it was very hard for them. And that's why the guys, they're so used to it. They got really, they did really good on that one home advantage if, you know that wave, right? Yeah. It gets a, it gets tricky out there. Especially with this kind of swell too. And on that low tide, it was super shallow out there. Like some of these sets when we had to duck dive, we're duck diving on dry reef. So we would get stuck on the reef trying to duck dive and just get smashed. Yeah. Oh my God. I think Kane actually did a a bottom turn and he hit reef Wow. On one of his waves. Yeah. So it was shallow, like no one knew it was that shallow on the inside. Yeah. On this video I put in as much as I could at trying to get everybody's rides on there. Like even, some of the not so perfect rides and all the wipe outs and stuff like that. Just so you can see a little bit how it definitely was a pretty challenging, the conditions were pretty challenging. There's a lot of a lot of wipe outs, a lot. The takeoff was tricky cuz you couldn't take off too far inside, cuz then it backed off and then, but yet, so you had to be in just the right place to take off. But yeah, maybe talk a little bit about the conditions and challenges. So on the high tide it's a little bit easier to take off at. We call this shoulders, it's called. And so in the beginning of the heat or the beginning of the contest, a lot of guys was taking off on the outside. But when that low tide came in, a lot of guys like Jack was smart. He would stay way inside, do a chip shot, and then go out and catch that one big wave. Because that's the one that everyone was looking at from the start, taking out that big bottom turn. Pono and I think JD was in the, on the outside, local guys was on the outside trying to paddle into it, which, it helped them. But then like I know one of the wave. The wave that the, was, that 3 43 wave dropped the wipe out . But then what they didn't see was your drop into that wave, that drop into that wave was heavy. So for him to take that drop and you can't really, yeah, the floors are seeing it from the judge's point, but they're not really, for some reason, they weren't looking at those type of critical drop-ins. They were waiting for the second wave on seeing what, because it's oh, okay, that's gonna see what he got. And those three for three was probably the best three wins I've ever seen. Whole time. That was literally one after another . Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing. But yeah, if you seen Ponos drop, cause like I said, Pono and JD Irons was hanging on the outside trying to take out yeah, that was more my mentality. Cause this is a spot I always foil, so I look for those steeper takeoffs, those more critical sections on the, those takeoffs. Cause if you stick those takeoffs, it's a lot harder to do compared to a chip in shot. For me, that was my mentality to try to take off as deep as I could. And if I I make it. If I don't try. But yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I think for some reason it's like I, I played the same video  over and over here. Wait, I s's a great thought. Think I the wrong one here. This is be exciting . It's pretty dope. And I was watching it on my phone and I was like, so now I'm watching it on the big screen. I'm like, Ooh, wow. It looks way more heavy. , I gotta plug it through my, to my big tv. Yeah. Yeah. And I actually, I rendered it in high resolution, like for k I think so, so it should be pretty cool to watch on the big screen too. So sorry. I had the was playing the, just the short version. But yeah. So in this one I just tried to put as much footage as I had into it. The different riders and stuff, everybody can check it out. I was trying to turn off the volume. That's what happened. Okay. There go. Okay. So actually the question that people had was about the rules. So let's go over the contest rules what were the rules for proning? What were the rules for stand paddling and so on. Maybe go over that a little bit. On our first contest, I got my cousins together, other people that I was. Helped me start the whole foiling evolution going on. And it was it wasn't easy because as a foreigner, that foiling can go in any direction towards the end. We got into, arguments and this and that  we, we needed to just stick with one point. But our idea was to, whatever we do in the contest is what we as a fo fever guys like to see in the real world means of safety wise. So leash required our big thing is not coming in within 20 feet of another person as the other guy, as the other person drops in. And then obviously no dropping in and stuff like that. But those are the two main parts of it. The stand up and everybody else have the same rules except for the stand ups. They, they could use straps if they wanted to. . Yeah, so I talk a little bit about that. Cause I know it's a little bit controversial that the foot strap thing. So why, what is your reasoning behind not allowing foot straps for the, for prone foiling? The big reason is not a lot of guys foil strap. So it'd be unfair for the straps and the straps go against each other. So it was easier for us to have straps because the guys with straps, they would have to buy a board that has straps or put on straps and it would be a lot easier if we went the other way around. And this contest, in the beginning I had an expression session for straps, but in the long run I wanted, we wanted to make sure that we had everybody surf at least twice. So I took up that straps expression session for that one heat. But that's the main reason. Plus, you gotta look at the score too. If versus one guy with straps versus another guy without straps, the whole scoring would be totally different because if the strap guy is doing just a front side whitewater whack, compared to a guy doing a strapless whitewater wax, same thing. I would rather score the guy without straps higher points than the guy with chefs because it's a lot more critical and it's a lot harder to do without straps. Yeah, agreed. And it's amazing that there is so many aerial maneuvers without straps, that Yeah. Yeah. I dunno who it was, but somebody did a back flip. . Yeah. Back flip, double rail, grab back flip . I saw that. I, oh, so and then Mateo was doing 360 airs. Yeah. And he threw the boosting air. So it's not to say that you cannot do these things, do without straps. It's possible. It nof legal's doing it. Why can't we? But yeah, it's just because of that less money spent on trying to get a board with straps. I wanted to make it even for everyone. Yeah. Oh, ammonias. Yeah. And then this was the wave on the right side of the bay. And I was, there was like some ma beautiful barrels coming through Yeah. On that side too. Yeah. This is my favorite RA in the whole wide world for surfing. We won't say the name, but, yeah. Yeah. Let's keep that a secret . Okay. But yeah, just, the waves were just unreal. And they just kept coming too. It wasn't like, just one set, it was just like, it seemed like just, it just, the waves just kept coming and coming. It was pretty impressive. Yeah. Cause the next day we arrived and it was half the, And there was a lot of laws. And same thing with the first contest. It was literally, it was like just as big as this contest and then the next day went completely flat. So I don't know how, or I don't know, God's giving us some good waves and, and some, I believe that the locals are like they should know that every time they know that we have a contest they should know that had waves. So  guaranteed huge waves, right? ? Yeah, I think it's like an overall, everyone, we did the beach cleanup. The camaraderie inside and outside the water, all the support that we've had. All the hard work we put into this, people flying from all over, supporting this contest, supporting the cause for, the maana women in need. I think overall, I think that is what helped us have these kind of waves. To me it, because the day before and the day after was totally different compared to our contest. So I truly believe that it was in all together everybody coming together as a whole for this contest. Made it happen. Yeah, definitely. The good energy brought nature brought it to together definitely. And nobody knows about Thursday Pono and I went out when it was going like 30, 40 miles an hour. Winds we're winging and we paid the price for that one. We were the only two guys out at Calak and we didn't have the right equipment and it was blowing so hard that we couldn't make it back. So we ended up in, we ended up in the harbor, holy back. And I felt so bad. But then I turned around 10 minutes later and I seen pono behind me is okay, good. I don't feel, I don't feel like a retard now. . So what the wind direction, is it kinda offshore there or or which what's the wind direction when it's Tradewinds? Yeah, it's basically straight offshore. But what's a good about Calak is it tells you where the swell is on the island, except for that northwest or a straight west swell. Cause it'll this, when the big salt swell it'll still break, break like this except for that surf on the right hand side. So it'll tell you this bay will tell you where the salt side has. Or the east side waves or the Northeast will have waves. This is a totally indication of the whole island, basically. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean it's amazing cuz it seems like a fairly small entrance into the, into that bay for it to catch so many swell directions, and it's same direction that 40 degree direction that Kahan Bay has. Ka Yeah. Which is like a every time. So every time I'm surfing, I'm foing at Kahan Bay. I already know that Kak Bay is going on all Cause we would call each other. We would call each other and be like, what? Kak? Yep. Kak Gateway. What? Kohan? Yep. . . Yep. That's pretty cool. Okay okay, so let's go back to the to the rules cuz actually Derek had some questions about that and stuff too. Like in, in terms of the the scoring criteria, like what were the judges looking for? To, for the points and stuff? Wello I'm sorry, the Danny. Yeah, I know. It's so distraction. It's unreal. Sorry, watching the video. Yeah. points wise was wanted to make it like the surfing, speed, power flow as surfing. I don't see us as, a little bit, we're not a considered ourselves the way we surf the same way or foil the same way we surf. Years, few years ago no one was doing it and then we started to do it years ago and like, why can't we surf it foiled it like a surf surfboard. And I wanted to make sure that the progression goes towards that end. And on the judging scale standing critical traditions the type of waves Jack won the prone for many different reasons, but he is also caught one of the biggest waves of the day. And then so on a foil, the speed is there. So we have no comparison to two surfing. But yeah, we just want to judge it the same way we do surfing style. Ok. Kinda stay more in that critical section in that pocket. And instead of just staying away from all the white water and all that, we wanna see, be able to come back, cut back and hit it if possible. On this day it was, you'd be on a whole nother level if you're cracking it. White water snapped off the top on a bomb set, in front of me too. And he landed it, that's the type of stuff. It's just unreal, but didn't do it in the finals. But yeah, those are the type of stuff that you'll, you rarely see on a foil. And it is good this year, and that's where the progression we thought would be three years ago. And looking at it now, it's, we never thought would well hit white water or doing the airs, Arizona, the foil, but these guys are doing it on pretty big waves now and going for the barrel too. That was going for the barrel. Yeah. . Yeah. Yeah. And, but the crazy thing is these guys going for the barrel that they know is gonna close out like pono and two waves in a row, he knows it's gonna close out, but he the adrenaline of the competition and he can, he, I ask him like, when you came out, did you hear the crowd? And he was like, dude, you can totally hear the crowd. I was like, . Oh. Cause you rob, you were out there and oh my gosh. The crowd was just so pumped. It was unreal. Oh yeah. It was a great, I couldn't hear the crowd. It was like a, almost like a live concert or something like that is what it felt like. A little way I could hear, I, it's like reaction more than I could hear you announcing . Oh really? I, how loud it was. Yeah, because I was speechless. That's why , yeah. I mean there was that one where you just like pointed, maybe talk about that one wave where you just like flying down the line. There was backside grabbing the rail and then just so fast that you just couldn't keep the foil in the water. Oh was, that was j. That was jd. Jd, sorry. JD Irons and that wave Ash won him the white ball. Hopeful the wipe out of the day. Cause everybody was getting wipe outs, but the amount of speed that he was getting on that wave and was a big set, we had to give him that. Cause it was just, I felt my eardrums pop when heed. And that was backside too. That's even more crazy. Yeah. More scary. Riley. Yeah, I that's the speed that he was flying on the reve and then just coming to a complete stop. Just what? Hitting the water. Full speed. yeah's. It's not a fun, it doesn't good, but it good to the crowd. . Yeah. You get his ways so good. Okay. Right on. Yeah. So and then originally you had planned for the Sunday to do like a down wind race, right? So where would that have been? Like what was the plan course, if there was wind and yeah. What was the plan for the down race? Cuz Yeah, that was so pri primarily we wanted Caia to end it at the Jeti right here in Coate Bay. Okay. It's about a, I don't know, maybe a 10, 12 mile stretch straight northeast. And it was looking good, but that wind started to come early Thursday, Friday, which thank God, because Saturday would've been my, my God. It would've been so heavy on if the winds came out on Saturday it would be like outta control, but would've been a whole different scene. Yeah. All the boys, you know that no whole new thing is the winging and everyone is really, actually excited about that. But yeah. Bummer that we had to not hold it but it was a good time next time, I guess on Saturday. Yeah. Yeah. I thought this kid, Mateo was a real standout as well cuz he was doing both the standup division and the prone division. Yeah. Yep. And this is his second time doing that. Yeah, same thing. Back in 2019, he won first Inop and second in pro. Yeah. And then it's pretty amazing cuz he went like from, and there was like no break between the heats too. So he went like from the pro standup final straight switchboards and straight into the prone final. Yeah. . And, it happens that way. That's the consequences of trying to enter so much divisions. You're gonna have those moments where you go back to back. But it is not even 20. I don't believe. So I, his energy level is on a, on another level. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. If that was me, I would've been like, oh no, thanks. I'm good. . Yeah. Take. Yeah. What was I gonna ask? Yeah. Oh yeah. The different divisions and the results. Are the, have final results posted somewhere? Sort of. I, did, I post everything but the pro cause we lost the results. . Okay. And I'm still searching for it. I know someone took a picture of it, but yeah, I know. I don't even have the results in front of me. Is it double? No worries. But yeah, I, some maybe I can put, maybe you can send me the results later or whatever I can post on this video as well. But people were asking like, what are the, cause you only announced three finishes or whatever. Alright. But and then yeah, they were asked, people were asking, what about making a two day event? Also the judging like is it's on the side of the bay, almost facing away from the break. Like the, cuz the break, the wave breaks away from the judge's stand. They were saying, is that the best location? Wouldn't it be better to have it judging from straight on or from the other side of the bay? What's your take on that? We got those houses right there on the cliff that we could rent. That's an option. Or maybe to get a room at the Marriott. But it was so much easier accessible for us to do it at the Canoe Club. And people's gotta realize that most of this money's coming out of Pono and i's pocket. So for us to even rent the room at the Marriott, it's probably impossible. . Yeah. I then plus, and then plus if we was to set up like on the beach or something, you would've to think about whole scaffolding, scaffolding on the beach and then getting permits to do that on the beach. It's a lot of things that we would have to think about in order to try to do that. Especially on this day, we weren't expecting for it to have this much barrels to actually hold up nice and clean. A lot of them you were, if you were on it and you went for the barrel, you'd be able to make it up easily. That's good. That's how good and clean it and. With a canoe club. If we didn't have these kind of barrel sections and whatnot, it's a perfect spot to be for the judges to be the top story. And you could actually see everything from there. Yeah. And the judges were upstairs on the second floor too, so you had a pretty good vantage point of the waves from the upstairs. So they they could see, I was up there most of the time and we could see pretty good. only part it was hard was in the morning time when that sun was directly over. We couldn't decisive the color jerseys, but that's it. Especially when they're pumping out. Cause I was up on the top for the first two heats and then guys would be pumping out and then as soon as they turn around to just go straight down, catch a wave, like they get lost in the sun. But as soon as they, as soon as they reach the the break, we could see their jersey colors. . we have to kinda work that out. Be like, Hey, okay, we're not, so we're not judging them on watching them glide into the wave. We're only watching, we're only scoring them on the more critical section when the wave actually breaks. So we have to kind figure that out first thing in the morning. Yeah, that makes sense. We had seven judges, so three judges, three judges, scoring. A head judge and then three spotters. And that's one of the things we learned from the first contest to make sure we have a spotter per judge just to call out. Because, and that's the reason, one of the reasons why we kept the two for one max per ride. Cause otherwise guys like Jack and Mateo would be doing 10 for once and yeah. So actually let's talk about that a little bit. So basically the rule was you can take off on a wave, ride it, and then pump out and get a second wave, but that was it, right? You couldn't get more than two waves in one to for one score, right? Correct. Correct. And the reason for that is cause just to make it more of an even playing field for guys that can't pump like an 18 year old . Yeah, exactly. And then, so on a smaller day you would see like they'll do two for ones. My thought process was like somebody like pono can do so much wa so much turns in on that one wave than they would somebody else is doing two waves. They're doing as much as turns so that it gave everybody that, that chance to score. If that makes sense, but, oh yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I think that rule makes sense. Cuz you don't, yeah. You don't want it to turn just into a pumping contest. Also, then people would probably use bigger foils which don't perform as well on the wave and stuff like that. We're sticking to that whole performance side of Foley. Yeah, I noticed too. On the standup paddle board side, like it seemed like the guys with the really long, the longer boards were got the best scores. Yeah. Because cuz they were able to catch the waves easier and stuff like that. It seemed yeah, I like Dave and Mateo, but that's a big board for Mateo. So board it looked like the do board. Yeah. Cause like guys, Derek looked like he was having a hard time trying to, cause it's so much water moving at that point. Yeah, Derek was on his tiny wing fo board, so it wasn't even to stand paddle board. So yeah, you can double it. Sorry. Him and Nick Ben is always my top two picks, but this day, when it's bigger on a smaller day they would, just tear it up. But because it was so much water moving at that, think that's had a hard time. But the first two places, Nick Bennett the third, but the first two places, Mattel and Daniel. They had bigger boards, so they were catching most of the waves. Yeah. So for prone foiling po talk a little bit about your equipment. What were you using and what would you say would've been like perfect equipment for this day of foil surfing I was riding my Freedom Fusion board. It's like a 4, 5 17, 3 quarters and 28 liters. And then I was writing my fo was access 7 99 front wing with a silly short piece lodge 3 25 progressive tailw wing. A lot of guys were, yeah, a lot of guys were riding that more high aspect kinda wing for that speed. I know a lot of guys was running the lifts. 90, Jack was running, riding the 90. I think we were all planning on riding those smaller wings for just for that speed. And we can carve, but I think the only guy in the prone division that was riding a big wing was Jake. Jake pers Yeah. He rips on the big wings. I think he's the only prone Foiler I, I know of that can rip on a two 10 go foil. Yeah, like a shortboard. And he rips that thing like it's. No other, everybody else was riding those small wings. He was riding a big wing and just ripping on it. That just shows the progression in who you are as a person and what you're capable of. Yeah. And the seven, the 7 99 access, I have that one too for wing filling, but it's a pretty small foil. It has, it doesn't have much drag, but you need to maintain that speed. So it's not that easy to pump. You gotta really keep up the speed, right? Yeah. It definitely needs the speed to keep it going. But once you're in that rhythm, it's all about mainly that rhythm and the technique for your pumping style. , if you can keep that then, you're, you can go for quite a while compared to a, for me I would rather ride a smaller wing than a big wing. In any condition. I even ride over here like one, two foot days. I ride my small wing. Cause I like it super loose, super carv. I can almost ride it like my surf wing as well. That's why. Yeah. And is this more efficient? You have less drag, right? So it's easier to maintain the speed too, because you don't have to work as hard to go faster it seems yeah. Yes. Ooh. And yeah, the two, like what about the holding it over two days? Have you thought about that or I guess the plan was to have one day of surfing and one day of ra down wind racing kind of thing. So we just did it one day. That's how we started it in 2019. And then three months later, we actually had a contest in Maui that we had to cancel three weeks prior cuz of the pandemic. So we had every set up, everything else for Maui, everything was ready to go. That was scheduled for two days. We just kept it down to one day, and then this year we're like, okay let's go ahead and add the the wing race to it. But we're gonna keep the koi one to one day for Calak. . Few reasons. One, I don't wanna take away two days away from the local boys out there. I think one day, one day is long enough, especially on the swell like this. But so COI is always gonna be that one day I call pa and then hopefully the next day is a race. But the Maui if we have an a Maui, it's gonna be at guard rails and those are gonna be two days, two day events. Okay. And then, so yeah, so Maui do you like actually talk a little bit about your plans for the future, because you said that you had something planned in Tennessee next summer, is that right? Yeah, we trying to do a wake foil contest in Tennessee in July on the 14th, 15th, I believe. And I still of wanted to do something in Hawaii in May, whether it's at Kaco or in, or guards on Maui. Okay. So that's the plan. And then back to Koi, the weekend after Thanksgiving. Awesome. Kaka ACO would be cool. That's our backyard, so Yeah, that's, but but for Tennessee, like what, like awake wake foiling contest? How would that work and what would be the criteria and stuff? It's curious. And and that's what we're trying to figure out. So they had an invite maybe about two months ago. Brian grew up then I think it was in Orlando, I believe. And they scored it more like wake style foiling. . So we're gonna try and do that same thing, but have different division. Whether it's strap and strapless, that's gonna be something new to us. We've been doing in the last couple years, doing the whole traveling to the wake side of it. We did a tour last, like a few months ago actually. Just do, went from lake to lake just to see how many people are out there foiling. It's actually unreal the amount of people that's foiling because the, what was it, the surf wake I believe or waking, I should say. Those are starting to go away and now they're starting to foil a lot more. So the competitions right now, it's, especially for the the foil side, it's still fresh and we always wanted to be one of the guys who actually push it out. So we did, did our homework trying to travel around to different, to see what r Wanda talent, and then two, how, what are people doing the bolts they use. I learned, I starting to learn about different type of bolts. The size of the waves how many waves are behind. It's unreal how they do it. So last year we did it at the Wakefest and we got invited to do. Road record. How many boilers behind the wake? I think we only got 16. The, right now the record is 30, 31 or 32, I believe, by the Cohesions. So next year because we were from the 50th state our number is 50. I wanna try to see if I can get 50 guys behind the wake on the foil. Wow. The weekend before Wakefest and then at Wakefest. We're gonna try again. You're gonna give us this past year wake Fest is the first time Wake allowed any other sport in Wakefest, and they gave us two runs per day, which was pretty amazing. Wow. The crowd here was one at Kak was one thing, but they have 1500 wake boats in the water lined up screaming when the foresters came down. And it was such an intense experience. And next year I'll make sure the foil fever. We're gonna go go check it out and put on our contest. My friend Brian from Flight Deck, Tennessee, he's out there and he's doing a lot of the leg work for us. We've been doing it for the last, I don't know, four or five months now. When I called them like the day after this contest and I was like, okay, let's go. Let's get started. Working on the Tennessee contest. So we're gonna putting it out maybe in January. I would say to the public we already got a place to stay. It just, there's a lot more logistics trying to get a the lake because, it's open. Especially the lakes in Tennessee, you have three different states that goes through that lake. So you got guys from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee that shares the same lake. There's a lot of people on that lake. But most of them Go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say, you said what, 150 wake boats on the lake or something like that. That sounds crazy. It was cool cuz they were all like tied up to each other. Oh. And it was like a big, it was like the cars, they call it walkie, but it was such a huge crowd and you get the, we stayed on the houseboats that was behind it. It was so intense. So intense. So hopefully on this first one that we do, we know it's not gonna be as big, I don't think any contest, any oil contest that we do is gonna be, can beat this. We said that 2019, but yeah. Saturday was way. Way bigger. It definitely, I think it definitely topped our first contest. Yeah, I just like the waves and the performance both were just, yeah. Just amazing. And I don't think anything like this has helped, been helped before, so it's just really cool to be there in person and see it happen. For sure. Oh, we're happy that you came down. Yeah, me too. I was stoked. Actually one thing I wanted to mention, somebody in the, on my video commented how was I able to get my drone to fly? Because this is a kind of really close to the airport and it's not in the flight line, but it's like in this blue zone, which is a restricted flight area for drones. You're not you need authorization to fly there, . And when I first tried it and I brought two drones and all my batteries and everything like that, and I couldn't get it to work, I was really frustrated cuz I showed up with all my stuff and then I couldn't fly and then cuz I had a DJ I flight controller and then I, I tried all this stuff that, that it said to do and it just kept rejecting my my thing. And then I finally tried my older controller, which works with my phone. And then while I was logged into the d I account using my older controller, maybe I didn't update it or something like that, but for some reason I was able to like self authorize, just go through that and then it worked, I was lucky to be able to fly cuz it took me like an hour to figure out how to make it work. But so basically, yeah, the way I was able to make it work was like self authorizing through my phone being connected to the, the phone controller on the dj Oh. Photo could tell you. Right there. Let me see you right there. That's where Polo's drone is right in this area. I know. I Oh, that was your drone Oneo. Yeah, I think we got pretty close a few times. Yeah. . Yeah. No, my drone is actually in Kak. Oh, in the water. Yeah. So I lost like few months ago, Uhhuh, I was flying it and then it automatically just went to auto landing. While I was out above the water flying, it just started landing, coming down slowly and slowly, almost close to the water. And I tried to shoot it to shore on the sand and it just barely, almost reached the sand, but it landed right in the water and it was like, oh, it's gone. That's, so we spent all day trying to swim for it.  all day for two days. . A lot of times it is usually happy just to get the SD card back with the footage, right? Cause you know the time, once it's in the salt water's probably not gonna survive it anyways. But at least you can get the footage outta it, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. I actually have the footage. It landing in the water. Oh. And it was connected to my phone, so I got the footage from that, cause I was recording that whole flight while it was landing Oh yeah. That's, it's pretty hilarious. Yeah. But yeah, that's something to be aware of that it's actually not an automatic thing that you can find the drone there, . Yeah. It depends on the size of your drone too. Yeah. So I had the airs. It was, it worked until, up until that day. Even the Minis, I know Chris Christian Park, he was flying his drone, so I think he had the DJ J Mini. Yeah. So he was able to fly it out there. It depends on the size of drone you have. Yeah. I guess that might be it too. But yeah. And then I also wanted to mention Alex, a GU from Gofo was there with a, I guess he had a telephoto lens and was shooting from the beach. And he posted a video too on YouTube that couple days ago. And that one has you can hear the comments from the crowd and the crowd cheering and stuff like that, which is definitely, that, that part is missing from the drone video for sure. That you don't get that. Oh yeah. The audio from the crowd is pretty cool. And then announcing Yeah. You get so pumped. You hear the crowd going, I was telling people the last few days, it's if we didn't have the contest and it was just a free for all regular session, you wouldn't see guys be pulling in like that or doing the crazy stuff that they were doing Saturday. But because these guys are like pushing each other, and that's a cool thing about the foyers, it's just no matter if you're in competition or not, everyone's pushing and hollering on the side yelling go. It's such a cool vibe, the spoilers, and that's hopefully, it's, it lasts a little bit longer. But even though, in the competition, the boilers we're something different, we're something special, I believe. I agree with that. Totally. And what do you think what's the cause of that? Like why is, why are boilers so much more open and yeah, like more open to sharing and just enjoying it together versus most of these foresters are surfers and in the lineup, on a surfboard you can sit in a water for an hour and might catch two waves. Where on a foil you can sit in a corner, tiny half a foot, white. And have the time of your life and catch two for one, three for one and or whatever. But when you get done, you're so tired, you're like, you're resting for 15 minutes anyway. Yeah, but, and it's so funny cuz I was pointing head and one of the uncles, the locals, and he's at the top of the hill and we, I walk up to the top and he goes, how come every time I see you spoilers, you guys always smiling Oh yeah, remember that? And yeah, I was like and I told him, cause after an hour session, avoiding to climb up that cliffs hill and make it , we're like, oh, our legs are so tired. And the last thing we wanna do is climb up that cliff. But it's true. All the floaters you see the positive attitude, the positive feedback from everybody trying. You'll never have a surfer go, Hey, come here, let me teach you how to serve where porters they're welcoming. I wanna teach you because they know the consequences of porters. We wanna teach and we do. We have free lessons, we have free demonstrations to the public that we put on once in a while for the whole safety. How can we tell these guys don't do this, don't do that when or when we are not out there actually teaching 'em how the right way of doing it. Because it is dangerous. Yeah. And even if we're somebody that has a lot of experience surfing and they think they can just jump on a foil and learn it easily because they already know how to surf sometimes that's the most dangerous because they're like, yeah. They you have that mentality already. Yeah. Mentality that they don't need any advice or whatever. True. But you can be on a one foot wave, on a foil and no matter what, you have to be on your toes. You start to be, you gotta be humble the whole time. And whether it's 20 feet or one feet the same humbleness is exactly the same. Yeah. Either way. Either way. You can end up with 20 stitches on your head if you know what you're doing. True. Either you'll get the stitches or some you'll do it to somebody else. That's what we are trying to avoid. I think something worth mentioning is that despite, everybody like having pretty gnarly wipe outs, in the most critical section, everything like that one and the foil Yeah. Tumbling around your head and stuff like that. Like nobody got injured, right? There was no injuries in this event, right? Or were they, did they miss so. There was one somebody grabbed a foil, I think by his hand. Oh. That was it. I forget who it was, but oh, was it Kane? Maybe. I'm not sure. Got the hand sliced open or something? His foot. Yeah. Oh, his foot was his foot. Okay. I know you keep on his foot. Yeah. Somebody contest or whatnot, but I saw Kane the next day we was out foiling again at Cak. , not bad, but yeah. Anyways so it looks really dangerous, but I guess if you if you know what you're doing and know how to avoid the foil it can actually be relatively safe, I would say. Oh, so the number one rule and when I taught pono how to foil when we got started and how I started that, these words will always stick to my head. And I always tell the same thing to anybody who wants to learn how to foil and foiling is, it's not how you foil, it's how you fall. And so when we started to learn have the confidence in falling hitting the white water, like I have full confidence on hitting the white water because I have full confidence on how I know how to bail, but I know how to. Once you start having that tendency of, or not confident in falling, that's basically when you get hurt. Yeah. And you gotta stay humbled. Of course you're gonna get hurt. It's not if it's wet. Yeah. I think the biggest tip for beginners is when you're surfing sometimes, like if you lose your balance and you're starting to fall off, you can catch yourself and you basically try to pull off the maneuver until you hit the water. And if, if you hit the water, then you're, then you crash. But foiling like as soon as you lose your balance a little bit or you feel like the foils not right out underneath you, it's just time to bail out right away and not try to correct it or save yourself in falling. It's a lot easier to come back to catch another wave than get hurt. Wait, couple weeks, , and then For sure. Let's talk a little bit about your background. Like what, how did you grow up and how did you get into foiling and all that? I'm curious Bono yeah, start with pono. Oh. I pretty much grew up here on Coi, here on Oahu a lot. Was back and forth between islands. Fondest memory of be learning how to surf was probably at Huy Little Beach here on Kauai. At the river mouth. Yeah, trying to learn how to surf. And then I got into body board when I moved up to Oahu, body boarded at a spot called tumble Lands in Mali. And then, yeah, and then pretty much moved back here, surf. And then I actually got started with Four Lane back in 20 20 18 from this guy, my uncle he was for before me and then he came over for New Years. Him and Uncle Cleve was like, Hey, you need to try this. So I tried it and I was pretty much hooked. I was watching guys Foley, I call ay for quite a while before I even started and I always was like, wow, that looks so cool, but looks so dangerous. Or maybe that's not for me. Sorry. It was actually Uncle  Cark, I would always see him out on his sub foiling. . I was like just, I think he was like one of the only ones that I actually saw like ripping on a foil so early in the game. Back in what, 2018? Yeah. He was definitely a pioneer, right? Yeah, for sure. He was one of the first guys and then my uncle Jason set me up with a foil and a board. I was pretty much fucked ever since. And still am. It's literally an addiction.  Talk, maybe talk a little bit about your first session. Like how was that , what did you learn on your first session? My first session That what foot waves? Or like 10 foot waves. It's scary. , I, that was the first day. The first, yeah, the first day I landed actually on the rail on my ribs. But the second day was like three to four foots. Oh, . And he couldn't even catch a weight. That's how, three, four foot horns on a perfect day. It gets really double gnarly. Super good. And I wanted to go out there, so I took Bono and he didn't catch. It was gnarly. That was my first of shame. Yeah. And he got humbled so bad. It just, and I got humbled as well too that day. But being his second day and taking him out there that, that was funny. Yeah. So what about you, Jason? Are you from Kauai as well originally or? Yeah, from Coi. I live about this is my home break right surface since I was five years old. And then, I went back first day of Foing what my friends and my cousin then was like, oh, we need to get up or you get you on. Foing was like, okay, I'll just try. I actually waited a few months for me to try it because I knew this is one of the sport that you'll like, so that's why you don't want do it. One, it's really knew how expensive it was and then how addictive it was. We really knew that before we even got one, one of these. It's like one of those sports that don't wanna do it because of that. But once I got on, that's why. Yeah, so I got it away. First base, first time was a kak bit, got super humbled, flew back the next day, went straight to Hawaiian water sports and bought my first set. And I was on the phone with my cousins, kale and Ola, and I was asking, what do you need? And the whole time, the whole drive all the way to a pulled into the parking lot, . And he was telling me all this stuff and you telling me about, you're gonna get hurt, this and that. And so that's how I started. And then just got, and then I ended up just pointing Queens after I came back. I got my gear. I learned how to fo like queens and pops and canoes. So what was your first foil? What did you start on? That was the first foil was John Mu bar, the Nubi and the eba Go Foil, Eva fo, which, it wants to fly it. The those right there, that set just wants to fly. So I have no problem learning on one of those for sure. It just doesn't wanna fly too fast. ? Not, yeah. Compared to what these guys are running and what we are running nowadays, it's a whole new ball game you have to, the progression, like from 2019, the progression, yes. Talent and confidence on your foil. But the gear has gone through, I mean it's so crazy the progression on the gear, the foils and the boards. I remember the boards back then. I remember one guy came out for real, the foam, a Clark foam had says Clark Foam on it and he basically no shape it, nothing. He didn't take a sand to it. He glassed the foam and stuck a underneath. I mean it was here in Oahu and I was laughing, but he was writing it. It was super flex of course, cuz there was like no carbon back. It was just straight stringer. It didn't last very long, but but I thought it was pretty classic, but the boards back then was just, yeah. Compared to now it's different. And then Oh, totally. So what do you ride now? What's your for foiling? So my setup is a magic 8 0 8 board made by Glen thing. Four, five left 17 and a half at 28 meters is my board. And then my foils are, we write access like the 82 82 centimeter use of mass and with the city short. And I ride a little bit bigger wing now cause gain a little bit weight as like the seven 40, I believe, the seven 40 PSC and a three 50 wing. Those things are so good for us. , a lot of people ask especially beginners is like what foil or what equipment should I buy? And that's one of the biggest, I wish, my cousin guys helped me, but now we have more options. Oh yeah. Every day there's new equipment coming in and like Honolulu, every other guy here shapes sports. You can get boards all over now, but guys like ing, guys from Freedom, those guys learned in the beginning the hard way, but now they've, they learn so much. And now the progression and how solid the boards are and how light the boards are, it's unreal. Super cool. Yeah. And then people, a lot of times people think that the board's not that important cuz you're just writing the foil, but it, the board does make a big difference cuz Yeah, like that the board is what kind of gets you up on the foil right in the first place. So without the right board, it's hard to even get up on the foil. Oh, for sure. And then in terms of length have you gone a little bit longer? It seems like for a while everybody's going as short as possible and then now people are using a little bit longer boards again? Or what's been your experience or progression? Oh, exactly. So we all started what, 3 10, 10 and wider was that 22 inches wide and like 35 liters. But now it's, the length Glen was like, oh, a little bit wider or longer and less say, okay, but I gotta come more narrow to make. For what I wanted to do. . So we went all the way down to 17 inches wide and the length we did go about, but yeah, three, four inches longer. And then we just started to pull in the leaders, the volume on our boards. Cause we noticed that you can feel the foil even more, it's way more responsive. Having that tail dropped in on the other bit. But yeah, it's insane. Yeah. Progression, the equipment, I for and for wing footing. Have you guys been wk foiling at all or are you getting into that at all, or? Yeah, not so much. Oh we've both definitely been wing foing. I can say was hooked on wing. Cause all he talks about every time is, Ooh look get. And it's barely that's yeah. What happened there? It looks like it is like the bottom dropped out from underneath you. Huh? So I told him that way. If he went, if he had a longer fuselage, he may, he would, he might would've had a chance. That one. Cause the shorter fuselage makes it more like a more loose on the front and back. So if, when you see him drops. He's going so hard and he was trying to correct it, and the thing just went, woo. Oh, was that the double up? Yeah. That one was crazy. So on that wave, that was the finals. So as the tide was, was lower dropping, I could see that the barrels was more like, it was a lot more wide open, more on the inside of the the brake.  Away from shoulders where everybody was taking off. So it was forming the a frame section more on the inside. So I was like, oh, okay, if I pump out, let me see if I can connect and get one of those. So as I'm going out and pumping it, I was like, ah, don't, I don't have a set here, but I see this wave. So its like, oh, ok, I'll just go for it. And as I'm pumping, I see a double up. I'm like, and I'm already behind the set. So I'm like, oh my goodness. What am I gonna do? So in that video, there's like a split second where I looks like I'm relaxed, but I'm like, should I go or should I not? And then in that split second, I'm like, ah, just go for it. . Yeah. It looks like you, you try to drop the nose down into the way, like you try to just go straight down the face, right? Yeah. Straight down. And try to correct it at the bottom of the way. But I was like, way too late. I was like, oh, crashed Yeah. Yeah, that was definitely tricky and there's a few times where you could see there were actually like sometimes the guys on the wave and then the wave right in front, there's another wave right in front breaking, and then they're yeah, it's and then doubling up or whatever. It was definitely a little bit, definitely tricky, right? Not just a smooth ride . No, everybody stepped, everybody who was out there in the waters stepped up their game. It was un unreal on how much progression there was. And we were all cheering each other on, like I was in, when I was in my heats, I was cheering on the guys that was in my heats, cheering on the guys that was in the next heat. We were trying to push each other and just, everybody's just charging us just sending it. It's so unreal to just see that, like in the water. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've never seen that many people trying to pull into barrels on it's every other way. So we like try to duck under the lip and there was a few, actually a few rides that people pulled off. Fully barrel and then coming back out. It, I don't think I really got those, but definitely a few. It looks so perfect. Yeah. Not at all. Yeah. We were actually talking about maybe renting a house on the, on that other side of the bay. Oh, that was the, when you have your event and then maybe we could have the judges sitting on the balcony there, Oh yeah. And then of course, mother Nature's gonna provide waves again. , cause usually the waves like break further on the inside too, not, it's not always breaking that far out. Yeah. But anyways, yeah, I mean it's just a beautiful setup too. And then, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the other division. So you had the gro division. What ages were the Gros? 14 and below s. Okay. And who, who won that? The gro division. Caden Pritchard from Maui. Cool. Yeah, I actually interviewed Caden for a wing full interview. He's also a really good wing foiler. He's, yeah, he's good. He's a charger for Little Gro. He's a grab it's charge. Yeah. Very cool kid. You had the, sorry, go ahead. The women's? , Glen was my pick on that. When every time, when the waves are this big our pick is always Glen now. Cause she's the only one that I know that charges super hard. She's charging all the way to I don't know, six, seven months pregnant. It was. And then and we had the Capona League, the 60 and above. Cause we did that one for the people of Koi. Cause a lot of uncles actually foiled at the spot  and they always just wanted to, I'm not gonna put them against somebody like Al or yeah. Mateo or whatever the case would be. But, so it was actually really good that we actually ended up having a division for them. So it was pretty good. And KA is 60 and over, right? Yeah, 60 and over. Okay. What's out? I think a Coco makes 60 next year. Yeah. So they gotta be careful. , you can enter that one next year. . Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the boys are down. So there's upstairs where the judges were sitting at, up on the top of the new hall. Oh, there you go. Oh, and then, yeah, afterwards you had a cool event. Lots of cool prizes and everything. Nice dinner. So that was cool too. Live music, everything. So yeah, that was a great event. I have to say. You guys did a really good job and I know it's a lot of work to do something like this thank you for putting it on and yeah, making it no was so cool. Especially the first competition that we've done. In 2019 we put this on po I went to po you're gonna contest. Okay, let's do it. And out of all everybody that on the staff Ohana, my sister, it was my sister, my mom my, my daughters. None of em. Foil, none. I won't foil none of 'em really serve the competition contest wise, nobody's done it. Initially I was in the contest of 2019 and then my buddy Cle, the head judge is like, there's no way you can foil this contest. We are gonna need help . So after that I, these guys told me I, I'm not allowed to foil any of our contests ever. So that's how we, now it's, it was just funny cuz like everybody's doing this. The only guys that foil is the judges. That's the only people on the staff that actually foils, which is cool. Which is amazing, having that support like we just, we volunteered them, not volunteered, them kind help us out with the contest and they're all up for, they saw our vision and the supported us from the get go. To have that support is like unreal. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So do you think I guess here on Oahu, like the foil contests are usually kind of part of other like the buffalo surf meat, they add like a foil division and stuff like that. But it seems yeah, it seems like there aren't really that many real surf foiling competitions yet. Yeah. Yeah. We are the I believe we were the first one ever in 2000. Yeah. A full foil contest. Yeah. Yeah. Because like you said, Rob, it was a part of part of Duke's, part of the buffalo. So this is the first time I think we had, I didn't know the contest I did with you. Was it the Pumping? Yeah. The hundred Waves contest or whatever. Hundred man one I think was the boys man one. And that was awesome. That was that. Oh, you guys got this on. So I actually, I was gonna play this kind of do a separate video outta this, but this was like when we got there on Friday, the day before the event we went straight from the airport to to this spot and it was like blowing. We like all excited about, went out in the water and I. Good wing foiling session and yeah, and I only brought my wing foiling gear. I didn't even bring any, anything else, but cuz I was looking forward to trying to do that down downward race, oh yeah. Glad you guys scored at Hon Ma Beach. Yeah. Was a super fun spot too. Why didn't we go there? ? You didn't wanna, you wanted to go call. Oh, okay. But yeah, I'll probably do this, share this another time, but, so yeah, get back to you guys and but yeah so let's talk a little bit more about foiling and like for people that are getting into foiling, want to wanna get better. Like what are your pointers or like what were like some breakthroughs for you or like good tips that you can share with people, both of you behind the boat, in the river or a lake, getting food. I think that's the easiest and safest way to, to learn and the fastest, instead of trying to take off on waves, not knowing how actual foil works. And then, yeah, like on a bigger board, bigger foil to it, it it'll help you get up easier and faster instead of a smaller setup where, It's a little bit harder to get up on foil at first. Once, once you figure out how the foil will react to like your foot placement, your body weight, front to back foot ratio, all that you have to take into consideration in order to get the right height on foil. And then just trying to be safe on the foil. I I think each time you go out every session, you gotta remember okay, this didn't work. Oh, okay, wait, this work. Okay, let me try this. It's a step by step process. You can't just go out one session and be like, oh, I'm ripping, or I know everything about Foing because the next session you'll get humbled really quick. Yeah. And it seems like a lot of people they try it a couple times and then they just give up. They find it too challenge. Yeah. With foing you have to be like consistent, go every day. Cause I think when I first started, I think I went six months straight every day, seven days a week. literally limited. Yeah. Until I got it like fully down. I think the more consistent you are, the faster you learn. And the better you become at a whole new sport. Just the feeling alone gets you out there in the water just to be up on foil and just flying. Just fly straight. Just flying straight is always fun. I think that was the main goal from like the beginning. So for me, I forward at c Coffee, that's where I learned. And then my goal in the beginning was always try to make it to shore. Just go straight and make it to shore without getting her . Yeah. What about you Jason? You got some tips? Yeah. So once you get on, so I actually, when I teach people, I take on my ski and I have a six, six blue planet that I actually use to to teach. And to me, that's one of the really good board to learn cause it's long enough and it's a lot easier to control. They can actually stand up on the thing without lying down with knees, doing all, you bypass all that part, go to the stand up, hold the rope and you just take off. So I always tell guys when we start to learn is everybody just wants to fly and they wanna stay up there, it's like everybody wants to be like 10 steps ahead, we need to step back a little bit, I always tell like one of guys like, crawl, walk, run. There's no rush. Once you can get up on foil, I tell the people to push it all the way back down and then go back up again and then push it all the way back down. That way, how much pressure each leg or are you standing in the right spot to push it down to control, learning how to control once you get up to that 36 inches or whatever left your real foil is because that's when you start to get hurt and when you start to breach. So always if you start to control yourself at like 12 inches, go up, go back down and just keep on doing that, then by a time when you get to your 30 inches, whatever case you have control to stay at that spot. But that's one of the, one of the other things that, that we like to teach too. Cause there's no rush in learning how to but expect nowadays you got, these 10 year old kids learning how to foil on the very first day. Yeah. Yeah. I thought one. Go ahead. Yeah, I think part of that is just, yeah the equipment's so much better and more dialed in. And if you have, if you have the right equipment and the right instructions, then yeah, it's possible to learn it quickly, especially for young kids that just pick it up easily. Yeah. But yeah, that, I think that Sam pa always say, stay low and in control, right? Low and in control. Low and in control. Still to today, if I'm coming down the line, he'll say those exact same words to me.  Sam never changes. He'll, no matter who how good you, and that's the thing we talked to with Sam PAs we don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, you're going to get humbled or hurt somebody. So you got to stay on your toes at all time and, be focused on a foil by you being on a board. But once you get up, you have to stay focused which is amazing. I think that's why we're so addicted to this sport, because n

Qatar World Cup Centers International Human Rights Issues, Corruption, And Sportswashing The 2022 FIFA World Cup is underway in Qatar in a climate marred by years of controversies related to human rights issues, corruption, and influence peddling. While this is the first time the games will be held in an Arab country, Qatar's bid was a remote possibility until it shockingly won the bid back in 2010. FIFA, the international governing body of football, is considered one of the most openly corrupt institutions in sports, where bribery, corruption, and influence campaigns are rampant. Since winning the bid, Qatar has faced sustained criticism for labor rights abuses since the country began luring low-income workers (largely from Asia) to work on construction projects in what international human rights groups have labeled dangerous and exploitative conditions. The country has faced renewed criticism of its internal human rights issues, particularly around women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights since fans have started to arrive. International NGOs have been long calling for accountability over the games' human cost, and teams have been put in the awkward position of navigating complex disagreements between the Qatari government, FIFA, and the general public. Read more ➝   Summary Meta Spending $7 Million To Stoke Recurring Donations | The NonProfit Times Jeff Bezos plans to give away most of his fortune: Why 'it's a big deal,' from a philanthropy expert | CNBC When 10M meals aren't enough: Childhood hunger nonprofit struggling to meet demand | kare11.com Survey: Nearly 1 in 4 American Donors Increased Giving Due to Rising Inflation | NonProfit PRO      Rough Transcript [00:00:00] This week on the nonprofit news feed, well we're talking about a little thing called the World Cup and unfortunately, how it is mired in a number of issues of human rights and corruptions, so we'll get to that in just a bit. I'm back from Hawaii, uh, on a trip with my family. It was fun. Lot of sand everywhere. [00:00:49] Kids love the beach. Uh, but it's, it's, uh, much appreciated. Nick, that you and Matt handled last week, I, uh, I was a little jealous. I did wanna share a few words on the FTX collapse, but we'll, we'll get to that in the future. Something tells me those dominoes are not done falling. Yeah. George, I'm sure, I'm sure that story will be making a comeback as we talk about crypto philanthropy and the fallout from that. [00:01:16] To your point this week we wanted to talk about QAR and the 2022 FIFA World Cup. So the World Cup began this weekend in Qatar in a climate marred by, let's say, years of controversy related to human rights issues, corruption in. FIFA and influence paddling across the board. So this is the first time that the World Cup is being held in a Arab country, but Qatar's bid was considered just a remote possibility until it somehow shockingly won the bid back in 2010. [00:01:55] And fifa, the international governing body of football. Is widely considered to be one of the most openly corrupt institutions in sports, uh, accusations of bribery up and down the whole chain. It's essentially assumed Qatar bought this bid. Um, but now this is coming full circle because since the bid was awarded to guitar, the country has consistently faced criticism for pretty egregious labor rights abuses. [00:02:26] Uh, human rights issues, uh, workers working in extreme and deplorable conditions on the massive construction projects. And now that the World Cup itself is underway, a focus not only on the labor issues, but of just human rights issues more broadly in the country related to women's rights, um, LGBTQ plus rights, and the country's facing. [00:02:51] Criticism from international NGOs calling for accountability and the whole thing's kind of a mess. But it's a complex situation. So, George, what, what are your thoughts on this one? This brought to you by the public service announcement that not all nonprofits are good. And I'll remind that FIFA actually is a, is a nonprofit, uh, that, that is running this. [00:03:19] And I think, you know, you mentioned that you wrote a paper about this when you were in college back in 2010, about the human rights abuses, the, you know, the modern day misuse of labor there. Estimated deaths, which can't be accounted for. But Amnesty International and I have seen others quote in the, uh, 6,000 or more potentially that have actually just died, you know, issues of taking someone's passport once they come in and forcing them to work. [00:03:49] Uh, you know, that it's, uh, it's an unfortunate thing to be happening in, you know, this age of , this agent of like modern globalization. When you bring the Globe's spotlight in, I think we have to be careful also about pushing Western ideals on other cultures. It's hard, you have to balance this like absolutism that we have the perfect moral compass here. [00:04:21] So, you know, put a pin in that perfect moral compass here, baked in our western ideologies of, of, of rights and equality, and you really have to. It's hard to remove that because I do think there's some objective truth to like allowing certain freedoms of frankly, people to love each other, uh, to have providence over their own bodies. [00:04:47] Uh, I, I, I want to believe in something like that, but also you just have to note when you're, when you're speaking with that, you know, absolutism to just be careful. The fact that they're, they're doing this. They couldn't even have it in the, the summer. They had to have it in November because it's not a climate that, uh, accommodates life in the summer. [00:05:10] Like, no joke, 120 degrees. Like you can't take a ball in that temperature. I think the ball just sort of evaporates. It makes no ecological sense whatsoever, uh, to have done this and made this level of investment. And I really hope a touch more. Frankly, discretion and intelligence of just because they can pay doesn't mean we should do it this way from fifa, frankly from the Olympics, from these large institution, large institutions that, you know, do pull the world together. [00:05:43] I, I think there's something very beautiful about the World Cup and I, and I hope it doesn't get lost because yes we can, we can focus here, but the truth is 5 billion people are most likely going to watch. 5 billion people are going to agree that one team beat another team. Do you know how hard it is to get 5 billion people to agree on a thing, to watch the same thing? [00:06:07] There's just, I think, something beautiful about this, that despite all of this and the sports washing involved, like it is, uh, it is something that I'm glad everyone is still participating in and, and not simply boycotting because it's. It's easier to destroy than to create. It's harder to, frankly, some of these captains wanted to wear arm bands in support of issues of LGBTQ and human rights. [00:06:35] They wanted to take a stand. Some are kneeling, some are showing it, but they're still participating. I'm more nervous when we stop participating collectively. And so, you know, uh, that's, that's how I'm viewing these games. I'm gonna watch. And we'll, we'll watch the news and we'll see that. And, uh, it's hard for mold to grow in the sunlight and there's a lot of sunlight right now on guitar. [00:07:02] Yeah, George, I couldn't agree more with that, that characterization. And I wanted to give a shout out to some of the, the nonprofits that have been doing, uh, really great reporting on this. And I've been flagging it very early. And as you alluded to, I wrote a paper on. Years ago in college because the issues were, were still salient then. [00:07:24] But Amnesty International in particular has done really great research from the beginning on workers and yeah, it's, it's really challenging. Um, and, and really actually sad, I mean, workers are essentially being lured, uh, Poor workers from Asia into this country, they're having their visas confiscated. [00:07:47] It's not a good situation. Um, but I think to your point, the World's Cup is an opportunity to shine light on these issues, right? And I do not think we should be giving Qatar Pass. But that being said, uh, the chance to come together, Is, is really important, especially in a time of division. So yeah, I agree with that. [00:08:15] But let's just fire everyone at fifa. I have no . I Oh yeah, let's get of those. Let's cleans. Oh my gosh. [00:08:23] I think, I think 5 billion of people could possibly agree to that, that it's, it's really funny to see an institution solo, but an event so, Yeah. Um, , if you, if you're really into this, like do a deep dive on the bid, it's like the most outrageous thing. There was like a plane of the US delegation that flew to wherever it was, like Finland, Sweden or something for the bid process. [00:08:52] It was like, Mid-level State Department people, a couple of us soccer people, the United States activated Morgan Freeman took him on this plane, but it was clear like Morgan Freeman didn't prepare anything for this speech. It was like this like kind of incoherent jumble of like why the, it's the whole story's wild. [00:09:12] If you're into it, just read about it. Uh, but, but anyway, we'll leave that. [00:09:17] Uh, yeah. Moving into the summary, I'll, I'll jump through this quickly. Meta, formally known as Facebook, the artist , formally known as Facebook Me, is gonna spend, uh, 7 million to stoke reoccurring donations around Giving Tuesday. Which is great. We'll, hope you're all getting ready for your Giving Tuesday to, to make what you can of the kickoff to Giving season, not the end, but the kickoff to Giving season. [00:09:41] We have a bunch of those resources. Hope you find them. And, uh, another one here. Uh, Nick, do you wanna talk about what Bezos is announcing? Yeah, George. So Jeff Bezos, uh, formerly CEO of Amazon is, has announced, was giving away most of his 122 billion fortune. Uh, but this article from cnbc.com says, leaves many questions unanswered. [00:10:10] Uh, It says that Bezos, thus far has resisted developing a public philanthropic identity, unlike that of his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott. But I don't know what's your take here is, is, is Bezos having a, I don't know, a conscious time? Time to do. Good moment. What's this about? I'm gonna say the following phrase, and I'm excited because I'm gonna say it so many times that people are gonna be sick. [00:10:40] And here it is. Pledges are pr. That's it. I'm gonna say that every single time I see that, those of you listening, every time you see something like this, every time you see a post like this, I just want it ring in your head. Pledges are just pr. Cause if you were doing it, we would see the check and we saw that with Sam Bankman. [00:11:07] Getting all that ink across all those papers about how altruistic you was going to be in the future. Right about me now for things I haven't done. It's called P, so Bezos can shove it until we see a check. That's what I think. [00:11:25] I agree. See? See it Hit the books then we'll. We'll talk again, uh, remains to be seen. He's got some, some rockets to fund as well. So yeah, God bless him. Get it done. All right. This next one comes from care.com out of, uh, Richfield, Minnesota, and this is actually a follow up on a story we've talked about, but, uh, there was a 250 million fraud investigation to Feeding Our Future, which has fractured trust and efforts to feed hungry children across Minnesota. [00:12:02] Um, and it's really affecting, uh, this nonprofit and a time when it's, quote, quietly delivered 10 million meals to hungry kids and counting. So, Yikes. It seems that you just have a perfect storm of kind of bad scenarios. Here. You have 10 million meals to hungry kids. Uh, being that's a gap, like that's a gap in our safe, our social safety net, in my opinion that is being filled by this nonprofit. [00:12:32] Also at the center of a quarter of a billion dollar fraud investigation. Yikes. It's sad to see. Hopefully it doesn't erode confidence in giving locally to food banks that you know are serving your area. The, the larger groups have have a trust gap to fill. I'd say the ones that are, you know, chapter based and working out there. [00:12:57] The on the onus is on communication and transparency, but please don't let that hopefully be a barrier to giving locally, supporting, uh, supporting your. Food banks and nonprofits. We, we spoke and had that podcast recently with Move for Hunger when, you know, please go back and listen to that if you haven't. [00:13:17] Uh, because I think Adam Lloyd does a top shelf job of explaining how the need is year round and there's ways to support that. Yeah, George. Absolutely. And this actually takes us into our next article for nonprofit pro.com, which says that on behalf of a poll conducted on behalf of Vanguard Charitable conducted by interviewing 2000 US adults. [00:13:42] Uh, it found that 60% of American donors with a charit giving budget, say rising inflation had no impact on their giving or caused them to increase their giving over the past 12 months, the nearly 24% saying they increased their giving. So we were talking about how critical time this is. Food pantries and nonprofits like that. [00:14:06] Um, but it seems that the, the giving public is aware of that need, not stopping, giving potentially increase in giving e even in light of inflation. The survey size is a little small, 2000 adults, but. I think that's really optimistic news that the public is still committed broadly to charitable giving despite, uh, what's now kind of record setting inflation. [00:14:37] It's a positive signal, one that we hope is, uh, is accurate as far as polls go. Giving Tuesday coming up, we're predicting that over 3 billion will be donated, uh, in and around the day, and hopefully is a, is a strong end of. Giving cycle. You know, sadly, we might as well just root for the markets to go up because that is another predictor of, uh, of giving. [00:15:00] You know, we're past midterms, so now, uh, it's time for nonprofits to get their narratives out there. [00:15:06] Absolutely. All right. How about a feel good story, George? What do you got? All right. This comes from the venerable ks LTV five.com and Salt Lake City, Utah. And it's estimated that Americans will throw out more than 200 million pounds of perfectly good Turkey meat this year, uh, most of it after Thanksgiving. [00:15:32] But this woman. Uh, Dana Williamson founded the nonprofit Waste Less Solutions, which tries to rescue unused food and donate it to community organizations that need it. And we talk about food waste a lot on this podcast. And there's a couple, quite a, a number of organizations working in this space now, but great to see, uh, local Utah resident, uh, bringing it close to home and helping out the communities in Salt Lake. [00:16:02] Any, any percent or stats on what percent of those, uh, pounds of Turkey are actually dry because he definitely left it in the oven too long. No stats on that. Nothing there. No stats on that. We gotta call the the Butterball hotline. I love projects like this because food waste needs to be solved locally. [00:16:21] It's a last mile problem. We have enough food, we don't have enough food in the right places. Um, going back to Adam Low conversation in our, in our previous podcast, to end on a lighter note and because he made it to the end. Hey Nick, I got a, a question for you. How, how do you organize a Giving Tuesday fundraiser to help the earth? [00:16:42] I don't know. How does one organize such a thing? George, you plan it. [00:16:51] That was good. That, that's, that's, that's your, that's your, that was good. The best one. All right. On that note, uh, leave a rating if you feel like it, if you feel like giving. Um, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday.

This week, we have our first Podcast guest, Writer/Director Rob Cohen. Rob has written and directed for shows like The Simpsons, Wonder Years, The Ben Stiller Show, MAD TV, SNL, Just Shoot Me, Maron, Big Bang Theory & Black-ish. Join Michael Jamin and Rob Cohen as they discuss their careers, breaking in, and what it means to have a long, fruitful career in Hollywood.Show NotesMichael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Watchlist - https://michaeljamin.com/watchlistRob Cohen on IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0169712/Transcripts are Auto-GeneratedRob Cohen:Just shoot Me was in the nineties. And if you said NBC in the nineties had so many comedies, some were good, and some were terrible. But now, if you look at NBC, are they doing any comedies? Like maybe two?Michael Jamin:Yeah, maybe. Yeah.Rob Cohen:Yeah. So, so it's the same place, but it's the, the tide is clear. So for somebody to aspire to working on wacky old-timey NBC comedies, it's very foolish. However, if they are a self starter and, and determine what their roadmap is, nobody will stop them. You can't guarantee success, but at least you've tried it and you might be successful trying it and pursue what you like.Michael Jamin:Right. You're listening to Screenwriters Need to Hear This with Michael Jam. Hey everybody, welcome to Screenwriters. Need to hear this. My name is Michael Jamin and Phil is not here with us today, but I have a special guest. This is our first time ever having a guest on, on our podcast. And I'm absolutely thrilled that it's, you know, in Hollywood. People say this is my good friend, My, but it's true. Rob, you're my good friend and thank you.Rob Cohen:You're my goodMichael Jamin:Friend. Yeah. . And so it's nice to actually have a good friend kick off my guest on the show. So let me introduce you. This is Rob Cohen, Writer, Director, and I'm gonna scroll through some of your credits so people know who you are. And and I'm sorry, I'm, I'm only gonna do some of the highlights that I think I'm gonna leave out. Probably the someone's I, because you had, Rob has a huge resume and you're a writer and a director, but you started andRob Cohen:Some of it is good.Michael Jamin:And for, for those of you wanna make a, a visualization. Rob also worked on one of your early jobs was The Simpsons and the character of Millhouse was Rob modeled after him. So Rob is picture Millhouse now older and sadder. So, and also Rob's Canadian. So I wanna talk about how a Canadian breaks into the business. Sure. The whole language barrier, how you learned English. Right. I wanna learn how weRob Cohen:Figured out Yeah. How the machines work so we could Yeah.Michael Jamin:I know you drove a dog sled growing up and now, now you drive a car. So stuff like that. Thank you.Rob Cohen:Thank YouMichael Jamin:Thank you. So let's begin. Rob's, I guess your first staff job, I guess was the Naked Truth, your big one?Rob Cohen:No, my very first staff job full time was the Ben Stiller show.Michael Jamin:Oh, right. Will you go back even further than that? Bend Stiller. Right. And you also did Mad tv. Hold on. Your credits are crazy good. Like you have a huge list of credits. Naked Truth work with me, I met you on, well I think I knew you before that, but just shoot me work. You work together, right? Bet, bet. Midler show. Yes. According to Jim. Mm-Hmm. , according to your credits, you are on, According to Jim. Right. the Jamie Kennedy experiment. Was that a show or an experiment? Rob?Rob Cohen:That was an experiment. That became a show on the wv.Michael Jamin:See Dots? I don't know what that is. It'sRob Cohen:A amazing, That was a pilot for nbc. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Oh, Pilot. How did you get that in there? Father of the Pride? You remember that, that animated show American Dad? I've heard of that one. Yep. Big Bang Theory. Heard of that one. Mm-Hmm. , 20 Good Years. Mm-Hmm. , our friend Marsh McCall created that show. Mm-Hmm. Emily's reasons why not. Mm-Hmm. fascinating.Rob Cohen:You're really combing through all theMichael Jamin:I'm on IMDB.Rob Cohen:Yeah, of course.Michael Jamin:There's more Life In Times of Tim, which was a riot that, that animated show Maron, which we brought you back. We hired you to be a writer and director on that. We're gonna talk about that. Yeah, sure. Lady Dynamite with our friend Pam Brady. Mm-Hmm. I don't know companies. I don't, I don't know. So I'm skipping over the, But you also have your own show called Hanging with Dr. Z. We're gonna talk about that. And then, But directing credits are also crazy. I mean, really I'm all them. Well, well you're, you're, you're good looking. Thanks. Let's go over some of them. Sure. Obviously you did a, you did a bunch of Marons. Yeah. Mystery Science Theater, 3000. You did some Lady Dynamites. Yeah. You did Blackish. Mm-Hmm. Stand Against Evil, Speechless. Bless this Mess. Superstore, you directed mm-hmm. The Goldbergs, you directed. Mm-Hmm. Interesting. told that Mo You are, And then most recently, somebody somewhere, which I, I talk about that a lot cause I love the pilot of that. And I just love that show. You directed five episodes of thatRob Cohen:Damn right. Seven,Michael Jamin:Seven. We have to update your IMDB. Yeah,Rob Cohen:Yeah.Michael Jamin:Let's start at the beginning. Cuz a lot of people ask me this and I have no answer. How does a Canadian start work in this country? Like, there are lawsRob Cohen:There are laws and I mean, I know that Americans are all about purity. So I will say that Canadians, they're almost like Americans. It's almost like we live next door to you guys,Michael Jamin:South or north of us.Rob Cohen:I, I don't know, , I don't know. But I didn't have any aspirations to get into showbiz or even come to the United States. So I didn't know that it was a, it was all a fluke. The whole thing was a fluke. I can certainly condense the journey.Michael Jamin:Let's hear it.Rob Cohen:The fast version is I was a bit of a scam as a young man and was encouraged to live on my own at a young age. And so I lived on my own and I was just a complete screw up. And I grew up in Calgary and had no future whatsoever.Michael Jamin:You were encouraged to live on your own at what age?Rob Cohen:15.Michael Jamin:Why? You were, you were a handful for your parents.Rob Cohen:I was a handful because my dad had gotten remarried and the mix was not the greatest mix. So there were two opinions on how things should work in that situation. I was of one opinion andMichael Jamin:TheRob Cohen:Back was of another.Michael Jamin:But looking back on it, do you realize, Do, are you, do you feel like you were wrong as a 15 year old? Or do you like No, I was right.Rob Cohen:You were right. I was absolutely right. Interesting. Absolutely. Right. and so I just, You,Michael Jamin:You were on your own at 15, Dude, I, I couldn't imagine.Rob Cohen:Yeah. I had an apartment. I, I mean, it's not like I suddenly got, was living on my own and figured everything out. I was still a disaster. I just had my own apartment and I was so stupid that for the first month I was like, Oh, this is awesome. My party pad. And I had all my buddies over and we were just doing stupid things. And then I got the, basically realized I had to pay rent and gas and electric. And I was like, Oh my God. Like, I actually have to pay these bills to live here. And I was delivering pizzas at night, and that was certainly,Michael Jamin:You're gonna school during the day and delivering pizza.Rob Cohen:Yeah, I delivered pizzas. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was a comp, I was a disaster. I had a 75 Dodge Dart that I would deliver pizzas in whatever the weather was and would like steal gasoline from car lots. So I could put gas in my car to deliver pizzas. I was a complete idiot.Michael Jamin:Have you tried pitching this as a show?Rob Cohen:No. it's just, it's so, it's, it's interesting in hindsight, but it's also, you know, you could call it, you know, like it's like Don portrait of a team runaway. It's like Rob portrait of a complete disaster because every choice I made was wrong. That'sMichael Jamin:Mind's a good show.Rob Cohen:. Well, maybe at some point, but I think I sold a pilot once about my parents' weird divorce and how they lived a block away from each other, but had the same address through it, some flute. But anyways, I was just drifting around for a while, just doing nothing. And sort of speeding up to your question. My cousin lived here in LA in the Valley, and I, because I was doing nothing in Calgary and had, I was not gonna college, I did not have enough credits or interest to go to university. And just got my car one day and left my apartment in Calgary and just threw a bunch of stuff in the car and drove down here to LA to visit my cousin who lived in Vaneyes. And again, like speeding through the boring stuff. I was just gonna visit for a couple days and crash on his couch.Rob Cohen:And I met this girl that he was going to school with, and we, she and I hit it off and I'm like, I'll stay another week mm-hmm. and then I'll stay another week. And then I sort of had this, if you want to use the word epiphany incorrectly realized like, I could go back to Calgary and do nothing, or I could stay here and do nothing with this girl. So I decided to like stick around for an you know, excuse me, undetermined amount of time. And then realized I'm kind of living here. But I was, I lived here illegally for many years.Michael Jamin:And you were like 17.Rob Cohen:Yeah.Michael Jamin:How old were you? And you were living here illegally?Rob Cohen:Yes. For many years. Interesting.Michael Jamin:Yeah. And, but you were working, How did you work then?Rob Cohen:I worked under the table. I got a bunch of jobs. I think the statute of limitations is over, but I worked at different restaurants and Right. The, I was a security guard at a mall. I sold shoes, I fixed yogurt machines.Michael Jamin:You know, I worked at a yogurt store. I wonder if you fixed Humphrey yogurt.Rob Cohen:You fix, did you fix them? I worked at a place called I can't believe it's Yogurt. And then they opened up a second store that said, Yes, it's yogurt . So they basically, they opened up a store that answered a question nobody was asking. No. Was asking . Yeah. And I still remember how to, you know, you unscrew those four bolts and you pull out the assembly and you take the O-rings off and you clean them and then you lu the O-rings and then you put the thing back in. But it was all the reality was because I looked and mostly sounded like an American people never asked. And this was pre nine 11 and pre all that stuff. And they just thought I was American. And no, not one person asked me for any validating id. Wow. And I, I made up a fake social security number and got hired and they, a lot of 'em just paid me cash under the table.Michael Jamin:This is perfect. Yeah. Now, and then at some point, well, but maybe I'll skip. So how did you, how did this whole Hollywood thing happen? When did you decide, how did that, when did you decide you wanted to be a, I guess, a writer? Right.Rob Cohen:Well, I never decided it. I, I, it's such a boring story and I may actually do it as a pilot, but cutting to the chase, I was delivering food for a, a deli that is no longer in business in LA Right. And had a lot of clientele that were in show business. And this one guy took a liking to me and basically said, you know, if you ever wanna get outta the exciting world of late night sandwich delivery, gimme a call. We need PAs. And I didn't know what a PA was. And he explained what it was. So I, I, this is how dope I was. I was like, Yeah, sure. So I'll, I called him up and went over to the Fox lot and he explained what a PA was Uhhuh and I thought it paid more than working at thisMichael Jamin:Deli. And he, he was a producer. What wasRob Cohen:He? Producer? for, I mean, he's still a producer, but producer of The Simpsons, Tracy Elman show. Oh, okay. This, he's an amazing guy named Richards guy who I, I literally owe everything to. And he hired me because I was nice to him when I would deliver food as a PA on the Trace Elman Show. And that was the very first time I was exposed to anything in show business whatsoever. And I was assigned to the writer's room, so I was in charge of getting them food and cleaning up. And And that's a queen. Yeah. And it was an amazing writer's room. And that was it. That was the first exposure to it.Michael Jamin:And then when did you decide you wanna start? When did you start writing?Rob Cohen:I didn't start writing. I was there for the last two seasons of the Tracy Elman Show. And then on the last season I didn't even, I still don't really know how to type. I started hunt and peck, but I would stay late at night. And they were, it was a great writer's room and they were really nice to me. And I just thought these guys seemed to be having fun. And one night they were stuck on a joke and that meant they were sticking around, which meant I had to stick around because I had to clean up after them. And I just decided like, I'm gonna write down a couple options for this joke. And sort of meekly slipped it to one of the writers, this guy Mark Flanigan, who was an incredible, and I'm like, you know, I don't mean to step on eight toes, but I just, I wanna go home.Rob Cohen:Ideas. Yeah. And that was literally, I wanna go home. And he, they used one of the jokes. And so I got to go home . And then I was like, Okay, well I'll try this again. So I, I started to very quietly with months in between side sort of pitch ideas. And then I went in at night after work and Red Scripts and sort of taught myself how a script is visually structured. Right. And then on the computer would type fake scripts just to physically format a script. And then, because it was a sketch show, I had this idea for a sketch and I just typed it up and it took like a month for me to type up a six page sketch cuz I was terrified. Right. And they ended up buying it and Wow. It was like $1,600. And I got an agent at caa, but I was still a pa at the Tracy Elman show. Right. And, and then I thought, again, showing my lack of planning for my life it was like, this writing things seems kind of fun, like maybe I'll try it. And that was, that was when I had the first inkling that perhaps that was something I may want to try to pursue. But there was no guarantee of success.Michael Jamin:And then you just continued writing specs scripts and your agents started submitting you places.Rob Cohen:I wrote a bunch of spec stuff and then by that point to Tracy Mond show was canceled and they switched. It was the same production company as The Simpsons, which was just starting. So they switched everybody over to The Simpsons. And then because everybody there was so great when The Simpsons took off, you know, it just was huge outta the gate. They had all these weird assignments that they needed help with. Like can you come up with 50 grant calls for Bart? Can you come up with a promo for this? Do the Bartman video that's gonna be on mtv. And I'm actually looking, the, my very first check sort of professional check over on the wall was for writing the intro that Bart Simpson was gonna say on MTV for the Do the Bartman video that had Michael Jackson on it. Right.Rob Cohen:So I got $300 and then just started sort of you know, writing weird things. And the, the first actual job that I got was I was recommended by one of the writers to these producers named Smith Heian. Mm-Hmm. And they were doing a 50th anniversary Bugs Bunny special for CBS. And they needed a writer that knew a lot of stuff about Bugs Bunny. So I had a meeting with them, they hired me for $2,600 to write this whole special, And that was like my first professionally produced credit of something that was, I, I was involved in from the beginning to the end. Right. But I'm still a paMichael Jamin:And none of this see, people ask me like, Well, do I have to move to Hollywood to work in Hollywood? AndRob Cohen:Like, Right.Michael Jamin:I mean, this wouldn't happen if you were not in Hollywood.Rob Cohen:Oh yeah. And it was, everybody says this, but it was absolutely a different time. And I also think that because it was the late eighties, early nineties and things were, there were way more jobs. And also because sketch shows were so popular, they needed people needed little bits. And also being around The Simpsons from the beginning, it was great like that. The Do the Bartman thing I sweated over that for a week and it was probably four sentences. Right. and I would write like top 10 lists for Letterman and try to send them in like naively thinking here's, here's 20 top 10 lists, Maybe you guys will like them. And I was just, I would stay there late at night in the office on the Fox up by myself with, you know, feral cats giving birth under the trailer just writing weird stuff and kind of figuring out the job as I was doing it.Michael Jamin:And then how did you get the Ben Stiller Jo Show?Rob Cohen:This has gotta be also boring.Michael Jamin:I think it's fascinating.Rob Cohen:Well, the way I got the Stiller show was The Simpsons had taken off and I was still working for Gracie. And I had an idea for an episode and it was season two of The Simpsons. And so I went and just wrote this episode on spec on my own. And it was basically a diehard parody cuz Diehard had come out just like a couple years before that about the power plant where Homer works getting taken over and he inadvertently becomes a hero and saves a power plant. Mm-Hmm. . So I wrote this whole spec, I turned it into Sam Simon who was running the show and was just great and he loved it. But what I was told sort of off the record is at that time, Gracie Films had a rule where they could not hire writers that were already working for the company in another capacity.Rob Cohen:It was like this weird archaic rule. So being a Ding Don I was like, Oh yeah, well screw that. I quit. So I walked over to the main bungalow and spoke to Richard Sky and I was like, You know what? I think that rule's terrible and Sam likes my script and I just think I'm gonna try this writing thing. And, and I quit. And they're like, Well, we're sorry to have you go. And then as I was walking back across the parking lot to get my stuff, Sam grabbed me and he is like, I heard you quit. And I said, Yes. And he goes, Well now you don't work here anymore, so now we can hire you, but we can't use your idea because you pitched it to us when you're an employee. And I was like, That's weird. But cutting to the chase.Rob Cohen:They took me upstairs to the writer's room and they had an index card that just says Homer invents a drink and most deals it. And so they said, We would like you, we loved your script and you've been here since the beginning. Like, we'd love you to write an episode. And I was like, Absolutely. I was freaking out. And I said, like a, an arrogant idiot. I was like, But I wanna be involved in the entire process. Cause I knew the process cuz I was working on the show. And they're like, You got it. And so we broke the whole story and it ended up being the episode flaming mosMichael Jamin:Flaming. I know you wrote Flaming Mo. Wow.Rob Cohen:So I wrote Flaming Moose, and then time went by and, and it got produced and it was on the air. And the way that I got the Stiller show was I was doing punch up on this terrible movie for Morgan Creek and met this other writer there named Jeff Khan. And Jeff and I hit it off and he's like, Hey, they're shooting this weird pilot at my apartment, you wanna go check it out? And I was like, Sure. So we went over and it was the pilot for the Ben Stiller show. Mm-Hmm. . And Ben was there and he and I hit it off and he was asking what I'd worked on and I said, this episode that had just come out for The Simpsons called Flaming Mos. And he was like, I love Flaming Moes, you wrote that. So he said, if his pilot ever became a show, he would love to hire me because we, he and I had so many similar references in our life. We love disaster movies and all this other stuff. So we really clicked. And then a couple months later, the show got picked up and he called me and said, I wanna hire you. And that was my first staff job.Michael Jamin:Wow. What itRob Cohen:Entail? What it entail. IMichael Jamin:Not it is, No, I think it's so cool. I I've known you all these years. I didn't even know that dude.Rob Cohen:And then it's all flukes. It's all flukes,Michael Jamin:It's all Yeah. But it's also you putting yourself out there and I don't know. That's amazing.Rob Cohen:Yeah. I mean, I'm very fortunate these flukes happened because, ButMichael Jamin:You also Yeah. I hadn't but you put yourself in a position to have these flu happen too. Yeah. AndRob Cohen:You were put if I hadn't, but I was prepared. But if I hadn't met Jeff that day and we hadn't gone to his apartment, I would not have met Ben and that wouldn't have led to the show. Right. WhichMichael Jamin:Led. But you're also, I mean, honestly, and I mean this in a compliment, like you're one of the be better connected, more most connected writers. I know, you know, a lot of people like, you know, you're friend, you're a friendly guy, you, you know, a lot of people I guess maybe cuz you leave your houseRob Cohen:No, but you're, you're connected, you know, a lot of people, it's just,Michael Jamin:It's just I know, but I'm always, I'm always surprised by who you like you seem to know more people .Rob Cohen:Yeah. But it's only because I just think I hate this term, but I think the alt comedy scene was starting when you and I were starting off in LA Yeah. And because, especially because of the Stiller show, that whole crew were so important. Like Janine and David Cross and all those guys were so important to the alt comedy scene. And then that's where Jack Black and Tenacious D started and all these other people Will Ferrell. Like they were all coming up that way. I just think it was timing of an, an era that was happening. So wereMichael Jamin:Just, Were you involved in that? Like did you do like, what do you mean? Did you go to those shows and stuff? Like IRob Cohen:Oh yeah. The Diamond Club. Yeah. I mean it was, that was the whole scene. Like big intel books, the Diamond Club. IMichael Jamin:Didn't even know about it back then.Rob Cohen:Really? Oh my God. Yeah. That was where everybody hung out. Like I even performed in some of those dopey shows just because it was, it was a group of friends that were not famous yet that we're just doing these weird shows at this place, The Diamond Club in Hollywood, which is gone mm-hmm. . And you could tell it was like, you know, Jack and Kyle, you knew they were amazing, but they were not tenacious to you yet. Right. And, and Will was not Will Fiery yet. He was a guy from you, the Groundlings and people were just, you know, Janine and David and Pat Oswald and all these guys that were justMichael Jamin:Right. So let's talk about those guys. So they were, you know, these are people putting themselves out there. It's not like Absolutely. They're not saying, Hey, I put me in my movie. They're just putting themselves out there. They're doing shows. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's just how you do it. And so is they're not asking to start at the top, they're starting at the bottom.Rob Cohen:Yeah. Well I think that's a great point. And I think using the, the Diamond Club shows, The Diamond Club was this horrible, horrible dumpy club. A club is a loose term that was owned by one of the the Stray Cat was it Stray Cats?Michael Jamin:Yeah, I know the band. TheRob Cohen:Band The Stray Cats. Yeah. It was like Slim Jim Phantom, I think was the guy who owned the club. Okay. So it was this horrible, decrepit theater that was near LaBrea and Hollywood and it was kind of a you can do anything you want kind of place because it was just soaked in like old piss smell and booze. But the good thing was a lot of friends of ours, like this friend CJ Arabia, started to put these shows together. And so she would ask everybody in our little group that all hung out and travel together and dated each other and whatever. It's like, hey, we can do these shows at the Diamond Club. And I'm not a performer, but it would be like, we would build entire sets out of corrugated cardboard and paint them because the Diamond Club didn't care. They just wanted to sell alcohol to people that came to the shows . So there would be like, you know, shows where you look now at the lineup, you're like, Holy crap, that's the, that's like a lineup of insane comedy hitters. Right. But at the time they were not, they were just young weirdos.Michael Jamin:It's so, because you know, I moved here in 92, I lived right in West Hollywood. I lived right on the corner and I'm just, it's amazed how like we just didn't know each other then, you know? Yeah,Rob Cohen:Yeah. But you and I actually in Seavert sort of weirdly intersected with the Wonder years unbeknownst to us.Michael Jamin:I well sever wrote on that. I didn't he sold number years.Rob Cohen:No, but you guys, and you're credited on my episode.Michael Jamin:I'm no, I I didn't work in the Wonder Years. Si sold ans sold an episode of Freelance episode of Wonder Years, my partner becauseRob Cohen:Yeah. But it's so weird because on screen, it's you two and me credited on the episode. I pitched to Bob Brush. He tried to ripMichael Jamin:Up. Not me, dude. I don't have any credits on Wonder Years. You gotta, I Oh,Rob Cohen:You know, Seavert and his old partner?Michael Jamin:Yeah, his old partner. Yeah. Yes.Rob Cohen:Sorry. It was Sivert and his previous partner.Michael Jamin:I'm surprised he got credit though. Okay.Rob Cohen:Wow. Wow. The whole thing was Bob Brush was just stealing ideas left and right. But wow. That's interesting. But that's SivertMichael Jamin:And I But you never wanted to I'm well, I'm sorry I cut you off. GoRob Cohen:Ahead. No, no. I was gonna say, I didn't know you were Seavert yet. Right. But on that episode, Seavert and I share credit even though at the time we were complete strangers. And then I really met him when I met you on just shootMichael Jamin:Me. Right, Right. Now, did you, you never wanted to perform, I mean, it's funny cause you have performed but you never wanted to.Rob Cohen:I have performed reluctantly. I hate it. And it was like, whether the Diamond Club show or if I've been like an emergency fill in at the Growlings, it's, before I do it, I'm like, Hey, this is cool. It's gonna like sharpen my brain and it's gonna be a great thing. Just jump off the cliff and try. And then in the middle of it I'm soaked in sweat and hate myself. And then at the end I, I am so relieved it's over and I absolutely loathe it. I wait,Michael Jamin:I'm just shoot me. I remember we had you play the dirty bus. The dirty bus Boy was your character. Dirty Dirty bus, and you hit it outta the park.Rob Cohen:. Well, all I had to do is sort of wiggle my eyes. Lasciviously while it was clear the older waitress and I were messing around.Michael Jamin:Oh my God.Rob Cohen:Cause Andy called me in and said, Can you, He's done that so many times where it's like when he had True Jackson, he's like we need somebody to be the hobo king. Can you be a paramount an hour? I'm like, .Michael Jamin:Okay.Rob Cohen:But it's not. Cuz I love it. I, I hate it, but it's also, it sounds so goofy that if I don't have any lines or something that I'm fine doing it. But I ended up on so many shows I worked on as a writer, being an emergency go to that.Michael Jamin:IRob Cohen:Truly, I truly hate it. IMichael Jamin:Truly hate it. As mentioned, Rob was talking about Andy Gordon, who's a writer we worked with a number of times. Yeah. A great guy and hilarious writer, butRob Cohen:Hilarious and so funny. Like just as a personMichael Jamin:It really witty, really making laugh. Yeah. And you just had dinner with him. Yeah. It's so fa Okay, so then you were okay. Then we worked together and just shoot, We, for many years, we, we used to sit next to each other. Yeah. Sometimes at least. Yeah. And then, and then what happened was years, I remember years later we were doing a pilot. We were helping out a pilot. I don't remember whose Do you, do you remember? We were, I remember I pilot, I don't know, might have been, might have been a CBS Ratford pilot, but, but what happened? So people don't know. So when someone makes a pilot, it's very, at least back in the day, it was very common for the person who created the show to call in their friends as a favor. Hey, can you guys help, you know, sit a couple days and help me, You know? Right. Pitch on jokes or do the rewrite or whatever. And as it's courtesy, you always say yes. I mean, you just never, never say no. And CauseRob Cohen:You also hope, if it's a success, you'll get a job.Michael Jamin:Yeah. But sometimes you have a job so you don't even care. But Sure. But, but absolutely. You always say yes. And I remember being there on the state floor, and I hadn't seen you in a while, and I was like, Rob, what are you up to? And then you said, I was like, so I was thinking you were gonna, you know, you had written on a bunch of shows, but you were like, Yeah, I'm kind of done. I'm done writing, I wanna directRob Cohen:Mm-Hmm.Michael Jamin:. And so what happened there? What was the, what made you wanna stop writing and start directing?Rob Cohen:I feel like I, I'm gonna continue to take long, boring stories and compress them, but the, the quickest answer is I'm so appreciative of the, the fluke that come into writing. And I, I was a writer on TV shows for 18 years. Right. And I, I greatly appreciate the opportunity that it provided in all areas. But what was happening would be I would be on a show and they would need somebody to go supervise, like a shoot on, like at, you know, the Radford lot. There was that fake New York Park. So they would need somebody to go film a scene that's supposedly Central Park. Right. Also, if they were doing any exterior shoots, I would volunteer to do that. And there's people we know that are writers that hate being around actors and they just wanna stay in the room. . And I was, I was realizing I wanted to get out of the room mm-hmm.Rob Cohen: and go where the action was. And then I would direct some, some friends of mine would do low budget music videos and I would do it for free. And then I was kind of building this weird little real sort of unknowingly. And then other friends of mine that part of those Diamond Club crowds that were now becoming well known comedy performers were doing movies. And they would ask me if I would help write the promos, you know, the commercials for the movies. And foolishly or otherwise, I would be like, Yeah, if you, if you arrange for me to direct these promos, I'll definitely, I'll write it and I'll do it for free. And they're like, Okay. So because they had muscled with the studio, they would be like, Rob's the guy and he's also gonna direct it in the studio's. Like whatever you say.Rob Cohen:Right. So I realized that I was really enjoying it. I'm not saying I'm good at it, but I was really enjoying it. And then building this sort of very weird real. And then when the writer strike happened 2007, 2008 I was walking the picket line and kind of had this feeling in my head, like, if I go back into the room, I'm going to stay on the path of being a TV writer probably for many, many, many years. And this is an opportunity. I was pretty honest with myself. It's like, what I really, really want to do is be directing, like, to make the stuff instead of write the stuff. Right. So, so I decided on the picket line that I would kind of hop off the writing train and just try to keep cobbling together these weird little directing jobs. AndMichael Jamin:That's,Rob Cohen:That was when I made the term.Michael Jamin:But I remember being on the floor with you on this stage and say, I remember this conversation really well. I was like, Wow, you're gonna be a director. And I said, like, So is your, because you know, Rob's a big shot writer. I said, So is your agent helping you out with this?Rob Cohen:Right.Michael Jamin:And what was your answer?Rob Cohen:Not at all. They wouldn't not at allMichael Jamin:Discuss it. And why not didn't discussRob Cohen:It because I was making money for the agency as a writer, and they did not want to go through building me up as a director because they were and it wasn't evil, It was just, those were the facts.Michael Jamin:That's exactly right. And that's, it's not, it's because that's a hard sell. They're not gonna push that rock up the hill. They already have directors and Rob's a no one is, he's said, no one is a director. Correct. And so you, you were literally starting your career over, and the way you did it was by working for free, you know, by just doing it and not asking for permission. You just did it. You know, figure out what you can do. And I say this all the time on my podcast, on my social media, like, and I use this, I use as an example, you know, you did it. And then I, so we were at one point we were running Maron, and that's, and I use you as another example of how to get work there. So I don't remember who contacted who, but we were, Maron was our low budget show, really super low budget show. And I guess, and how did, how did we get, I don't remember. I don't remember details, but we came in contact again.Michael Jamin:Hey, it's Michael Jamin, if you like my videos and you want me to email them to you for free, join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos. These are for writers, actors, creative types. You could unsubscribe whenever you want. I'm not gonna spam you and it's absolutely free. Just go to michaeljamin.com/watchlistRob Cohen:In what I think it was, I emailed you guys to congratulate you on the show and we just started a dialogue. And then you guys very generously asked what I was doing. And I think that's how we loosely started this conversation.Rob Cohen:Right. But it was you Sivert, Mark, who I'd known a bit in the past. And then was it Erco or was it yeah,Michael Jamin:Probably Pi Cerco.Rob Cohen:Yeah. I can't remember. I mean, you guys went way out of your way to let me have a meeting.Michael Jamin:But what's what I, IRob Cohen:Remember is in Glendale.Michael Jamin:Yeah. And what I remember about that meeting was how prepared you were. You came, we met with a lot of directors and we needed directors who were cheap, can do low budget. Who, And you, you had, you were all that I could do low budget cuz you do low budget, you do no budget. Right, Right. And you came in super prepared, and I've talked about this before as well. I, I think on my podcast, we on social media is like, you blew us away. So what you did, as I remember, you watched the presentation, which is already shot, and then you, you blocked it. You, you, you drew diagrams and you said, this is where I would've, this is how I would've shot the presentation. This is where I would've put the cameras. And see, by doing it this way, you have less setups and you don't have to move the cameras much.Michael Jamin:And because you do, because you're being efficient with your setups, you can make your day, you can get all the shots that you need because I'm not getting a ton of coverage. I'm just getting exactly what I need and I'm getting it fast. And the fact that you took all that time to draw those drawings, you, you know, you proved to us, and I remember you walked out and we were like, He's hot. You know, he's the guy, he knows how to do it. Mm-Hmm. , you know, you blew us away. So it wasn't like we did you a favor, you came in, you were prepared. You know,Rob Cohen:We, Yeah. But I really, I mean, again, I remember that meeting so clearly because I was, I, I, I loved you guys. I thought the presentation was awesome and the show had all this great promise, but I loved the vibe of what the show could be and really, really wanted that job for those reasons and to work with you guys again. But also because I knew there was a way, and it was my old writer sort of producer brain thinking like, there's limited time, there's limited money. How can you maximize the writing and the, the humor opportunities, but your production schedule is so crazy tight. How can mathematically you do both things? And that's, I remember leaving that meeting and just like, I, I didn't know what else I could've said, but it was really my experience as a writer and a producer, just like, this is how I would make this more efficient. Not that you guys were inefficient, but it was just how my brain had worked from the writing side.Michael Jamin:And that's, and I, and that's what we appreciated most about you as a director, is that you came from a writer, you were a writer, you understood the writing, you understood how to be true to the script, how to service the script. And I gotta say, it was always very easy working with you was never, you had never had any ego attached. You were like, Hey, is this, how do you like this? Oh, you don't like that? Maybe you like this. It was always, you know, course pleasing the client basically. ButRob Cohen:You guys were not only were you my friends, but you guys were the bosses along with Mark and I I would say just, it's not even from a Canadian standpoint. It's like you are hired to visually capture the script that has been written mm-hmm. . So if somebody's coming in thinking like, here's how I'm gonna put my stamp on it, or this is gonna be for my real, it's a mistake because Right. What I, what I love doing, and you guys were great show runners, was if you got Guy, if there was an idea I had, I would happily run it by you because it made it easier if you liked it. And if you said, Well, we actually thought about it this way when we wrote it, it's like, that's cool. My job is to visually capture it. Yeah. And, and also it's like this scene's running over, so here's a, here's an idea how we can pick up that time.Rob Cohen:Right. Or Mark has an idea. So it's like, okay, let's honor what Mark is saying and Right. That's to me, it's your number one goal is to take the blueprint and build a house. And it was so easy because you guys, we all knew each other, but we all came from a writing background. Yeah. And it was, it was like, well, you know, this B story's never gonna pay off this way, so what if we just save some time and just make this like a joke instead of a B story or whatever was going on. ButMichael Jamin:I remember right. I was always relieved when you, when you were directing, I was like, Oh, this is gonna be a good fun week. It's gonna be easy. It's gonna be yeah, we'll get what we need.Rob Cohen:Oh, I loved it.Michael Jamin:Yeah.Rob Cohen:I love that show.Michael Jamin:Yeah. That was, we had a blast. But it was, yeah, it was low budget. And then, so what do you say to, because it's so many people, you know, they do ask me like, Well, how do I, how do I become a director? Mm-Hmm. . And so how would you tell people, young people just starting out, I would do what you just did, but go, let's hear what you would say. No,Rob Cohen:I, I would say you know, again, to sound like an old man, times have changed mm-hmm. . and I would say that the number one thing is to show somebody that you have directed something and that can be directing it on your phone or making a short film. There's so many ways to do it inexpensively now with technology. There's no excuse. Right. My second answer would be it's to show the people that have written the show or have the script that you can not only be trusted to run the set and get all the scenes and get some options e editorially, but that you also aren't literally just filming the script that you are gonna mind some more humor. Right. Or you have a style that's appropriate and that's established in the first part that I said, which is make your own real.Rob Cohen:You know, like there's a music video I did the total budget out the door before, way before that was $2,000. Like everything. Right. And we were able to, you know, we had three minutes and 25 seconds or whatever it was to do it, but we were able to get some funny stuff within the video and it was for Virgin Records. And the one letter I got back from was like, We love this video because there's so much funny stuff in it. It wasn't about the song, but it's finding a way to sort of add, without putting the spotlight in yourself because the spotlight should be on the script.Michael Jamin:But once you have your reel, like okay, how do you, who do you show it toRob Cohen:You? If I was doing it today? I think you show it to I mean YouTube is a great example of somewhere that for free, you can exhibit your wares mm-hmm. , I would say the going, showing it to an agent is a, is an older route that I think is gonna be more frustrating because you can now start a website of yourself and send it around to people with a click. I think, you know, the great thing about short films is there's so many festivals and a lot of 'em are online that even if you make a three minute short film for a, a very inexpensive amount of money, you could literally have people around the world see it after you're done editing it. And so that's what I would do today is write something, because if you write it, it gives you extra juice.Rob Cohen:Mm-Hmm. . And then you're also not paying a writer. Right. And you, and then the way that you saw it as a writer, writers basically direct stuff in their head when they're writing mm-hmm. . So then take the initiative to film what you saw in your head originally and put down on paper. And then there's so many people that would do favors. Your friend might be an editor and he needs something for his reel. So you make a deal. It's like, if you edit this for me we'll have a finished product, then both of us have something. So I, I would say it's, it's, it's it's hustle, but it's not like that lame thing of you gotta hustle. I think it's an iPhone will make something so beautiful. And with an iPhone and a tripod, your costs are gonna be your phone and a $10 tripod.Michael Jamin:And I, I say the, I Go ahead. Continue. Right.Rob Cohen:Well, no, I just think there's no excuse to not make stuff. Yeah. But you want to, you, you want to use the internet you want to use film festivals that a lot of 'em have free submissions and start a website you're on webpage and people will find it like they, somebody's gonna see it. And as long as you keep adding to it on a fairly regular basis, it's the same as when you and I were starting, you would have to send out a packet and to meet writers for staffing meetings, they would want to either read your spec half hour or your writing packet. So this is the same thing, it's just your directing packet.Michael Jamin:Right, Right. I say this all the time, I think people think I'm nuts, but Yeah. It's just like, stop asking for permission and just do it. Yep.Rob Cohen:Absolutely.Michael Jamin:A Hundred percent. And stop and stop thinking about starting at the top. How do I sell my, how do I direct for Twentieth Century Fox? No. How do I direct for my neighbor? Yeah, That's, that's the question. Yeah.Rob Cohen:But that's what I loved about those music videos. Not to keep referencing 'em, but you're, the, the greatest thing is when the artist said yes, because I was like, Oh, this is great. I'm gonna have a music video in my real, And then you realize like that $2,000 pays for catering, pays for editing, pays for a dp, pays for lighting, pays for location, and you very quickly realize you have no money. But the challenge of that is so great and has so much value, these little jobs that people can take because when you do show it to somebody, they go, You made that whole thing for $2,000. That's ex or damn, or you made this short film for a hundred dollars and you could, I you could, if you have a Mac and an iPhone, you can make a film.Michael Jamin:I said, so funny you say, cuz I said the same exact things. Like the less money you spend, the more impressive it is because you're saying aRob Cohen:Hundred percent,Michael Jamin:You know, and, and by the way, no one's gonna be impressed by the Dolly shot or the special effects you put in because you're not gonna, you know, the Marvel movies are gonna do that a thousand times better than you can ever dream of doing it. Yeah. So it always comes down to the script and Yeah. And, and how little you can spend. That's the impressive part.Rob Cohen:Yeah. And I will say, not to over compliment you, but whenever I have meetings for directing jobs that every, the shows that they bring up almost every time that they're really curious about are Marin mm-hmm. standing against Eva, which is another Iffc show. And somebody Somewhere, which is the Bridget Everett show, which is an incredible group of people that do that, but on a fairly low budget. Yeah. And nobody wants to talk about how you pulled off some amazing big budget production because they know you had a big budget, but if you can show them that you can work lean and mean and you were involved from the ground up it has so much cred with everybody that to this day, like it happened the other day, people were talking about Marin, they did not believe what that schedule was like. Yeah. And when I explained it to 'em, their minds are blown. Yep. They, they can't believe it's possible. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Right. Yeah. FastRob Cohen:And it is possible.Michael Jamin:Yeah. It was like two or two and a half days for a shoot,Rob Cohen:Which is two and a half days for an episode.Michael Jamin:Yeah. And ordinarily, it's like five. Right. Or how do you, have you ever directed an episode that was more than five days?Rob Cohen:I've done one that's six. Okay. but you know, me, the thing that I would say in these meetings is like basically a, a regular work week, you will have completed two episodes where most shows are barely getting one for a way bigger budget. Yeah. But the great thing about the Iffc model was they don't give you notes, they stay outta your way. They're supportive and they appreciate that you're delivering a television show for peanuts. But then everybody benefits because they've agreed to embark on a journey where everybody has skin in the game. And that, that I think also will help people get writing or directing jobs.Michael Jamin:I see. I, I think sever and I, we prefer, you know, we take whatever work we get, but we prefer working low budget for that reason. They leave you alone and you can actually be more creative. But how do you feel when you're like, I would imagine directing a high budget piece would be more stressful and, and and terrifying.Rob Cohen:It is, but because there's more writing on it. But I would say the larger budget stuff that I've directed, and it's not like major movies or anything like that. The, the pace of things is a lot slower mm-hmm. because people have more time and more money. And to me, I love going fast and lean and mean because you still have the amount of money, but why not get five takes at a scene instead of two takes. Right. And, and so if you have more money, it doesn't mean you get lazy, you keep your foot on the gas, but you just get more options. Right. And so I think learning anything, writing or directing anything from the ground up with no resources will make you be more creative and more efficient. And people, when they're hiring you, certainly for directing, appreciate how efficient you are. Because you're basically saying, Give me the keys to the bank and I will take care of your money and you'll have five choices instead of two choices. Right. And that's what it comes down to.Michael Jamin:You say choices, do you mean coverage or do you meanRob Cohen:Coverage?Michael Jamin:CoverageRob Cohen:Takes coverage? You know, Maron, we would rehearse it as we blocked it. You know, like it was, it's not like we had these long, lazy rehearsals. It was like, Okay guys, we have three hours in the living room. Let's,Michael Jamin:Do you have more rehearsals, more rehearsal times on your other shows? Yeah. We had no rehearsal time.Rob Cohen:Yeah, sometimes, but I also think that's built into the larger budget. So if it's a network, single-camera show, people can walk away to their trailers and you call him back when you're ready and then lighting director gets everything perfect. And again, like with Joe Kessler, who is our awesome DP on Marin mm-hmm. , that guy works so well just like running gun, Running gun. Yep. And there's ways to make stuff look great. And also Mark, who's not a trained actor, was delivering some really heavy stuff mm-hmm. and people are finding it as they go. Because I think that team mentality, if you're writing or directing, everybody's on board. They, they've signed up understanding what the job is and once people chip in it's gonna make it a better experience in every area.Michael Jamin:Now you, I'm changing gears here, but you also do a lot of like this Dr. Show. Like you do a lot of, like, you do commercial work, but you also do like bizarre passion projects on the side. Mm-Hmm. , Right? So talk about like that. Like what, what's, what'sRob Cohen:WellMichael Jamin:Hanging with Dr.Rob Cohen:Yeah. It was during the Pandemic and Dana Gold, Pete Aaronson and I are friends and we just, everybody was stuck inside and a lot of work had gone away because of the pandemic. And we just started talking and kind of came up on the fly of the show and realized we could make our own YouTube channel and if we put the money together ourselves, then we're the studio. So nobody's gonna stop us because we're paying for it. Right. So Dana does this incredible Dr. Zs impression and we were like, what if Dr. Zs hosted the Mike Douglas show? But he was sort of like a cheesy Sammy Davis Jr guy, and we would call in favors with friends of ours who would be real guests, shoot them remotely and make 10 episodes. Right. And it was truly a fun project during Covid. And we ended up, you know however you could describe having a small but interested following making season one of Hanging with Dr. Z. And we used the internet and Instagram and, and all that stuff, which led to us having a really successful Kickstarter campaign for season two. And the budget, I wouldn't even use the word shoestring, I would say it was like a photocopy of a shoestring, but I love doing weird, silly stuff. And a lot of it it improvised and it just tapped into all of our favorite ways to do stuff. Right. But it was working with friends, you know, during a pandemic.Michael Jamin:Right, Right. People have friends and you do project with your friends, right?Rob Cohen:Yeah. And we ne we, we have not made one penny on that show. We, we have lost money on it, but willingly because it going, what I said earlier, we could guarantee it would exist because we were creating it and paying for it. So there's nothing stopping us. Why not? Like why not do it?Michael Jamin:People often say to me like, you know, they want, or they want me to read this, they want me to make their career. And it's like, you don't need me to make your career. You need three funny friends. There are three friends with a similar vision. Yeah. Do something with them. And that's exactly how you, that's how you started. That's how I started. Yeah. And so that's why I say stop asking for stop begging for permission to just start, you know, doing it. Just do it.Rob Cohen:The thing that, like using hanging with Dr. Z as an example, and only because it's something that I was involved in that came out of some friends of ours who were politically active when the elections were happening, the 2020 elections mm-hmm. . And there was a group that had reached out to my friend Colin to make a campaign to stop Mitch McConnell. And so they asked Dana and I like, Could you guys help us out? And there's zero money involved, but are you guys interested? So Dana and I just started to shoot the breeze and we thought, let's just shoot Dr. Zs basically talking about why Mitch McConnell should be stopped. We shot it in his backyard and his girlfriend at the time played Nova and he played Dr. Zs and we did it in front of a, a green screen sheet and we knew we were gonna put the Statue of Liberty from Planet Apes behind them and shot a political ad in two hours.Rob Cohen:Right. And then we had so much fun with that and the, this little weird ad kind of did well enough within the small circle of people that love Dr. Z's political ads, that that's what led us to talking about the talk show. But again, it was just homemade. And my point is, I think whether people call it a passion project or whatever they wanna call it, if they have an idea and they write it or they direct it, or they do both, you immediately eliminate people saying, You can't do it because you did it. But more importantly, the people that could give you other opportunities respect the fact that you did it and didn't wait around for somebody to give you an opportunity. Right. Cause you will get the opportunities by creating your own opportunities.Michael Jamin:And that's, that's one thing I always admire about you, is you're, you're very entrepreneurial that way. And it's like, Yeah. You follow your heart.Rob Cohen:Yeah. But I'm also convinced, like as flukey as my career started, I'm convinced that it's gonna end. Every job will be my, my last. So I'm trying to keep more plate spinning Uhhuh. But I also love, you know, like whether it's, you know, somebody somewhere is such an amazing experience because of Bridget and Hannah and Paul who created, and Carolyn Strauss and hbo. And it is the nicest group of people and the most enjoyable environment where you can, every single person on that show in rural Illinois is there because they want to be there. Mm-Hmm. . And that energy drives that show where people watching it on TV can feel that vibe. Right. And, and whatever people think of that show, it's like summer camp where every year you get together and people are so excited to take very little money to be part of this experience.Rob Cohen:Right. And that the same thing can happen with person X deciding they want to make a short film or they wanna make fake commercials or whatever, because they're gonna set the tone and they're gonna create the vibe. So I think it's a mistake if somebody's like, I only wanna do cool stuff, or, you know, nobody's gonna let me do my ideas. It's like, Yeah, you're not letting yourself do your ideas. So when you told me you were starting your course, I'm like, the biggest obstacle to somebody making anything these days is the person who's bitching about it.Michael Jamin:Yeah. That was me. Yeah.Rob Cohen:No, but, but it's all doable. Can you guarantee success? No. But you will gain amazing respect and opportunities by having it be tangible instead of complaining about it.Michael Jamin:Yeah. Yeah.Rob Cohen:And that's just a fact.Michael Jamin:That's just a fact. Well, where do you see, where do you, because the industry has changed so much since we started, What? I don't know. What's, what's your prognosis for the future? What do you see? People ask me this, like, I don't know.Rob Cohen:I think, what doesMichael Jamin:The present look like?Rob Cohen:Well, I don't know, but I think it's quite obvious that streamers of the future and broadcast networks are not the future. Mm-Hmm. . So you and I were lucky enough to start in sort of part of the glory days of the nineties when mm-hmm. , you know, you had multiple staffing meetings, you know, you would just, it would be that sort of dating circuit for a few weeks where you would bump into people going in and out of offices. And you started off like having four offers. And then it would be two offers, and then it would be one offer. And then it goes from you hoping you do get an offer, or hoping you get a meeting and you could see the tide is turned. So to me, the future is definitely streaming and smaller budget, shorter orders mm-hmm. . And if somebody is expecting it to go back to people paying you a lot of money to do 22 episodes of a TV show a year, I think that is very foolish. Yeah. In my opinion, because it'll never go back to that.Michael Jamin:Yeah. Yeah.Rob Cohen:But it shouldn't go back to that.Michael Jamin:Well, it is what it is. But, but no,Rob Cohen:But there's no more musty tv. Like Right.Michael Jamin:YouRob Cohen:Know, look at the Emmys. Like, it's the, the show with the biggest amount of TV stars on it that just aired, had the lowest ratings ever. And it's not because of one person, it's because they've lost their viewership. Right. It's, they, they're not gonna get it back. People aren't gonna wake up one day and go, Gosh, I can't wait to watch this award show on broadcast. Like, those days are over.Michael Jamin:Right. And so it's always about, it's about hustling, it's about getting work, looking for the next job. Mm-Hmm. about doing your own stuff. Right. Yeah. And, and at the end of day it's gotta be, it's also has to be good. Whatever you're working on, like, you know, has to be great. Right. Well, IRob Cohen:Mean, look, I've done more than my share of crap and largely in my own hand. And I think that an opportunity is an opportunity. You know, there's a lot of credits I don't have in my IMDB page because the show was either a deeply unpleasant experience, or it's such a crappy show. You would spend so much time explaining it to people that they would fall asleep. And so the reason that I've called those credits is because it's, I'm grateful for the experience, but it was a stepping stone to what, what I wanted to do. And if I hadn't taken crappy show X, it wouldn't have led to a more positive thing. And, and I think like what you're doing is encouraging people to pursue an idea that they really believe in and learn the basics of how to write it and shoot it. Mm-Hmm. and just that small amount of initiative, even if you never show your project to anybody, you've made it, It's, it's an immense amount of satisfaction. Mm-Hmm.Michael Jamin:. That's right. Incredible. Exactly right. And I, I said that as well. And if you didn't enjoy it, then this Hollywood thing is not for you. Cuz if you're not enjoying it for free, you're not gonna enjoy it when someone's banging, you just, you, you're just gonna get money for it. That's it. Yeah.Rob Cohen:And there's people that do that, and they make a fortune. But it's also, you know, like, not to keep talking about when you and I started, but mm-hmm. just shoot movie was in the nineties, and if you said NBC in the nineties had so many comedies, some were good and some were terrible. But now if you look at nbc, are they doing any comedies? Like maybe two?Michael Jamin:Yeah, maybe. Yeah.Rob Cohen:Yeah. So, so it's the same place, but it's the, the tide is clear. So for somebody to aspire to working on wacky old timey NBC comedies, it's very foolish. However, if they are a self starter and, and determine what their roadmap is, nobody will stop them. You can't guarantee success, but at least you've tried it and you might be successful trying it and pursue what you like.Michael Jamin:See Rob Cohen is Rob Cohen. Everyone is, is there something where, is there something, What, what, Is there something people can do to follow? What do you, what what do you wanna, Can we plug something about what you're doing? Can we No, no. Can,Rob Cohen:No, I mean, I'm not on social media. I, I'm I just, I I'm genuinely appreciative of the projects that invite me to be a small part of it. And those happen, you know, here and there. And there's nothing to really follow. But I, I just think I'm excited to see this on your, your podcast. You've built a great following.Michael Jamin:I'll say this, when I need a pick me up, when I need a little encouragement, I call you mm-hmm. to kick me in the ass. Right. So I, you're just a great dude, and I appreciate you so much and for coming on and for sharing, but you thought was what was boring, but it was not boring at all. I, I learned some things about you.Rob Cohen:Yeah. I was a disaster as a young man, and now I'm an older disaster.Michael Jamin:, that's soRob Cohen:What you're, what you're doing, I know you're wrapping it up, but IMichael Jamin:Well, that's okay. I I don't wanna take more of your time, but go ahead. No, you'reRob Cohen:Not. That's, you're not, I'm, you've got as, as long as you want. I, I really think that if somebody wants to be a writer or director or producer or an editor, then do it. Like, again, you don't have to show it to anybody, but if somebody writes something really great, you can show it to people and someone will recognize that you have talent, but nobody's gonna be able to know anything about what you want to do if you haven't, if you can't manifest it. Right. So you know, again, like when you guys gave me that opportunity on Marin, unbeknownst to me, it, it was a huge help in me getting my next directing job because it, it legitimized me as a director, and then the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But if I hadn't had that opportunity, it would be a struggle until there was another opportunity. Right.Michael Jamin:So you wanna It would happen eventually.Rob Cohen:Yeah. But you wanna be prepared for those opportunities. Right, right. So I just think that's just common sense. But what you're doing now, like if I told you you're gonna be doing this five years ago, you would, you would laugh.Michael Jamin:I would've said absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Wisdom, Rob. Hustle. Hustle muscle. That's it. I can't thank you enough for coming on, coming on the show time, man. Thank you for being my first guest. I, I didn't, I'm surprised I let you talk so much. I thought maybe I'd be doing all the talkingRob Cohen:. No, I'm surprised I talk so muchMichael Jamin:. I'm surprised. I'll let you get a word edgewise. Yeah. I dog a lot. Dude, thank you so much again. AndRob Cohen:Anytime. I love it.Michael Jamin:Don't go anywhere. We're gonna, we're gonna have a post more to wrap up after this, but Sure, sure. Thank you, everyone, for listening. And until next time,Phil Hudson:This has been an episode of Screenwriters Need to Hear This with Michael Jamin. If you'd like to support this podcast, please consider subscribing, leaving your review and sharing this podcast with someone who needs

Bible Reading: 1 Chronicles 29:10-13Laughter erupted as the Belford family finished a rowdy game of charades.Melody, a neighbor girl who had joined them in the game, got ready to leave. "I wish my family got along and had fun together like yours does," she told Cara. "We argue and fight all the time. Why is your family so different?" Cara shrugged. "I guess we're just happy people. And maybe we work harder at it than some people do." That evening, Mom served a chocolate cake for dessert. "This tastes great, Mom!" said Sawyer, Cara's brother. "You should make it more often.""It's one of the best cakes I've ever tasted," said Dad."Thank you," said Mom. "I appreciate your compliments.""Mom! No fair!" Cara complained. "You know I--""Oh, that's right," Mom interrupted her. "You made this cake, didn't you?""You did, Cara?" Dad asked. "It's delicious!""I don't care who made it," Sawyer mumbled through a full mouth, "as long as I get to eat it."After dinner, Cara and her mom folded laundry while Dad and Sawyer cleaned the kitchen. "You know, honey, I have to admit something," Mom said as she paired socks. "I deliberately accepted the praise and compliments you deserved--but only temporarily and for a purpose.""You just wanted to tease me, right?" Cara said. "That's okay, Mom.""Actually, I wanted to make a point," said Mom. "I heard you and Melody talking earlier, and I wanted to make sure you understood the real reason our family is different. The peace, love, and joy we experience as a family doesn't come from us working hard to get along. Jesus deserves the credit for that. Because we trust in Him, He's given us His peace, love, and joy and helps us show it to one another each day."Cara bit her lip. "I know, Mom, but I wasn't sure Melody would understand that.""Maybe not," said Mom, "but I wanted to make sure you understood it. The reason we're able to love each other the way we do--and forgive each other when we need to--is because of Jesus."Cara nodded. "Maybe I can find a way to help Melody understand that so she'll want to know Him too!" -Karen E. CoganHow About You?Do you remember to give God credit for the blessings He's given you? If you know Jesus, He helps you show His love in your relationships with others and experience His peace even in difficult times. Don't be afraid to let others know He is responsible for those good things in your life. Praise Him for all He's done for you, and look for opportunities to express your thankfulness to others.Today's Key Verse:I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth. (NKJV) (Psalm 34:1)Today's Key Thought:Give God credit for all He does

We have winners for the Stash Busting Blanket Along! Plus project updates, camping in the Club Car and some clothing memories. Full notes with photos, links, and transcript can be found in the podcast section of our shop website: TwoEwesFiberAdventures.com Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Subscribe on Android or Subscribe on Google Podcasts Jul Designs coupon code: 15% off with code TWOEWES. Laura Bellows Blog post series on wearing a Balinese sarong. Thank you to our patrons. To become a patron visit Patreon Page. Marsha's Projects:  Unpattern Top Down Raglan Pullover by Karen Alfke. Ben tried on the sweater and it is too big. Designers instructions were misleading so I ended up with too many stitches for the body. Need to rip back to correct number of stitches because the sweater is too big and I don't think I will have enough yarn to finish. Very frustrating. This project need to be set aside for awhile Troyggja við Mynstur (Sweater with Round Pattern) by Tora Joensen (translated by Kate Gagnon Osborne: I have finished the body and the first sleeve. Washed and blocked the sleeve to be sure the size is correct because it felt tight unwashed.  I'm spinning a 2lb bag of Manx Loaghton in my stash. This is a protected breed from the Isle of Man. I am using a woolen spun technique and have spun 5 skeins or approximately 400 yards. Spun three more bobbins that are ready to be plied. Happiness by Kyle Kunnecke using Yarn Snob Power Ball. The skein is massive, weighing 500 grams and 2,187 yards. I wound into three cakes and labeled yarn ends 1-6 so I can keep color order. In order to pull from the outside of cake, which I prefer, I am starting with #6 and working backwards. Kelly's Projects: I'm a little more than halfway done with the shortie socks out of Tomato and Mink Falkland handspun yarn. It's a 3-ply chain plied yarn. I can really see the variations in thickness since chain ply has a tendency to exaggerate the differences. I also have an overplied and unbalanced yarn. This is good for durability in socks, but is also something that can happen in a chain ply. While your fingers are doing the chaining, sometimes your feet don't slow down.  I also have a new spinning project with the remainder of the Columbia fleece. I blended this with tussah silk top that I had in my stash. It is spinning up thin so I think I'll make a 3-ply with this.  Stash-Busting Blanket Along Listen to the episode to hear the winners. Summer Spin-In  Started June 1 and goes until September 5. (US Labor Day) If you are on Instagram use #summerspinin2022. Black Sheep Gathering June 24-26 Albany, Oregon Saturday June 25 meet-up starting about 4-4:30. We will supply snacks and beverages. We can't wait to meet you! We Want to Hear You! Give us a call and tell us about your favorite LYS!  Go to speakpipe.com/twoewes and leave a message. It will take 90 seconds or less. Or you can use the voice memo app on your phone and email us the audio file. We'll put your voice feedback on the show!   Show Transcript Marsha  0:03   Hi, this is Marsha  Kelly  0:04   and this is Kelly.  Marsha  0:05   We are the Two Ewes of Two Ewes Fiber Adventures. Thanks for stopping by. Kelly  0:10   You'll hear about knitting, spinning, dyeing, crocheting, and just about anything else we can think of as a way to play with string. Marsha  0:17   We blog and post show notes at Two Ewes Fiber Adventures dot com. Kelly  0:22   And we invite you to join our Two Ewes Fiber Adventures group on Ravelry. I'm 1hundredprojects, and I am betterinmotion. We are both on Instagram and Ravelry. And we look forward to meeting you there. Both  0:36   Enjoy the Episode  Marsha  0:43   Good morning, Kelly. Kelly  0:44   Hi, Marsha. How are you? Marsha  0:46   I'm doing well. Kelly  0:47   Good. Marsha  0:48   Well, not really, though. Not really.  Kelly  0:50   Oh, really?  Marsha  0:51   Well, I'll talk about it when I get... oh, that's my teaser. But anyway, I want to hear how you're doing. Because I know you went on a camping trip. The first real camping trip in the trailer, not the show but a real camping trip. And I want to hear about it. Kelly  1:10   Oh, okay. Well, we got home yesterday. It was a short trip. Because by the time I made the reservations there weren't a lot of sites. You know, the sites that we liked, that we know we liked, that we were familiar with, because we wanted to make sure that it was an easy trip. The sites that we were familiar with were only available until Friday. So we left Tuesday, spent Tuesday night and Wednesday night and then came back yesterday. So it was a fun, quick trip. The weather was gorgeous, gorgeous weather. The campground that we like to go to is called Mount Madonna. And it's on what I think is called Hecker pass, it's a mountain pass through the Santa Cruz Mountains. The the far southern end, I would say, of the Santa Cruz Mountains between Watsonville and Gilroy.  Marsha  2:08   Okay.  Kelly  2:09   And, and I... the reason I'm making the point about where it is is because I have an idea to to float that we'll probably talk about later on in the podcast. But anyway, the trip was great. The, you know, getting in and out of our driveway part of it was successful, then we stopped at his work to let people take a look at it. And the guys that he works with were really, you know, I mean, it's it's kind of like the .... I don't, I kind of don't get it the same way. Because to me, it's about the camping experience. I mean, I think the trailer is beautiful. But I don't have like, you know how when, when men, and probably some women too... But a lot of times you'll see a classic car. And then there's all these men gathered around the classic car looking at things that I've no idea what they're looking at. Like, that's kind of the way people are when they look at the trailer. And so, you know, going to his work when he got a chance to show it off to the people that he used to work with. And they were super impressed. They'd heard a lot about it, you know, because it's been being worked on... it had been being worked on since well... We got it in December 2020. So you know, it's been a long time coming.  Marsha  3:27   Yeah. Kelly  3:27   They'd heard a lot about it and seen pictures and stuff. So they wanted to see the finished trailer. So we stopped there on our way up to to mount Madonna. And the second day, the you know, the only full day that we were there, my mom and Dennis arrived with snacks to christen the trailer and, you know, visit with us because they like camping up there too. But they weren't able to camp that particular weekend because their trailer needs to go in for some work. But they did come up and visit. And I took the dogs on lots of trails and sat and spun. I basically brought my spinning project that I'll talk about and sat in the sun and did some spinning and we ate cheese and crackers when we arrived so we ended up not having dinner that night. And then my mom and Dennis they came with snacks the second day. So we had snacks and didn't have dinner the second day. There was very little cooking we didn't have to do any. Oh, I made tuna sandwiches because I had made some tuna you know some tuna salad was already prepared for the first night and we didn't eat it. So the second night when we were supposed to have barbecued hamburgers. After my mom and Dennis left a little while later we were kind of hungry. So we had tuna sandwiches and so it was easy in terms of, you know, we didn't do the eggs and potatoes or pancakes for breakfast we didn't do barbeque for dinner. There was not a whole lot of cleanup because it was mostly cheese and crackers and chips and salsa and yogurt for breakfast. And so there was lots of time to just sit around and spin and take the dogs for walks. And they did really well. It was Beary's first real camping trip. And he did great. So yeah, it was really fun. Marsha  5:32   So and then where you camp at Mount Madonna. Is it...Do you plug into services or? Kelly  5:39   Yeah Marsha  5:40   Did you have to bring your own water? Okay, so you have water and electricity.  Kelly  5:43   Right.  Marsha  5:43   Well,okay.  Kelly  5:43   Yeah, they have hookups. They call them partial hookups, it doesn't have sewer hookup. You dump the sewer, and gray water, black water and gray water tanks. When you leave, there's a dump station where you do that. So we got to do that for the first time. Because we didn't have that in our old trailer. You know, our gray water just went into a five gallon you know, a five gallon... It wasn't a bucket, it was like a jug. You know, grey water went into a five gallon jug and we didn't have a bathroom. So there was no black water tank. So but yeah, we had electrical hookup. And we had water hookup. City water, they call it. So yeah, we had all the all the hook up stuff that we needed. Today I'm sitting in the trailer to record. I don't, I probably won't do this a lot, because we did get a cover for it. So he's going to keep it covered. But I thought oh, I'll record in the trailer today. It's beautiful outside. It's actually a little warm in the trailer because Robert had some of the windows closed but it's going to be in the 80s today, maybe it already is.  So anyway, I'm sitting at the trailer table and and I'm testing out the inverter because I've got my phone plugged in and I've got my computer. It's the first time I've plugged in something more than a phone, which you can charge off of the 12 volt system battery. So right now I'm running my computer, it's it's plugged in and it's being you know, being powered by the solar.  Marsha  7:31   Okay, pretty cool.  Kelly  7:33   Robert's got a small solar power panel that he uses for what he calls trickle charging when it's just sitting in our driveway. So the batteries don't get overused but they also don't go dead. And then we have the larger solar panel that we haven't used in a camping trip yet. We didn't need them because we had power hookup at Mount Madonna. But Mount Madonna also has tent campsites and we went around and scoped out the sites with no services. I mean they have they have bathrooms, obviously, and they have water but you have to go to the place where the faucet is and fill up and bring it back. And we went and scoped out those areas to find some of the sites. We marked down some of the sites that are long enough for, you know, for our trailer and the truck to both be off the road, off the main road. So those campsites there were a few that we're going to probably try out if, you know, the main area is full or if we just want to get into a more quiet area or just to try it because we haven't  Marsha  8:49   yeah you can go off grid you're self contained so to speak. Kelly  8:55   Yeah we don't need the electricity or the water so yeah, yeah, it should be really fun. Marsha  9:04   Well I thought it was really cool, too, that, you know, the one thing that you have not finished for the trailer is the curtains that are gonna go at the windows.  That's down the line but the... your sort of... your stop gap measure is you put up all your vintage linens like tablecloths and stuff as sort of temporary curtains. I thought they were so cute. Kelly  9:27   Yeah, in fact  I have the one sitting here. I'm gonna have to prevail on my more experienced weaver friends and some of the people who do more technical work because (and I'll put a picture in the show notes, in fact I'll text it to you while we're talking maybe). So this one tablecloth and I think this is one that came from the batch that you gave me when you were going through all of your all of your stuff.  Marsha  9:56   Oh, right.  Kelly  9:57   It's so... it's it's linen. It's a small tablecloth, a small table tablecloth, but every corner has this really interesting detail. And some of it is actual like cut out and and then bound. Or I guess it's possible that it's not cut out. That just the warp and weft threads are just bound to make pretty good sized, like quarter inch square, holes. And then some of it is just in the hemstitch, which I haven't ever done. But I'd like to try. I think that it's not that difficult. And I know I can find instructions for it. And then there's also this other mesh detail that is... I've done some woven lace, but this is actually with thread you come back after the fact. And you use threads to wrap the warp threads and the weft threads so that you've got these holes. Like it pinches in.  Marsha  11:07   Yeah. Kelly  11:08   It pinches in the warp threads and it pinches in weft threads and then you get these little holes. So anyways, very interesting construction. And I'd really... there's not enough. I used this one tablecloth in one of the windows, like folded over. But there's not enough even for that one window. Well, I guess... I guess there would be for that one window. But I would like for the two windows that are across from each other in the bedroom to be at least similar.  Marsha  11:43   Yeah, yeah.  Kelly  11:44   So and I don't think I want to cut this one up, because it's just pretty. But anyway, I'd like to reconstruct this fabric or do some kind of facsimile of this, of this sort of fussy, fussy work. Weave something and then try that. I think it would be really kind of a fun challenge for those two bedroom windows. And then the kitchen window--and I'm not sure where it came from, it might have been a piece that I bought somewhere else. It's like a table runner, but it only has lace on one lengthwise edge. And so I don't know maybe like a buffet? You know, something that was against the wall, you would put it on that and it would hang with the lace part hanging over the front. And I just sewed a little sleeve for the for the curtain rod and used it as a kitchen curtain. The kitchen window has two crocheted lace panels that are sewn between linen fabric. And it's really cute, it's a bit too long. And I think when I'm going to do... I didn't... All I did was put a sleeve in the top of it for the rod. So it's just one panel, one piece going across the whole window. And I think... I can't decide whether I want to do it as a valance and just have one piece going across the top of the window as a valance or if I want to cut it down the center and be able to split them for the kitchen window. But I think that one will stay. I think that one in some form. Not the form is in now, but in some form that one is going to stay Marsha  13:26    okay  Kelly  13:27   in that kitchen window because it is really cute. And  it's the perfect size whether I make it into a valance or split it down the middle. It's it's really the perfect size. So that one will stay and then the other one that I thought was really funny is there's a dresser scarf and I think the dresser scarf also came from the stuff that you gave me.  Marsha  13:51   Okay. Kelly  13:52   And one edge of it has crocheted lace that says Mother and so I hung it up in the window with  the side that said Mother facing into the  bedroom and my mom was laughing. She's like, I'm not sure you want your mother in the bedroom. [laughing] Marsha  14:14   Yeah, really. But you can't get into too much trouble on that bed, Kelly! [laughing] Kelly  14:23   With the word mother right over your head. [laughing]  Marsha  14:26   Yeah, really.  Kelly  14:29   It was really... it was... it's a really cute piece and it has plain lace on the other side. So the outside of the window had the plain lace showing. The inside of the window had the lace that had the word mother on it. So very fun. And then I used one of my I... wanted to cover the front window. Well really I wanted to keep the curtain rod from falling out. And so I put another vintage tablecloth in. I had one with flowers on it in the front window hanging up, and you know, a floral one, and then we just used that one on the table while we were, you know, while we were there. So yeah, yeah, we had a really a really good time. So the thing...Oh, Bailey's barking in the background because the mailman just came.  The thing that I was thinking as we were there, because they do have the tent sites. And they also have yurts for people who didn't typically do camping, but I was thinking it would be fun to have a little camping meet up.  Marsha  15:39   Oh, yeah. Kelly  15:40    And, and we could provide, again, for people who didn't necessarily do camping or have camping equipment. You know, we could do you know, here at the, at the trailer, we do coffee in the morning. And so people have their coffee, and then we could do dinners. You know, barbecue dinners, and some people would, who didn't camp typically could, you know, still eat. [laughing] We wouldn't need to worry about you know, about bringing a camp stove or, or that kind of stuff. You could get by with minimal equipment. You know. Marsha  16:16   Yeah, yeah. Kelly  16:16   That's what I was thinking. If you wanted to you could rent one of the yurts, or get one of the tent sites, or if you have an RV, bring an RV. So, you know, I don't know how many people that would actually turn out to be. Probably not very many. But I thought that might be kind of a fun thing to look into. Marsha  16:33   So, yeah, we'll think about that.  Kelly  16:35   Yeah, yeah. I really enjoy that campground, because it's very close to our house. And, you know, it's in the woods. But it's not like the wilderness. And then on our way...I won't get off the camping thing! But on our way to Black Sheep gathering we're going to stay at a couple of Harvest Host sites. Kelli, that we met at Stitches, had recommended Harvest Host and I looked into it and decided to get a membership. So we're going to be staying at two places. One is a rice farm on the way up, and the other one is a winery. So I'll have to report back on how that  goes. But that should be fun. It'll be at first. I've never done that kind of camping, where you just pull up at somebody's business and park in their parking lot. So yeah,  Marsha  16:45   It'll be interesting.  Kelly  16:57   Yeah, yeah,  Marsha  17:07   How fun. Kelly  17:37    I'll definitely report back. Marsha  17:39   So yeah, well, I remember Kelli talking about it. She was really excited about it. She said it was just really, really fun. So Kelly  17:47   It's perfect for a trip where, you know, where you're on the go, because it's a one night experience. You don't stay there multiple nights. And that's not something that we've done a lot of either. You know, the trip up to Black sheep is probably the one of the those... that's one of the only types of trips where we've done the camp one night, then pack up and go kind of camping. We usually, wherever we're staying, we stay a little longer than that, even if we're moving on, you know?  Marsha  18:18   Yeah. Well, I'm excited because I will see it at the end of this month, just  two weeks, I think, or so I'll see it. Kelly  18:26    Yeah, yeah.  Marsha  18:27   Anyway. Okay, should we move on? I don't want to cut this off, because it's super interesting and fun, but I don't. Should we move on?  Move on to our next topic?  Kelly  18:39   Yes. Let's move on to our next topic. There was some fiber content in there though. I have to say because I did talk about lace curtains and possible weaving. [laughing] Marsha  18:47   Yeah, Yeah, it is. Well, I think the trailer is just, it's just fun. It is just super fun. So. Okay, so before we get to projects, we just want to mention that Jul Designs coupon code for 15% off any of their products is still available. It's still going on. And just go to Jul Designs website, there's a link in the show notes and just use the coupon code TWOEWES and that's all caps. And so check that out. Did you buy your... Kelly  19:24   No I have not yet. I keep thinking I need to go in there and do it and I haven't done it. But I was looking there today as I was putting my stuff in the show notes. And I found a couple of things that I like, so I'm going to do that before we-- before I put the computer away today. And then also I noticed that she has a blog post series. Laura Bellows who has Jul Designs. She's an anthropologist, I think, and anyway, she has this blog post series on wearing a Balinese sarong and I saw the title and I saw the pictures and I bookmarked it, because I want to go back in and read it. It looks like it's like three, three or four posts on the different aspects of of that and I thought, well that's very interesting. Because, again, fabric right?  Marsha  20:17   Fabric  Kelly  20:20   So, so yeah, take a look at her her blog posts and take a look at her-- all of her different shawl pins and shawl collars and different closures and, and such. And thank you to her for providing this coupon code for for our listeners. Well, and speaking of thanks, Marsha, we have another thank you to do.  Marsha  20:45   Yes  Kelly  20:45   Our patrons from Patreon. We just want to want to give them all a shout out because we're so appreciative. These patrons that provide the funding that supports the prizes, they support the podcast hosting, all of our community events, you know. The the Alongs that we do, we are able to have prizes, you know, in the abundance that we do because of the support of our patrons. So we wanted to thank them. And our most recent patrons are--so thank you to them--Christina Y, Kelly B, Laurie M, Francesca Q, and Shelly M. They've all joined Patreon and become patrons in 2022. And then we also have Pamela R, Connie L., Cheryl C., Jan H., Hetty C, Jane H,  Colleen G, and Mindy C. Thank you for your sponsorship of our podcast. Marsha  21:56   Okay, and we also have Eman, Amy L., Patti B. ,Joan B., Tammy S,  Kathy M., Natalie, Martha P.,  Melody W., Joanne Y., Greta. H. Kelly  22:17   Okay. And also thank you to Joylaine O., Barbara G., Rachel W., Joyce G, Angela D, Laurie L, Charlene, and Erica N. Marsha  22:34   And a thank you also to Debbie F., Erica J., Rachel S., Patricia E., Catherine K., Karen B., Jenn N., and Janet S. Thank you, everyone! Kelly  22:51   Yes, thank you! We really appreciate your support. And the other members of our community also appreciate your support. Because, again, it allows us to do the kind of the kind of events and alongs and prizes. Oh, and I see I just scrolled down to the next page. Ann Gi is also a patron. Thank you, Ann Gi!  She's been a patron for quite a while. And so sorry that she was missed! Marsha  23:20   Sorry. I didn't scroll down far enough. So sorry, Ann Gi. Kelly  23:24   All right. Well, with that said, What about your projects? Marsha? We'll go from up note to maybe a down note? Marsha  23:37   Oh, yes. So here's what I have to say about both my projects. The first one. So I'm going to talk first about the sweater I'm making for my son. And I'm using my hand spun. And have you ever heard Kelly of the law of attraction that you say, you tell, you say something out to the universe, and the universe gives it back to you. You have to be careful what you say because it can give you positive things, it can give you negative things. So I'm sort of laughing about this because one of the things I kept saying is how much I enjoy knitting with my handspun. But well, the universe has given me the gift of knitting the sweater for the third time. So I will just back up and just say So, bottom line, I'm taking this sweater and I'm setting it aside for a while. And I just did a note, too, about my brother's sweater. I'm kind of setting that aside for a little bit too. So the sweater I'm making for my brother, or excuse me for Ben. This is the... Do you remember? Not to rehash this whole thing but first I started making the phrancko.com sweater that didn't work out because of my gauge. So I now started doing the unpattern by Karen Alfke. And this is the raglan pullover from the top down, where you actually just take your measurements. And basically, it's the same idea of what Frank Jernigan is doing, or Amy Herzog used to do, where you, it's like, you know, the computer does the math. In this case, I'm doing the math. But we talked about this in the last episode, about the pattern. When you get to the part where you're, you're increasing for the sleeves and the body. There's an error in the pattern. I'm calling it an error. Somebody else may not say it's an error. But when you're figuring out how many stitches to have on the arm and have for the body, it says, you do your math, and times the gauge, you know, whatever it equals and then it says front or back goal stitches: 176.  Kelly  25:48   Yeah.  Marsha  25:49   And I kept knitting beyond I kept knitting. Because it said front and back.  Kelly  25:56   No, it said, front or back. Marsha  25:58   Right, it said, front or back. I read that as I needed 176 stitches on both the front and the back. Kelly  26:05   Each, right? 176 stitches each.  Marsha  26:08   Yes. Each. For the front, 176 stitches and for the back. What it really should be, instead of saying front or back goal stitches, it should say front and back, right. So I need a total for the whole body, front and back combined of 176. I have, because we caught this when I was down there for when I was down in California at your house going to Kelly  26:37   stitches or NoCKRs? Marsha  26:41   I believe it was NoCKRs. And you said, we decided, we added up my stitches, and I have 224. Kelly  26:49   Right. And we caught it because you were so far down. It was like you had... you still weren't ready to split for the split the arms off of the body. But you were far enough down that it looked like you should be splitting the arms off the body.  Marsha  27:07   If I continued to the point where I should split the arm holes I would be at the waist. Right?  Kelly  27:13   Almost.  Marsha  27:13   That's an exaggeration. But that was right. That was the-- that was our clue. Kelly  27:18   And then you said, wait a minute, if I keep going, this is going to be way too long. Right? And then we started looking at the pattern. Marsha  27:26   And right and you caught the the mistake and the pattern. So but we had that conversation, you know that moment? And you have this conversation? We convinced each other? Yes. So they should just stop and keep going. Right? Kelly  27:42    Because how many stitches did you have on each? Marsha  27:45   I had 224 total  for the body combined. And if I had continued What's two times 176? It's 252?  No, it's more than it's more than 300.  Yeah, that's right. And so, Kelly  28:07   So you said so you were supposed to have 176 all the way around, and you had 224 all the way. So you had essentially you had about 50 extra stitches. Yes. How did we can convince ourselves that was ok? Marsha  28:24   Well, and this is what I'm gonna... so this is what I'm gonna say. To finish it, we convinced... we have this conversation. You're like you said I think it's going to be okay, . Kelly  28:34   How far would you have to rip it back?,  Marsha  28:35   But it will be ok. Kelly  28:38    Oh, that's too far to rip back. That, you know, oh, that would be unpleasant number of rows to rip. So Marsha  28:46   So. Yes, I should have just ripped back then. Because I knit the entire body.  Kelly  28:52   Right.  Marsha  28:53   And half of the first sleeve by the time he came home. And I tried it on him.  Kelly  28:59   Yeah.  Marsha  28:59   And it's way too big. Kelly  29:03   Well, and to be fair to you, he gave you a sweater that he liked as a template. And holding the sweater you were knitting up to the sweater that he liked as a template, they looked about the same size.  Marsha  29:21   Yeah.  Kelly  29:21   But the sweater that he liked as a template is alpaca and drapey and thinner machine knit. And it's fine yarn--alpaca.  Marsha  29:31   And it's also that style where it's basically you know, the body is a square, and then the and then the arms just stick off and so here's my the moral of the story. When you have that feeling, and you know what you should do, you should just do it then. Kelly  29:49   Yes, when you have that feeling and you say, Oh, I Oh, gosh. ripping all of that out. I really don't want to do that. I think it'll be okay. That phrase, I think it'll be okay. Should be a trigger. It won't be okay. You need to rip it out.  Marsha  30:07   Yeah.  Kelly  30:08   I'm so sorry. Marsha  30:10   I know. So he tried it on. I don't know now, it was two weeks ago or so when he was here.  Kelly  30:17   Yeah, right after our last episode, I think. Marsha  30:19   Yeah, it was Memorial Day weekend, I think. You know what, I don't remember because I was so upset that I sort of had to go to bed. No, I'm kidding. But I did I have that feeling like-- that feeling like, I'm gonna cry. Yeah, I feel like I'm gonna cry. And I think I should go get in bed and cry. But no, I'm a I'm a, I'm a grown woman. And I'm going to now go out and take the dog for a walk or do something else. And I'm just gonna set it aside and not think about it for a while. And then I have to just, I was and I was very angry at Karen. And it's not her fault, because well, I don't know if it's... No, I can't blame her. But it's just the way the pattern is written. It's not-- it is not clear. It's a mistake in the pattern. And I didn't catch it. You know?  Yeah, you have to actually be thinking,  I mean, you have... Because I just couldn't figure out how you could have gone so wrong from the pattern. And then, so then I took the number of stitches that were supposed to be what I thought just the front and divided by your gauge to see how many inches that was supposed to be. And realized it was the 40 inch circumference that you needed. Yeah, like, Okay, well, if it's not an error, it's at least a place where things are unclear enough that it should be changed. Yeah, but So, Karen lives in the Pacific Northwest. And I know she's a friend of my friend Kim. And so if I ever see her, I promise I will be nice to her. [laughing] Kelly  31:55   Your mad won't last too long. Marsha  31:58   It won't last and honestly, the truth is, once I rip the sweater out, yeah. for the second time.  Kelly  32:05   Yeah.  Marsha  32:05   And reknit it for the third time... Kelly  32:07   Karen, if you're listening, Marsha will be okay. Marsha  32:10   I promise I'll be kind but... And as I say, once I rip it back and start over again I now it's really clear what my mistake is. Okay, I'm crossing my-- you can't see me but I'm crossing my fingers. Kelly. Hopefully I'll be okay. And I won't have to knit it again.  Kelly  32:28   Yeah. Knock on wood right now. So Marsha  32:32   yeah, knock on wood. Kelly  32:34   Everybody out there. Knock on wood for Marsha. Marsha  32:36   It's funny because I was reading the our posts in on Ravelry in the discussion thread, like when you posted the episode, and then people make comments, and I don't remember now who it was, I'm drawing a blank. Someone said, I'm so sorry that Marsha is having these problems that I talked about in the last episode with  my brother's sweater. And I was laughing. I thought, you don't know the half of it. I had been. Yeah. Anyway, I will have the joy of knitting with my handspun a third time. Kelly  33:08   It's a good thing you like that yarn. [laughing]  Marsha  33:10   Yeah, really? But I'm not going to say that anymore. Because it got me into big trouble. I think. So anyway. Okay, so now moving on to my other sweater that's a problem. And this is the sweater with round pattern. Or Kelly, how are you pronouncing it? Kelly  33:30   Well, we have a pronunciation audio from Cat. And it actually isn't sweater with round pattern. It's well, she'll, we'll play it. So we'll put the audio in right here.  Cat  33:42   Hi, Kelly. Hi, Marsha. I believe it's "Tro-cha vee min-stur" Trocha: sweater. Vee: with. Min-stur is pattern. And I looked it up in the Faroese dictionary and I'll send it to you. Mynstur means any pattern, not necessarily a round pattern. It could also mean a pattern for for weaving, for embroidery. Depending on the context. In this case, it would be a pattern for knitting. Marsha  34:12   Okay, so, Cat, thank you for that. Yes, that really helps us out. Okay. What's going on with that sweater? I have, as you know, now, this is the second time I've, I mean, I switched to this pattern. I've knit the body up. This is a bottom up. So I've knit up the body up to the armholes. I've set that aside and started the sleeves. Kelly  34:34   and you've blocked it. Washed it and blocked it and checked it out that it fits. Marsha  34:37   Yes. Yes. And so I did it halfway through so that's why the pictures of it in Ravelry there's this weird line. Okay, body set aside. I started the first sleeve. Didn't like it because I was... oh, let me back up. The sleeve you're supposed to cast on and knit the cuff. Then you do some color work, work in stockinette, right above the cuff, and then you knit  the main color up to the armhole, set that aside, do the same thing with the second sleeve, then attach the sleeves to the body and knit the yoke. My concern about that is, once that's done, you cannot adjust the length of the sleeves Kelly  35:18   without ripping everything out Marsha  35:20   without having to rip out the yoke. Yeah. So I what I decided to do is a provisional cast on with one row of the one of the contrast. The colorwork... the cuffs are supposed to be in the navy blue. So I decided to do one row of the navy blue and then start the colorwork. And that was a disaster because you're doing it, you know, magic loop. And the tension was terrible. It was all over the place. Kelly  35:51   And you have no base to hold on to while you're doing the colorwork. Yeah.  Marsha  35:55   Right. So I ripped that out. I cast on again, provisional cast on. I did three rows of stockinette in the blue, the navy blue, which is going to be the cuff color, because I thought, what will...  and then I knit the color work. And I did about an inch of the main color. And I realized, I don't like the color work because the everything is knit on size eight. But what I've decided to do with the yoke, is I'm going to knit that on nines, and I forgot to switch to nines for the color work sleeve. So I ripped it out back to the... it was not as horrible, but I had to rip it back out to the three rows of the Navy of the stockinette. And then I reknit the color work on nines. And then I switched back to eights and I've done most of the sleeve, I would say it's three quarters done. And I thought it feels a little tight. Kelly  36:57   Oh no. Marsha  36:59   I don't know what's gonna happen. But I decided I'm putting it on waste yarn, and I washed and blocked it. So I did that yesterday. So it's sitting there drying. And so I I just want to make sure. Kelly  37:12    Yeah. Marsha  37:13   I don't want to finish that sleeve and do the second sleeve and  have them too tight. So  Kelly  37:20   oh my gosh! Marsha  37:22   All I can say is, what the hell?  [laughing] I hate... I hate these projects. I hate these projects. So just to help myself I...So Ben's sweater's being set aside for a while. My brother's sweater is going to be set aside for a while. I just need to take a break from it. And anyway, I decided to cast on something else. So Kelly, guess what I cast on. Kelly  37:53   Something for you.  Marsha  37:55   Something for me! And just the name alone is gonna make me happy. It's called Happiness.  Kelly  38:00   Yes.  Marsha  38:00   And the designer is Kyle Kunnecke and I'm using the big giant baby that I bought at stitches, Yarn Snobs Powerball, and it has all these colors in it. It's so interesting. I will post pictures, too.  It weighs... this skein of yarn weighs 500 grams, it's 2187 yards and it was a bit of a challenge to get it onto the swift. And then I wound it into three cakes and what I did is because if you-- if you break it, well... First of all I have to say this is amazing yarn. I'm kind of curious how he's able to get 500 grams and over 2000 yards with not a single break and there's no knots at all and so it's a continuous piece of yarn. I don't know how he dyes it so beautifully given that it's so thick. I mean he's got the color goes all the way through. It's amazing how it's clearly when you open it up into the hank it's it's that's how it was dyed. it was not dyed in another form and then wound into that hank, you know. You can see it's been dyed in that hank. Yeah. Is that was not reskeined. No Yeah. Well anyway, so Kelly  39:23   Hard enough to skein it in the first place before you dye it! Marsha  39:28   So what I did is... I... but I wanted... It may not be important to keep the color order given the way this thing is sort of this very, very crazy, chaotic color, you know, it may not be necessary. Kelly  39:40   I think it's necessary.  Marsha  39:42   Well, I wanted to keep the color order. So what I did is I wound it into three balls, but I put a piece of tape like painters tape on the beginning of the yarn, but as I started taking it off the swift I put it in-- I labeled that end 1 and I put it in so the end 1 now is on the inside of my cake. And end 2 is on the outside of my cake. Right, so then I break that, and then I put a tape on the next the piece that's coming off of the swift, that's 3 that's now wound on that's on the inside of a cake, and 4 is on the outside of my cake. And then the third one, end 5 is on the inside. And end 6 is on the outside. I like to pull from the outside. So I can't pull from the outside of the first cake that is labeled one and two, because two is on the outside. So I'm starting at the very end. So I'm starting with the third cake, which is end starting with six, which then five will be in the center. Then I'll go to two, 4, which is on the outside. 3 is on the inside. And then the last cake 2 is on the outside and 1 is on the inside. Does that make sense? Kelly  41:06   Yeah. And that's I think going to be really important because the cakes of yarn actually look very different. Marsha  41:14   It's true. And the the first one I wound off and the last one I wound off look the most similar. The one that's right in the middle is darker, it has more black in it. So I think I think it is important to keep the order. Kelly  41:32   Yeah, because that way you don't have to alternate skeins, it'll just go along the patterning of the skein. And whatever the differences are, they will change naturally, the way the skein changeds as opposed to abruptly if you weren't going in that order. So I think that's a smart way to do it, Marsha.  Marsha  41:55   Yeah, so I already started knitting on it. I'm so much happier. It's on size four. So it's a nice, it's a smaller needle. Because the other thing I need to mention that I did finish my garter squish blanket over Memorial Day weekend, the deadline to finish it was May 31. And I believe I finished it on May 30 with a day to spare. But that was knit on 13s and that's like, it really feels you can't really get a rhythm knitting with those, because they're so big. So I'm very happy with this so far. And I've just knit. Let's see, I'm knitting on it now. And I have to do two inches of ribbing, and then I'll switch to stockinette. And so I...this is what I'm planning to bring to Black Sheep Gathering the end of the month. So I can just knit mindlessly on it and talk to people and not look at those other two sweaters. Kelly  42:52   I think that's a really good plan. And the thing about this one is that it's a nice kind of boxy sweater with a lot of positive ease. So that's a lot of stitches going around and around in stockinette. So it'll be it'll be perfect knitting for a long time.  Marsha  43:12   Yeah.  Kelly  43:14   And I think everybody probably has the size needle that they feel the most comfortable with. Or the range of needle size that they feel the most comfortable with. I really like my sock needles at the low end. And then I like threes. Like threes, fours. That's a twos threes, fours that's a really nice size for me. It feels they feel right in my hand. Where when I'm knitting with five fives or sixes for a hat, it's not that I don't enjoy it. But it's always nice to get back to my little needles. Marsha  43:49   Yeah, yeah. Kelly  43:51   So that's that'll be good, too. It's right in your your comfort knitting zone. Yeah, well, that's good. I'm excited about it. I think it'll be I think it'll be a good project for you. It sounds like you're excited about it. The colors are great. Marsha  44:07   And then I have been spinning on the Manx Loaghton. And I've been spinning on that and I'm planning on bringing my wheel and that to Black Sheep Gathering and mostly spinning, I think.  Kelly  44:21   Oh, good.  Marsha  44:22   That's it. And then as I say finished project, I finished my garter squish. That's my only finished project. Kelly  44:27   and it turned out nice. Marsha  44:29   Yeah. It's nice.  Kelly  44:30   How do you-- have you put it next to your other two? To like, see how it compares and what you like? Like, how do you like them compared to one another? Or are there like, this is the first one that you've done with flat colors? Marsha  44:47   No, it's the second. Kelly  44:48   Oh, the second one. That the first one you did was also was the Cascade.  Marsha  44:54   The first one was flat. The main color was like a blue like a I don't know what color blue you would call that one Kelly  45:00   Not quite navy-- kind of between the Navy and kind of a darker royal blue? Not so bright as a royal blue, but not so Navy. Marsha  45:10   And and then this one, it had brighter colors more. Not really natural colors. The contrasting one? And then the second one I did is when we dyed all the yarn so we had the gradient and then all the painted variegated.  And then the this one that I just completed the background was a brown, then all the colors are like sage and orange. And I don't know, it looks more like the first one.  Kelly  45:43   Yeah.  Marsha  45:44   And ironically, I what I really would like to do is I would like to do one where the the, the main color is just a cream or a natural color like yours. That's what I-- but I found that's what I wanted to do. But you know, I had all that yarn. The first one it was using the yarn from my dad's sweater. And then the one that I just finished, I had a lot of just undyed yarn, and I dyed it because I Kelly  46:16   because  the solid was the brown. Like you've always had a different solid. Marsha  46:21   Yes. But actually now I'm kind of thinking I could have. Well, no, that really wouldn't, because even the natural colored yarns were all slightly different. I didn't have a consistent... I was thinking what I could have done is just reversed it. And the one that yarn that was sort of the... No, I did it the right way, because the yarn that I dyed for the background was all kind of camel colored, right? It wasn't natural. Yeah, yeah. So anyway. Kelly  46:44   Well, you'll have to put a fourth one on your needles Marsha  46:49   I cannot do a fourth one, ugh! Kelly  46:50   No, you know what you should do? The next one you do, because I think there will be another one in your future at some point. Not in the near future. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be another one.  Do that one that is the, I think it's called the sediment throw. Where you go corner to corner? Marsha  47:07   Yes. Um, I was thinking about that. And then the other one I'm thinking of is, there's the one for my brother that he wants.   Kelly  47:19   You're not doing any projects for other people for a while. Marsha  47:22    No. Kelly  47:23   I'm gonna lay down that law for you, Marsha. [laughing] Marsha  47:25   I know. But the one I really want to make is... I'm sorry, I should have been... because I didn't know we were going to be talking about this in depth. Let me look at my patterns... Kelly  47:37   Well, a lot of people did the habitation throw.  Marsha  47:42   I'm looking for the one that I... because I've been pulling out yarn for it. Anyway, there's the one for my brother. And that's all with the Noro. And I don't really have I don't have any Noro. So I have to figure that one out. I was scrolling through my patterns. I can't find it. It but anyway, basically, it's like chevrons, kind of, you just use sock weight yarn that you and so that's when I was sort of thinking of using that. And I was actually thinking because I have so much sock weight yarn like scraps. But I also have a lot of sock weight yarn that I bought single skeins, that I don't really like them. I don't want a shawl out of them. I don't want to make socks. I was thinking I would put that all into the blanket, but I have, you're supposed to use about 500 grams. To make the blanket. Total to make the blanket. I was sort of thinking maybe what I would do is hold the sock weight yarns double and go up a needle size. And so I could use some of those one off skeins that I don't really like very much. So anyway, Kelly  48:52   I think it's a perfect solution.  Holding yarn double is a perfect solution to using the partials or well, partial skeins that are leftover but also full skeins of, of yarn that you bought that you don't need another pair of socks or you weren't in love with it anymore. Marsha  49:13   Yeah. I'm hoping I get my Juju back.  Kelly  49:15   Well, focus on your sweater first because that is, I think, that is just such a fun pattern. That sweater is cute. The yarn is great. It's comfortable knitting because you just start doing stockinette around and around until you're sick of it. Marsha  49:36   Yeah. So I think I have these you know, my brother's sweater and Ben sweater are sitting in my bedroom in their project bags. I think I'm gonna go put them in the closet.  Kelly  49:44   I think you should. Yes, put them away where you don't have to look at them and feel any kind of guilt or?  Marsha  49:49   Yeah. Anyway. So let's go into more positive things. We'll finish my projects and go into your projects.  Kelly  49:57   Okay, well, there's not much to say This will be short. I'm making a pair of shorty socks. And I'm using a hand spun yarn that I've that I've actually used before for socks. It's out of a fiber was Falkland, which, it's not as soft as I would expect Falkland to be. But there's not, you know, it's not horrible. Just when people talk about Falkland a lot of times they talk about how soft it is. But anyway, it's Tomato and Mink, or Mink and Tomato was the colorway. I don't now remember where I got it. But it was a number of years ago, maybe 2013 or 14, something like that. And I spun it up and last summer or the summer before I made a pair of regular socks out of it. And I had spun it for socks, I made a three ply, so it's long color repeats, it's a chain ply. One thing I will comment about chain ply because there was a little bit of discussion about it on the Ravelry group this morning. One thing about chain ply, it definitely magnifies your inconsistencies. So I have some places where this yarn is super, super thin, like a lace weight. It's a three ply, but super, super thin, because my fiber got thin. And then you're putting the three thin fibers together and you do the chain ply, so it's thin. And then in the thicker area, you know, because when you're chain plying, you're plying areas that are close together, I'm plying three, three thicker strands. And then I've got a thicker yarn, so it's more like a sport. So this yarn varies from a really thin lace weight to about to sport weight. Which is fine, it makes a nice sock. It's not you know, it's honestly this is one of the things I try to tell people is that those kinds of inconsistencies, you think they look big in the skein or in the yarn, but once you knit with them, even in stockinette, I'm really not seeing that kind of inconsistency in my knitting. So it doesn't show. The other thing about the chain ply is you have a tendency to over spin it. Because your feet... you need, you really need as your hands slow down if you get, you know, stuck or you miss the chain, or you just need a little extra time. And you don't also slow down your feet, you get it over spun over plied. And this yarn is pretty overplied. I mean, it's like kinking on itself as I'm trying to knit with it. And you know, it's been washed. And a lot of times when you wash an over plied yarn, it does relax quite a bit. But this I'm a lot of times having to, you know, pull out the kinks, as I'm knitting. The places where it's pigtailed onto itself. That's really good and I did it on purpose. Well, it's a it's a good feature to have for sock yarn, because it makes the sock yarn more durable. But it is a little bit annoying to knit with. And it is a feature of chain plying, if you're not really careful, you can get you know, you can get things over plied when you don't mean for them to be. But these are just a pair of shorty socks, and they're not going to match because they're with the leftover balls. And these are... so one of them has a gray cuff, the other one has a gray and orange striped cuff. And then half the foot is gray and other half the foot is orange. And this one I've got a gray cuff and an orange part of the foot. And then I have only gray left. So it'll only have one orange stripe or the other one has, I think two or three places on it that there's orange. So these are really long pattern repeats which again is another one of those features of chain ply is that you can get those long-- or not pattern repeats, color repeats, you know, long stretches of color. So they're self striping, but the stripes are about four inches in some places. Yeah. So that's my socks. And then I have a new spinning project. So I'm using up the remainder of the Columbia fleece. I had been using the Columbia and the Oxford. Spinning those up, I spun those all. I had spun those in the past two summers and then used them for my garter squish. And then I I'd used up all of the Oxford in the final part of my garter squish. And so then I started with the rest of the Columbia fleece and I carded it and I added in tussah silk. So I have this tussah silk top I had bought like a pound or eight ounces of it or something a long time ago. It was in my stash, I got it out and I just, you know, blended that in as I was carding, and it is nice. This  fiber's really nice. I have these batts. And you can see, like, I blended the silk, I tried to blend this out pretty well. But there are places where you've got like this strand of like silk fiber running through it. That's just super pretty and fun to spin. There's a lot of silk content, I tried to get 50/50. But I couldn't. I only wanted to do three passes through the carder, and I couldn't get 50% silk into the fiber in just three passes. So that's alright, it has enough silk in it. It's going to be really nice. And it's spinning up pretty thin. So I'm probably going to make it into a three ply, but I don't know, I might two ply it and use it for a shawl or something. I'm not sure how much I'll have when I get when I get done.  Marsha  56:04   Yeah.  Kelly  56:05   And I think in this case, I am going to spin all the singles first and then decide if I want to do I want a two ply. Or do I want a three ply? How much yarn? How much of this yarn do I want? And then I think I'll also dye it after the spinning is finished. Because that'll be interesting because the dye will take differently on the silk and the wool.  Marsha  56:26   yeah, interesting.  Kelly  56:28   And I cleaned up my wheel, took it all apart, washed it, oiled it-- well, washed it, polished it, put it back together, oiled it. It's spinning so nicely. Marsha  56:41   So I have a question. I don't see your mohair sweater on here. Kelly  56:45   No, that's put away for a little while. It's been kind of warm. I haven't knitted on it since I think I was knitting on it at the last episode when we recorded and it's still sitting up in the in the guest room vanity area from that day. I haven't touched it since then. I got really into the carding that was the main thing and then the socks are just something that I started at the Pismo rally trip to have something to knit in the car and then I brought them with me in the car to this, you know on this trip, but I haven't made a whole lot of progress on them. Marsha  57:23   Well, I have a comment about it. When I was walking Enzo and listening to the last episode, you were talking about the sweater and how you had had that sweater in the 60s. You-- the mohair sweater that you bought in the boys department.  Kelly  57:41   Yeah,  Marsha  57:41   And I was walking  along and I of a sudden I thought, why was that sweater in the boys department? I mean like because it was hairy right? It was like a hairy mohair sweater. Kelly  57:52   It was a vest. Marsha  57:52   A vest Yeah, I mean a vest but like it was in the boys department? Like what boy was wearing?  Was that a style to have those hairy vests or? I think that's what just struck me is like, what boy was going to be wearing that? Kelly  58:07   Yeah, I know. I don't know. Well, I told you it was unusual. I it was an unusual piece of clothing. Marsha  58:15   I know so you always think of the boys department having...You know when Ben was born and Iwould go to get him some clothes and and all these--so much variety and interesting things with for girls. And the boys it was all like Navy and brown. Like there was nothing fun really with boys clothes. And so that's why I'm like, What boy was going to be wearing that hairy vest? [laughing] Kelly  58:44   Well, and this was ...I wonder if I have any pictures with me wearing it? This was tan, kind of a tan brown color. And they had a... I don't think the whole vest was Argyle. I don't think the pattern was totally Argyle but it had a thin orange like thin orange diagonal striping like an argyle. I just remember the thin orange stripe. I don't really remember if the whole thing was Argyle. If it was, it was muted, you know, it was like a tan and a light brown or something. It wasn't wild colors. But yeah, it was... It wasn't, you know, totally hairy like my Sonny Bono jacket. You know, it wasn't like that. But it was definitely hairy.  Marsha  59:37   You know, I guess I'm out of touch. I'm out of touch with what boys were wearing in the 60s and this  Kelly  59:42   Well, let's see, when would it have been? Late sixties or early seventies.., depending on when I had it. I think I had it in like middle school. We don't have middle schools here but-- or we didn't have middle school where I was but it would have been like middle school age, maybe fifth sixth, seventh eighth somewhere in there. So it would have been the early 70s. Marsha  1:00:09    Yeah, yeah.  Kelly  1:00:10   No, I can picture it... I can kind of. Yeah, I think  it could have been like maybe something the Monkees wore maybe.  Marsha  1:00:20   Well, you know, I mean, I don't know. I, since we're on this topic, I remember it was very popular for girls when I was in middle school. Well, elementary school, but like late elementary, like, sixth grade or something, but those crocheted vests. All the girls wanted, like, crocheted vests and it was like those granny squares, right. And my my aunt made one for me, my great aunt made me one of those vests and then Kelly  1:00:55   It would be right in style now if you still have it. [laughing] Marsha  1:00:58   Yes. And then also do you remember Go Go boots?  Kelly  1:01:01   Oh, yeah.  Marsha  1:01:01   Did you have the white Go Go boots? Kelly  1:01:03   I didn't have them for regular life. Wehad white boots for my baton. My baton group. Marsha  1:01:11   Oh, I had gogo boots and white gogo boots that I wore to school because everybody wanted them and I my parents bought me a pair, probably at Sears. And they were like vinyl. Yeah. And my feet practically rotted off in those.  Kelly  1:01:30   Yeah.  Marsha  1:01:32   Well, between you know, nylon socks and plastic boots. I remember a my mother finally said you just can't wear them because my feet were I was getting like, like athlete's foot or something and just sitting in that moisture all day long. So she said you can't wear them. So I was only to wear them like once a week or something.  Kelly  1:01:51   That's funny. Yeah, we had them for baton, for parades and stuff. That was part of our parade uniform. And, and the other part of our parade uniform was vinyl. And it was like a cowboy vest with a suede. It was the beige cowboy vest with a suede star on it and suede like edging. Right. And then the bottom part of it was these vinyl bloomers.  Marsha  1:02:24   Bloomers? Kelly  1:02:25    Bloomers Marsha  1:02:25    Pants. Kelly  1:02:26   Like, bloomers! [laughing] Marsha  1:02:32   They wouldn't they have no drape or anything, right? I mean, they must have been... Kelly  1:02:37   there's no leg, right? So they're just bloomers. So they like they just, I mean, I maybe I'm not using the right word. They were like they're like the shape of underpants. [laughing] Marsha  1:02:51   Oh my gosh. [laughing] Kelly  1:02:54   And I, honestly this is terrible. This is maybe too much information. But I remember one parade thinking of the you know, the, the vinyl and the not breathing and the... But I remember one parade where the edge of the vinyl the unsewn seam edge. Because my mom made them, right. Somebody in the troop made them and most of the girl's parents or moms made them but then there were some moms that didn't sew. But my mom sewed so she made ours. But the seam allowance wasn't covered. And I had oh my god, the most painful, painful raw area Marsha  1:03:36   down there. Kelly  1:03:38   From marching with that seam edge of this vinyl rubbing on my leg. For the whole parade. It's like oh my god. When I think back on that. Yeah. And then we had the white, the white boots. And we had cowboy hats. Oh, it was cute. Marsha  1:03:58   But painful, but very painful. Kelly  1:04:01   Well after that one parade my mom did fix it. She... I don't know what--she covered the seam allowance in some way. But yeah. Oh my gosh, I should look for it. I should look for a picture.  Marsha  1:04:14   Yeah, yeah,  Kelly  1:04:14   To put in the show notes. I don't know if I have time to do that. But yes, funny, cute. They were cute. But when I think back... So that's the end of my projects, Marsha. That's why we're talking about so much random other stuff that's not knitting. [laughing] Marsha  1:04:35   I know. Well, hopefully things will start looking up for me and so that we'll have better things to talk about in terms of projects. But anyway, moving along. Let's talk about the Stashbusting blanket along because that is done. It ended on May 31. And we have winners. Kelly  1:04:55    yes.  Marsha  1:04:56   So so let's just say what the prize is going to be  Kelly  1:04:59   okay.  Marsha  1:04:59   We debated a long time about what the prize should be. Because we thought of yarn, getting people a-- but then this was all about stash busting right? You could look at this both ways. Oh, they didn't want any more yarn because they were working to get rid of yarn out of their stash. Or you could look at it as everybody got rid of the, the yarn in their stashes that all the stuff they used, it was really a Stashbusting. And they need some yarn. So we couldn't make up our minds. We finally decided to go in a completely different direction. And everybody who the winners will receive a pattern of their choice up to $10. So that's going to be the prize. And we have five winners. So Kelly, yes, so we'll list them. Let's say who it is. Kelly  1:05:44   Our first winner is michembry, Michelle, and she made the Habitation Throw. And I really liked that pattern. I'm gonna, I think I might at some point, make one of those because it turns-- a lot of people did them and they all turned out really, really nicely. So congratulations, Michelle. Marsha  1:06:04   Yes. And our second winner is cattitude. Cat. And she made the sunburst granny square throw. Kelly  1:06:14   Yeah, congratulations, Cat. She's our Faroese interpreter. Marsha  1:06:20   Yes, yes. Our foreign correspondent. Kelly  1:06:23   Our third winner is iheartbooks. And she also made a garter Squish, blanket. It turned out really nicely. I just have to say that is the best pattern. I really think that pattern is so versatile. So congratulations, iheartbooks, and I didn't say what her real name is. I don't remember if that's because it wasn't there. Or if I just forgot, but iheartbooks, Congratulations! And Laura Sue also made a garter squish. And Kelly, you have a note here accursed Romney?  Yes. She she made a post in one of the-- I think this one was from the discussion board. I drew from both the discussion, and the fo thread to get the winners. And she was using this what she called the accursed Romney that she was trying to get rid of. But she also knit this during the caregiving and loss of her mother, and talked about how soothing it was to, to knit, you know, that garter stitch pattern. And to just-- kind of like what you were talking about with the sweater you're doing. You can just knit and knit and knit and not have to really think too much about it. So yeah, she got she got rid of a Romney fleece that she'd had forever and had been probably she felt like it was multiplying in her stash because I have that feeling about some of my yarn. Like, wait a minute, I thought you were gone.  Marsha  1:07:55   Yeah.  Kelly  1:07:57   And then our last winner, also with the habitation throw is Starwood knitter. So congratulations to Starwood knitter Marsha  1:08:08   and to all the winners. It was a really fun along Kelly  1:08:12   Yeah, it was it was. Marsha  1:08:14   I would consider doing another Stashbusting blanket along next year. Yeah. Different pattern though. Kelly  1:08:23   That's good. Give  everyone some time to think Marsha  1:08:27   and  build up their stash. Kelly  1:08:28   Build up or go through their stash and get ideas. Get some creative ideas. Because honestly, when we started this, I didn't think I had the right... I knew I had stash. But I didn't think I had the right yarn to make one. And it wasn't until I put it all out. And looked at it for a couple of weeks with different ideas before I thought, Oh, I know what I could do. I could combine these and yeah, so. So yeah, well, so definitely have to do that again. It was really fun. Yeah, we'll need to have some time in between to do something other than blankets. Marsha  1:09:08   Yeah. So as I mentioned before, the prize is a pattern of your choice up to $10. And Kelly, we're gonna have people contact you.  Kelly  1:09:20   Yeah, through Ravelry or, two ewes at Two Ewes Fiber Adventures dot  com, the email address, Instagram, any of those ways, just get in touch with me. All I need is to know your Ravelry name and what pattern you want. And if you're not on Ravelry and there's a pattern you want that I can get to you some other way let me know that too, because I've been able to do that for some other people. Marsha  1:09:50   All right, and then the Summer Spin In is underway. It started June 1 And it goes until September 5 We've talked about what we were spinning Kelly  1:10:04   I put up the thread. So there's a thread on Ravelry and I have a hashtag summer spin in 2022.  Marsha  1:10:13   Okay,  Kelly  1:10:13   so if you want to post, if you have Instagram and you want to play, post on Instagram. Go ahead and use the hashtag summer spin in 2022. And there's no, I have no punctuation in that summer spin in, there's no dash or anything. It's just  three words summer spin in  and 2022. Marsha  1:10:34   And then the other thing Black Sheep gathering we've talked about mentioned it during this episode, but just the details: Black Sheep Gathering is taking place in Albany, Oregon on from June 24 through the 26th. And Saturday, June 25, we will have a meet up at the trailer starting around 4:00 or 4:30. And so we'll have some snacks and beverages and if you are at the black sheep gathering, stop by and say hi. Kelly  1:11:06   yeah.  Marsha  1:11:09   So I should say too, Kelly, I did sign up for a class. You will laugh about this one. I'm going to take a color work. Finally. So I'm actually excited about that. Hopefully, I'll learn some good tips and techniques. So and then our last order of business is we want to hear from you. So we've done this before where people have been sending us audio recordings about their favorite yarn shops. And so just go to speak pipe.com forward slash two ewes and you can le

In this episode of the BTP Podcast, Pouya speaks with Tugrul Guner, a Physicist by training and Machine Learning Engineer by trade. Enjoy!   Tugrul's Social:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tugrul_Guner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tugrulguner/   Pouya's Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pouyalj/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pouyalj LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pouyalajevardi/   Episode Transcript... ----more----   SUMMARY KEYWORDS quantum optics, arrogance, imaging, materials, physics, degree, confidence, observe, kinda, people, agree, thinking, science, human, quantum mechanics, postdoc position, field, evolved, point, question SPEAKERS Pouya LJ, Tugrul   Pouya LJ  00:00 Well hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to yet another episode of the b2b podcast. We've been away for a while I have for sure. But I am back with a very great friend of mine, tool gunner, and I am happy to introduce him to you what a legendary man he is. He has okay. Oh, you know what? I'm not gonna give you the introduction. I'll let him introduce himself the way he he sees fit. Hey, Joe, how are you doing?   Tugrul  00:43 I'm good, by the way, are legendary?   Pouya LJ  00:48 No, no, I know you well enough to give you that, you know, give you that adjective. So that's all well deserved? For sure. All right, turtle. So why don't you give us a very brief but comprehensive background about yourself, the way you see yourself from your academic background personally. Yeah, go ahead.   Tugrul  01:10 Yeah, sure. Sure. I will start with when everything changed in my life. I was like, I was not cared about anything before, like last year of my high school. So I was like, playing video games going out like playing soccer. And the classes were like, I wasn't. I had zero interest at all. But I wonder I was reading a lot. I was like, I was kind of reading lots of different books, different types of books, mostly like fantasy books, like Dragon land series, forgotten mediums. It all started with a lot of things by the way. Yeah, anyway, but that was also another story. My father, like, gave that present to me like a lot of drinks book. But the second book, he just grabbed a random book from there probably, like, just grab the second book. And then I Oh, what's this looks let me read the first one. Then I started with the Lord of the Rings. Okay. But back then I was reading this Dan Brown's book called demons and angels, or whatever. Demons.   Pouya LJ  02:22 Read the book, but I've watched the movie. Okay.   Tugrul  02:24 Yeah, I also watched the movie, but I don't know. Like, it was a good book. I'm not sure. But the thing that just like was interesting to me when they were talking about like, antimatter. So I just, like stuck at that point, like, Oh, my God, what is this? Like, I never heard of this before antimatter. Like, I wasn't even interested in physics. Okay. No, no, no, no, but antimatter was like, something changed. What? I never heard of this before. And I realized that I mean, we have lots of things we don't know. That was the, like, a break point in my life. Okay. We're, we're just pretending that we are we know stuff that based on our observations, these are like a micro sis macro systems that we are observing daily, like mostly, like, wearing like an eternal outdoors, we all know, so we just ever have that. Like, I mean, if you drop something, it just falls down. Like it's a gravity, I mean, this kind of stuff. But I that was something different. You can observe it you need to be in that field to know what is antimatter. So that was a some kind of like, a break point in my life. Okay, then, I started to read a couple of things about it, then I noticed that oh my god, this is something else. There's another world inside of this like, like quantum mechanics, even though I had no idea what quantum mechanics is, but I was like reading uncertainty principles, something is not clear. But something sounds are like, interesting, like, Oh my God, what's happening here, like the universe is not really like, observed something more and more. I mean, then, last year, in my high school, I develop interest in the physics as you expect, like, then I was like, for the my bachelor degree, I have to study physics. And I have to I have to become a theoretical physics physicist. I mean, because I really wanted to understand everything. That didn't happen, of course, but I'm gonna mention that I'm going to talk about it. So So I in in my country, for bachelor's degree, you have to take an exam and after the exam, you need to write the university and discipline like this university physics. This university for example, electrical engineering   Pouya LJ  05:00 to give his background so when you're originally from Turkey, so you do your Bachelor's there. Yes. Okay. Go ahead.   Tugrul  05:10 Yeah, yeah, my masters and PhD there too, but Right, so, so you have limits, of course. So you can just write 20 University and 20 different subnets. So I wrote physics for all of them. Because I was like, obsessed. So, yeah, I just got into physics. But it was kind of disappointing. Like, okay, I was kind of, I mostly like, thinking about this ideas, thinking about how universe should work. And this kind of like a philosophical way of Lego discussions, I've kind of mostly like that way of it. But mathematics. When it starts to become complicated, you start to lose control of your thoughts. Also, sometimes, like, if it gets too complicated, you start to focus mostly on the mathematics to solve that problem. You're getting away from your first idea, and you can find yourself with into different concepts, different mathematical tools. Of course, it can guide you different discoveries, of course, but you need to, you need to have that skill to have fun with this mathematics. I didn't have that one. So still, I was like, kinda stubborn. So I wanted to do my master's degree also in physics, which did the quantum mechanics from from the fundamentals, which was focusing on the foundations of it like, main things like fundamental things. So we published a paper about quantum tunneling. Because there was a problem about estimating time in quantum mechanics. And tunneling is a phenomenon that happens in time, even though there were people that researchers like arguing about maybe instantaneous, maybe it's not time dependent, but we found the time for that, which we published. It was a nice journey for me, but then I changed my topic, like, very like a, like a 100 watt, like 180 degrees, like, just back with like, a different direction. Which I started doing my like a PhD in material science and engineering, talking about the relevant components.   Pouya LJ  07:35 The way you say. It was 180 degrees deviation. One would think this is a you went to art since fallen artists. No, I'm kidding. Within the realm of physics, you didn't want it okay. Yeah,   Tugrul  07:51 I mean, like, change my direction, like, I mean, it all you can also call it 90 degrees to I mean, I was just like I did, I was like, spanning somewhere else. Yeah, I started to work on some applications. I was kinda materials, material scientist, I was working on polymers, polymer composites, emissive materials, like I was mostly working on alternative materials for the white LEDs, because in LEDs, especially white LEDs, you were using phosphorus, which they contain, like rare earth elements. So I was trying to develop new materials or trying to increase the efficiency of the this phosphor materials inside the tube. It was nice, it was a efficient pH like I published like kinda 20 papers, because it's an application is not a theoretical physicist. So it was kinda like it's highly liked, like you can publish papers, as long as you develop something and you showed us an increase those improvement, it works. Or you even you can come up with a new material, which we were there was like a sample. One kind of material was very popular back then we even published a couple of papers awarded called halide perovskites. Yeah, so I was kinda like optimistic about my postdoc. Because like, 20 papers, so I was like, okay, I can find a good postdoc position around the world, but it didn't go that way. I applied like 600 700 positions with a detailed applications. I didn't get a response from most of it. Probably some I didn't even send the second secondary email to them, but probably they went and noticed, like one of them just, he's a Turkish professor. Also, he's a professor in Montreal,   Pouya LJ  09:59 Montreal. Canada, yes,   Tugrul  10:00 that's Montreal in Canada. So that's he sent me like the position and offered me the postdoc position, which was an amazing subject. It's called water fast electron transmission electron microscopy, which transmission electron microscope by itself is a characterization tool that can image materials at nano scale, which is like 10 to the minus nine is like, how much like 1000 Lower magnitudes higher magnitudes than the human hair, right in 1000, it was micron, so, probably around 1000. Similar things from the human hair. Even more, I don't know, like, probably some that kind of scale. So we were basically imaging nanomaterials at the Nano scale, like we were characterizing them trying to understand the shape some of the properties, but this is regular transmission electron microscopy, ultra fast transmission electron microscopy is where you are integrating your microscopy with laser. Now, you don't only have this imaging, you also have this laser, which you can also send it to your material and observe what's happening when your metal or nanoparticles are interacting with the laser. Which brings, we call it the time dependency for your observations, which is from imaging, a now you start to record movies, and you can visualize what they're doing and understand the interaction of places in time. So, by the way, my professors professor in Caltech, his name was like Zewail, he, like, got the Nobel Prize for this invention, mostly, you got the Nobel Prize for them to chemistry, but this was the part of the invention. So yeah, that that, in today in the world, there are only four or five facilities that can do this. ultra fast transmission electron microscopy is an expensive tool. After that, like I studied two and a half years in Montreal, Canada for as a postdoc, and my second postdoc, I came to Ottawa in Canada again. This time, it is a completely different lab, it is a quantum optics lab, because I also like I am enjoying it. I know I love quantum mechanics. So I came also like to learn quantum optics. And I was planning to apply some of my AI skills. Of course, I don't have any professional skills because I didn't study AI. I didn't study machine learning in any of my degrees. But I, since I love AI and coding, I always like, during my free time as a hobby. I also I tried to improve myself a lot. So then I started to combine quantum optics with deep learning because in quantum optics, you have noisy like results and etc. So you can combine them with the deep learning etc, we   Pouya LJ  13:27 can we take a step back, so can you tell tell me like what is actually quantum optics? Like, can you delve into it? What does that mean? Okay, optics is? Oh, yes, in the quantum, but how do they go together?   Tugrul  13:38 Yeah, of course, I cannot explain that like an expert of it because I work from the burning. But   Pouya LJ  13:43 even if you did, I wouldn't understand.   Tugrul  13:47 In Visual optic isn't just that it's the light. So you don't have to you don't need to have a like coherency, which means that like some kind of like, coherent motion or coherent interaction of your light. Like as a, like a physicist standpoint is like, How can I select it's not random, the photons in the light, if they're not acting random, they are acting in a coherent way. So they have some kind of correlation between them. So regular light is you don't have this year. They're just like, moving. They're just moving like in spacetime. But when you're talking about quantum optics, you need to use some kind of generator of this coherent light because light itself is not generating it with regular light sources. For example, we were using different crystals. You're sending your laser to these crystals. And these crystals are so special that they create coherent light, which they are correlated in the momentum. degrees of freedom. And I mean, they go into two different paths read up, I mean, when you hit them with the laser, out of the crystal, you have two life paths. One goes one direction, or the goals pregnant, the perpendicular direction. The main property of this two beam is their entangled, momentum entangled. So   Pouya LJ  15:25 this one, so the past crystal,   Tugrul  15:28 yeah, after they passed, the crystal crystal generates, of course, what was the efficiency of this generation like 8% 10%, maybe, I mean, it's a lot less not that high,   Pouya LJ  15:41 so you get better you preserve. So the light that comes up at the end of it is less than 50% of what you actually put into it.   Tugrul  15:49 Of course, yes, of course. So you have less light now, but you see that they are momentum in the momentum, degree of freedom, they are correlated, I mean, entangled. One is plus one is exactly the same moment with the negative value. What we can do is that, so if you observe the two beams, so imagine that you have two cameras, one is observing the, one of the beams or the other one is observing the other view. So you have triggers for these cameras. So one photon, when one photon hits one camera, it checks exactly the same time, the other one grabs any photon signal. So if the two photon hits the camera at the same time, you're saying that, okay, two entangled photons, alright. Other than that, you're not capturing anything. These cameras are own only when two photons are era, photons arrive these two different cameras at the same time. Because they, of course, you're designing your optical path in such a way that they like they travel the same distances. Yeah. Okay, because its speed of light is constant. So they have to travel the same distance. So they're like interesting applications of this, if you put an object in one of these beams, if you try to collect the other beam, it gives you the image of the object without touching it. What I mean is that, for example, you have two beams. And in one of the path of one of the beams, if you put an object, you know that right, so some of light is going to pass some of them not because they're gonna be absorbed or reflected by the object. Yeah, so other beam says they're correlated and entangled. So when you get the camera when these photons get the camera, so they are going to be triggered only with the other photons that are passed and reach to the camera. So you're going to have a kind of image of the object with other beam, which has nothing on this path. I mean, this kind of the this is called Ghost imaging. Maybe I just was so bad.   Pouya LJ  18:12 No, no, I think I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Not good boy. Yeah.   Tugrul  18:16 Let's go. Yeah, it's I mean, it was like I was kind of trying to develop a deep learning algorithm to make the resulting images better increase the resolution of it, because you can guess that there's a noisy array. So they're very noisy. Yeah, no, that was a nice thing. Also, I was enjoying working with the group and professional. But so like, last year? Yes, this year right. Now, this year, this is not last year. So I just got an offer. This is really hard to keep track of time. Yeah, exactly. Thanks to COVID. I received an offer from a company, which is not related to my research background, I started to work as a machine learning operations engineer, which are used my skills that I developed during my free time, which I recall, was considering them as my hobbies. Yeah. Yeah, that's a kind of Sir. I mean, I am kinda like, also, like, not because only that was just happened in that way. Not because of that, but also kinda like jumping from subject to subject. Because, I mean, there are lots of things to learn. And I know I'm not gonna be able to learn everything that I want to learn, but still, I'm trying to do my best to learn there's   Pouya LJ  19:47 a there's a huge degree of attention people give to, you know, specializing in something which is like, of course important. I'm not debating the significance of that but I think I Sometimes it gets missed how, how good it is to actually do these jumps between in between topics in that, it gives you a broader sense of understanding because sometimes some knowledge that you gain in one field, although it's not necessarily you're not a specialized, you're not an expert in that field per se. But then it can that knowledge can be analogous in a different field. So it gives you some sort of perspective, I feel. At least that's my personal I had a similar experience, I have a similar experience. And I even for my academic background, I had a similar experience. I didn't know really what I wanted. So I really liked physics. I really like computer science programming, software engineering. I don't know I liked philosophy. I liked psychology I liked, you know, I even liked cinema, like I still do. Photography, cinematography. So it took me a long while to land on where I landed, ultimately. But so yeah, I did jump around quite a bit, too. And I think it is important not to discount it. I'll do a specialization is very important. Again, I'm not doubting that. But I think sometimes when we focus Oh, yeah, you have to specialize. It's what do they say? There's a good thing. Yeah, I don't remember the same but something something and then master of none. Anywhere. Yeah. So it means like, you're you're, you know, so many things, but then you're not a master in any of them. And they see that in it in a in a in a negative direction. Not that either. But there's in a negative way with a negative connotation, meaning it's a bad thing. And I understand they're saying, okay, mastery is important. Of course it is. But one of the things you can master is how to learn different things. And I think that is also important. Anyways, sorry to cut you off, but I just wanted to Yeah, but   Tugrul  21:59 you're right. I think I learned how to learn during all of this time. Yeah,   Pouya LJ  22:03 that's right. That's right. And, and how to think how to think because, again, when you, when you become a master in one very narrow, specific field, then you're very comfortable learning things in that field, but not necessarily in other fields. And you'll get used to and accustomed to thinking a certain way, but not another. If you will, your neural pathways are very much aligned with a certain thing. And I guess in in AI, you're saying you're kind of like memorizing that, that the training set, right. You're overfitting in a way. So that's, that's, that's that's the danger with with over mastering in a very narrow field. I think it's, it's my, from from a personal perspective, of course, it's not going to harm anybody, per se, but it can harm you mentally, not physically.   Tugrul  22:57 But also the other side of it is like, okay, but other than that, like he was, you also, can there's also risk that you can be like, underfitting, I mean, like, he is like, you can have some generalization issue. So, I mean, you can stay like it's not overfitting sense, but I'm kinda you can stay like a generalized way. How can I describe like, you don't have for example, for myself, I have some confidence issues too. So I never I in my life, I never think I am 100% sure of anything. Maybe that's the issue. If you are if I got an expert on some kind of special if I have some kind of specialty if I study or work on something that 20 years, maybe I can build that confidence that level, but   Pouya LJ  23:53 it's tricky. Yeah. Yeah, no, I know. i It's very tricky. I think I agree with you. I don't I don't think I know. I can be 100% Like, I will never give the number 100 I'm 100% sure I'm even if I'm really 100% Sure. I'm 99.999% Sure. Yeah, and okay, but maybe that's part of it. But it's a tricky line though. There's a very fine line between between confidence and arrogance, I think and and that's another issue that arises like you know, when you're too much of an expert in something you're one of the very few in the world who knows something about something then then the ego plays a role and then sometimes it seems it may seem like confidence, but it is actually arrogance. And we see that like I mean the academia that there's plenty of it of course in industry there's plenty of it. There's everywhere like there's plenty of it right? So yeah, I know I confidence aside, you need to like Grow your confidence and all that of course you know you personally but like the rhetorical you any individual needs to go to come Because, of course, but then there's also another aspect of it that I think, you know, I like the fact that I am I remain not 100% Sure on things because I always give myself room to self correct to admit that I was wrong too. Because like, for example, otherwise you become like this politicians like didn't do clearly they're not even sure like, they're not even like if you talk to them in person in a backroom, with nobody listening, no microphones, no nothing with their buddies, for example, they're gonna be like, Yeah, and I don't know, maybe. But then but then they come out and, you know, say with such confidence, because that's how they have to play the game of politics. Right. But then again, you but then that makes them not able to self sorry, course correct. You know, acknowledge mistakes. So I think the fact that you're, you, myself included, like we are, you know, not? How do we say is not? I'm not saying they're not sure, but we leave room for error, or mistake. Because it's how I look at it. It's, even if I am very much comfortable in the field, let's put the word expert or master aside, even if I'm very comfortable in the field, and I have sufficient knowledge i i feel uncomfortable saying that I am 100% sure that something is true or not, or I think that's me leaving myself room that, you know, maybe when I may even caveat that did saying that the current knowledge. And with my current understanding, yes, I'm 100% Sure. But okay, there might be something that I don't know about that, but certainly something that I don't know about and a lot of different ways, maybe in that particular field too. And maybe there's error in the way I think about the world because if history is any indication. Most people most of the time have made mistake, I don't know any famous or infamous individual in the history that you can name that did everything perfectly. Yes. Just outright impossible. And if they if the written record, say that, which I have never heard of any individual, but let's say even if the hidden rows are written record, say that you don't know if they're hidden lives. And anyway, so that's what I think. I don't know. My point is that I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. Although it can have some downfalls in sometimes you seem, may may not even be because I know you'd like your to your humble individual. And sometimes you you know, you're not comfortable. being super confident in your but then, like, I know you like I know that the grasp of your knowledge is high enough that you if you were an arrogant prick, you would be like, Yeah, I'm 100% Sure, get get lost. Right. So, but then you're not that's that's the whole   Tugrul  28:01 thing. No, I mean, I don't understand how you can be like that. How you can be 100% Sure for something doesn't make sense. I mean, today we don't we have so many questions, even Newton dynamics, you can question them, even people came up with like a modification or to Newton dynamics, you can't be 100% Sure, even your observations are like, sinful to fit. With the models you have no, I mean, you can miss something your brain evolved some millions of years as a result of like, trillions of different paths, like a survival tricks, like some extinction, etc, etc. But you're still evolving, your brain is still evolving Darla, so you don't know how much room left for your brain that can evolve, which can be huge, which I think can be huge, because we are probably far from being like reaching the optimal optimum point. I don't even know if there is an optimum point. I don't think so even though we have here like we have full of weaknesses, flaws. And we are not even sure that our brain is really a good tool, even like a perfect tool. Even understanding nature. Maybe this is our problem. Maybe we are not going to be able to solve the universe because our brain is not capable enough of understanding it.   Pouya LJ  29:23 Yeah, no. No, I don't I honestly don't know how you can do that. I think it's not that being too short is a byproduct of arrogance. That's my guess. Like, because the more humble people I've seen, the less sure they seem people who tend to be more humbled who tend to not be arrogant or egotistical. They seem that, you know, they don't seem like that they lack confidence. They're fairly confident, but they're very comfortable admitting that I don't know everything. And I can't possibly know everything. And I may be wrong from time to time. I may I may be wrong a lot of the times, I think that is, again, this is my observation. I don't have empirical evidence to back this hypothesis. But this is my personal observation, the more you know, grounded people I've seen the more humble people I've seen, the less they have that ability to be like, No, this is done. This is settled. And, and let's, let's take a point recently, something from a very recent history, and that was like during COVID, the COVID science, there was plenty of arrogance from very established either scientists or officials in the authorities of science, quote, unquote, that they were like, saying things that you know, this is established science, you should believe it. This is no, this is true. The lab leak is no, I'm not saying that. The you know, COVID leaks from the lab, but they were not even they were they were treating you as a either stupid or racist if you even questioned it. And I was like, How can you be so sure it leaks from not leaked from the lab, and it came from nature, when you don't even know the source of sort of like the origin of species of this thing? How can you be so arrogant about it? And then I gave myself the answer. I was really thinking that and I gave myself the answer. I was like, yeah, that's arrogant. That's why like, there should be no room for arrogance, the human arrogance and, or any kind of arrogance as matter of fact, but we only know one kind. And that's the human arrogance. There should be no room for arrogance in science, but unfortunately, there is. So I think that's that. I think I'd rather being too sure. Is a symptom of arrogance is or is a byproduct of arrogance, I don't know. But they go together. I think that's what that's where he I see it.   Tugrul  31:56 I think this guy, this is kinda like a defense mechanism like this kind of people. I think, probably I'm not sure, of course. They think that they think that maybe, if they're if people start to think that there is a room of questioning their knowledge, they think, in this case, they think they're weak. So that's why they are pretending that they know 100 person, should they become like arrogant? No, you cannot question my knowledge. Yeah. Because they don't want to be seen weak, or maybe they have a higher position in somewhere. If they, maybe they think that if they seem weak, they can lose their status, they lose their position, whatever. I think that's the opposite.   Pouya LJ  32:45 Yeah, so okay, I completely agree. But I also disagree that is completely opposite. I think it's kind of the opposite, depending on how you depending on the area, I think, so for, for, for somebody who's claiming that they are the authority, like a king, or an emperor, or a queen, or whatever, right. So that person needs to maintain that authority. So they need to be listened to and accepted. Right. Okay. So that's that. But that's why I'm saying this should be. So that's, of course, the end. And they lose the grasp if they don't, or they feel that way. Again, it's not necessarily true, I agree with you, if, if a Emperor King was humble, and was like, you know, I'll do my best or even a political leader, I do my best to the best of my abilities to lead, but I'm a human, I'll make mistakes, if they admitted that they probably win a lot of votes. But that's aside, when you're talking about science and technology, you know, specifically science because it's in my mind need to present it should represent something very pure, and remove the elements of human human nature, but rather be a method to evaluate to think essentially. That's why we call it the scientific method, right? It has to leave the interpersonal inter, to like within the human character, human species, ugliness out of it. Of course, it's not going to happen because it's just humans. So I think that's exactly that's the specific area that I agree with you it actually is not. If if you're wrong, and you admitted it, that's the sign of strength. And, and I think people do, maybe not consciously understand that themselves, or or think about it that way. But they really appreciate when you admit a mistake, because then they can rely on your words. Be like, you know what, this guy is not full of shit. This guy admits when he's wrong. If somebody constantly when they when they caught in a lie, or when they caught in a mistake, they still insist, then how can I trust them? So I think I agree with you They just feel that they lose. It's a defense mechanism, they feel like they're losing the grasp on of authority, which is not really true. They're they're losing it when they enforce it too harshly. There was a quote, I don't remember where I heard it or who I heard it from. But basically, it was saying power is like sand in your fist, the more you try to hold on to it, the easier it will spill out of your fist. And if you doubt that just go on a beach someday, not you, anybody who's listening and go grab a because I thought that I thought about I tried to go grab a handful of fist so sad. and strengthen the tighten your wrist fist, rather, and squeeze, the sand will spill out at some point you will not but then the more you squeezed, the more it spills out of your your fist. So that's what they're doing. They feel like they have to, like hold on to this sand tight and make sure it doesn't spill out of their fist, but then doing that they're actually squeezing it out of their, their fists, because by tightening their fist, actually, they're occupying the room that the sand should ergo the sand will spill out because their fingers will not get you know, break the nylon screws that tight. Anyways, so So I agree with you. But the issue is that the thinking is wrong, I think.   Tugrul  36:30 Yeah, but I think yeah, I think the root of this behavior is probably we can investigate, like we can discuss in evolutionary evolutionary way. Probably because of the past like, not too long, like like, if you go to check the history even go like ancestors. Being sure is probably this is above, like a, like a living or death issue, life or death issue. Basically, he has to be shared for a couple of things, really. Because otherwise you can die me somebody can write Okay, so maybe it is rooted somewhere there this kind of behavior? Because you instinctively you want to think that you will surely you have to show us your data, you have to strong you have to seem strong.   Pouya LJ  37:20 Because if you're not so sure you remain indecisive. And that's   Tugrul  37:25 it worse than being so sure in the past, like any evolutionary point of view, probably so, but so sorry, sorry, interrupting you. But sorry, what I was thinking is that, like, when I was saying the opposite is better, like not being sure, I was just thinking in the future. So we already evolved, we already have some complex understanding we already not in the part of nature anymore, we don't we're not scared of like, hunted by like a tiger on the way but so we are even like, not natural about like artificially selected. Because we have our system, everybody surviving. So feature, because we don't have these issues in more which is good, which means that we have a long way to go ahead of us that can focus only on humans feature like including science, technology, etc. So we are also like, complex enough to think about our thoughts. We are in a machine that can question itself. And so we are at this level, and so we can start acting like in a mental like in it, we have to start thinking that we have lots of rules that we can improve ourselves and we can learn a lot with no need to be so sure for everything we are not going to die.   Pouya LJ  38:48 Yeah, yeah. So this is where I classify actually I have this because I've thought about this and I wasn't thinking about it right now but I've thought about this in the past, I actually have I call it I mean I don't have a literal definition out there, but I have internal definition I call it these are two different things though. One is how short I am in theory versus how sure I am theory sorry, practically. So how sure I am in theory okay in theory nobody's chasing me. I have all the time in the world to doubt myself. In practice, in real life, when you're facing life or death or or matters of extreme importance, that can be very costly, either monetary or, or, you know, matter of life and literally metal of life and death then then then it becomes important. So then when it's in practice, then I think you should basically act on the best information you have. Like the highest confidence degree you have about anything, you just act on it. That's it. You're done. You don't need to think, think twice or three times. My point is that you can I agree with you, it's probably something evolved in us. But you can still even in that environment in a chaotic West West world, or or even, you know, rules of the jungle kind of thing, you can still have this element of I'm not so sure about everything and still survive. So long as you're like, I'm not 100% Sure, but I'm 90%. Sure. And that 90% is above everything else I'm sure about. So I'm going to act on that knowledge. That's fine. that'll that'll get you out of it and actually, actually probably get you out of it the best. Because you're not acting on a random information, you're acting on the information that you have the highest confidence. You're most shorter, but basically, but you don't have to say I'm 100% sure about that. You just have to be like, I'm sure enough, but I'm going to act on it. And then the question comes, okay, now I'm sure about something 90% on your shirt about something, some what number of a percent, and we have to do one or the other. And then we get into a fight about who's more sure. So it becomes messy. I understand. That's what I'm trying to say. But But anyway, so that's a theoretical, doubting of yourself. And then the practical being sure of yourself. It's Yes, I agree, sometimes being indecisive because when you don't choose, that's a choice. Sometimes people don't choose because they're terrified of their choice. And then that's the choice itself. They don't choose because if they feel if they don't choose they are they can make a mistake. But then that's the mistake itself, because by not choosing, you're choosing. Anyway, it's not to get too philosophical. But I agree. I think it's it's evolved to be in us because if we weren't so sure, then we were indecisive and would be would be eaten by bears and tigers and such.   Tugrul  42:02 So more. And also, I think we just recently learned what is what does that mean that being sure, I think it's it just came with it like a science and technology or understanding about how we can share about something this came with the some physical philosophical questions, because other than that, we can question about being sure because you don't know what, what is it? I mean, being chill. What does that mean? before?   Pouya LJ  42:30 I think there is a meaning before science in the like, Okay, if we take it to before, 2000 years before,   Tugrul  42:37 like, first of all, let's go down to a Greek oak, but the   Pouya LJ  42:41 Greeks will do the same thing. They would disprove each other. Right? They would but but that's but they were doing science. So I grant that. But let's go even further back, let's go 10,000 years ago, I think there was a degree of being sure and unsure. And I think that was linked to discovery because let's say a caveman that went out of the cave, and they were debating is like, No, I'm sure there's something beyond this hill, I gotta go see it. And the other guy was like, How can you be so sure? I don't know. Like, there is nothing beyond that he'll under you're gonna die and we're gonna starve in the cave because you're the hunter. So   Tugrul  43:11 sorry, I don't agree. I think that okay. Mice kind of my story is like, a guy who is like a strongest one on this, like a society that they had just decides instinctively, everybody follows. There was no debate probably.   Pouya LJ  43:27 Right. But but then he can personally be shown that he his confidence was false. For example, He's sure that there's a, you know, there's nothing beyond the hill. But then to prove himself, he goes, and then he realizes, oh, there's something down the hill. So I was wrong.   Tugrul  43:43 Yeah, I agree. I agree. Probably, like a personal, like, initial level of being sure. Very minor. They didn't question the list.   Pouya LJ  43:51 No, I don't I think you may be right. I think it's it started from the ancient Greeks when they started philosophizing and thinking semi scientifically, yes, I think I think   Tugrul  44:02 because you have different information to be understanding, okay, for the same concept, we have two ideas. Okay, which one is correct? Then you can think about, okay, how we can be so sure about which one is more correct. And compare? Yeah, maybe you need the comparison for ideas, at least. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like,   Pouya LJ  44:20 I mean, I think, I think for that, as far as we know, at least, as far as I personally know, I think for that you have to, we can only go as far as the ancient Greeks probably. I mean, I think you may be right if we can, or maybe we just don't know about it, because it wasn't well documented. Who knows? Yeah, again, I'm not sure.   Tugrul  44:40 You never know. I mean, you know, you have to go there and observe it.   Pouya LJ  44:43 Even then, you know,   Tugrul  44:46 because we are we're creating stories based on our findings from like for sales, etc, etc. Like his drawings on the cave. They're all good models, but their stories still, like backed by evidences but that everything can be can still satisfy a like all these findings, but in a different way. So you never know you have to go there and observe it with a time machine, which is not possible. But there was that's what all I got all we got.   Pouya LJ  45:17 Yeah, and, you know, these are very interesting questions, and I think we should explore them more. And I'm very happy that we're going to do this. Okay. So for the audience who are wondering, we will be doing more of these kinds of episodes. Now, this was introductory for us to, you know, discuss with turtle get to know Him and who he is where he came from academically. Because not that not in the sense that academic academia is very important, but because first of all, you spend a lot of your life there. And second of all, because I think that kind of tells you what your interests are, where you're coming from where your perspective is at so. So this was the, you know, introductory episode, but we'll continue this discussions, probably from maybe a little bit more narrowed and talk about specific things into future episodes. But for now, before we come to a close, is there something you want to talk about, whether about yourself or about what we talked about or about anything, really, before we close for this episode?   Tugrul  46:22 No, no, I enjoyed this a lot. So I'm just looking forward to other episodes like we can discuss, but I wasn't expecting to talk about cavemen.   Pouya LJ  46:34 That's the beauty of it. I think. I do like some structure in the in the podcasts, but I don't. And I know everybody has a different, you know, style. And I like those who are super structured and those who are completely unstructured. But for myself, I like to be surprised in my conversations in a way that as you said, I didn't expect so. So anyhow. Yeah, there's a degree of chaos and too much control me ruin it. A little bit, just just as ordered enough that it makes sense. Okay, so with that. Thank you all for listening. And thank you all for joining us with the promise of many more of   Tugrul  47:18 these kinds. Of course, of course, I'm looking forward. Thank you.   Pouya LJ  47:22 Fantastic. And thank you all for tuning in. Tune in for more episodes in the weeks and months to come.

Episode Summary In this episode we get to meet Wesley Hagood. Wes has been involved in various software engineering projects and has worked for several major government contractors. His life was great. He was married and had four children. Nearly 20 years ago, however one day he asked his wife a question that caused his whole family's world to change. You will get to hear about this life altering question as well as the results that lead to he and his family adopting two Chinese girls and growing his family from four to six children. Wes takes us through the adoption story. It didn't stop there. As his new children grew older they wanted to learn about their birth parents. The story is not over, but one of his newest children, Mia, has now established a relationship that grows daily with her birth parents. Wes' journey is a fascinating one that shows commitment and, by any standard, an unstoppable mindset and attitude. I hope you enjoy hearing about this journey as much as I have. Thanks for listening and I hope you will let me know your thoughts about our episode and the Unstoppable Mindset podcast by emailing me at michaelhi@accessibe.com.   About the Guest:  Wesley O. Hagood has been a member of Families with Children from China (FCC) Capital Area since 2004.  He became a board member in May 2006 and has served as the President of FCC Capital Area since March 2012.  He attended the University of Maryland in College Park and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics Education.  He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Administration and Supervision from Bowie State University.  During his career, he worked as a mathematics teacher, computer programmer, management consultant, and program manager.  Wes resides in Easton, Maryland with his wife, Denise, and their two daughters adopted from China.  About the Host:  Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/  https://twitter.com/mhingson  https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links  https://accessibe.com/  https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe  https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!  Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast  If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review  Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson  01:20 Well, hi, and once again, glad you joined us on Unstoppable Mindset. We're here today talking with Wesley Hagood, who has got some really interesting stories to tell and being prejudiced. I will tell you that he has a college degree in mathematics education. So mathematics that's close to physics. They relate my master's in physics west, so I'm prejudiced. But we're we're glad you're here. And we're glad everyone that you're out there listening. So thank you and Wes, welcome to unstoppable mindset.  Wesley Hagood  01:52 Well, Michael, thank you for having me. Michael Hingson  01:55 We're, we're really glad you're here. I know, you've got some some great, interesting stories to tell us. And I think you've you've done some things. And you've been involved in some things that are as unstoppable as it gets. So we'll get to that. But why don't you start by telling us a little bit about you.  Wesley Hagood  02:13 Okay, well, thank you. Let's start at the beginning. I was actually born and grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, which is the Capitol, I worked as a math teacher. Also, after that, a computer programmer, computer based training developer, a management consultant, and I'm finishing my career as a program manager for a large government training program. I married Denise Lee in Annapolis, we had four children there, Katie, Mark, Kelly, and Paul. And my wife stayed home to raise our four children. And then she returned to college and became a science teacher and a librarian. And I would say it was, we were planning to kind of retire early, you know, and travel the world. But we were in our late, sort of mid to late 40s. And I said to my wife, you know, we're getting older, is there anything in your life that you really wanted to do that you've not yet been able to do? And she said, Well, now that you mentioned that. she says, I want to adopt a daughter from China. And I was like, kind of like, no way because I said, you know, we've discussed this before, several times. I said, we have four children, we don't need any more children. And but, you know, after asking her that question, I really didn't want to deprive her of something that was really important to her. But I also knew that, you know, this could not be her project, if you know what I mean. If we were going to adopt a child, I had to be fully on board, right? So you might say, Why did my wife say that? Well, when she was back in middle school, one of her social studies, teachers was pretty progressive. And he had the kids read an article, either from a newspaper or you know, magazine at the time. And it described a place in China called the weeping cliffs. And of course, the article was about infanticide. The fathers, the Chinese fathers would bring the unwanted girls, throw them off the cliff, and then the mothers would return to wheat for their lost daughters. And so when my wife heard this story, she was very moved. She was only in middle school, but she said, you know, if I ever had the opportunity, I'd like to adopt one of those girls. So after thinking over my wife's requests for her while I said, you know, I don't want to stand in your way and I'm willing to kind of help you realize your dream. But if you really want to do this, you're going to have to manage this whole process because I said, I'm very busy, you know, With my career, and she knew that I said, I just don't have time to do it. And my wife to be honest, it's not a she, she's a big picture person, right? She's not detail oriented. So I kind of thought to myself, if she really wants to do this, she's going to have to really focus to make this happen. And honestly, I wasn't sure if if something that was really going to happen, because as I said, I thought she might just be overwhelmed and give up and not go forward. But I was wrong. She must have really wanted to do this. And she successfully managed this process, this adoption process, which the State Department in the US says is probably the most bureaucratic process that the US government has. So to fast forward after this discussion, a couple years went by, because it takes a while to gather all these documents, prepare the application submitted, and then wait for the Chinese government to match you with a child. But in I think it was October 2003. We went to China. And we thought that a little girl named Shane Hong Yi, and we renamed her meow. And after a few months went by my wife said to me, you remember that? That discussion about my dream? And I said, Yeah, and she goes, Well, actually, my dream was really to adopt two girls from China. And I said, No way. You know, you never told me that before you said a daughter. But to be honest, adopting Mia was such a good experience for our family that I was the one who became the advocate to go back and adopt a second daughter. How old was me? And when you adopted her, she was just 18 months old. Okay. So she didn't have a lot of memories of, of China and her parents no memory whatsoever. Okay. Anyway, go ahead. So So in August and September 2006, about three years later, we returned to China, and we adopted a second daughter named you, Juan Shalane, and we renamed her May. Now today, Mia is a sophomore at Virginia Tech. And may who's a year younger is a freshman at Delaware Tech. So that kind of brings you up to current, current state, you know, where we're at, right? What caused Virginia Tech and Delaware Tech? Well, Virginia Tech, because at the time, me, I was applying for colleges, we lived in Virginia. And we basically said, Okay, your child number four, and may is child number, or your child number five, May as child number six, and you're gonna you're gonna go to a state school, pick one. And she actually ended up getting a full scholarship to go to Virginia Tech. And so that just made the decision even easier for her. And for us, what's her major? Her major is engineering, and she's focusing on computer science, so shouldn't have too much of a problem finding work after she graduates, no one you guys will get along since it's science related, and math related. math related, right? What's mais major? Mei is majoring in information technology. So she wants to do something similar. But she's a lot more focused on hardware. And Mia is a lot more focused on software, Mia loves to write code, may actually build her own computer, got all the component parts, plugged them together and made the whole thing work. I thought this is not going to work. But it actually did. And she's using that computer today.  Michael Hingson  08:33 Wow. Yeah. So what? What about the for earlier kids? So you guys go off and adopt these two children from China? Yeah, that had to have a great effect on you, your wife and the other children.  Wesley Hagood  08:51 It was really funny. They all had different reactions. The two older girls kind of said something to the effect of what aren't we? Aren't we enough for you? Something like that. My older son, who was a second child said, You're too old to adopt these kids are going to be run in the neighborhood, you know, and you won't, you'll be asleep you won't even know what's going on. And then the fourth child, my younger son said, Hey, it's your life, whatever you want with it. So it's kind of funny, they all had very different reactions to to adopting to us adopting children but they're all very glad we did and you know me and may are important parts of our family. Michael Hingson  09:32 So what happened when you brought each of them home then? And the other kids met them and all that how did all that go? Wesley Hagood  09:41 Like they were pretty excited. By the time we were returning from China with me I went very well. Actually. And the same thing with May, actually one of our four children Kelly, who was the second second daughter, third child, she went with us to China on the on the trip so she was there for the whole day. adoption process for Mai the younger of the two that we adopted.  Michael Hingson  10:04 So did the sisters hit it off even in China? Wesley Hagood  10:08 Well, we didn't take me with us to China made me and me and Kelly Kelly. Oh, yeah, Kelly just fell in love with her on first sight. And they got along very, very well.  Michael Hingson  10:20 How old was Mei when you adopted her?  Wesley Hagood  10:22 May was about three and a half years old. So it was a very different experience, because she was like a little person, right? She was speaking multiple Chinese dialects. You know, her, she was quite formed as a human being and an individual having had lots of life experiences, even only three and a half years old, very different than an 18 month old, who was very much like a baby or a toddler, does she have made that is much in the way of memories of being done in China at this point. At this point in time, she doesn't really have that many memories, because remember, she was only three and a half, right? But she told us things about China that we thought were not likely to be true, like just fiction and a little child's mind. Like, for example, she came back, she told us that she had a little brother. And we thought, okay, that doesn't make a lot of sense to us. But we later found out that she lived with a woman in foster care. And we asked the orphanage about it. And they said, well, the woman has a daughter, but she doesn't have any she didn't have any male children. When we found out that was wrong, the foster mother actually had a little boy. And May was actually taking care of him, to some degree when even though she was only three years old, when she was in China. And we know that this was probably true, because we made contact with a foster mother found out about her son. And she she confirmed a lot of what we knew, like for example, at three years old Navy knew how to wrap a baby in a blanket and hold it and feed it, which we thought was unusual for a three year old child. But I think she actually took care of her or helped take care of her foster mother's younger child.  Michael Hingson  12:10 How do you stay in contact with like the foster mother or other people in China? How do you do that as an email? Or what do you do?  Wesley Hagood  12:18 Um, at first, we tried email. But that wasn't a very good way to stay in touch in China. Everyone at that time used an application called QQ, which was developed by a company named Tencent, which you might have heard about, you know, on the US stock exchange, they're very, very large company in China. And then Tencent actually created a new and better and easier to use application called WeChat. Which is what pretty much everybody in China has on their phones today. So it's actually very easy to stay in touch with someone in China.  Michael Hingson  12:54 Do you do actual voice calls and so on? Or is it texting  Wesley Hagood  12:57 voice calls, you can send photographs, you can send videos, you can have individual and group video chats, it's very easy to use very intuitive, and, you know, very effective in terms of staying in touch with people.  Michael Hingson  13:10 Sure. Well, at least that way, you really can stay in touch.  Wesley Hagood  13:15 You can.  Michael Hingson  13:16 So so now you have six children all together.  Wesley Hagood  13:20 That's right.  Michael Hingson  13:21 So that's a good number. No more No more adoption plans. I assume.  Wesley Hagood  13:26 We're actually a little too old to adopt now. In our Michael Hingson  13:31 Yeah, well. Yeah, there's there's only so many hours in the day and so many things to do. Right. But you Wesley Hagood  13:41 in China won't let you adopt after you get to be a certain age. So you're pretty much done with them.  Michael Hingson  13:46 Why mandatory retirement? Huh?  Wesley Hagood  13:49 Yeah, that's right.  Michael Hingson  13:50 How did the process go, though, in terms of given China, the US different countries and all that, and certainly, significantly different philosophies and so on? How are they in terms of being supportive and such for people from the US adopting Chinese children, as opposed to what obviously they used to do with the weeping cliffs and so on?  Wesley Hagood  14:15 Right. Well, I mean, if you if you think about today, the relationship between China and the US is a lot more tense than it was at that time, right back in the early, early years of new millennium. China was very supportive of foreigners, if you will, adopting children from China. The I'd say, I've heard estimates anywhere between 120 and 150,000. Children had been adopted from China since the 1990s. And I'd say probably 85 to 90% of those were girls. And then the Chinese government was very appreciative that the, you know, the Westerners or the foreigners would come and, and adopt those children. Big Because the understanding at the time was they just had, you know, an exploding population, they, they were concerned about bringing the population growth down. They felt like it was necessary for the success of the country to reduce that. And so when they ended up with large numbers of children in orphanages, they were very supportive of people from other countries coming to adopt this children.  Michael Hingson  15:27 I assume that's probably changed some over the years and compare it to.  Wesley Hagood  15:32 It has it's changed, but maybe for a different reason. In the mid 2,001st, decade of 2000 2005, there about there was a big scandal in the Hunan province about children and being essentially brought to orphanages to be placed into the international adoption program. There were actually you know, claims of children being bought and sold and so forth. And when that story leaked out, the number of children available for adoption entering the orphanages significantly declined. I think most of the people in China believed that if their child was placed in an orphanage, the child would be adopted in country, not internationally. And they were the people in the country were concerned about that. And so after the word got out that many, many children were being moved into orphanages and then being adopted internationally, the numbers entering dropped off significantly. And today, the number of children adopted from China is much smaller than it was, say around 2005 2006, which was the big peak when maybe about 12 12,000 or more children each year were being adopted from China. Michael Hingson  16:49 What do you think it is today? Do you have a notion? Wesley Hagood  16:51 Today, it's probably closer to 3000. So it's a much smaller number. And in almost every case, I won't say every case, but in almost every case, there are children with some sort of disability, physical or other types of disability. And so the Chinese government continues to place those children for adoption, but there are just far smaller numbers that are entering the orphanages to be adopted. Michael Hingson  17:23 And a lot more of them are children with disabilities and such. Yes, yeah. It's interesting. I had the opportunity after my book thunder dog was published, which chronicle my life and wove into it, the story of the World Trade Center. I went to Japan in 2012, because it was published there. And there was a Japanese publisher. And one of the things that I learned was that for many years, and I don't know when it actually stopped, but for many years, if a child was born with a disability, they were euthanized. It was the standard practice and no one. I didn't get the impression that anybody was concerned about it, although they did evolve from that. So it is interesting, it's the usual thing about dealing with disabilities where we're not viewed as equal in the eyes of most people. And it's a it's an educational process, and I hope, one that we'll see continue to grow and that there will be more people, both in this country and in the world who will truly and intellectually and emotionally accept the fact that disability doesn't really mean lack of ability, we really need to change that view. Wesley Hagood  18:41 That's true. Absolutely true. Michael Hingson  18:43 So it's kind of one of those things that happened. Well, Mia, especially I gather has been a very significant challenge to you, because at some point along the line, she wanted to learn about her birth parents. Wesley Hagood  18:57 She did. I've tried to think I'd say that. It was probably when she was about four years old. She started asking us lots of questions about her birth parents. She wanted to know things like what are their names? What do they look like? Michael Hingson  19:16 How old and it was pretty clear that she obviously understood she was adopted? Wesley Hagood  19:21 Oh, yes, she was a precocious child. And she she understood and she was very, very analytical. So she was always trying to figure things out. That's the best way to describe me is analytical. And so you know, she'd say things like, well, how old are they? You know, those kinds of questions. And then, of course, probably the most significant was, well, why did they give me a way up to be adopted? Right? And we would just say to her meow, we don't know. And this went on for this went on for months. And eventually, you know, I talked it over with her mother and I said, Look at This is clearly very important to me. So I think that we should begin a search to see if we could find her birth family. And we told me that we said, look, we don't, you know, we don't know the answers to your questions, we know that it's important to you to understand, to learn and to get answers to your questions. So we will go ahead and do whatever we can to search and help find your birth family so that, you know, you can get the answers to these questions that, that you seem to need so desperately. And we didn't even know I didn't know if the time if it was even possible to find birth parents in China, because, you know, we were given so little information, obviously no information about them. All we were really told is that me it was found on this location on this date. And that's all we had, it was a place in China called Hong Fu, which was Hong fu road and Chinese. And she was supposedly found there about, you know, maybe 10 days after she was born. And that's all we knew. So, you know, I started thinking about how might we search and tried a number of different things. And then 14 or 15 years later, we actually discovered the identity of me as birth family members. And we had it verified through DNA testing. Michael Hingson  21:23 How did you discover them?  Wesley Hagood  21:25 Well, that's a very quick good question. We I tried, like I said, just about everything possible to identify or locate or birth parents. First, I went to China myself, I made a trip back to the orphanage, which we had not been allowed to visit. When we went to China, we met the children in the provincial Capitol on Joe. So I actually went to this small, rural, mountainous city and went to the orphanage and was looking for clues or answers and didn't really find much of anything, primarily because they wouldn't let me visit the orphanage because they said, you know, this is not your history. This is your daughter's, if you would, you know, if you really want to visit the orphanage and ask questions, you need to bring your daughter for a heritage visit. So six months later, I was back in China with Mia. And we actually visited the orphanage, we got to see her orphanage file, we got to ask questions. And we found the name of the individual who allegedly found her on Hong fu road. And you couldn't really tell from the Chinese characters the name whether it was a male or a female, there was no you know, identifying information other than the name. We track down anyone we could find in the city that had that name. And of course, no one knew any information about her and had no knowledge of me of being found. But that was the first thing. So we we took the documents that we were given and or visited the orphanage to find more information, and then didn't really get very far. So then the next thing that I did was to try to, I guess I would call it kind of a media based search, we tried to put posters all over the area where she was allegedly found in the in the town on on the road. And even though I had done that multiple times, or had someone do it on my behalf, I did it myself when I visited, no one ever came forward. No one ever contacted us. In fact, even though supposedly five children were found on this very short little st this very short little road in the in the center of the city. No one ever remembered any child ever being found there. So that it sort of started me making me question about whether it was true or not, you know, was the information that she was found in that location, because I would think that someone would remember at least one child found there, if allegedly five had been found there over a period of four or five years. But it turned out the third technique that I used was the most successful, which I call genetic genealogy based search. So it involves testing a child's DNA. And then when they matched to someone who had a common ancestor, you start building out a, like a family tree diagram, right thing, a traditional genealogical genealogical tech technique. And you build out these family tree diagrams for everyone she matched to that's a relatively close relative hoping that the that the tree diagrams would intersect, you know, and point to her point to her, her birth family and what was happening is we're making good progress and we were eliminating paths on the tree diagrams and narrowing in on the birth family. And then we uploaded me as DNA into a Chinese database and she matched to a first cousin. So that made it much easier To trace from the first cousin to her uncle, an aunt, who had relinquished a child for adoption, the same year Mia was born. And the first cousin put me in touch with her first cousins, cousin. And it turned out that she looked very much like me, she agreed to take a DNA test. And the results came back saying that they were full sisters, you know, they were sisters. And then, because I wanted to be sure I asked if the if the a sister biological sister would be willing to ask her parents to take a DNA test, just to make sure both agreed both took it, and the results came back. And it says they were her biological father and mother. So we're certainly found the family  Michael Hingson  25:45 of every will, Has everyone been able then or now to visit? And Wesley Hagood  25:54 well, we couldn't really visit we actually located the birth family in October of 2020. And of course, you know, the pandemic was in Michael Hingson  26:02 that COVID thing,  Wesley Hagood  26:03 full rage. And, but the good thing is using WeChat, as we talked about earlier, me has been able to have video conferences with her birth family members, including her mom and dad, and brothers and sisters like her, she has one brother and several sisters. And she's able to stay in touch with her sisters using WeChat. So it's it's not quite being there. But it's almost like being Michael Hingson  26:26 there. Yeah, it's as close as you can get right now.  Wesley Hagood  26:29 Yes, until the pandemic resolves itself. And we could actually maybe make a visit to China in the future. Michael Hingson  26:36 Mia has learned to speak Chinese. Well, when Wesley Hagood  26:39 she was growing up, she would go to Chinese classes, you know, during the week or on weekends, I would take her go with her because she was so young. At first, she needed support. And when she got to high school, she got so busy, she had to stop doing that just because it was very challenging. And I think she's probably lost most of it. But like a lot of people when you when you learn a language, you can recover it very quickly, once you get back in that environment. Yeah. Michael Hingson  27:06 How do they communicate them? Do the people in China speak English? Or how do I see what you're saying? Wesley Hagood  27:11 Yeah, her birth parents did not speak any English. But her three older sisters, all of whom, by the way, either went to or the younger, youngest of the three, just a little bit older than me, is still in college. And in China. Oftentimes, many of the classes are taught in English or some of them are. And so the, at a minimum, the Chinese students have to be able to read and write in English, even if they're not very fluent in speaking, that's a little harder to do unless you have a partner back to Swift. But they, they and then of course, WeChat has a Translation Translation function, right? So you can just you type a message in Chinese and send it and then we click translate. It goes into English, we type in English, send it back, they hit translate, although they're they're pretty pretty versed in reading English, so they don't often have to translate it. Michael Hingson  28:04 So me as biological sister in college, what is she majoring in? Wesley Hagood  28:08 Well, they have three, the one that's still in college is actually a biology major. Right. Michael Hingson  28:14 There you go science again, science again. And then Wesley Hagood  28:17 the older two majored in business, and they're both working in Chinese companies. Michael Hingson  28:22 Well, at least there's a science connection. So that's a good thing. They're not as much math and biology necessarily, but still plenty. Wesley Hagood  28:31 Yeah, yeah. In this thing, more and more math than there used to be perhaps in biology? Yeah. Michael Hingson  28:37 Well, math is kind of the rudimentary thing of all of them. You know, physics is a great subject, but it is so math intensive. And what a lot of people never get to recognize is getting down to the philosophies of physics that, that the math has really helped create. And there's so much philosophy and in physics, about the universe, and so on. And it's sometimes it's helpful to separate the two. But math is important. Wesley Hagood  29:06 Very important. It's almost like the international language. Michael Hingson  29:10 So what's another question? When you found me as birth parents, what did they think of the whole thing? What did they think of you searching and finding them and so on? Wesley Hagood  29:24 Well, they were actually quite surprised. Maybe even we could use the word shocked, because they believe that Mia was still living in China. So they did not expect that when she contacted them to learn that she had been adopted internationally and living in the US all these years. So that's, that was kind of their initial reaction. Michael Hingson  29:48 How are they now? Wesley Hagood  29:49 They're fine. We had our first group video chat using WeChat video on Chinese New Year day in 2021. And it was, it was great to connect with them and, you know, meet all the members of the family and chat it was it was a little noisy because there were a lot of fireworks and things going on in the background because it was New Year's Day in China. But then subsequent to that Nia had another, more quiet conversation just with her mom. And then some of the other members joined later. And I think as I said, prior to this, we we stay in touch with them using WeChat. And just this morning, I was chatting with one of me as older biological sisters about whether they celebrated the Ching Ming Festival, which is known as the Tomb Sweeping festival in China, which occurred on April 5, and it's where you go and you clean up your ancestors graves and offer sacrifices and thanks. And the the the older sister Jeanne said no, we couldn't go this year because of the the pandemic. Yeah, so that's still playing havoc with family traditions in China. Michael Hingson  31:12 Yes, it is everywhere. So how is it then that Mia ended up being in an orphanage? What, what happened? Wesley Hagood  31:23 Well, the Mia had three older sisters. And when she was born, her family, primarily father decided to give her to a woman who wanted to adopt a girl. And actually me as they have played a big role in transferring her from her mom and dad on the Damia was born actually to this woman who lived in a remote mountainous village in Shin Yi city, which is where Mia was born. And as far as they knew me, I was still living with that woman and part of her family. All those years later, they're not certain how or why the woman somehow must have transferred me to the orphanage about 10 days after she was born. They don't really know and they've lost touch with this woman. So you could see why they'd be surprised when we contacted them and said she'd been living in the US all these years. It's funny, we had actually produced a video as a way to try to reconnect with me as family in China and had it put on some websites there. When Mia was about eight or nine years old, and me his aunt told me Oh, yeah, I remember seeing that video, she said, but I'd never thought it could have been MIA because we knew Mia was still living in China. So she never even realized that the video was of her nice Michael Hingson  32:52 circumstances and strange twists. Yes. Well, I assume that at some point, Mia wants to go back and visit and reconnect physically. Wesley Hagood  33:03 Yes, when Mia first learned about the identity of her birth family, one of the first things she said is, do you want to go visit. But as I said, That was back in October, November of 2020. And as you remember, the pandemic was pretty much raging then and there wasn't going to be really any likelihood of traveling to China. Of course, things got a lot better into China until recently with the arise of the Omicron v2 variant. And now as you've probably heard, it's spreading quite a bit throughout China. Last count, I heard there was at least 24 provinces that had that variant. And, for example, they have shut down Shanghai a city of 26 million people trying to test everybody and continue their policy of zero COVID in China. So because that particular variant is so transmissible my guess is it's going to be quite a while before they actually bring it under control or get the situation resolved. And it would be possible to travel to China again. Michael Hingson  34:04 Well, it'll be a joyous and certainly a good day when Mia can actually go back and see them. So I Exactly, yeah, I Oh, I hope to hear about that once it occurs. Wesley Hagood  34:17 I know we're looking forward to it. But as I said, it's going to be a while I have a feeling Michael Hingson  34:23 it'll happen though. Wesley Hagood  34:24 I think so I believe that. Michael Hingson  34:27 You you in in going through the whole search and so on. You documented it as you went along, or how did you? Did you keep a record of at all? Wesley Hagood  34:38 Well, what happened? I think I mentioned I sort of semi retired in about a year ago in June 2021. And for I'd say about two and a half years prior I had started writing a book. And the title of the book is searching for your Chinese birth family. And the purpose I wrote it to benefit the 120,000 Chinese adoptees and their adoptive parents who began adopting those girls, mostly girls, few boys, but in the early 1990s. And the idea was to really to share what we had learned during our family's journey with others who might want to do the same. You know, really, there was no roadmap, Michael, when we started this right there was there was really very little online even that you could find about how to go and search. And so I had to think long and hard about how would we actually be able to do this, right. And I think my first thought was, well, I need to find an investigative reporter in China. That was my thought, who speaks English, right? Because I did not speak Chinese, who would be willing to undertake this project is sort of, you know, searching for my, my daughter's biological family, if I would help fund it. And I couldn't find anyone who would be willing to, you know, accept that challenge. Right. So my next stop was well, okay, I at least need to be able to speak this person. How about an English teacher, you know, someone who speaks fluent English, who might be willing to help, and actually found a couple of English teachers who were willing to go out ask questions, hand out flyers, that sort of thing, trying to get the word out that Mia was trying to reconnect with her birth family. And so So, Michael Hingson  36:28 you know, these were teachers, these were teachers in China, Wesley Hagood  36:31 teachers in China, where Mia was found, right, but the idea was to document all of everything that we tried that didn't work, as well as what did work, and create a framework so that people who were either considering launching a search, or maybe they needed to reinvigorate their search, because they tried a couple of things and felt hopeless and had stopped, you know, given that big picture, that frame of reference of how can you do it? What are the different ways to search? What are the most effective ways? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each, each type of search, right? And, and I documented all that in a book that I, like I said, started writing about two and a half years before, before we even found me as birth parents. So it was really an act of faith, that we were going to that the process that I was following, which at that point in time, was the genetic genealogy based approach that, you know, the testing of DNA and matching to other individuals, and then trying to understand who their living relatives and ancestors were in creating family tree diagrams, and so forth was going to pay off. And it eventually did, and it was actually accelerated when we found that first cousin, because we knew exactly what to do in terms of what questions to ask. We had built been building relationships with people from China for quite some time and documenting, you know, the relationships, and we were able to go pretty quickly, once we found that first cousin, Michael Hingson  37:59 you documented it all, you got all the information? How did you go about writing the book, then? Did you do it all yourself? Did you get someone to help you with that? How did all that work Wesley Hagood  38:10 out? No, I pretty much wrote it all myself, you know, day by day, little by little sentence by sentence. Eventually, I reached out to a publisher, heritage books, who I thought might be interested in publishing a book like this, because they are known to publish books about genealogy and family history. And I was actually surprised when I sent a query letter out. And I think I sent a couple of chapters that I had written at that point in the book. And they came back to me and said, Yeah, we'd like to publish the book. Michael Hingson  38:44 And what company was out again, it's called Wesley Hagood  38:46 a heritage books, heritage books. Okay, heritage books, and they're well known for publishing, geologically, Jeanne, Jeanne genealogy and family history, types of books. So people that are interested in doing research about their ancestors, right, they're there. They're known for publishing books on that topic. And this book sort of seemed to fit right, because I was advocating using those types of processes to actually trace from living individuals to back to ancestors and then forward again to the birth family. And so they were interested and they basically just gave me their their guidelines in terms of, you know, the format and all of that and I met their requirements and sent the book in and they published it and it came out this past December. So it's really only been out a little over what cember January March, little over three months going on for months now. Along is the book. It's about 132 pages, okay. It, it talks about the document based search that I described earlier, the media base to the genetic genealogy base search, I then kind of advocate for that third type of searches, the one that if you really want to make that connection, that's your best chance to do it. because the first two types, although they've been successful, it's rare that you'll be able to use the documents that China gives you, or even other ones that they retain that they don't give you unless you go back to China and choir and ask for a copy. It's very rare that you're going to find first family that way. Michael Hingson  40:20 First, the whole concept of the app, the whole concept of genetic genealogy, and so on is sort of the same thing that has been used effectively, and very famously, in terms of solving some criminal cold, cold cases and tracing back genealogies through genetic coding. That's Wesley Hagood  40:37 exactly right. And if you if you look prior to solving this code cases, people were using and they developed this concept called genetic genealogy to fill in gaps in a person's family tree. And then someone in a police department read about it. And I wonder if he could use that same technique to find solve a cold case and find someone who had committed a crime? Michael Hingson  41:00 Yeah, and the famous person who did it, I don't recall her name, has been a very famous consultant and works with police departments all over. But she proved the whole point of what was doable. And it makes a lot of sense. And certainly, it makes a lot of sense to be able to go trace people like you're, you were and are trying to do. And, obviously, you need a little bit of cooperation on all sides. But it certainly is an exciting way to do it. Wesley Hagood  41:26 That's right. That's a cc more that you were Yes, right. CC more, right. She's very, very famous. In fact, she was one of the individuals who I believe coined the term. I think she did. Okay. Michael Hingson  41:37 Well, you know, you obviously put a lot of effort into this and as much as anything, the emotional effort to make it happen. So you, clearly we're very committed, does it surprise you now thinking back on it, how committed you were given the fact that your wife just sprung this on you one day? Wesley Hagood  42:00 Yeah. Well, I certainly knew that I was very committed, right, because in some sense, I had put off doing other things that I wanted to do in my life. Because I felt like it was really important for both of our daughters that were adopted from China, to be able to have that, you know, have that knowledge and to reconnect with their first family, their birth family. And so I was committed to doing it. And we're still searching for Mays birth family using the genetic genealogy technique. You know, we're trying to be patient continue to periodically check all the databases, her DNA is in a number of them. And at some point, I believe that she will match to a fairly close relative. And once that happens, if that individual will cooperate and share information with us about their living relatives and ancestors, we should be able to trace from those individuals, to Mays birth family. And to be honest, the likelihood of that occurring increases every day, because these databases continue to get larger and larger and larger. And CeCe Moore was one of the people and others Blaine bet injures another big name in this field, who, who realized that once just one to 3% of a population, has their DNA tested just one to 3%. If you have yours tested, you're likely to match a close relative, which I think is bizarre. But that's all you need. And then Michael Hingson  43:27 are there databases in China? I'm assuming that somehow that's the way it goes. Wesley Hagood  43:33 There are databases in China. In fact, there are many more than there are in the US or in the West. But the Western databases, ones that you'd be familiar with ones like ancestry.com 23, and me, my heritage, those those Family Tree DNA, they're much larger, much larger. And in China is still a relatively young industry, if you want to call it that they call it direct consumer testing. And so the largest DNA database that I know of, which is the one that we put me as DNA N and and she had the match is database called 23. Mo Fung, which means 23 Rubik's Cube, it only has 600,000, only 600,000 users. And so in some sense, we were quite fortunate that we matched to to someone since we they've not yet gotten to the point where they've tested one even 1% of the Chinese population of 1 billion people, right? They've got a ways to go but but like I said, every day, the likelihood increases that that you'll find a match. The challenge with China is getting your DNA into their databases. And as I said, they're so small that the likelihood of a match or close match is not high. But at some point, just like in the West, those databases will someone will dominate the market, maybe two or three companies and they will become very, very large. And then if a Chinese adoptee 10 with one of those databases, they're almost certain to find a close relative, and we'll get a match and, and you know, hopefully, if that person will cooperate, we'll be able to trace from that individual to their birth family. Michael Hingson  45:12 Rubik's Cube is an interesting way to help name a database like that. And it makes so much sense because it's all about so many different permutations to get somewhere. Wesley Hagood  45:24 Exactly. Exactly. Michael Hingson  45:26 Which, of course, tempts me to ask the question, did you ever have any success at solving Rubik's Cubes, especially with any kind of speed earlier in life? Wesley Hagood  45:36 Personally, I hate physical puzzles. Nia loves it, me, it was one of those kids that you could, you know, mess up the Rubik's Cube and hand it to her. And within just a couple of minutes, she could put it back in shape, I was never quite like that. What I like is solving, you know, the, the type of puzzle that that we focused on with me, you know, like, you've got a problem, and you need to find a solution, which means you need to build a methodology and apply it to the problem to come up with a solution. That's what I really enjoy. And I'd say, that's what I've done for most of my career, which was spent in consulting, you know, Michael Hingson  46:17 sure. Yeah. So me, me hasn't taught you the intuition of how to solve a Rubik's Cube, I gather, Wesley Hagood  46:24 she hasn't, I have no, I have no desire to learn it. Michael Hingson  46:28 Well, I like some physical puzzles, because they're a real puzzle. And I'm not thinking so much of jigsaw puzzles, but real puzzles, like that have a lot of intuition and some creativity behind them. But there's nothing like being able to solve puzzles, like what you did. And I love those kinds of puzzles. I guess, from a reading standpoint, that's also in part why I like a lot of mysteries, although I like really the well written ones, because there's a real puzzle there. And the trick is to solve it before you get to the end of the book. And there's some authors I can do that with. So their, their mysteries have become less interesting. But there are some that I thought were some of the greatest puzzle creators that I've ever encountered, because I've never been able to come anywhere close to solving them until we get to the end of the book. And then it really is obvious. And there were just things I didn't pick up on. Sure. But puzzles, puzzles are great. And they do, they do tend to challenge the mind. Wesley Hagood  47:35 Right, exactly. And that's the type I like the best. Yeah, Michael Hingson  47:39 well, I guess that comes from, for both of us from some science backgrounds, we do deal with a lot of puzzles. And the more we solve the more we develop our own mindsets and our own brains. And the more curious we become I know, I've been curious my whole life. And that's a good thing to be curious. I agree. Absolutely. You clearly have demonstrated an ability to be curious and be patient about allowing your curiosity to take you wherever it goes. All your kids that same way. And your wife. Wesley Hagood  48:15 You know, I don't know if I'd say curious, I hadn't thought about that. The thing that first thing that comes to mind when I think about all of our for older children is that they're all extremely hard workers. That also applies to me. And May, they're all very hard workers. And I'd like to think that that's because we gave them an example of a model to follow. Michael Hingson  48:34 Well, and that's, of course, always a good thing to be able to be a good role model on. That's something that I think kids need in general, and we need to be the role models to bring them to where we would like them to be, which is successful, anchored and so on. Wesley Hagood  48:54 That's right, and mature and moral people, which is very important. Michael Hingson  48:58 Yeah. Yeah. So it's a it's an ongoing process. Needless to say, Well, tell me a little bit about if you were to talk to people about this whole concept of the unstoppable mindset and, and well, what does it mean to you? And how would you encourage people to go about developing a greater mindset and I deliberately use the term when creating the podcast unstoppable mindset because I believe that it is for me. It started in thinking about surviving the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11. And what I never understood at that time, and even for many years afterwards was I knew that I was focused and calm during the escape. Clearly not seeing what was going on. But also recognizing it didn't matter that I didn't see what was going on. And that's something that's so hard for people to understand. But the airplane hit and are building 18 floors. Above us on the other side of the building. So the reality is in the environment where I found myself going down the stairs, no one knew we were all in the same boat. But for me, what I realized, in going through the process was, I stayed focused. And it took a while to recognize Well, I did all that because I had learned what to do in an emergency, I had consulted with the Port Authority, people I had consulted with fire people and others, and not only learn what the procedures were in case of any kind of an emergency, but also learned all the physical information that I could learn, and it eventually just kind of clicked into a mindset. To me, I knew what I could do. And I knew that I knew everything that I could, could know, even so I asked my question myself the question many times, anything else you think you ought to learn or anything else you want to inquire about? And sometimes I got new ideas and went nasty about them. But it created a mindset. So when September 11 attacks happened, I just started observing, and drawing conclusions, and reacting to those, rather than just being panicked by the fact that somebody said, I see fire and smoke and millions of pieces of burning paper above us, and we got to get out of here right now. Right? So what how would, how would you advise? Or what would you advise people about unstoppable mindset, that whole concept? Yeah, Wesley Hagood  51:27 well, I would say this, for sort of the vast majority of my career, I was, I worked as a management consultant, right. And sort of the definition in my mind of a management consultant is a person who, in my case, advise government managers on how to think about and improve their processes, find a better way to work be more successful, right. And one of the things that we had to do was be comfortable with ambiguity. Because, as you said, after the events occurred on 911, there were a lot of things that you just didn't know, you didn't know what was happening, right. And so I think, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. It's not easy. We all like certainty, right? We don't like ambiguity, but you have to become comfortable with it. And I'd say in the world in which we live, we have to, we have to be comfortable with things not being clear. But at the same time, as you said, not panicking. Thinking about what we know what we don't know, what's the best way to go forward? What what are our goals? How do we accomplish them. And I would say that, you know, if, if something's really important to you, or to your family, you should never give up, you should just stick with it. That doesn't mean you have to burn yourself out, right? You can take breaks, like when we were searching, there were times where it was so exhausting. You just needed to take a break and go off and do something else have a picnic. Whatever it was, you know, take a day trip, right? Take breaks, but don't quit, don't give up, stop periodically assess what you're doing. Ask yourself, is this working? Is it leading me any closer to my goal or not? If it isn't, then try a different approach. And the final chapter of the book is called our story. And the reason I put it at the end of the book, where there was two reasons why number one, I've read books about searching for birth parents, not Chinese birth parents, but just in general, you know, like in the US, for example, or something. And people sort of interleave their story in in with the process. And it makes it very confusing. And it's almost like a tangent, right, that takes you away from well, what are the steps I should be following? I didn't want to confuse the readers with that. So I put it at the very end of the book saying, look, here's our story. If you read this, at the end, you'll you'll have a better understanding of the process we followed and why we you know why I came to the conclusion that this, this one approach was the best approach to search. But also, I put it there because I wanted them to understand all of the things we tried that did not work and that despite failure, if you will, we'd never gave up right? It's really like you would say the unstoppable mind. Okay, that won't work. Let's try this. That won't work. Let's try that. There are a lot of revelations in the book, things that I tried or almost tried that, that, that that didn't make a lot of sense, but I wanted the reader to understand we've tried just about everything possible, to give them the context and understand that what I'm advocating what we're advocating as a family will work if you stick with it, right. We've tried all these things so you don't have to think of it that way. We failed many times so that you can make a quicker If you can move more quickly to success. And so that's that would be my advice right to someone in terms of developing an unstoppable mind. And I would like to add, I think you should also pray for God's guidance, I'll tell you, my wife spent years per she, she spent far more time praying that we would eventually find me and his birth families. And I did not to say I didn't cry, because I certainly did. But I probably did more physical work, she did more praying. And I think it was the combination of those things that also helped us actually get there and sustain us, you know, through the, the arduous process, if you will. Michael Hingson  55:44 I wonder how much praying she did, to get to the point of having the wisdom to approach you and get you to come on board and then praying for you to be a part of it. That'd be prayers there, too. But the power of prayer is really important. And I think that whether God says it or not, life is a puzzle. And you demonstrate so vividly the concept of solving a puzzle. And people will come along, as time goes by, from reading your book, and maybe listening to this podcast or just from their own experience. And we'll add more to the puzzle solution, which is what makes this so exciting. One of the most important things that I have learned and you talked about ambiguity, and so on, one of the things that I find most important to say to people is, don't worry about what you can't control focus on what you can. And that was a message that I got, and is talked about in Thunder dog where I believe well, I know God spoke to me because it was a very physical speaking to me, which is something that I think is hard for a lot of people to understand. But there are things we don't have control over. And if we fret about that, and spend our time worrying about that, then we shift away from dealing with what we can and making things better. And the reality is what we can't control will get worked out one way or another. We just don't have any control over it. So why should we spend a lot of our energy on it, it just gets frustrating. Wesley Hagood  57:21 And that's that's a good message to remind others and remind ourself of often right that what does it say in the Bible, there's a passage about not being able to like extend your height by a little bit or your life by a single day, something to that effect. So why worry about those things, right? Focus on what you can control what you can do, Michael Hingson  57:42 the rest will take care of itself. So if people want to get a copy of your book, well, actually, before we do that, I want you to if you will talk a little bit about FCC. Wesley Hagood  57:55 FCC. Yes, FCC stands for families with children from China. And I am the president of the FCC chapter in the capitol area. So Washington, DC, serving families in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. And we were a group of families that just sort of self organized. Like I said, back in the sort of like maybe mid 90s, as adoption from China started to happen on a more regular basis. And really, the purpose of it was to help other families who were seeking to do the same to help them understand the process, what it would be like and to create a community for those families who had done something that was really rather unique at that point in time. And it's grown to the point where there are chapters there, each sort of individually, individually structured, all over the US and really all over the world. But then as as the number of adoptions has declined from China, and the children that were adopted as infants, often right, our young children have grown up and are now in their teens, or maybe in college, maybe even young adults outside of college, the chapters have started to decline and a number of them have are inactive, right. But most still have a Facebook group or something so that you can get in touch with them if you'd like to do so. Especially for families who are still continuing to adopt from China. Michael Hingson  59:29 Is there a website? Wesley Hagood  59:31 Best thing to do is just go to Facebook and type families with children from China and you'll find them pop up all over the Michael Hingson  59:38 place. So there isn't like an fcc.org or families with children from china.org. Wesley Hagood  59:43 There, there was one like that. But that one's even defunct now. It's it wasn't a How can I say this? It wasn't a single organization. It was a collection of organizations who all had kind of a common purpose, right, and tended to use a common name, but each each individual one was individually charter, usually with the state in which they were located. So there Michael Hingson  1:00:13 wasn't a confederation or just as you said, an individual organization, they were just, yeah, groups that formed, obviously, with a very common and relevant purpose. Wesley Hagood  1:00:25 Exactly. Yeah. Well, part part of what they also did was to help, you know, help the families and the children learn about Chinese culture, Chinese customs, etc. Because that's something that we all promised when we adopted those children that we would raise them with knowledge of their country, their culture, their customs, that sort of thing. Michael Hingson  1:00:47 Well, if people want to get your book, how can they do that? And if people want to reach out to you and maybe talk with you, or gain more wisdom from you, how can they do that? Wesley Hagood  1:00:56 Okay, well, the easiest way to find the book is just to go to Amazon books and search for the title. And the title again, was searching for your Chinese birth family searching for your Chinese birth family. And then if they wanted to reach me, the easiest way would just be to send me an email to my Gmail email address, which is my name, Wesley middle initial, O, last name. Hagood@gmail.com. Michael Hingson  1:01:22 And Hagood. Is H A G O O D? Wesley Hagood  1:01:25 That's right. H A G O O D? No. Y inHagood. Michael Hingson  1:01:30 Well, that is is really so cool. And I'm really glad that you came on to tell your story. I think it's an important story for people to hear. And you obviously enjoyed the adventure, challenges and all and you obviously demonstrated a very strong, unstoppable mindset going through all of that in any way that that implies. Wesley Hagood  1:01:56 Yeah. Well, Michael, thank you so much for having me on your on your podcast show. It's great, great to be with you. Michael Hingson  1:02:03 Well, I enjoy it. And hopefully, if you find other people that you think would be good guests, no matter the subject, we'd love to hear from them. If you want to come back and talk about engineering, we can do that. You and I both have worked long enough with the government, however, that there are probably a lot of government contracts we can talk about otherwise we would no longer exists in the world. And Wesley Hagood  1:02:26 that's true. If you're like me, you signed the statement that you'll keep this information confidential for the rest of your lifetime. So Michael Hingson  1:02:33 what information is that expense? So I was I used to sell products to SAIC and other government agencies and I've worked for a company that that made products and we had a lot of fun but some some really interesting very quiet contracts. And that's okay. I'm all for for security when it's relevant to do but it's, it's a lot of fun to have had you on and clearly you have demonstrated some some great things that I think will inspire people so I really appreciate you doing it. And for those you know, for those of you listening, love to hear your thoughts, you can email me Michael Hingson, you can email me at Michaelhi M I C H A E L H I at accessiBe A C C E S S I B E.com. You can go to www. Michaelhingson.com M I C H A E L H I N G S O N.com/podcast. To hear other episodes, or you can go to any place where you find podcasts. And if you found this elsewhere, go there and you'll find the rest of the unstoppable mindset episodes. And please give us a five star rating. Please say positive things. We appreciate that. But I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have. And if anyone out there listening has ideas for guests, or you want to volunteer please do so I'd love to hear from you, Wesley again, thanks very much for being here and for giving us a lot of insights today. Thank you so much, Michael. Michael Hingson  1:04:09 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

This song by Lauren Daigle has meant a lot to me the last few months and I feel it hits a lot of how I felt during my addiction and through recovery. I hope you enjoy my rendition! The actual song is linked at the bottom. Lyrics I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I'm not enough Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low Remind me once again just who I am because I need to know Ooh-oh You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing You say I am strong when I think I am weak And you say I am held when I am falling short And when I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours And I believe (I) Oh, I believe (I) What You say of me (I) I believe The only thing that matters now is everything You think of me In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity Ooh-oh You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing You say I am strong when I think I am weak And you say I am held when I am falling short When I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours And I believe (I) Oh, I believe (I) What You say of me (I) Oh, I believe Taking all I have, and now I'm laying it at Your feet You have every failure, God, You have every victory Ooh-oh You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing You say I am strong when I think I am weak You say I am held when I am falling short When I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours And I believe (I) Oh, I believe (I) What You say of me (I) I believe Oh, I believe (I) Yes, I believe (I) What You say of me (I) I believe Source: Musixmatch Songwriters: Lauren Daigle You Say lyrics © Appstreet Music Original song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sIaT8Jl2zpI

00:00.00 mikebledsoe Welcome to Monday morning with Mike and max and today we're gonna be talking about order and chaos. You know I think that there's a place for both and society as a whole likes to swing really really hard and me as an individual I do the same thing max. Thanks for joining for another Monday as we discuss topics that seem highly abstract and somehow try to get it to become practical for the listeners. 00:28.90 Max Shank Yeah I think order and chaos could be the name of our show because it's really quite a chaotic ride I think it's an excellent train of thought that gets frequently derailed. But that's part of what makes it fun and interesting and not only do I think order and chaos are ah definitive of each other they define each other i. I think what you said is perfect. We we swing back and forth really hard from more order to more chaos and we try to get tighter control and then more freedom and ah you know more openness or more boundary setting and that back and forth ah can be. Can be really exciting and in societies actually None of the things that's really important about playing and especially wrestling roughhousing that sort of thing is understanding the line between fighting and play fighting and ah. Being able to introduce chaos in a safe environment because the whole purpose of society is to create order reduce chaos as much as possible so you need something to dose you. With chaos. So you don't become um a a sissy and sad. 04:01.40 mikebledsoe Yeah, that and it yeah said I mean the like for me creativity happens after things get shaken up I think about um, no structure is the structure forever. Um, we the human spirit desires for change because we also live in an environment. Ah, ah, ever present change and um, you know we got to if we want to have some stability. We do need to set up structures in society. We need to set up structures in our own life. But we also need to recognize when it's time to assess and reassess these things and I think creating those safe spaces like you're saying where we can't introduce chaos in small amounts or over a short period of time in ah and a confined space. Ah. Really allows us to not have to go through really big societal bits of chaos which I think we're experiencing right now. There's when I think about rites of passage for young men that has been. Ah, regularly conducted over Millennia and it hasn't really happened in american society in the last few generations and so nature comes along and says hey um. Noticed that you guys haven't introduced any of this planned chaos. Ah you know a rite of passage for a man usually involves being out of control and and being needing to submit to the universe and. And usually facing death in some way or the acknowledgement of death and it can feel It's a big pattern interrupt and pattern interrupts tend to be a little chaotic in nature and when a society or an individual. Has been comfortable for too long in their order then nature is going to come along and shake it up because everything's always changing and we may be fighting to keep it the same but at some point the environment's going to break the the individual or the culture. 08:24.35 Max Shank Yes, and you also sacrifice some of the excitement of life if you imagine someone who was born in a castle isolated from most of the world. There's going to be None of order. None exposure to chaos and they may live their whole life in that environment and then have a child of their own that lives in that environment but eventually ah just like the seasons change and ah different. Creatures Rise up and overcome in different parts of the ecosystem. Ah the people in power never stay up there for long and the more you try to create order the more fragile that individual becomes because they're not dosed. With that chaos and that stimulus because our bodies and minds are always adapting via the said principle. So We're always adjusting to what's going on. So if you have no exposure to Chaos. You will be much more fragile. Ah. 10:54.40 mikebledsoe Um, yeah. 10:50.13 Max Shank By by definition. 11:18.74 mikebledsoe Yeah I'm listening to a book by Ray Dalio right now I think it's called the rise of the rise of nation rise and fall of nations or something like that and he he he's talking about the 5 cycles through a society and. 11:10.69 Max Shank M. 11:24.51 Max Shank Ah. 11:58.14 mikebledsoe You know if you've read the fourth turning they they identify None cycles. He identifies 5 and these cycles last about 100 years or the the cycles last about 2025 years and there's 4 or 5 of them depending on which expert you ask? and basically what happens is it. Ah, you the society falls into ah each generation becomes more and more chaotic until it's unbearable and that everyone who's like and it usually ends in civil war and external war and then everybody says. Fuck it. We need. We need more order. You know the the economics are broken where everyone's fighting with each other It's it's highly disordered and then what you end up with is a whole yeah a whole generation comes comes along and is like starving for it. So they. 13:04.10 Max Shank The big prick comes in. 13:19.11 Max Shank Yeah, one and it's ah. 13:52.30 mikebledsoe They're wanting I mean that that's basically how Hitler got the power right? Germany was experiencing an incredible amount of chaos and this guy says you know what? if you just do what I say then things will be better and and they were for a while. There's there's there's videos of like. 13:33.19 Max Shank Exactly. 13:52.97 Max Shank And it's frightening. 14:31.72 mikebledsoe The the population gathering and arenas and exercising together. They were like very lockstep and everything was really good for a short period of time until the 1 person who was in charge decided to fucking go nuts and one of the thing. 14:34.17 Max Shank Right? Where there's there's like a line where people are like you know we're really glad that this ah this dick really like got things under control. You know it was a little too chaotic I felt afraid there was pillaging and rioting and then that dictator. Crosses the line and everyone's like whoa, not like that and then and then it goes back to you know, just that did that to that to da today. 15:47.14 mikebledsoe Um, well the the danger is is when you're when you're in ah and a highly ordered society like that the the amount of thinking by the individual is reduced because they don't have to make as many choices and so. They're less likely.. There's that slippery slope they're less likely to catch poor judgment from the top because it's been so good and just one value judgment at a time and next thing you know you're just killing a bunch of people. 16:15.69 Max Shank Yo absolutely and you you can understand why that would attract people I remember watching this series. Excellent series. The dictator's playbook. The episode on Mussolini he's you know, given a speech from some balcony and he goes None italy None decision and everyone goes. Yeah, they are. 17:51.80 mikebledsoe Yeah. 17:24.61 Max Shank Onboard They want a so bad like None maybe hundreds. It's so many people and they were so excited that he's like look I will call the shots. You guys don't want to trouble yourselves with these minor details I will take care of everything and. If you've had a good lady or significant other in your life having someone make decisions for you effectively in ah is amazing like there are certain things like some. You have this comparative advantage where someone else now is responsible for stocking the kitchen stocking the bathrooms getting this taken care of like you know you have that division of management basically and it feels amazing. Like if you get the right person to make your decisions you are on Easy Street. It's just ah, absolute power right. 19:55.50 mikebledsoe Yeah, well I think I think the the happy medium with that because I agree is is you know when you have for instance in the United States you have if you had None person if we had a dictatorship you have None person making the. Decision for 350000000 people. It's not possible for the human mind to be able to grasp the actual impact of the decision on on the individuals and this makes me think about Dunbar's number you know was a. 20:42.37 Max Shank Oh. 21:10.94 mikebledsoe Around None is about as many people as 1 person can keep up with in relationship after that you know people all kind of start looking the same. You don't make as much eye contact. You're not going to remember their names. You're you're not in community and this is why a lot of churches. 21:07.45 Max Shank Oh. 21:49.94 mikebledsoe What they do is they break up after they get to about 150 members and then another church will open up. Ah yeah, and so these like that most churches do that. But in some churches become megachurches and have 10000 members or something like that. 21:37.77 Max Shank It's like setting up little franchises with limits. 21:56.53 Max Shank Yeah. 22:28.92 mikebledsoe And that requires a higher level of leadership and hierarchy hierarchy has to be built into the system in order for that to happen. So when there's and the same thing for Crossfit Gyms all these crossfit gyms sprung up a decade ago and we all watched it happen. It. 22:10.19 Max Shank Right. 23:05.62 mikebledsoe It was a very community driven thing and when it got about 150 members 1 member goes I could do this better. They go open another gym and then they pull some of the gym members away and it's it's just like church and. 22:53.27 Max Shank Ah, crossfits are like church well said I agree there are a lot of similarities there I'm on board. 23:41.28 mikebledsoe Ah, yeah, there's a lot of similarities. Yeah, but I think it's a really great demonstration of Dumbbar's number and that the person the person that I'm gonna trust to help. 23:29.31 Max Shank O. 24:13.36 mikebledsoe So make decisions for me right? There's somebody on my team and my company my girlfriend my close group of friends. You know, somebody's organizing a ah ah week long vacation I don't even ask me any questions. They just tell me how much money to throw in the pot and then I show up I'm okay with that. But when we start dealing with people I've never met before and have never met me and now they're making decisions on my behalf I think that becomes problematic. 24:31.63 Max Shank Well, yeah I mean that's that's trust right there I mean who who you choose to trust is a really important choice choosing the right doctor instead of the wrong doctor. Choosing the right trainer instead of the wrong trainer right? Coach instead of the wrong coach and it's not that there it was an absolute good and an absolute bad.. It's just whether or not the resultant partnership or collaboration is gonna be constructive or not because. Some people respond really well to ah stick-based motivation and competitiveness and some people respond way better to carrot-based motivation and creativity and Non-competitiveness. So just finding the right? um. Partnership there like who do you trust with that area of your life is massive. 26:59.62 mikebledsoe Yeah, and going into trust I think one of the reasons we're we're in a massive amount of chaos in our society right now is because there is a lack of trust you know nobody like like the trust of the media is an all time low. 26:43.99 Max Shank Um, well yeah. 27:37.62 mikebledsoe Politicians is an all time low you you ask the average american and they'll just be like yeah the the news and the the politicians are all full of shit. You know there's probably twenty thirty percent think it's still good. But. 27:25.71 Max Shank Which I think is which I think is good I think ah like a skeptical society will actually come up with better solutions but trust saves Calories. Ah the whole Concept. Of a group is built on trust the the whole the whole thing is trust based ah fiat currency all these different things you're trusting that the person in charge is going to do. What's best for You. You're trusting that. Um. You know if you help out with the hunt that you're going to get some of the bounty from that hunt and that we're all going to be part of this unit. We're going to look out for each other.. It's like you scratch my back I'll scratch yours and having those relationships. Is the most powerful thing there is like I think of one of the best survival tools as a radical Rolodex So Just having the right array of people that you can call experts in different fields. But more importantly people that you trust to give you. Real solid Answer. So our whole response to bringing order into chaos bringing order out of chaos is based on faith or Trust. Ah, even if you take it from a religious standpoint. You are putting your faith or trust in a supreme being that we cannot see so it's all it's all trust you could say that? yeah. 31:12.48 mikebledsoe Know or or you could say that that supreme being is everything and everywhere and you see it all the time. But yeah, that's what I say. Ah. 31:13.51 Max Shank I'm pretty sure God is a butterfly. It's the butterfly God Yeah, the other all the other ones are not true I mean I'm pretty religious but it's definitely the butterfly god. 31:45.94 mikebledsoe The Butterfly god. 32:04.78 mikebledsoe There you go. So I I think I think back to like personal experiences with order and chaos and I watch I look at my own life and I watch my own self I'm one of those people that the pendulum swings pretty hard. I Think for some people the pendulum kind of hangs out in the middle for me. It's I go really deep into chaos and then really deep into order and ah, there's not a lot of time spent in the middle. But for me I think that helps with ah. 32:39.39 Max Shank Go. 33:23.50 mikebledsoe More progress is it's definitely not the less least painful way of going about it. But I find it's not for everybody but when I'm but everyone does experience that everyone goes to these cycles of order and chaos and the when I go into. 33:06.10 Max Shank It's not for everybody. 33:59.68 mikebledsoe Times of order what I see is a destruction of the structures. Ah that I had set up in my life previously. Whatever rituals or routines that I had previously were swept away So a really good example of this is I went I sold all my things. 33:32.25 Max Shank Length. 34:39.80 mikebledsoe Got down to two bags and went nomadic for a few years I really didn't have much of anything I left my books with some friends. Yeah yeah, dude I I did some crazy shit Um, during that time it was it. 34:20.60 Max Shank Speaking of a rite of passage right? feels like a rite of passage. 35:15.32 mikebledsoe I destroyed everything like I I left the business I had spent years building I ended up getting divorced I was traveling didn't have a home the level of novelty that was always present was so high that getting making progress on any None thing was. Was close to impossible including taking care of my own health and but it was a really necessary time for me to reestablish a new structure so I needed to I desired a. 35:29.75 Max Shank A. 36:26.78 mikebledsoe New structure so much that I had to I had to really flatten the building I had to rebuild some people are just renovating their house all the time I needed to it was a teardown say my life is a Teardown. Let's just go back down to the slab. Let's go down to the slab and then rethink the floor plan. 36:11.45 Max Shank Ah. 37:05.66 mikebledsoe And everything so the I think I think the reason yeah I think the reason people don't do that is because well when you've been living under 1 structure your whole life going back to the and rebuilding new floor plan. You have no idea what to do so there's there's the lack of. 36:39.21 Max Shank Takes a lot more time to do that. Also. 37:43.52 mikebledsoe Knowledge that can be scary for people to do that demolition plan and then the the knowing that man I I spent say None building this one house and now I'm just going to completely demolish it and start over I know that what I build next is going to be so much better. But. 37:35.91 Max Shank Her. 38:23.36 mikebledsoe That's a lot of work. 37:56.33 Max Shank And absolutely and it's even ah, depending on. Ah how you're wired. It's more like choosing which limb to cut off because it's a part of you is like you're. 38:54.38 mikebledsoe Yeah. 38:30.73 Max Shank Your identity is wrapped up into whatever it is you have going on this marriage this business this habit this thing over here to like strip those away and start coming to the I I think. Crazy shocking realization that most of your like baggage and Bullshit was just thoughtlessly inherited just thoughtlessly and you you weren't like trying to inherit it. It was just Monkey See Monkey Do Bing Bam boom. 39:58.54 mikebledsoe Um, yeah. 39:48.63 Max Shank And you're like now I'm this and you get wrapped up into like I'm this and this is good cause I'm good and that's what I'm trying to say all the time. So why would you want to let that go in exchange for something that is unknown right? because that's what really scares people is like I'll take this from. 40:44.56 mikebledsoe Yeah, and. 40:26.73 Max Shank Familiar pain to the unknown that is like I don't know if it's a devil's bargain or a fool's bargain but it doesn't sound like a good deal and yet that's what most of us make is we'll take the familiar pain I'll take familiar pain again. Thank you compared to the unknown. 41:28.26 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, there's um I think in the landmark education they call it the winning strategy. So it's it's a strategy that you learn at a young age where you go Oh if I behave like this. 41:03.49 Max Shank Ah, no yeah. 41:17.77 Max Shank Oh. 41:29.70 Max Shank Um, ah yeah. 42:04.72 mikebledsoe Then this happens or I get to avoid this by being like this I get to you know my dad got mad at me 1 time for doing this. You know I'll never do anything that resembles that ever again and now you become now that that becomes part of who you are and forms the personality and it becomes a winning strategy and. 41:39.89 Max Shank Totally. 42:15.71 Max Shank Oh man. 42:44.80 mikebledsoe And you end up and you get the reward at a young age and then you start collecting evidence for that being a winning strategy. Yeah, you're like oh and you're unable to see where it's not working because it's the only thing that's present. So this is what creates the blind spots. 42:27.79 Max Shank Um, it's like heroin. Oh my god. 42:45.71 Max Shank Man. 43:23.54 mikebledsoe And the the winning strategy is something that is very difficult to let go because it is usually very responsible for a lot of success in your life like somebody may their winning strategy may be shit talking themselves and that's and they overcome it like the beside Navy Seal's name. 43:21.95 Max Shank Yeah. 44:01.38 mikebledsoe Who are ah David Goggins yeah I mean he's he's highly accomplished but he seems miserable as fuck and so he he seems like it is like like he's a perfect example. David Goggins is a perfect example of somebody who. 43:36.69 Max Shank Goggins. Yeah. 44:41.32 mikebledsoe Has a winning strategy. It's getting him some type of reward. But it's costing him so much in his life that he's completely unaware of and doesn't he doesn't value it because he hasn't touched it yet and yet I've met I mean I went through this myself I went from becoming successful. 44:37.30 Max Shank When. 45:16.80 mikebledsoe Shit talking myself and what I was trying to avoid versus you know, ah talking to myself like I was a how would I talk to a None ar old. Well, that's probably how I should talk to myself and so anyways going back to the the people are afraid to give up that. Winning strategy because they're afraid that if they let go of that piece that that piece of their identity. They're not going to be good at something anymore and being good at something is what's earned them. Love. 45:46.51 Max Shank Oh my God It's like a tool. It's It's like you're setting down your sword before you waltz into the Dragons Den It's like when I was a kid I learned about lying now. Okay, lying is a strategy. 46:30.44 mikebledsoe Yeah. 46:24.11 Max Shank That has almost no limits to it in terms of what you can get for Yourself. You can get out of trouble instantly so I was lying all the time growing up as soon as I was able to get away with it I mean what's a better rush than that and there are all kinds of behaviors like that. That they work so you just keep doing them. 47:34.92 mikebledsoe Um, yeah, yeah, they work and then until they don't right? and this is this is where you know, um when we did when in psychology when when we look at like stages of development and. 47:19.29 Max Shank Until they don't. 48:13.72 mikebledsoe What ends up happening is the the things that that move you into one stage of development will end up being the things that hold you back from the next and in fact, when if you look at say the the model of spiral dynamics for psychology and and human development is you're actually moving from. Um. 47:59.71 Max Shank A. 48:52.36 mikebledsoe More of an eye oriented to a we oriented but there's also a bit of chaos and order on either side of that as well. So it's more of a spiral so you got we and I so some stages are more we oriented some stages more eye oriented but then it's it's not ah, it's not a straight line back and forth. It's ah it's a spiral. 48:40.75 Max Shank Ah. 49:29.10 mikebledsoe And in between the eye and the we is is chaos and when you're making the transition and then you've got to bring the order back and so for people to want that chaos in their life. They usually have to be really unhappy with the way something's going on in their life. People when I think about this I think about ah people that have dysfunctional patterns of behavior and a lot of people I think think about oh I have anxiety or I have like some type of system a symptom that might show up in the Dsm um, Dsm whatever it is the. Psychology playbook of symptoms and diagnoses and they they think oh I've got this I'm suffering from this thing and that's the dysfunction. But it's not the best way to find dys function in your life is to just to see what's not working. What what do you desire to be different in your life but you can't seem to get there that to me that demonstrates that there's some type of dysfunction and usually people believe that there's nothing they can do about it. But once they get a hint. And they're just fucking sick and tired of this thing being true in their life. You're like you know I'm gonna do something about it fuck it and then they start digging deep and there's a lot of work to be done there but that that itself becomes chaotic because as you start making changes in your life. You basically have to start behaving differently for everyone else in your life. And they do not like that because they expect you to behave a certain way and that that creates relational chaos. 52:14.97 Max Shank I Think of it in a very basic way which is you have momentum being a certain way and the easiest thing to do is just continue with that Momentum. That's the most effortless thing you can do. So your pain or discomfort needs to be proportional to the adjustment of your trajectory like you need to be dissatisfied or uncomfortable enough to overcome the momentum of living a certain way. And it's not until that happens that a person takes action. Otherwise why would they? it's pure law of least Action. We're going to do the minimum we can unless ah otherwise authorized from a higher order kind of function. And even that is going to be based on a ah big picture discomfort um with just letting things flow as they may. It's like ah I'm uncomfortable not doing this thing. It's it's too painful to not. Go to Mars anymore. It's too painful to not get a divorce anymore. It's too painful to not start a business anymore. Whatever it is. There's like it's different for everybody different pain threshold for different pain catalyst. 55:40.30 mikebledsoe Everyone's got different rock bottom. Yeah, and that makes me think about our concept I I know I didn't create it. But um, the the feather I don't know where it came from the feather the break the Mac truck and if have I told you about this yet. 55:46.10 Max Shank The feather the brick and the Mac truck. No no I told you this but why don't you go ahead and share it with everybody. 56:28.20 mikebledsoe Are you. 56:34.76 mikebledsoe Pretty out did I hear I didn't hear from you did you or did you are you the originator. 56:15.21 Max Shank Go ahead. Just let let them know what it is. It's fine. Go ahead. 56:55.98 mikebledsoe Um, so yeah, the the the feather the Breakke the mack truck. You always get the message very lightly in the beginning and most people ignore it then it comes a little harder and then it's a fucking mack truck and it runs you over. 56:51.95 Max Shank Here. A e. 57:31.96 mikebledsoe And think that the skill is learning to listen for feathers and so it's a it's a it's a it's about being more sensitive. Yeah. 57:23.75 Max Shank Right? But you don't want to get startled every time you feel the wind either right? when there's nothing there. Yeah, you didn't get that for me for me. It's always been the wind the feather the brick and the Mac truck. 58:04.28 mikebledsoe No, you gotta be you gotta be listening to the right thing. 58:23.54 mikebledsoe The wind the feather oh shit oh shit, did you get it from somebody. Are you reading the same person or did you are you really an originator. Do you even know. 58:12.97 Max Shank Now I just I just made the whole thing up I never heard of it until just now. But I thought it would be fun to ah, just throw that Monkey Wrench in there because because see for me. Ah I think. 59:01.42 mikebledsoe Ah, the wind the fact. Okay, we'll throw in the wind now now we've got 4 levels. 58:52.97 Max Shank It's it's like ah a hypochondriac. The hypochondriac is thinking. Everything is some health disaster and really they were just constipated or something like that and I think the line between Prudence and paranoia is a truly fascinating one. 59:33.18 mikebledsoe Yeah, um. 59:31.55 Max Shank Because everybody has a different idea of what is reasonable preparedness and responsibility like the ability to respond or not so it's It's really the same thing like what's the line between prudence and having like a very deep awareness. 01:00:11.44 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah. 01:00:09.93 Max Shank Of what's going on around you and responding to the slightest stimulus so being a little I don't know hypersensitive versus like hyposensitive. It's ah it's an interesting thing. 01:01:04.60 mikebledsoe Yeah. 01:00:41.87 Max Shank So so like to kind of bring us back to that concept of the feather the brick and the Mac truck that what you're saying is change is or or like life. Let's say is giving you signals. 01:01:43.28 mikebledsoe M. 01:01:19.51 Max Shank And if you pay attention to the signal when it's really light. It's not going to cause you much harm. But if you if you wait the feather becomes a brick becomes a mac truck when it eventually just absolutely wrecks you. 01:01:57.20 mikebledsoe Right. 01:02:13.12 mikebledsoe Yeah, becomes more painful but also the amount of change that you're gonna have to make is probably more drastic so it's a double whammy you got extra pain and and additional work to do like I think about say somebody who is a. 01:01:56.33 Max Shank Um, yeah. 01:02:52.68 mikebledsoe A meth at it. You know if they're one weekend and they notice like oh I'm not getting good sleep I'm Jittery I you know I'm not paying attention at work or whatever and they and they go you know what? I've you know I'm gonna check myself into a clinic and I'm gonna kick this thing but then you got the person who's. 01:02:25.25 Max Shank Ah. 01:02:38.41 Max Shank For her. 01:03:31.22 mikebledsoe 10 years in you know they're missing their teeth like for them to be able to get their life back on track and get a job and all that is going to be monumentally more difficult. 01:03:25.91 Max Shank Right? So going past the point of no return basically like how how hard it is. yeah yeah I mean David Goggins is a ah great example of ah. 01:04:07.88 mikebledsoe Yeah, there's a point you cross where you never getting back? Yeah yeah. 01:04:05.55 Max Shank Someone who has just made such an impression on so many people I think you know he he just flipped total extremes right? Big fat guy boom now I'm a Navy seal running millions of miles. Oh my foot's broken. 01:04:55.40 mikebledsoe Um, yeah. 01:04:45.43 Max Shank Who Cares stay hard and I think that now that Persona has gotten him speaking of winning strategies. So now even if he did say you know what I think a more gentle form of exercise is really the right choice for most people because. You know, Actually you're going to harm yourself long term by just running through these injuries. Ah, he almost can't do that now because he has got this winning strategy as this character and I think he. 01:05:55.24 mikebledsoe Um, yeah. Well, you know. 01:05:59.77 Max Shank Wants to be that character for himself and for everybody else I think he's got to be thinking. Wow This is an amazing thing that I am doing here and I'm this guy for myself and for these other folks. 01:06:50.50 mikebledsoe Yeah I think a lot of people are attracted to it because they yeah they're they're attracted to it and they want to do it. They want to be like it. But I think it's a it's. 01:06:37.95 Max Shank Superhero shit. Of course it's attractive. 01:07:27.40 mikebledsoe It's immature in a lot of ways you know there's there's somebody who I saw go through a transformation which was a gary banynerchuk and I don't know if he shifted I Never really heard him say hey I had a realization I'm changing the way that I'm speaking now. 01:07:14.71 Max Shank He. 01:08:05.50 mikebledsoe But I watched him shift over like a 5 year period of hustling rind. You know, get out of your mouth and maybe that his audience matured and he needed to shift his his message. 01:07:47.10 Max Shank Ah. 01:08:00.99 Max Shank He. 01:08:33.64 mikebledsoe But it became more of like hey let's work smarter not harder like be kind to yourself all these things Gary Vaynerchuk I mean if you go back and watch videos from ten years ago and him trying to motivate a crowd. He's telling him to like you know, buck up, you know quit being a little bitch and now he's. 01:08:31.53 Max Shank In. 01:09:09.56 mikebledsoe He's found a little more kindness in in his approach. So I think there's a that's something that was working for him but he also was able to to mature beyond that hopefully David Goggins experiences the same thing I mean for his sake because I mean if you got to keep that persona on. 01:08:47.84 Max Shank Right. 01:09:47.38 mikebledsoe For the rest of your life. It's just hard to. 01:09:21.90 Max Shank But maybe that feels like good for him. Maybe that's that's exactly what he's looking for he he won't be happy unless there's a ah, big physical challenge and you know who can imagine what it's like to live that guy's life. 01:10:22.44 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, yeah, who knows and there's a place for everybody right? like there's a reason that he's so prolific right now is because there are a lot of soft people that need to hear that message. They're probably sick and tired of being soft or like you know what I'm I'm fat too. 01:09:57.85 Max Shank Is what I say. Ah. 01:10:21.19 Max Shank Yes. 01:11:00.82 mikebledsoe And I don't know what to do about this so you know what? like and I mean I am of the opinion that whatever, whatever the fuck gets you started go but my encouragement is it's never the whole thing get gets you started on being healthier. 01:10:33.47 Max Shank Right. 01:10:55.17 Max Shank Whatever gets you started on anything. Ah. 01:11:40.46 mikebledsoe But you know it got fat shamed Now you're losing weight. Okay, but here's the thing is take it further yeah like take it get up take it further. You know I think people a lot of times. It's It's like. 01:11:22.69 Max Shank You got fat shamed you got fat shamed. 01:12:15.30 mikebledsoe The reason you're fat is not because it's not necessarily because you're not exercising enough or you didn't You're not I mean these are the the behaviors you're not exercising enough and you're and you're eating like shit but like there's an entire lifestyle that goes behind this that that needs to shift that doesn't need to be. Maniacal about food and exercise. 01:12:35.29 Max Shank It's literally just using food as pleasure more than your activity will allow and the reason we do things like that is because we feel like there's something missing and we want to change our state salty sweet fatty cheesy bits. Will will pretty much resolve that immediately. It's not super long lasting but you know Obesity is just a drug addiction that has a really easy to see physical manifestation to it. 01:14:15.22 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:13:47.35 Max Shank Right. Ah, it's It's like a lot of people are addicted to their phones but it doesn't make you £40 heavier. Oh you're you're addicted to your phone but this other person is addicted to ah like hostess cupcakes. That's we're not getting sponsored by them but just because. 01:14:55.26 mikebledsoe Not yet max not yet. 01:14:30.53 Max Shank Just because they're addicted to just God I Hope so sponsored by Twinkie. Ah, but yeah, if someone's addicted to hostess cupcakes instead of the telephone they get fat but it's you're still just. Pulling a pleasure lever to distract from being here and now basically right. 01:15:46.26 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah I Um, definitely use food as a little bit of entertainment and but you know what I've I've figured out how to use my entertainment food. Like I can get really entertained by my food without it being just outlandishly terrible and that I think that's ah, that's a good like like. For instance I eat like ah, a keto ice cream that doesn't have It's like the cleanest one I could find mammoth It's mostly just fat. With a tiny bit of sweetener supposed to just cream and by the way I mean just eating frozen cream by itself is so good. Yeah, and then and then I put put strawberries on it I put strawberries on it and then I put. 01:16:35.10 Max Shank Don't don't eat that bad sugar. Don't eat that bad sugar fat Only sugar is bad for you. Don't eat sugar Listen there's a killer out there. It's sugar. 01:17:28.34 mikebledsoe Raw honey on it. Yeah yeah, and then that'll usually beat whatever fucking dessert that's sitting on the shelf somewhere or even at a restaurant like it's actually tastier. 01:17:00.87 Max Shank Um, very fancy. 01:17:20.81 Max Shank Well, you know that's great that you have found a strategy that that works for you. Um, for for your mouth pleasure. Although. 01:18:03.82 mikebledsoe Um, yeah I know it's not your your morning cheesecake that you like to start your day with. 01:17:54.75 Max Shank I Do like to start with a cheesecake and mocha in the morning if the opportunity arises I'm definitely going to take it. Absolutely. 01:18:46.22 mikebledsoe Ah, well ordering Chaos I. 01:18:20.35 Max Shank So with the with the food is it about the mouth pleasure like the the flavor the chewing the swallowing the whole thing I mean that's what helped me like get a handle on the the food addiction I mean it's all good right. Is it that I like the flavor while I'm chewing. Is it like some deeper primal thing where I I just feel good that I'm putting stuff in my belly like there's this primal desire. That's like yeah food goes in this tube this way and then that's a good thing. 01:19:52.64 mikebledsoe Yeah, well I think I think for me it um like I'm a low appetite person. So yeah, yeah. 01:19:39.73 Max Shank How nice someone the other day said to me he goes. Ah I've been trying he was at he was at our gym he goes I've been trying to eat more and the idea of someone who had to try to eat more. 01:20:31.44 mikebledsoe You know? okay. 01:20:17.41 Max Shank Was so foreign to me ah eating more is my absolute default. Ah the concept of eating less food than I need or even just the right amount that I need is insane like every time I'm eating food I Want more. I Want hometown Buffet I want all you can eat sushi I Want a gigantic porter house with mashed potatoes. 01:21:34.54 mikebledsoe Yeah I think I think what may be different between you and I is I've been obsessing over the nutrient density of my food since I was about 14 So it's um. 01:21:28.17 Max Shank A. 01:22:06.66 mikebledsoe Like yeah I'm in this constant search for the highest quality of what I'm what I'm eating now Super dens. It's a superfood and so the yeah. 01:21:46.59 Max Shank That's why I just eat bullying cubes. 01:22:03.33 Max Shank I Think we should try to make that a thing super concentrated beef essence. 01:22:45.88 mikebledsoe Well, it's kind of like kale kale was like being sold as ah like a garnish for these buffets at Wendy's or whatever for for almost nothing and then it was listed as a super food. It was marketed properly and then ah. 01:22:34.83 Max Shank Ah. 01:23:20.12 mikebledsoe The fucking price of it skyrocket. We can do the same thing for Bullyon Cubes I think is somehow you know hate. It's. 01:23:01.79 Max Shank That would be such an exciting thing to get like all these high level athletes just snacking on bullion cubes. Everyone starts carrying around a little beef pouch salty. Yeah. 01:23:43.38 mikebledsoe Yeah I think it's a good hydration. It's more like a hydration tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but ah yeah I think for me like I've always all I'm like this this quality freak about food and be and like I don't want it. 01:23:46.70 Max Shank Here. 01:24:21.96 mikebledsoe I could eat like a footlong Subway Club sandwich like I could do that like don't get me wrong I could do it but but it just it just doesn't like um, there's something about it I Just don't I don't feel satisfied in the same way and so. 01:23:59.59 Max Shank That sounds good I like a good submarine sandwich. 01:25:01.60 mikebledsoe When I'm eating higher quality foods like it does seem like it's harder to eat. It's like I get satisfied more quickly So I don't eat as many calories and then I'm also burning through a lot of calories in the day and then if I'm training which I am right now. Are you just the. 01:25:00.83 Max Shank Then. 01:25:40.30 mikebledsoe The appetite just skyrocket. But I don't I won't put down just anything So then I end up eating Keto ice cream with honey and strawberries at night. 01:25:17.83 Max Shank A. 01:25:28.93 Max Shank Yeah I'll I'll eat healthy food I'll just eat 3 times the volume of what I should eat. It's weird I'll be at a restaurant or something and they'll be like. Do you want any dessert and I'll look at the dessert menu. 01:26:12.40 mikebledsoe Yeah I think I just have a small stomach some you know. 01:26:06.89 Max Shank And I'll be like no but I will get another entree instead when it's like roughly this I Really like savory foods so we'll be out. It'll be like sushi or something they'll be like oh you want dessert and I'm looking the desserts I'm go think I'll just have more rice and fish and avocado and that kind of thing. 01:26:59.64 mikebledsoe A ah. 01:26:42.61 Max Shank Um, food Huh How about that. 01:27:13.82 mikebledsoe Yeah, so going back to ordering chaos where we started. Ah I I think that what we're gonna be witnessing moving forward is a lot of people seeking order. There was I was listening ah to. 01:26:55.61 Max Shank Order up. 01:27:16.30 Max Shank A. 01:27:52.76 mikebledsoe Gad sad god sad how do you say his name on Rogan the other day and it was talking about how some of the professors are starting to report that the that the new students in the college in the universities are. Really wanting a more conservative approach to things like they seem to be tired with you know all the the crazy shit around you know like they're being 72 different genders and and all that kind of stuff and so the ah. 01:28:26.15 Max Shank All that shit is just all that shit doesn't matter. It's just about whether or not the discourse is violent or not I think. 01:29:13.46 mikebledsoe Well I think that's part of the problem is it's it. You know it's obviously been violent people certain people aren't allowed to talk at universities because they get shouted out and basically forced out So that's chaos. That's that's people's emotional state. 01:28:57.53 Max Shank Right? wild. 01:29:51.40 mikebledsoe Overtaking their behavior becoming illogical and then are unable to you know have intepit discourse. So I yeah I think I mean if we look at if we look at what Ray Dalio says if we look at the fourth turning. We look at these things that these people who talk about. These cycles that are going on in the world and I think we're pretty getting pretty close to maxing out on chaos I mean I think the only thing that's more chaotic for for for the american public for for the. 01:30:19.51 Max Shank Um, what whoa woa I don't know I'm still listening though but I don't know. 01:31:05.40 mikebledsoe For the American Public's taste for things you think they can take more chaos. We'll see. Um, yeah I could see it going a little bit further I mean but the the only thing that's left is is now and. 01:30:58.23 Max Shank Um I think of anarchy as chaos like anarchy is chaos that I mean that would be soak I Oh my God I think things like I don't think things are being run well. But. 01:31:40.16 mikebledsoe No anarchy is different. So ah. 01:32:01.30 mikebledsoe Boy here. 01:31:36.77 Max Shank My gosh I think a lot of stuff is still running so smoothly so predictably in such an ordered fashion I mean I hope it doesn't get more chaotic and unpredictable. 01:32:22.40 mikebledsoe Well well anarchy anarchy just means without a ruler and so it no without a ruler and so it has to do with. 01:32:06.67 Max Shank Right? Well without without rule isn't it or just without a guy who enforces the rules then. 01:32:59.34 mikebledsoe God. 01:32:36.89 Max Shank No. 01:33:08.42 mikebledsoe Ah, well if you define God by natural law like like gravity like like to me that is the the forces that have put been put in place to create physical order in the world which we don't need. Anyone to be in charge to do that right? like real laws are things that no person has to enforce and so you have natural law and then you have common law which is basically don't fuck with me and I'm not going to fuck with you right. 01:33:47.53 Max Shank Right? But who's enforcing that is the question. That's what I'm saying So it's ah you know I think there would be a lot more people stealing each other shit if they didn't think there was some like repercussion. 01:34:22.64 mikebledsoe Well people ultimately have to enforce it for themselves. Yeah. 01:34:43.68 mikebledsoe Her maybe maybe well here here's wait. There is a reapercussion so here's an example San Francisco has riots how long do they last Minneapolis long fucking time. You know how long they lasted in Miami. 01:34:25.51 Max Shank That the hired guns could lay in a long time. Yeah, not as long. 01:35:20.78 mikebledsoe Yeah, about 36 hours and then it everyone went back to order and it's not because they put more police force out. It's because the the ah the police came out and said hey if you own a store on this street. You might want to come out with your gun. They basically encourage people to protect their own property because that's a state in which they honor property rights right? and then right and then but. 01:35:43.30 Max Shank Which are the only reason we have all these rules in the None place. 01:36:24.58 mikebledsoe But property rights aren't necessarily I don't think they necessarily have to be enforced by an outside entity whereas in California you have government officials that are impeding property rights so in 1 state you've got the encouragement of protecting your own property like we're not even going to do it. You do it. 01:36:19.49 Max Shank Right. 01:36:32.53 Max Shank Right. 01:37:03.90 mikebledsoe And then in San Francisco they're saying whatever you do don't protect your own property or else we're gonna come after you, you know you can't have a gun if you shoot somebody on your property. We're gonna you're gonna be in trouble. So some people would say that San Francisco has got way more order or. 01:36:46.10 Max Shank Right. 01:37:42.64 mikebledsoe Whereas Florida seems a little more anarchist right? where they're encouraging when I think about anarchy it brings it down to there is a ruler and each person has to be their own ruler in which case. So we look at Miami and people would say oh we're just gonna let people kill each other but the the amount of damage that was done and the amount of deaths were really small because what happened was people came out with their guns. A couple writers got shot and killed and then everyone goes. Oh you can't do that or else you might get shot and killed and so they just don't do it anymore. So I think this is a good example of of the order being placed by. You know, an authoritative government is shown to be ineffective. So I think. 01:38:32.51 Max Shank Um, well yeah. 01:39:31.30 mikebledsoe Majority of order that's produced people generally want to be kind to each other people generally want to get along in all the research people avoid conflict. They don't They don't do these things they enter into conflict when they think they can be faceless and nameless and they're wearing a mask and and running through the streets. 01:39:24.49 Max Shank Most people. 01:39:38.77 Max Shank A. 01:40:09.94 mikebledsoe With a thousand other people and they can blend in now they become that's chaos. That's that's that's the mob but that's not anarchy. That's ah anarchy would be everyone. There would be consequences. You're held liable for your personal stuff. 01:39:48.30 Max Shank Um, a mob. 01:40:44.12 mikebledsoe Just because everybody was doing It doesn't mean that you are um that it's okay to do it So There's a level of individual responsibility that I see that happens with anarchy and I think that this I think that anything that's not anarchy is actually a. It's an illusion because if we if we go up so we. 01:40:58.49 Max Shank Well hold up every society is an illusion based on a unify unifying set of beliefs whether it's the tree spirit or an eye for an eye code of hamurabi or hey that guy with the big stick is in charge because he can beat up everyone else. 01:41:50.46 mikebledsoe It's just it's a story. 01:42:02.26 mikebledsoe Well well the big, the big stick guy is usually what people think about anything about anarchy is like it's like oh yeah, it's a power game right? It's like if everyone's just running around and. 01:41:38.50 Max Shank Right? And we just do what he says. That's all. 01:41:56.53 Max Shank Well it it is extra Well if there's no recourse if someone takes your stuff except for your own then everyone is going to have to arm themselves significantly more now I do think that would make a community. 01:43:01.74 mikebledsoe I Think it would be a much more peaceful community as well. 01:42:33.81 Max Shank Much much stronger been to Oklahoma I agree completely. Um, people would respect boundaries a little more I believe and if you think that you may get shot. You're less likely to go try to Rob someone unless it's really really desperate. 01:43:32.78 mikebledsoe Um, yeah. 01:43:12.31 Max Shank And even then you're more likely to go ask? What can you do you can beg borrow or steal if someone has something you want. You know you can work you can beg or you can take um so I think it has a lot to do with. 01:43:52.82 mikebledsoe Now. 01:44:05.90 mikebledsoe Or. 01:43:51.67 Max Shank Fact that we can get our needs met relatively smoothly and I think if you had let's say a dis because I'm not a fan of how taxpayer dollars are managed at all because that's all government is it's all all of our pooled resources put to work by a few. Ah. Clever folks. But I think if you were to dissolve that whole system. Ah it would be a really shaky turbulent. Ah very chaotic adjustment period because the whole concept of. dollars and cents and retirements and everything would just completely collapse and all of these agreements based on that old system would also collapse so all of your existing contracts would basically be like I'm gonna just not. 01:46:08.66 mikebledsoe Well, a lot of a lot of these structures are are corporate in nature and so these agreements and so any agreements you have with government I mean it's a corporate. It's an agreement between a corporation and an individual which is technically like unlawful. 01:45:43.21 Max Shank Do that anymore. 01:46:13.47 Max Shank Right? But those ah but those agreements are basically just for if you have to go to a court. 01:46:46.74 mikebledsoe In a way. But. 01:46:56.84 mikebledsoe Yeah there I got a I got a show coming out with Jesse Elder where he covers the whole going to court thing but the which I think will be interesting but I want I want to take this back to the the idea that that do we live. My argument is we already live in anarchy right? And so the I was thinking about this the other day is so there's a war between well I'm about to explain it. So everyone everyone thinks that there's a rule of law right? like the United States is like it's it's not ruled by men. It's ruled by law. 01:47:21.70 Max Shank Why do we live in anarchy. Okay. 01:47:46.37 Max Shank Sometimes. 01:48:14.78 mikebledsoe And so that's that was that's kind of the concept of the United States it's not necessarily how it's resulted, but that's the concept was to to keep us out of trouble. But if we get outside of the United States and we go global. We have global anarchy right? the. 01:47:57.31 Max Shank Right. 01:48:53.24 mikebledsoe There is no. There is no authority that makes the countries behave So some of these. 01:48:32.10 Max Shank Maybe oligarchy maybe more like an oligarchy than total anarchy like I think there's a lot of power centers and unions and allegiances that guide the flow of the world. 01:49:22.52 mikebledsoe There are there are the um that that are a lot less oligarchies. Well depends on the oligarch like what system you're using can be less violent. You mean you could say that like Elon Musk is probably None of the most powerful people on the planet. Not probably He's more powerful than most countries. Ah and ah, but all the interaction with him and his stuff is is voluntary. So it's it's a less. He may be he may be in charge of people's minds in a way because he's deciding you know what? they. 01:49:54.17 Max Shank Which is amazing. Ah, right. 01:50:38.78 mikebledsoe They may be seeing because he controls that way, but it's not.. It's not overtly coercive or or violent. Um, but if we if we extrapolate out and we go what keeps these nations like what supersedes the nation you know and some people might say Nato UN. Ah, have all these different organizations where these countries send representatives and they jerk each other off for a few days and then go back. Ah these that the truth is is the only thing that keeps anyone from fucking with anybody else is the possibility of total destruction. There's an entire global strategy going on by each country On. You have a few powers that are trying to dominate. But there's all these allies that are created and rules and and and they're generating all this stuff but generally like if you I think people. People are under this false premise of there is law and order that's produced by human beings. But it's completely inaccurate because if we keep going to a larger Magnitude. We start seeing that there's nothing other than brute force and power that is. That is in charge and so in which case I say that that's truly just Anarchy. We already exist under it. But the problem is is we suffer under a ah like ah this illusion because people don't ah. Because they put their trust in the illusion. They never take personal responsibility. They never become their own ruler. They never make their own decisions. They never learn to protect themselves feed themselves provide for themselves and so they're putting the trust in something illusory that can change at a moment's notice. And put them out in the cold. 01:54:07.63 Max Shank Um, yeah I I tend to think that all ah Authority matters are resolved that way with the threat of total destruction on a micro level and on a macro level. You know the. 01:55:06.22 mikebledsoe M. 01:54:45.33 Max Shank Way that individuals are ruled the way that countries are ruled the way that countries rule over each other.. It's always the threat of total destruction and you know self-preservation is a very powerful instinct and I think that's probably what drives ah countries more than anything. Is the self-preservation Instinct of the rulers. 01:55:59.64 mikebledsoe Um, yeah, gotta be I mean I think that's just everybody. 01:55:39.27 Max Shank Keep the power get a little bit more keep the power get a little bit more because it never ends it very rarely ends well like the dictator doesn't like ride off into the sunset and be like hey guys I had fun oppressing the shit out of you. Thank you for letting me just go on. 01:56:36.86 mikebledsoe Yeah, well when was the last time there was a dictator that like died of natural causes and everybody all the your country. The country was like oh yeah, ah. 01:56:14.47 Max Shank Down the dusty road dude North Korea North Korea one of my favorite front. None of my favorite stories ever I another plug for dictators playbook. Very good series. The story of ah Kim il-sung. And then ah Kim Jong -il and now kim jong un none generation dictatorship pretty good for the modern era he is repressing the shit out of those people's ability to see information and see what other life is like he's smeared the hell out of the fat americans it's incredible. 01:57:29.64 mikebledsoe Now. Yeah. 01:58:00.28 mikebledsoe I need to I need to watch this. It sounds. 01:57:33.19 Max Shank Ah, anyway, Kim il-sung dot died of natural causes. Kim Jong -il also died of natural causes. Kim Jong un maybe eating himself to death. But that's still a natural cause basically like it's incredible. 01:58:25.98 mikebledsoe Yeah, well what I'm saying yeah but people aren't happy what I'm saying is like has anyone ah as a dictator ever like died and then everyone's like oh genuinely sad. 01:58:17.75 Max Shank There is way less obesity in North Korea than the United States that's a fact that's a fact. 01:58:57.48 mikebledsoe Did you did you listen to that? Ah interview Rogan did with um that North Korean woman who escaped at fucking crazy. Totally worth listening to. 01:58:44.51 Max Shank Um, yeah I did it was wild. Loved it. Dude That's the history of the world is like awful awful stuff like that look at all the like torture shame the the um juxtaposition of. Art and war as ah, vessels for this oscillation between order and chaos is Incredible. We're making these beautiful pieces of art. We're you know, putting together quilts and nice things for people and medicines and then we have like these. Ah. Mechanical suppositories that expand up your anus as torture and you just have these like weird is such ah, an insane level of destruction and violent and then creation and cooperation and you know optimism. I Mean human beings are insane and then a few of them get really insane and are like I will lead these people and then and then I here's what I think happens I don't think this is going to be a very popular take but I think ah. Most of the most of the guys who went and did these insane things. It was really like the whispers of a lady that was driving him. You know what? I mean I think we we cannot. We cannot Blame. Ah. 02:02:04.24 mikebledsoe Oh yeah. 02:01:53.57 Max Shank White We We can't make white men the whipping boy of all the evil shit. That's ever been Done. You know ladies men of all colors of all creeds have oppressed people I'm sure that there were Queens who would tease their king about the size of his kingdom. And just nag nag nag him until he conquered the neighbors be like you call this a kingdom This is the tiniest Kingdom. That's what I think yeah. 02:03:07.16 mikebledsoe I think that was like Alexander the great alexander the great. Yeah and what's her name or is it Ashley and I got this conversation the other day which was we we take we take like things that are really hot. Like unstable topics in society and then we debate them in the car and because she grew up in the bay where there's a very she grew up in a very left leaning view. So there's a lot of opportunity for me to ask her questions just had a curiosity is like okay how is. 02:03:38.67 Max Shank Ah. 02:04:22.20 mikebledsoe Okay, this is how I understand this situation. What's the okay, what's going on over there and she tells me I'm like okay have are those people have they considered this so no, okay, cool and so it's like it ends up in a interesting conversation. So one was um, we were listening to a show. They're talking about. Um you know, ah, ah, equity like equity amongst men and women for pay right? who you know men men generally get paid more money than women and so the feminist movement has been. Incredibly focused on money in in regard to things not being fair and so and so that was my that was my so we got in this conversation. so so yeah yeah so Ashley's like you know it's unfair and. 02:05:19.71 Max Shank They already spend all the money. There are so many reasons for there are so many reasons for this I mean. Okay. 02:06:16.72 mikebledsoe And I was like I was like well have we talked about all the contributing factors to why it might be that way and then the number one? Well the None thing that I came up with not came up with but like the None stat that we looked at was ah okay. So men make how much more money on average and women for the same type of work. Okay, well, who spends the money who who spends more money. It's like well the women spend 70% of all the money on. 02:06:44.45 Max Shank But there there are like 10 different reasons that things usually are this way if it was so clear cut as like the Twitter sized argument would have you believe then every smart businessman would just hire women I would save. 02:07:45.74 mikebledsoe Totally. 02:07:24.37 Max Shank I would save 25% on my ah payroll and I would be because if it's the same job for ah 25% less money. You would be a fool not to do it. You would have just factories. You would only have women employees. It would only be women working ah like why wouldn't you why wouldn't you no no, it's it's stupid. It's just another distraction. We have so much more in common. 02:08:32.48 mikebledsoe That's that's a really good point or because of discrimination people are are misogynist What it's It's ah it's a. Well the thing the thing is is people people will they look at the result and then they they that that's the explanation. Oh. There's not this so it must be.. It must be that that person that men are generally bad at you know that are generally misogynistic. 02:08:37.10 Max Shank Ah, then we have different. 02:09:41.72 mikebledsoe So There's this like the proof for a lot of people. The proof is in the the lack of equity versus getting into all the little things that might contribute to that and you make a really good point because you know what? if if I could get away with that I do the same thing and. And then you could like claim to be nobles like oh I I Only hire women and and in the background you know you, you're making more money That's not necessarily I don't see in the conversations I yeah. 02:09:53.91 Max Shank Um, yeah. 02:10:09.43 Max Shank It's just like a different type of sexism I mean I don't think I think more than people being like pro-man or pro lady or anti-man or anti-lady people are just selfish understandably. So. You're the only None living your experience. You're the only one responsible for it if you can get a few extra points of street cred for talking shit. Why wouldn't you I mean we talked about how effective lying is talking shit is so effective I mean do you think Tom Sawyer painted the fence. No. Sweet talked the other kid and said hey wouldn't you like to paint this fence I will trade you the opportunity of painting this fence for that shiny red Apple you got and so he's there eating the Apple while this guy is so happy that he now has the opportunity to build a fence so people are just. Selfish and they realize that they can talk to get attention and energy and that kind of thing instead of work and there are so many I mean my god we could talk all day about this like alleged discrimination between men and women. But um. This is a contest that nobody wins there's no way to win this discussion because it's like hey did you know that men kill themselves 4 times more than women they're like no I didn't know that is like well can you just like fucking eat the quarter and like. Not worry I mean we're dying 4 times as much at our own hand like is it really? So amazing. Yeah. 02:13:43.26 mikebledsoe Well 98% of workplace deaths are men as well like I it's like is what. 02:13:27.69 Max Shank But but that's that's the whole point is like people just do what they want to do that's all and quite frankly, you know if you're a lady you can just get really hot and nice. But if you're a fella I mean I guess you could do that too like you could be a cabana boy. Type of ah life strategy I've considered it I've done the entrepreneurship thing for a while but I've also considered what if I put the same amount of dedication to being like a really like goodlooking Kabana boy right? and just like teach yoga classes by the pool of some like rich lady. And my whole responsibility is just like oh a little more suntann for you I'll whip up a little ah sandwich for you there like that's totally a strategy and maybe I would earn more doing that than what I'm currently doing so. It's fine, but it's just that usually the way that a guy shows. 02:15:33.80 mikebledsoe Maybe maybe. 02:15:21.39 Max Shank Ah, dominance in the hierarchy is by making lots of money That's usually how it is and then if you like get the gender roles confused sometimes you have people chasing things that don't even feel good to them. They just do it because they think they're supposed to and that's. 02:15:54.00 mikebledsoe Um, yeah, yeah. 02:16:21.18 mikebledsoe Yeah. 02:15:59.83 Max Shank I think that is ah actually really scary sp

Deirdre is co-founder and CEO of Capsho software which automates content creation.  In this interview taken live at Russell Brunson's Mastermind In Paradise.  Deirdre gives her TOP THREE SECRETS on how to START AND BRING YOUR PODCAST TO MARKET.  She also breaks down her 2 hour process for creating all her content for the week!  It is awesome.  Not to mention Deidre is charming, smart, and fun.  Listen learn and enjoy!See Deidre here: https://deirdretshien.com/, https://www.instagram.com/deirdretshien/Administrative: (See episode transcript below)WATCH this episode here: Table Rush Talk Show.Check out the Tools For A Good Life Summit here: Virtually and FOR FREE https://bit.ly/ToolsForAGoodLifeSummitStart podcasting!  These are the best mobile mic's for IOS and Android phones.  You can literally take them anywhere on the fly.Get the Shure MV88 mobile mic for IOS,  https://amzn.to/3z2NrIJGet the Shure MV88+ for  mobile mic for Android  https://amzn.to/3ly8SNjSee more resources at https://belove.media/resourcesEmail me: contact@belove.mediaFor social Media:      https://www.instagram.com/mrmischaz/https://www.facebook.com/MischaZvegintzovSubscribe and share to help spread the love for a better world!As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Transcript:Mischa ZvegintzovHello. Oh my gosh. We are live people are doing it. Right? Yes. Good. Good. Good, good, good. Welcome everybody to the table. Deirdre TshienCo-Founder and CEO of capture. Now ca ke sh o because I know with my accent it sounds like capture. Mischa ZvegintzovYes, yes. But Deirdre Tshienthat's my Aussie accent ca, ca P sh ERT capture. Mischa ZvegintzovFantastic. And DJ helps podcasters monetize their content. Yeah. Which can be a challenge. Deirdre TshienTotally, because like, you know, a lot of us, especially as business owners, we started podcast because we're kind of here or we're told that it's a great way to generate leads or get people get authority, create visibility, all of that, and it doesn't happen. And we're left wondering, or know what we're doing this thing. We're creating all this content. But now what do we do that? So that's when we come in? And we help with Mischa Zvegintzovthat? Yeah, fantastic. And you've got a whole little software platform that automates a bunch of eggs and creates exposure and all sorts of fun stuff. Yeah. Fun thing to know about Deidre. She has four podcasts for four. So tell me, you've created four podcasts for anybody out here watching people are watching right now. They have some level of success with their business. They know they want to start a podcast, give me some tips give me like the top two or three things that come to your mind for that fledgling podcaster? Deirdre TshienYes, so the first one, I think that I checked that took me out to begin with was like, you just got to stop. I think a lot of us get hung up on the perfection. You know, it has to have a really well produced intro and really well, just accurate, and it has to have like, quality sound. You know what, no one cares about that stuff. When you're just getting started. You just want to start getting out there and getting it like getting known for what it is that you do. So that's really my first thing is like don't even worry about all that stuff to begin with. Yeah, just get started. And then you'll learn stuff, and then you're tweaking it. You're iterating you'll improve it. And that's that's what we're Mischa Zvegintzovas well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's the best thing. Okay. And then, yeah, we just want to say one thing. Yeah, I think that's the whole bit of finding your voice in podcast land, writing, the only way to do it is to get out. Deirdre TshienI can tell you like, the first ever, ever podcast that we started, which actually falls into a statistic that you always, you always talk about, is it was back in 2000. It actually, we started our first ever podcast, and it's actually live. It's actually on iTunes. Yeah, but we only ever released two episodes. Mischa ZvegintzovYeah, so the statistic is this, seven out of 10. Seven out of 10 podcasts. Do not make it past 10 episodes. Yes. That's pretty heavy. That's pretty intense, I think. But so you made it to, we made Deirdre Tshienthis. But I think the thing was that at the time, we did the thing where we were like, Okay, we just kind of want to get started. But the the flip side to that of jumping started is we didn't know who we were talking to, we didn't know exactly what we're talking about. And I think that's where we must do with it. So that I think is really the second thing I was saying is like, obviously you want to get started. But second thing is that you kind of have to know what you're talking about and who you're talking to. Those are incredibly important. Because without that, not only will you lose juice, alright, because you don't really have like a theme. You don't really have a path that you're following. But I think very quickly your listeners might be unless you're incredibly entertaining. Yes. But other than that, you might be like, I don't really know what I'm tuning in for us. Yeah, Mischa Zvegintzovyeah. We just saw our coach dance who we love. Oh, yeah, right. You might be listening, right? But Vince, Vince likes to tell me, Misha, your charm is not a product. So that might help you sell. But it's not a dance. So if you're listening. Deirdre TshienYeah, so that would be Yeah. So you got to know your niche. You got to know who you're talking to. Sorry. Get started. Just get to know your nation we're talking to Yeah, that thing is like, actually marketing. Actually got to get the podcast out there. Because it's one thing to start it and it's great. It's great. If you're all you're doing is just trying to like, create content and just know find your voice and just know what it doesn't want to talk about. But if you want to actually make it a thing and generate leads from it. Yes, you're gonna have to actually promote. Mischa ZvegintzovThat's a great point. Tell me do you think there's a best time to start marketing? Or do you think you know what you're starting to parse podcast get used to marketing? Deirdre Tshien100% Yeah, you just have to I mean, this is and this this thing that we're in right now in mastermind paradise that Russell Brunson, who Click Funnels is putting on. And he always says that as a business owner, you're actually not a business owner or an entrepreneur, you're a marketer. Right? Like, you are a marketer. So that's, I think that's across everything. So especially we're talking about podcasting. You want to just get used to marketing it. But honestly, young business, you just got it underlined. Mischa ZvegintzovAs, as for somebody who's new with their podcast, what would you say is the best like one or two or three tips on how to market like how to how to bring and start bringing your podcast to the audience? Deirdre TshienYeah, so the first thing is like, you want to be as efficient as possible, smart with our time. Now, I say that. And a lot of people are like, Oh, yeah. Repurpose repurpose, which is totally Yes. But I'm also a big believer in using the platform's for what they are intended to be used for. So if you if we repurpose, which I'm a big...I'm actually a big fan of repurposing the concept or the theme, not necessarily the actual THING. Mischa ZvegintzovYeah, right. In other words, we record this don't necessarily repackage this recording, but take the concepts and the thoughts and what we're talking about, and maybe create something written for it.  In other ways, and other creatives and other graphics. And, you know, obviously, if you're on Instagram reels is a big thing. So creating reels that are specific, you know, things are specific to that platform that work for that platform.  There's no point in creating content for content sake as well, right? That's the other thing. You want it to get visibility.  You want it to get out there. So you want to be really quick as what actually plays on that platform, like surgically, what works. And then you want to create the content for that. But the great thing is, when you have a podcast, you've already spoken on content, right? You've already spoken about the things you've already done, brain dump all your thoughts out, you read, you know, certainly just use those those, you know, thoughts and hoping that you've spoken that and just repurpose that not just the video or not just the audio? Mischa ZvegintzovYes, that makes sense. Yeah, no, it makes it makes total sense, I think. Take your long form content that you've created, and get ready to repurpose it, but repurpose it towards the platform you're going to so if it is reels, then maybe pull that real clip out. Or if it's blog, land use, maybe summarize, Deirdre Tshieneven so what we're doing for reals. And what we're going to be testing is we're going to use the audio, like to pick up an audio, but we're actually going to use different visual. So it's not like a visual bias, it'll be something completely different. Where the audio is just Mischa Zvegintzovis the the word. Right? Right. Right. Right. So if we pulled out a key moment of this clip, we would take the audio, but then then we've got a different visual aspect behind it that maybe tells the story in a different way or pulls the Deirdre Tshienfunny because we as I said, we're just testing it. But the first test that we did, actually last night, I think someone was like, did someone mentioned Steve, Christine was someone was like, Oh, I saw that video, that reel that you did in in Central Park or was like on our like in New York, obviously. And she's based in New York, based in New York. And, and it was actually that was one where I had taken some really short footage of me walking in Central Park, and we overlaid, so we use that as an overlay for audio. And that clearly made an impression because someone actually mentioned that to me yesterday to be like, oh, yeah, I saw that. I saw that. You were talking about where we were I live in Norway. Yeah. And so. But as I said, it has to work. Mischa ZvegintzovYeah. I love that I've been my brain has been going there too. As I've started repurposing a lot of my videos and things. I'm like, I want to expand, I want to start doing that, that overlay or that? I don't know if he would call it that in the overlay with a different vision. And yeah, so I love that thought. So where were we here? I still totally lost track. Marketing. Yes. So repurposing. Deirdre TshienYes. Okay, so and then really a hack. I think that you know, that definitely, we and we can definitely go into detail about this is something called Content hacking. So, to that point of knowing what it is that you want to how to how to use that platform in the right way. We use this trick called Content hacking, and it works on any platform that you're on. So we do tick tock, we do it on Instagram, you know, whatever you want. Be on content, which is find, find purse, creatives, whatever, like content essentially, on that platform that's working, and not just working in terms of like, Oh, it's this really random viral video because it's someone dancing, something not like that in that sense, but like, it's working for the audience that you're actually telling. That's the, that's the key to that. So that's why I'm like, I'm not just a believer of like, oh, I want viral content. It's like, yeah, you want to create viral content, but you want to create viral content for your that actually, that your audience that works for your audience. So that's, that's a trick of content hacking. So that's a really great way to see, you know, what is working for my audience? And how can I then use that as inspiration for my own content, which may very well be based on audio that you've recorded? Or concepts or things or the stories or the tips that you have come out from Ukraine as long form content? What is it you can take from that and use for these pieces of content out of these posts that your content? Mischa ZvegintzovYeah. Does that make sense? It makes total. I'm like, I'm talking as my brains going. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it made total sense. I, I love the point too, as well. Don't just hack the cool dance, but find, find the Gary Vee clip where he's speaking to your audience and say, yeah, that's, I want to model that or, or you find a random piece of content that speaking to your audience. And you can say, Yeah, model that right now. Just Dance for dancing sake. Yeah, Deirdre Tshienexactly. Exactly. And that's, that's the really cool thing is like, because I see a lot on social media for podcasts is that they tend to just do trailers. Yeah, like, and it's like, cool episode dropped off set about to drop off. It's just dropped. And it's kind of like a pretty generic caption and things of that, which I get, because that's kind of the and I call it that. And I don't mean that people are lazy. But if I could just call the lazy way. Yes, you have content. And you just, you're trying to take the shortcut, right? To mitigate it. But that's why I always go back to what was needed. How can you actually be smart? To actually So yeah, if anyone is just doing trailers, please think critically. Mischa ZvegintzovTry to grow past. Love. Yes, we love. Yeah, lots of love. What other Eddie's top of mind tricks come to mind? Yeah, Deirdre TshienI guess the last one, I call it I call it visibility, growth hacking, actually. And this is where again, going back to what is what were all of these platforms created for? Right? This is social media platforms, which means that you want to be social, which as an introvert, by the way. By the way, I say all this from a place of love, genuinely, because I've done all I've done. Mischa ZvegintzovYes, yes, stumbling around, tripping over our feet,  exactly. All the things. And so this was one that I Oh, my gosh, I, when I realized I had stopped doing this, I fought against it. Like myself internally. because I was like, I can't be social. I'm not a social person. I'm not like this and that. But honestly, when I've been so doing it, the difference it has was phenomenal. So what that means is, you want to actually be engaging with your dreamyest buyers. With your audience. Because and the reason why is because we can I always say, do we ever want to leave any of our marketing to chance? Do I ever want to leave it to Mischa Zvegintzovbuy? We don't? And that's, especially if we're paying for somebody, right?  That's kind of what we're doing. When if all we do is post. , which is I get it, there's a lot of effort. But you kind of like putting out into the world and you're hoping you're leaving it to chance, you're hoping that someone's gonna stumble across it, you're leaving a lot to chance that the right people are gonna find you somehow, okay, amongst everything Mischa Zvegintzovelse that's out there, all the noise. Deirdre TshienSo that so the way that I have to think about this is, you know, I'm never I'm not going to leave it to chance or I'm going to want to activate, and then I want to try to get in front of it. And that is, yeah, reaching out. And I don't mean in a spammy way, like DMing. Not none of that. But like actually finding your genius buyers on the platform, engaging with them again, because what happens is that they're like, oh, this person either sent me something, or They complimented me or whatever. Let me check what I wonder what they do. I wonder what they just head over to your profile. You've got an awesome, really awesome buyer. podcast link is there like it's all continents? Right, yeah, so then then naturally going to be like, Okay, well, now I know this person, let me check out what they do what they talk about. And that's when you start creating like trust as well. When they you know, cuz they're gonna, they're gonna start listening to the awesome content that you have. And that's how, Mischa Zvegintzovyeah, so if I'm hearing you, right, you're saying, hey, go find your dreamiest customers or the people that you want to interact with? And like, comment on their stuff, like, great content, or I love this thought. Ethically, absolutely authentic, Deirdre Tshiennot just like, dropping hearts, Mischa Zvegintzovrandomly look for the look for the people that strike a chord with you. And I think too, what's really valuable about that as in my own path with that strategy, is that the upfront work is kind of a lot of work like finding who do I resonate with? Who do I authentically want to interact with? Right? And for me, it's kind of takes a while, right? You know what I mean? It's not like today I wake up, I'm gonna go interact with all these people. And you're like, I don't like a lot of these people, it turns out said with love. Did I did I say that? Right? Deirdre TshienYeah. And that's actually, you know, honestly, the point that I got to where I say anything, I was like, I don't have time. And honestly, like, if you're a busy entrepreneur, you probably shouldn't be doing a lot of this activity. Yeah, to be honest. Like you should I, in all honesty, be Systemising. Yeah, as soon as possible. Because that was the exact same point that I got to where I was like, Oh, my gosh, I am spending like 17 hours a week or something ridiculous. It's just not worth your time. Yeah. And so I've got it down to an art where I only legally spend up to So less than two hours a week in total. For all of my social media activities, and everything else I get, I haven't been paid for. Mischa ZvegintzovAnd we're going to talk about the A's in a minute. So hang in there with us, because we have two things we wanted to talk about was one like, Hey, listen, podcasters are some great tips. And number two, what if you're getting to the point of I'm busy with a lot of stuff, I want to get a VA to help me with this. And before we speak to that, I think I love the idea of two hours. You've got it down to two hours. But my guess is you schedule it, right? Like schedule the interaction with the social media don't. It's not every time I every time I look at my phone, it's like no, Tuesdays at 8am is my half hour time block. For the for the interaction. Deirdre Tshien100% Yeah. So do you want me to break the two hours down? Mischa ZvegintzovAbsolutely. Love it. Oh, my God. Deirdre TshienThis is amazing. Oh, good. Oh, good. Okay, so on Monday, I do 30 minutes with, I have a 30 minute meeting with my VA so that this is actually included. So my interactions with the VA is actually included in this two hours of social media activity. So 30 minutes on Mondays with my VA two and what she does is she does the whole process of content hacking, so she'll go out she'll find inspiration. Short, because she knows my business. Obviously, she'll come up with her own. And she's listening to because we record our podcast, like, like a week in advance. Sure. Yeah. So she'll have heard the scheduled not yet drafted, podcast episode, so she'll know that already. She'll have heard or like the concepts or the chords, the TIF the story, so she already knows all that. Yeah, she content hack. So that's the Crossfield grab, like, posts, videos, everything. And then she will actually come up with like, Okay, this is the inspiration. And this is the concepts Yes. For what we're gonna, we're gonna be talking about, and this is potentially a draft caption as well. Okay. Now the draft caption she gets from capture, because that's what the software does. Yeah, so the software is a little bit like a client put it like a cross between Mad Libs. And generally where you get asked some questions because it's trying to elicit your story. You complete the prompts, and then it takes all of that and creates a bank captions for you. Specifically, short form captions designed for Instagram right now. So that's what that's because I can I do that straight as I record my podcast, so and I do capture a stream that actually accounts for some of my time on social media. And then my VA will pick that up, she'll do the content hacking, she'll see the captions or come out of capture, and she'll propose this is actually due to our personal week, which is crazy and I only I can do that because I have this whole system systemized. Yeah, so she shows me my 12 grid of her proposal. So we'll spend that that 30 minutes going, I'll go Ah, yep, love that. I think we should maybe her with this concept instead on this theme or let's just tweak it this way. So I'll give her my feedback. And then she'll finalize basically a list of things that she needs from me, which might be I need you to record this reel I need to take these images I need you to shoot this video. Like whatever that is. And doing literally like shooting all that takes like 15 Mischa Zvegintzovminutes. That's amazing 15 or 20 minutes to create content Deirdre Tshienlike crazy. So that yeah, and then basically I I spend about 15 minutes like the other mornings engaging, you know, doing like replying to comments, and finding so my VA as well will actually find my trainees buyers again, she knows who they are. She'll go out she'll find them. Mischa ZvegintzovSo I want that I want to I want a VA to find my dream. Yes people to say here's who you need. Exactly. Deirdre TshienSo I just go straight. Mischa ZvegintzovRidiculous. Okay, so yep, Deirdre Tshienso that's some some some of the time and then on Thursdays I do we do another half an hour me in the VA, where she'll actually have created she'll find have finalized all the cuts. So because I've given her the wrong because on Monday after meeting, she's given me a list of the things to create. I've created it I've just given her the raw files. I don't do any editing myself, none of that because she will then have spent time doing that. And then on Thursday, we'll come together and she'll show me the final meals, the final edited image, all that with the captions and sometimes if there's any grammatical things or whatever clean up I'll just quickly go in and you know, not but that's, that's it. That's literally it. Mischa ZvegintzovThat's amazing. That's amazing. Like yeah, it's it's so real quick if you want to see more of what teachers doing and I will at some point, come back to this and put it in the show notes. But tell people what's your Instagram handle so they can see what you're doing? Deirdre TshienDJ shed is the so I have two Instagram handles DV Shan or capture HQ headquarters. Yeah, I couldn't get capture. No. It's always such a bummer when that happens. But yeah, so my my primary is DD Shen D irdr. ETS h i n so that's on Instagram and Tik Tok as well. I am there on YouTube are we're just sort of starting to get that going again. I kind of popped back because I needed to get all this stuff figured out. Well, we're gonna be on this series and Facebook, and Facebook. Mischa ZvegintzovSo Deidre is helping people like you create the system or implement the system that she created. So if somebody wants is like, oh my gosh, Deidre has got light bulbs going off for me. How should they reach you? What's the best way for them to? Deirdre TshienYeah, like, definitely DM me? On any of the socials, email me, I'm DJ at cap show.com You can go to my website, DJ shen.com. Like there's a variety of ways to Mischa Zvegintzovreach out, reach out.  Reach out to me. Yeah. Mischa ZvegintzovIn DM and DMing is fine. Yeah, you will. You'll you'll make content. Great. Let's talk a little bit about the what did we cover everything there? Was there anything? Yeah. Deirdre TshienIn terms of process wise? Yeah. Yeah. That's the highlights on this is something that you thought you had any questions about? Mischa ZvegintzovNo, I think we're good. I'm excited a little bit to talk about the VA piece. Yeah, I think my I was talking to Deidre before and I was like Deidre, you know, my, I don't, how do you engage with the VA to, to, to start that relationship? Or? I can't remember exactly how I framed the question. I was like, what was the first thing you had a VA do for you? That's what Deirdre TshienYes, yes. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So this was a this was a really great question, because I remember. So the way that I got my first VA, she actually reached out, again, organic outreach, she just reached out to me and was like, Hey, this is me. So I am. And this is what I can help with. At that time, I was in the back of my mind to get a VA but it wasn't really like something because I honestly thought that I didn't have enough. I wouldn't have enough work for her. And so because she had reached out to me I was I, because I do reply to DMS. So I was like, Look, I don't know if I have enough work for you. But if you're up for it, let's have a chat. That's zoom call and have a chat about it. So we haven't zoom call, I kind of explained my thinking that I was like, I don't know that I have enough work. But you know, this is maybe what we can start with and it might look like 10 hours a week or five hours a week, or I actually didn't really know. And she was totally she was like, Yeah, let's give it a go. Let's try it and we'll see. And so she actually helped me so the first things because I was running challenges every month actually I was like challenged. So the first thing that we knew that we need help with was all the support for the challenge. So everything from like, letting people into the page groups, and, you know, making sure that all the details are collected, and, you know, getting like welcoming them into the group, you know, checking in the backend with our we use Active Campaign as our, you know, automated email like,  you know, checking that all set up Deirdre Tshienthere and it's all working. All the back end admin stop. Yeah. But, and it was like, and that was awesome. And once I honestly, like once we had that whole, like, the questions in my mind started changing, it wasn't any more like, Oh, what  is it that I can offload on? Deirdre TshienI mean, there was a lot of that, but it was more like, Okay, well, what more now can I don't know? What more can she do Deirdre Tshiento actually add value to this business and to actually grow this business? That's been a game changer for us. Mischa ZvegintzovThat's exciting for me. I'm sort of in that sort of in that space, right? Where you got to take the leap, take the risk, maybe start putting out some feelers out there. Was it you that said, Who was I talking to? They said, Hey, two tips about getting a VA make sure that they are this Joseph if you met Joseph, okay. He said make sure that they ask about you, and not are just telling you about themselves. And that makes sure they're aligned with your vision. Is that 100% Yeah, Deirdre Tshienright now like I so we are VAs are Filipino. And they are, like the most loyal the I literally had a conversation with one of them the other day, and I was like, I almost cried. I think she was like, You have given so much that you basically have someone for life. Like she's like I if as long as as long as you have me like we will. And the great thing is with that is that they understand your business like you know, you don't you don't want to be churning as much as possible. Yeah, develop Mischa Zvegintzovgood long term working relationships, right. So Deirdre Tshienthe best thing about that is that they know your business inside out, they go through everything with you, like the number of iterations and pivots that we've made out between business and the poor, the poor team, they lied, because they don't love change. I'm just gonna prove as a generalization. They don't love change. But I think we just did it to them so much that every time we do it now they're like, Okay, cool. Like, just Yeah, they just taken this dive, and it's them just adapted to how it is that we do business. Yeah. Which is awesome. So yeah, it's like they definitely, definitely, I think they need to know, they need to know you your culture, you have to build the culture. That's important. Mischa ZvegintzovYeah. I love what Alison prince said this morning about, hey, we're entrepreneurs and part of being entrepreneurs is we get to pick who we work with. So work with who you like, work with your friends. And it sounds like you have nurtured that relationship with your VA. It's very powerful. Deirdre TshienSo we have three VAs and love. I mean, they sometimes they frustrate the heck out of me like but that's just natural. Right? Right. There are some times when I'm like, what is happening, like why, you know, but, like, fight like, seriously, I would not for the world like I yeah, I am. So I feel so fortunate that Mischa Zvegintzovyeah, what would you say quick off the cuff top one or two tips for anybody that's like, I think I want to get a VA like what what would be like a good middle, just Deirdre TshienI think that's gonna be the tip or everything inside. If you're ever doubting or thinking about something, Mischa Zvegintzovjust do it, just do it. Because nothing is permanent. Deirdre TshienThis is the thing too. I think this is a thing that we forget,  right? Deirdre TshienLike, we get so caught up in like, mitigating the risks and you know, think about all of the you know, it's not perfect if for whatever reason, it doesn't work out or you kind of wander down the track. That whatever like, that's fine. It's not it's not great. Not ideal, but like it's much better to have tried it and done it and proven it or not proving it yourself. Thank you. And not so good. is gonna be my plan. I Mischa Zvegintzovlove it. I think I Why do we even need to add beautiful. Thank you for that. We're in Mexico right now we're in Cancun area actually south of Cancun hotel excurrent which is an amazing, I'll get us a food right? Deirdre TshienOh my gosh, I just I am blown away because you know, you do tend to maybe like set expectations a little bit lower when you're in a resort. Yeah, but it has been amazing. Mischa ZvegintzovFor lievable Yeah, and help. That'd be the staff I guess. Great and super. Russell, if you're watching or getting to watch this Thank you for hosting this for us bringing us all together we got to hear Pedro Adeo today Pedro you crushed I mean, that panel What else do we get? We got Ollie.  Obviously Allison Yeah. Mischa ZvegintzovWhat's up? Was it Brian who was the numbers guy? Brian Bowman man Brian just I look forward to the day where am I hope he's still with click with the to cc x where I can take advantage of what he brings. Yes, right. Can you just it's so savvy. So do you feel like we missed anything? Is there anything to talk Deirdre Tshienabout this for hours? Honestly, yeah, I think we covered like the main the main things but yeah, I I'm not joking. I could talk about this on the hour. So it may be if anyone wants to hit me up if they want to geek out with me on this stuff. totally happy to Mischa ZvegintzovYeah, fantastic. Thank you and and thank you for so much for playing and doing some co creation and putting ourselves out there and I'm using all the new mic gear for people that have been watching me. Yeah, I've got some tips myself. Great. Fantastic. But thank you everybody for watching. Again, Deidre, go find her on social media. Yes. Deirdre TshienAwesome. Awesome content and just encouraging people.

CHAPTER VI. Pig and Pepper For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen. The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.” Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together. Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky. Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked. “There's no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.” And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces. “Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?” “There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on without attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he can't help it,” she said to herself; “his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud. “I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till tomorrow—” At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him. “—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened. “How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone. “Are you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That's the first question, you know.” It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It's really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!” The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for days and days.” “But what am I to do?” said Alice. “Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling. “Oh, there's no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he's perfectly idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in. The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup. “There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!” Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing. There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear. “Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins like that?” “It's a Cheshire cat,” said the Duchess, “and that's why. Pig!” She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:— “I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats could grin.” “They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of 'em do.” “I don't know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation. “You don't know much,” said the Duchess; “and that's a fact.” Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not. “Oh, please mind what you're doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his precious nose!” as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off. “If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.” “Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—” “Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!” Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I—” “Oh, don't bother me,” said the Duchess; “I never could abide figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: “Speak roughly to your little boy,     And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy,     Because he knows it teases.” CHORUS. (In which the cook and the baby joined): “Wow! wow! wow!” While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:— “I speak severely to my boy,     I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy     The pepper when he pleases!” CHORUS. “Wow! wow! wow!” “Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her. Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it. As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. “If I don't take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don't grunt,” said Alice; “that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.” The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears. No, there were no tears. “If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence. Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further. So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. “Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it's pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don't much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you're sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.” Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?” “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.” “But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.” “How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here.” Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how do you know that you're mad?” “To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog's not mad. You grant that?” “I suppose so,” said Alice. “Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.” “I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice. “Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?” “I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven't been invited yet.” “You'll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished. Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again. “By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I'd nearly forgotten to ask.” “It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way. “I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again. Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I've seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree. “Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat. “I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.” “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. “Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!”

16THE SKY WAS QUITE DARK on the day that Veronica invited me to her house to play. It was a Saturday. Veronica called at noon. My mother drove me to her house and said that she would be back to pick me up before dinner. After I had taken my hat and coat and gloves off and said hello to Mrs. McCall, Veronica led me to the playroom in the basement.      “This is the playroom,” she said.     “It's nice,” I said.     The floor was covered with red and white squares of linoleum tile. A bar made of blond wood was at one end of the room, and a number of stools stood in front of it. A small pool table was in the center of the room, and to one side was a card table with four folding chairs set around it. We played Monopoly for a while, and then we worked on a picture puzzle. Veronica's mother brought us some milk and cookies and said that she had to go out to do some shopping. Veronica followed her upstairs. I drank my milk and ate a couple of the cookies. They were the kind with a small amount of peanut butter encased in a crunchy beige cookie, the two halves of which could be pried apart so that the peanut butter could be removed with the tip of the tongue. I heard the front door close, and I heard the car start and drive off. Veronica came back down the stairs. She closed the playroom door behind her and stood with her back against it and her hands behind her back. She tilted her head to one side.     “What shall we play now?” she asked, and she tossed her head just enough to make her hair swing.     “How about pool?” I suggested.     “How about Clothes Closet?” she suggested.     “Clothes Closet?” I said. “How do you play that?”     She walked across the room to a door and opened it. “First we go into this closet,” she said.     I went into the closet. It was used to store toys and games and sports equipment and brooms and mops. There wasn't a lot of room. When Veronica came in and closed the door behind her, the two of us were squeezed pretty close together. It was very dark.     “Now what?” I asked.     “Now we take off our clothes,” she said.     “Wow,” I said. I started unbuttoning my shirt. A thought struck me. “What if your mother comes back?” I asked.     “Oh, don't worry—she won't,” Veronica said. “You can't just take off your clothes all at once, you know. You have to follow the rules—”     “But what if your mother forgot something?” I asked.     “Don't worry,” she said. “You have to take off what I say. Are you ready?”     “Well—”     “Take off your—shoes!” ordered Veronica.     “Veronica—”     “Are you taking off your shoes?”     “Well, yes, but—”     “Now you take off your sweater, and I'll take off my dress. Go!”     “I haven't got my shoes—”     “Hurry up, Peter. You have to keep up with me. Now I'll take off my undershirt, and you take off your shirt. Go!”     “Was that a car?”     “Hurry!”     “Yeah. I'm hurrying.”     “Now you take off your pants, and I'll take off my socks. Go!”     “Maybe we should start putting our things back on, Veronica. I—”     “Oh, don't worry so much, Peter. Have you got your pants off?”     “Yes, but—”     “Good. Now what have you got left on?”     “Socks and underpants,” I said. “Maybe we should start putting—”     “I only have underpants on, so you should take your socks off.”     “Why don't we save this game for—”     “Peter, a lot of boys have asked me to play Clothes Closet with them, you know.”     “Yeah, I guess—”     “Take your socks off.”     “I am.”     “Good. Now we'll take our underpants off,” she whispered. “Ready?”     “Well—” I said.     “I'm taking mine off,” she said. “Are you taking yours off?”     From the way she was wiggling around, I could tell that she really was taking her underpants off, and it seemed to me that it wouldn't be fair not to do as she was doing, so I said yes and pulled mine off, too.     “Do you have everything off?” she asked.     “Yes,” I said.     “Here,” she said. “Give me your hand.”     When she groped for my hand, she touched my belly. I swallowed and reached toward her.     “Honey!” called a voice from upstairs. “I'm home!”     “It's my father!” said Veronica.     “Oh, no,” I said. I began grabbing wildly for my clothes.     “Don't worry,” she said. “He won't come down right away. He never does.”     “Oh, what are we going to do?” I whined. “What are we going to do? What's this? Is this my shirt? This is your dress. Oh, if your father catches us like this—”     “Don't get all upset,” Veronica said. There was an edge to her voice, but many years passed before I realized that the tense and breathless quality was caused not by alarm but by excitement, that part of the thrill of Clothes Closet for Veronica—perhaps all of the thrill, come to think of it—came from flirting with the danger of being caught by her father, of having him fling open the closet door, gasp, grab the nasty little boy with one hand and Veronica with the other, throw the boy out the front door, drag Veronica to her bedroom, throw her over his knees and spank her bare bottom.     “Oh, these aren't my socks,” I wailed. “Here! They're yours. They don't fit me.”     “Peter, the best thing to do is to stop for a minute and take a deep breath, calm down, and then just get dressed the way you do in the morning.”     “In the morning, I'm not in a closet with you!” I said.     “Hello-wo!” called Mr. McCall again. “Where's my little honeybunch?”     “He's going to come down in a minute,” said Veronica. “Are you ready?”     “Yeah,” I said. “I'm ready.”     When Mr. McCall opened the door to the playroom an instant later, he found Veronica taking aim at the four ball while I stood holding a cue and praying silently that he wouldn't notice that my shirttail was out and my sweater was on backwards.     “There you are!” said Mr. McCall. “Didn't you hear me calling?”     “Oh, sorry, Daddy,” said Veronica. “I was teaching Peter how to play—pool. I guess we didn't hear you.”Have you missed an episode or two or several?You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you've missed.You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.You'll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It's a pdf document. Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe

Can anyone invest in real estate? No matter your age or gender, you can invest in real estate by educating yourself and finding a mentor who will guide you through your journey. This is what Ruth Hiller believes and is sharing with her fellow women investors who are still navigating the seemingly complex world of multifamily investing.  Ruth calls herself an “accidental businesswoman” due to a legacy asset that she's forced to study to capitalize on its value. Years later, she founded YesMF! to help her investors grow their wealth and passive income through multifamily real estate. She has also invested in more than 2,000 multifamily properties as a general and limited partner.     [00:01 - 05:04] Opening Segment Ruth Hiller happily shares how she got into real estate investing Listen to her experience in selling a legacy asset [05:05 - 14:23] Real Estate Investing For Women This is the reason Ruth calls herself an “accidental businesswoman” Ruth talks about her background as a graphic designer How she applies graphic design to real estate The first parameter she looks at on a deal Ruth shares her experience in raising capital for the first time [14:24 - 16:49] Final Four Segment A tool or resource you can't live without An underwriting tool called, Property Analyzer A real estate mistake you want our listeners to avoid Not educating yourself Find yourself a mentor and educate yourself Your way to make  the world a better place Promoting financial literacy and mindset among women Reach out to Ruth See links below  Final words   Tweetable Quotes “Find a mentor and educate yourself before you invest in your first deal.” - Ruth Hiller “My number one parameter for a deal is I have to know, like, and trust the sponsor team.” - Ruth Hiller “I'm a firm believer in financial literacy and mindset, especially for women…I want to add value to that group to make sure it's possible [that] anyone can do it.” - Ruth Hiller -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Email ruth@yesmfnow.com to connect with Ruth or follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.    Join Ruth on her mission to help women grow wealth and passive income through multifamily investing! Connect with me:   I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook   LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!   Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Ruth Hiller  00:00 Find a mentor and educate yourself before you invest in your first deal. I invested in multifamily 22 years ago. I had to do a 1031 exchange and I had a bad feeling about it. I did it anyway. I didn't know about due diligence. I didn't know about lease audits. Have I had a mentor back then, then I would have avoided losing money on that deal.   Intro  00:20 Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we will teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson  00:32 Ruth Hiller has invested in over 2,000 multifamily doors as a GP and an LP and one thing to know is that Ruth calls herself the accidental businesswoman, which I think is absolutely hilarious. Ruth, look forward to jumping in today and find out more about that. Welcome to the show.   Ruth Hiller  00:49 Thanks, Sam. First of all, thank you, I'm really honored that you invited me to be on your podcast. I've looked at your other guests. Listen, it's amazing. So thank you for having me. And I hope that I can add value to you and your audience today.   Sam Wilson  01:00 I'm certain you can. You've done a lot, do 1,000 doors, even if it were all an LP would be a lot to talk about because there's so many lessons you can learn, I think in this business from both sides of the equation, but you've been on both sides of this quite a bit on you know, as a GP in an LP. There's three questions I ask every guest who come to the show, though. In 90 seconds or less, can you tell us where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?   Ruth Hiller  01:21 Where did I start? I inherited 119-unit multifamily building 22 years ago, I come from three generations of multifamily investors, my grandma invested in multifamily in the 40s to support her family had an A has she knew how to do that. Then my parents bought this property in California in the 60s. And when they died 22 years ago, I inherited it. And I didn't really become involved in the business till about four years ago when I went to a Tony Robbins event. And I decided like I need to be more involved in understand this. This has been a part of my life. And so I wanted to learn how to optimize the business I owned. And so I met my mentor there and signed up for his course. And he helped me optimize that and get helped me get my start. In my multifamily investing career. I've been involved in that now for about two and a half years.   Sam Wilson  02:09 Wow, that's interesting. So you guys owned it for 22 years after you inherited it. So you must have inherited it with some other family members.   Ruth Hiller  02:16 Yes, I inherited it with them, my uncle and then he died about six years ago. And then my cousins took over, unfortunately, or fortunately, however, you want to look at it, we didn't get along very well. So you know, as Tony Robbins says like, they were worthy opponent, right. So I had to educate myself. And so that's how I got so involved. The reason I got so involved in the multifamily ecosystem was so I could educate myself and optimize that business. I had no idea that I was going to be a GP. I knew I'd do passive investing. But I, Yeah, that wasn't on my vision board at that point.   Sam Wilson  02:46 Right? That's really, really interesting. And so you guys, I think we talked about this off-air, but you have finally gotten that asset to a point where you're ready to sell it.   Ruth Hiller  02:54 It is under contract and ready to go. We are Wait, I'm waiting for the Show Me the Money, you know.   Sam Wilson  03:01 Outside of and I'm not asking for all the family dirt, but outside of maybe, you know, internal conflicts or just disagreements on how an asset should be run. Why are you selling using selling the proverbial milk cow?   Ruth Hiller  03:13 Because it wasn't optimized and I'm 50%. And they're 50%. And we were just in a business deadlock. And so after studying with my mentor, and you know, I wrote like 40 business plans, I underwrote it, I “Oh, you could add this, you could add that, oh my god, you could triple the income.” And they were like, man, we're good. We like it just the way it is. So it was an impetus for me to just understand more about this. And so I knew I couldn't do it with that particular business. And that's alright. I've done it in other businesses that I've bought other multifamilies.   Sam Wilson  03:44 Right, now that's intriguing. Yeah. So you guys, if you couldn't come to an agreement on how the asset should be run, you at least come to an agreement on the fact that, hey, we can all sell this and make some money along the way.   Ruth Hiller  03:54 And the good news was, it was worth triple what I thought it was.   Sam Wilson  03:59 That's always good news. Had there been any surprises, you know, owning a legacy asset like that, because I think you said you guys have owned it since the 60s.   Ruth Hiller  04:07 My parents bought it in 1968. It went through various stages where like it was when they bought it, it was a kind of like it's west of Compton, which was in a great area in the 60s. So there was a lot of problems there with that. And then we had luckily had a property manager that stabilized the property. And it's been pretty, it's been cash flowing and pretty good. But we've had a lot of deferred maintenance that I'm going to say we didn't pay that much attention to until recently.   Sam Wilson  04:33 Right. So you had to get a lot of those things corrected and cleaned up before disposition.   Ruth Hiller  04:37 Yes, the thing that I've learned too, about, you know, writing that into a business plan, it's like what is the CAPEX that you want to do because we buy mostly B and C class properties. So there's always going to be some sort of deferred maintenance and I like having the business plan, knowing what we're going to do and like when you're, you know, when you have those kind of assets, there's always going to be plumbing problems. There's always going to be you know, air conditioning problems, some of the older stuff, bill, you know, it's gonna have lead paint or some other stuff. So you have to be aware of that when you're buying that kind of asset.   Sam Wilson  05:05 Yeah, absolutely. That's really, really intriguing. Talk to us, you know, you guys, so you're selling this 119-unit, what was the transition? When you said, “Alright, so now that I've educated myself on this asset we currently own,” which has a really cool way to get into real estate, by the way. Yeah, I don't think anybody come on the show. They're like, yeah, I inherited 119 units. And that's how I got into real estate.   Ruth Hiller  05:25 That's why I call myself the accidental businesswoman because I've, and then I bought a bunch of other real estate on my own single family homes. And then it was until a few years ago, I'm like, Oh, my God, this is a business. Right? So I kind of jokingly say, I'm the accidental businesswoman.   Sam Wilson  05:38 Oh, that's funny. I like that. You know, what was the jump where you said, you know, it's one thing to say, Okay, I own this, I want to learn about it. So I know how to run it properly. And then at what point was liable, you said, “Hey, wait, I can actually just go out and buy more of this because this makes all the sense in the world.”   Ruth Hiller  05:52 It was three years ago, I was sitting on a bus in Malaysia, and I turned to the guy next to me, and I'm like, what do you do? And he's like, I teach multifamily apartment investing in B and C class properties. I'm like, what, like, I own one of those. And so I joined his program. And I went to his first seminar, and I took 500 pages of notes. And that day, they do 506 B, which means you have to have an existing relationship with the person that you're investing with. And I had one with him. And he said, “Hey, I have a deal. Do you want to invest?” I'm like, hell yeah. Right. So that's where I got started. And I been in that ecosystem two and a half years and gotten to know enough people who are great operators, who I'd want to invest in. And then this last year, I invested in 10 LP deals, and then I did my first co-GP in November.   Sam Wilson  06:36 Wow, that's a strong move to jump in on 10 LP deals. Talk to us about your design background. What is that? And then I got some other kind of questions to bounce off of that related to what you just said.   Ruth Hiller  06:47 I went to Art Center College of Design, I've trained as a graphic designer. So that's my background, I just decided that's not what I like to do as a living. So I've, you know, I've painted, I've done a bunch of things, and I still love design. And so I always love to help, like on these projects, you know, to help design stuff because I have a really great eye for interiors, and for signage. And just for the way things should look.   Sam Wilson  07:11 That's intriguing. So has anybody or I guess how have you brought that to the table from a limited partner's perspective?   Ruth Hiller  07:17 I haven't from the limited partners perspective as to co-GP that was one of my duties was to design the signage and the paint scheme. And some of the, you know, the investor gifts and stuff like that. I just I love that. It's I designed the deck that you know how, when you present a deal, I design the investor deck. And so that's another way that I can be creative because I like to use both sides of my brain even though I'm an accidental businesswoman. I like to you know, here's my other side of my brain to be creative.   Sam Wilson  07:45 100%. And man, do we ever need the creatives in this business. For those of us that have not a shred of creativity in them? I guess speaking from personal experience, it's like, I don't know, like, “What do you mean?” Like, I can't even dream it up, let alone on make it look good and Photoshop. So or whatever you're using Illustrator? I don't even know the right software. How have you analyzed deals, because there is this is a very kind of like, hey, the numbers work or the numbers don't right. But from an artist perspective, with a more, you know, creative person, it's a little more, I guess, dynamic and moving where you go, hey, you know, I like that deal. I don't like that deal. So what have been some things that you said, “Hey, here's how I analyze the deal that I want to get involved in,” just kind of walk us through that process.    Ruth Hiller  08:24 My number one parameter for a deal is I have to know like and trust the sponsor team. That's number one. Before I even look at the deal, I get deals every day, they “Oh, it looks amazing.” But I don't, yeah, no. And then I have a really good intuition about people. And the second parameter is the location, it has to be a location. And then, you know, after studying with my mentor, I can analyze a deal. I can go through the software and understand where they're getting the number. So I have to, you know, I said the others, this guy, Keith Cunningham, who's a business guy, and his mantra is I love numbers. And numbers love me. So I've trained myself to love the numbers and the spreadsheets because that's part of it. Right? Even though that's not where my brain initially wants to go.   Sam Wilson  09:05 Right. And I think I love your ordering there. Because that reframes and we've I've said this, we just said this, in the last interview I was just doing, which I mean, it's the same thing over and over is the people, then it is the location, and then it's the numbers, which the soft skills. I mean, that's a very soft skill, but it has all the bearing in the world on how the deal turns out, is finding the right people and you said there's, you know, you use your intuition, even when you are vetting sponsors, what does that mean to you? What are some things that you personally do you say, “Okay, this is how I figure out if I know I can trust this person.”    Ruth Hiller  09:35 I have a really good intuition. So I don't know what it is. It was a gift that was given to me, like someone comes up to me and I'm like, oh, hell, no, I don't know how to explain that. That your soul, like spirit. I don't know what that is. But it's interesting. So I usually I have to listen to that. And I find when I don't listen to that, it's, it's interesting. Sometimes it hasn't worked out, you know, I'm like, I didn't listen to that voice. I should have, you know, and so I just have a feeling and then most of the time I haven't changed my mind on that feeling, you know, unless I tried to push against it, I guess I don't know if everyone has that in them, it's just have to sit down and listen to that. So that would be a first thing. And then, you know, I've been in this ecosystem for like two and a half years. I work specifically in that ecosystem. And so the outcome I wanted was to get to know as many people as possible because I'm a people person and see, who do I resonate with, right, you know, how can I add value to them? And how can they add value to me? How would we make a great team?   Sam Wilson  10:28 That's a great point. I love that it's funny, you know, intuition is probably something that gets overlooked. And probably just in the West in general, it's like, you got to follow what it is that your gut says is good or bad. And if you don't, I'm with you, I have gone against my gut on more than one occasion. And I can tell you, it just like you said, it's never turned out. I've never been like, now we're gonna do this anyway, like all that turned out great. It always ends up being bad.    Ruth Hiller  10:52 I know right? But you just have to listen to that. And I think coming from an art background, I have a lot of intuition that like what I'm creating, you know, to me, it just comes out. Right. So I'm more aligned a little bit more in tune with that, right? I'm used to just listening to that. And then if I force it, no, it's not good.   Sam Wilson  11:10 No, it definitely isn't. And I think that's an interesting thing. And we don't talk about it a lot on this show. We've had a few guests that kind of brought this up. But yes, this is a hard skills business or hard seeming skills business. It's like, hey, the numbers make sense, the right location, the cities, right, all these things line up. But it also, there's just some things you got to pay attention to along the way, I know we avoided I avoided buying 10s of millions of dollars worth of assets just before the pandemic and I know not everybody had this, but it was an asset class that really got kicked, you know, it just got taken out at the knees. And I had a really bad sense about the deal. So it's like, everything pencils, it looks amazing. Like, this and I was sick to my stomach. We didn't buy it. And then not three months later, I mean, those were just doing terrible and still so high. Okay, well, I'm listening to it.   Ruth Hiller  11:56 Exactly. Yeah, exactly.   Sam Wilson  11:58 That's certainly awesome. Talk to me about your first raise. You know, you guys just did this in November, you closed your first I think 1430unit property in Carrollton. Was that right? Harrison? Texas? Yeah, yeah. about raising them. You raised a few million bucks right out of the gate. How was that?   Ruth Hiller  12:13 Well, my partner had a lot of confidence in me, I was a little nervous because it was my first one. And now I have a pretty big community. I'm in the Tony Robbins community I'm in, you know, my mentors, community, and my home community. And so I'm like, she's like, “You can do it.” And I'm just like, Alright, and so a lot of people are really interested because my mentor had said, like, make sure you nurture your database before you go out and raise money. So for like, the six months before I got that deal, I wrote lots of articles on like, what is the syndication? You know, because a lot of my investors were new. So it was mostly education so that when the deal came, people were like, they were ready for it. So that was good advice from him. I thought that was amazing. And so the thing about raising like, everyone seems really interested, you make this list you call people, you just tell them the numbers. And then some of them ghost you. I'm okay with that right. But at the end when like, it's kind of like herding cats like, Okay, you need to get the PPM signed, you need to like, get this going. And oh, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. And then just like, make sure you do it by this deadline, the deadline's up, you know, and so I think that was the hardest thing. And so I'll know going into the next one that like, I hopefully, I'll know how to handle that in the next capital race, which will be coming soon.   Sam Wilson  13:21 Right? And that's something you said herding cats, it's absolutely true. You know, and especially as you start raising, you know, millions at a time. It is, man, it's tough to get everybody to get their documents signed, because then you get somebody that's get stuck on the portal, or you get somebody that hasn't wired their funds yet, or if there's even, I mean, I did it to somebody last week and other syndicator that I'm putting some money in passively. It was, hey, I'm in the deal. I'm gonna get doc sign and wire money. And then the week, you know, just disappeared on me. And it's like, Friday afternoon. I'm like, “Hey, I'm really sorry. Just kind of didn't have time.” So anyway, I had to deal with that on Monday. I'm like, golly, I'm doing the same thing that somebody else did. It to me. This is awful.   Ruth Hiller  13:58 Yeah, that's part of it, right? That's just part of it.    Sam Wilson  14:01 Yeah, it is. It's herding cats and getting people on board. But Congrats on getting that done. That's a big raise out of the gate. And I think that's pretty impressive and a testament to not just your ability to vet and find good deals and partners, but also just the intuitiveness that you have there. You said like some will goes to you. And that's okay. Don't take it personally just keep moving. So…   Ruth Hiller  14:20 I say persistence is my middle name.   Sam Wilson  14:24 Businesswoman who persistence is her middle name. Ruth, thank you for coming on the show today. This has been a blast to jump into the final four questions. The first one is this. What is one tool or resource, think digital, software, something along those lines you find you can't live without?   Ruth Hiller  14:38 That Property Analyzer that is supplied to me by my mentor group.   Sam Wilson  14:42 What is that Property Analyzer?   Ruth Hiller  14:44 It's an underwriting tool for me, okay, so I can take and I could take an OM and I can take the rent rolls and plug it in. I can't live with that because I'm the accidental businesswoman. Hell no, I can't make my own.   Sam Wilson  14:55 No understood. That's absolutely tremendous. Question number two is what is one mistake real estate you could help our listeners avoid and how would you avoid it?    Ruth Hiller  15:03 I would say find a mentor and educate yourself before you invest in your first deal. I invested in multifamily 22 years ago. I had to do a 1031 exchange and I had a bad feeling about it. I did it anyway. I didn't know about due diligence. I didn't know about lease audits. Have I had a mentor back then, then I would have avoided losing money on that deal.   Sam Wilson  15:24 Right, yeah, absolutely. Ruth, when it comes to investing in the world, what's one thing you're doing right now to make the world a better place?   Ruth Hiller  15:31 I'd like to mentor and help people. And I also like to donate money. I'm a firm believer in financial literacy and mindset, especially for women because I feel like a lot of my investors are women, it's their first time and they've never done it. And so I want to add value to that group to make sure like it's possible anyone can do it, right? You can be 60 and do it. It doesn't matter. You just want to educate people to, so that they can feel confident to take the first step.   Sam Wilson  15:55 Right. I love that. Ruth, if our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you. What is the best way to do that?   Ruth Hiller  16:00 My website is yesmfnow.com. I don't know what you're thinking but MF stands for multifamily. Should you invest? Yes, MF. You should.   Sam Wilson  16:10 Yesmf.com. Is that right? Yes…    Ruth Hiller  16:14 YesMF, Yesmfnow.com    Sam Wilson  16:17 Okay. Cool. Ruth, thank you for your time today. I do appreciate it. It was a pleasure and honor to have you on.   Ruth Hiller  16:23 Thanks so much. It was great. Thank you.   Sam Wilson  16:24 Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen, if you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners, as well as rank higher on those directories. So I appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

00:00.44 mikebledsoe I'm gonna try oh welcome to the max Mike or them. Oh no, no no oh I Totally screwed it up already do over do over. Okay, welcome to yeah I'll edit it. Yeah well. 00:03.90 Max Shank That's how it works when you try. Okay, we got to do it over. We got to do it over just start start over fuck that wait wait wait. We're still recording though the whole time. Yo no, you won't just start the whole thing over. 00:19.65 mikebledsoe I had it every time. Yeah. 00:20.97 Max Shank Really oh, that's cool. 00:27.30 mikebledsoe Ah, welcome to Mondays with mike and Max or if max is saying it. It's max and mike and today we're gonna be talking about learning. We want to teach you how to be a genius and you know. I would say that max and I are both geniuses at certain things I wouldn't say across the board but we have gotten really good at a few things apiece and ah and and things that we were not good at as children. So it's not 1 of those things where we just became good at it. Because you know our dad did it or anything like that. So we have both put a lot of attention into learning how to learn and that has taken us pretty far I would say most people would say that we're happier and more successful than the average guy. 01:20.13 Max Shank Sound really happy right now. No I Guess we're probably just happier than the average person. That's good. 01:21.90 mikebledsoe Our age Do I do I fuck I didn't think so. 01:30.80 mikebledsoe Um, well I'm happier than I'm happier than ah I used to be I can say that. So um, um. 01:35.84 Max Shank Happiness is a state of mind folks. 01:40.34 mikebledsoe Ah, maybe um, but you can also learn to be happy. So yeah, holding a perspective and being able to stabilize that state. Yeah well. 01:45.13 Max Shank Oh yeah, meditation is a state of mind too. Meditation is a state of mind you can practice that as well hundred percent. 01:58.13 mikebledsoe 1 thing that was brought to my attention when it comes to learning is there's a difference between accumulating facts and being able to regurgitate them or to be able to know how to do a certain thing and there's another. It's another thing to hold us. Ah. Hold a perspective so wholly that the knowledge that's necessary to make things happen or to have a conversation just comes with a lot of ease and it's more of ah, being able to stabilize that perspective but people who are into. Ah. Obtaining a lot of knowledge what they'll do is they'll they'll they'll tap into that perspective for a moment and then they'll slide back into their current perspective and then over time you accumulate enough Data Points. You can you can solidify that and then the conversation becomes very very easy when. 02:56.36 Max Shank I Call it Toolbelt knowledge I say if you can access it immediately and you use it with some regularity then it's in the tool belt and then you have something That's maybe like toolbox knowledge. Where for example I speak. 02:56.37 mikebledsoe Discussing a certain topic. 03:14.96 Max Shank Ah, fluent Spanish but there are some words that I wouldn't be able to think of out of the blue. But if someone said it to me I would understand what they were saying and so I think that's more like in the tool like I I can't like you I don't use it all the time and there's been some deterioration. 03:25.16 mikebledsoe What. 03:34.10 Max Shank But I would understand it like I would know what you're talking about and so I just think of it like you have tool belt knowledge which is readily available and more importantly, you use it with some regularity because there's ah, there's a half -life or there's a shelf life I guess on. Information and if you don't use it. You lose it. That's a big thing for learn for learning. 03:54.66 mikebledsoe Yeah I guess similar to the perspective conversation is if if it's it's looking through a specific lens and if you're looking through that lens regularly you're it's in use in it and it stabilizes if you're not looking through it regularly. It gets dirty. 04:13.95 Max Shank Perspective is a huge thing. Um, it's hard to even say where to begin with something as important as perspective because perspective is a locale.. It's like are you zoomed in. Are you zoomed out. Are you looking into the past. Are you looking into the Future. What's the the tint on the lens you know that saying ah seeing the world with rose-colored glasses or through rose colored glasses and some people see the world as a ah, very dark and mean and nasty place and they see themselves. As ah, unlucky. For example, but that's just a matter of what you focus on and that whole comparison syndrome that we get into is really the only thing that colors how lucky we feel or don't feel. So. It's all what you compare it to because you can't define something in isolation you have to compare it to something else same with distance same with mass same with ah the way you live anything it all is what you compare it to. 05:23.80 mikebledsoe Yeah, was they say the ah comparison is a thief of all joy I find it to be a bit easier to learn things when I'm happy um and can learn more than them. Ah, there's I remember looking at a study at 1 point that said that. 05:27.86 Max Shank Um, I've heard that. 05:43.24 mikebledsoe If you add play into what you're learning then you can learn up to 20 times faster. So. 05:50.62 Max Shank Well play is 2 things you said recently play is the first form of training which is practicing which is learning. That's what animals do like big cats. Small cats too other predators they play. As their first form of killing. Basically so um, play is the first form of practice or training or learning if you want to call it that and then the other thing you were saying about being happy is for true learning to occur. 06:11.39 mikebledsoe Um. 06:28.49 Max Shank You need to be interested so you need to be curious and you need to be motivated. Um, you can learn something but you won't truly like learn it and own it if you're doing it just because you must like. For example, school and we could do a whole podcast. About how school is the most colossal misuse of time and abuse of children that I can think of but we'll skip that for another time my point is I mean look it's it's bad but we don't need to belabor the point. Ah yeah. 07:05.42 mikebledsoe I'm in agreement by the way I'm not so the the listeners if I'm laughing because I I know where max is coming from not because I think he's ridiculous. 07:07.41 Max Shank I'm not gonna change. 07:13.60 Max Shank I mean I've taught people stuff in ah in a three day seminar that actually increase their income and their physical health. There's 3 days like that's not long and in 12 years they like don't remember what Sacajawea did they just know that that's a word fuck that shit. 07:20.71 mikebledsoe Right? 3 days that. 07:30.63 mikebledsoe And they're probably they're less healthy in no better position to make money. 07:31.45 Max Shank Ridiculous. 07:35.16 Max Shank Yeah, you sit in a desk for a really long time. You're like looking straight down. It's horrifically bad anyway, all all that. Ah, ah, torture of children aside the reason that people don't remember it is because a it's not in the tool belt because they're not using it. And b they're being coerced into doing it like you must remember this or you will fail and be Bad. It's like okay like I'll do it but I'm not going to not going to do as good a job I'm not going to be as excited and enthusiasm about it and enthusiasm. Comes from ah the root for being possessed by spirit possessed by the Muse. So enthusiasm is really the the energy. That's why you can see people who have very little knowledge actually. Be extremely successful because they're very enthusiastic about the little that they know. 08:34.94 mikebledsoe Yeah I've been talking to my girlfriend about that a bit is she? ah. 08:49.37 mikebledsoe Ah, Max is red with laughter. Ah now I've been talking about ah but well I noticed that there's a lot of people who make a lot of money in real estate. So we've been talking about getting more aggressive about. 08:52.81 Max Shank Ah, ah. 09:06.81 mikebledsoe Investing in real estate and I and it's ah it's a new I know a bit she knows a bit we need to get deeper into it if we want to be good at it. But I go I look at it I go I know a lot of people who invest in real estate or and have been very successful and they don't ah. Occur to me to be the most intelligent people on the planet. They're not.. They're not some type of Genius They they're they Found. They are some type of Genius They found a way to do something and they just repeat it and because that's what works in real estate you find. 09:27.28 Max Shank And. They are some type of genius. 09:43.37 mikebledsoe Find someone who's really successful in real estate and you'll you'll find that they they do 1 or 2 things and they just do it over and over and over and over again. It's it's a bit redundant, but it's also very exciting to watch your your personal wealth climb. 09:58.28 Max Shank Yeah, and you can also lose your shirt in real estate. You can get totally burned by buying a property at the wrong time and not really predicting or preparing for an income decrease I'll just. 10:03.73 mikebledsoe Here. 10:17.45 Max Shank Just remember seeing this house in del mar near where I live and it was ah sold for 18 million a couple years later they put it on the market for 21 million and then I watched them progressively lower the price all the way down to 6 million. 10:36.24 mikebledsoe Whoa. 10:37.16 Max Shank So the value went from 18 million to 6 million and you know there were like all kinds of crashes and stuff going on but this was like on the bluffs like right by the beach in del mar probably that because there are 3 rules in real estate right? location location location this was a. 10:53.43 mikebledsoe E. 10:57.13 Max Shank Primo like Crown Jewel of real estate. It was massive had tennis court. Its right on the beach was ridiculous but they they got taken to the cleaners because they bought it the wrong time and they couldn't survive through the liquidity crisis. Basically like there's that saying that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent which is kind of a good thing to keep in mind. 11:23.87 mikebledsoe Yeah, Well I think ah great. That's a great point is that that's not likely an intelligence issue as much as it is um, ah, people in what I've seen with people who do make mistakes in investing is. They let their emotions take over and they're afraid that they have a fear of loss and then that's why or they're a fear of missing out or a fear of loss and which a fear of missing out is just fear of future loss and or potential loss and and. 11:59.32 Max Shank Yeah I think go ahead. 12:03.54 mikebledsoe And people they break their own rules like they have this rule around how to invest in real estate or they have a rule that they that's been passed down and if you follow those rules it 99 percent of time you probably can be fine. But then you see a spike in the market or you see a dip in the market and then you you freak out and you react or you you break your own rules or you break the rules of the people who taught you and that because of an emotional experience and that's when people that's what I see when people lose their shirt. 12:35.70 Max Shank Well, it's risk reward right? if you concentrate your bet into 1 thing like let's say you put all of your money on Alibaba 15 years ago, you'd be like really really happy and if you put all your money in blockbuster Video. You'd be really really sad and if you diversified you wouldn't have returned as much as if you had concentrated all of your money into 1 big bet. But you're also limiting how much you can lose. So. I think with life and with investing the thing you want to understand is that it's usually pretty ah clear risk reward ratio and you want to try to aim for things that where you have 2 ways to win and no way to lose pretty much and there's another saying I like which is. 13:27.13 mikebledsoe Yeah. 13:31.91 Max Shank Why risk what you need for what you don't need and that's why you know you hear a story about someone you know, buying some unknown cryptocurrency and they like 10 X their money and then you're like feeling greedy yourself, you're feeling that fear of missing out. So you might catch it at the very top and then and then catch the falling knife as it goes down whereas they caught all the upside. So We we try to use the past to predict the future but it doesn't always go that Way. So if you. 13:55.77 mikebledsoe Yep. 14:11.80 Max Shank Plan for the fact that you will sometimes be wrong it. It works out. Okay. 14:19.70 mikebledsoe Yeah, that's that's the point of anti- fragile the book by is it Nicholas taleeb nasim he he wrote black swan anti-fragile. There's a new 1 that came out that I want to on a read next. And yeah. 14:22.65 Max Shank Um, yeah. 14:37.87 mikebledsoe The whole concept. He's ah he's a great investor himself. Ah and his perspective on strategies for investing is pretty much saying you know shit will go wrong. So how are you set up for that whereas most people like. 14:51.59 Max Shank Well. 14:56.10 mikebledsoe You know they're watching the crypto markets right now and I mean I mean this applies to the learning conversation we get because if. 15:01.23 Max Shank Yeah, you don't have to be smart to do well in investing like um isaac Newton famously said something along the lines of he could predict the movement of celestial bodies but not the madness of crowds and he like lost all of his money. Investing in the East india trading company he like got taken to the cleaners lost every I mean obviously a very intelligent fellow. 15:20.51 mikebledsoe Oh yeah, so. 15:26.90 mikebledsoe Yeah, well well let's just take bitcoin for instance I've been paying attention to crypto markets since 20138 years which is over half the amount of time they've been in existence. So. 15:34.44 Max Shank The. 15:44.18 mikebledsoe I've been through some booms and buss already and what I know because I've been in it long enough is I go Yeah, just you buy a bunch and then you hold it and then you watch everything go up and down and watch everyone else freak out and then you just keep on holding it and you keep on holding it and you keep on holding it and you take some off here and there. Um, there is a strategy for for when to take some out and but most people aren't playing that game. Well, that's the thing It is simple. It is very very simple. Ah, but when the people who who suffer and I've got many close friends who. 16:06.70 Max Shank Make it sound so simple. You make it sound so simple. 16:23.40 mikebledsoe The market starts going up and they start dumping money in or the market starts going down and they start pulling money out and I'm I'm going Whoa Whoa Whoa Just just chill the fuck out just consistently put money in consistently pull money Out. Don't you know. You're not going to.. You're not going to see the wave coming if because if you can see it then everyone else can see it and sometimes that does drive the market up a bit but again long term strategy I've had I've had really big returns from that that simplicity just. 16:55.86 Max Shank So what you're saying is you are an investing genius. 17:01.39 mikebledsoe Um, well are we gonna be playing comparison here. Ah you know what I'm in the 1 percent I'm in the 1 percent for crypto I'll say this I'm in the 1 percent of crypto trading. Ah when it comes to investing in general. No. 17:11.15 Max Shank Um, okay oh that's good. 17:20.10 mikebledsoe I'm I'm not I The crypto thing is huh How does what differ I Oh crypto trading versus investing versus. 17:20.98 Max Shank How do they differ. How do they differ. Ah well I mean it's they're both and they're they're both investing I think the big mistake people make with investing Probably the biggest mistake is they invest money. That they might need soon. 17:41.00 mikebledsoe Well,, there's that 1 and then they invest money in speculation versus Value. So 1 of my rules in investing is what value is being generated in the world by this product or by this service and So. Do I Find what they're creating to be valuable Tesla For instance, do I do I think that those cars hold out. Absolutely they're creating something valuable some of these cryptocurrencies that are you know a 2 page white paper and you know they just. 18:02.43 Max Shank Ah. 18:18.76 mikebledsoe Fleece everybody and they don't have any specific when I when I read about what the purpose of that cryptocurrency is and it doesn't make sense to me and it doesn't seem valuable to me I don't touch it. So. 18:30.82 Max Shank Maybe that's lesson 2 of investing is invest in things that you understand. 18:35.35 mikebledsoe Invest in things you understand, but ah I think invest in things you find valuable and Beyond beyond the dollar. 18:40.48 Max Shank Well, that's not necessarily. Yeah I mean that's not I disagree because if you invest in something that's valuable at a price that is unreasonable then you still lose money on your investment. 18:56.13 mikebledsoe Yeah, it's got to be worth the value that it's demanding. 18:59.64 Max Shank And that's really hard to determine. You know you have price-to earnarings ratios you have identifying trends and there are all these ways that we try to get clear on what something will be worth later. Will it be worth more later and there are all kinds of things like. 19:13.19 mikebledsoe You know. 19:17.89 Max Shank There was a 20 year period where coca -cola returned a zero percent return to its investors and you'd think like man coca -cola is valuable. Their brand is worth billions by itself. But it it all depends on what you pay for and that's the same thing with real estate. Um, unless you are holding real estate for 50 years the profit is in the buying. Yeah. 19:40.61 mikebledsoe Yeah, the deals made and or the the value is in. It's in the buying it's when you make the purchase. Um that that's for sure and that's ah, that's a big reason why and I haven't tried to touch anything in the last year is everything's so hot it is cooling off a bit. The markets are cooling off a bit but it's been so hot that and people are like you could better get in I'm going get into what I'm gonna get in at the peak. So I can come crash with the rest of you now. 20:07.53 Max Shank The the Fomo the Fomo hard to know if it's the peak. That's the tricky thing about investing I mean there are a lot of ah big institutions buying lots of real estate right now and it's um. 20:17.98 mikebledsoe M. 20:26.21 Max Shank Apparently this is now an investing podcast. So if you're tuning in this is investing tips with max and Mike ah. 20:33.71 mikebledsoe I Always try to stay away from investing tips too because. 20:36.89 Max Shank Yeah, it's the worst like this is not a recommendation I think everyone listening should just go by tulip bulbs as many tulip bulbs as possible fill your garage with Tulip bulbs. That's the tricky thing about times like ah. Like what we're seeing right now is some things just go absolutely meteoric they go insanely high so fast and if you are investing in something more steady. Let's say like real estate perhaps usually more steady. Ah, you're getting blown out of the water by some kid who bought dog coins so in the short term. You're just getting absolutely murdered if you're really looking at value which is. 21:17.17 mikebledsoe Yeah. 21:27.27 Max Shank About Theio ah about the Price-to-arings ratio like what's the prospect. But also what's the priceturnings ratio Anyway, the whole point is if you are not going to take a lot of time to make investing your career. You probably are better off just buying the market overall and minimizing. 21:47.14 mikebledsoe Yeah, which did really well this last year but I mean if we adjust for inflation and a few other things probably just did okay. 21:47.20 Max Shank The risk like just by the S and P five hundred. Yeah, yeah. 22:04.50 Max Shank It's a tricky thing because it all comes back to opportunity cost and I use these analogies for exercise quite a lot.. It's like our you know our heavy squats. Good. It's like well maybe. A for who and B can I do something better with that Energy. You know what? I'm saying so the same thing is true with investing. It's not is this good. It's is this better than the other stuff I could own and that's that's why it's so tricky because. You know you look. There are a lot of good companies that you can own that create value that are profitable. There are a lot of companies that you can own that are not profitable and so it's purely based on a prediction that they will create more and more value in the future. 22:46.33 mikebledsoe Yeah, um. 22:55.54 Max Shank Above and Beyond what is already priced. It's very tricky stuff. Anyway, if you you're not going to make it tool belt knowledge. You shouldn't ah fuck around with that. 22:57.25 mikebledsoe Yeah. 23:04.38 mikebledsoe Yeah. Back to learning. 23:14.59 Max Shank You'll learn your lesson really fast if you invest money that you shouldn't a fool and his money are soon parted. 23:20.46 mikebledsoe Yeah, well the 1 thing I notice I'll say one last thing on investing. Ah when you're you're talking about opportunity costs I I watch people try to invest money when they're in credit card debt. So they. 23:35.82 Max Shank Don't do that paid pay down the debt that's stupid. You get the interest tax free. They don't understand money. Yeah, exactly. 23:39.50 mikebledsoe Yeah, the the amount of people that tell that tells me that someone doesn't understand how the numbers work. Yeah, you just don't understand money because your best investment is to not have credit card debt if you have credit card debt. Nothing nothing's going to be that 10 to twenty percent interest you're paying on that. 23:55.15 Max Shank Crazy. Yeah, that's ridiculous I would say pay down the credit card debt and then after that invest in your income you know invest in building a customer list building a product setting up your service-based business more effectively because you can get. 24:03.69 mikebledsoe Yeah. 24:14.74 Max Shank Hundred percent 2 hundred percent thousand percent returns by investing in yourself. But if you get a fifteen percent return year over year in the market. You'd be like Yay. So. 24:23.32 mikebledsoe Well, there's something about money going in your bank account that you didn't have to do shit for I get I got some cheap thrills out of that. 24:28.99 Max Shank Totally yeah, but if you set up ah an online library of products that'll that'll bring in money without any extra effort to plus you plus you own your customer list. 24:44.34 mikebledsoe That's true. That's true. 24:48.74 Max Shank And that's huge I mean you see right now. Some people are are losing their instagrams and facebooks and Youtube accounts for saying things that they I I suppose shouldn't have said because Papa Papa Youtube Said. Ah. Wasn't okay to say those things and you know if you are dependent on another entity entity to store all of your customers for you. They can go away so you got to have your own you got to own your customer list. 25:23.60 mikebledsoe Just made a post about that the other day email is not dead so many who are focused on social media when ah, that's right again if you're looking investing that's ah. 25:24.97 Max Shank That's so important you got to own that customer list. No it works it works until it doesn't. 25:42.30 mikebledsoe That's 1 that's got a ah a black swan event. Ah as a possibility and and that is black swans occur when you're least expecting them and the event that does occur that brings a downturn is not something you ever imagined would happen. 25:44.53 Max Shank Ah. 26:00.42 Max Shank And. 26:01.83 mikebledsoe Just 1 day you wake up and shit hit the fan and so that can happen if Facebook youtube instagram decides or google decides to to stop featuring your stuff you know shadow banning is 1 1 way where it's not. Overt you didn't see you get blocked but all of a sudden your traffic goes to nil and and I've got several friends that's happened to not just in the last couple years but over the last 3 4 years there's ah there's a very clear. 26:20.82 Max Shank Um, wild. 26:38.69 mikebledsoe Ah I Guess attack I don't know I hate using the word attack in this sense. But there's a clear diversion of attention away from things and people that are actually helpful towards big corporate desires and. And wanting people to adopt more main you know Mainstream corporate services and products. 26:59.75 Max Shank Well. Um, hey man ah censorship is an admission of guilt if you ask me? Yeah, yeah, So as long as we're on the learning subject. 27:09.46 mikebledsoe I like that I like that censorship is an admission of guilt. 27:23.97 Max Shank We can we we um problem maybe ah what is rewarded is repeated. That's ah, that's a big thing about learning. So there's. 27:25.75 mikebledsoe I think we've talked about learning for 5 out of twenty five minutes so far. 27:40.30 Max Shank Conscious learning where you're like oh I'm going to learn to play the piano or I'm going to learn how to speak german and then there's unconscious learning it could be conscious also but where you adapt to certain patterns. You know your phone. May notice that you prefer watching animal videos at night. But you prefer watching news videos in the morning I know that was that was what I noticed interestingly enough when I was just still logging in. To youtube instead of using a separate browser and not being logged in and just searching for what I want and it would give me like you know would give me like John stossel and all these different guys who I actually trust and then at night it would show me more like. Animal videos like learn about the peacock spider and things like that so you will um basically be guided throughout your day by algorithms that are digital or otherwise. And you develop these patterns that are repeated over and over again. So it's very difficult to get out of those patterns once you're in and that's why having a pattern break is so valuable. 29:02.35 mikebledsoe Yeah, well, it's Interesting. You come out the unconscious learning and I read this book called Spiritual enlightenment. The damnedest thing by Jed Mckenna have you read that 1 okay. I Think you really enjoy it total. Yeah yeah. 29:20.99 Max Shank I've only read like 4 or 5 books in my life total. Yeah, that includes Dr. seuss books. The loax was good. 29:31.70 mikebledsoe Ah, so in that book he talks about how the mind is built and he says that people like to visualize the mind like it's this beautiful web and I've got this thought over here this belief or this idea and it's over here and then ah and. String goes across and it connects over here and this is beautiful intricate web that just it's infinite in Nature. That's how I used to think about the mind and the fact that he outlines that in the book tells me that other people think about the mind similarly and. He talks about how how ah language is laid out when as we as we get older and the order in which we learn words impacts how our mind works and what those words mean to us at that age and how that impacts the mind and. But he what he finally gets to in this explanation is that people think that mine is this beautiful integrated web and it's really just a rat's nest. It's just all jumbled up you and I could be born at the same time same place same parents in our interpretation of. The world is gonna be different and and you only need 1 interpretation early on kind of like the butterfly effect right? He's like you've got this butterfly over here that causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. Ah, there's 1 1 instance where you interpret something your mom or dad did at the age of 2 that shape your personality in a way that the impact the lens that you look through for the rest of your life and so you completely neglect certain pieces of information and you collect the evidence to support your your lens. 31:25.90 Max Shank Is confirmation Bias right. 31:25.63 mikebledsoe Over here, right? and nobody is nobody is safe from that confirmation Bias we we all do it and so that's 1 thing that when we if we're talking about learning needs to be acknowledged is that. Much of what we we believe to be true just is not true and it's good to question those be able to question those thoughts and and do some unlearning because learning something new I I found to be a lot easier to learn new things. When I look at what must be unlearned and that's not necessarily an easy task. So the way I look at it is ah it's easier to to write on a if we're thinking about a. Ah, a hard drive I want an empty hard drive and I want to be able just put things on top of that or what may be better is up. Yeah, or or you got a page you're you're writing you're writing your thoughts on a page with a pencil and. 32:30.10 Max Shank Empty your cup like that ah martial arts example. 32:42.41 mikebledsoe Ah, you're just having to rewrite So you've got these thoughts that you believe to be true and you're trying to overwrite them So you're just trying to make the words on top of those other words darker and thinking that you're going to be able to change those thoughts and at some point those darker words may overshadow. 32:51.17 Max Shank The. 33:01.11 mikebledsoe Words that were previously on the page. But why don't you just use an eraser first using erase or era words then write. It'll be much more clear it. So it it may take a little more effort in the beginning but long run it's way easier or if you start with a blank page instead of a. 33:06.78 Max Shank A. 33:19.59 mikebledsoe Page that already has writing on it. These are the things that this is how I think about the mind and when I'm learning something new I ask myself? what do I need to unlearn before I learn this. 33:31.89 Max Shank I think part of the reason it's hard for people to let go or erase or burn ego death is because they identify so much with it whether it's ah good or bad or neutral. It's familiar and we gain a lot of our sense of stability through our self-im image and so if you have a self image that is maybe harmful to you. You know some people are ah shoot all kinds of things anorexic. Self-loathing whatever there are all these manifest obese. Um, you know to protect yourself. So for example, a lot of people are really overweight just because they never want to have a chance to be rejected in the first place but if so if they're just this big fat person. No 1 that'll never even happen. So you get so identified with this identity that it blocks out any potential for change and that's why any kind of change requires some sort of removal of material like you have to chip away. At the ego in order to make room for something new and different. 34:51.53 mikebledsoe You know. 34:57.42 mikebledsoe So aside from chipping away the ego and unlearning First what are some? What are some things that you put into a place I'm a big fan of your your five minute strategy. 34:57.74 Max Shank The. 35:11.97 Max Shank Um, yeah, yeah, there's sort of a quantum effect of 5 minute blocks because it feels easier to start psychologically and it's it's so easy for me to. 35:13.44 mikebledsoe For learning new things. Can you explain that 1 35:31.81 Max Shank Just jump around from thing to thing and put stuff off. So if you do like usually five minutes the word just comes right before it. Oh it's just five minutes but ten minutes feels too long and with my mobility program I did five minute flow I get. So many versions of the same message which is hilarious which is you know I started doing five minute flows. But now I can't keep them under ten minutes I can't keep them under fifteen minutes and yeah 36:05.94 mikebledsoe I've got a problem. How do we fix this? ah. 36:08.90 Max Shank Right? Exactly? No, That's that's exactly the thing. It's a scam and I tricked. You guys. So haha I tricked you into getting started which is where the inertia is and once you start moving then it's really easy to keep going with regard to learning you don't. Want to practice a skill poorly. You're better off to take a break and come back and do it Again. Probably the biggest fallacy with this is within like the fitness thing. It's like you're pushing through. The the pain or pushing through the struggle or like you know, but you wouldn't do that if you were practicing shooting baskets or hitting golf balls. You would try to stay as fresh as possible and that's really 1 of the key elements for optimal learning. Is you. 37:03.39 mikebledsoe I think. 37:06.39 Max Shank Go in you do the thing total focus and then you pull away from it and then you go back in total focus and then you pull away from it and if you've ever done something where it requires total focus like tennis or fencing or fighting. Um, or even like ah a video game where you have to constantly either like move left or right let's say to avoid obstacles the ability to focus and not break that focus for a long period of time is something that you can practice as well. But you will. Improve that ability better if you take some small breaks. 37:48.26 mikebledsoe Yeah, the the increasing the capacity for focus the way that I like to approach that is I can tell when I'm losing focus. So. Um, working on I like to work on 1 task at a time I think that's important if people are trying to multitask they're they're so unfocused the whole time. They don't even realize when their their capacity for focus is going down because they just are starting so low already and what I like to do is set up a timer. And so I know that I can work if it's before noon I can do a ninety minute work session completely focused I use brain fm I use a bi neural beats type of thing to help me focus and my phone's on a timer. So the music will stop. When I'm supposed to stop my work and so most the time if it's before noon and I can work in ninety minute sprint I don't move out of my seat I'm in front of my computer and I am I am knocking out whatever needs to get knocked out and then the afternoons I noticed that. I don't have the same amount of juice might be seventy five minutes as the day goes on my my amount my periods of time of work separated by a break becomes shorter now. 39:12.53 Max Shank So that's wisdom is knowing yourself and acting accordingly. 39:16.92 mikebledsoe Yeah, and what what got me there was I got into ah started getting into deep work zones which can take twenty thirty minutes to get into the the space of deep work the the amount of. Focus that you have is basically what I'm describing and that that level of focus can be achieved a lot sooner I can achieve that focus a lot sooner now because I've done it so many times I've gotten into that really deep work zones. So frequently that my my brain knows how it goes it says oh this is what we're doing now shut everything else out focus on this 1 thing and so when you get into this deep work zone enough. You can tell when your mind is starting to leave it. So. 40:08.77 Max Shank Free. 40:10.99 mikebledsoe when I when I'm reading something and I read the same paragraph 3 times you know I have to reread the email that I am going through or I you know I basically just start making mistakes mistakes or needing to repeat things to try to remember or whatever it is. Ah. I can so I'm watching my mind begin to drift and so what I've done is is instead of working through that empowering through that. What I've done is I go oh I gotta take a break I go for a walk I go check my mail which is you know quarter mile away I go. Take a nap I ah you know, go play with someone's dog. Whatever so. Ah, match gave me a good look. Ah so I I know when to take a break because the mind works very much so like muscles in the body and and you know in the fitness industry. It is very interesting that people have this tendency to. Push through the pain and basically practice shitty movement they practice moving poorly and they practice getting injured is what they're doing and so ah I think ah I think a large part of. That reason is because there are certain benefits to pushing to that point of failure but they are overemphasized in the fitness industry and then in addition to that people people just don't understand. What poor movement is and what good movement is and they don't understand they're they're practicing to get injured and then of course if you throw in something like Crossfit now you have this competitive competition component that is going to drive people to do things that they don't really they don't really have the capacity 42:07.66 Max Shank Well, we've we've learned a false image of fitness I think so that's something really interesting about the things that you learn is you may very well have learned a false premise. So even if you do everything. 42:08.40 mikebledsoe To do so. 42:15.37 mikebledsoe Yeah. 42:27.29 Max Shank Allegedly, correct if the entire if it's built on a false Premise. You're totally Screwed. You have like no chance of optimizing the amount of effort that you put in so with fitness For example. If Your athletic capacity is not increasing from your health and fitness practice or your movement practice. Whatever you're probably wasting your time I mean a lot of people use fitness as a way to burn Energy. With no rhyme or reason it's like putting too much gasoline on your in your car like overeating and then putting your car up on blocks and just running the engine. So It doesn't overflow. That's like 1 of the worst things you can do um because just like with investing. What you're sacrificing for doing that Bs is the chance to do something that could improve your overall capacity your ability to fight your ability to run your ability to play I mean Ah, that's the tricky thing about opportunity cost is you're sacrificing. Everything else you could be doing to do this. So If you're not enthusiastic about it. It's like dude, why? why bother there are plenty of good options and you know getting stuck into the whole thing about aesthetics is ah is another tricky thing. That's just based on. 43:49.84 mikebledsoe Go. 44:02.99 Max Shank What we've learned you know like I always joke about the aztec aesthetic which is like a big fat guy at the top of a temple watching the heads roll down like he was the best thing you could be a big fat guy and then you know over time sexy lady. Has changed from fat lady to thin victorian era plump and then we went through like the Ninety s or something where the supermodels weighed like 85 pounds and now we're kind of coming round to like thick is good again. So it's all. 44:39.33 mikebledsoe Yeah. 44:42.50 Max Shank It's all a matter of that individual perspective and that's why you can think of your focus like a lantern or a laser.. That's what I usually tell people is you can soften it like a lantern and that's for a martial artist may have heard the term soft eyes before. Like sometimes I'll practice while I'm juggling and I won't look at the balls I'll juggle but I'll be trying to take in as much other stuff as Possible. So I can focus right in your eyes right now or I can step back and I can be as aware as possible of everything else in the room. 45:09.17 mikebledsoe Ah. 45:20.51 Max Shank And it's a really big difference in terms of how you focus so being able to cycle between those is extremely valuable because you don't want to always be laserfocused sometimes you want to have that wider perspective. Of what's going on and that's usually where joy and gratitude can come from is when you see the big picture rather than like oh my god my my life sucks compared to that guy over there and I hate that guy. He's got a nice, whatever and you know you get stuck. 45:59.36 mikebledsoe Yeah. 45:59.65 Max Shank Ah, tunnel vision right? So being able to zoom in and zoom out and realizing that your concepts of good and bad good and evil are are learned. You know, ah lions don't worry about that. Lions don't have a concept of good and evil they have a concept of danger from like other lions and they have a concept of hunger and that's it they don't have a concept of good and evil it's ridiculous. It's like totally a human invention I mean there are a lot of. Old stories that talk about that. What's that the wasn't that where eve ate the Apple wasn't it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that the whole thing is just having this awakening that's crazy uncomfortable that. 46:41.45 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah. 46:53.50 Max Shank Your whole idea of this is good and this is bad is just implanted from from the last guy 46:59.48 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, are yeah I mean anything that's conceptual in nature that is that that we can't point at physically is usually passed down from from somebody else and. 47:14.59 Max Shank Yeah, so if you focus on things that are intrinsically enjoyable then you will find the things that will make you the most enthusiastic you will naturally put more time into learning you'll. 47:17.61 mikebledsoe Very interesting. 47:33.24 Max Shank Be interested in learning the finer details. You know I sometimes I say it's not exactly true. But I think the sentiment is right? The only difficult thing is something you don't want to do if you want to do it then it doesn't matter. 47:47.39 mikebledsoe E. 47:52.80 Max Shank Like you you would just want to do it and if you don't want to do it then it's probably going to be more difficult. So. 47:53.43 mikebledsoe Right. 47:59.67 mikebledsoe It's why people look at people doing a crossfi workout and go I can't I don't know understand how you do it? How do you push through whatever not realizing that that person is doing that workout loves doing that workout for whatever reason or they've at least learned to love the workout. 48:11.80 Max Shank Um, yeah, um, well and sometimes you can sacrifice the temporary feeling for a bigger picture win like I actually never um, enjoyed lifting weights that much as weird as that might sound. Just did it because I wanted to be the most Alpha guy Possible. So now that I'm in a place where I'm a lot more honest with myself about what I'm doing just to get a result or what I'm enjoying I do a lot of weird stuff at the like I enjoy like explosive things like heavy lifting is like okay. Do some but I can play tennis for like 2 hours and I'm dying to play more tennis because it's so Fun. It's so engaging I'm using all these different skills. So That's intrinsically enjoyable to me but you know the idea of doing like a Crossfit workout. 48:56.40 mikebledsoe Yeah. 49:09.73 Max Shank I Don't even see the point of it for example so you change over time. 49:11.51 mikebledsoe Yeah I Want to go 1 thing I Want to ah point out I mean you said a lot of really good stuff. There 1 is how you how you use your focus and how you can go from laser focus to that soft focus and I think about that as contraction and expansion. And if you spend too much time in contraction then you won't be able to expand very much if you if you spend too much time in that expansion. It's gonna be difficult to to concentrate that that attention. But um, being able to cycle between the 2 is gonna give you more capacity for each. So. The same way then analogy with um, you know somebody who's really athletic their muscle needs to be able to contract incredibly fast but also be able to relax incredibly fast so you got to be able to snap that muscle and it's got to be able to snap back into. 50:01.41 Max Shank Her. 50:08.33 mikebledsoe And to just relaxation and those are the people who are the most athletic have the most endurance all these things um and the same thing with with attention. Can you play? Can you go that soft focus. Can you go that that laser focus and I think about it just like breathing. You got an inhale and you've got an exhale. Got to spend time in either. So I do want to hit that and then the other thing you talked about is the false premise and it's very interesting because that's 1 of the things that I I see creates a lot of disagreement in the world is well 1 is. Which we talk about regularly which is semantics people just are they don't even realize that they're in disagreement about the meaning of words and so they think the word that someone else is using means something than what they intended it to be so um, it's that that's number 1 I think number 2 is and what we've witnessed over the last couple years is the premise in which people are coming from are different and they're arguing about stuff that's at the surface or they're focused on what's on the surface and not looking at the premise in which everything else is based. So. Ah, it's what's that's a term in Mathematics. Ah for for assumptions I forget what it is maybe it'll come to me but basically it's it's ah the premise that you know 2 plus because 2 plus 2 equals four then. All this other things and mathematics must be true because 1 plus 1 equals 2 that then means and so what I've what I've witnessed especially in like say so the scientific world and is ah. 51:45.39 Max Shank Um, right? or. 52:00.53 mikebledsoe We see these big shifts in how science is viewed when someone comes out and questions the validity of the premise in which we've been operating from and so ah, there's. 52:14.57 Max Shank Often Those guys get burned at the stake historically speaking. 52:18.95 mikebledsoe Yeah, they get historically speaking it. You do not be want to be the 1 that that ah challenges consensus. Yeah yeah, well, ah well that that's the other thing too is be be aware of of ah. 52:25.51 Max Shank Um, don't kill the messenger I think we've heard before. 52:38.25 mikebledsoe Consensus group think and anytime anyone uses the word is it Ah, who was it. Ah, the guy who wrote Jurassic Part Michael Crichton I you. 52:46.69 Max Shank That guy is an animal I recommend anybody go listen to some of his talks Michael criton is a fucking animal. That's a genius. 52:55.65 mikebledsoe Yeah, he you you sent me a video of his and I is an hour long talk and I ate it up. It was so good but he talks about how Consensus science is not science. It's. 53:05.67 Max Shank Yo, ah. 53:12.84 mikebledsoe Anyone who starts using the word Consensus science is actually anti. It's an anti-science concept. You can't state of fear is talk. Yeah, so you know just throwing that out. There is a warning anytime anyone starts using consensus science. Ah. 53:17.75 Max Shank Um, it's called State of fear. That's the name of the talk I think I think so yeah. 53:32.56 mikebledsoe That's that's when you know you should turn around and run. 53:33.61 Max Shank Well, you got to consider the source. He also introduced me to a concept called gelmon amnesia which is where like you're an expert in fitness so you open up the paper and you read a fitness article and you're like this is totally false. This is ridiculous. But then. You forget that that was totally false so you read the rest of the paper as if it's true. It's like wait a second like fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me. 53:56.45 mikebledsoe Ah. 54:02.42 mikebledsoe Yeah, yeah, but we have we have a whole world of people running around with false premise theyre running around with um that this is I'm not going to say that I know how all this works but there's 1 thing that I've noticed. 54:09.61 Max Shank Right. 54:21.90 mikebledsoe But you know I listen to people who are healthy so people who are healthy and have spent a lot of time thinking about these things long before the pandemic those are the people who I like to talk to and think about what they say but 1 1 premise would be germ theory versus Terrain Theory. And ah germ theory is a false premise because it's not even being considered a it's considered to be a fact versus the way it's being treated is it's not being treated as a theory. Ah, and that's 1 thing I'm noticing in society as a whole is that people are treating theories as if they're facts I was just I was just ah and this is how far I'll take it is I was watching a ah. My girlfriend was watching like an animals show is basically like Discovery Channel you know, looking at these cats and it starts off with eleven million years ago this predator descended into this region of the world and I go. Are they fucking serious. They just state that that like it was a fact I'm going I'm going No fucking wonder adults are running around the world acting like things are facts that are theories or that are just ideas presented by other people. Yeah, you may have a lot of evidence to suggest that but it's still a theory and so what we're experiencing right now is we have this mass adoption because because traditional or I'll say conventional medicine in the United States is based on germ theory When. Ah, the when if you were to just look through this pandemic through the lens of of terrain theory Everything that's being advised for people to do sounds insane. But. 56:26.81 Max Shank Yeah, of course you got to be careful who your mentors are like with kind of bringing it back to learning like who do you trust? what's hilarious is that so many more people trust Joe Rogan than they trust any of the other people allegedly reporting on what's going on. 56:29.76 mikebledsoe But if you. 56:43.89 mikebledsoe M. 56:46.27 Max Shank And there are so many premises that we've been talking about here's ah okay, like obesity for example, obesity rates are like through the roof so you could argue that most people kill themselves because obesity is like the easiest way to die quicker. From all causes whether it's diabetes, Heart disease etc like all that stuff. Um, if you're weak and fat. You die Faster. There's no question about that. But I think the biggest false premise is that we should run people through the same filter. That's exactly 1 of the reasons why school is so catastrophically bad like I don't think ah ah like about some things I'm like really dumb but about ah like I almost got held back in school like that's crazy when you think about it like I'm not like too dumb you know what? I'm saying. 57:34.22 mikebledsoe M. 57:41.46 mikebledsoe You're 1 of the smartest people I know so that. 57:41.77 Max Shank So the whole nah I mean but I've only like read a few books isn't that all that matters. No I think smart is about how efficiently you can live the way you want to live like if you're living the way you want without expending a lot of energy then you're smart. Most people just want to. Ah, peer Smart I don't frankly give a flying fuck how I appear to people as long as I can live in an efficient and effortless way as long as I can move in efficient and effortless way and I think that's why people like fighting that's why I like it because it's very honest, you got a winner and you got a loser. You know I like playing tennis because it's honest I can't be like ah that ball was in no it was fucking out you missed bitch like try again. Ah so the the whole the whole premise that we should be run through the same filter is ridiculous. The whole premise of health is ridiculous. The whole idea that we should just blindly follow what a few people say we should is ridiculous like there's like a list that goes on and on I don't have it right in front of me but I wrote a bunch of the stuff that I thought was wrong about it down. But. I mean it's it's the same um as anything else. There are so many false premises out there that will lead you down a path because you can have a valid thought process and those are the 2 pillars of truth right? You have a true premise or false premise and you have a valid thought process. Or an invalid thought process. So a lot of the time you have a false premise with a valid thought process so it looks good. You're like yeah that that does like make like the logic make sense but because the premise is false everything else just goes completely out the window and that's. Kind of where I tie it back into where you put your faith or where you put authority into because when it comes to learning 1 of the quickest ways 1 of the best ways to learn is through a good teacher. But if you choose the wrong teacher. That is also a sure-fire way to fuck you up, you are going to inherit all of his ego bullshit I mean look have you ever seen youth sports probably like the parents and the coaches. 59:54.20 mikebledsoe Here. 01:00:03.44 mikebledsoe Oh yeah. 01:00:10.84 Max Shank Are doing a lot of harm to those little fuckers especially if they're trying to live out their dreams or like how about how about like a beauty Pageant Mom I mean when it comes to learning you got to really consider who you try to emulate like there are people out there who seem very healthy, Very joyful. 01:00:11.35 mikebledsoe Oh yeah. 01:00:30.39 Max Shank And loving relationships and maybe they're not behind the facade so you got to you got to do some digging to really see like do I want to try to emulate. Do I want a monkey see Monkey do that person's life. It's a big deal. 01:00:44.10 mikebledsoe Yeah, that is a big deal. Ah so I I sat down on an airplane on Saturday and this really old indian guy that's down next to me. 01:01:01.65 Max Shank Dot or feather. 01:01:03.48 mikebledsoe And dot and ah he sits a real indian he sits down next to me like from India ah, he had the accent and everything you know he he spent some time India and pakistan and. 01:01:11.84 Max Shank Yeah I get it. No, you're right. 01:01:20.77 mikebledsoe Sits down he starts talking I mean he was referencing something things that were happening in the sixty s so this is how old this guy is and do you have to go? Oh maybe it was on my hand. Ah I think late. Anyways. 01:01:28.30 Max Shank That wasn't on my end. 01:01:40.32 mikebledsoe Um, I sit down. We start talking and I come to find out. He's a ah substitute teacher and in Florida and I was asking him all these questions about does he enjoy it. So um, by the way this guy had a stroke the month before so he was he was being a He was a little slow so I actually spent the flight helping him do things like open up his his chips and getting him to the bathroom and all these things but he sat there and just taught me shit the whole time. So. Ah, my girlfriend was blown away. She's like why did you like that guy I was like he was teaching me the whole time. Ah so 1 of the things he says is he goes you know what the problem with kids these days is I say don't know how to think they only know what they know and he says ah that. They believe that 2 plus 2 equals four which is true but they think that that's the only thing that equals four they don't realize that 3 plus 1 equal 4 this is the analogy he was using. You know they don't realize that 4 times 1 equals four. They only know that 2 plus 2 equals four. He says. 01:02:50.40 Max Shank It's kind of. 01:02:52.63 mikebledsoe They only know what they know they don't know how they got there and and and. 01:02:56.58 Max Shank I Know exactly what you're talking about.. It's like a reflexive fear-based reaction to like hey don't worry I know don't worry I know they're like regurgitating stuff that they learned but they don't have like any kind of logical. Thought process that can help them discover something different or New. They don't have a set of tactics that can help them learn something better. 01:03:23.95 mikebledsoe Right? So he said that and I go Wow. That's such a really simple way of explaining critical thinking versus whatever, whatever, not critical thinking would be but being a dumbass. Ah, is and so ah, yeah, if anyone been. 01:03:47.61 Max Shank What's more important. What's more important you own a business I own a business. What's more important if you're going to hire somebody that they already know a bunch of things or that they have the ability to learn new things. 01:03:54.80 mikebledsoe What. 01:04:01.22 mikebledsoe Oh definitely the ability to learn new things. Um, well, there's there's 2 different types of employees. You got the people that that Mcdonald's is shopping for which is we just want people to be able to follow the steps. Yeah, we want robots. 01:04:10.45 Max Shank Ah. 01:04:17.62 Max Shank Automatons. Yeah. 01:04:20.35 mikebledsoe Um, and then you have you know Google executives Those people are hired because they're not going to. You know they're going to create the rules they're going to think of new things right. 01:04:27.94 Max Shank They can see the big picture they can. They can think of what to do. It's like the difference between being a ah Master chef and a soou chef where you're just preparing the diced vegetables. 01:04:40.20 mikebledsoe Yeah, and the the problem is is we're we're closing out 2021 here in the next couple months and ah, all those jobs can be that don't require creativity are going away. They're being replaced by robots. Ah, those amazon jobs won't be around much longer truck truckers won't be around in 1015 years that won't be a thing and that makes a but lot of people that's a lot of employment so you know that we're 60000. 01:05:16.63 Max Shank We'll probably go to more service business. 01:05:18.99 mikebledsoe You know we're now 60000 ah truck drivers short in the United states as part of the you know? yeah I read. 01:05:23.57 Max Shank I I didn't know that I met a guy who I thought was really dumb but he was actually really smart because he was like a pretty young kid when I was doing Moyai and he owned like 5 semi trucks by the time he was twenty 2 Did n't graduate high school and he started driving a truck and then he bought another truck and then he bought another truck and he just he was like retired he was like 25 years old is like it was great but he sounded dumb and about a lot of no, he really did. 01:05:51.19 mikebledsoe Wow brilliant. 01:06:00.36 mikebledsoe Well, he found his strategy. 01:06:02.16 Max Shank Ah, nice guy exactly That's what I mean like you you don't want to compare everybody with the same measuring stick because however you measure yourself That's also going to be the same stick that you beat yourself with basically well which if you're into that I mean that's fine. But. 01:06:08.13 mikebledsoe Right. 01:06:19.37 mikebledsoe I've always thought of myself as quite the masochist so works out. 01:06:25.54 Max Shank That's why we get along so well I'm a little more sadistic and you're a little more masochistic. 01:06:27.42 mikebledsoe Am Yeah, you're the dom fits. 01:06:31.64 Max Shank I Think everybody knew that already. 01:06:38.24 Max Shank Ah. 01:06:38.28 mikebledsoe Ah, alright, let's wrap this bad boy up any any closing thoughts. Yeah. 01:06:43.66 Max Shank On learning. Ah when it comes to learning the most important thing is that it's important to you that you use it and that you continue to use it and. When it comes to learning movement. Probably the thing that people miss the most is going super slow like even a super slow walk across the room. Super slow walk across the room with your eyes closed take the normal movements you do close your eyes try to do it as slow as possible. Try to do it as fast as possible. Try to change the angle a little bit and deliberately go outside of that normal range and there are a lot of other ways but I'll just keep it brief I would say maybe changing the speeds is like 1 of the most powerful ways. Especially really slowing down and. Consciously moving through the entire movement and then just be careful who you choose as a mentor for overall learning. 01:07:44.74 mikebledsoe Yeah, love it. Yeah, stop listening to our show. Um, now you so. My my final thoughts are what what are your be intentional. So the best way to learn is to be intentional with each moment that goes by and that's something that's practicing itself but ask yourself why you're doing something so as max was talking about. Um, learning a new skill. Why am I why am I squatting today you know am I doing it fast am I doing it slow. Why always be in the why why you're doing something and the more time you spend in the intention and understanding the why. But when you're doing anything. Probably find yourself take more time take more care and the quality of that go up I think that quality is definitely the result of learning so that's all I got Appreciate. Conversation today max where can people find you. 01:08:58.41 Max Shank Thank you brother I can be found at Maxshank Dot Com or at macshank everywhere you can Also Google me, there's also there's a ton of stuff out there. 01:09:06.35 mikebledsoe Whatever you do don't get google my name. Ah it'll be you get a mixed bag of things you find me find me on Instagram at mike underscore blood. So and. 01:09:15.46 Max Shank Don't really. If there was ever way to make people want to Google you that was it. 01:09:25.00 mikebledsoe Ah Shh telling him my secret later yall love me max. 01:09:31.43 Max Shank Love you buddy.

After another eye-opening Leech Anatomy 101 segment (2:39), Aaron, Banks and Evan dive into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's leechiest themes (11:29), scenes (16:37), and characters (23:04). To get some relief, the guys head into their second Leech on a Beach segment (33:32). They conclude by considering the film's medicinal qualities (36:15) and giving an overall rating -- from 1 to 4 -- of the film's leechiness (43:26).We're always looking to expand our pond -- please reach out!Series URL: www.theleechpodcast.comPublic email contact: theleechpodcast@gmail.comSocial Media:@leechpodcast on Twittertheleechpodcast on InstagramExternal Links:“Leeches,” Australian Museum [link]Transcript:Evan  00:11Hey everyone. Welcome back to the leech podcast, the most visceral podcast. As always, the leech podcast is a show about movies that suck the life out of you, but also stick with you, and may even be good for you. I'm joined as always by my two favorite leechy gentlemen, Aaron Jones, and Banks Clark. Hey guys.Banks  00:32Hey HeyAaron  00:34Hey Hey HeyEvan  00:34It is great to be with you again. Listeners might remember the three of us used to teach together that we discovered our shared love of difficult movies that make your heart bleed. And of course, we used to teach together now we leech together. So it is great. Great to be together as always. We have a packed show for you all again today. This is I think we're halfway through our first season of the leech podcast, which is very exciting. Today we'll be talking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a 2004 film starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. We will dive into that as we go. We always also are looking to expand our pond. So to that end, if you like, communicate with us @leechpodcast on Twitter, and theleechpodcast on Instagram. Please send us your ideas, your thoughts, your feelings. We like all those things. And this week in particular, if there is a leechy novel, a book, a story…Aaron  01:43[Gasps]Evan  01:43… that is leechy for you, we would love to know what that novel is, because if there's enough “suction” on this idea, oh, we might need to have any tea book club. So @leechpodcast on Twitter, theleechpodcast on Instagram. Please send us your leechy novels, Jen. So other other other things that the listeners should chime in on,Aaron  02:06But don't send us leechy navels! Like if there's a leech on your belly, but...Evan  02:11… A leech in your navel actually should probably you should probably go talk to your doctor.Aaron  02:15…. Talk to your primary care physician.Banks  02:18That just makes me think of that one scene in The Matrix. The part where that thing goes right in...Aaron  02:23Oh, oh, that is the truly leechy naval scene of all, yes.Evan  02:28That scene has stuck with us. Okay, before we dive into this episode, Aaron, please teach us about leeches.Aaron  02:36“Teach us about leeches”. Yes. Well, this week's movie where we watched was a little more romantic. So I was wondering about that, you know, with your romantic partner, I was kind of looking each other in the eye. And I was wondering, could I look a leech in the eye. And I became curious about the eyes of leeches. I found this bit of information from the Australian museums kind of natural history museum in Sydney. And it is sort of deliciously vague in a way that I want to share with you. And these are about the sensory organs of leeches and I quote, sensory organs on the head and body surface enable it to detect changes in light intensity, temperature, and vibration. chemical receptors on the head provide a sense of smell and there may be, this is what gets me, there may be one or more pairs of eyes.Evan  03:36One or more?Aaron  03:39One or more pairs of eyes. The number of eyes and their arrangement can be of some use in identification. However to properly identify a leech, dissection is required. I was struck by that this time whether that some different kinds of leeches have one set of eyes. Some have none, apparently, and some have many. And I'd like to know more. Anyway, looking a leech in the eye may be difficult because probably all they can see of you is a shadow in the way of the sun.Evan  04:09Wow, that that feels apt for this...SunshineAaron  04:13Sunshine!Evan  04:14Wow, look, well, points. Anyone who makes a metaphor out of that bit of leech anatomy. Thank you, Aaron. So let's dive into this episode. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Banks, will you tell us what happened in this film?Banks  04:30Well, I will try. As always, quick spoiler warning. If you have not seen this movie, pause this episode and go watch it. There are some movies that you can hear about and then watch. And guess what you could do it here and you would be doing yourself a terrible disservice. The first time watching this film you will be transported in 1000 different directions and it is a delightful transportatio--and it's just worth have been carried along in that journey. So watch the movie if you haven't, then unpause this leech podcast and purse and then we can leech with you. So quick spoiler warning. And this is a movie that has multiple timelines, you know, these timelines converge, they diverge, and it's definitely it's …. you know, we just recently watched it, I'm still, like, late, which timeline was happening when, but it's, it's really remarkable how it all comes together. The movie starts we meet Joel Joel Barish. He's played by Jim Carrey, you know, sort of quiet character. And there's this really interesting use of voiceover, where we learned that this very sort of quiet, normal, somewhat boring gentleman all of a sudden is doing a very impulsive action, on been sort of surprised, and even to himself, and he ends up on a beach in Montauk, where he meets a woman and they all of a sudden have this unexpected chemistry and the woman is, in a clementine paid brilliantly by Kate Winslet. And through the sort of the course of their conversations, and everything, you realize there's some sort of interesting history, there's some things that make sense. And then all of a sudden viewers are transported to a different moment. Right, to a different time at which, actually, this relationship has been ongoing for some reason. And also that there's been a fight, and that the relationship ended. And so all of a sudden, the viewers made very terribly aware that there are multiple things going on at once. The histories don't align properly. And what we learn is that after this fight, Clementine, who is this, you know, opposed to you know, Joel, who's this, you know, very sort of boring, keeps himself more of a quiet gentleman, Clementine is, you know, she changes her hair color all the time, she's impulsive, she's vivacious, she's all over the place. And what she has done after the fight is actually go to this, it looks like a dentist's office, it's like the world's most mundane-looking thing for a sci-fi film. But it's like this futuristic technology that wipes up like a very specific traumatic memory from your brain, in a very specific way, and that she has had this done. And Joel learns this through some friends who shouldn't have been able to like to pass it along, but Joel learns. And then he is then realizing that he's in this different, like an area that he himself needs to have this done. And so then he goes and demands that this same office, you know, do this procedure on him because it is too painful for him to know that she has wiped him from her memory. And so, all of a sudden, we're caught in these timelines, that's also you know, where we started. There's the timeline of the history of him learning about it, but also we learn we're actually in the timeline of him actually undergoing the procedure as he sleeps.Aaron  08:23Mm-hmm.Banks  08:24And what we then learned is that through the course of him actually going to the procedure, he decides he does not want it. He decides that, actually, their relationship was so powerful was so meaningful, that in spite of all the bad things, he wants them to stop....but he's already asleep. They're already wiping his brain and it's hilarious. The technicians doing it are played by Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst. Mark Ruffalo plays Stan and Kirsten Dunst plays Mary, who are themselves are in a relationship, and themselves are like throwing like a party while they're doing it. We also recently then we also learned that Elijah Wood is playing this character named Patrick, who is stealing Jim Carrey's identity in order to be able to date Clementine. So Jim carries obviously, Joel's identity to steel to be able to date Clementine. Right. So we have all these crazy timelines happening at once you learned that the doctor in charge of this entire facility actually had a relationship with one of the technicians. So you have these love triangles. All of this is happening while Jim Carrey is asleep, trying to evade the very process. And the thing that is giving, you know, Joel and Clementine the ability to evade, right, this process of wiping the memory of the relationship, the very life of the relationship, what's keeping them and sort of the very vital breath of that alive is the fact that there is something about the relationship that allows them to want to do something different, do something impulsive, and that breaks the cycle and they're able to evade through memories and all these, you know, interesting psychological pathways, they're able to sort of thwart parts of the procedure. And in the end, interestingly, they fail...and the procedure succeeds. So it would seem. Because Jim Carrey wakes up the procedure, seemingly a success, and we are brought back to the very opening scene of the movie, where he is then, for some reason, this boring man impulsively does something almost like Clementine would, and they end up in Montauk. And these, you know, two individuals who had erased one another from one another's memory, insist upon meeting one another, again, in spite of themselves. And it ends on this hopeful but restrained hope or they found each other again. But will this repeat again? That's the movie.Evan  11:12Yes. Yes. Really? Well, put Thank you Banks. So we're going to move into the leechy. See, or sorry, leechy themes from this movie? And I think I'll just build off something you left us with there, Banks, which is this interplay… so my theme would be the interplay between their individual choices, and I don't know, fate, I guess. The theme is, can maybe another way to put is, can people change? Or are they always going to repeat patterns of behavior, patterns of relationship? If they can change? What is going to be the engine of that change? What actually drives it? And I do think this film has something to say about that. I'm going to put a pin on it, because I think we'll come back to it. But my theme is this interplay between fate and choice, especially through the prism of a relationship. Hmm.Banks  12:09Wow. And that's a really powerful theme to the film plays, right, you know, one of the plays right into what I'm thinking of, for a lot of the film. For me, one of the most powerful themes, is just an explanation of coping. How do people cope with difficulty, and this film is just just takes your right into people's coping mechanisms, at least for me in a way that like, is a little too relatable to be comfortable. Oh, gosh, I've done these. Evan  12:42Ooh, Ooh… That's real.Banks  12:43That's really, like, you know, for Jim Carrey, I relate to his character, so much I relate to Joel, because he's just this, you know, resorts to, to the same patterns to cope with the things that are just difficult in life. And he himself is at odds with his own state of being boring and doesn't know what to do with it. And is oddly attracted to this woman who is the opposite of that. And so it's about you know, well, some people cope by creating patterns, some people cope by being wildly different. And, you know, trying to do things in different ways. And, you know, there's this theory out there that, you know, Clementine, Caitlin's his character is like, has like Borderline Personality Disorder, I don't really think that's a really you don't need to psychologize it like that. She's just a really awesome, I think strong character, but definitely is coping with life in a different way. And then you also meet through all these other characters in the side, just different ways of dealing with difficulty. I think coping is just a huge part of this movie.Aaron  13:47Mm hmm. I mean, hmm, I have a lot of things in my mind. Some themes that stick out to me is one that I'll talk about for now has to do with memory. I'm thinking about the power of memory, and even even the sort of mirrors residue of memory. Now, after these two people have found the procedure done, there's a way in which memory sort of like persists beyond all active attempts to erase it. There's something like core and deep, and that in sort of goes beyond the mechanical, neurological parts of memory, down into the level of identity. And I'm just I'm thinking about all the ways it's like we are the finger. We like the fingerprints of our experiences and memories are so deep in us. The idea of erasing them becomes ridiculous, even at the level of the science fiction we're given at the lacuna, doctor's office.Evan  14:53Right. And I think what's I think what's so interesting there is that they do succeed in erasing her From his mind, but it's but they don't. They can't tracer from his body. His body remembers. And there's something like deeper than his mind that remembers her.Aaron  15:09Yeah,Banks  15:10Truly. If I'm not mistaken “The Residue of Memory,” to quote you know, maestro Aaron Jones over here. Isn't “The Residue of Memory,” the title of your very first jazz fusion album?Evan  15:28I know it was his second one. Oh, that's right. I believe compromised second draft.Banks  15:38Oh, that's right. You might remember from an earlier episode, he quoted it. It was the subterranean network that fuses the different buns of the sandwich. Oh, that was the parasite episode. That was his first episode.Evan  15:54Yes, yes.Aaron  15:55Spicey call back, sir. Spicy indeed.Evan  15:59Banks is there a scene that leeches on to you?Banks  16:05 It speaks to the to0 close for comfort. For me, it's it had there's this scene it's fairly early in the film and epitomizes almost the thorn in the side of Joel and clementines relationship. And it's it they're sitting down. And they're eating Chinese food.Aaron  16:32Oh, no  Banks  16:34It is the most painful scene. It's and this is leechy to me in the sense that like, I kind of want to forget it. Because I really can't forget it.Evan  16:45And because I've lived it, right.Banks  16:48Yeah. Like, I've been like “Daaang, I've been there, man.” But like, but like, I think we've all been in relationships where we felt this sense of being suffocated by monotony, the sense of something that was at one time supposed to be celebratory, has instead become like a performance of, you know, all the reasons why the relationship is not working and it's just boring. And they're just sitting there eating Chinese food, commenting on how the food that they've been ordering every week, the same day, is the exact same, and having nothing to talk about. And the silence is just so palpable that it will it just makes you kind of want to, I don't know, attach some leeches to you to suck it out of you. Because …. somebody say something interesting. Aaron  17:43Kind of want to run away screaming.  Banks  17:44For me it's the Chinese food eating scene. It's just, it's for me that's like, almost unwatchable. But like, in a powerful way, not like, bad but like, I have lived thatEvan  17:55We cannot speak into something very real, right?Aaron  17:58Yeah. I'm really gonna jump in here. I'm, I'm thinking of like, what are the different kinds of things that relationships can survive, and one is the site horrific level of monotony that we're describing. But the other thing that for me, the can relationships survive the full voicing of the truth, the full voicing of the truth and the leakiest scene for me, that just, I just brings me into agony, I feel awful, as I'm watching it, and listening to it, is the scene at the end where they have both received the recorded tapes of them sort of naming the things they despise most about the other person. And then, Clementine walks into Jim Carrey's apartment as he's listening to the tape where he told the doctor everything he despises about her now. All these like nasty, ugly things he thinks about her. And she makes him keep the tape running while she is there. And the discomfort is just like rising and rising and rising until I feel it in my body as I'm sitting there watching the film. He's talking about how she just uses sex to like, make people like her. And she's this like, shallow, foolish person. And she's listening to it. And he's listening to himself say it and horrified. And for me, there's the kind of weird hopefulness at the end of the movie is where they decide they're going to try and be close again, not only with this kind of remembered level of monotony, but with the full, like, difficult truth spoken. Oh, that's leechy for me. Oh, took something out of me!Evan  19:37That is an amazing, amazing sequence. I think I'm torn--I have two scenes. I think they… I think they actually sandwich the one you're talking about. The first one and I want to highlight just the visual storytelling that's going on in both of these scenes. This film was written by Charlie Kaufman Who is an amazing screenwriter, but this is the place where I think the director and the director of photography directors, Michel Gondry, I think they really shine. Because the first thing I'm thinking about is the final memory he has with Clem before, his mind is completely wiped of her. And it's actually the first night that they ever spent together, or that they met. And they were on Montauk. It's they met on the beach at a party, and they connect. And basically, she convinces him to go into this house that's owned by someone else, but no one's currently living there. It's dark. He feels really uncomfortable because you could tell he's a rule follower. He's, he doesn't like to, you know, transgress rules. She's going upstairs with alcohol, saying, hey, come upstairs, spend the night with me. And he remembers that he did not actually spend the night with her that night. He actually left he got scared, and he left. But the way the film tells this is that you actually see them talking to each other. And he says to her or his memory of her, I wish I had stayed. I wish that night that I had stayed. And it's so powerful to look back on the very first interaction with this person. And you see the regret. But you also see this, sort of, change in perspective that's happened to him. But then, and this is the part that is leechy for me. He leaves in the memory. And as he's leaving, Gondry has the house literally collapsed, just as his memory of her is collapsing. And so it's this good. It's multi-layered, right that their relationship seemed to be almost doomed from the start. The house is crumbling in their first interaction. And, and yet, he's also where he is now in the storyline. He knows, oh, actually, I still love her. And she whispers in his ear and meet me in Montauk. And that's what sets the chain in motion to get to come back to the beginning of the film. So it's just such a multi Vaillant image. I think that's my leechy scene.Aaron  22:05Almost leechy for the artistry, as much as anything in the story.Evan  22:09It's unforgettable, for me.Banks  22:13The artist is not lacking--that's for sure.Evan  22:16It's stunning.Aaron  22:17Oh, yeah, consistent throughout the film. I mean, the film is a complete package where every knot has been tied. It feels like you modify it. Can I jump into leechy characters? Leechiest character, I have to talk about another kind of leechy scene that kind of fits into this. The groove I'm describing about the film containing all these kind of like perfect moments of symmetry. And I … so leechy character for me, who I hate, just deeply despise and hate is Patrick, Elijah Woods character. I freaking hate that guy. For like, part of me, like I'm addicted, addicted to these ideas of like, of authenticity and originality, and to see someone sort of like, he takes Jim Carrey's journal, Joel Barish. His journal and is sort of like trying to recreate with Clementine, all these moments that Joel Barish already had with her and I'm just feeling sick watching this happen. But then the ultimate moment is when they go to the the frozen lake, the frozen lake, where Joe Parrish and says and recalls and writes down in his journal, he says they're lying down next to each other on the ice. I could die right now. I'm just happy. I've never felt that before. I'm just exactly where I want to be. And then to watch the scene where freaking Patrick, just like stumbles and fumbles his way through that line, and it means nothing and Clementine doesn't care at all. Like, oh, I Oh, this is so gross. And I hate Patrick. Like he's he like he sucks so much life out of me. He's least number one for me in this movie, that's me.Evan  24:05He is definitely high up there. I also would on that kind of leechiness, Dr. Mierzwiak. Oh, Tom Wilkinson's, character also is leechy for me, but I'm actually not going to talk about them for a while much like, in Pan's Labyrinth when Vidal was so obviously, the villain so, so terrible. Yeah, I think I mean, Mierzwiak, and Patrick are obviously leechy. And they suck life out. Yes. But for me, the painful one who is instructive and who sticks with me is kind of like what banks was saying earlier. It's Joel. I think Jim Carrey's character is really on this viewing? He sticks with me and I think so many of his insecurities and his questions and his doubts of himself and his doubts of the relationship. Man those structures towards, you know, early on. It becomes ironic later, but early on when he's looking at Kate Winslet on the train and he says, “Why do I fall in love with every woman who gives me the time of day?” I mean, that's an extreme statement. And also like, I have been in places where that is a real thought. And that movie named it. And so, I think there's that and then just his, you could tell he's smart. He's really sharp. He has some creative elements like he, I think he draws and he writes, and yet he's so unable to vocalize what he feels. He's so inside. And, yeah, there's just resonances for me that his character sticks with me and embodies those hard parts of myself but also embodies, it's just kind of he goes through a hero's journey through his mind, through his memory, I think. And we'll talk, I think we'll talk more about this. But where he ends up makes me oddly hopeful, while also recognizing the pain and struggle it took to get there is leechy for me,Aaron  26:11Can we say Have we talked about this idea that? I mean, there's something leechy about Joe, but there's also something leechy about the process of like, delving into the underworld like this is Pan's Labyrinth? We've talked about this before. But yeah, like going into the depths like this, the descent into his memory is also a descent into opening up all these different kind of Pandora's boxes of repression inside him. Yes, like the moment of shame where he longs he like longs to be hugged by his mother, but she like, won't pay attention to him or he's caught masturbating. And he's like, so uncomfortable in his own skin. Like having those boxes opened. Oh, oh, this is leechy. Indeed,Banks  26:54You cannot watch this movie, and not imagine your own embarrassing moments being so exposed. Everyone watches this movie, and everyone just like, peeks into their own little box isn't the same or like, ooh, that's like, oh, “That's what it would be for me!” There's something about that movie that,  does it like it is a journey into one's own embarrassments at times. Aaron  27:22Makes me want to tell all my dirty secrets. But I'm not going to….Banks  27:33Haha, please don't… please….I mean, you know, if, if I'm honest, I will say, I think that Joel's character is also for me right there. But if, if no one's else gonna is going to talk about you know, Dr. Howard, is it “mirrors-wack?” Miers-wack?”Evan  27:48MierzwiakBanks  27:48“Mierzwiak!” He, you know, there is one thing I would like to highlight about his leechiness, and yes, there's a huge li uncomfortable, hugely inappropriate, hugely leechy component with regard to him. You know, having an affair with a young woman and then allowing his own lab to then wipe her memory of that affair only to then rekindle it. That's just that's just absurdly, it's so bad. But like, also very believable. But like in a terrible way. For me, one of the other things, it's very easy to miss, I think, but really, just for some reason sticks with me is this is his lab. This is his company, this is his lab, this is his company, and his company, has these policies that you actually get to hear about and the background of some of the scenes. Like you get to wait in the room with Joel Well, we learned that, Oh, no, you know, “I'm sorry, Miss so and so but we can't wipe your memory three times this month. That's just against policy.” Like they're going like, it's they make they have turned this method of memory wiping, into a deeply unhealthy pattern of coping, that is, and just are profiting off of it. There's something that like you are seeing these people in waiting rooms dealing with the death of a cat, dealing with all these things, just wiping them from memory, as well. That's just what you do. So you can move on. And now obviously, like “Welcome to the modern world,” we all have our own ways of doing it. But I think that's a part of the modern world but saps us as we are just only using avoidance as our coping. Like what happens if that's what it is, what if memory wiping becomes the only way that we cope with difficulty? Like that's one of the major questions that this film asks and the answer is not a pleasant one or one that is hopeful. In fact, it's is the reconnecting of memory with difficulties, and the radical acceptance of it that I think does it there. And I'm going to stop there because I'm getting into the positives and the “hirudo therapy” aspects. For me, I'm just gonna say the doctor there has some high leech levels that need to be, uh, need to be expressed.Evan  30:18I think that's really well put and I think just to build off it real quickly, I do think that it is the contrast between characters who basically just have their mind-wiped, and where they end up by the end of the film, they're all pretty much alone. Whereas the character that did go down the road of having his mind wiped, but then chose actually to  embrace memory, Joel and then also Clem, they end up in some kind of connection. And I do think the film is we should play around with this some more but I do think that something about facing memory going into it is actually the way to connection and the avoidance leaves you alone, perhaps.Aaron  31:03Yeah, anyway, can I, I would love to jump in here because I think there was something that this movie taught me something new about leakiness Oh, oh yeah. Next to the the act of remembering and Dr. Mierzwiak and all this, that the moment so what I'm what I learned about leechiness has to do with my physical experience in my body as I'm watching a film. And there was a moment where like, from the center of my body, kind of radiating toward my hands, I started to feel physically numb, like something weird was happening to me. And the moment that that happened was when Mary, Kirsten Dunst's character, learns that her laundry was wiped at the moment where Dr. Mierzwiak's wife arrives on the scene and sees them kissing inside and, and says, “You can have him, you've had him before.” And at that moment, like my whole body just goes, [Makes out-of-body-expierence sound]....This is really like taking something it's doing something to me.Banks  32:13Isn't it true that when a leech bites you, there is a numbing agent.Evan  32:19There is a numbing protein? Yes, that's right.Aaron  32:22Oh, guys, I tell you what, I think I like me to take a quick vacation though. This is getting like, a little intense. For me.Evan  32:29It's getting a little intense. Aaron, do you want to take this top beach? Do you want to beach? Are there any leeches on that beach?Aaron  32:35I wanna do the leech on the beach segment? Come on, let's do leave on the beach. On the beach. When I try and want to go on vacation on this film, where do I go? Actually go to one of the moments of like greatest dysfunction, which is this ridiculous relationship? In the movie between Joel's two friends, Carrie and Rob. Remember what I'm talking about? Yeah, like Carrie and Rob, who are like, there's something about the way that their relationship is just so obviously bad. Like they're throwing laundry at each other and like always sniping at each other. She tries to pick up a cooler and it just like falls over on her comedy montage. Evan  33:20At the beach, at MontaukBanks  33:21At the beach!Aaron  33:21But a moment that gets me the most I just can't help but laugh is where Joe's over at their house and you just hear this relentless hammering. And Rob is just sitting at the table like making a birdhouse. Like, why? Why is this even here? Why is this happening? But uh, that's it this moment of the just deep absurdity. And we're where we're seeing actually like, what love looks at, like, in a way that's not all that inspiring or interesting. But for some reason that like it's uplifting and light-hearted to me, and I go on vacation in those moments.Evan  33:59I love that. My vacation is also related to Bob, who of course is played by David Cross, the immortal Tobias Fuque from Arrested Development, and perhaps a satire, perhaps unrelated, but in that show Arrested Development. There's a pill called a “Forgive me now.” Which I think perhaps is based on this movie. And that is a funny version of something very serious. That has happened in this movie. And I laugh at that…;Aaron  34:27that's beachy, that's beachyBanks  34:31Arrested Developemnt is talways a good beach to go to. It'll ride on Montauk anytime. Just not the Netflix seasons, don't do those.Evan  34:40Yeah, yeah. Wasted time. Well, that is our leech on a beach segment for this week. Here. Thank you for taking us to the beach.Aaron  34:50And to be clear leeches also their bodies are like segmented they are segmented worms. So the idea of segments is really nice for the pod. Thank you.Banks  35:00And we are now transported from the beach. So thank you for that.Evan  35:05We have built leach anatomy into the structure of our podcast. Speaking of which, I think it's time for some “hirudo therapy,” the medicinal purposes of leeches. Who would like to begin?Banks  35:24I'll begin with one here. So for me, I think that there is a hirudo therapy in this, you know, this, this one goes out to all the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy fans out there. But in DBT, there's this important idea called “radical acceptance.” Okay, which is the, you know, it's simply looking at difficult situations, and, and simply trying to see them as they are and accept reality for what it is. And so we can move forward. And there's this great moment, I think of radical acceptance throughout this movie, but one in particular. And that's when, after the fights after everything at the very end of the movie, you know, you know, Joel has just heard Clem's, worst comments to him, and Clem has just heard Joel lay into her and these recorded videos, and then they stand in a hallway about, they could, you know, both ready just to end it with one another. And they just say, you know, we could try again. And guess what, this is probably gonna happen again. And that's when Joel, that's when Jim Carrey's character, says, “Okay,” It's this moment of incredible radical acceptance that I've never seen a better portrait of it. It's an acceptance of who they are, and acceptance of what their relationship could be the good and the bad together. And the acceptance of, “We could see where this goes”Aaron  36:58In most moments of acceptance, with that level of like, crystalline, very fresh sense of everything that's wrong, and tragic, and toxic and weird. Yeah, that's very radical.Evan  37:11I think that connects in a lot of ways to the therapy that I was thinking about. And it connects back to my theme of fate and choice. And there's so many patterns that repeat in this movie, and you see the dynamics of their relationship, keep repeating in the memories, and they keep repeating, because in some ways, Joel is fundamentally who he is. And Clem is fundamentally who she is. And you can't change those things. And yet, Joel has been on a journey in this film, he has gone into his memory, he's gone into happy memories, but really, it's the traumatic ones that he has to go to, to come out the other side as a different person. And the time works so funny in this movie, I think Banks you put it well, it's only one night, and yet he is a different person. That morning when he wakes up, although he doesn't know it totally, than he was when he went to sleep. And I think for me, what's therapeutic about that is this acknowledgment that the way forward, perhaps in a relationship, but perhaps just for self-acceptance, is actually through memory. It's through facing past things, especially past trauma. If the way forward for Ophelia was through fantasy in Pan's Labyrinth, I think this film offers us a painful, but ultimately, a restorative way forward through memory.Aaron  38:45Yeah, this is what yeah, this is this movie is hard for me. Yeah, I think that anyone who anyone who's had a lot of heartbreak, and I've been divorced, you know, watch you watch this film and watch the kinds of dysfunction and kinds of pain that people experience here like I can, I can dredge up a lot of hard material. But I think that one of the things that I find medicinal about the film is that it's I think that after you've, after you've been really hurt by love. There's this question of like, am I gonna open myself up to that again? Is it worth opening myself up to love again? And the message of this film is it like it's a high risk proposition to love. Because the things that you will learn the things that you will come to know involve pain. And I and I find myself both really chastened by this film like, “Hello, sir. Be cautious about love but But sir, you should, you should open your heart because there's something deep and real really meaningful about coming to know that the difficult risky thing called love.”Evan  40:07I think that raises a question for me. I want to know what you think. The film seems to say. “Yes, it's hard. Yes. All this pain has happened. Yes, there's risk. But yes, but okay. But try again” or “Say yes to love again.” And just speaking for myself it. It rang true. I felt like the film earned that optimism. But I don't know what do you guys think? Did it? Did it earn it? Is it too? I mean, because there's also a way you could argue like, this relationship was toxic, and probably bad for both of them. And is it good for them to keep trying on something that?Aaron  40:57The film seems like make a virtue out of continuing to try things that are destructive?Evan  41:05Yeah, I think you could read it that way.Aaron  41:07Yeah. Make a virtue out of dysfunction. Oooh, yeah. I don't know about that.Banks  41:12You could read it just as a cycle of codependency.Evan  41:16Oh!Aaron  41:18I don't know what I think about that. That's not what I want to believe about the movie. But I think that the movie entirely leaves that door open, actually.Evan  41:26Yeah. Same.Banks  41:29I agree. Both with the sentiment of not wanting it to be that way. And also having a very hard time arguing against it. But I'm gonna fall and say it's not that's not. I'm just gonna go with my gut and say, I don't think that's what the movie is about. I think the movie is asking, in the end, it does earn, you know, as you're saying, a bit more optimism a bit more of the sense that the worst of us doesn't define the all of our future.Aaron  42:03What does that mean? I think that that immediately leads me to the burning question of if this movie is a movie that is that has this like this optimistic note to it. Like how many leeches am I supposed to give this movie? Oh?Banks  42:21Oh,Aaron  42:24OOh Ah! I see how many leeches now? Does anybody have a sense at this point?Banks  42:29I did remind our viewers we do this on a scale of four. Right? One out of four leeches: four leeches being the, you know, the the “gold standard” of a leech movie. And “one” being not so leechy, but maybe a wee-bit? “Zero” being not leechy at all. What are you doing on the show? So.Evan  42:49So I'm at I'm at three leaning for but I'm going to go three? Oh, I want to save four for a couple that, well, we will get to that. I think I just want to hold it like I think parasites are solid for oh, there's a couple of others. In my book. Here's why I'm at three. Okay. I couldn't get this film out of my mind. We watched it a while back. I've been thinking about it. I've been wanting to write about it. I've been busy and haven't been able to write about and I've been frustrated that I haven't been able to write and think about it. And so it's just like, wormed its way into my brain. And so it is stuck with me. And I think it's stuck with me on this viewing. And I'll maybe I'll highlight the other leechy scene that I didn't talk about, which is after they agree at the very end, to try again, the film actually closes with this image of the two of them on the beach in Montauk with snow on the beach. And they're running and they're like playfully, hitting each other with snow. I believe it's from maybe the first time they hung out or some other memory. But it's this playful image in this very cold beach. And it's it's a haunting image on its own. But then Gondry repeats it two more times. This repetition, this repetition, almost like the cycle of this relationship will continue and continue? Oh, and I think in a way, the coldness of the image, the repetition of it. I think it tempers a little bit of the optimism that I feel in my bones. When they reconnect. I'm like, Oh, this is the best. This is it. I think that they end the director ends with that note of No, this is a cycle of cold playfulness, not a cycle of Cold Play, but in a cycle of cola. Playfulness, that maybe that's just what love is. Or maybe it's a more ambiguous thing that he wanted leave us with I don't know, but I can't stop thinking about it. I found this film so instructive about so many things. It's such a “three-leecher” for me. I yeah, I just love this film.Aaron  45:11Mm-hmm.Banks  45:12Three leeches.Aaron  45:14Yeah, honestly, Banks. I think I need to hear from you. I'm not even like, I'm not even sure. You got to help me out, convinced me.Banks  45:21It's I think it's three. For me, I'm going to agree with Evan. And I think that its three for me, like, if I were to say, like, find to give it like, in terms of just how much I like it. I probably give this a “four out of four” stars. But we're talking leeches here.Evan  45:39Leeches not stars.Banks  45:41Just the, you know, for me, the film has so many incredible qualities, like three leeches is a high bar and it does, it sticks. It's difficult. It's it takes something out of you. I do not want to watch this movie sometime again in the near future. But I desperately.... there's a part of me that never wants it to let go either. Like, yes, it's for me like that need like, okay, that we're in leech territory here. But in the end, you know, for me, when I think of a truly [leech movie], there's almost a fear that needs to be there. There needs to be that. Like, there's a space that enters. That is deeper, that's darker, that is more powerful, maybe even brighter, I don't know, but it's just more visceral.Evan  46:35I mean, this is the most visceral podcast, it is. You tremble, you tremble before and I feel like….Banks  46:44...and I might be shaking a little bit, but ain't trembling yet. So, three leeches for me.Aaron  46:49Hmm. This movie came out in 2004. I was in high school. I think definitely at the time, I would have seen it as a one or two. I thought it was like, artsy and cool. Kind of great. But it wasn't something that likes stuck close to me. You know, at that time, I think this movie is like a heat-seeking missile, except that it is like the heat that it seeks is heartbreak. And like it sniffs out the heartbreak and attaches there. Wow. And I think that would pull me up to a three now. Definitely not for me. But that sense of it, like just finding my heartbreak and leeching on right there. Ooh, for me three. Yeah, I'll give it three for that.Banks  47:43Is this the first time we've all agreed?Evan  47:45I think so. Which is great. I think. I think aside from ratings, I think something I just feel like we have to talk about this movie or I want to name is this would be a somehow a romantic comedy, drama, a sci-fi, a horror movie, like there are horror elements in the some of those memories. It's almost like a Freudian meditation on childhood, like, and it's visually stunning. I mean, I think this is where thanks to your point, like it is a four-star in terms of the quality of filmmaking and writing and performances. I mean, we have really talked about the performances, we talked about Kate Winslet who is like,Banks  48:23She's the star. And this is yeah, she puts everyone else to shame in this movie, and everyone else is brilliant.Evan  48:33She's like, literally the figment of Jim Carey's imagination in the movie, and yet unforgettable she's unforgettable.Aaron  48:40The moment immediately comes to mind is where we're, uh, Jim Carrey is like being a baby toddler version of himself like under a table. And she is being his like mom's friend who, who's like also herself and is like, what is this dress I'm wearing? And then in order to like bring him back from his babyish waist tries to like show him her underwear. This is so strange.Banks  49:10It's so funny because like in the scene before it's like this very like sensual like thing and like, they're they like, that's where like, you like see like the underwear in there. It's like, very sexualized and very, like, you know, intimate and then it's here. It's like the least sexual scene ever, and it's such hilarious change. It's like, Oh, we're gonna flash a three-year-old. Let's just do that. It's brilliant. So weird.Evan  49:37So weird. Well, on that note, it's been another episode of the leech podcast. Thanks, everyone for tuning in. This was about the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are many more episodes to come in this season. And we hope you will join us for all of them. Again, if you would like to contact us You can find us on At leech podcast on Twitter and the leech podcast on Instagram. We would love to hear from you, including leechy novels that you have in mind for a book club.Credits:Hosted by Evan Cate, Banks Clark, and Aaron JonesEditing by Evan CateGraphic design by Banks ClarkOriginal music by Justin Klump of Podcast Sound and MusicProduction help by Lisa Gray of Sound Mind ProductionsEquipment help from Topher Thomas

  Summary: Mary has long term recovery and works as a LADC licensed addiction councilor for the center for drugs and alcohol and works as on-call chaplain. She leads spirituality groups with persons in recovery. Our discussion on procrastination is a response to stress because of a lack of clarity. It also is a response to anxiety and uncertainty, or not knowing the next steps to take. Whether it is a response to calling a bill collector, having a difficult conversation, or cleaning house, we all fall into procrastinating something. When it becomes chronic then we may need professional help, but when it is a poor habit, we can correct it by awareness and taking a small action to get motivated. Being willing to look at the deeper reason we procrastinate is key. [00:00:00] Vicky: Hello, Mary. Glad to have you here with me. [00:00:04] Mary Carlson: Hi, Vicky. [00:00:05] Vicky: Great to have you. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are? [00:00:12] Mary: My name is Mary Carlson. I am born and raised in Cloquet, Minnesota and really haven't lived anywhere outside of this area. Right now, I am employed as a casual LADC, licensed addiction counselor for the center for drugs and alcohol. Then also, I work as an on-call chaplain at Essentia Health in Duluth; stay pretty busy. I'm also a woman in recovery, so taking care of my recovery is important to me. I am married. We have a little dog here, her name is Bailey. I have four children; three biological children and one bonus child, I call him. He's our oldest child. We have nine grandchildren. Stay really busy just with life stuff. [00:01:05] Vicky: It sounds like it. Between counseling and your ministry, being a chaplain, that's interesting combination. [00:01:15] Mary: It is. I've actually never worked as a counselor in a field having to do all the work that counselors do because they do a lot of paperwork. When I went to school to become a chaplain, I learned early on that in order to do any kind of a group in a treatment center that I had to be a licensed counselor. That's mainly why I got my license for counseling is because I couldn't do a group without one. The groups that I've done with people for the last 20 years have been primarily spirituality groups, not religious groups; I like to make that clear. I even make that clear to my group because, unfortunately, it seems as if religion is brought up, there's usually an argument. The groups I do with people are more about finding what's in them, the worthiness in them, especially to remain-- like to find a place in sobriety, how to use that part as a strength to keep them going and recovery. [00:02:17] Vicky: Wonderful. Our topic today is procrastination, is it a problem or a response? [laughter] I think for me it can be both, right? First, it's a response and then it becomes the problem, I think. What triggers procrastination for you do you think? [00:02:38] Mary: Different things trigger procrastination for me and different times in life-- sometimes I'll procrastinate-- Well, I guess the biggest thing for me that causes me to procrastinate is not knowing what I'm doing, the fear of not knowing what I'm doing, not being really clear on it. For example, I knit and crochet. If I hit a part in the pattern that I'm not familiar with like I have to do this little mental gymnastics to get myself to pick it up and work through it. The funny thing is, once I get to it and work through it, it's fine. Just getting myself to that place to actually pick it up because I just-- I don't know, there's something about my brain that wants to shut off if I'm not real clear. I've noticed that throughout different situations in my life too. If I'm going to walk into a situation and I don't have a real clear understanding of what's going to happen in that situation, it causes me a little bit of angst. [00:03:38] Vicky: Yes, so connected to lack of clarity and maybe some anxiety around the uncertainty. [00:03:46] Mary: Definitely, yes. I think maybe even a little deeper is thinking that I should be able to just do it all. I should just be able to whip through this knitting, it shouldn't have to be a problem that I have to pay attention. [00:03:57] Vicky: That I think is an important point. We expect so much of ourselves. [00:04:02] Mary: Yes. [00:04:04] Vicky: What feelings cascade from procrastination? [00:04:08] Mary: Mostly, I think dread. I think I could link exhaustion to that because every time that thought comes into my mind that I should be doing it and then I shut it down, it just makes me tired. The funny thing is, I can remember having a lot of procrastinating maybe looking for a different job or talking to somebody that I don't feel like talking to, so finding every single reason I can to put that off. Then I finally come to the point where I have to do it and I do it and I'm like, "Why did I wait so long?" You know? [00:04:57] Vicky: Right. I love that dread feeling that we get, and it's an energy suck, isn't it? [00:04:54] Mary: Yes, huge energy, for sure. [00:04:59] Vicky: What do you observe about yourself and others when they're procrastinating? [00:05:04] Mary: When I procrastinate, I feel like I get into a place where I just sit and spin. I may have one particular issue that I'm procrastinating on but it starts this cascade effect. It's almost at times can be paralyzing depending on what the situation is and how hard I am working on procrastinating because I think that is a conscious effort. It comes to mind, "I don't want to do it, I'm going to put it off to the side," and it keeps bouncing back and you keep putting it off and it bounces back. [00:05:41] Vicky: That spinning, especially as it's something more important and it's looming larger and larger, then I start freezing up on everything. That physical response of fight or flight or freeze; for me, I'll start to be freeze. I think that's in response to, "I would flight if I could. Nowhere to run to, it's coming down the pipe and I see it coming. Oh my God, here we go." Do you find that you procrastinate less as years of your recovery have gone by, or is it still show up frequently? [00:06:18] Mary: I think procrastinate less just because I've learned. In anything that we do, we recognize a pattern. If you start to pay attention-- or I should say, if I start to pay attention, I can usually recognize those patterns. I always tell people, "We don't change anything until we really see it." Sometimes it takes a while to see it, even if it keeps bumping me in the head, you know what I mean? Now I can recognize that as, "Oh, I'm putting something off," you know what I mean? [00:06:52] Vicky: Label it correctly. [00:06:54] Mary: Yes, "I know what this feeling is." [00:06:57] Vicky: Yes, that goes along, I can so relate because it used to be just of a generalized feeling of, "Yuck," and knowing I was wanting to dodge something but not-- like you're saying no clarity of even what I was trying to avoid does like-- [00:07:14] Mary: Yes, or that you were avoiding something. [00:07:16] Vicky: Right, and now to be able to label that. [00:07:19] Mary: It makes me think of the fifth step because I've been talking a lot about the fifth step to people-- not the fifth step, six and seven. Step six and seven, you know the our character defects? So many times for me, my character defect is a reaction. It's like a survival skill to something that's   going on deeper within me. The trick is to recognize that I-- "Oh, yes, anger, sloth," those are a couple of my procrastination character defects. Then going, "Okay, what's deeper? What's deeper than that?" and to start looking a little deeper into what's going on. [00:07:59] Vicky: The motivating factor to want to avoid in the first place. I am afraid of not being good enough? Am I afraid of rejection? Am I afraid of being punished because I made a mistake and that's my belief system, that mistakes get punished or? [00:08:20] Mary: Yes, that deeper intrinsic stuff that we carry that we're not even aware of, it shows up as character defects. [00:08:28] Vicky: Right, on the unconscious level. What tips do you have to deal with anxiety and fear before you're tempted to procrastinate? I'm sure like me you can start to sense it coming, like, "Oh, this is a pattern that I'd like you to talk about. I would normally procrastinate this,"   calling this bill collector or having this difficult conversation with my child or scrubbing the bathroom, which I hate, or whatever. [laughs] [00:08:56] Mary: Whatever, yes. I think it comes down to that same tool again of recognizing that I'm doing it again. Then I guess the other part is being more gentle to myself because I have a tendency to be really cruel to myself because if I'm not doing it right, I'm usually some kind of an idiot, and I have a whole gamut of names I call myself; even becoming aware of that and paying attention to that. [00:09:22] Vicky: You and I have been in recovery for a long time now. I was amazed in the last year in particular how much that judge still operates. [00:09:32] Mary: Oh, huge. [00:09:34] Vicky: Yes. The value of being able to identify it and talk it out with somebody else, to even say, "Hey, there you are. I see you, and I hear what you're saying, and thank you for sharing, but please be quiet now." [00:09:48] Mary: Yes, "Go find something else to do." I think that that judge during this time especially this COVID time, lockdown, and just the last four years, that judge has becomes such a huge part of our culture because there's no gray area left in life anymore; it's either you're right or I'm right. There's no give or take under-- even trying to understand, even with the procrastination stuff is like having some empathy for yourself and some understanding that usually when we procrastinate on doing something, there's an underlying reason. It might be that day that just that I'm being lazy. In a bigger scheme and a bigger picture, there might be something deeper in there that maybe needs some exploring, but to have that kindness to yourself and to recognize that. It's funny because I really-- and maybe I still hang onto that whole belief that life is just supposed to be so hunky-dory and everything's happy and I'm always smiling and life is good. The reality is, life is life and there's probably as much pain in this life as there is good. How do you walk through that, especially when we're in that place of being so cruel to ourselves? How do we have any kind of empathy or mercy for ourselves? [00:11:18] Vicky: I think what I've learned and I think you have too, those are the times to reach out to a friend and get that support. You mentioned not being clear, I can't remember how many times I'd reach out to talk to my mentor and she would say, "Well, you don't have enough information yet," and I was like, "Oh, oh." [00:11:40] Mary: That's the value of having a mentor, a sponsor, someone else in your life. I remember early on when Brené Brown wrote her first book, I went to one of her workshops, and this book was on shame. One of the things she talked about is that we should all have a shame buddy so that when that voice starts out in our head, we can have someone to check it out with who understands that voice. [00:12:06] Vicky: That concept, that is so important, to be able to help you shift from, "Oh, this is who I am. Identify that I'm a bad person because shame takes over that way," to, "Oh, I'm experiencing shame and is it legitimate in this circumstance?" [00:12:24] Mary: Right. That's another part, is understanding my shame language. [00:12:28] Vicky: Shame will shut me down, I know that. I'll practice avoidance big time if I'm in my shame part. [00:12:35] Mary: Right. Think about procrastination and-- especially like things like the bathroom, who loves cleaning the bathroom? You put it off, and then shame jumps in and says, like, "You lazy sloth." "No, I just don't want to do it today." [00:12:51] Vicky: Not my cup of tea today. Our program talks a lot about taking action; to get unstuck, you just need to take action, and even a small step can lead to another step to another step. Is there any other tools that you use to get unstuck? [00:13:06] Mary: I think that especially when I think about early on in recovery, and you just addressed it as having that other person to talk to, and I'm so grateful I had the people around me in recovery to listen to me while I muddled through all these beliefs I had. It took many conversations with many people listening to me talk about the same thing before I finally came to a conclusion on it. Even in procrastination, if it's something that keeps showing up that you're not doing, maybe have a conversation with somebody you trust, like, "Why am I so not willing to do this? What's holding me back?" [00:13:50] Vicky: Resistance, identify it. [00:13:53] Mary: This way I've learned, get through those things is to talk about them. That I don't have the answers in my head usually. [00:14:00] Vicky: Right. I've noticed about myself that if I start pulling back and withdrawing, I might need a good cry about something. I don't like to be vulnerable, but it's amazing now I've recognized, "Call somebody, have that cry, get it over with it," it clears the energy out around whatever it is. [00:14:22] Mary: So true, so very true. [00:14:25] Vicky: Do you think perfectionism has any part in procrastination? [00:14:30] Mary: I know it does in my procrastination because I think I talked about it earlier, thinking that like I had to understand everything and know how to do it before I even entered into whatever it was I was doing, like the pattern in the crocheting or whatever, that part that makes me think that, "I can't make a mistake. I can't do this wrong," huge. I think the two Ps probably are intertwined. [00:14:55] Vicky: I think so too. Digging deeper we focus on the impact on our mental and physical health, what costs are we paying when we stay stuck and resist growing. [00:15:06] Mary: The price we're paying is we don't go anywhere. I know for a woman living in recovery, it's real easy to go backwards by just avoiding that stuff. I can think about that in terms of relationships that I would get into that were so harmful, but my complete unwillingness and inability, and people would even get mad and say, "What are you staying there for?" My inability to see the reason that it was as bad as other people saw it, maybe that's it. There's this disconnect, I think, especially in relationships. What I found for me is this was part of doing a fourth-step with my former marriage is that there were a lot of things I did to survive in that marriage and to keep marriage the way I thought it should be because I was married to this human being that I thought I saw all these qualities in; however, those qualities would never show. His behaviors were completely contrast to what I thought I saw in him. In doing that, my sponsor had me write a letter to him, not to give to him but just write a letter to him, and identify every place in that marriage that I did things to cause the marriage harm. I think I was far enough along where I was able to really look and see. What I realized is the things that I expected him to be when he wasn't able to be that, were also very shaming to him and it led to a lot of his behaviors. Does that make sense? [00:16:46] Vicky: It does. [00:16:46] Mary: It helped me to forgive myself because I didn't see it in me, and it helped me to forgive him because I saw how painful that must have been to him. [00:16:58] Vicky: You just touched on something for me that causes me still to procrastinate. I don't like endings, any kind of ending. If it's a season, summer is ending and it's coming to fall; if it's a relationship; a job. The idea that everything has its time and its place, man, I'll hang on as long as I can, that's important. As we know, my show's based on small changes that lead to big shifts. What small changes could you recommend for our audience to help them get unstuck? [00:17:34] Mary: I guess the thing that's been most helpful to me is starting to pay attention to myself and my patterns. For example, in procrastination, if there's something that keeps popping up that isn't getting done, then it's time to stop and go, "Oh, okay, what's this about?" It may not be anything at all, really, but it might be something core to you. Until we start paying attention to ourselves and giving ourselves some time and some energy like we would put into our jobs, in our relationships and stuff like that, we'll never learn those things about ourselves. I think that's probably one of the biggest things I've learned to do is to start stepping back and go, "Okay, what is this?" [00:18:16] Vicky: Take an inventory of it, really admit it. [crosstalk] [00:18:19] Mary: Yes, and a kind inventory also; not just sit back and go, "Now I'm sitting here and not getting that done again. What's wrong with me?" It might not be anything wrong, it might just be-- who knows? To give ourselves that time. [00:18:35] Vicky: Curiosity, I heard you say empathize with yourself, be curious about what is this, instead of blaming and shaming ourselves say, "What is there?" There might be something that-- your inner voice, I've found sometimes is telling me, "I was going to sign up for a class not that long ago. I had the link open I don't know how many times and didn't click and register. When I paused and said, "What's that about?" just like you said, I didn't really want to go into the class. If I would have been on automatic behavior, I would've-- [00:19:13] Mary: I used to do the automatic thing a lot, I used to just jump into stuff and not give it any thought at all. [00:19:20] Vicky: Right, go from procrastination to jump both feet in, off we go. [00:19:25] Mary: Then procrastinate because you jumped in. [laughter] [00:19:30] Vicky: Being present, today you mentioned that. Do you have any services or programs that you like to promote? I always give people an opportunity to promote if they have their own business, something that they want to have people participate in, or a Facebook group they'd love to have people join. [00:19:49] Mary: No, not at this time. I don't have anything of my own. [00:19:53] Vicky: Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here, Mary. I've enjoyed our conversation. I really value your friendship. [00:19:59] Mary: Thanks for inviting me. [00:20:00] Vicky: I value that. I know we're going to collaborate and work together on some things in the future. [00:20:06] Mary: Yes, so maybe I could promote those because I'm on the same page. I have as much respect for you as I heard you say you have for me. It's fun to be on this path together. [00:20:20] Vicky: It definitely is, it definitely is. To me, that's really the value of recovery over time, is those relationships that we form with other people that uplift us, inspire us, and move us forward. I'm thinking not thinking that it has to be a big job or career or move us forward in-- [00:20:43] Mary: In life. [00:20:44] Vicky: Yes. Being kind to ourself, being loving to our family, loving to ourselves. [00:20:49] Mary: I think there's a part two about be it recovery, be it healing, whatever it is, but there's a common language that we speak. [00:20:58] Vicky: Yes, most definitely. Thank you again for being here. [00:21:04] Mary: Thank you. [00:21:05] Vicky: To my audience, I will say thank you so much for being here with us and sharing today. If you enjoyed the show, please like and leave a review. I love to get emails from my audience, so keep sending them to info@[unintelligible 00:21:18].com. Tell me what matters to you because I want to provide content that makes a difference for you. As we leave, remember, you create your beautiful life one moment, one step at a time. Bye now.

　　Now I shall never, never leave you again!""Are my eyes really telling me the truth?" answeredthe old man, rubbing his eyes. "Are you really my owndear Pinocchio?""Yes, yes, yes! It is I! Look at me! And you haveforgiven me, haven't you? Oh, my dear Father, howgood you are! And to think that I--Oh, but if youonly knew how many misfortunes have fallen on my headand how many troubles I have had! Just think that onthe day you sold your old coat to buy me my A-B-Cbook so that I could go to school, I ran away to theMarionette Theater and the proprietor5 caught me andwanted to burn me to cook his roast lamb! He was theone who gave me the five gold pieces for you, but I metthe Fox and the Cat, who took me to the Inn of the RedLobster. There they ate like wolves and I left the Innalone and I met the Assassins in the wood. I ran and theyran after me, always after me, till they hanged me to thebranch of a giant oak tree. Then the Fairy of the AzureHair sent the coach to rescue me and the doctors, afterlooking at me, said, `If he is not dead, then he is surelyalive,' and then I told a lie and my nose began to grow.从今往后，我永远、永远、永远不再离开您！”　　“我眼睛看见的是真的吗？”小老头擦着眼睛回答说，“你当真是我亲爱的皮诺乔吗？”　　“是的，是的，是的，真是我！您已经饶恕我了，这不是真的吗？噢！我的爸爸，您多么好啊！……想一想吧，我却是那么……噢！只要您知道多少不幸劈里啪啦地落到我头上，我碰到了多少倒霉事情啊！你想象一下吧，我的可怜的爸爸，您那一天卖掉了您的上衣，给我买了一本识字课本让我上学，我却溜去看木偶戏，木偶戏班班主想把我扔到火里去烤他那只小羊。后来也是他给了我五个金币，叫我带回家给您。可我碰到了一只狐狸和一只猫，它们带我到‘红虾旅馆'，它们在那里狼吞虎咽，后来我一个人夜里离开旅馆，路上遇到两个杀人的强盗。他们追我。我跑，他们追，我使劲跑，他们使劲追。我跑啊跑，他们追啊追。最后他们还是捉住了我，把我吊在一棵大橡树的树枝上。后来一位天蓝色头发的美丽仙女派车把我救走。大夫看过我以后，马上说：‘如果他没有死，那就是还活着。'这时候我忽然说了个谎，我的鼻子就长起来，5 proprietor n.所有人；业主；经营者参考例句：The proprietor was an old acquaintance of his.业主是他的一位旧相识。The proprietor of the corner grocery was a strange thing in my life.拐角杂货店店主是我生活中的一个怪物。

Dorrie is a holistic lifestyle coach and animal communicator/healer based in Auckland, New Zealand. She has a background in sports, beauty therapy, therapeutic massage, reconnective healing, astrology, NLP, EFT, Reiki, Zen, Tai Chi, Kempo and Qigong. She is certified Ren Xue and Yuan Qigong instructor and a gifted Qi therapist. Today's interview is centered around her participation in the documentary "Already Free". Brandon Handley 0:41 4321 Hey, there's spiritual dope. I'm on today with Dorrie Van Roij-Houtappels helped me outdoors. Do you? You got you got Dorrie. Okay. And then. So Dorrie comes Dorrie comes to us by way of a documentary called already free. And this documentary follows both theory. And there's other gentlemen, Norbert no barito. Who they, they, they came together through like, transformative transformative practice of Qigong. And you know, throughout the decade long a practice of this practice in the wrenches system, Dori was able to come to a place of you can say enlightenment, or this kind of awakening. And this is a practice that you've been doing door has been doing for over 10 years now. And it's currently has her own practice offers one Gong classes, and works one on one as a holistic lifestyle coach. And you know, you're out there to inspire people talk a little bit earlier, and women in particular are is one of the you know, that's an area that you're highly focused in right now. And we've been trying to get together now for what three, four months story is exactly. This big thanks for being on the podcast that you're in New Zealand, it's 9am there on Sunday. And I appreciate you waking up to do this today. Dorrie 2:17 Well, I'm very happy to be here, finally. And to really to spend some time together. So I look forward to this as a Brandon Handley 2:25 thank you. So you just say checked out a podcast or two and some of the stuff that goes on. So you may have heard the question you may not have, I like to start us off with the whole idea that we You and I are vessels for, you know, universal creative energy, and it flows through us and to somebody else, like for great meetings. So the idea is that somebody is going to be listening to this podcast today. And there's a message that can be delivered only through you only right now and to that person, what would you say that messages or Dorrie 3:02 that you truly can believe in yourself? And that you, you can find yourself? Because I think that is what we all are doing here on earth? We are really looking for the truth. The true you, isn't it? Who am I? Who am I really and I think that when you look at that, that you really can find yourself. So just not giving up? I'm looking for the ways what? What is beneficial for you to find yourself. Because if I can do it, then you can do it too, because we all are humans. Brandon Handley 3:40 with that. I mean, it's I love I love the message. And you know if you could clarify what you mean, right? What does it mean to find yourself and you know, what did you What have you discovered? about who you are? Dorrie 3:54 Huh? Yes? That's a good question. And of course, a very big question. But for me, when you look at my history in my life, it sometimes hasn't been that easy. And I think we all have our life story. And we all have our challenges to go through life. But what if the biggest challenge would become your biggest treasure in life? And so, what I always ask people is to look deeper and to look in a broader way to life to understand life better. And with that, I mean, it is that we are really feeling and that we think that it is reality at this moment what we are doing but the question is, is it that way? Is that what you think that you are? Is that reality? Or is there maybe a deeper you somebody who is really connected Did with everything I mean, without who is connected with nature, who is truly connected with all the human beings who really feels at home within themselves, and who truly feel what you say in the beginning that creativity, because that is what I, what I have experienced, and also how I've been learned all the information that that person is always there. But you are not aware of that person yet. And so that person, why can't you see that yet? It was because, yeah, we are more running alive with a lot of patterns. And so what are, yeah, I can go deeper. And that may be later I think that too, truly find behind the habitual ways of thinking what you are now doing in your life, to find behind there, your heart, for example, with all the beautiful qualities, which can steer you through life, that has, that can have a great impact on your life, which it also did for me. Brandon Handley 6:19 Now, that's definitely a lot of great stuff in there, right? Feeling feel, especially feeling at home with yourself, as you're mentioning, the idea of the creativity finding this way through, you know, kind of your own internal creative devices. And then the idea that the real you is always there. So let's talk a little bit about that as as, as we as we kind of go through these different layers and your journey there. And I think that where we want to start off with is a little bit about the documentary, right? And what is the what is the where to go the system, right? The the Qigong system that you went through the the ranchu system, right, and how you got involved with that, why you got involved with it, and kind of where that led to for you. Dorrie 7:13 is unbelievably cheap. Would you like me to start with? Well, Brandon Handley 7:16 I mean, so you got involved with the, you know, the ranchu system? What led you there? And what is that? Dorrie 7:23 Yes, well, as you probably also can hear how I speak English. It's not my first language. So I'm coming from the Netherlands. And we emigrated I say, we that is my husband and two children, then they were still at the age from what is it four and six. And we emigrated now 13 years ago to New Zealand. And I really got drawn to this country here in New Zealand. Because of just a feeling what I felt I thought all that nature and it is so so you know what, I just got drawn to it. And also for the children one thing for them to grow up in a more natural way as as being in a very busy country from the Netherlands. And so we went to New Zealand and I so I, I already did their healing work, I did more animal healing, and also for people. And I was looking for a way for myself to relax more to find something nice for me to do in my free time. And suddenly, I just found somebody who was actually growing vegetables and the vegetables at that place. They tasted so beautiful. I never had this that's such a beautiful fetch the boats and I told her, I said, Oh, that is so amazing. Wow, what is that? What kind of secret are you using? And then she said, Yes. Well, when I'm gonna tell you that about it. You're gonna be surprised. And I thought Oh, really? Yes. She said it is undo when she gone. She said, I said Oh, really? Well, I know what she gone was because I did that a little bit in the Netherlands already. So and she Gong is a form. Well, most of the time when I explain it to people, it is Tai Chi. And most of the people are aware what it is. But actually Tai Chi comes from Shi Gong, it's a very old form what we use in in China, China. For movements, we use movements, breathing techniques. But there's it more. You use the hands with it. And yeah, all kinds of things are kind of meditations moving mad at Asian. And so that is what she did there at that moment that apparently she used that also to grow her vegetables with. That was really very interesting, of course for me, so I thought I'd give this a try. Well, that's how my journey there started. And I must say, although I did healing work, I find myself sometimes not in really the best state. And, and even with doing she gone, I noticed when I do it, that she gone in the beginning that I immediately already felt a lot better. That was also very strange for me that I could feel the results over so quick. And so when I was doing the, the sheet wrong, I still had the feeling that I yeah, how do I say that? That I still? I was in a good state, and then I went home, and then my state dropped again. Yeah, and especially when you have little children? I you must be actually in a good state, isn't it? Because they, yeah, they Brandon Handley 11:12 do real quick, if you don't mind what you what do you mean by not in the best date? Like just Dorrie 11:17 yeah. So what what is what is actually a normal state, a normal state is when you are relaxed, calm and natural. And so for me, that is that is normal, there is no other state. And that may be seems now for you, then strange. But when you are going to learn about this, then you then you understand that that's, I think the way you've been brought up that you have learned that it is normal to be angry, it's normal to be very sad, or whatever, because we do have our emotions. And then I now I have learned, yes, of course, we are all human beings. But the question is, do we really have to do that? Maybe we can develop ourselves and grow. So that we learn and that we don't have to do this anymore? And that we can stay in a normal state what I say in a calm, relaxed and natural way. And that it's really possible. Brandon Handley 12:23 It is that where you your your your quote, unquote, normal state was, you know, you would still have anger, was there depression involved as well? Was your normal state is low, would you just say you were kind of in your normal state was low and you you were doing the Qigong. And while you're doing Qigong, you were able to not feel that way you were able to feel this sense of calm that you're talking about this normalization of feelings. Whereas as soon as you stopped it, then you would go right back to the not the best state that you were talking about. Dorrie 13:04 While it is not that that every time is the same, of course, sometime you stay long in that state. Yes, it is that you you notice that when you are doing the Shi Gong, that immediately your whole energy level goes up. And that you can feel very calm and really very relaxed, and you're in beautiful states. And so that is of course, very nice. But and that I think that is also for other modalities when I look at a yoga. So a lot of mothers Tell me when I do the yoga, it's very nice, but then I lose my good state again. Well, that is exactly where their Rancho system comes up. So, we are talking about doing she Gong, but that is not all that is not what what makes it that you reach the state that you go to that state. It's not about reaching, it is about just going there. And so, the rain shoe system, it is really a holistic system. So what do you do there, you learn what your mind is doing the whole day. You learn how to, to find other ways to get yourself back into balance. You learn about nature, because nature is very important to go to that state. We are not so much connected anymore with nature in this ever fast going world. So learning about nature, about the rules from nature, I think that's also important. And then so you learn about your heart. You learn what it is to have an open heart And so the founder from the system, that's young say. And so the, the, he talks about having the five heart qualities. And here we are talking about openness, trust, openness, love, gratitude, and utmost respect and gorging. And so you learn about these qualities. So and so there are nine methods in this holistic system, which is really a lot. So you have the the moving meditations, you have stillness. So you do still practice where you stand still, where you learn to focus, where you learn to be quiet. And then so learning about your mind with this presence, learning with the heart, learning to, to be in the present moment. And so that is all coming together. And you know, one person needs more this one person needs more depth. But I've never seen an holistic system, but it's so broad, what brings it all together to reach higher realization, wisdom and growth. Unknown Speaker 16:19 And Brandon Handley 16:22 so you've got your five heart qualities, you've got your methodology, where Now where was the system developed? Or are you able to share that? Dorrie 16:30 Yes, so the Shi Gong, the first basic information, what Yonsei has, it comes all from China. And it has its its roots from traditional wisdom. And you can think about that wisdom, kung fu wisdom, the Buddhism, the martial arts, yeah. And so there is all that that foundation, but when Yonsei came to New Zealand, so he emigrated from China, to New Zealand, he figured out by traveling also, through all the places also in America and Europe, that people need that they're a different system, and that he really wanted to, to put all the tools in there, what we, as Western people really can good can understand. And so that is when he developed here, the young Gong system here in New Zealand, with these nine methods. Brandon Handley 17:30 Okay. And so I got, you know, my guesses then, like, these are, you know, sounds corny to say ancient Chinese wisdoms, right, but like, these ancient Chinese wisdoms that he has put into place, in a holistic system, right. So it's not just a Chee Gong, there's other pieces and involved in it, and he's put it all together to have a complete system Dorrie 17:54 is, and that is also what you really will feel if you're going to practice it, because I have really done quite some other practices in my life before that, I started this, but I, you know, you every time have questions about life, and so I did one thing and then I had questions, and then I went to the other system, and then I again, other questions came up, and I hoped like that, but when I finally found this system, I really got all the answers that I have in life. And that was so unique. And so, every aspect of life we are talking about. So that is also where you can say teach us about it can be death, it can be about, for example, the COVID. Now, it can be your physical health, it can be anything. And so having there abroad or look with somebody who has reached such a high level of wisdom, it's really interesting to Yeah, for your own growth in life. Brandon Handley 19:01 Were you able to work with him in person? Dorrie 19:05 Yes, awesome. Yeah, no, Brandon Handley 19:07 I think that's, you know, that's highly beneficial. Right. So there's lots of systems online, that you have access to in terms of with a lot of like, even yoga practices or other meditation practices. But the idea of having that person in person with you, and not just online, I think that makes a very big difference. Dorrie 19:29 Um, well, I agree. I did that also, in the one I've stated before the COVID. I felt that and so we all went to retreat from him. And so before the, for example, the teacher training that was every year, two weeks, that we all gathered together, and then in the meantime, we could see until but through the COVID we have learned that it actually isn't the problem because if feeders are live streaming the information, what comes from there, through the whole community, what is built very strongly will receive them also this information. And I think that you, you can make shifts very easily being together, what we call the key and the key field, if that makes sense. I Brandon Handley 20:23 think I think that, uh, there's, there's a, there's that element of trust, and everybody kind of focused at the same time on the same thing, and together, you know, to create or be immersed in that field together. So I think that that that certainly makes sense to me. You've mentioned that some of some of your biggest questions were answered, right? What was like, what's an example of one or two of the big questions that were answered? Some question is, it's very important that your vegetables taste differently to. Dorrie 21:00 Yes, so I learned to grow my vegetables in the way that that lady did. And yes, you can really taste it. And it is with anything that you do in life when you learn to put a chip in it, so that is the energy and it and the mind into it, then your whole meal, what you're cooking for the day can taste completely different and, and that are so many other things that you asked me my questions about life, it certainly had to do about death. That I felt that because I've always been very intrigued in in that are always in my life from a very young age. And so I got there the confirmation that, that it was the way I was feeling about death. And, and now I truly also can feel that after I've made this last bigger step, I don't know how to explain it differently, I must say. Brandon Handley 22:04 Would you say that that the it's a shift, right? Would you say that the place that you're at now is just simply a shift from where you were before? Not necessarily different, but different, right? I mean, it's it's really hard to kind of put in the terms. I was the Buddhist line or Buddhism line I don't know if it's true or not, but you know, before enlightenment, chop wood carry water after enlightenment, chop wood carry water. Right. So but there's wood you there's just a different quality to life, which is Dorrie 22:43 Yes, it is. So yeah, on the one hand, we can say there is nothing special. But on the other hand, yes, it truly is special and why is it special? Because I'm everyday in a good state. And every moment of the day in a good state. Well, that was not something what I could say that I was what you mentioned, of depression, not feeling sometimes really deeply alone in life. And now feeling the feeling that I always feel in a good and an uplifted state and I'm very content and harmonious inside myself. I think that is on the one hand truly a miracle. And to and but on the other hand, yes I am just me so there is nothing special. Brandon Handley 23:36 Dori how long what you know how long did it take you to a recognize that that space was available for you? And then the How long did it take you to maintain that state of being? Dorrie 23:53 Well, to maintain I still I still am the same. So it is still my state like that since that it happened. So not nothing has changed. Only my life has more depth now though Brandon Handley 24:07 when So when did you have that realization for yourself? Like how long a doctor practicing that she gone? Dorrie 24:16 Yes, well, when I give this answer now to you, then people are going to compare themselves with me. We are going to do this and that is actually not what I would like to do. Because you know when I learned that I when I started to do she gone, the system was not yet there. And so the system now is is fully there with all the nine methods. And so people who are now starting they go faster through it. So I did first the senang she gone and when people are doing she gone than they know what I'm talking about. And then I started to do this system that in total, I'm learning from Yancey for now for 12 years. So better the last four years have been really intense for me Brandon Handley 25:13 just in terms of that quality of life that you're talking about the transition and change where you that have entered your life, Dorrie 25:21 or years, but right from the beginning. And so when I would say the first seven years, I made my make huge shifts in growth in my life. And I can also see that in all from all the teachers who are went through this course, we all really have changed completely I can see everybody has had so much growth in their life. Brandon Handley 25:46 No, and that I love that. I think that's great. And I think that it's fair and I understand your reluctance to, you know, state how long your journey has been, simply due to the fact that everybody's journey is their own right. I mean, somebody somebody could get to a certain spate in the blink of an eye, and somebody, it may take 40 years. And and so with any with any practice, the practice is to become more yourself, as you were talking about in the beginning, right, finding out who you are, and being comfortable with who you are, and understanding who you are, versus if so, yeah, versus becoming or attaining this thing within a specified period of time. Dorrie 26:39 Yeah, that's just what you're saying. You never know, of course. What makes it that you are able to make that step has to do with your previous life? Yes, I think so. But on the other hand, I can see so much growth from the people who are who have done this, the system, that is really remarkable. And so, at the moment when I have this big step, and before me, also, there'll be for me, Norberto Rodriguez had the same, which is remarkable, isn't it that two people in the same system, go to that step, and other people are following. So because we are human, so we can we can do that, too. And so I think really, when you when you are in that, yeah, in that flow, and also when you when you receive that theoretic information, I think that a lot is possible that when you already then yeah, you get that push to do it. Right? Brandon Handley 27:47 How would you say this work has impacted your family life? Dorrie 27:54 Yes, very beautiful question. It has changed to the life of, of our family members, for all of us. It all has a lot of impact. And so now our children are at the age of 20, and 18. And so they are really in the face of gaining a lot of information from learning, you know, learning in at university, but then he didn't have changed a lot. Yes, they are so much connected with themselves. And hear well, there is peace and harmony in home. And which i think it's it's a very beautiful thing. And that is the same for my husband. So he has been on this journey with me. And so it's not that he is really doing the course here. But he learns from just me talking about life, of course, and when you are open to that you can grow to. And so we can say that we have made a big change that we all are and we all are every time taking new steps. It's amazing to see your children grow in this way. Brandon Handley 29:19 I think that it's interesting that you bring up to the idea that your husband while he's not in the course with you, he is learning through kind of what you're doing. He's opened himself. One of the questions that I see a lot of people ask is, you know, you're growing dories growing at Dorries rate, and you're growing in like, you know, by by this practice, and maybe he's not growing as fast as you or a perceived, you know, so how do you answer that question? You know, what if my spouse or significant other isn't growing at the same rate or the same way I am, what are your thoughts, sir? Well Dorrie 30:00 I have learned to look inside myself to answer that question. And I think it is also that you can find there your solution to that, because it makes me even more eager to grow more in my life. Because I think when you reach a high level of realization, then you can feel compassion for the other, you can understand the other, you can see the patterns, the struggle where another person goes through in life. And so then you also can, can react in a different way to that person. So, for example, when, when the person next to you becomes angry, you can be upset from that. But that then actually means that maybe you need to work a little bit more on yourself. Because why should I become angry when another person is angry? Maybe I can find different tools to let that person understand life better. And worse, also, what I have done, Brandon Handley 31:14 right, so sounds sounds. Yeah, so sounds like sounds like, you know, if it seems like that growth or activity isn't spiritually aligned with who you are outside of you, you still need to look inside of yourself, right? If it's coming from outside, you know, that anger somebody else is angry, or, or maybe somebody else is in growing it, quote, unquote, the rate that, you know, they, quote, unquote, should be, right, the truth of the matter is that it's still you that needs to grow and needs to find and or create that space to allow for for just long, and again, it's all you Is that what you're saying, Yeah, Dorrie 31:58 yes, every second of the day, you need to have awareness about yourself. So when that will disturb you, when that other person would have that emotion, then it means that you need to come and action and do something about it, to get yourself back to that good state, because something is going on there. Because if you are in a very good state, if you are in that feeling of high realization, you don't need to be bothered by anything. Nothing needs to be happening. There you are, everything is already okay. The way it is, isn't that. Brandon Handley 32:35 Right? Absolutely. We just have a real tough problem. Like, it's a challenge if you haven't done some of this work already. To see that. Right. You know, back to your earlier point, you know, the real you is always there, this person that you're talking about that that you are that this realize being right and and always having this, this this potential state that always exists, right? This potential you that always exists, it's just your ability desire to cultivate it, and sit with it. Is that what you're saying? Dorrie 33:20 Yeah, so that that person who you really are. So I tried to explain it, that person who you really are, is highly connected. Yeah, it's, it's connected with your spirit, your soul. So we call it in the red shoe with this, your shin. And so that is also what you take with you, when you when you die, that's what you always will take with you. And that's part is highly connected with your heart. So, when you were born, you were connected with that part. Yet you you felt all your heart qualities on what I was talking about in the beginning, I trust, openness, love, gratitude, and that through respect, but one when you're going through life, and that is already in a very early stage. You you get experiences in your life, isn't it? It's normal, of course. And so, bit by bit the pure information how you were born becomes vague, we can see. And so you you there get patterns. Now, what are patterns? What are patterns in our life? Well, it is information, what is received, processed and used in the same way. Repeat repeatedly. So let me explain it to you. With let's let's explain that just with with driving a car when I'm Driving a car, you know, can you remember how you in the beginning had to learn to drive the car? You were looking with? With what food do I need to, to bring to use the brake. And then when something what came on the road, you really had to start thinking about that I Oh, wait, I need to do this. And then I need to put my right foot on the brake. And then it happens that my car will stop here. After a while. Yeah, you don't know better. And suddenly a duck comes on the road, and you just you would use your brake, you just do that it becomes automatically Yes, right. And that is actually the same what happens in your life with many, many things. It can be on a habitual way. For example, using now the COVID, we couldn't go outside and you come back, you are at home and you want to go for your dinner and you have your dinner ready. And you think I'm going to sit for in front of the TV, and you sit there and you eat your meal. And the next day you think attipas actually quite nice. It was cozy there. I do that again. But before that, you know, you sit every day in front of the TV, eating your dinner. Yeah. And that is the same things within life. But then on a different way on in the with the consciousness. So maybe you're saying now something to me, like Dorrie. Whereby let's let's Ms. Now think I must have come up with an example. Though, let's do a talk here. And I immediately feel that I can't do that. And so why actually Shouldn't I do that? Because it's something what is naturalism there to do with talk? But no, it reminds me of when I went to primary school, and I had to do a speech there. And that was actually really very scary for me. So now I can't be natural anymore in that. And I just say, No, I don't, I don't have time for that. But actually, what really is there is a lot of fear. And that is a pattern, what is underneath there under the skin, what is going on. And so there are a lot of presence in your life, really a web of patterns. And it can be like that you want to hide for yourself, it can be like that you feeling greed, actually, which is a normal thing. But still, that you feel great. It can be that you are suspicious in life, that are a lot of patterns. While and this is what we learn that when you have awareness in your life in when something happens in your daily life, that you detect what kind of things that are playing, and that you can do something about that, that you can change it. You never can say all now I'm not doing it anymore. That's not possible. It's that it is it is in the brain a shortcut to do things. So we have to do it that way. But we want to have good patterns in life, the healthy beneficial profits, and not the patterns will give us this Yeah, not free and natural life. So when we work on that, when we really work on these patents, then suddenly there comes space in your life that cause more calmness in your life. And so when you then work on these heart qualities, you can suddenly go deeper feeling yourself, which is really very interesting. I would say that Brandon Handley 39:08 that's something that the feeling ourselves. And the snap natural state is something that in western civilization, that we're kind of trained out of. Right, and kind of what you're talking about is these patterns that we develop. We refer to it oftentimes as our programming, right? our default programming is like, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm going to do this thing because of that result that I had that one time or vice versa, like you're saying, right? Like, it's really scary up in front of class, second grade, and I don't want to have to feel that feeling again. So whatever I can do to avoid that feeling. I'm going to keep doing and what you've learned through your practices is to kind of go through see that within yourself and learn how to feel through it. around it and get yourself into a place of this free and natural and what and my guess is that when you're staying free and natural is to express yourself without that fear to be yourself without that. inhibition, and and fear, right? So you're liberate yourself from from something like that Is that Is that about right? Dorrie 40:23 And that is being at home. Brandon Handley 40:25 Yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. So you're doing this practice, now you've got, you've got your own practice. But you also mentioned that you've got an A Women's International charity that you're working on or practice that you're working on, you want to share a little bit about what that is, and oh, yes, thank you, Dorrie 40:44 Toby, on 2022, we are going to start with a foundational program. And yes, it is a charitable trust for women and the name is so she is now. And yeah, it's really beautiful. So the information comes totally from the rain shoe system. But that is that we are really focusing on the female females in the world of female energy in the world. Because I think that that is important. Now, that is that is how I felt it that it is important that the women really can find themselves here. I think they this we can see that also in the leadership in the world, the women really aren't doing very well isn't Brandon Handley 41:33 wasn't New Zealand that had like a really great Prime Minister. I don't know what the is the prime minister, she did some really great you know, you New Zealand went through this with female labour COVID with female leadership, and that was highly regarded. Dorrie 41:51 Yes, very beautiful from jacinda. Arden. And but that is not that is not all that I see in the world, what I can see is that the women, they have the connection, they really have a beautiful connection to spread a message in the world, through their own families. And by being becoming mothers, for example, and to share this with our own family members, because that will beneficial also very much are a man in the world. And I think that we need some more of these feminine qualities to to reach more peace and harmony in the world. Brandon Handley 42:36 When you say feminine qualities. What do you What are you saying? Dorrie 42:41 The the qualities, to use your heart the qualities to connect with each other. I think that women are very good in Connect making connections with each other. And to feel that the heart qualities can can bring. Yeah, profound change in the world. But as I said, we need to first dive into learning how your mind works and to Yeah, to to make that change Brandon Handley 43:14 for ourselves. Right, I forget the term. It's a Buddhist term that talks about the heart mind connection, it sounds like that's what you're trying to do. Right, you're taking you know, whereas I would say that the two differences, probably my own observation would be the two different primary differences between male and females that females lead with their heart, right that the innate connection, and then men tried more to lead with their head, you know, I'm not saying that women don't but just as a as a, you know, which one takes over most time, like men try to lead with like more logic and, and, you know, these these lines versus with their heart, right? So by combining your head and your heart, you're able to really, you've got there's a whole different thing happening there. And Buddhism has a term for it, I forget what it is off top my head. But that sounds to me a little bit what you're doing, you're saying Alright, listen, with your with your feminine qualities which are already innate with you, let's, let's bring that to connect with your mind. So that you know we can really express and, you know, take your place, you know in life, right. Let's go ahead and lead from that space. Dorrie 44:31 Yes, absolutely. And yet, you can see when when I look at the evolution from the women, of course we have changed a lot. But we had to receive our rights as women and but the question is if that went No, it went of course the way it had to grow. But now it is time to come back home more to your authentic A women qualities, because we have been always like, well, it's more like fighting against the man that you also go there, you know, like the like, feeling these same qualities that i think it's it's not, it's not what we really want to do we want to just to come home in our own qualities, and that can bring change for our men also in the society. Brandon Handley 45:25 Oh, yeah, I mean, I think it's funny, like I'm feeling the vision more than I'm seeing it right now what you're saying, and I understand. Definitely, I think a challenge two to present it. But I feel I can feel where you're going with it. And, you know, I think that's I think that's fantastic. And I think that there's the time is certainly now. Right. for for for that. And I think that, um, I think the space is open for it, right that what you're doing the work that you're doing. And I think that it's definitely, definitely necessary. Right? And it's not it's not i think is it's not this combative nature and space and place that women need to be in, they need to be in their own right space. And you know, and it's it's difficult to put, I think, into words, but I understand, I think, where you're headed with it. And so I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how that goes for you. And I think that that's a great work that you're doing and putting out there. Dorrie 46:32 Now, thank you. That's very, very lovely. Yeah. And I can understand that, that you that it's not at this moment for people is that you think, yeah, how is she going to do that. But it is going to be in a very practical way. Because I understand very well that most of the women don't have so much time during the day, actually. And, but you can see that what I have done now, I also have two children and a job and I still am able to do this and to reach the state. So then when I can do that, and everybody in the world can do that, isn't it. And so I thought about this, and I thought, we really need to do this in a practical way that you get the core information and to use it in your daily life. You need to use it in the heat of the moment, you know, when something is happening, then you must be able to have tools to grow and to come back home and yourself. And so yeah, I hope that I can surprise you. Yeah, listen, next. Yeah, I Brandon Handley 47:41 think I think that, um, you know, I think it's, it's the intent to do it, how it has to happen. It's still unfolding for you as my guests, right? It's still unfolding, and it's still presenting itself, but it's in motion. And, and you're a part of it, right? You're, then that's that's really, I think all you can say, right, as it develops and as you present it. So, Dorrie, is there anything else that you would want to cover or share with the listeners of this program today? Dorrie 48:13 Um, well, maybe if I if they haven't seen for sure, they can have a look at the website there. And then they that will lead them to the place where they can have a look at the documentary because especially also when you have physical problems, physical problems, mental problems, quite questions about life, I think it's really worth it that you will have a look at that documentary. And when you are looking that you are just feeling inside yourself, actually, what am I feeling now that I am receiving this information? And that's it, this it tickle myself? Do I feel there something? Because I think that is a call from your heart. Right? Right. So if you do, Brandon Handley 49:05 yeah, I mean, and the movie The documentary is is already free. And, you know, I can share out the link from that, so that people can go check that out. Basically, you know, they follow Dorrie, Norberto and they share the story of the red shoe system, and just kind of the changes that came into both Dorrie and Roberta's life. And you know, as Dora keeps saying is like, hey, if I can do it, you can do it too. It just takes it just takes and it's a practice, right or Dorrie 49:38 Yes. And yeah, what I say when I can do with em, you can do with too, but I really would like to tell to the listeners. When you would have found something that is so profound. How would you spread that in the world? Tell me It is not so easy, of course, because the world is very big. But I really would like to give it to all of you. And that is also my, my goal now in my life to really to tell it to others, that there really is a lot possible when you really want Would you like to develop yourself Brandon Handley 50:20 now apps? Absolutely, I think that there's, there's a place that you can get to and a space that you can get to that. I can't say that I'm in a consistent state that door is talking about, but I have had this experience of being in that place. And you know, that then the desire comes through. Alright, well, how do I keep myself in that space? Right. And and that's, that's, that's the challenge, especially with our busy lives, and all these other things going on these default programs that Laurie was talking about, and all the other ways that we've always been like, well, who do we really want to be? And I think Dorrie, that's, that's the story that you're sharing. So I've got a couple of questions for you. I kind of liken this podcast a little bit to a speed dating, right? Like somebody is going to come on my spiritual speed dating, somebody is going to come on listen to this podcast, it's in search of like, their next spiritual connection, right? The next, you know, somebody they want to date for a little bit in the spirituality space, right? Because there's so much out there, right. And it's a little tongue in cheek, it's a little kind of entertainment, but like, so I just have, like, one. Um, one quick question for you would be, what is our greatest distraction. Dorrie 51:41 Our greatest distraction is our mind. And we need to catch ourselves when we are operating from the construct that says self identity. Our greatest destruction is really our mind, and we are not aware of it. We are not aware of where we are. And that is, when we have figured that out, then we can come home to ourselves. Brandon Handley 52:08 You would say that's kind of the beginning, then to understand that we are you know, we're not our minds, and that our minds is the biggest distraction and starting to pay pay a lot of attention there. Dorrie 52:19 Yes, so but you need to learn that, of course, if you don't know, we, you need to pay attention to them. Nothing happens. So somebody needs to tell you what to do. How to do that? Brandon Handley 52:30 For sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, one of the other things is I do a martial art, you know, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I always bring it up too, right? Like, I could be doing, I could I could do jujitsu my entire life without instruction, and I would never get it. Right. Right. I may, I may get a couple things, right. But by taking the lessons and having somebody that knows how to do it, and training me to do it, I'll then become aware of what I need to do in the right situations at the right time. So that, you know, I can find this calm and space in place versus doing it in a frantic worried, always concerned kind of manner. I have these techniques, these tools that you're talking about with this system that you can put into place. Right so that um, yeah, yeah, yes. Very. Yeah. So Dorrie, thanks again, so much for being on today. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Sunday morning. And you know, so somebody, you know, again, outside of already free if somebody wants to come check out what Dorrie is up to, where could they go to find out more about you and your organization that you have planned? coming for? 2022? Dorrie 53:39 Yes, so well, the organization from rain shoe, it is the rain shoe international.org. But rain shoe, you spell that r e n and then x UE it's a little bit tricky. It's a little bit tricky sometimes for people. Well, and for 2022. The we don't have already our professional website up but we do have the the website up for donation for the charity. And you can have a look there at She is now.net. There you can find our information. Brandon Handley 54:18 Thank you, Dorrie. And are you taking clients now yourself as a coach? Dorrie 54:24 Well, because you mentioned that in the beginning, at this moment, we are just producing all the content for Yeah, for the launch from a she is now but after that, I probably will do that again, my, my personal coaching because I do that Brandon Handley 54:42 for people all over the world. So that's on hold a little bit right now until you've got this other piece as well. Fantastic Dorie, I know that I know that that's going to be very successful for you. I can you know, I've got a great feeling for it. Myself, and when you describe it, it just feels feels very Yeah, absolutely. It feels very good. clear for you. Right and that that path is is is open for you. So thanks again for being on today. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

(seaso) A story of an Engineering student in India during the COVID pandemic https://bio.link/zihaku AI transcription (OMG this is almost perfect!) Hello, and welcome to the open minded podcast. Hope you all are having a great day. And welcome to another episode of the busy lynnie series, an episode where I talk about random news and other stuff. So today I'm going to talk about COVID. And, and how it affected me being a college student. So let's go all the way back to December of 2019. When COVID was supposedly shown up in the state of Ohio and China, to be honest, it really didn't matter to me, it didn't affect me, heck, I didn't even know about its existence until of course after January of 2020 when the virus was seeping into India little by little still, it didn't actually affect me I think it was first discovered in Delhi if I'm not wrong way far from the place I live in. So my life for so far the same getting up now taking the college bus going to college at 8am going back home at 4am you know all the normal stuff. But that's when COVID started to come more and more inside India. And at march of third if I'm not wrong, India was put inside a nationwide lockdown. Now, to be honest, even though it is you know, COVID is horrific, killing people 1000s of people every single day and ICT has killed millions of people as of now within two years. At that moment, I was you know, happy because not because of fact of COVID because of the fact that I didn't have to go to college anymore. I was happy that I could stay in my house. Now for a lot of people they found it really they were really pissed and annoyed that they had to live inside their house. But personally, I as in being an introvert I prefer being inside my house inside my room playing games and watching YouTube and stuff like that. So I welcome this new type of lifestyle. I was happy for almost July, March, April, May, June, July, I was like happy enjoying living my life playing games and stuff, wasting tons of time watching YouTube and other stuff. But after a July, no, after like three or four months of me enjoying I've started to really hate being inside my house for some reason. I couldn't believe as an introvert as as a person who enjoys being inside their house. What is going on? Why? Like, I didn't find anything exciting anymore. Like, I Oh, okay, there are kings. I mean, I could play a few games or other su too. I can watch a few videos. But aside from that life was pretty boring, right is just one day would pass without you even knowing. And that's why I started this podcast. Like I wanted to do something I thought like okay, I have been staying inside my house for so long. I have not spoken English, right, English is not my main language. So having spoken it for a long time, I have lost touch now what can I do to improve my grammar and my English, obviously, one of the ways is to talk more English. And that's why I had the start of podcast because I started to listen to some podcasts here and there. And I thought it was a great idea to start my own podcasts to improve my grammar and English communication skills as well. So that's when this all started, by the way, I was in my second semester of my first year when this you know, in 2020 at July, so the best thing was my second semester, the my college that I am studying in literally pass, right I passed second semester without writing a semester and exam. I was really happy for them. They just passed me by taking my internal mocks, right? internal mocks and considering that and they gave me a CGPA like eight out of 10, which is pretty pretty good too, in my opinion. So currently now I'm in my third semester, which is the beginning of my second year. Actually, it's my end of my third semester, but my third Semester Exams are currently going on right now. And that's pretty much what I'm going to talk

Visualize Your Journey Through Life, It's The Key To Success with Halle Eavelyn One of the hardest things I ever see is the ability to be present. We wanted to take that magic pill and be I'm thin. And we're done. It just it does not work like that. The reason is that it isn't the destination in the first place. It's a journey. The reason you stay present in every moment is that you're not trying to get anywhere, you're just are and are is the destination. About Halle I was an atheist until I went to Egypt the first time, and then, literally, my life changed in one breath. And that's the truth – we are all one breath away from enlightenment; the question is: Which breath? So I knew if I could get you to a place of letting go, of releasing the resistance and the tight hold you have on the controls of your life (that thing that our egos tell us is the only thing keeping us sane), you could get on the path of your own best journey in your business and your life. When I first started using the tools I had been taught on my own “seeker's quest,” I began to be guided in that work, too. It's like your soul talks to my soul and tells me what to say that gives you the most transformation. For a long time, I didn't fully trust that guidance, because (perhaps like you) I'm so logical, and I want to be able to SEE it to believe it, but it's become second nature to me now, so I no longer question how, I am just fully in gratitude that I hear the answers you need to shift. However we work together, I'm looking forward to sharing the next part of your journey with you. www.halleeavelyn.com www.feedingfatty.com Full Transcript Below Visualize Your Journey Through Life, It's The Key To Success with Halle Eavelyn Tue, 6/15 12:03PM • 55:08 SUMMARY KEYWORDS people, energy, feel, terry, life, intention, hands, roy, long, podcast, talk, moved, accomplish, book, empowered, thought, love, eat, set, body SPEAKERS Halle, Terry, Roy Barker   Roy Barker  00:23 Hello, and welcome to another episode of feeding fatty. This is Roy, this is Terry. And so we are podcast we are journaling my progress, sometimes progress sometimes regress through this wellness in. No when we talk about wellness, we talk about a lot of things its diet not being on a diet, but what we eat our exercise our mindset, sleeping, I mean it's everything water intake, all of these things combined. And so even though we are chronicling my journey, Terry is my trusty sidekick and helper.   Terry  01:00 And a little bit about me to see.   Roy Barker  01:05 We also do have professionals that come from time to time to help us with these things to show us, give us some good feedback heads up, you know, give us some new things to think about and today is no different. Terry, I'll let you introduce,   Terry  01:17 we have been looking forward to this one with Holly Evelyn. She is a transformational coach, a speaker and a writer who helps people break out of their old patterns so they can live their best lives. And Holly, I'm gonna let you go more into detail. I'd rather hear you discuss your background and, and all of that, and welcome so much to the show.   Halle  01:39 Thank you, thank you so much. I have just so enjoyed the little bit that I've gotten to know you both. And I think that your your journey into your own, you know, deeper versions of yourselves and like bigger versions of yourselves not physically, but emotionally and and mentally is, is so admirable. I think there's a lot of people who are waking up now to the idea of, you know, it's time to look for something more than just, you know, let me get married, get a great job, have kids grow old and die. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However it is it can be bigger, and you guys are on that arc. And I really loved that. And I just wanted to mention that right up front.   Roy Barker  02:22 Well, thank you. Yeah, it's, it's it's exciting. I mean, you know, I'm an old dog trying to learn some new tricks. It's it's kind of a fun journey. Some things work, some things stick. But, you know, we're finding a lot of great things.   Terry  02:35 Yeah. And even though I mean, some people start out, trying to work on the physical aspect. And man, it goes so much deeper than that. It's just all this inner work. And then you're like, Oh, my gosh, I don't want to know that about myself. I don't want to know everything you find out. It's all nuts. But let's say it's   Halle  02:56 okay. Well, I was gonna say it's really what you're saying is is correct what it's like, while you're in what I call like, in the swim, right? So when you're in that, that primordial soup of I don't want to look at these ugly places in myself. And I'm not talking about like, you know, I don't like my thighs. I'm talking about like, the ugly places like in our internal experience, you can feel like crap as you're going through it. You know, I was on with a client earlier today. And she was saying to me, like, I know it's growth. But it really is just annoying my energy. And I totally get that. It's like, it's no fun when you're in the swim. However, when you get to the other side of it, you know, and I'll tell at least one personal story that I can think of that will we'll talk about that specifically. But when you're on the other side of it, it's like, Oh, thank goodness, I did that. Oh, I'm so grateful that I went through that and Oh, the me that I am now is so much better, and so much braver and so much more capable of handling all that comes my way on a daily basis. And and then that makes a big difference too.   Roy Barker  04:03 And I think it's good to reminder about that about handling things and changing. It doesn't happen overnight, as much as we wish that it would that, you know it's a progress. And I think you said like look into the future that if I keep this mindful practice, it gets better day in day, every day that I practice it, it just gets better and being present   Terry  04:23 is so important. Just being able to feel it and be there in the moment.   Halle  04:31 Yeah, and let's talk about that for a second, Terry, because in my experience, that's one of the hardest things I ever see with clients is their ability to be present. So first of all, did you know that goldfish is have attention spans longer than we do? goldfish his attention span is nine seconds and hours over the last, you know, 20 years or whatever. No surprise has shortened from 12 seconds to eight and the internet attention span Like how long you can focus on something on the internet without distraction is 3.8 seconds. So we're like, you know, you're we said earlier, like, we wanted to take that magic pill and like, Oh, I'm thin now lovely. And we're done. And seen. And it's just it does not work like that it does not work like that we say that it does. We hope that it does we want it to, but it doesn't work like that. And the reason is that it isn't the destination in the first place. It's a journey. And the reason you stay present in every moment is that you're not trying to get anywhere, you're just you just R and R is the destination. And that's really weird for people. Right?   Roy Barker  05:43 It's tough because we are so focused on the finish line. And I think you know, and this applies to our health, wellness business, just life in general is that we could be so focused on the finish line that we miss all the great stuff in between. And then we get to the finish line and we feel very unsatisfied. I think because we missed all the stuff in between and it's it's kind of a hollow victory a lot of times.   Halle  06:10 Okay, so my story about that is a little sad. I was standing at or sitting in a room filled with my entire family, my extended family, and my aunt and uncle who are no longer with us, we're standing on the Dyess being lauded for their 50th anniversary. And my aunt Shirley said, I look around this room. And I think Where did 50 years ago, I have these moments. I mean, they had plenty of money, they crossed the you know, the the Atlantic on the QE to multiple times, they lived in this stunning place in Corona Del Mar, like overlooking which some of the most expensive real estate in the United States overlooking the ocean, they raised three children they had like everyone that was in the room with me, my whole family was like, you know, like, mostly because of them. And my aunt was now the matriarch of the family. And yet, she's saying I can only remember a few of those moments. And in fact, a few years later, she ended up maybe 10 years later, she developed dementia. And by the time she died, she could only speak in what we called Word salad, which was complete gibberish that had like cadences, that new sound that sounded familiar. And I remember at that age, just really looking at her and listening to her and it hit me like a ton of bricks, I will not live my life like that. I do not want to look back over 50 years. So I'm going to give your listeners a good tool. So we didn't even talk about all of this, but I'm a transformational coach. Right. My job is to help people transform their lives and not just transform their lives. But you know, when you stop worrying about food, clothing and shelter, you can start thinking about art. It's what I call the Renaissance theory. And so when you're busy saying how do I feed my family? or will there be enough this you can't focus on creating masterpieces I believe that that's why the Renaissance is so beautiful, because the the the work has come down to us as as so a beautiful and enduring and magnificent is that the artists didn't have to worry about where their money was coming from it was fully funded by people who had more money than they knew what to do with. Okay, so how does that translate into our lives, when you get the stuff out of the way that is the worry, the doubt the fear, the uncertainty, the the the victimization of yourself the stories that you tell of your, you know, the failures that you've had. And when you stop all of that, and you move into the present moment, all of that goes away. Because in this present moment, right now, right now, all our needs are met, right? And now, and now. And now and it's our job moment to moment to be in that present. So a good tool for this when you're just like crazy, crazy busy, and you're like oh my gosh, I can't like nothing's going right, what can I do? Pause and just take set the intention of being centered, and what is being centered. It's grounding yourself with your feet firmly on the floor. It's aligning your spine and long column with your neck and your head right over the top of your spine. It's moving your posture, even if you're still sitting so that your feet are firmly on the floor. And so that you're you're sitting erect and then you take three deep breaths and it will help if you breathe into your belly. A lot of people breathe into their chest and that's very shallow breathing. And I call this the breath of life because it when you move it down into your belly when your belly expands on the inhale and then releases Exhale, it changes, it floods your body with oxygen. And I believe that it literally can add years to your life to do this. So if you take those three deep belly breaths and set the intention that you are centered, and call your energy back from anywhere that it was before this now moment, you can spool it up using like thinking of it as like you're, you know, rolling it up like a ball of yarn, or my girlfriend likes to say, she wants to slurp it up like a strand of spaghetti. It doesn't matter what you do, it's just a momentary thing, where you're not thinking about the meeting you had that morning, or the fact that you have to pick your kid up in an hour or whatever, you're just bringing everything back to center. And when you do that it takes it took longer to describe it than it would to take to do it, believe me, it's really it's it takes exactly as long as those three deep breaths, and then you'll find, you're now present. And another way of getting present that's really easy is go from the outside to the inside. So you want to look like at the coffee cup that's in front of you, or the desk that's in front of you, or the cell phone that's sitting there. And you want to just notice without any judgement all of the things around you, and then begin to turn your attention inside, check in with your body. How does your stomach feel? How is your breathing? Does any do any parts feel out of alignment? Can you get them back into alignment, and then you'll be able to turn further within if you would like but going from that outside in is another way to help be present. And a third way is to literally stop and smell the flowers focus on one thing, a totally mundane moment, like how does that rose smell? or What does that book cover look like? Or whatever it is that is like right there in your face in that moment that can help you to stay present and four or five or six of those moments every day. You will not be like my aunt standing there going where did the last 50 years ago, you'll feel all 50 of them one moment at a time.   Terry  12:17 Oh, that's great. Because I mean, I already feel that I already feel like where did all of that go? You know, we're just kind of getting Wait, I'm just getting up there. Roy always says, Yeah, she's not aging. I'm the one that's age. But now I already feel that, you know, we've we've got older parents that we're trying to you know, in that caretaking mode, not not living with them, but trying to get all the logistics down and all the family dynamics and all ever everybody's dealing with that that in a different way, you know? And we Yeah, I don't even know where was going with that. But you know, no, it's   Halle  12:58 okay. My mother in law moved in, and my mother in law moved in in February, she's Cuban. And it's a really weird, you know, it's like this, these two. I mean, I'm, I'm Lucy right and in, in in I Love Lucy and my Cuban family is like, you know, the Ricky ricardos Desi Arnaz. And I'm just like, I mean, and I live in Miami now. And it's like, I feel like this, you know, fish out of water. But when my mother in law moved in, there's other responsibilities that come in, you know, we're never going to be able to take a fast walk ever again. Well, you know, until she passes, and by that time, I'll probably be slow. I know. So it's like you're you, you know, we have to spend an extra, like, if we tell her to be ready at noon, we really have to tell her to be ready at quarter till, because she will have rushed around to get ready earlier in the day. But now she's sitting and taking her time. And if you say to her, you know it's time to go, then there's the 15 minutes of the things that she forgot to do and now needs to take care of just like you have to kind of adjust for all of that stuff. And it can feel I know I've a lot of clients who are caretakers for elderly people. And it can feel like such a slog, and such a stressor. And my mother in law, by the way is the easiest human being in the world to have living with us. She's an amazing housemate. But but there are differences. There are nuances. You're not you know, you can't walk around naked anymore. You know, there's there's just situations that are a little bit different. And for people who are taking care of elderly parents, or also you know, if they're taking care of, of disabled children, it's the same thing. It's like an ongoing thing, where you're always the caregiver, and who is going to take care of you. And a lot of people gain a lot of weight during that time, because they're eating emotionally because it's the only solace that they have under those circumstances.   Roy Barker  14:57 Yeah, the other thing I think, you know, kind of back a little bit in the conversation that we spend so much of our right this moment worrying about something in the future something in the past. And, you know, I, I will say that the science is pretty clear on the fact that our brains as complicated as awesome as they are, we can, you know, really deal with one thought at a time. And you know, when you're out to eat, if you're with somebody, you can either have a conversation and be focused with them, or you can be on your phone, but you can't be on your phone and be paying attention, or you get fragmented pieces. And so I think that's the other thing is that, you know, I feel like that's what makes our time go is that we're so future focused on, you know, I've got that report due next week. This is coming up. And another trick that I've kind of picked up over the years. Luckily, I learned this a long time ago, but it's just jot stuff down, because I don't have to be trying to retain it. And in the business world, there's a lot of people that you know, don't write list write list, and I think we have to do what helps us but always just don't feel like I have the worry and the stress, if I just get it down on paper, I can always go back and look at it instead of you know, instead of constantly playing it through your head, I got this at three, I got that if I got this tomorrow, write it down, you don't have to think about it again, just look at your paper.   Halle  16:26 Yeah, so I have three different sets of things, I have my calendar, which will keep my meetings and stuff. But I also have a if you saw my desk right now you would laugh, I have this crazy set of post it notes just like out in the middle like covering my desk. And those post it notes, keep Top of Mind stuff that I need to do like now. And every couple days, I'm like sorting through the post it notes and I'll throw away the ones that are done. And then I do I have like, I have a whole set of notes on my phone. And I love keeping notes on my phone because I can talk into it. And that, you know, and all of these things, the value of them is what brings you peace of mind. So for example, let's say that the post it notes, which kind of make my desk look messy, was my desk in my office, so I can do whatever I want. But let's just say that, that I had been raised to keep a really clean desk and to keep you know, and you know, and that I believed that an unclean desk was the sign of an unclean mind. Right, that was my story that I told myself, then the very system that I've got that would work, I would be telling myself that I would be feeling guilty every single time or wrong making myself wrong every single time by my very system. So the question isn't what system do you have? It's how do you feel? You know, a lot of people are like, we're, you know, they're like, a lot of people are into procrastination, right? They're, they're like, they'll put everything off. And I accomplish a Okay, a crazy amount. I really do. Like every two weeks, I'm with my accountability partner. And the list that we send back and forth of everything we've done the previous two weeks looks like what wouldn't take a normal person two months, how does that happen? It happens because I love it. And I love doing it. But that acknowledgment that very acknowledgement by having an accountability partner, by choosing to list out all the things that I've done over the last two weeks, that is a reward in itself. And then I have this great system that I love, I call it the cycle of success, I'm going to share it with all your peeps right now, because this is good for all of this stuff. And it will actually kill procrastination. The system is you take your big old to do list because what you're talking about ROI is like it reminds me of that scene in Harry Potter where like Dumbledore takes the wand and he touches it to his forehead and the thoughts come out and go into the pensive. So that's what we're doing. We're taking the thoughts out, we're like sticking them in the iPhone, right? That's our magical technology. So when you do that, you end up with this list that's like this, and then that makes you feel like crap every day. You know, everybody I know who wants to accomplish a lot has a never ending to do list. So what do you do to fix that you create what I call the empowered to do list and the empowered to do list is exactly three items long. And the rules are, you have to be able to accomplish all of the items in a single day. So the tasks have to be broken down into small enough increments that they're like your wet your list might your to do list might say redo my website, which you're empowered to do list would say contact the graphic designer to have the logo redone for example, because that's something that's a phone call, you could do that in one day. And then the second rule is that it can only have three things on it at a time. And the third rule is that at least two of them have to do what I call move the business needle. means return on my phone calls, check all my emails and, you know, write up an idea that I had, none of those are moving your business forward in that moment, right? So it's not the mundane stuff. It's just like the stuff that you intend to do, because we tend to have way too much going on at the same time. And then we feel like we never get anything accomplished. So you check your three items off on the empowered to do list, which you can do in one day, because they're set up that the tasks are small enough, how do we eat the elephant one bite at a time. So we have elephant bites on our empower to do list and then at the bottom of the empowered to do list is one last item reward. And now you can take whatever it is you were doing to procrastinate. check Facebook, for a half an hour binge watch two episodes of the show that I'm like madly in love with, go have a walk in the park, whatever it was that you were procrastinating with. I had one guy play Minesweeper for an hour. That was what he was doing to procrastinate when he moved it to his empowered to do list. As his reward, he would like come in, get all three things done immediately, and then just play Minesweeper for an hour. And then you can rinse and repeat with the next three items or rock on with your day knowing that you've accomplished things, right.   Terry  21:23 I remember hearing you talk about that on one of your podcast episodes. And I was like, I do I have I play this game two dots. It's mindless. Just I mean, yeah, right. laughs at me, but it helps. I don't know what I mean. It helps me kind of get my thoughts aligned sorta are in   Halle  21:47 it, Terry? It's not that don't don't No, no, just for any of this. It does. Because it's using it's giving your brain the parts of your brain that you're using to get stuff done. It's giving that part a break. It's like you've plugged your batteries into the wall by playing to.or listening to episodes of your goddess awaken. I am so happy.   Terry  22:12 Oh, behind I haven't. But we I love them. They're very   Roy Barker  22:17 it's the main you know, we're taking a digital break where the the lady is holding up the book that she's reading with the the phone inside? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I   Terry  22:28 do that. Like, oh, I'm gonna read   Halle  22:33 well, we The thing about the the thing about the empowered to do list that I love is it gives you permission to accomplish certain things. And then it Pat's you on the head and rewards you when you do it. The problem with the to do list is we will just go from thing to thing to thing to thing. And we're never getting we never feel like we're accomplishing anything, because we never pause to recognize that we have accomplished so much. So I mentioned my accountability partner earlier that when I write that list, oh my gosh, I have to I have to dig deep because it's like two weeks. Oh my gosh, what did I do? And I look and I Oh, I did that. And that and and that and that. And now I feel fantastic. And so even maybe just having an accountability partner can help make a big difference for you as well. The important thing though, to remember and this is this comes back to the you know, the purpose of your podcast, your your feeding Fatty, I think that is hysterical title, you're feeding fatty concept, that our bodies are not fat. Our bodies are a result of our fat brains. And our brains are fat because we lie to them all the time and tell ourselves how much we suck how wrong we are and what we're not doing right. So when you feel into the energy of does the system work? It's not does the system work? It's how do I feel about the system? How do I fit does this make me feel good people like I always tell people, why do I have bumper sticker coaching? Because it's small enough to fit on a bumper sticker and you'll remember it in an emergency and why is that important? Because if I tell you a 12 step brilliant process to fix something and you can't remember the first three steps now you feel bad, right?   Terry  24:34 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love that bumper sticker coaching. Well, no. Well, here's   Halle  24:41 a sorry. reframe for you, Terry with with you. Just you just said Look, you're like oh, I'm listening to your goddess awakened for pleasure. I'm a little behind. Now you're feeling bad because   Terry  24:56 your mind I know. Right?   Halle  25:00 So so so that's not good either. So Okay, so here's here's, here's your reframe for feeling behind. Are you ready? I'm writing it down. Your reframe for feeling behind is to keep this mantra like close to your heart. I am exactly where I need to be right now. Because we're ever you are, that is exactly where you need to be right now. And we will make up all this stuff. Right? If I had come out with that podcast A month later, you'd be ahead. But I didn't like your mind.   Terry  25:35 But it's all arbitrary. No, and I was kind of upset because I just like, blew through them right away. You know, when we first talked a couple of months ago, I was like, Oh my gosh, and they're, they're just the right amount of time to because, you know, sometimes they can get long, but you know, 15 to 30 minutes ish. And with the bumper sticking, bumper sticking bumper sticker coaching, and oh, my God, I just blew through them. I was like, Where's the rest?   Halle  26:04 They're coming, they're coming. The long episodes are the hour long episodes, or if I have a guest, or if I do a trauma clearing for somebody live on the show, I allocate an hour because, you know, you can't just clear trauma and 30 seconds, however, in an hour, we can accomplish a real ton. So it's, it's I love the feedback. Thank you. Thank you so much. I   Roy Barker  26:28 really appreciate that. Yeah, we just listened this morning. I think it was the one on women empowerment, and you're stuck in bad situation. So this is the sisterhood. Yes. That is like the latest episode. Terry, you're all behind. And I thought it was interesting. The one thing I've always heard all my life is I'm not going to be spoiler alert, give it away, but I'll let people listen. But the one part you talked about a particular person that was married to another particular person. And you know, the old saying rings true that whenever you marry for money, you will earn it every day. I'm sure that she has. Yeah. Well, let's talk about let's talk about energy for a minute. Because, you know, for people that don't know, we talked to you a long time ago, we tried to do a taping for a business episode that I ended up vanishing. Like I Dream of Jeannie. And but the other thing that we've kind of done in between here is we went and did. Terry, you tell him you say what it was? Oh, no, I   Terry  27:40 want you to say because it sounds so good when you say Reiki. Reiki, yes, Reiki whatever   Roy Barker  27:47 that thing is, we did that. And it was it was amazing. Because I'm, you know, I'm a cowboy kind of guy. grew up here. I've been around here my whole life. And so I love you, Terry. Yeah, it really is. So me going to one of these things. It's it's, it was not out of my comfort zone. I was ready to travel. It's just not in my norm. You know that in the meditation and all that? Yeah. Anyway, I was just, I was mystified about, you know, the one thing she did was hold her hand over my head. And I felt like my head was on fire. I mean, the heat that she drew out of me or we had together or whatever, I don't know how that is. But then the other thing too, is like, I've got kind of a bad shoulder. When she started migrating, she went to the troubled spots on my body first. And just the whole thing was very interesting. I were I'm going to go back I think Terry has been back for her second round. But so let's what's what's your take on our and, you know, I know people think about like, our, our car mechanic energy, like, you know, if I'm putting negative stuff out and saying negative things about people, all that comes back to us, but, you know, there's also this energy and balance of just moving in life. Mm hmm.   Halle  29:09 Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love this topic so much. And I love that you are getting into this for yourself. Because, you know, this is what I was saying is this is there's so much more to life than just what we see like in front of us on a daily and it's such an opportunity to, you know, when we when we go down the rabbit hole of any kind of energy work, it's often just so powerful. And I'm gonna back up a second and and talk a little bit about why I feel that I have the right to discuss this because I think it's going to be important. So I was an atheist until I was in my mid 30s. And not only an atheist, but an atheist who had panic attacks about death, because I just thought there wasn't anything after my body ceased to exist. So that was like the most awful thing I could think of. And then when I went to Egypt for the very first time, I had a spiritual awakening. And that spiritual awakening took me from being an atheist into being this deeply spiritual. God is everything everywhere, God is like breathing person in a single breath. And it was like, so huge and powerful and amazing, singularly the most incredible moment of my life. So far, cuz I'm definitely open for more. And it really, that from that moment to this, I basically become a different person. And my work now is all about energy. And I mean, I have a background in theater and multimedia and real estate and travel. And now I coach and I use every single bit of it, what I use the most, that I didn't understand that I had, was my intuition. And I've come to the understanding that what we believe are our intuitive gifts, which we either have or don't have, is not true. Everyone has intuitive gifts, everyone is, is gifted in the same manner, however, to the extent that you were raised to shut that down, which a lot of parents shut the kids down, right, and your imaginary friend was probably, you know, an intuitive thing and may or may not actually have been in the room with you. And yet, your parents will tell you like, that's not okay, or, you know, shut that away, or you had a tendency to, you know, see dead people or whatever, I've heard all of the things from people who have been told, like, you know, they're there, it's like, you come into the world, and it's almost like you're wearing your, your skin on the inside and your nerve endings on the outside. And depending on who you are, and how you have been raised. That can, you can be told that that's a very bad not okay thing. And the world will shut you down just in general, because they, your, your school, your church, your government, whatever everybody wants you to walk the path that they have outlined, good or bad, I'm not judging anybody, I'm just saying, people don't like it, when you call her outside of the lines, it's confusing. And, and it can be very upsetting for people, especially people who are like more, you know, structure oriented. So all of that to say that we all are made completely of energy, like completely, and everything is energy. This, you know, this podcast is being broadcast from three different physical homes, everybody's got a different microphone, we all have computers, doesn't matter. All of that is also energy. And when you get into the physical atoms of what looks like a solid structure, like a table, it's, it's mostly made up of empty space. And the atoms in that empty space are the same atoms that make us up as well. And there is a difference, because you know, the table does not have a creative life force that that is sentience, but it does have the energy of the creative life force, so everything is energy. Now, I was wondering when you said Reiki whether I was going to talk about this, and I've decided to so I've never said this out loud before because it's not something that I like get paid to do. But I was told a couple of years ago that I am a Reiki Master. I've never studied Reiki However, when I'm in a hospital, my hands automatically just come up and go and do Reiki on people who are sick, and they get better. I've seen it happen often enough that I'm like, Okay, this is a thing, I am not making it up. And I believe that that gift expanded, because when I was in Egypt, having my spiritual awakening, I started blessing my food. So I would hold my hands up, and I would attempt to activate the energy in my hands with my thoughts, so that I could connect to my food. And if you ever hear me pray over a dinner table and I do pray over all my dinner tables, what it's what I say is, I'm so grateful and I'm grateful for the food made with loving hands and the food going from farm to table and as I do that I am energetically activating my hands connecting with that food because that food is full of atoms and molecules that make me up and when I claim that that is all turning into love and light in my body, it really will help me shift what you know what what we focus on expands. So when we spend all that time going on on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, what do you think that's doing to our bodies? Where is that chocolate cake going? Exactly. Whereas when you claim that it is turning into love and light in your body, when you are blessing it when you are connecting with it, and when you are deliberately present moment Terry enjoying it, it shifts how it processes in your body. Now, I don't understand all of it. But I understand that it is true. And my programming growing up was always don't eat that you're going to get fat, which is very confusing because Jewish families do this thing where on the one hand, it's don't eat that you're going to get fat. And on the other hand, it's Did you finish your dinner, you're going to get sick, if you don't eat all your food. Both of these things are going to this Did you know there were starving children in China. So all these things are going at the same time. And so you're gonna get really confused. And if you have strong personalities in your life, like I did, you get really confused. So I've spent my whole life going or any food that I put in my mouth, other than lettuce will make me fat. And I was guess what I was fat my whole life my whole life. When I was six, I was a size six, when I was eight, I was a size eight, when I was 12. I was a size 12. I thought that was how it went. I was sure by the time I was 16, I was about a 1416. And I stayed there until I was in my mid 40s when I finally came into a new understanding, which by the way was for me doing 12 step for food. And what I came to understand is that control is the master addiction. And when I learned that it didn't matter what else I did, as long as I gave the control over to my higher power. And once I started doing that, everything began to shift in my life in a really, really good way. And Roy, in my opinion, everything that I said everything. And everything we talked about all the throughout this entire conversation is all about energy, because it's what are you putting out in the world? And what do you expect to get back? Or do you think that that Reiki would have worked as well on you, if you had said this doesn't work? This is crap. As she put her hand on, you know, there's no way   Roy Barker  37:23 you had to, you have to have an open mind and be receptive. And it's it's funny, because I just wrote down the three words that as we started doing that I had had, I'd had one of the worst weeks that I've had in the last couple years. Like I had a one time on a Tuesday and a Thursday. And I went Thursday night and I almost didn't go because you know, I was just out of sorts, but I went. And so as she, as she started doing her thing, you know, I kept my eyes closed and was just kind of meditating. And it was like I was between sleep and consciousness. But I just that's called the theta state. Yep, yeah, I just might, it was all also to my chest just swelled up, I could just feel everything welling up in me. And then the three words that came to mind were patience, peace and strength. It was the most bizarre, you know, half because those are the words I needed to hear at that time. But I just felt, yeah, it was kind of like an out of body out of body experience almost that, anyway, that, that and the other thing that I've started doing when I meditate is you know, people kind of snicker about the old, you know, the picture of the person sitting there with their hands like that, but you know, what I have become to find is, that's, that's my antenna, or that's me, you know, I love it all bringing it all to me. And I just feel like I'm much more receptive if I can put my hands in that pose that it's like I'm welcoming in, you know, whatever God has given me at that time.   Halle  39:01 And the mudras, which are the different positions of the hands, each one actually has, and I couldn't tell you what each one has a different meaning. So when you see the pictures of the Buddha, and the Buddha is doing this, this is a giving and receiving pose of the Buddha's. So that's, that's this particular mudra and it is a mudra. But to but the normal mudros for meditation, you you bring your thumb and forefinger together in a circle, why are you doing that you are creating a closed circuit, so does a closed energy circuit that is allowing like a circular experience of energy where it goes out and it goes in and so you're having that flow, and then there are different mudros you know, like, some like like this one, or like two fingers up, and then the rest of the fingers close. Those are all different moods that you could use. And another thing that you can do To create that closed circuit, but also to allow the flow is to clasp your hands as well and turn them over so that your palms are facing up and sit with your hands in your lap like that. That's another way to create that antenna thing. It's not coming through your fingers, it's actually coming through your crown chakra. Right? And it's so it's the full of flow of that energy is coming through. I mean, it's too literal to say like looks coming from the heavens into the top of your head and going throughout your body. And yet, that's actually a really comforting way of thinking about it. And let me ask you about that what you said about welling up so you were talking about your like your heart welling up, did it feel like a bunch of emotions welling up? Or did it feel like your heart was very full, which was it?   Roy Barker  40:49 I think it was very full, it wasn't welling up emotionally. But it was just like, rap prior to these words coming to me, it was just like all the energy. You know, I don't know if it was that it's like, everything just kind of rushed up in here. And I just felt no puffed up empowered. Okay. Like, that's kind of like, you know, super how you think super great.   Halle  41:15 I love it. I love it. Okay, so Joe dispenza, who is a chiropractor turned brain scientist who loves all this stuff. Joe dispenza talks about this idea of what he calls heart coherence. And heart coherence is now he's he so he works with a company called heart math. And they will they do biofeedback. So they've actually done lots and lots of tests, because the tests they've done are too crazy. Like, if you weren't hooked up to machines that were empirically proving what he's saying, you'd be like, yeah, that's a bunch of crap. But they're there. They hook people up to the computers, and the computers record the information. And that's how they know. So for example, they did DNA tests. And this is at the beginning of the book, breaking the habit of being yourself if anybody's interested. Okay. Well, and you haven't read it yet. All right, well, okay. Now, so. So this is you're gonna, you're gonna be like, run, don't walk to this book at the after, after you hear the story. So the experiment that they did was they they took DNA strands, okay, now DNA strands are double helix, right? There's two that you can see, it's actually 12. But that's a whole other conversation. There's, so it's a double helix, the two intertwine strands, and they took these two intertwine strands, and they gave them in test tubes to people. And they asked people to set an intention to unwind the strands of DNA. I don't know if you've ever heard the expression, it's in your DNA. What does that mean? It's completely unchangeable forever, because you can't change your DNA. And that's like, what? Okay, so you shouldn't be able to do anything to change your DNA. Are we in agreement about that? Yeah. Okay. So he did three different groups, the first group, simply set the intention. The second group went into heart coherence, which is this feeling of flooding your heart with love, until it feels so full that it is about to burst sound familiar, Roy. And then the third group first experienced heart coherence and then set the intention of unwinding the strands of DNA. The first group, nothing, the second group, nothing asked me the percentage that the strands of DNA were unwound. And the third group that had both heart coherence and following that intention, what do you think the percentage of DNA that was unwound?   Roy Barker  43:43 100%.   Halle  43:45 And that would be less really cray cray? No, no, it wasn't that high. But it was 25%. way bigger than or no, but but it's 1%. You'd be like, that didn't happen, right? 10% you'd be like, no way. But 25% is obviously not a coincidence, right? It's not a placebo kind of an effect. So why did the DNA on wind by even by that 25% it was the combination of heart coherence and intention. So he says, you put your like to create intent to create a result that you desire to manifest something, you would fill your heart with love, feel all the puppies, you know, the yummy puppies in the world, all those kitten videos that you've ever seen, plus the person you were madly in love with before they broke your heart, all those yummy feelings, and then you set your intention for the thing that you want to manifest. So, Roy, what you said really reminded me of that because it is a precursor. When you feel like that when you feel like your heart is so full. It is a precursor to setting your intention now I can't see your stomach. I can only see your from the neck up. But you look like you're not.   Terry  45:07 What would you say?   Roy Barker  45:08 I said, that's by design. The camera   Halle  45:11 you, you look like you don't need to lose any weight. But let's say you still need to lose some weight. Okay? Right? Yeah, we can go, right? Okay. So the first thing to do is to set the intention of releasing, not losing, right releasing it. And the next thing to do is to combine your intention to release Why don't we want to lose weight because we want we'll have to find it again, we want to find the things we lose, you don't want that right. So we release the weight. And we do it, if you choose to, you could do it by creating that heart coherence, that feeling of everything is enjoy in in alignment, enjoy and my heart is so full, it could burst. And then seeing yourself visualizing yourself at your ideal weight. What happens though, instead and this, you know, the harv eker t harv eker says where intention goes, energy flows and results show that's his little expression, right? So but what we focus on expands right, if you want to, you know, you want to see in your minds, you can hold it in your hand. That's what my my crypto coach says. So I love all of those things. Thoughts are things right, Wallace wattles said that we when we when we talk about losing weight we're talking about we're making ourselves wrong. When we talk about how fat we are, we're making ourselves wrong when we talk about, oh, I'm eating this chocolate cake. And it's going to go right to my hips, we're making ourselves wrong. When all you do is focus on I am my ideal, perfect body weight. At the same time that you have that beautiful love filling your heart, you're combining this magnificent brain power that you have with your heart energy, to the visualization of your brain with the heart Love energy. And that's where the magic can really start to happen. So I just, I wanted to share all of that with you with your listeners, because I know from my own experience, but also from the AHA that I've had. I was at the I was at the dolphin cancer challenge, which is here at a Cancer Center in Miami. And I was there for like the fourth year in a row. And I've never gone back since because I got the message loud and clear that day. I looked up and there was a banner right over me and the banner said 60,000 people fighting cancer, and all of a sudden it just hit me like a ton of bricks. What if those 60,000 people were affirming perfect health? Who wants to fight cancer? First of all, it has the energy of cancer right in the words. Secondly, it's got the energy of struggle, right in the words, right? We are fighting the thing we don't want. What if we just focused on the thing that we do want? What happens when you water? The negative tree, it grows, what happens when you water the positive tree it grows. So the trick is starve the negative tree don't give it any energy. Because what happens to a plant that you don't give any energy to it dies. withers and dies. Know   Terry  48:37 that. Yeah, we still needed to hear that right now. Yeah, there have been there's been a little negativity.   Halle  48:45 We all get that, right. Look, there's two there's two things Terry, there's, there's what happens. And then there's how we react to what happens. And actually there's a third thing which is getting ahead of it. So that it it you can co create so that it always just happens positively. Right? However, sometimes stuff happens from the outside that is so far out of your control that you you or you weren't expecting it to the point where you, you couldn't get ahead of it. Now you still wait can't get ahead of it. Now you're like, Oh my gosh, I'm drowning. That's where you take those three deep breaths, you get present and you begin to say, like when we're in fear, doubt, uncertainty, unhappiness, negativity, any anger, whatever. get curious. Curiosity is an amazing tool. Hmm, I wonder why I feel like that. Hmm. I wonder if I could feel different. Could I allow myself to feel different? Would it be okay with me if I wasn't upset and the things still happen, right, we can have that whole interaction, right. And now your brain starts to shift out of the negativity because you've actually put it on. You're like, Come over here. Let's go over here and let's get onto this track instead of that really well worn One that you're so used to going down.   Terry  50:03 That's awesome.   Roy Barker  50:04 That's a great ending thought, I know I've got a, I know you've got a hard stop that I know you'll never take my call again, if we blow through that.   Terry  50:15 vapors.   Roy Barker  50:17 We could go on talking for a couple more hours, it's always a pleasure speaking with you. And so before we get away a couple things we always like to ask though, is, what is a tool or a habit. And I know that we've talked about a few but a tool or a habit that you use every day that really helps you in your personal life or your professional life, something that you just can't do without.   Halle  50:41 I call it working out at the spiritual gym. And to me, it's the habit of getting up in the morning, going into prayer, meditation, and for me, it's yoga stretching, if I don't stretch my body, it means my mind isn't going to stretch. So that's what I tend to do. That is what I tend to do and and I believe that whatever your practice is that you you can help yourself by working out at the spiritual gym and have another recommendation if we have a second   Roy Barker  51:16 we've got plenty of time. I brought a prop.   Terry  51:19 Okay.   Halle  51:20 Yeah, my, my new book neutral glamorous, how to feel beautiful inside and out. And a lot of what I'm talking about today, that bumper sticker coaching stuff and also on the tools to workout at the spiritual gym can be found in neutral glamorous, so I just wanted to I just wanted to really recommend that if people would like more help with that. And you can actually buy it on neutral glamourous neutral is en nu t Ri neutrik glamourous calm, or they can also buy it on Amazon. And I think by the time this airs, the audible book will be out the book will be out on Audible.   Roy Barker  52:03 Okay, so So tell us also, before we get away, tell us not about the podcast where we can find it. And then also, you know, I know that you do some coaching and other things tell us you know who you'd like to work with? How you can help them and then of course, how they can reach out and get a hold of you.   Halle  52:20 Oh, thank you. Well, I want to work with anybody who is looking for a giant transformation in their lives ready for that quantum leap. Maybe they've worked with other coaches, maybe they've been struggling with something for often their whole lives. I love working with people to help them I tend to focus on women entrepreneurs over 40 however, I have different types of clients that I work with, if you do go to my website, though, you will find that it is highly focused on the goddess energy. Sorry, I dropped my phone. And and you can go to the easiest way to get to my website is, is it's halleeavelyn.com but the easiest way to get there is to go to Halle mindset calm, because mindset is so much easier to spell than Eavelyn. So it's highly like Mary H A L L E and then Halle mindset calm. And when you're there, you can subscribe to get all the latest information about my books, my upcoming tours, I'm doing my next tour to Egypt in October, and which is a tour about balancing the sacred divine masculine and feminine. And then you can also get all the information about the podcast, the podcast is called your goddess awakened, I would type in your goddess awakened and my first name Holly, because there's so many goddess things that like you know, they suggest to you and the podcast is still so new. But it's on like 17 platforms. We're on iTunes as of like, I don't know, two weeks ago. And then it's also a show on YouTube. And you can subscribe on any platforms, you just go to your favorite podcast platform and type in your goddess awakened and Halle. And then hopefully that will come up for you. And then please subscribe on the site. Also, there is a free gift on the site right on the front page called three keys to slay your inner critic. So pick that up for yourself as well while   Roy Barker  54:17 you're there. Oh, yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. It's always a pleasure and you'll have to come back. We got plenty to talk about. that's gonna do it for us for another episode of feeding fatty Of course. I am Roy.   Terry  54:32 I'm Terry. Holly. Thank you so much. This has been great.   Roy Barker  54:36 You can find us on all the major podcast platforms as well iTunes, Stitcher, Google Spotify. A video of this interview will go up on YouTube when it goes live as well. We're on all the major social media networks. So until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your health. Bye www.halleeavelyn.com www.feedingfatty.com

Michele Hansen  0:00  This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Orbit. Orbit is mission control for your community, grow and measure your community across any platform with Orbit. Find out more at Orbit.love. Michele Hansen Hey, Colleen.Colleen Schnettler  0:15  Hey, Michele. Good morning.Michele Hansen  0:18  It's been a while.Colleen Schnettler  0:19  Oh, I know. I've missed your face.Michele Hansen  0:22  I've missed your face and your voice too.Colleen Schnettler  0:26  Yeah, I think we haven't recorded in almost a month now.Michele Hansen  0:29  Yeah.Colleen Schnettler  0:31  Crazy.Michele Hansen  0:32  It's been it's an every year in California now.Colleen Schnettler  0:35  Yes.Michele Hansen  0:37  And I guess we should catch people up. So the other day we were emailing about what time we should be recording since there is now a nine hour time difference between us. And it occurred to me as we were sort of trying to figure out scheduling and whatnot. I had this sort of thought for a moment of You know what, we've done this for almost a year. That's a really solid run. Like apparently, like, I think most 90% of podcasts only make it to like, what, three episodes or something like that. Maybe, maybe we've maybe we're done. Maybe we did what we did what we set out to do, and maybe we should walk out on a high note.Colleen Schnettler  1:21  Yeah.Michele Hansen  1:23  And then I said that to Mateus. And he was like, No, you can't stop the podcast, it's your thing.Colleen Schnettler  1:29  By the way, thank you. saving the day. It's funny, you should mention that, Michelle, because a lot has changed in my life in the past month. And I had a similar thought, but not because of the time zones more because I'm like, sick of hearing my voice. I feel like I've been, I feel like I get on this podcast every week. And I just complain about how hard it is to start a business. And I'm not actually doing anything. Like, I feel like I've lost my bias to action. Like you aren't doing things, I guess I don't know, I just like colleagues, just do the thing. Stop talking about doing the thing and just do the thing.Michele Hansen  2:08  It's so interesting that you listen back to it and you hear that you're not doing anything. When I feel like if you were to you know, I like I imagine you listen to some audio books on your long road trip from Virginia to I did California rather than listening through our entire catalogue.Colleen Schnettler  2:30  That would have been funny, though.Michele Hansen  2:32  Yeah, I imagine you celebrate our entire catalog. But I feel like I hear you did not have a side project going last summer. Like you spent the late summer in fall. And I guess it wasn't really until the fall you like decided to go all in on this. And then by December, right, you had something launchable. And you got it out there. You got into the training wheels phase of the Heroku marketplace. And then you were finally led out into the world in February. And last we spoke you were at like right, right around 1000. Mr. That sounds like a lot to me.Colleen Schnettler  3:19  When you say it like that sounds really great. Go me. I just feel like for the past couple months. And to be fair, I have been single parenting three kids separated from my spouse, right in a pandemic. So it's been a little crazy. But for the past three months, I feel like I've just gotten on, and we've been recording, and I'm just like, Oh, I want to do this thing. And you'll say something brilliant. And I'm like, Yeah, I should totally do that. And then it takes me like, a month to do something.Michele Hansen  3:47  But I think so make sense, given all of that. And maybe we should clarify that you were away from your spouse not separated. Like, Oh, right. That utilitarians? Yeah,Colleen Schnettler  3:56  totally separate. Yeah.Michele Hansen  3:57  But like you I feel like you have gotten so much done. But also I think what you're saying of kind of, you know, when you're working on a product, especially in the early days, I feel like it's very normal to kind of look at everything that has to be done and be like, Oh, my God, there is so much to be done. This product sucks. Why is anyone paying for it? I have so much to do. Is this ever going to be like a real business Never mind something that I'm proud of? How am I possibly going to get all of the time to do all of these things and like beating yourself up for not having all of that time because you are a human being that not only needs to sleep and eat but has other other real life commitments like child rearing. Like I think what you're saying is totally normal.Colleen Schnettler  4:50  Okay. Like I've been doing a lot of whining, like, Oh, it's hard to do these things or just shut up and do theMichele Hansen  4:59  way like, you know, People ever do acquire us and then and then people like you, and then you can go start a business, another business and I'm like, Yeah, dude, that's hard. Like I have one that works. Like, I don't want to do that again. It is hard.Colleen Schnettler  5:13  Oh, it's good to hear you say that. I just feel like I'm moving slowly. I think that's a better way to put it. I feel like I'm moving at glacial speed here. And it's a little frustrating.Michele Hansen  5:23  Yeah, of course it is.Colleen Schnettler  5:25  So speaking of having calls with people who want to acquire you, someone reached out to me, a small company that acquire small sasses. And we had a call. Oh. So that was very flattering, I guess is the right word. Hmm. I mean, I know that happens to you all the time. But it does not happen to me all the time. And he did not find out. He did not find out about me from the podcast, or any of the heat, even though I had a podcast, which is always funny when someone is like, Oh, I didn't even know that. He's like, what made you want to start the business? I was like, Oh, well, if you have 52 hours, you can go listen to my podcast. I didn't say it like that I was much more professional.Michele Hansen  6:09  So you could put it on to x, and it would be half of that. ButColleen Schnettler  6:15  I was pretty cool. To have someone reached out about buying the business. And just to kind of start the dialogue. We had a very casual, we did not talk valuation. We didn't talk specifics, but we did have a very casual chat. So that was kind of cool, I guess.Michele Hansen  6:32  But you're you're, you didn't leave that like committing to sell it to them? Like, are you gonna go there call with them?Colleen Schnettler  6:39  Yeah, so the plan is, I mean, I'm not commit, I didn't commit to anything. Okay. I feel like I should say that. We kind of did the get to know the situation chat. And let's have another call if you're interested in a couple months deal.Michele Hansen  6:56  And a couple months. Okay. But it's not like right now.Colleen Schnettler  7:00  No, there it was. It was no pressure. Like we were just, we were just you know, he flattered me, of course, like you were saying he's like, Oh, you know, you started this thing. I'm sure you're gonna start a lot of things. And I thought of you when he said that.Michele Hansen  7:16  And you'd be like, No, actually, I am a one trick pony.Colleen Schnettler  7:21  Yeah, I think it was a good call. But yeah, I think well, it was kind of a Hey, let's talk again in a couple months if if you're interested. SoMichele Hansen  7:30  I don't I mean, you know, investors are playing the long game, right? Like,Colleen Schnettler  7:33  yeah,Michele Hansen  7:34  I know. There's some investors who've been trying to court me for a while, you know, God, oh, for years, like, and I mean, so yeah, they'll wait a couple months. And have you ever isn't, there's a book about was it like, built? Built to Sell? Right, like,Colleen Schnettler  7:51  yeah, I listened to that in the car. I didn't listen to all of it, because it's very long, but I listened. I got started on it in the car.Michele Hansen  7:57  Yeah. Did you also listen to never split the difference?Colleen Schnettler  8:00  No, I listened to April Dunford book. Oh, about positioning. Obviously. Awesome.Michele Hansen  8:08  Yes. Yeah. The one. Was it? Awesome.Colleen Schnettler  8:11  Yeah. I mean, I think you know, her book is aimed at a wider range. It's not specifically focused on single person sasses. But I really think the thing I drew out of her book and Harvard's book, what I forget what it's called, that's embarrassing. But um, it's like building to sell or something was zero to sold, thank you zero to sold was the importance of niching down. And so my focus, what I took from both of those books was I need to niche down, I need to position myself properly. And to do that. I'm going to focus on the Heroku marketplace.Michele Hansen  8:45  Mm hmm.Colleen Schnettler  8:47  So yeah, I enjoyed both of it. Yeah. I enjoyed them both.Michele Hansen  8:50  It was good. Maybe I feel like we've probably unfairly built up some suspense at this point. So first of all, we are continuing with the podcast times. Oh, yeah. Colleen feelings about not getting enough. Done. aside. We are continuing. So if you have been sitting there worried that this is the last one, you're not. We are continuing. And Colleen, Colleen says has not been acquired yet. Right?Colleen Schnettler  9:15  did sell it? Do you get asked? Do we have any other newsMichele Hansen  9:19  updates that we should bring people here?Colleen Schnettler  9:22  While I'm up ending everything in my life. I do have some other things to say. Oh, so the reason, obviously, during this podcast I love and I love talking to you every week, as we've discussed before, even if no one listened. But the other thing is when we started this podcast, when I was trying to get this ass off the ground and I just was hitting every roadblock imaginable. This podcast kept me accountable. So since I'm kind of feeling that, like, I'm not progressing, I'm going to start kind of using this podcast to keep me accountable again, like this week, I'm going to do this thing. So that's something I want to kind of be more actionable on what I'm trying to do to keep Moving this business forward. Oh, yeah. So, so I did other thing. So I took a full time job. Oh, that's right. That's a big, it's a big update, which is so counterintuitive for like, indie hackers, because usually hear people like their goal is to get out of their full time job and get into consulting. So they'll have more time to work on their side projects, I found for myself, that was different, because I was getting really high value clients, and they're wonderful, but they're intense. So what I was finding was the intensity of the mental energy and space I needed to fulfill my client's needs was not leaving me with a lot of extra brain space for simple file upload. So the job I took is actually a company I've worked for before as a contractor a couple years ago, and I negotiated Fridays off, so I have a full time job, but I only work four days a week. So I'm hoping I can use those Fridays, to work on simple file, upload and be able to kind of give that my full brain space on Fridays.Michele Hansen  11:18  That makes sense. That's nice that you got Friday's off.Colleen Schnettler  11:21  Yeah, it's weird being in a W two. I know everyone's not in the US. I shouldn't say w two. It's weird to be back in a full time job, though. Like It Is it? It's just weird. It feels so because I haven't done it in cash, like 10 years, no, eight years. So it feels weird. But I know that I know the team. I know the guys, I know the product. So it's not it's not like that starting a new job stress. It's more just like slotting myself in and, you know, adjusting to the way they work and things like that. But yeah, it's still kind of weird, because I haven't done it in a long time.Michele Hansen  11:57  Do you feel like you're gonna, like now have more of that, like mental space for those Fridays?Colleen Schnettler  12:05  I think so Michelle, and I think so because the work isn't the work at my full time job is interesting. But it's not super high intensity, if that makes sense. So I think it's going to be just the right level of work to kind of, you know, give me some spare cycles, like spare brain cycles to work on my own stuff. And I found that just I know, the dream of some people, like I told a few people, and they were like, Oh, my gosh, why would you do that? Because I know the dream for most people is to quit their full time job and go into a more of a consulting contract role. But for me, I found like I said that it was just the clients I were getting, I was getting, we're just real high intensity. So it wasn't like, Oh, I'm just gonna work 30 hours a week, like that wasn't, they weren't real on board with that. And so although you know, you make more money, as an independent developer, I think the pace of this job is going to align better with my life goals.Michele Hansen  13:07  And, you know, I found that when I was working full time, like, or, I mean, I work full time now. But like, when I was working for other people, I don't know how to, like, say that, like, you know, when you're working in another company, inevitably, you have a lane. And maybe if you're in a really small company, you have multiple lanes, but like, you don't have the whole pool in the same way that you would as a as an entrepreneur. And I found for that, like those first couple of years, the fact that I was constrained to only, you know, a couple of different areas in my full time job was like, frustrating, but I could channel it into geocode do because all of the other stuff that I basically wasn't allowed to do at work and like, I would have ideas about things and would be like, well, that's this entire other department. And it would be like, like, you can't do anything about that. Like, I could channel that into geocode do and, and it like almost becoming this way of professionally expressing myself. Yeah, well, to get to do things that I couldn't do at work. And like that was exciting and motivating in its own right of like being able to feel like I was bringing everything I possibly could to the table. Like I had an outlet for that.Colleen Schnettler  14:28  Yep, that's exactly how I hope this falls out.Michele Hansen  14:32  We'll see it took the pressure off of the business to to be that like full time income.Colleen Schnettler  14:37  Yeah, and that's kind of nice, too. I think. Like I said, you know, you do make more as when you're independent, but the constant context switching, you know, a new client every six months to a year. It's kind of exhausting. Yeah. So yeah, so lots going on here. So hopefully, I have now arranged my life in a way that I will have some energy back to work on simple file upload, your, IMichele Hansen  15:09  think we've talked in the past about how people, like, I think I saw somebody made some graphic ones of like, this sort of hierarchy of, of work or products or whatever, you know, that starts at, like, the very bottom is, you know, working for another company as if, like, you know, having a tech job is like this terrible bottom of the barrel. And then and then you go become a consultant, and then you have an info product, and then you have a SaaS product, and then you have, I don't know, like, something with cryptokey, like, whatever they feel like is the is the, you know, this sort of golden shining, like, point at the top of this of this hierarchy. And I reject that, you know, you know, like, I have gone from SAS like to infoproducts now, but I think there is like a value judgment that happens for people who go from having their own indie products back to full time, or who skipped steps to like, right, like, we never did the info product, quote, unquote, phase like, it's fake, like, that's not actually a process that people have to follow. And if your life necessitates that, like right now, having a like a part time, SAS, and a full time job is like where you want to be, and that consulting isn't fitting in that, and you're going to just zigzag on down and go your own path. That's totally fine. Like, you don't have to follow the same path that you know, someone on Twitter follows, like, make your own path. It's okay, if you need to, you know, hop around a bit and make it work.Colleen Schnettler  16:56  Yeah, I totally agree. And it's interesting you say that, because I definitely struggled with some of those decisions. Like Wait, I'm not supposed to go back to full time work After establishing myself as an independent developer. And then I was like, Oh, wait, I can do whatever I want.Michele Hansen  17:12  Sweet. Yeah, you're an adult, you can do what you want, you can make the decisions that are the right for you. And it's, there's, yeah, there's like this, it's almost like people should be ashamed of having to go get a full time job as if it's sort of like admitting defeat. When, and I just, I just reject that. Like, I don't think that's true. Like you're making the best decision for you, you have, you know, it's It's for your own mental health, for your professional health, for that of your family, who you're providing for, like, all of those things are important considerations. And it doesn't matter what people on Twitter think, like, yeah,Colleen Schnettler  17:56  that I feel like I'm in a really good spot now. So I'm, I'm now geographically co located with my spouse, which sounds ridiculous, but that just means we're together again. Yeah, you know, so I got my husband back. I got my co parent back. I live in sunny San Diego, and I took this job. So it's a lot of change. Feeling like, so good. Michelle, and I'm so feeling like, like, I'm ready to kick some ass. Can I just say, I think you are. Yeah, so I'm super pumped about that. It's almost you know, and the other thing about this whole experience, success begets success, right? Like, it's like, as I've been building and public, and as I've been getting traction, things start to compound, like, I get this guy reaching out, and he wants to buy my SAS, like, I get random people on the internet sending me like really nice. Twitter DMS, just like that are like encouraging and telling me what a great man. I love that. Like, thanks, man. That's so nice. So I feel like this whole process compounds, but I think being visible, you know, I was talking to some people before I went on this call, because I didn't with the investor because I didn't know what to expect. And one person was like, Well, you know, you know, maybe you shouldn't tell him this. Or maybe you shouldn't tell him that. And I was like, I have a podcast, like everything about this company is like, public knowledge. And I know there's risks inherent in that, right. But I really think the benefit I have seen, especially as a social person has greatly greatly outshined the risks associated with that.Michele Hansen  19:40  I mean, I would say the same for writing the book too, like it never would have gotten to be a book had I not done the newsletter and been getting feedback and encouragement and comments and stories from people in that very early stage and even just now like literally just before we were recording, I was on a call with someone Whose company is in earnest capital, and they're starting to do their first customer interviews and they wanted some feedback on the scripts that they had made based on the ones and deploy empathy my book. And it was so like, it was so exciting talking to them about it. And and yeah. And then we ended up having this really great conversation about using customer interviews as a way to basically like fuel content generation, and SEO, which is basically is our marketing tactic. But yeah, I think being open about about it can be really, really inspiring in a way that like we, like, you know, we got feedback from people when we launched your codea. But they were like developer friends of ours. Like it wasn't, like, during that whole developing phase, like we actually really didn't we didn't kind of have this like community element, but I think I mean, I feel like we both definitely have now but for very different different reasons.Colleen Schnettler  21:06  Yeah. Speaking of the book, yeah, it's July How's it going? Um,Michele Hansen  21:16  um, so, so I finalized the copy like, two weeks ago, which was was just really good moment. Like I actually like I genuinely have not touched the copy in about two weeks. And but had some like really good progress on it, like I ended up sort of at the last minute getting to interview a product manager at stripe, about their customer research process. And so I like to include a ton of examples in the book from stripe, which was pretty awesome because their their process or how you might see it in a team because different teams might run it differently. was so validating because like they, they also very much take this sort of customer first perspective and have from the very beginning like the calls and brothers were doing support in the very beginning. And that's just continued throughout the company, and I think really explains why they're such a fantastic company to work with. But so I was able to include a ton of different examples from stripe in the book, but then I had to get it approved by stripe coms before it was published. Interesting. Yes, like that took some time. I mean, it's totally worth it. Like that took some time. And then I basically took a week off. And then now I've just kind of been working on the cover getting some reviews. Um, and then but I think the cover is basically done at this point. And now I just need to like upload the whole thing to Amazon and get a proof copy. And then after we do the proof copy, then we'll open it up. Wow, that's an aside, I think I don't think we talked about this, I did decide to do a private podcast as a presale for the audio book.Colleen Schnettler  23:14  No, we didn't talk about this. Um,Michele Hansen  23:16  yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of excited about that. Um, I love podcasting, As you have noticed. Um, and again like the the idea of sitting down to record an entire audio book feels like slightly overwhelming but doing it as a podcast where I release a couple of chapters per week and there's a small group of people who are following along and you know, can give feedback or encouragement or whatnot is kind of exciting to me it is summer so that sort of makes it hard to get that like truly quiet time to record. And I don't have like I want to have a booth eventually. But and when we were eventually able to build a headquarters but we don't have shed said headquarters at the moment so apparently I can surround my desk and pillows. I was gonna try that out for a future episode and is everybodyColleen Schnettler  24:13  knows acoustic wall things too.Michele Hansen  24:15  Yeah, there are there's also like some like cage thing you can get for a microphone to help with it. But because mine is on a boom and not like mounted on the desk. It doesn't work as well, apparently. So I might do the pillow for it approach really like NPR reporters will do if they're in a hotel room. And yeah, but yeah, so I'm going to do a private podcast and I decided to give everyone who has done the presale By the way, like so far access to that private podcast as well. Okay, so yeah, so So everyone who has done the presale of the the PDF, ebook copy of the book, they get that and then all of the notion and Google Drive templates and then also the private podcast which you know, well costing more if you buy it after the pre sale closes, so I guess we help people when that ends.Colleen Schnettler  25:06  Yeah. Can you explain that I didn't follow. I didn't follow the pricing structure for that. So if you buy the book now on pre sale, yeah, you will get access to the private podcast.Michele Hansen  25:16  Well, so you I mean, you get the PDF of the book, or or, you know, there's other ebook versions. There's also actually an online version, too. It's not really written for that. But there Yeah, there's an online version as well. And then there's, there's Google Drive and notion templates, basically, to make it easy to like, copy the script and then, and then make your own version of it based on that. And then also give them access to the private podcast. That will be basically the presale of the audio book. So eventually, that will all all of those podcasts will get wrapped up into an audio book.Colleen Schnettler  25:57  Got it. Cool.Michele Hansen  25:59  Yeah, I think I guess I might do like a separate presale for that once this main presale ends. Like I feel like such an imposter using all these words, because like we don't do any of this was a little bit like, yeah, thisColleen Schnettler  26:15  isn't really my wheelhouse.Michele Hansen  26:16  But I yeah, I Oh, yeah, IColleen Schnettler  26:18  buy. I often buy physical books and audio books. So I you know, I would buy things like April dumpers book, I have a physical copy. And I have the audio book. I do that a lot with a lot of books. AndMichele Hansen  26:32  so what is the physical book do for you? Well, like how would you use them differently?Colleen Schnettler  26:37  I'm on Team physical book. Like, I always I hate I mean, I don't want to use hate. That's a strong word. I don't like books, I have to read on a tablet or on the computer. I want physical books. But I switched between them, which is a little weird. But like with with obviously awesome. I bought I bought the book, I started the book. And then I had the road trip. So I was like, Oh, well, I'll just listen to the rest of the book. And then I have both and it makes me happy. So you can like reference the physical book, write that for me, especially for business books for me. I've done the reverse to especially for your book, like I would probably be someone who would listen to your book, and then buy it. Because I like physical books for reference. But I like podcasts and audiobooks for what I'm trying to do other things.Michele Hansen  27:27  Sort of building the like general base of the knowledge and then once you know that, there's like something specific that was interesting, then you can go find it in the book.Colleen Schnettler  27:37  Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I do that frequently. I don'tMichele Hansen  27:41  listen to audiobooks myself, because I find that I don't retain information as well. And I only read books on Kindle, if it's a book that I would never want to reference. So it's been like, it's been really interesting for me. Actually, when I when I interviewed the 30 odd early readers, this was one of the questions I asked them was like, so how does it like what did those two different things do for you, like walk me through the context when we when you would use them?Colleen Schnettler  28:12  Yeah. And of course you did. Good for you. So meta.Michele Hansen  28:19  Always.Colleen Schnettler  28:20  I did. I did try to use your customer interview techniques on the guy who was inquiring about my company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was just trying to kind of understand where he was coming from. So I think I did relatively well,Michele Hansen  28:33  Chris Voss and never split the difference talks about using empathy as a negotiation tactic. Like I referenced his book a ton in my book, because, you know, fundamentally, you want to understand where someone is coming from and why. So you understand, like, what, like, what they're trying to do. Yeah. And especially with an investor calls, like, you know, sometimes it could be someone who genuinely wants to invest in you, but like, you never know, if they're doing, you know, their own research for a company that they've already invested in, or they're doing right due diligence on a company they might invest in, and they're trying to talk to all the competitors, and get some sort of inside information. And so I mean, as you said, you, you didn't say anything that you hadn't already said in the podcast, which I think is really smart. And to get it, it's Oh, it's just smart to get them talking as much as possible and say, as little yourself as you can, even if this, you know, could end up being a hugely beneficial thing. And they could, you know, you could be totally aligned on interests like, but my I mean, my first step in any sort of negotiation, which this would be or is at this point, is to get them to talk as much as possible.Colleen Schnettler  29:48  Yeah, okay. Can we play one game before we get off this podcast? Sure. Let's say I want to sell my company someday for $3 million because Okay, I want to house in California. Okay, ridiculous. What? And I know, there's like a million things that go into valuation. But spitball? What kind of revenue? Do you need to even be in that ballpark?Michele Hansen  30:15  So it really depends, right? Like, I think the general multiples I've seen, which, you know, I like I'm not an expert in this at all. So I think I run into times revenue. There's probably somebody listening out there who actually like knows these numbers better than I do. But I think one and a half, two times revenue is pretty annual, maybe maybe up to an annual revenue of two times maybe for a small SAS like this. I did not plan to talk about that today. So I probably would have looked at those numbers first. But, um, but I think that's about the range. And no more than 5x, probably, annual revenue, and it really matters whether this is a like, is this a person who is acquiring the company to run it themselves? Is it a company that has a portfolio of small classes that they're running together? Or is it a strategic acquire, ie someone who is consolidating their market share, a strategic acquire will pay much more than the other two types of buyers? God?Colleen Schnettler  31:27  Okay, we'll talk in a couple years. My revenues ever $1.5 million, then you can advise me on that.Michele Hansen  31:38  Actually, you should just really hire somebody who advises people, right? If I can help you with negotiation strategies, but like, you know, SAS, you know, m&a is not my whole area of expertise. hire somebody who knows what they're doing.Colleen Schnettler  31:55  All right. I'll check back in five years. We'll see. See him there.Michele Hansen  32:00  Oh, it's been good chatting with you again.Colleen Schnettler  32:02  Oh, so good to be back.Michele Hansen  32:04  I missed this. I did, too. Alrighty. Well, I'll talk to you next week. All right.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Alex Street bares all about making his transition from an accomplished youth pastor to a speaking coach, wrestling with validation, bravery, self belief, merging two worlds... Then Alex tells Lesley his awesome B.E.I.T action item of going out and finding a coach who has been where you want to go, and how to create confidence even when you don't have it yet.In this episode you will learn about:Taking the leapMerging your work and your lifeFacing fears about sharing why you are an expertHow to create confidence even when you don't have it yetIf 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.References/Links:InstagramAlex Street websiteAbout Alex Street:Alex is a Storytelling Coach, helping you share your story and connect with your audience. He has been a Youth Worker, Actor, and Public Speaker for two decades. His specialized blend of storytelling, captivating content, and a powerful performance has set him apart as a speaker and coach for audiences of all kinds. Alex is the host of the Fearless Speakers Academy and the Make Speaking Magical video course. He has a Masters in Theological Studies, lives near Toronto, Ontario as a husband of 15 years, and he's dad to three Gen Z kids.If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser and Castbox.Lesley Logan ResourcesLesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable PilatesFollow Lesley on Social MediaInstagramFacebookLinkedInTranscriptLesley Logan 0:01  Okay, okay. Hello, everyone. Hello, my dear friend Alex Street, I'm so excited that you're here. I'm really excited to get to spend this morning together, you are one of my favorite humans on this planet. And when I was creating this podcast, I wanted to make sure that you were on it specifically because your story is so inspirational. But you don't just have one story that's inspirational. There's like many parts of you and facets to you that I want to share with everyone. And so I want to let you introduce yourself to the listeners and the viewers here. So Alex, take it away.Alex Street 0:35  So good, Lesley, I am thrilled to be a part of this. It is such a joy to be invited in here. And yeah, such a pleasure, we're gonna have some fun. So I'm in. I'm in Toronto, Canada, and I am a storytelling coach. I really help people uncover their story and share it with confidence. And what I'm finding is, this is something that I have been doing all along. And something that I'm more recently really embracing as, this is what I bring to the table. Like, this is the thing, this is what I'm here to do. And I mean, I'm really doing that I'm finding that as I uncover my own story. So this is all part of the journey for me, I'm only taking people where I've already been I'm taking people on the same transformation that I've been on from powerless to confident. And as I do that, it's an absolute wild ride and I'm loving it right now. So, story all the way all through and through in my family with me with my kids, now. It's all about story and how to get your story out to the world. That's what I'm here for.Lesley Logan 1:49  I love this. Okay, so there's a couple things that that stuck out with me there. Aside from that you are a father with kids, and I'm sure that there's a there's an element of pressure that comes with being a parent that you want to make sure that they live a life that has the lessons you've learned imparted onto them, right, like Alex Street 2:08  Yeah, a little bit.Lesley Logan 2:11  That's why, that's why I have dogs. Alex Street 2:16  Good.Lesley Logan 2:17  Um, I, I love that you you just said in this that you have discovered that story is your thing all along. And I wonder what led what was the what was the... I don't know, the discovery of the gem. Like when did this come upon you that you're like, oh, story is my thing.Alex Street 2:35  Yeah, it's it's just rooting down is doing the work. It's having the bravery. I think that's all that it was was over the last really 18 months, I would say I got brave enough to go deeper and deeper and deeper into who I am. And and to go to the roots of my journey. I think for probably 15 years, I was staying pretty surface, like up top doing good work and doing all kinds of things. But any questions that I had about what I'm supposed to do in this world was all about how I'm supposed to show up. You know what I mean? Like, how do I do the thing that I feel led to do, but I hadn't really done the work to discover, well, what is that thing - like what is deep down at the core, the very center of it all. What's driving me forward? So as I did that work, then I kind of you break through the surface, and you break through the surface of just how I'm showing up or what I'm doing. And you really get to that why and for me, storytelling, performing... that's been there, all along, right from the start. And so then that becomes a through line. And I just see so clearly how that is, that's, I mean, it's very much even in my blood, I would say.Lesley Logan 3:51  Okay, so you said brave, and I this is something resonates because I believe in being bold. And I think that the being brave part, the being bold part, is where people get stuck. And I also mean that you just like, because it's hard to have confidence or feel brave or feel bold and something you haven't done before. And you and I met at a mastermind, which, you know, six months before that I actually didn't know what a mastermind was.Alex Street 4:15  Samesies! I'm with ya!Lesley Logan 4:21  But I just I was in a place in my life probably similar to you. Where I was, I was very good at not being less like overconfident, like, like blabbing about myself but like I was really good at what I did. However, there was this thing inside me that just felt like there I was meant to do more and I wasn't stepping into that. And I think a lot of people it whether it's your job or a relationship, a friendship a goal, you have something that you want to do you know the thing that you're supposed to be stepping into and you might not have it completely - like with full clarity - but you know what, that is and it, there's, it tugs at you and it causes it like it keeps me up at night and I was like What is this thing? I joined a mastermind hoping to figure out like, what was my next thing? Because I hadn't seen it. Right. So it's really hard to want something you haven't seen before. And so when you when you were becoming brave to do the thing... What... What was the... what made you feel okay to be brave?Alex Street 5:20  Yeah. It's so good. I mean, it's just so like you're tapping into everybody's like, "yeah, I get that. I feel that, oh, she's saying exactly how I feel." Because that's it, like most of the clients that I work with now are coming to me in that sort of a space saying, like, I know that there's something or I'm just, there's something here, but I'm not saying it right. I don't I can't get the messaging, right. I don't know. It feels like I have two different stories, like I'm living two different stories. And all that it is, is, again, you're just up on this surface of like, like you did coming in saying, "?How do I get the answer? How do I do this thing better?" Or, "How do I do this thing more efficiently?" And so how did I get to the place of finding that bravery? Oh, man, many years of questioning, of doubting of, of leaving opportunities, of rejecting opportunities, of jumping into the unknown. Cue the Elsa music, really just expanding and saying, I wonder what else is there...I mean, if we want to go right back, like I can take you into the story and the journey of like, you know, how I got to here. And we can go there if you want. Yeah. Because this is where, right? This is the relatable part of the story. Again, you can look at the last three years and be like, okay, who am I based on these years? And I would say, no, no, no, look at what you want to do now. And then say, Where did that begin? And so for you, if it's like, I want to affect people, I want to help people build their businesses and you go like, Alright, where did that begin for you - like that helpfulness, that entrepreneurial spirit, like, were you making lemonade stands were what was this all about? For you? And for me, I want to help people perform. I want to help people tell their story with confidence. And that then deals with speaking in performance, all kinds of stuff. And for me that begins, like second grade, when my mom who's an actress, put me on stage. She like she came into the school and directed a pantomime, which is like a kind of production that's just total silliness, right? And it was Cinderella. My brother was one of the ugly stepsisters, like it was just bonkers. Which I'm so glad that he was because we can still make fun of him. So he was that, and my mom created this scene with a teddy bears picnic, just so that I could be in the in the show and dress up like a teddy bear and play badminton. But something caught on to me there, like, that was it. I was like, "This is fun." Whatever this is, I'd second grade. I'm like I caught the bug. And my mom hadn't performed for a long time. But then she got back on the stage. And I then grew up like as a young teen and teenager, I was backstage like I went to the theater with her, I would see you know, she was in a production that would have a run of maybe 30 shows. And I was there for like 13/15 of them. And so I would watch the show sometimes. But then sometimes I would actually just sit backstage as quiet as a mouse and do my crosswords or something and watch the whole show happen behind the scenes. And I was just I didn't know it then, right? But it was further enhancing, developing, growing this, like this thing that was planted inside me. That was this love for the whole thing. How people show up, how they perform what story we're telling, how to tell the story well, and it just grew and grew and grew to the point where I'm like, I'm gonna be an actor. No, no, like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna get an Oscar. I had the speech written for my 21st it was before I was 21. That was my goal. I'm gonna win an Oscar.Lesley Logan 8:56  Oh, my God, I love this so much.Alex Street 8:57  Sadly the speech has been thrown out. ButLesley Logan 9:01  So so. Okay, I... this brings you so many thoughts. Because I think when you're listening to someone tell a story. And you see, you see the results of where you are, I am or anyone else in their life, like you see the fruits of the labor, but you don't see how far back the labor went. And I think a lot of people forget that their childhood was filled with so many experiences that set them up for today. And I was in theater for a while growing up and so I can picture I can picture this the the setting that you're taught, you're describing, and you're basically growing up seeing how performance, speaker, story changes people affects people. And so of course, this is something that you want to do and now and now you are teaching people how to tell their story which is beyond because I think some people listening like I don't even know how to describe my story. I put it together. I've been blessed to hear how you do that. And I and it's just so freakin amazing. So, if you're, if you're wanting to have help with that, this is your man. But I do wonder, you know, when you - there's a point between like, you want to be an actor, you want to have an Oscar, and now you're a story, coach. Yeah, the space between that... Where like... Can you take us a little bit into that? Because I think that is a journey where people might, you might have thought, well, I like wandered over here, and I wandered over here. But all of those are like pieces to the puzzle that made you who you are. So can you just share like a little brief part of that tour?Alex Street 10:34  Yeah, absolutely. Like this is, and this is the thing, this is where it gets into the how - how you do it is kind of actually, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant. But that the beauty is like that I was trying to do the same thing the whole time, which was not only tell my story, but help other people tell their story. And so I, you know, I tried to be an actor move downtown Toronto, and then took a left turn and went into youth ministry, and became a youth pastor. You know, as you do if you want to be an actor? No, I don't think so, that's not the route. So you jumped, I jumped into this. And, and of course, like, there's parts of me that at the time, were saying, of course I did. Because I get to get up every week in front of a group of people that are unforgiving, and yet wildly forgiving – young teens – who like they won't give you an inch as a speaker, and yet, show up, show that you care. And they're here to hang out. And they know that you love them. Like that's all that matters to them. So I had weekly opportunities to practice my craft, to practice telling a story that is 1000s of years old, in new and fresh ways. That is the Bible and the story of Jesus and all this and trying to put on characters, whatever I can do to capture the attention of a freaking 12 year old. It was this incredible challenge of performance of storytelling. And then, I mean, forget the stage element, I just actually get to hang out with teenagers and families and help pull out what I see in them, that other people don't. And I just got to see, Wow, you really have a gift for leadership. Well, you ever really have a gift for stories, you really have a gift for making others feel safe. What if you started to use that? And then start to pull those gifts out of them? So there's this journey that Yeah, I'm youth pastor, and it's weird. And does that feel separated? I don't know. But ultimately, it was this further journey. Again, just doing the thing that I've always been here to do, which is to tell stories, and show up with confidence helping other people tell their stories as well.Lesley Logan 12:42  Oh, this is so great, because I think so many people, I get this question a lot. If you for those who don't know me, I also coach people in the fitness business. But I get this question a lot. Like, "What are people going to think if I just announced that I am this instructor now?" And I'm like,Alex Street 12:57  Yeah,Lesley Logan 12:58  They're gonna be really excited for you. Right? But like, you know, that feeling because I'm sure when you when you left, being a youth pastor, and then you decided to be a story coach, like, did you have that feeling like, "What are people gonna think when I say I'm this now?"Alex Street 13:13  Yeah, that was a big moment. That was Yeah, one of my, you know, hinge moments, everything that I've told you so far is kind of the in-who-I-was category. And then there's this moment where it was jumping into that mastermind. But a couple years ago, where I was trying to figure out what am I supposed to do? I know I'm supposed to speak, I'm not a youth pastor anymore. I left that about five or six years ago, realizing I'm not in that box anymore. And yet, there's still something that I'm here to do. I'm here to speak in some way. And, and I saw this opportunity to help, you know, to either speak with organizations or help those running organizations perform better perform in a higher level. But what if, what if I talk about that? What if I show up like that, and I start saying, Hey, I'm leaving the ministry space and going into this space. And still, I'm still have gigs at that point, like speaking at retreats at events with hundreds of teenagers still have, I'm still being invited into these things. What if I start to say, I'm going over here. And then to think about going into the mat to that mastermind. Like, that was the thing I took the jump, I made that leap. And that's all kinds of different things all in there. But then I remember standing up in front of the group with a microphone. I was the first one to introduce myself. And the only thing that I was thinking was like, Okay, how do I talk about my business? That's one thing. But the thing that was most of my mind, I have 90 seconds to say who I am. And the thing was not not "say this" in my head was "don't say youth pastor, don't say youth pastor, don't say youth pastor" because I was thinking these people in this space, entrepreneurship, business, whatever it is, they're not going to respect that my entire resume. was with snot nose, teenagers. Are you... like, like, what good is that? What, that... So I was terrified to talk about where I'd been to one group. And I was terrified to talk about where I was going to the other group thinking that they would lose their influence and their respect caught in this in between space. And that, I think, is where a lot of people as you were just alluding to find themselves, "Now, how do I move forward into a new space," leaving that behind and stepping into something unknown? It's a terrifying place to be. I'll just be honest,Lesley Logan 15:37  We're definitely going to come back to this because I want to know, like, it was what was their announcement or not, maybe there wasn't but right. I was in that room, y'all. And Alex was the first person to go and I My name is Lesley Logan. So I'm always in the middle of everything, right. And so I'm so grateful. I was like, thank God, I'm go first, like, but it's so funny. The stories we tell ourselves, because I remember thinking like this. I mean, like, you're listening to different people in all walks of life, talk about basically bragging, you're allowed to brag for 90 seconds. That's like literally what you're told to do. And I was raised, like, Don't brag, it's, like, unattractive. And so like, having to overcome the thoughts of like, it's okay to brag, because I don't want it but I was like, I'm a Pilates instructor like, who in here is gonna be like, Oh, yeah, that girl, that's the girl who's gonna help me. You know, it's just so funny. Like the stories we tell ourselves about all the people in a room. And actually, and it's so funny, because I would, I would never let anyone in the room I was talking to ever let themselves think that way about who they are and what they do, but we get in these spaces. And so and so, you know, I remember when I was like, Okay, and now I'm gonna announce that I'm a business coach supplies instructors, I'm I'm thinking people are going to be like, what you've been teaching for two years, girl like, no way, like, Who are you to do this. And I got to a place where I was so frustrated with not making the change that I needed to see that I just like, announced it. And I'm one of those people who's like, kind of like, will announce things. And I'm, like, run off and just see what happens later. Like, did it catch on fire? Like, how are we doing? But I would love to, I would love to hear like, you know, you're in this space of like, I'm not telling this group. Like what I'm doing now, I'm not telling this group what I was doing. When did you tell all the groups what they needed to hear?Alex Street 17:34  Yeah, so let's say I mean, just put a timeline to it. That was September, I think 2019. When even just signing up for that mastermind was me "being it," right, "being it till I see it." That's that that was it. I was like, Alright, well, I'm going for it. Here we go. I don't know what this is. All I know is that I can't take my business, whatever this is to the next level to any level without somebody guiding me along the way. Let's get into a room with 50 other people and see what happens. But you step in that space, everybody looks perfect. I don't belong there. All these thoughts through my head. Don't say your youth pastor, nobody will respect that. Just go up and talk about what you do. And then get the facts and get out of there. That's what was going on my head, Mr. Confidence, Mr. Like guy who has shown up in every room that he stepped into in a ministry setting, and is the one leading the way, essentially, and now I show up in this setting in this new group with these new people. And I'm going in thinking, like, I'm going to be the one who, who brings something today, I'm going to be the one who helps people today. And immediately, I felt so small. And so that smallness is what I said, when I get up to the microphone, I said that I share my intro eventually I did say yeah, so my business is Gen Z matters. It's helping organizations work with the next generation. And I remember pausing and then filling the gap with I'm an expert in this because I've been a youth pastor for 15 years, and my mouth kept going, but my foot was kicking myself. So Oh, man, I was so frustrated with myself at that point. But the cat was out of the bag. That was it. It just sort of happened. And what came after that is what was important, because then I sat down, people were like, Great, good job, good to meet you all that stuff. I think it was the next session. Actually, you and I were at the same table together. And you said something to me, Lesley, that I still have in my notebook. You said, You are a badass when you got up there and grab that mic. You knew your shit. We could see that. You had so much passion. We need more of it. And so I took that when Whoa. So all these gifts that I thought were only valuable of speaking of all these things that I had not been affirmed of yet were immediately being affirmed in this new environment. And that sparked something else inside me that like re-lit this flame to say, holy crap, this is possible. And then later that night, I had dinner with some people and they said, you realize that your story, you being a youth worker for 15 years, that is your superpower, you've had weekly speaking experiences, speaking opportunities. There's worldwide keynote speakers that haven't spoken to a crowd as many times as you have Alex, you got to lead with that. And so that's that started to open me up and go, holy crap. Okay. So whatever doubts I had about sharing with this new group, were very quickly extinguished. Because it was the right group, because they're nice people, and most people will respond that way. That's what I'm finding. Do you know what I mean?Lesley Logan 20:51  No, I Oh, my God, I do know what you mean. I want to just like, go back for a second. First of all, y'all can't see this. If you're on listening to the podcast, but like, I, I didn't know what I was telling you would be that, that pivotal in your life, y'all. I'm ..................... Anyways, um, but so if you're listening to this know that like, when you are out, if there is something on your heart, say it to someone, because it might be the exact thing that they need to hear, to take that next step to take that next brave step. And so thank you for sharing that with me. Because I made a commitment to myself a few years back that like I was going to tell people, the thing that was on my mind about them in person in the moment if I could, because you, it's hard to get that moment back. So I wanted to do that. And I'm so glad I did. You don't even you know, I can't even tell you if it was like, I just knew I had to tell you that. And so I'm so glad you heard it. That's also really awesome. But, you really, you said - it be until you see it, you enter the room that is so bold, you enter a room of 50 people. And you didn't feel like you're ready to be there. You're this intrinsic motivation of like, trying to figure out what's next what your next step is right executable, like showing up. And then like the steps you took to act like the what you learn, you made some steps that you could do, and like you had this target audience that you were working towards, which I really liked. So all these words can represent different things for different people. But you really, you really that whole moment was an absolute Be it till you see it moment. And I love that it was like this little you said/called it a hinge like was hopefully or maybe it was the thing that puts you on the other side, you can go back to Toronto and go, yeah, y'all. This is what I'm doing now. And this is why I'm so good at it.Alex Street 22:36  So that Yeah, exactly. So that was like, you know, that's one half of that sort of change. And then the other one was yes, then that gave me the boldness to come back. And I was hosting a podcast at that point called made for this. And it was just it was helping people tell their stories and do and discover what you're made for. And I was like, I feel like I'm not even sharing my story of doing what I made for. So here's the here's the chance. And I just turn on the microphone. And it was the most unscripted yet kind of scripted. Like I you know, I had my points, but I just said, I'm just gonna go for this and speak from the heart, and let it go and and told that journey. And that was, that was a faith journey. That was a career journey that was a family journey. Like I felt like there was so much in that to essentially come clean to, you know, families, people that I've influenced, and had, and inspired and had incredible memories with for 15 years that I was like saying, "Hey, this is like, this is what was going on." And it was just a movement away from kind of what I've always believed or what I had believed at that point. And here's the shift, and here's why I think you can too. And here's what to do when you're not who you are. And that was the point of it all. And so then as soon as I mean, I recorded it. And that's one thing. Anybody can go and record something and speak into a microphone with nobody in the room. Hitting publish on that baby. That was when my hands were shaking. That was when you know, I'm staring out the window questioning everything. Is this a mistake? Why did I do this about to hit delete, and hit published and they're publish and there's freedom? That's it. absolute freedom to just go, "Who cares?" Like I mean, what what was I so worried about? And then here's the key, this whole journey of me being afraid to share that story, because what are they going to think? Or what are they gonna think? Well, again, we had that one experience where let's say you and I sit there and my doubt was that you would respect me and you actually showed up and said, holy crap, you've got something special here. And then when I release that, and I'm afraid that they're going to not respect me, the only people that came forward, nobody came forward and said, "What? How terrible! This is awful." Everybody came forward and said, Thank you can we can we set up a call because I'm going through the same experience. Or, thank you for sharing this. It's exactly what I've been going through. And I was afraid to tell anybody. And that just reinforced further solidified this belief that I have that drives everything that stories change the world, when you cheer, when you share your story, it will actually change those that hear it. And that's, that belief is what drives me forward. And if we all believe that, then we'll find the confidence, we need to share what we've got.Lesley Logan 25:27  Oh, I'm in love with this because I do. So, because I resonate so much with this whole idea of like, you have to hit publish, and you're like, Oh, my God, this is it. Like this is when it's going to go out and like what, like, what have you and it's so funny, because I think, you know, I'm really grateful. My husband when I, because I do share, I'm like, this is what I'm afraid of. Because it's easier if you just like put it out there. Like all of a sudden, a lot of the fear is like, it sounds so silly. When you say it out loud. Sometimes you're like, really?Like, that's so weird. But, um, so but I think oftentimes, we don't actually acknowledge what that fear is like, what is the fear that is going to happen? And we just, we have it in our head, but we don't actually speak it out loud. And when you speak it out loud, it doesn't actually give it power actually, I think takes a lot of that fear away because you see it, black and white, like this is it it's like really? Is that really what's going to happen. Like you can really have that conversation with yourself. But I love that you didn't delete it, you did hit publish, and I wonder were you like, check, like refreshing your email or reviews are like, were you like checking to see if people had any responses? Or did you just like, were you like me? Or like publish? Run away! Alex Street 26:40  Yeah, definitely, there was a sense of, okay, who's gonna see this, who's gonna who's gonna listen, and you know, it's not it was like, there was 150 listeners per episode, like, this is not a massively published thing this is. But even To that end, it's mostly people that knew me, I think at that point who were listening to it. So now, anybody that knows this is going to is going to hear the journey. And so there was a little bit of that. But then this letting go, I think what happened when I hit Publish was that was actually me letting go of those expectations. And those, you know, what are they going to say, kind of thoughts and fears. And, and what I realized, even with that is that, so much of this, so much of showing up is about you, it's actually for you at first, it's it's for you to let go of a lot of those fears, it's for you to let go a lot of a lot of those doubts and self limiting beliefs that you have for yourself that truly nobody else has. Lesley Logan 27:43  Right...Alex Street 27:43  People are thinking of you a lot less than you ever think they are, like Lesley Logan 27:49  So true!Alex Street 27:50  To zero amount. Lesley Logan 27:53  It's so true! Alex Street 27:54  And so so much of these fears that are holding us back from showing up. It's not about appeasing anybody that's out there or helping them see it all, it's really just about you getting to the point where you actually do have that. You create that confidence that wasn't there before, to do the thing, so that you can continue to show up, and then it becomes about your audience and really showing up for them. So that's what it was, for me. It was, I had to do that. I had to do that for me.Lesley Logan 28:19  Oh, I love that. It's so true. I want to reiterate like people really don't talk about you as much as you think that they do. They're not even thinking about you. And the ones that are that is that they're not thinking about you... They're thinking about 17 other people other than themselves. So they'll just be like, "Oh, did you hear about Alex, he did blah, blah," and then, "Oh my gosh, but john did this..." and like, like, they're, they're not even it's like in one ear out the other. It's like not even sticking with them. And so if people are the like, not your people anyways, but um, I do think you said it, like, there's an action you took and action is the antidote to fear. So, confidence is this interesting thing, that it's really hard to be confident in an area you haven't done something before. It's hard to step in confidently going "I am a stories coach," if you've actually not coached anyone on stories. And I've been doing a lot of research on this because people always asking like, Lesley, you're just so confident. And it's like, really, I do most things scared at as fuck. Like, seriously, like, including this project of a podcast. But, um, but I, I have I have I know that the more I take action towards the thing that I want, the less the fear has the power, the less like things that are stopping me from doing it and you get so much clarity from that, and you get a lot of like you, you get that boost of confidence that comes from that. And I think, you know, I was talking with my therapist, which I think everyone needs, needs someone like that, about confidence versus self esteem. And she says Lesley, you could have confidence on a snowboard and be not confident on skis. It's not like it's not something you have all the time, right? It's like it, confidence is very much in the moment, and you can have it like you can make it happen. It's a state of being. But it's not necessarily like, if you're not confident in one thing, then you're not confident. Right. And it's a difference on like self esteem, which is like, where you where you believe in yourself more than you don't like as a high self esteem. That's how I'm thinking of it. And maybe over time, as I research it, it will change. But I feel like the you know, the more people who are listening to this, the more people take action towards the thing that they're wanting, the less the fear is control. And the more confident you'll become, because you'll have done something in that area of what you want. It's a kind of a cheat in a way.Alex Street 30:46  Well, right, and so much of fear. And that doubt, like take it to snowboard, and you're going to be terrified that you can't do this thing. And it's a completely made up scenario. And so whether it's, can I actually make it down the hill and survive without hitting a tree? Well, it's made up until you have the evidence to see it to know if you can balance on that thing or not. And it's the same with, if I put this out there, what will people think? If I start talking about myself in this way, what will my old clients think of me? What will the new... will the new clients accept me? Like there's all these questions that we make up without taking any steps of action? So you're creating this terribly convoluted and complicated story with it's a choose-your-own-adventure in your mind, and you're not actually going down any path and it's wildly exhausting. Like, no wonder we're walking around, overwhelmed, tired, distracted, because you have 16 narratives going on in your head about what's about to happen. Instead of saying, this is I think, where I'm being led, this is consistent with my story. And so I'm going to take this next right step? And we'll see if it's the right step. If it's the right step, or the wrong step, at least it's a step. And that might just be the most confident thing that we can do today and call, call it confidence. Don't call it a whim. Don't call it an accident. Don't call it. I don't know. I'm just winging it. No. Yeah, that action, as you say, Lesley, that is it. That's, that is confidence - to go and do anything today? It's not to belittle it, but like, that's it. If you show up. You're, you're creating confidence. And I think that's it, we're waiting, we expect competence to be the same that you're born with. And simply not. It's something that's created in you. And it has been created as you believe, as you find the boldness, and you learn to bounce back.Lesley Logan 32:46  Oh, I love this. I love this. It's you're not born with confidence. It's something that... I love that so much. All right. So I'm Alex, I want to make sure that listeners hear a "be it" tip from you. So what is bold or executable, intrinsic or targetable tip that you could give those listening, because I'm sure they've resonated with you so much and a tip from you, would, might just be the next first step they should take?Alex Street 33:14  Yeah, I love it. I think my my tip, my encouragement will be kind of all of those things. And it really is. Get someone to help. That's, that's for me. I've had friends that have had conversations with me all along. And I adore these people, I have been on the journey with them. And yet, they don't understand exactly the choices that I want to make, or the world that I want to get into the work that I'm doing. Now. They don't understand the level of that. And if they do, they can tell me things. They can challenge me in certain ways, but not specifically around, like, what's my business going to do and what's my impact going to be? And so I would say you know, the bold, executable, intrinsic and targetable invitation or tip is, I mean, really to nail it down, it's get a coach, get a coach or get in the room with other people who will be able to coach you who are specifically on this journey that look like the same journey that you're on. They're all afraid they're all taking the next step. They're all trying to get their business right. They're all or they understand where you're at and how to get you into the next one will challenge you ruthlessly and will target in on what your need is, and we'll help you get there. So that will require boldness, because Holy crap, the money, I don't know. It's executable, because well, I got to find someone. And then I got to say yes. And instead of just letting it hang there, the intrinsic drive is alright what? Okay, I know I need to make a change, but it's not happening on your own. So let's listen to that intrinsic self sense. That is bringing you to towards community and bringing you towards others and find that help. And then the targetable is, get it done. Do you have a coach or not? If you don't, then it's not happening. So I would say that for me, that's I mean, that's been my game changer. That's the way that I'm helping people now and seeing that happen in their life, those that are bold enough to step in and say, help me understand my story. Lesley Logan 35:24  And you all...Alex Street 35:24  Turns into, like, change.Lesley Logan 35:26  Alex have so many, like you help so many people. And so where can they find you? What's your Instagram handle? What's the best way people can get in touch?Alex Street 35:34  Yeah, fantastic. So my website is AlexStreet.ca. You can kind of find all the info there. And then yeah, I hang out on Instagram all the time. So that's @streetsays, Lesley Logan 35:45  oh, y'all, if any I know so much probably resonate with you. But do us a favor, screenshot this, share it tag us both. And please put a takeaway, like, what is something that you took away from this, so that Alex, and I can hear what resonated with you and root for you and cheer you on in this way. Like, you're not alone in this journey. And I'm so grateful for you listening. I'm so grateful for you Alex being here to share your story. I couldn't think of someone better to bring on the show to actually talk about story and share it. I think I'm so grateful we met and nothing happens by chance. We were meant to be in that room together and many people in that small group together. And I'm really excited to see where you both go from here. Thank you for being here.Alex Street 36:25  Oh gosh. Lesley, this is so good. It has been such a joy. You're a fantastic host. Thank you for leading us through this conversation. I'm truly excited for how this will help people. Lesley Logan 36:38  Oh... hold on. Hold on.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, I have a guest who discusses nutritional AI that you can eat. Grant Everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. Wow. Today I have in the house with me. Mr. Daniel DeMillard, he is the CTO of FoodSpace, and I am just honored for the opportunity to meet him and to get to hear his story and what he and his organization has been doing with AI. Alright, let's jump into this. Okay, so, Daniel, first of all, welcome. Daniel Thanks for having me, Grant. Great to be here. Grant It is, it is really great to have you here and to have another another patriots in AI, right things that you guys are doing, as I got to know you. And before we started this recording, I was fascinated with the kind of work that you guys are doing and where you focus your use and application of AI. But before we get too deep into that, would you step back in time and tell us? Who's Daniel, where do you come from? And what is it that's brought you to this point to be CTO applying AI in such a cool way? Daniel Yep, so I actually studied economics and finance in school and came across an online class by Andrew Yang on Coursera. And at that point, I just absolutely fell in love with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I was like, wow, this is absolutely what I'm wanting. Yeah, with my life. So, you know, started studying a lot. Got a job eventually at IBM Watson, and worked at a small company doing what type classification, then I was doing some consulting on the side, where I actually got connected with iosshare, Nike, the CEO of foods, but at the time, it was a lunchbox. And they were developing a consumer facing app that, you know, they were trying to pair people with recipes. And you could set up a diet profile for yourself, and instantly order things online through instacart, based on recipes that you find. And I initially got engaged with them, building a wine pairing recommendation application, where, given a certain recipe will automatically recommend a wine pairing that would go well, really well I Grant ...need that certain kind of food, you're like, Hey, this is the right, right, Daniel ...we're gonna wanna medium red wine with that right or a very sweet dessert wine. Grant Until it this where lunchbox started, they were focusing on solving that problem. Daniel They were focused on solving the one stop shop for keeping all of your recipes together, ordering food very easily. And then also being able to manage your diets, and allergens, and just make making sure all of that was really seamless. And they also had a great mission of trying to mitigate food waste, so that they could recommend given all of the stuff that you have in your fridge that would normally sit there and forget about they could recommend a recipe and for you to make of the things that you've already selected. And so Grant all right, very good. All right. So so then you bumped into them, and you started to work with them. Tell us a little bit about the transition over to food space. How did the vision change? Daniel Yeah, it was actually pretty serendipitous, and rather abrupt. So back in 2019, io was a part of grocery shop, which is a big conference in the CPG space and food industry. And he's trying to pitch this idea of lunchbox to brands and retailers to get them to sign up for it. And they all have basically kept telling them the same thing of like, hey, it's a great idea. It's super interesting. I would love to but what you're asking for with all of these like dietary profiles, and The information necessary to build these types of recommendation algorithms. It's we just don't have it, we don't have ingredients and digitized nutrition labels. And, you know, we have the very minimum. So given that that information is like, Okay, well, we've got to take a step back. So he calls me up. And he says, you know, hey, Daniel, would it be possible given a bunch of computer or a bunch of e commerce images, to extract the product information from there and actually read it from those images. And I had done a little bit of stuff with computer vision by that point, using, like pre trained, convolutional neural net models on image net, and then using transfer learning to identify key regions. And so I stopped and thought about it. And I was like, yeah, you know, I think the problem is tractable enough. And the technology's in such place, now that we can absolutely solve this problem. And so yeah, two years later, we now have a model that can classify things that matter of seconds. And we're gonna extract that product information and seconds with 99.7% accuracy 99.7. So if I bring I can assume to you, and you can see the label on it, you can figure out what this is, you can identify it. Exactly. So we'll extract things like brand name, product, name, net weight, the ingredients, the nutrition label, any certifications, such as whether or not it's recycled, kosher, non GMO, vegan, all of that awesome stuff, including marketing claims, like low sodium or, you know, contains less sugar, those those types of things, well, pull out all of the relevant information from the product label. And we'll read it in the same way that a person would read it. A lot of other products that do something similar or are entirely based on the universal Product Code code, the UPC barcode on the back, where they're basically just looking things up from a database, a database might have inaccurate information, it might be out of date, so might have been accurate at one point, it might have been transmis, transcribe with whoever transcribed it in the first place, we're gonna read that label and not image, the same way that a human would label it so that it's, we're going to the ground truth. Grant So PC based, you're actually extracting the actual text, you're figuring out what this is, and then the semantics of it. What does that mean? Oh, it means this ingredient, this so much in the, you know, in terms of the amount of the ingredient, and so forth. Daniel Exactly. And then we will also derive new information from that information that we've extracted, such as whether or not it's going to be had certain allergens. If it contains peanuts, we're going to let you know if it has a peanut allergy. We're also going to determine whether or not it conforms to different diets. So I'm a vegetarian. And I'm constantly reading labels for obscure things like whether or not my cheese contains rennet in it, which is a animal derived enzyme. So we will read all of that for you, and then derive whether or not it's going to correspond with with your diet. Grant So can you talk about some of the use cases around this? So are you targeting b2b scenarios? Are you doing b2c? Is that something that I as an end consumer comes in interacts with it, let's say through through my cell phone? or How are you? How are people going to consume this this cool platform? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are primarily focused on optimizing the e commerce experience. So if you're on Walmart, or Albertsons or target, and you are using your favorite grocery delivery app, or you're going in to do pickup, all of that purchasing decisions are happening upfront on the e commerce website. And at the very least, we want to make sure that that information is present and accurate so that you can make the decisions yourself whether or not at the very least, you can see that ingredients label and search to see if that rennet in gradient is there, or if you're trying to, you know bulk up make sure that it has enough protein or has low sugar, low fat, whatever your dietary needs are. We want to make sure that information is there. But we really want to enable a more optimized ecommerce experiences where you know in your little left side of the toolbar, you can select vegetarian or pescatarian or low sodium diet or a South Beach diet, or I'm allergic to shellfish, and automatically only be shown products that correspond to your dietary needs. So we really think that optimizing that e commerce experience and the search is where we can have the largest impact right away. Grant So So some of the health profile of the person intersects with this, is it coming off? Like, I don't know, like, like the fitness app? Or is it coming off of other sort of apps? And then are capturing that health information? How do you integrate with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are basically providing the data to the retailer so that they can make those optimizations. But certainly being able to integrate with, you know, My Fitness Pal, or Weight Watchers would help optimize these experiences. And we are in discussions with those types of companies as well to improve their databases. So that you aren't, you don't have to manually type in all of that information on your fitness app, you can basically just look it up in the database, and it's accurate and recent. One problem that we've seen is that 30% or so of data is of grocery products are updated every year. So anyone I think use one of these apps has the experience of typing in their information, finding out finding the correct product, but it's a little bit outdated, the calories are a little off the nutrient profiles a little bit off, we're gonna make sure that it's updated. And in the right place. Grant That's interesting. So you talked about accuracy, the model accuracy for AI? And I think you should say 97%. Right. 99.7. Daniel Yeah, we are absolutely religious about that is, wow, you know, that is the problem that we're trying to solve. Right now, if you look up any product, on, say, a large, very large e commerce website, like walmart.com, there is a somewhere between 40 and 70% chance that there is at least one mistake on that website, regarding just the ingredients and nutrition information. So if you're trying to base you know, your health profile on that, it's it's an inaccurate, so we are just absolutely religious about getting every single piece of information. Correct, at least as so far as it corresponds to the product images. Grant So is this is this just for humans? Or is this also food for animals and pets? And how does this work? Daniel Yep, so we've definitely just, we started with humans, we are expanding to pet food and being able to build attributes around that two things like wet versus dry pet food, whether it's for a large size dog, or a small size dog. And all of those attributes we're hoping will also assist in that product search and discoverability so that you're not being shown a dog food, that's, you know, too too big for your small small dogs. Right. Grant Right. Right. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And then in terms of what we're talking about, who it's relevant to terms, your current market, so it's for humans, obviously, animals in the future. But as we think about the humans, this English base, is it other languages, Spanish or Mandarin or others? Where are you in terms of multilingual? Daniel Yep. So, you know, food is, I think, sacred to everyone everywhere. And as we move from this, in store grocery experience, where you're, you have the product in front of you, you can pick it up, and you can read the label to an e commerce experience, where somebody might just be dropping that off to your doorstep, and you don't see the product until it's there. We really think it's important that we have as larger reach as possible. So we definitely are working on expanding our algorithms to apply to different regulatory regulatory environments. You know, Europe has, I think, 12 allergens, whereas the united states currently has nine, and they just added sesame, to their allergens. They also have different nutrition labels and different information that they require to be on those. And then in addition to that, the different languages that are actually present there, and all of that obviously presents different technological issues, custom models for each of those markets, but really what we've spent a lot of time Building and working on is creating models that can quickly adapt to these new domains and building a really robust training pipeline. So that basically all we have to do is collect more data, instill a little bit of domain expertise, where we have to learn a little bit about that new market or that language. But after that, we can adapt our models very quickly to that new. Grant You know, I just have to ask, given that I love the AI piece of this, as well as just the benefit that you're bringing to human family. I mean, that's, that's huge. When I think about the AI portion of this, I think, how, how was building that model? I mean, how you have a lot of cans in your food storage now. I mean, how much? How many boxes of Cheerios did you buy? I mean, that's amazing. How did you get through all that? That's just that, right? There is a big challenge, right? To get through enough instances? Daniel Yeah, um, I Oh, and Dan, my business partners, they spent a lot of time getting kicked out of grocery stores, because they kept picking out prod products and taking pictures with their phones. And so they were kicked out of a few grocery stores, I think they learned to, you know, explain what, what they were doing their first after a little bit, but certainly a lot of time, taking pictures of your entire pantry. Going around the grocery store, just pick it up as many random things as possible. That's creative. Grant Yeah, that's, that's really great. If you have any particular challenges in terms of the kinds of food and other words, some things don't have labels, right. So certainly asparagus typically right or decent, things like that. So how do you deal with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So currently, we only support branded foods. So it does need to have that product label. But it's interesting that you should mention certain types of foods, we were doing a analysis an audit of our accuracy. And we were noticing that a certain product category, yogurt, in particular, was creating a lot of issues for us and was very low accuracy. And it turned out that the curvature of the yogurt container, and then the fact that it kind of tapers down, creating a lot of issues for OCR model, where the text is kind of getting bunched up at the edges of that, you know, yogurt container. So we actually had to like build a specific model just to handle those types of containers. So certainly, you know, a lot of our time and effort has been focused on the corner cases in those weird scenarios where that are particularly difficult. The like, very simple run of the mill cereal box, where it's a nice rectangular box and the nutrition labels very prominent. And it's a very usual format that's easier to solve that most of our time has been focused on these weird one offs, like these tobert, tapered yogurt containers. Grant So so let me think about because I love the, again, this problem that you're solving and how it benefits people and their dietary needs. When I think about how people can consume this, what's the way that they will be able to interact with this standard? And what's the state of what space is doing today? Is it? Is it out there ready to be used? Or Where are you guys? Daniel Yeah, we're currently working with brands to get their data to the retailers and some retailers are a little bit further along than others and optimizing the, you know, experience for you where you can set up those dietary profiles for yourself and only be shown the products that correspond to your values, or do you only want organic food or you have a gluten intolerance, only being charged on those foods that correspond with those values or dietary needs to just getting the product information out there to the retailers in the first place. We're also working with some initial engagements with smart appliance manufacturers, things like smart fridges and smart micro microwaves, where you can simply scan the product, either using the barcode or just the front of the product and instantly have your oven or your microwave set the time timer or the temperature for you to cook that product for you. Additionally, being able to do things like recipe planning based on the products that you have in your fridge, being able to order products from I'm a retailer directly using the feature on your fridge that is based on your dietary profiles and just you never needed to get on your computer. And you could just order, you know, your gluten free pizza directly from your smart fridge that is linked to a product database with information that we're providing, we really think that more and more people are going more and more of our purchasing Our food is going to happen in this virtual digitized space, whether that's through your computer, your smart fridge, and the more that information is available, the more that we can build a more customized experience, and really make shopping easier as well, so that you aren't ever being shown products that don't correspond to your dietary dietary needs or your values. You know, even being able to set timers and things for microwave, it might sound trivial, but it really should make the entire cooking, cooking experience that easier for you. Grant You know, I certainly could benefit from walking up to the fridge and say, what are the possibilities of what I can create from what's in there, my wife will do that she's got that AI model already in her head, but I don't have that model, same set of food and go, there's nothing in there. And then she can craft you know, miracles out of it. Daniel So yeah, I'm the exact same way. And, you know, you could you can set user profiles for everyone in your family and say, Hey, you know, I'm a pescetarian. And my daughter's gluten intolerant and my son really only it's organic food, and being able to mix and match all of those constraints, we can figure out what recipe and you know, what to eat for dinner, right? Grant And so it sounds like, like, like, we've done that, that South Beach diet multiple times. Sounds like you know, you can literally walk up to your, to your fridge at some point and say, Hey, what is it that I can make that is in compliance with the South Beach diet? Daniel Exactly. And then things like, you know, macros counting, like calorie counting, and counting how much protein that you're consuming, would be a lot easier using if all of this information is digitized, and you're interacting with it in a smart fridge type environment where it can track what you're picking up and making. So I think entering information into one of those calorie counting apps is often a pain and I think, a limitation for a lot of people. So anything that can mitigate some of that barrier to getting healthier and keeping track of what we're putting in our bodies, to me is very much welcome. Grant So we've talked about the art of the possibilities around this right? What is it that this can bring the people that dramatically influences and impacts their health? What do you see in terms of the downsides? What hurdles or challenges? What could get in the way of either people adopting this or getting value from it? What what concerns or challenges do you see there? Daniel Yeah, so some of the things that we've seen in the industry about the difficulty to use this type of data is, every retailer kind of has a different format for how they ask for data. Some retailers want the units and the nutrition and the value to be separate. So if you have seven grams for protein, sometimes they want us separate key for seven and a separate one for brands. They might call things different. Some people might think call things, UPC, other ones call it barcode. Other ones call it product ID. So that's some of the work in transit translating the data mapping or the data model to each of those retailers can be a major bottleneck for a brand say wants to get their data to Walmart to Albertsons to target. And they basically had to look at these like massive Excel spreadsheets, but like 70 columns or 150 columns, and manually copy that data over and it's a huge pain. And that that is one of the major reasons why only the largest of brands have the resources to get their data digitized in the first place. So what we do is, you know, we're going to first extract that information for you automatically from your images. You don't have to hire a team of people to do that extraction in the first place, where we've also built these mappings for the top 10 retailers where we can automatically syndicate and get the data in the format that they want to see. Whether that's directly through an API, and just automatically updating your information through an API, fortunately, some of the grocery industry isn't quite as forward thinking. So a lot of updates are just made through Excel spreadsheets. But we'll create that Excel spreadsheet for you. So that it's basically just a matter of sending that over an email. And I think that should mitigate a vast majority of the bottlenecks currently faced in the industry. Because some of the, I could just imagine being a brand manager and be like, Alright, well, here's my data mapping. But then there's these close lists for Walmart, where, you know, I'm supposed to put in a certain beef cut type for this product. And doing that, for every single one of my 150 500 products, that is going to be a huge ass. Grant Yeah, it has said that. It's one of the things that drew me to this. And when you and I were first talking about this recently, which was, I feel like the work that you're doing is not only scales to the larger brands, but also it's pulling out all this information that makes it available, even the small to medium business space as well. And so feels very scalable, therefore approachable to benefit a lot of people, lots of different scenarios. Daniel Yeah, absolutely. And we try to make things as easy as possible to get integrated with our system. So, you know, our simplest use case, if you already have data and a list of URLs for your product, you're going to send us over a CSV with your URL links and the product IDs associated with those. And we'll download those images for you and process them through the system. And now you can download it and whatever data format you want, you know, CSV or JSON, or an Excel or in target specific taxonomy format, or Walmart's or Albertsons. Or you can upload it through a, you know, drag and drop upload portal where you can just drop, drag a folder of your product images into that upload portal, interact with an API, or even give us access to your put them up on an FTP server and point us to it and we will download the images there. So it's really trying to make things as simple as possible. So that whatever your tech stack is, and whatever the size of your organization is, we can help you get up and running as quickly as possible. Grant Lots of integration strategies for if that's powerful. That's awesome. Alright, so let me ask you, if the for the people that are listening to this, where are you going to direct them to what's what's, where are you going to invite and where do they go find out more about this? Daniel Yep, so a FoodSpaceTech.com is the place to find all of the information. Grant Okay, FoodSpaceTech.com; Awesome. That's great. Daniel Okay, we actually just released a brand new website. So it looks great. And you can look at it now. Grant It looks awesome. I've asked you a ton of questions. What questions Haven't I asked you? What would you like to share that I haven't prompted you? Daniel Yeah. So I think that can be skepticism and the world of AI. And, you know, whether or not we can do what we say that we can do. And we are, again, just absolutely religious about product accuracy. And I think it's good for anyone who knows a lot about AI to know that AI can only take you so far and the machine learning is only going to get you so far. So we've spent a very large amount of our time building a very sophisticated human in the loop process, were really trying to figure out where the ML system is doing well and can be trusted, versus when a human needs to come in and take the reins and make a more educated more critical thinking decision about things with things like building known rules between the nutrition label. So calories is a very direct calculation from total carbohydrates and protein and total fat. So we can basically just cut check to see if that calculations done well. We can cross check our nutrition information against our ingredients where we've actually built models where we can predict certain nutrition elements based on the ingredients. You know, we know that a cookie were the first ingredient might be butter or sugar is going to have more fat content than something where the first ingredient is carrots. So if anything falls outside of those ranges, we can alert it and say, Hey, something's gone off the rails here, we should make sure if human takes a look at it. For certain container types, we know we are struggle a little bit more things like that yogurt container. So instead of relying on the ML models that work most of the time, but not all the time, we can just flag that certain product type for review by a human just to get another check on it. But we really think that the just to solve a problem, at least in the near term, using AI involves humans in that in the loop and being able to really distinguish that the easy cases, the happy path that I like to call from, hey, we've seen a new domain, you know, maybe it's a it, both English and Spanish is written on the back. So our models are getting a little bit confused. Let's flag that for review. Grant Yep. Yeah, I really appreciate the qualification around AI. I tend to prefer to think of it as augmented intelligence than artificial intelligence, I feel Yeah, I feel like that's the state of where it really is. There's so many things out there, like, Oh, you know, ai robots and Terminator that give a real misperception. But, but today, this stuff around deep fake, right, is really starting to become, you know, a bit of a challenge, right, in terms of creating even less trust around this. So it's a real misuse, if you will, of that. So in this particular case, this is obviously real, honorable use of AI itself. But the whole if we can keep people's perceptions to this is to augment your thinking process, right? Your cognitive behavior. So even though it's coming to you and saying, This is what you could or should eat, or this is what makes sense, you know, from a nutritional value, you still own the responsibility yourself, right to end up saying, Yeah, this is something I'm gonna do, I'm not passing that off, you know, to the AI model and say, do all the thinking for me, right? Daniel Oh, absolutely. And I could not agree more, you know, we are just providing the information to you. But it still requires that critical thinking and decision about your own values and your own goals to make the final decision about what you're going to put into your body. Right. We're just trying to make that easier. Make that whole decision process simpler. Yeah. Powerful. Grant They're very cool. Okay. All right. Any last comments, before we wrap up here, Daniel? No, it was a great to be here at Brampton. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time and for sharing this cool platform that you've put together everyone, go take a look at food space tech.com. Thank you for joining and until next time, go get some nutrition. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

In this episode, I have a guest who discusses nutritional AI that you can eat. Grant Everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. Wow. Today I have in the house with me. Mr. Daniel DeMillard, he is the CTO of FoodSpace, and I am just honored for the opportunity to meet him and to get to hear his story and what he and his organization has been doing with AI. Alright, let's jump into this. Okay, so, Daniel, first of all, welcome. Daniel Thanks for having me, Grant. Great to be here. Grant It is, it is really great to have you here and to have another another patriots in AI, right things that you guys are doing, as I got to know you. And before we started this recording, I was fascinated with the kind of work that you guys are doing and where you focus your use and application of AI. But before we get too deep into that, would you step back in time and tell us? Who's Daniel, where do you come from? And what is it that's brought you to this point to be CTO applying AI in such a cool way? Daniel Yep, so I actually studied economics and finance in school and came across an online class by Andrew Yang on Coursera. And at that point, I just absolutely fell in love with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I was like, wow, this is absolutely what I'm wanting. Yeah, with my life. So, you know, started studying a lot. Got a job eventually at IBM Watson, and worked at a small company doing what type classification, then I was doing some consulting on the side, where I actually got connected with iosshare, Nike, the CEO of foods, but at the time, it was a lunchbox. And they were developing a consumer facing app that, you know, they were trying to pair people with recipes. And you could set up a diet profile for yourself, and instantly order things online through instacart, based on recipes that you find. And I initially got engaged with them, building a wine pairing recommendation application, where, given a certain recipe will automatically recommend a wine pairing that would go well, really well I Grant ...need that certain kind of food, you're like, Hey, this is the right, right, Daniel ...we're gonna wanna medium red wine with that right or a very sweet dessert wine. Grant Until it this where lunchbox started, they were focusing on solving that problem. Daniel They were focused on solving the one stop shop for keeping all of your recipes together, ordering food very easily. And then also being able to manage your diets, and allergens, and just make making sure all of that was really seamless. And they also had a great mission of trying to mitigate food waste, so that they could recommend given all of the stuff that you have in your fridge that would normally sit there and forget about they could recommend a recipe and for you to make of the things that you've already selected. And so Grant all right, very good. All right. So so then you bumped into them, and you started to work with them. Tell us a little bit about the transition over to food space. How did the vision change? Daniel Yeah, it was actually pretty serendipitous, and rather abrupt. So back in 2019, io was a part of grocery shop, which is a big conference in the CPG space and food industry. And he's trying to pitch this idea of lunchbox to brands and retailers to get them to sign up for it. And they all have basically kept telling them the same thing of like, hey, it's a great idea. It's super interesting. I would love to but what you're asking for with all of these like dietary profiles, and The information necessary to build these types of recommendation algorithms. It's we just don't have it, we don't have ingredients and digitized nutrition labels. And, you know, we have the very minimum. So given that that information is like, Okay, well, we've got to take a step back. So he calls me up. And he says, you know, hey, Daniel, would it be possible given a bunch of computer or a bunch of e commerce images, to extract the product information from there and actually read it from those images. And I had done a little bit of stuff with computer vision by that point, using, like pre trained, convolutional neural net models on image net, and then using transfer learning to identify key regions. And so I stopped and thought about it. And I was like, yeah, you know, I think the problem is tractable enough. And the technology's in such place, now that we can absolutely solve this problem. And so yeah, two years later, we now have a model that can classify things that matter of seconds. And we're gonna extract that product information and seconds with 99.7% accuracy 99.7. So if I bring I can assume to you, and you can see the label on it, you can figure out what this is, you can identify it. Exactly. So we'll extract things like brand name, product, name, net weight, the ingredients, the nutrition label, any certifications, such as whether or not it's recycled, kosher, non GMO, vegan, all of that awesome stuff, including marketing claims, like low sodium or, you know, contains less sugar, those those types of things, well, pull out all of the relevant information from the product label. And we'll read it in the same way that a person would read it. A lot of other products that do something similar or are entirely based on the universal Product Code code, the UPC barcode on the back, where they're basically just looking things up from a database, a database might have inaccurate information, it might be out of date, so might have been accurate at one point, it might have been transmis, transcribe with whoever transcribed it in the first place, we're gonna read that label and not image, the same way that a human would label it so that it's, we're going to the ground truth. Grant So PC based, you're actually extracting the actual text, you're figuring out what this is, and then the semantics of it. What does that mean? Oh, it means this ingredient, this so much in the, you know, in terms of the amount of the ingredient, and so forth. Daniel Exactly. And then we will also derive new information from that information that we've extracted, such as whether or not it's going to be had certain allergens. If it contains peanuts, we're going to let you know if it has a peanut allergy. We're also going to determine whether or not it conforms to different diets. So I'm a vegetarian. And I'm constantly reading labels for obscure things like whether or not my cheese contains rennet in it, which is a animal derived enzyme. So we will read all of that for you, and then derive whether or not it's going to correspond with with your diet. Grant So can you talk about some of the use cases around this? So are you targeting b2b scenarios? Are you doing b2c? Is that something that I as an end consumer comes in interacts with it, let's say through through my cell phone? or How are you? How are people going to consume this this cool platform? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are primarily focused on optimizing the e commerce experience. So if you're on Walmart, or Albertsons or target, and you are using your favorite grocery delivery app, or you're going in to do pickup, all of that purchasing decisions are happening upfront on the e commerce website. And at the very least, we want to make sure that that information is present and accurate so that you can make the decisions yourself whether or not at the very least, you can see that ingredients label and search to see if that rennet in gradient is there, or if you're trying to, you know bulk up make sure that it has enough protein or has low sugar, low fat, whatever your dietary needs are. We want to make sure that information is there. But we really want to enable a more optimized ecommerce experiences where you know in your little left side of the toolbar, you can select vegetarian or pescatarian or low sodium diet or a South Beach diet, or I'm allergic to shellfish, and automatically only be shown products that correspond to your dietary needs. So we really think that optimizing that e commerce experience and the search is where we can have the largest impact right away. Grant So So some of the health profile of the person intersects with this, is it coming off? Like, I don't know, like, like the fitness app? Or is it coming off of other sort of apps? And then are capturing that health information? How do you integrate with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are basically providing the data to the retailer so that they can make those optimizations. But certainly being able to integrate with, you know, My Fitness Pal, or Weight Watchers would help optimize these experiences. And we are in discussions with those types of companies as well to improve their databases. So that you aren't, you don't have to manually type in all of that information on your fitness app, you can basically just look it up in the database, and it's accurate and recent. One problem that we've seen is that 30% or so of data is of grocery products are updated every year. So anyone I think use one of these apps has the experience of typing in their information, finding out finding the correct product, but it's a little bit outdated, the calories are a little off the nutrient profiles a little bit off, we're gonna make sure that it's updated. And in the right place. Grant That's interesting. So you talked about accuracy, the model accuracy for AI? And I think you should say 97%. Right. 99.7. Daniel Yeah, we are absolutely religious about that is, wow, you know, that is the problem that we're trying to solve. Right now, if you look up any product, on, say, a large, very large e commerce website, like walmart.com, there is a somewhere between 40 and 70% chance that there is at least one mistake on that website, regarding just the ingredients and nutrition information. So if you're trying to base you know, your health profile on that, it's it's an inaccurate, so we are just absolutely religious about getting every single piece of information. Correct, at least as so far as it corresponds to the product images. Grant So is this is this just for humans? Or is this also food for animals and pets? And how does this work? Daniel Yep, so we've definitely just, we started with humans, we are expanding to pet food and being able to build attributes around that two things like wet versus dry pet food, whether it's for a large size dog, or a small size dog. And all of those attributes we're hoping will also assist in that product search and discoverability so that you're not being shown a dog food, that's, you know, too too big for your small small dogs. Right. Grant Right. Right. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And then in terms of what we're talking about, who it's relevant to terms, your current market, so it's for humans, obviously, animals in the future. But as we think about the humans, this English base, is it other languages, Spanish or Mandarin or others? Where are you in terms of multilingual? Daniel Yep. So, you know, food is, I think, sacred to everyone everywhere. And as we move from this, in store grocery experience, where you're, you have the product in front of you, you can pick it up, and you can read the label to an e commerce experience, where somebody might just be dropping that off to your doorstep, and you don't see the product until it's there. We really think it's important that we have as larger reach as possible. So we definitely are working on expanding our algorithms to apply to different regulatory regulatory environments. You know, Europe has, I think, 12 allergens, whereas the united states currently has nine, and they just added sesame, to their allergens. They also have different nutrition labels and different information that they require to be on those. And then in addition to that, the different languages that are actually present there, and all of that obviously presents different technological issues, custom models for each of those markets, but really what we've spent a lot of time Building and working on is creating models that can quickly adapt to these new domains and building a really robust training pipeline. So that basically all we have to do is collect more data, instill a little bit of domain expertise, where we have to learn a little bit about that new market or that language. But after that, we can adapt our models very quickly to that new. Grant You know, I just have to ask, given that I love the AI piece of this, as well as just the benefit that you're bringing to human family. I mean, that's, that's huge. When I think about the AI portion of this, I think, how, how was building that model? I mean, how you have a lot of cans in your food storage now. I mean, how much? How many boxes of Cheerios did you buy? I mean, that's amazing. How did you get through all that? That's just that, right? There is a big challenge, right? To get through enough instances? Daniel Yeah, um, I Oh, and Dan, my business partners, they spent a lot of time getting kicked out of grocery stores, because they kept picking out prod products and taking pictures with their phones. And so they were kicked out of a few grocery stores, I think they learned to, you know, explain what, what they were doing their first after a little bit, but certainly a lot of time, taking pictures of your entire pantry. Going around the grocery store, just pick it up as many random things as possible. That's creative. Grant Yeah, that's, that's really great. If you have any particular challenges in terms of the kinds of food and other words, some things don't have labels, right. So certainly asparagus typically right or decent, things like that. So how do you deal with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So currently, we only support branded foods. So it does need to have that product label. But it's interesting that you should mention certain types of foods, we were doing a analysis an audit of our accuracy. And we were noticing that a certain product category, yogurt, in particular, was creating a lot of issues for us and was very low accuracy. And it turned out that the curvature of the yogurt container, and then the fact that it kind of tapers down, creating a lot of issues for OCR model, where the text is kind of getting bunched up at the edges of that, you know, yogurt container. So we actually had to like build a specific model just to handle those types of containers. So certainly, you know, a lot of our time and effort has been focused on the corner cases in those weird scenarios where that are particularly difficult. The like, very simple run of the mill cereal box, where it's a nice rectangular box and the nutrition labels very prominent. And it's a very usual format that's easier to solve that most of our time has been focused on these weird one offs, like these tobert, tapered yogurt containers. Grant So so let me think about because I love the, again, this problem that you're solving and how it benefits people and their dietary needs. When I think about how people can consume this, what's the way that they will be able to interact with this standard? And what's the state of what space is doing today? Is it? Is it out there ready to be used? Or Where are you guys? Daniel Yeah, we're currently working with brands to get their data to the retailers and some retailers are a little bit further along than others and optimizing the, you know, experience for you where you can set up those dietary profiles for yourself and only be shown the products that correspond to your values, or do you only want organic food or you have a gluten intolerance, only being charged on those foods that correspond with those values or dietary needs to just getting the product information out there to the retailers in the first place. We're also working with some initial engagements with smart appliance manufacturers, things like smart fridges and smart micro microwaves, where you can simply scan the product, either using the barcode or just the front of the product and instantly have your oven or your microwave set the time timer or the temperature for you to cook that product for you. Additionally, being able to do things like recipe planning based on the products that you have in your fridge, being able to order products from I'm a retailer directly using the feature on your fridge that is based on your dietary profiles and just you never needed to get on your computer. And you could just order, you know, your gluten free pizza directly from your smart fridge that is linked to a product database with information that we're providing, we really think that more and more people are going more and more of our purchasing Our food is going to happen in this virtual digitized space, whether that's through your computer, your smart fridge, and the more that information is available, the more that we can build a more customized experience, and really make shopping easier as well, so that you aren't ever being shown products that don't correspond to your dietary dietary needs or your values. You know, even being able to set timers and things for microwave, it might sound trivial, but it really should make the entire cooking, cooking experience that easier for you. Grant You know, I certainly could benefit from walking up to the fridge and say, what are the possibilities of what I can create from what's in there, my wife will do that she's got that AI model already in her head, but I don't have that model, same set of food and go, there's nothing in there. And then she can craft you know, miracles out of it. Daniel So yeah, I'm the exact same way. And, you know, you could you can set user profiles for everyone in your family and say, Hey, you know, I'm a pescetarian. And my daughter's gluten intolerant and my son really only it's organic food, and being able to mix and match all of those constraints, we can figure out what recipe and you know, what to eat for dinner, right? Grant And so it sounds like, like, like, we've done that, that South Beach diet multiple times. Sounds like you know, you can literally walk up to your, to your fridge at some point and say, Hey, what is it that I can make that is in compliance with the South Beach diet? Daniel Exactly. And then things like, you know, macros counting, like calorie counting, and counting how much protein that you're consuming, would be a lot easier using if all of this information is digitized, and you're interacting with it in a smart fridge type environment where it can track what you're picking up and making. So I think entering information into one of those calorie counting apps is often a pain and I think, a limitation for a lot of people. So anything that can mitigate some of that barrier to getting healthier and keeping track of what we're putting in our bodies, to me is very much welcome. Grant So we've talked about the art of the possibilities around this right? What is it that this can bring the people that dramatically influences and impacts their health? What do you see in terms of the downsides? What hurdles or challenges? What could get in the way of either people adopting this or getting value from it? What what concerns or challenges do you see there? Daniel Yeah, so some of the things that we've seen in the industry about the difficulty to use this type of data is, every retailer kind of has a different format for how they ask for data. Some retailers want the units and the nutrition and the value to be separate. So if you have seven grams for protein, sometimes they want us separate key for seven and a separate one for brands. They might call things different. Some people might think call things, UPC, other ones call it barcode. Other ones call it product ID. So that's some of the work in transit translating the data mapping or the data model to each of those retailers can be a major bottleneck for a brand say wants to get their data to Walmart to Albertsons to target. And they basically had to look at these like massive Excel spreadsheets, but like 70 columns or 150 columns, and manually copy that data over and it's a huge pain. And that that is one of the major reasons why only the largest of brands have the resources to get their data digitized in the first place. So what we do is, you know, we're going to first extract that information for you automatically from your images. You don't have to hire a team of people to do that extraction in the first place, where we've also built these mappings for the top 10 retailers where we can automatically syndicate and get the data in the format that they want to see. Whether that's directly through an API, and just automatically updating your information through an API, fortunately, some of the grocery industry isn't quite as forward thinking. So a lot of updates are just made through Excel spreadsheets. But we'll create that Excel spreadsheet for you. So that it's basically just a matter of sending that over an email. And I think that should mitigate a vast majority of the bottlenecks currently faced in the industry. Because some of the, I could just imagine being a brand manager and be like, Alright, well, here's my data mapping. But then there's these close lists for Walmart, where, you know, I'm supposed to put in a certain beef cut type for this product. And doing that, for every single one of my 150 500 products, that is going to be a huge ass. Grant Yeah, it has said that. It's one of the things that drew me to this. And when you and I were first talking about this recently, which was, I feel like the work that you're doing is not only scales to the larger brands, but also it's pulling out all this information that makes it available, even the small to medium business space as well. And so feels very scalable, therefore approachable to benefit a lot of people, lots of different scenarios. Daniel Yeah, absolutely. And we try to make things as easy as possible to get integrated with our system. So, you know, our simplest use case, if you already have data and a list of URLs for your product, you're going to send us over a CSV with your URL links and the product IDs associated with those. And we'll download those images for you and process them through the system. And now you can download it and whatever data format you want, you know, CSV or JSON, or an Excel or in target specific taxonomy format, or Walmart's or Albertsons. Or you can upload it through a, you know, drag and drop upload portal where you can just drop, drag a folder of your product images into that upload portal, interact with an API, or even give us access to your put them up on an FTP server and point us to it and we will download the images there. So it's really trying to make things as simple as possible. So that whatever your tech stack is, and whatever the size of your organization is, we can help you get up and running as quickly as possible. Grant Lots of integration strategies for if that's powerful. That's awesome. Alright, so let me ask you, if the for the people that are listening to this, where are you going to direct them to what's what's, where are you going to invite and where do they go find out more about this? Daniel Yep, so a FoodSpaceTech.com is the place to find all of the information. Grant Okay, FoodSpaceTech.com; Awesome. That's great. Daniel Okay, we actually just released a brand new website. So it looks great. And you can look at it now. Grant It looks awesome. I've asked you a ton of questions. What questions Haven't I asked you? What would you like to share that I haven't prompted you? Daniel Yeah. So I think that can be skepticism and the world of AI. And, you know, whether or not we can do what we say that we can do. And we are, again, just absolutely religious about product accuracy. And I think it's good for anyone who knows a lot about AI to know that AI can only take you so far and the machine learning is only going to get you so far. So we've spent a very large amount of our time building a very sophisticated human in the loop process, were really trying to figure out where the ML system is doing well and can be trusted, versus when a human needs to come in and take the reins and make a more educated more critical thinking decision about things with things like building known rules between the nutrition label. So calories is a very direct calculation from total carbohydrates and protein and total fat. So we can basically just cut check to see if that calculations done well. We can cross check our nutrition information against our ingredients where we've actually built models where we can predict certain nutrition elements based on the ingredients. You know, we know that a cookie were the first ingredient might be butter or sugar is going to have more fat content than something where the first ingredient is carrots. So if anything falls outside of those ranges, we can alert it and say, Hey, something's gone off the rails here, we should make sure if human takes a look at it. For certain container types, we know we are struggle a little bit more things like that yogurt container. So instead of relying on the ML models that work most of the time, but not all the time, we can just flag that certain product type for review by a human just to get another check on it. But we really think that the just to solve a problem, at least in the near term, using AI involves humans in that in the loop and being able to really distinguish that the easy cases, the happy path that I like to call from, hey, we've seen a new domain, you know, maybe it's a it, both English and Spanish is written on the back. So our models are getting a little bit confused. Let's flag that for review. Grant Yep. Yeah, I really appreciate the qualification around AI. I tend to prefer to think of it as augmented intelligence than artificial intelligence, I feel Yeah, I feel like that's the state of where it really is. There's so many things out there, like, Oh, you know, ai robots and Terminator that give a real misperception. But, but today, this stuff around deep fake, right, is really starting to become, you know, a bit of a challenge, right, in terms of creating even less trust around this. So it's a real misuse, if you will, of that. So in this particular case, this is obviously real, honorable use of AI itself. But the whole if we can keep people's perceptions to this is to augment your thinking process, right? Your cognitive behavior. So even though it's coming to you and saying, This is what you could or should eat, or this is what makes sense, you know, from a nutritional value, you still own the responsibility yourself, right to end up saying, Yeah, this is something I'm gonna do, I'm not passing that off, you know, to the AI model and say, do all the thinking for me, right? Daniel Oh, absolutely. And I could not agree more, you know, we are just providing the information to you. But it still requires that critical thinking and decision about your own values and your own goals to make the final decision about what you're going to put into your body. Right. We're just trying to make that easier. Make that whole decision process simpler. Yeah. Powerful. Grant They're very cool. Okay. All right. Any last comments, before we wrap up here, Daniel? No, it was a great to be here at Brampton. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time and for sharing this cool platform that you've put together everyone, go take a look at food space tech.com. Thank you for joining and until next time, go get some nutrition. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

Comedian / Deaf queer activist / public speaker Hayden Kristal joins Jenn to discuss animals, motivation, and being a memorable side character. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE BELOW   FOLLOW HAYDEN: Insta | Twitter: @haydenkristal FOLLOW JENN: Insta | Twitter: @jennwelchnow FOLLOW LADYHD: Insta | Twitter | TikTok: @ladyhdpod PRODUCED BY LEFT HANDED RADIO: Insta | Twitter: @lefthandedradio ***** LOVE THE PODCAST? WANT TO HELP SUPPORT PRODUCTION COSTS? Join the LadyHD Patreon and get sweet perks / goodies or Leave a tip in the LadyHD tip jar   TRANSCRIPT:   Unknown 0:00 This is where the theme song should go. Bah bah, Unknown 0:02 bah, bah, Unknown 0:03 bah, bah, Unknown 0:05 ADHD. Jenn Welch 0:07 Let's just like get into this. Hi, everybody. This is Jenn Welch, your host of ADHD a podcast for distractible women, women and people with ADHD. And I am so excited for today's guest is one of the funniest people I've met. I caretaker to a menagerie of, of amazing animals. And I, public speaker extraordinaire and just all around cool person. Let's everybody is cheering and clapping for Hayden crystal. Yay. Hooray. Hayden Kristal 0:48 Thank you so much. That was such a nice intro. Thank you. Jenn Welch 0:51 Thank you. I just come up with it on the fly every time. Unknown 0:55 Really good. Unknown 0:59 podcast. Jenn Welch 1:02 I hope something comes out of my mouth. That is that is okay. Um, how are you? It's been so long since I've seen you. Hayden Kristal 1:10 I'm in Colorado with the critters. It's snowing today. Wow, that sucks. But I know I was really disappointed. I went out for a ride and then I was like out riding an athlete. Because this oh fuck that and I went home. Unknown 1:25 Not happy about it. Jenn Welch 1:26 Which which animal were you riding? Hayden Kristal 1:30 Squidward my baby. Jenn Welch 1:33 Oh, my goodness. Because there's a mule right? There's no mule, but there's five horses and three donkeys? Hayden Kristal 1:42 Oh, three donkeys. Okay, but a donkey. A donkey is a mix between a mule and a horse. Or is it? Okay, yeah, well, it's a mix between a donkey and a horse. So you have three donkeys? Five horses. Unknown 1:59 Yes. Jenn Welch 2:00 They don't make mules? Nope. And how do they get along with Bitsy and pinkman? Hayden Kristal 2:12 bethy doesn't like any of them. She just like leaves them alone. She won't go in the pasture. But pinky love to chase the donkeys and they love to chase her. Unknown 2:20 Yeah, have Hayden Kristal 2:22 have an ancient rescue donkey. He's 23 years old. He's a mini donkey. So he's like the size of a Great Dane. And his name is Nicola Ross. And he loves Pinkie and she'll bark and chase him back. It's really cute. Oh, Jenn Welch 2:37 that's so sweet. I like to imagine. So, for people who don't know, Hayden's dogs, pink Ben is I Deaf Border Collie, okay. Bitsy is a blind and deaf Aussie. Unknown 3:00 Yes. Hayden Kristal 3:00 And last night What? Yeah, I took this really cute video of her and my dad reuniting seeing each other for the first time since COVID started and it hit the front page of Reddit and then ABC ran it in a field good segment last night. Jenn Welch 3:19 Oh my God, that's amazing. Hayden Kristal 3:19 amazing. It's like sidebar as a comedian how annoyed I am that my dog has a TV credit before I do. Jenn Welch 3:30 Technically, I think it's your credit you filmed it you put it out there for the world. Hayden Kristal 3:35 I wasn't in it. My dad has a TV credit before I do oh my Jenn Welch 3:38 god content that you created. Hayden Kristal 3:41 It is content that I created. I don't think my name was mentioned at all. But my dog does have a network TV credit before I do. Jenn Welch 3:54 I love that I I was thinking earlier about Bitsy and pinkman. And I was thinking about how Bitsy is kind of like a little furry like metaphor. I mean, obviously for the experience of being blind and deaf, but also I think for like inattentive ADHD, because she's always just like in her own world. And then you just have to like tap her and be like, come on back. Like this is what's going on Hayden Kristal 4:28 every once in a while because I have an attentive ADHD but every once in a while she just gets this laser focus. Well, yeah, I was sitting by my mom's feet while my mom is eating dinner the other night and my mom was eating ribs. And Bitsy was just like, No, I'm eating ribs. And she just like, like, jumped up, grabbed the plate and ran like rat flip the whole plate was watching barbecue sauce off the dog for like an hour. But like she gets these moments of pure focus or shopping to accomplish Jenn Welch 4:58 or then maybe she's just inattentive ADHD everything because I was gonna say pinkman is like hyper focus, like pinkman like with a ball. Hayden Kristal 5:10 Yeah, there's something wrong with pinkman we're not sure what she's just like congealed amphetamines. She just is the world's first like meth based life form and that of carbon in my bed looking at me right now. Oh, Jenn Welch 5:30 oh my god, I just remember the one time my dog sat for them. And pinkman literally, I made the mistake of like throwing a ball indoors. And that was it. There was like, no peace. Hayden Kristal 5:45 That's her whole deal. Happy. Jenn Welch 5:47 Yay. Um, so how old? Were you? Cuz I don't think we've ever really talked about how old were you? were you when you were diagnosed with ADHD? And how did that because I do want to talk about like the intersectionality of like others sort of like disability and stuff like that. But like, how did that coincide with with when you like, I don't know, we've never talked about like the the death thing too much, either. Really? No, people usually have to pay for that. Did you only do that on your only fans? Hayden Kristal 6:24 My only I was gonna say because that's what I talked about as a public speaker. I'm sure that my agency would be thrilled. I started doing workshops on all my family. That's actually super funny. And I maybe should do. Like educational content. Oh, me fan. I kind of love that. And I definitely want to do it. I wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult. Yeah, 19 or 20. And I went, I got a diagnosis because I had been seeing a psychiatrist for a long time. And my girlfriend at the time was like, I can't take you anymore. I need you to go get help for your add. And I was like, No, I have a DD. And then I went into my psychiatrist. And I was like, so my girlfriend thinks I have ADHD. And she goes, Oh, do you? Not? And I was like, not that I'm aware of. And she was like, Oh my god, I'm so sorry. She was like, I don't know why I thought that you had it. I thought we had had this conversation. And you were just like cool with where you're like, Oh, that's not great. And I remember doing the like the test like the quiz they give you? Yeah, she was like, Do you often misplace important things. And I was like, I swear to God, I'm not doing a bit. I was like, I don't know where my keys are right now. Somewhere between here and my car, presumably. But that's as specific as I can be at this juncture. Oh Jenn Welch 7:56 my god. My mom keeps texting me every day saying Have you found her driver's license yet. And I I haven't told her that I also can't find my debit card. But um, so they're both missing in my apartment haven't left my apartment and months. I like the only reason I know it's missing is because I had to go get my vaccine. And I had to like, I just had to give up and go to the vaccine appointment without my license and like, like nudge, nudge my way into like getting a shot. I have no idea where it is. And they were like, We can't go back home and look for it. And I'm like, it's not gonna help. It's not gonna help. I have no idea. Hayden Kristal 8:39 No, and retrospect, I don't really understand why I wasn't diagnosed sooner. I had been going through debit cards roughly every six weeks. Jenn Welch 8:49 Yeah. Hayden Kristal 8:50 Like, that's how long I could keep one or like I would lose it at four weeks and just not replace it for two weeks. Like I was going through them so regularly with the lady at the bank, me. I don't really get why I wasn't diagnosed. I also went to like a tiny private high school for like, I need your podcast on air quotes. The most air for gifted students. And it was it was real circle jerky about like everybody learns differently. everybody's mind works differently. And now as an adult, I'm like, yeah, it's in the DSM. Like we just did nothing. But like, sit and congratulate ourselves about how special My mind was, for a long time. And then I started Adderall. And now I can be a person. But um, I think the question of the intersectionality of that, and that disability is really interesting, because I talked about on stage that I was they thought I had autism, some kind of autism when I was a kid, and which I've read that there's a lot of overlap between like a Add ADHD and autism diagnosis and especially those, but there's also a lot of overlap in autism and hearing loss diagnosis. They're both communication disorders. Right and so I think it's really interesting that we kind of circled it nothing I don't have hearing you That was a valid diagnosis. Jenn Welch 10:22 Well, I wonder I wonder too if like I'm like some of the stuff that was ADHD stuff was like well that's just because you know of the issues with hearing so that's why that's why he didn't miss that or that's why Hayden maybe Yeah, that's Hayden Kristal 10:39 a great way and I also wonder how much of that fed back into itself like I couldn't hear it so I just checked out like and like how much that got in trench but my mom and her whole side sure have add on ADHD? I don't really get how they missed it except that I was like not like running around like I wasn't what you picture is like a rampaging ADHD Okay, sure. You Jenn Welch 11:08 say that you're not rampaging ADHD child. But in the few years since I've known you I've never seen you without to unruly dogs. Unknown 11:20 of like, dogs are not Jenn Welch 11:22 here. By unruly by unruly I mean, I was one of them's deaf, and the other ones blind and deaf, and you have to be really aware of what they're doing at all times. And they're big. I don't mean they like I mean, are there, you're not there. They're so well behaved. They're so well behaved, but you have to be engaged with them, right? The whole time? Not really, Hayden Kristal 11:47 I will accept that. Hey, is there something wrong with pinkman? No, I do, but I wasn't like, Unknown 11:54 I accept that. I'm Hayden Kristal 11:55 a weird person. Except that I'm definitely like, a, like a memorable side character. But I'm no I but I wasn't like bouncing around. I wasn't like jumping up and down on the couch. When you're on the classroom. I just was always, Jenn Welch 12:17 I always feel like when I bring Augie out with me places in public, like he's just a little dude. And he like makes me feel like I'm expending so much energy, like trying to kind of like, make sure he's not getting in somebody's soup or making sure he's not, you know, meeting a new stranger who is going to go home with or make sure he's stealing the microphone from the comedian. You know, or like, whatever. So I can't imagine having two of them, I guess is like, that's why I see it as like a high energy pursuit to have the dogs with you. Like, you know, yeah, I Hayden Kristal 12:57 understand what you're saying. I spent I did like, I went to like a professional facility and did like dog training and dog sports for a while. Yeah, they're pretty self sufficient in terms of just being good. But it's like, I do like having a constant distraction. Yeah. Or like, they're like, they're like furry fidget spinners. Like I think the pet Unknown 13:20 wide bar. Hayden Kristal 13:21 My mom got a fidget spinner for free. Like someone gave it I was gonna throw it away. Then she found me sitting at the table with it, like up against my face just wearing it. She's like, okay, and I was like, Can I have this? And she's like, yep, You sure can Unknown 13:38 have a $5 trinket? Unknown 13:43 Yeah, Hayden Kristal 13:43 I was just mesmerized. I was like, this thing's pretty good. I like this a lot. Unknown 13:48 Oh my god. Um, Unknown 13:50 I should have been diagnosed a lot sooner. Jenn Welch 13:53 Yeah, that fidget spinner man. I know they became like a joke but the first time I got my hands on one I like I was it felt like I was home. This is where my body is. Hayden Kristal 14:08 Yeah, I was like I lit so satisfying. Like bearings in it. Jenn Welch 14:14 Oh boy have like that weight to it. That spinny so good. It's so good. Um, we because we haven't talked about it too much. But I guess like your experience with like, you know, deafness and like communicating and ADHD and how it all kind of rolls together and how it all I just want I want to hear everything about it. Here everything about how like I communicating and like just, all all of the all of the things, all of them. extrapolate something from what I just from what just came Hayden Kristal 14:59 over. Using hearing aids and like, I went to private schools that I gave, only about 30% of spoken English can actually be like lip read the rest of it you get through context and guesswork. It's like a, just an never ending an unrelenting game of Wheel of Fortune all the time. So the processing power that it takes to have a conversation with someone, and lip read that conversation is a lot, particularly in like a classroom setting. And I really have to focus, because I'm only get 30%. So I need all the context clues that I can get. And then sometimes when I'm talking to people, there's a bit of a lag. Yeah, like, it's not very long. But there's a bit of a lag as I'm like, putting stuff together. And I think that, that burned me out. Like, I think that that and it still does, like I noticed when I'm signing my ability to focus as much more Jenn Welch 15:57 I can only speak to like, obviously, I don't have issues with hearing, but after I hit my head, I did have issues with like audio processing and stuff like that. And also hearing words wrong. Like I would hear multi like multi multisyllabic words as like, just almost like a classic like a Rebus puzzle like, so if a word is like a carburetor, I would hear it as like automobile cold eating her like carbery you don't like that's how I would? Oh, yeah, that's how my brain would hear it. So I'd have to like put it together. And yeah, it's exhausting. Like, kind of trying to communicate with something like that. And you can't respond as quickly and like, whatever. And so how does how does signing kind of like open things up more? Like I imagined that just the the experience of mental listening versus like whole body communication is like you have to be in your body like your I don't know, tell me tell me tell me Unknown 17:09 things? Um, Hayden Kristal 17:11 no, it's just, um, it's being able to receive the information without having to take the time to like, process it consciously. Like it just comes in streams, and I'm able to respond. And that's a lot less exhausting than it is to have to like work out that puzzle for everything that said, I will say My vision is not great. And so I'm super nearsighted. So somebody is more than like, a couple of feet away from me. I do have to kind of actively process and squint to see what they're saying. But that's just more a personal not wearing glasses problem than it is like an actual processing issue. That's I don't like things on my face. Yeah, my fucking problem and not going to touch my eye like an idiot. Oh, contact lenses Unknown 17:57 are the worst. Jenn Welch 17:58 Yeah, you get the LASIK? Hayden Kristal 18:00 I could and I thought about it. But I also like that requires like taking the initiative to figure it out. Like, not learn how to do it myself. Like I'm just gonna get I'm gonna forge a laser vein and I are so busy. I could I've thought about it. I should probably go do that. I feel like I got a queue. My, my sense of smell is really good. So I felt like as long as I have that, like, I need to address the other issues. Okay, so you really identify with Bitsy, is what you're saying? i? I do. Yeah. But I'm a really good. I just learned that not everybody like I can totally smell like my family all smells like people smell different to me. And like I can tell which one of my dogs comes in the room by like, smell. Yeah, I just learned like, that's not a thing that people don't that translate. Well, you guys are missing out well develop sense of smell. Jenn Welch 19:03 So what how old were you when you learn to sign? Hayden Kristal 19:06 I started when I was 15 I think I must have been 16 cuz I I started college early. I think at the time. It was very out of character in retrospect, very unbranded and super funny but I got pissed at one person in high school and I dropped out and got my GED the same week. I went to college early. And I got scholarship money for my GED score. So I did not beat the system. I slam dunk the system. I still think that's one of the like, talk about committing to a bit I got that one person dropped out and got a GED. But then I started college and I was really struggling because I went from a tiny private school to a big public university and the Deaf Services Coordinator there recommended I started learning sign language and I had this kind of like internalized complex like that I didn't need to learn sign language because I was smart. And cuz that's what it's about. That's what it's about. And then when I started, I was like, oh, okay, and my grades shot up. And like, my social ability shot up, like and even with hearing people, I think just because I'm not so tired all the time. I'm still very awkward. Jenn Welch 20:31 I know we all are. But Hayden Kristal 20:33 yeah, we wouldn't become comedians if we had social skills. Right? But I feel like in terms of like confidence and self assuredness, I really bloomed because before I couldn't, it was hard for me to go do stuff because like, I couldn't go out to dinner with friends because it was dark in the restaurant. Like I'm just gonna sit there and that's like, even at comedy clubs, it's very early and all of it I'm like, having war flashbacks to pine box. Like when it's dark. And, like, there's a lot of background noise. Like there's no way for me to be able to, to lip read and communicate, which is a bummer, because I like hanging out with comics. But yeah, but being able to sign and having that outlet, I think gave me like more tolerance for those situations. Yeah, cuz I have outlet where it's not like that. Jenn Welch 21:28 Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool. So how, I guess the last thing I want to talk about is because we're getting close on time, but one thing that really impresses me about you is this career that you've forged that I going around and doing these speaking the speaking circuit and and finding these like connections like you have the awesome one about Bitsy and you have the awesome one about like gay SL which is like the intersectionality between like LGBTQ activism and, and disability, activism and everything. And how how, how did you? How did you follow through on all of this shit, because I keep wanting to put something together to do. Because we had talked about it in the past, like doing something on like, improv and PTSD or like doing something. Yeah, I have this podcast now. Like, I could talk about ADHD, like, whatever. Hayden Kristal 22:35 What? You know, 100% dude, by the way? Jenn Welch 22:39 Um, yeah, it's but it's, but it's like, doing it. It's like the actual doing it. Yeah, stops me, you know, Hayden Kristal 22:46 I find a fun way to convince myself to do stuff is to trap myself in obligations. And then you so Midwestern, that I can't back out of it. Jenn Welch 22:58 That is how I've done all of my solo shows. And my half hour is I just booked and and then I'm, and then I'm staying here. likeable foot. Hayden Kristal 23:06 Yeah. And then so I started. So if anybody I mean, why would anybody know. But my day job is doing well. Now, also comedy, but I work mostly with corporate gigs, and colleges. And I do stand up and also workshops about what I call intersectional accessibility, or how we can make our resources the most available to the widest range of whole people. So I started doing that actually started public speaking before comedy, because I just, and then I made the switch because I was like, This is too much money in respect. But I I started by applying to conferences, which are kind of like comedy festivals. And I kept doing those. And I really liked doing those. I like going and interacting with people. And I like performing. So I just kept applying to those, like I would get in a little like zone and apply to like 50 of them. And then whichever ones would take me I'd be like, Fuck, now I gotta go to this. And then I just kept doing it. And I don't write anything out. One of my teachers in school is really impressed. She's like, you can give a whole presentation and you don't have to write anything down and like, I can't write something down. That's one of the things that I love hearing that, because that's one of the things that's been stopping me with this route is I feel like it was speaker gig, you have to be respectable. You have to have a script, you have to like whatever but I don't. I don't even write my jokes down. Like I did an hour long solo show and didn't write any of it down. Jenn Welch 24:37 Yeah, Hayden Kristal 24:38 but I think that that's an asset and I've gotten a lot of feedback, especially working with college students. I get a lot of feedback that I am fun, and it's personable and it's not threatening, and it's not like I'm not lecturing me and it's when now I've done particularly KSL I've done so many times that I think if I flatline and somebody like Like, electrified me, I'm not remembering what the English word for Unknown 25:05 different different, different. Unknown 25:07 Yeah, yes. Hayden Kristal 25:11 We were playing with that game like we try to guess the word. Now we're gonna get stuck on that we're gonna have to Jenn Welch 25:17 get now we have to guess the game of the word that game where you get hurt. Hayden Kristal 25:21 Um, but I've done that so many times if flatline and you shocked, I would just sit up and do that whole workshop word for word, and then I would just go back down. But it's not. I didn't start doing like, like big name conferences like I started doing little garbage conferences, and then worked my way up. And so I slowly felt my way through. And it becomes kind of like a comedy set, like you build the framework. And then as you go through, you can add more stuff and take out the stuff that doesn't work. And you kind of I, my method is I feel my way through it as it goes. Yeah, it's the same as comedy. It's like you don't start public speaking start small. I think people think of like getting paid $250,000 to go speak at Goldman Sachs or whatever. But you don't start doing that. It's the same as comedy. You build up your speaking as though you build up your program. And I've been doing that for, like seven years, I think. Eight I know, time is so relative, but I that's something I've been working on forever. And so my thing is that, when, especially when I was starting out was to just trap myself into commitments. And then I have to go do it. But you all you need is like an outline. And and the thing I tell people when I teach public speaking, is that you don't, you don't need to worry about it. You don't need to memorize a speech. If you know what you're talking about. If you know what the point you want to get across is that's the important thing. So like are gay ASL at the teach these signs and then talk about intersectional intersectionality, accessibility and intersectional accessibility with Bitsy, I want to explain who she is, why she is deaf and blind. How I trained her what that means for me, like I have those points. And so I know I know what the thesis is. And I just have to get up there and tell it to you. Like that's it. And it doesn't matter if the wording is exactly the same every time. It would be a nightmare for me. I would be so bored if the word is the same. Do you get laughs during your talks? Oh, yeah, big time. I have jokes that I can't do. I want to do ASL is like a one person show? Jenn Welch 27:34 Uh huh. Like as a great title. Hayden Kristal 27:37 Thank you. I have so many good jokes. I have a joke for every letter of the alphabet because I teach the alphabet. But it's like I can't do it on stage. There's just no context for it. Yeah, like it's just, but I think it's like a friend show. It would work really well. Yeah. Jenn Welch 27:55 I could definitely see that. Um, I, I am feeling pumped about this. I just need to book myself some dates and and then do them. And then Hayden Kristal 28:09 Dude, you should. Yeah, you should I think you would do really well. And it's I've had as many cool opportunities as I've gotten from comedy. Like I've gotten to do some cool ridiculous shit from Yeah. public speaking. Even just like doing because Jenn Welch 28:23 I would do improv trainings for for companies and for corporations. And that was just like ridiculous. Like, oh, I get to go in for an hour a day and teach improv to timeshare salesmen. To go to the devil's work, yeah, right. On top of two pyramid schemes, she stands. But I going to, you know, like a corporate retreat at the Jersey Shore to like, teach improv and like, whatever and having dinners and stuff. Um, but, but also just like, I, I feel like I'm being able to, like say something that's like, helpful in a way or like, you know, like, spreads good goodness. Although, I feel like I feel like Oh, that's so much responsibility, but it's also a lot of responsibility to like stand in front of an audience of people and be tasked with making them laugh like that's also a weirdly big responsibility you know, that they left their houses in Yeah. COVID days. Yeah. Hayden Kristal 29:31 Talk about this, I'm, I've been working on a new workshop about like activism in the digital age, and something that I've been talking about for a long time. But I feel like it's more relevant now is that it's not it's not my anybody's job to any educate anyone. I don't think that you have an obligation to be an activist just because of how you identify and the groups you're a part of. I think that your responsibilities to yourself and self care first, and that can be really rough. In and of itself. Yeah, I also think that if you put yourself in an educator context, it's your job. Like if you want to be an activist education is your job. But they think that if you put yourself in that context, I feel like there's a responsibility there. I feel a responsibility when I go, but I also feel like, it's not on me necessarily what people take away. Like, I know that there's going to be a couple people who really lash learn, and there's going to be other people who just are like, whatever, and forget that it happened two minutes later, but I think that I mean, also this is like very, maybe not helpful, but like, also let the market decide baby like, go do a workshop and people hate it, you'll know, right? Unknown 30:48 I know. Jenn Welch 30:50 But it has to be perfect before it happens. So we are we're at time, I want you to tell people all the places where they can find you, but I want you to do it as Bitsy and so where can people find you? Hayden Kristal 31:09 Okay, I feel like for context people should know that I do voice characters for my dogs and Bitsy my ex otherwise, I'm gonna be bluedart medicated by a robe not that that would help with this but I do voice characters for my dog Bitsy is like a like a trashy little pageant girl who is deaf and blind so people are really nice to her because she's disabled but she's also never experienced hardship. So she has a super awesome internalized sense of superiority. Yeah, Jenn Welch 31:41 I meant to ask you this earlier too. So in red fold into this giving of your of your places that people can find you also what Bitsy imagines a horse to be. Okay, Unknown 31:55 that's a lot. Hayden Kristal 31:58 Okay, so are you all sorts of places? Why number one, oh, the internet. Like also because my mother does social media survival social media is just an event. Mama's by Hayden crystal ha y d E and K our eyes ti l or like Instagram at peacock, and like, all those kind of things. But you can find me on pigment the dog that temblor calm. We're very color famous. And then also I sent you back. I don't like horses. They're overweight. They're very chubby because like, I don't wait for 100 pounds like only weigh 43 pounds. A year massive. He have a dog but like also you 1200 is much bigger than 43 and I don't fit that skirt. Jenn Welch 32:46 Amazing. I'm in heaven. I'm in heaven. I'm Cathy sweet, sweet Bitsy girl. Um, guys. I'm Jenn Welch. You can find me at Jenn Welch now. Jenn Welch w l ch now like right now. And at all the places and follow the podcast lady HD pod at lady HD pod. Also at all the places Patreon oh my gosh, I have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash lady HD, sign up a small monthly little I become a Patreon patron of the podcast and and get perks and goodies. Like one of them is a is a is a zoom art party that is perhaps quarterly or maybe monthly. I don't remember what I put. So that would be fun, wouldn't it? And that's what you get if you're a patron of the podcast. So anyways, um Hayden Kristal 33:48 that Find me on my site haydenkristal.com that Jen actually made for me. Oh, Jenn Welch 33:54 yes, go to go to Hayden's website and see the beautiful illustrations that I did I Oh, what am I doing? The beautiful illustrations that I did have. We are beautiful. Hayden Kristal 34:08 I just got contacted by a very fancy law firm to do corporate diversity training. And they were like, We love your website. And I was like, your UC immigration law firm and my website is dope but it's also it's got like 80s pop art of my dogs. But this these eye socket are replaced. I was like, Okay, I can vibe with this. I can do a lecture there. That's amazing. Unknown 34:34 I love it. I love it. Unknown 34:35 Oh. Thank you for doing that. We're done. Now. We're done. Unknown 34:40 Yay. Hi. All right. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Andrew Weingart speaks to Tracy about being a conscious parent with your children, helping them develop their true selves. Andrew can be found on Instagram at www.instagram.com/elevatewithandrew/  Details of his course are here: https://linktr.ee/elevatewithandrew For 80% off the course, message Andrew direct for a promo code (or drop Tracy a note and she will connect you). Tracy can be contacted as follows: Website: www.tracykimberg.com Phone: 07928 154054 Facebook: www.facebook.com/Tracy.Kimberg.Counselling.Therapy.Coaching/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-kimberg-9564a3193/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/tracy_kimberg_hypnotherapist/ Hello and welcome to the waves of clarity. This is the 20th episode. Oh my goodness. I can't hardly believe it. It's been five months of weekly podcasts. And I want to thank you for listening for your support. I hope that you have really managed to listen to most of the episodes and that in each episode you found something valuable that has made a difference in your life. Let's be honest with each other. This last year has been an absolute nightmare at times, but we've also had loads of really special times and memories that we're going to carry with us for a very, very long time. But a lot of us have lost our motivation, our mojo, so to speak. Have you lost your mojo. Then this episode is exactly what you need to listen to. I have a guest, his name is Andrew Weingart. Andrew is a motivational speaker and he specializes in teaching people about mindfulness and also helping teenagers be better motivated and more mindful in their lives. Being a therapist is extremely rewarding. It can also be quite difficult sometimes listening to people's hardships and the troubles that they have in their lives, but there is nothing more. Wonderful for me then getting an amazing review from a client that's completed their course in therapy, or has completed the first step and is willing to carry on in the process of improving themselves and building their resilience throughout their lives. So, today I want to share with you a very special, um, review, which is from one of my clients. It's a young lad that. Really what amazed me. He walked into my office feeling really shy. And, um, the transformation that I saw in him over the three months that he came to see me was absolutely magnificent and made me very proud in a way, not of myself, but of him because he is the one that did the hard work. So this is his review in his own words, which I really love. I was nervous in the beginning and didn't like talking, but felt comfortable after the first session. I have learned how to be confident now. And I'm so thankful that I came and definitely recommend this. So this type of review is really what makes my job worth doing. I love it when people really feel the benefit of coming for therapy. Very important to remember is if anything, in today's episode, when I talk to Andrew resonates with you. Then I welcome you and I invite you to contact me. I'd love to have a discussion with you and see if there's anything we can do to help you. And if I can't help you, I can definitely refer you to someone that can help you. I'd also like to invite you to next week's episode, which is going to be focused on the importance of proper communication in your relationship, healthy communication. Open communication, which is vital for your relationship to thrive and grow. Let's get on with this week's episode, excited to introduce him. He is really interesting and I'm sure you're going to enjoy listening to everything he has to say. Welcome Andrew, to the waves of clarity podcast. I'm so honored to have you here. So I'm going to introduce you. I'd like you to introduce yourself and tell people about who you are. What you do and what your passions are. Well, thanks for that, Tracy. I appreciate it. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day and what you're doing here as well. Like providing a platform for myself and other people who want to help inspire others and create ways of clarity. Um, a little bit about me. Well, I grew up. Normal kid, um, in New Jersey, uh, was always like the life of the party, like just vibrant, uh, always joking around like just, just being a goof and felt so free. And, um, it wasn't until really that I hit sixth grade. I was 12 years old that I actually came down with Lyme disease. And it took, uh, four different hospitals to figure out what it was. Cause I had a rare case of a it's called Lyme meningitis, or I got double vision and my headaches were so bad. It felt like I would literally cry. And um, so the point of me telling that story is that was actually when I first can remember experiencing feeling bullied. Um, I received a card, a big like huge card. From my classmates and they mailed it and somehow they got it to the hospital. And I was reading, there was so many lovely things on it, but right in the dead center of the card, it said gay. And I had made up in my head that I knew the kid who said it. And it was the first time I actually experienced being bullied and. Really from that moment on now, looking back gradually, my confidence just started to diminish my willingness to shine my light and just not have a worry about what other people would think about me slowly started to diminish. And then I started to continually attract that because, um, the mind, you know, the thoughts that we have is what we continue to attract. So I started to attract more bullies. My older brother started to bully me, which seems pretty natural for an older brother, but that also affected me. Right. Um, and then from there, um, I went to, I. Got a bunch of injuries from high school sports. And because my injuries were so bad from sports and my body was out of alignment, but not only my body, my energetic body inside of me, it was out of alignment. I actually found yoga when I was 25 and it was, it was strictly just to heal my physical body. And then as I started to heal my physical body, I ended up meeting my. My Ukrainian teacher, who is like, uh, a Buddhist monk. And it was the first time that I experienced whatever anybody calls it, universe source creator, God. Right. I experienced that through his words and I said, wow, this is what I've been. Like I've felt that there was something else there. And my soul always knew. I always felt that was connected, but I Oh. But I never knew how to like get there. I was like, you know, where's the key to open the door to have this information until unlock this. And so I met him and I became a yoga instructor through his course. And, you know, since then I've done personal development trainings, um, and the training similar to landmark forum, which is big on development. And from there, I really, I just started coaching people. It was my passion to help other people. And one day just hit me. I said, Whoa. I said, if I had all of these tools and techniques that I have now, when I was a teenager or when I was 12, when I first got bullied, I wouldn't have allowed myself to go down this spiral. And I just see it. I'm like if we can catch, if we can educate teens before they get into this. And, and anybody, the sooner we get this tools, these tools and information, the more easily we can hold that true pureness that we are as a human being, or I believe that we're pure whole and complete from birth. It's just through our patterns, our conditionings, our habits, what we're. What we learned from our parents, even though they do the best that they can with vape, what they know, and also society and media and et cetera, is what programs us into someone who we think that we are, but it's not who we are. You know, like I did this little mini Ted talk. It was like, you're not who you think you are. And to let people know, it's like, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, all this person that you think you are is not actually, you it's just. All of the things that in experiences that you've. Grabbed from your life from media and what they tell you you should do in this and what your parents think is best for you. Most of the times, we're just, we're just mimicking our parents, but is that truly what we believe in our heart and soul that is most important to us that resonates with us. And I think this is a great segue into the whole parenting. And I specifically work with teens, but th but parenting in general, it's like I noticed oftentimes that. The parent believes and in right. Do mind. I understand that my way is the best. But they're doing it out of love. Right? That's the first thing I want to mention is like, I know that it's coming from love, but the team doesn't see it in that way. And the teen is like, they're rebelling because that's their, that's their development, mental part of their life. When they're looking to create their own identity and to create their own independence. And that's where the clashing between the two common, I think that's where a lot of the parenting issues come from. And, um, Yeah. So that's me. That's me. And, um, I'll pass it back to you, cause I'm sure you have some questions for me. I can go on forever. So when, um, when, um, the say, when I started talking about my job and I love my job, um, you know, I have to really, um, say to myself, you need to shut up and it's. Um, but, um, I think, um, when you think about how there's a lot of talk. About, um, having an awakening when you met life. Um, in the olden days, they used to refer to it as a midlife crisis. Now they've they refer to it as an awakening. Um, and. My theory is that the wakening comes exactly because of what you have just described because of how we've been told, how we are, how we should be, what we should believe in, how we should act and all that. And eventually we have a delayed reaction to realizing who we are, and that's when we have this awakening. When we older. Um, I was wondering, what do you think, um, we can do to. Um, shift that awakening earlier for our children to shift it, um, to not happen later in life so that before they end up finding a life partner before they end up, um, making very serious choices about the future to have that awakening, um, Before and earlier then what we are as grownups. Yeah. It's a great question. Um, I think that. W w as you alluded to it doesn't have to be a mid-life right. It could be at any point. And, and when I experienced mine was when I was 28. Um, and I think that we can experience that immediately or get to the point in an ideal world that we never even have to experience it because we never lose that pureness of who we are. Right. Um, what I've learned from my experience in hearing others' experiences is oftentimes it takes. It takes some sort of bang energy and circumstance to happen in order for that awakening to occur. So sometimes it's such, it's such, um, you know, great arguing, like intense arguing in a relationship, or somebody does something to us. So harmful for me. I had a DUI and I became allergic to alcohol. So that was kinda like my wake up of like, okay, let me just like chill out, settled down. Like. You know, and I started to find myself on this path, um, as far as what we can do, um, we must educate, we must educate our teens, uh, all of our children, uh, no matter what age and. I think that's, you know, kind of what we're doing here is like, whatever platform, never think your voice is too, too small, first and foremost, if you can impact one person, right. That butterfly effect, you can impact one person to wake up. They can be the next Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra. You don't, you don't know. Right. Um, so I think that's really important, uh, is to share, share your gifts authentically vulnerably and. Never think that your voice is too small. Um, really getting to the teens and understanding, I would say number two is to really get on their level, especially as a parent one tap into like who, who. Who was I when I was a teenager, what were some of the things that I went through? Because I believe that life is always reflecting back to us, the things that are unresolved within us. And so it's like, okay, how is my team acting? And how can I be accountable for that? Not from a place of I'm blaming myself. I'm a terrible parent. I don't know what to do, but like, How am I being with my child, that's working for me. How am I being with my child? That's not working for me. And then what can I bring forth from me that can create that shift? And a lot of times for, in my belief for everybody, but since we're talking about parents, it's the need to be, right? Like, it's like, Oh, this is the way that it is. And it should be. And if my kid would just do this, then everything would be great. But guess what? He's not, or he or she is not, you. Right. So he, or she has a different, we all have different perspectives of lot of life. So when we can get to a common ground and learn communication, and this is what I teach in my eight week course for teens is a particular way to communicate with people in the world so that they understand you and they get it. They get what you're saying what's happening is there's a disconnect. What you're saying to your teen is not landing for them. Okay. So it's like, so it's like, how can I be accountable and how can I be resilient and relentless that no matter what it takes, I will even be willing to be wrong about all of what I've been doing so that I can create that result. And I think that's super, super cool Warren. In your work? How, how, when do you, I think one should start with this. I know the answer, but you know, I think. Obviously from birth, but when you, for people that have never heard about or thoughts about changing the way that they parent their children, what do you think is important for somebody listening that thinks maybe I'm doing it wrong. I need to maybe change the way I'm parenting my child. What, what would you say are a couple of basic steps that they can, um, try, um, in the way that they parenting to change things and better the relationship with them and their children. Yeah. So to answer your first question, like you said, it's early possible. They're actually teaching, um, S E L, which stands for social emotional learning. They're implementing these programs in the schools. I know in the U S I'm sure it's worldwide and it's not in every school, but hopefully it gets there because it's teaching these kids how to be, how to learn socially and interact, and then understand their emotions, which is in my experience. First of the first importance, because when we can understand our inner world, then we can clearly understand our external world and then we can get results in our life. We're not experiencing depression, anxiety, et cetera. Um, so yeah, and of course each age group, you're going to have different things that you're going to teach based on their level of understanding. Um, as far as things that like a parent can implement right now with their child would be to. Seek support know that you don't have to do it on your own is definitely I think a very big priority because there is a 10th attempt, a tendency of righteousness between amongst human beings in general. Right? It's like I can do it on my own. I'm going to figure this out. And if I w. Human beings in my experience also have this struggle to ask for support because it means that you're weak, that you're not smart and these types of things. So as a parent or something, yeah. Right. And understanding that you're not alone. There's so many parents out there that are going through the same exact thing as you just with a different twist on it. So it's like, how can we come together as a community of parents and a community of teens? So we can start to address these issues? I would say number two is listening. Listen with the intent to simply listen and feel like do your best to feel the emotion and the pain, the suffering that the teen is expressing to you and notice as well. That what they're saying on the surface is not actually really, truly most of the time, what they're dealing with, the reason why they're mad or angry or lashing out at you is not, it's like. If you can look okay, like why are they upset? And asking questions would be number three. So ask questions, you know, go deeper with asking permission. I would say is number one is ask permission to your child. Hey, are you open to talking about this? Cause a lot of times parents go in with like, Oh, I have this entitlement that I can just do and say whatever I want. Cause I'm the parent, which okay. When they're younger. Sure. Because they need guidance direction, but especially as a teen moves towards their adolescents, it's huge. It's in our biology as a human, as the mind develops, we long for a sense of independence and self-identity, and. Yeah. And what happens is teens start to look elsewhere. They don't, they don't teens want that independence. So they actually look elsewhere from their parents. Their parents is just like their security, but they want to start to explore. So I often hear a lot of times parents say like, Oh, I feel like I'm losing my son. They never talked to me. My daughter, you know, I feel distant. And it's also that surrendering as a parent of knowing like, Hey, I'm doing great. And like have that discussion with them. Listen, tell them, tell them you understand what they're going through or ask them what they're going through so you can relate to them. And then once you're both on the same page, now, you're like, okay, listen, here's the boundaries, but you. Invite them to create the boundaries with you because now they're starting to be independent. You have to give them a say, but that doesn't mean like, Oh mom gonna stay until 3:00 AM. No, you get to negotiate. Okay. How's 11 instead. Okay. So now they have a sense of say, and then you create that connection. But if it's the constant like this, you do what I say. A lot of times that comes from a fear of the parent. Not wanting them to get hurt, not wanting to get her wrong or wrong. Around the wrong crowd into drugs, around the friends, et cetera. And I get that and that's where that sense of surrender comes in. Right. So it's a fine line and I'm not a parent, so I wouldn't be able to tell you that it's easy and I'm sure it's super challenging, you know, but yeah, that's, that would be my, those are my main tips. So it would be, um, Hmm. Let's see if I can recall them ask permission. Right. Um, ask, ask them questions to see how they're feeling and really relate because we can make up in our head like, Oh, they're feeling Ang angry, but really, maybe they're not feeling angry. So asking them like, what's what are they experiencing? Um, Alyson was the other one and listening yeah. With the intention to simply feel what they're feeling, having that compassion. Yeah. That's often, I think a lot of the time, the problem is those exact three things. Um, but you can, um, that can spill over into every single relationship. Not only with our children, you know? Um, I think if they are parents listening out there. You know, even when you are in your own relationships with your partner, those are the three key tools to actually having communication and respect for each other. Those three things are vital in any relationship. Absolutely. And I think also too, teens don't feel heard people in general don't feel heard because we do too much talking and not enough listening. So it's like a teen wants to express something or, you know, Like, you know, share something and then like the parents just, it's almost like a, I know better. Let me tell you. And it's like, they don't feel heard and whatever, whatever you're experiencing with your team, that they're probably also going to experience and is, like you said, it's going to show up in other areas of your life. So it's an unresolved trauma or pattern or conditioning that you've had from your past life. So like, I would say that's another piece of advice is like, As an adult, take yourself on. Take your own inner work on, as you start to heal yourself, you're going to learn, you're going to release things like, Oh, I used to never listen because I felt unheard from my dad or my mom. So now when I heal that within me and I work on that, now I could be more present with my child so that they now feel heard. And now you're breaking that, that pattern that has been going on for lineages. You know, there's so many single people Aaron's out there. Um, that's with girls dads, with boys, women, moms, with girls and boys. And I think it can be quite difficult when you don't have a second parent as a backup. How do you. See, um, maintaining that balance between not always being the bad cop, you know, it's very, very difficult. Um, when you are single parents too, because you're trying to make a, for the parent that's not there. So obviously you have to almost. Be the bad cop all the time. You never get a break. What's the importance of creating those spaces where you can actually just not be the bad cop, just be there in the moment with your child. Because for me, I think that's so vitally important to create those moments. Very difficult when your kids are teenagers, because they don't really want to be around you. They want to be with their friends or lock themselves in their room and only come down. For when they starving. Um, you know, how important are those pockets of communication time when everybody's feeling in a good space? Yeah. So what I would say to that is to realize, well, first and foremost, setting boundaries is important. So having that conversation with your child of like, Okay. And being open and honest about your feelings as a parent. I think a lot of times parents sort of like hide their feelings from their kids because I want to seem like I'm strong and I need to be this strong person for them so that they feel like they can rely and trust. Trust me, right? When really I guarantee that if you get vulnerable and you're willing to cry in front of your kids, you're willing to share your deepest feelings with them. It's going to allow them to share their deepest feelings with you and feel more comfortable, which is going to create a deeper connection. So if you can express to your child, Hey, listen, Mary, right? Like it's obvious that, you know, dad and I are now divorced and you know, it's just, when you're with me. It's just me. And so explain to them, like, I feel some, like, I don't like feeling like the bad cop, but also as a parent, it's my duty to make sure that you're safe and whatever. So like let's create some boundaries. Right. And let them know, like if they cross a boundary or if they, if they upset you. Talk to them be like, Hey, can I talk to you for a moment, get permission from them and then share vulnerably, listen, you did this. And this is how I felt. Not from a place of blame, right? But you can be accountable. I felt this way when you did this and let them know, listen, I'm not blaming you, but I want you to know that when, when you do this, it makes me feel this way. And you can even say, listen, this is a trauma. This is. This is a pattern that I have that's unresolved within me from my past. So just know that, you know, although it's not because of you, it would support me. Right. And then you create that's what creates the connection. When you can create that connection with your child, they're going to want to be around you more. And then once they're in alignment with your boundaries, You're going to have that space now. It's like, Oh, they're going to honor you. And you don't have to be the bad cop. Of course, there's going to be times where they get out of line cause they're kids. Right. And you check them on it. But it's most of the time, you're not going to have that freedom and that space to be able to be with them because they know where you're at and they know where you're standing. And it's important to say, and if this boundary is crossed, like these are the potential consequences, and I would never recommend any physical consequences, but specifically like, Hey, like you're not going to be able to go out with your friends or this, that, and the other, because that's important as well. Um, So, yeah, thanks. That's, that's very, very helpful. Um, another thing I wanted to ask you is, um, with your courses that you offer, you obviously do a lot of motivational speaking with teenagers and so on. Um, What, um, what do you think is the key to lift someone up from a dark hole when they a teenager and they are so depressed, they may be self-harming and they feel lost and they don't see any, um, why else, what would you say to anybody listening that has a child that's really battling with their mental health? Um, Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I specifically have not dealt with a teen one-on-one, who was at least told me that, uh, something is that serious. However, I have a friend who's experiencing it right now, um, with her son and. Me. I'm just like, get them on the phone with, get on the phone, me like, um, cause I just feel that I can help and support any and everybody, is that realistic? No, of course not. However that's how like, uh, confident I feel about it and I'm how passionate I am about it. Um, number one, I would, I always like to just, I mean, connection is. Is the key, like getting to down to their level and really just letting them know number one, they're not alone. Right. Other people have gone through this, relate to them, tell them about your struggles. You're not, maybe they're cutting themselves and you've never done that, but you can relate to something else where you can. Once they see that you're also human and it's not just them. Right. Because typically what's happening in their mind is like, this is just me. I'm the weird one. I'm the mess up one. Or like life is too overwhelming. I don't, I don't have a solution. Number two is, and I forget where I heard or read this, but they say that because you're still here, right. Most of the time. So we can educate them about like, it's your mind. That's not you. So separating yourself from your thoughts, your thoughts, and distancing and being the observer of them, and then realizing. Wow. Although like my thoughts do consume me often. I still am in control. Why? Because I'm still here on this earth because if you lost complete control, you wouldn't be right. So it's like letting them know, like you do have power because maybe they might say, Oh, I'm powerless. Or I can't do this. Well, obviously you can do something because you're doing this right now. You have the control to be here. You're alive. So then just moving the bar an inch at a time versus trying to get them from cutting to like this, you know, whatever the next Martin Luther King. And one second, it's not, it's not feasible. So letting them know that. And then the inch by inch is so important to make that progress each and every single day, because our habits are what create. Are I, um, who we are and the results that we, that we, I'm sorry, our habits create the results in our life. Right? So if we want a certain result, you go back to the habits, but if you want to create effective habits, you got to shift your identity. So it's going into like, having them realize that I am not the thoughts. Who, who do you want to be? Right. And then getting them to that space of like, W who's your ideal self before all of this happened? Who were you kind of like in my story. Okay. You still are. That is just your co it's covered up with all these different things. It's like, how can I just continue to Polish the gem until I remember who I am. It's coming back to returning to love who we truly are. Time, um, our teams make really big mistakes. Like we, we do as humans, we've all made mistakes and they get themselves into something and they find it really hard to get past that, which is similar to the previous situation. But I find that teenagers are really hard on themselves. And they find it really difficult to forgive themselves when they've slipped up or made a huge mistake or disappointed their parents. Because I find that often the biggest thing is that disappointment that they feel that they such a disappointment. What, what would you say to a parent that has a child that's really done something really bad and can't get over it. How do you, how do you pick your child up from feeling like they such a disappointment now? And your words seem so pointless because they, they don't believe it. Yeah. So the F the first thing that I would. I would invite them to, to educate their child on, is that nothing is a mistake and everything is an opportunity. Right? So in order for you to be the most successful entrepreneur, to be the star athlete, you mean to tell me you went from zero to this star athlete without ever making a mistake? No, it's impossible. So our mistakes help us to learn and. You know, it, it really all comes back to the connection that we can create with our child. Because if the connection's not there, then they're probably going to be like, whatever mom, you know, I've done it a bunch. And that's also where you can reach out to other people for support, right? Like sign them up for a course, get them involved with a mentor because they're, they're looking for adult advocacy outside of the home. So it's like, who can I. Support them in finding that's going to help them in realizing these things. Um, again, as a parent coming from the space of like, how can I be accountable? Like where, where, where is it? Where am I operating from a parent that's creating and contributing to this again, not from a place of I'm wrong or. Or I'm bad, but it's like, okay, where can I shift? And sometimes that requires getting support because you only know what, you know, you don't know what you don't know. So. In order to discover what you don't know, you have to go to people who do know it. Um, and there was one other thing that I wanted to say, I'm trying to remember, um, Oh, it's a to be motivated. Oh, another thing I was gonna say is, you know, they feel the pressure to not like upset their parents or just the pressure in general that the world is, is, you know, from all the situations in the world is to let them know that there is no pressure to perform. That's actually one of the biggest things as I was doing my research is that teens feel this pressure to perform. They already feel the pressure going from a kid, right? Because you go from a kid who you have no responsibilities at all. To all of a sudden you become a teenager. You're in high school, you know, you have older kids, you're the lowest class. You're getting bullied. You have this responsibility to get good grades. Cause then you have college or you have to learn something because had a career. Then you have to start managing your finances on top of that. If you add the pressure to please your parents, it's just another thing. So it's like as a parent, how can I. How can I relieve that pressure and let them know, like, listen, whatever you do, like do, as long as you're doing your best, like I'm here to support you and supporting them with the things that they do want to do as long as it's not causing them harm, if they want to go and be the next painter. Encourage them to do that, because guess what? It's probably going to change in six months. You have to let you have to let them explore plenty, because what happens if you tell them, Oh, well, painters don't make that much money. They're starving artists, this and that. That's immediately going to put this thought in. Like I CA I'm unable, I'm incapable of doing something. It's going to stunt their creativity and you're operating from a space of, I want to control because this is what I think is right. Right. So it's letting go of that control. And there's four survival contexts that we operate from the need to be, right. The need to be in control. They need to be comfortable slash safe and the need to look good. So anytime you feel yourself operating right. Okay, how can I be accountable? Let me look at one of those four. What place am I acting from? And it's likely one of those. And it's like, okay, how can I shift that? So I can be in a space of, you know, whatever it is you want to bring forth. Is it love? Is it compassion? Is it because ultimately if you want, if you want your child to be happy and successful, then support them in what makes them happy and successful? Not what you think is happy and successful for you. Um, But yeah, relating to the kids, let them know like, Hey, you're not the only one going through it. And really just being on their level is super important. And then getting them a part of a community or a mentor that has also, um, You know, working in the same capacity and that's what I'm committed to creating within my eight week course, I have this group, this safe space and container that we have on an app called Slack. It's similar to a Facebook group, but it's, it's an app. And we all communicate in there. We support each other. Hey, what are some of your wins? Hey, what are some of the things that you're struggling with? What questions do you have throughout the course? And it allows us to be vulnerable with each other. And it also allows the team to step up into their own leadership and support each other. And ultimately my vision is to have these teams. Realize how effective and powerful this work is like I did. And then also give back and be in service to other teams just like them. We need more things like that in the world. We definitely do. We definitely. Yeah. And I can, I can definitely see in the near future supporting and creating a course and a community with parents as well, because I think that just naturally leads into it. And, you know, kids don't have money to spend on a course. So ultimately the parent is going to be involved in some way typically, and they're going to want to know that this course is safe and that who I'm working with, I can trust and, and all of these things. So, um, Yeah. I mean, I know that you support the parent, you support the teen, and if you support the team, then you say you're supporting the parent as well. And, um, yeah, it's, it's no one's responsibility. I always joke around. I'm like about my mom. I'm like, how come I had to be the one to learn this and then teach you. But it doesn't matter because once you, once you remember who you are and you'll have the tools and techniques to read. Come back to who you are. You're going to have that courage, that confidence, that all of that coming from you. And so it's not scary anymore to talk to your mom and to look her in the eye and tell her that you love her and to inspire her to also take on the work and you guys heal together. you know, the other thing is that I think it's important for, to also make sure that your teens understand that the choices they make now don't have to be forever. You know, they can change their mind. They can reinvent themselves so many times in the future. You know, it's not about making a decision now and I'm sticking to that for the rest of your life. For instance, I, I started off, um, doing a teacher's degree, switched to nursing, and now, now I'm a therapist, so, you know, Uh, I find a lot of the teenagers with the pressures like you were talking earlier. I was so pressured to decide when they do their subject choices or when they're going to college and what are you going to be one day? And they can't decide what makes them feel inadequate hundred percent. If you don't know who you are internally, how can you know what you want to externally? That's why we're always going from job to job, to job. So again, going back to, if we. Can get this, ER, as we get this work to the teens earlier and you know, four or five, six years old, there's so certain with who they are inside. Yeah. They might go from here to there. Oh, I'm going to try this. I want to try this, but they do it in confidence. So whatever they do, they're going to be successful. So we don't have to worry and doubt. Are they going to. Do well, are they not, should I tell them to go into this? Should I tell them not to go in that they'll know on their own, as a parent, our job is to raise them and to be safe, to, to be safe and to support them and be successful, you know, not to control, not to, you know, worry. We shouldn't have to worry. And I know that we're in a time right now, where there's a bunch of stuff going on where it's like, worry, worry, worry, worry. And this is the opportunity for us to actually break through that because we've been worrying for years, all that the news shows his fear and worry. So as we can break through and be like, no, I'm safe. I'm whole, I'm complete. And. We are as when we come together at community and as I heal myself internally, Our immune system is we're all powerful as beings. So we don't need anything outside of us, in my opinion, you know, that only just enhances it. So I think this is a great opportunity to step into. A new paradigm, a new way of thinking as a community, as a society and the new earth, right. As Eckerd totally talks about in his new book, it's here. And we might have to go through some turmoil, but this is, this is part of it. Um, I kind of went off a little bit, but I wanted to come back to what you were talking about. Oh yeah. So to have to have the thought of, as a teen, like, Oh, I did this in the past. It's like, what? As human beings in general, even for parents, we identify as soon as we do something from the past, it's like, Oh, I did this. That means I am this forever, but that means I'm I'm. I made this mistake. It's like, I'm a mess up. I'm a bad parent forever. And it's not true. It's not true. You are who you are in the present moment. That's the only real moment. And for you to be able to create a new future for yourself, a new identity, you must be willing to let go of the past because if we keep it. If we keep thinking about the past, we're keeping those thoughts going in our head, even if it's subconsciously and then what do we do? We bring the subconscious thoughts into the present moment and we just recreate our past. So how do I create a new future is to be present in the moment and actually to think new thoughts that are, and visualize new thoughts that are in alignment with what I want to create. So that's another great tool for a parent is like, Stop thinking about what you don't want. Oh, I don't want my kid to be this, this and this. I don't want to do this anymore as a parent. No. Like what do you want to create and visualize feel it in your body. And feel it like the day that your kid comes up to you and says, I love you again, the day that this happens and feel it in your body, that's how you create, that's the magic and the superpower that we have that is not taught to us and should be taught to us. And I'll just leave it at that. That's so true. You know, it all boils down to the fact that we live in a, a thought created reality. And, um, you know, we have to always be kind. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, um, gosh, that was a brilliant discussion. And thank you so, so much, Andrew for joining me, it's been an absolute pleasure. So much has been said that I think, um, anyone out there listening is going to really find value, um, to it. And I just want to say that I'm going to add the link to your course. If anybody's interested, I can just look that up. Perfect. I do want to add something just in case, cause I know people like to leave as the ending comes. Um, I do want to add this. Anyone who's listening to your podcast right now, I'm going to put a special promotion link. For all of you for 80% off the course for any, any parent who has a team that they would like to be a part of this course. And you know, if, again, asking permission, talking to your teen about, you know, what are they discovering, what their pain points are, what their struggles are and what they, what they want for themselves and their future. And then, and then saying, Hey, if I. This is the simplest way to support somebody into getting what they want. Hey, if I told you that I had a potential solution for you, Mary, would you be, would you be interested in learning more? And if she's like, yeah, I would love to. Yeah, of course. I want to, of course I want to create what I just said that I want, of course I want to break through what I just said that I'm struggling with. And once they say that, be like, okay, awesome. I'd love to connect you on a call with Andrew and we can get on a call and we can talk about with you and your team about, or even just your team. Because sometimes the team doesn't want to share deep, like deeper details with the parent there and I can discuss with them, Hey, what are you struggling with? What do you need support with? And then letting them know if I think the course is a fit for them to get what they say, what they want in their life. So yeah, 80% off. Um, they can reach out to you. They can reach out. I can reach out to you. They can reach out to me since I'm tagged in the video again, uh, on Instagram, I elevate with Andrew and, uh, message me. We can get on a call discovery call. And from there, if you're interested, I'll give you the promo code. So that brings us to the end of the 20th episode of the waves of clarity. I hope you enjoyed listening to Andrew's passion about children and what he does and his whole ethic Grady about and his ethos about what he does is really inspiring. And without trying to sound like too much of a cliche, I'd like to say, remember, it's okay. Not to be okay. You don't have to hide your emotions. If you're struggling with your own mental health and feeling a lack of motivation, then talk to somebody it's so important. And that is the first step. In feeling better. And as you've probably picked up by now, I really love my quotes. So I'm going to read you a quote today and hopefully this will be able to inspire you to keep on going. The quote is by Charles F Kettering. And it says keep ongoing. And the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down. So keep on everyone. You might just stumble on something extraordinary

Hi i am here with Nelson L. Tressler, He is the Founder and CEO of IGOTSMARTER, a goal-achievement program and app created to help people succeed in every aspect of life. Despite his unbelievable difficult beginnings, Nelson rose to become a top commercial real estate agent and investor, completing well over $1 billion in transactionsCHECK THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY NELSON FOR MORE INFOhttps://igotsmarter.com/JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAMlearn how to activate yourself for a better future!https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/giftDO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!https://booking.builderall.com/calend...CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.comhttps://www.Achievehealthusa.comCreate a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Ari Gronich 0:00  Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians Paralympians a list actors in fortune 1000 companies decide not get results, they did not get results. I realized that while powerful people who control the system want to keep the status quo, if I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are joining me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as I chat with industry experts, elite athletes, thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree, and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down. I'm Ari, Gronich, and this is create a new tomorrow podcast.Welcome to create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. Thank you so much for listening in. Remember to rate review, COMMENT, LIKE subscribe, all those kinds of things so that we can start conversations and continue this on. Today with me, I have Nelson Tressler, and he is an interesting, interesting person has an amazing history. I'm gonna let him kind of tell you a little bit about that. But he's the author of the unlucky sperm club, and founder and CEO of I got smarter. So just the two names alone tend to reveal themselves a little a little bit, but I'd like you to kind of explain to the audience what it is that made you in the author of the unlucky sperm club and and how you got smarter.Nelson tessler 1:59  Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I have quite the origin story. So my mom became pregnant with me when she was 15 years old. She was one of 15 children, her father was the local trash collector in a small town. And while she was pregnant with me, her father drove a car into the town square. And there, he spotted two police officers, he stuck a gun out the window and open fire, killing one of the police officers and critically wounding another. My grandfather was eventually brought to stand trial, he was facing the death penalty. And during his trial, my mother testified to the jury that the reason that her father had shot and killed that police officer was that that police officer had raped her and she was now pregnant with his baby me. And that's kind of where it started. My grandfather's first trial ended in a hung jury, because of my mom's testimony, they took the death penalty off the table. But he was eventually found guilty and served the rest of his life more than 40 years behind bars, pretty much leaving behind, you know, his large family of 15 kids, my you know, including my mom, and now me in a small town that kind of deal with the circumstances of what had happened. You know, my story, you know, continues to get go on it apps, you know, it doesn't get any easier from there. You know, my mom eventually becomes 21 and starts to go to bars. And there she finds a peach of a man who eventually becomes my stepfather come to find out that he's an alcoholic, that he is physically and emotionally abusive to me and my mom on a daily basis, and having to deal with that situation. Eventually, my mom has four more children. And because of the lifestyle that's being lived in my home, a lot of the caring for, you know, basic needs for my brother and sister fall upon me. And that has a dramatic effect upon you know, my social life in my schooling life.I remember looking down at my report card when I was in the fourth grade, excited to see who I'd have for fifth grade and seeing that I had strayed. So my report card and that I'd be repeating the fourth grade. I was placed into special education, you know, I couldn't read couldn't write I still can't spell and eventually, you know, Flash forward. My stepfather was walking home drunk from a bar one night, and there was somebody else driving home drunk from that bar. They ended up hitting and killing him. It was at this time that my mom now has five children. She had dropped out of school in the eighth grade. never worked outside of the home. And as roughest her life has been to this point, losing my stepfather was really, you know, left her with no hope. And it was at this time that she decided that she was going to take her own life. And fortunately, she was not successful. But she was placed in on a psychiatric cold. And at this time, my family got split up among other family members to go live with him, I went to go stay with my grandmother, who is the wife of the man shot and killed the police officer. And it was, my mom eventually recovered and got out of the hospital. But it was at this time that she decided she wasn't going to be able to care for all of us. And I ended up going and living with my grandmother permanently. And for the first time in my life, you know, I kind of had that stable household, you know, even though you know, I'm living with my grandma, who, you know, some of her 15 children are still living at home. And, you know, my grandma's a saint, you know, she's raising five or six other cousins for whatever reasons, but for the first time, I kind of had a stable household to live in, you know, there was no alcohol, there was no abuse. And even though education wasn't a huge priority, my grandma at least expected that you were going to go to school, probably for her sanity, you know, to get rid of some kids for a few hours in the day. But for that first time I was, I was able to kind of really start to reflect upon my life, and what direction it was going. And I remember, you know, one time I was in the seventh grade, and a counselor came from the local university, to talk to us about what we needed to do to get into college, and kind of the bells and whistles went off in my head. And I thought to myself, you know, what, if, if I could be, you know, if I could graduate from college, maybe I could change the direction My life was headed. And, you know, anytime you put those thoughts in your head, that you want to do something different, or something that is going to be difficult, you know, that voice in the back of your head starts screaming at you all the reasons that you can't do it. And I remember thinking, well, you're going to try to be you know, graduate from college, you know, no one in my extended family had ever gone to college, only two people had ever even graduated from high school from my mom's family. And here I am, I'm in special ed, I can't read, I can't write, I can't spell. And I'm talking about going to college. And but, you know, I didn't listen to those voices. My life was not where I wanted it to be. And I thought if I could do this, if I could accomplish this goal, that I really could change the direction of my life, and eventually, you know, the life that I was going to give my future family. flashforward, you know, 12 years later, four different colleges four years in the Air Force, I finally became that first person in my family to graduate from college.Ari Gronich 8:03  Wow, congratulations. This is a it's a it's a tremendous story to begin with. What were some of the things that youth feel are different about you and your mindset than some of the other people who have experienced similarly difficult beginnings and, and yet, you know, they're still in that spot of wanting to have hope they're still living, right. So they still have at least a smidgen of of hope. And if you're talking directly to them, they're in the audience. If you're direct directing these comments to them specifically, what do you think was the difference maker in in you, that allowed you to gain that kind of shift and change and pivot?Nelson tessler 9:09  Yeah. Well, I think there's a few things. I mean, the one thing I I've always had that long term perspective, I've always looked into the future and really wanted, wanted to kind of realize where I was heading. And I knew the future was coming. And, you know, I also always knew that I was in charge of my ship that that I was the captain of my ship. And, you know, you hear that saying, you can't control the winds. But you can absolutely control the way that you set your sails. And I think so many people want to assign their problems and, you know, their heart aches upon other people or other things or what's going on in the world. And as soon as you assign your problems to somebody else or something else, you lose all control and I think one of the things that has helped me in my life is I've taken control for everything. And I've absolutely taken control for my own success. And as soon as I've done that, then I'm in control. And, you know, there's, there's bad things that happen, you know, you know, it hasn't been a smooth ride. But when you're in control, you can overcome that stuff that pops up. But as soon as you start blaming it on somebody else, or something else, you give away that control. And now the only way that things get better is if they change or the economy changes, or whatever, you've given control to changes, and then you're helpless, just sitting there hoping that somebody is going to change it for you.Ari Gronich 10:47  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because the premise of the show is kind of the world sucks the systems that we're living under suck. We've created these systems, I my saying is we made this shit up, and we can make it up better. And how do we then activate our visions for a better world. And it sounds to me like, the number one thing that you've done is taken personal responsibility for the world around you. And instead of assigning the responsibility to the world around you, to heal or fix you, and that's a really interesting perspective, because it takes away that ability to be a victim. And it gives you the ability to be a victor. But what do you say to the people who really like being a victim? And and really, you know, like, that's where they're getting their juice, and they don't see that they can get the juice from the other from that Victor versus victim?Nelson tessler 11:52  Yeah, I mean, you touched on my book, and the subtitle to that is, you're not a victim of your circumstances, you're a product of your choices. That's what I would say is, and you talk about, you talk about changing the world or the world around us. But you know, what, if you focus on your own world, and changing your own world, you don't need to change everything else that's out there affecting everything else. I mean, I can only control the things that I can control. And I think a lot of times is people want to change, you know, they want to change, try to stop the waves of the ocean. But you know, what, what they really need to focus on is changing themselves. And when you start to really focus on yourself and changing your world, that's when the world will change. Because the only thing that you're in control of is you, you can't control these other things. And as soon as you start changing your world, and start changing your mindset, and changing your attitude, that's when the world starts to change for you. Because we all live in the same world. But we all don't look at the world the same way. And if we're, you know, we're going to find what we're looking for, you know, if we're looking for everything that's wrong in the world, or everything that's wrong with the people around us, guess what you're gonna find it. But if you're looking for everything that's good in the world, and the good things about the people that you surround yourself with, you'll find that as well.Ari Gronich 13:24  Awesome. So let's go get into some, some techniques, some some of the minutiae of what you talk about in your book, because I don't like to just kind of throw out the phrases and throw out the theories and the concepts I like to give the audience things that they can do, and actionable things that they can do. And I'm going to, I'm going to use me as an example. So that I'm going to let you kind of refer back to this particular thing. So my entire life, there's been parts of me that have felt like I'm a burden. Right? So as I did, and, and abused, and you know, growing up, I had medical conditions. So Pete, you know, my family needed, needed to take care of me a little bit differently than, say, my brother who didn't have all those issues, right? So he may not have that same feeling of, I'm a burden. And so therefore, I can't ask for help. Therefore, I can't do this, right. You know, those, there are things that that were in my life were out of bounds, so to speak, like asking for help. I had to do everything myself. I have, you know, it's like those kinds of issues. I know a lot of people have that, but they also have others. So why don't you just talk to that a little bit and then how in your book you kind of and I don't normally promote somebody's book, but I am going to give you the opportunity to explain the techniques, the tips and tricks that are in there that help people get through whatever it is that they're going through, and hopefully non conceptually more of like actionable kinds of things. Yeah.Nelson tessler 15:19  Well, thank you, I mean, that one of the biggest things that ever changed my world and my outlook on life, is the concept of things only have the meaning that you're willing to give them. And I mean, that hit me like a ton of bricks, is you get to give meaning to everything that happens to you in this world. And when you get to give meaning to everything, why on earth? Would you ever give anything a negative meaning, and I know, I know, I've lived through some horrible things and some horrible circumstances in my childhood and in my, you know, adult life. But what I found is when you dig deep enough and hard enough, and like I said before, if you're really looking for something good, or what I can learn about this, or how can I use this to, you know, get me to where I want to go, you'll find something, you'll find something in there, you know, you get to tell your own your own story. So you get to tell yourself what this means to you. And as soon as you start assigning good things to think, you know, you know, supposedly bad things that happen to you, as soon as you start to see the good and those things and give it a positive meaning. That's when you start to, you know, create, get energy from it. And, you know, I told you guys my origin story, and that used to drain me that used to weaken me, I ran, I literally ran across the country to get away from everything that that story represented to me. And for the last, you know, 1718 years, nobody knew about that story, except my wife, my kids didn't know about it, my friends didn't know about it, my coat, nobody, because I was running from it. But then I decided, you know, what, that happened to me for a reason. You know, all those things happened to me for a reason. And then I started to say, you know, what, what if I could share that story, what if people could would hear this story and get inspiration and motivation to take control their own lives, and all of a sudden, I gave those circumstances in my life a positive meaning. And now, you know, instead of it draining Me and Me hiding from it, now it strengthens me and I and I am get fired up whenever I talk about this story. Because I know that there are people out there who are going to hear my story. And they're going to realize that you know, they are not, you know, a victim of circumstances, they're a product of the choices, and all they have to do is start taking control of it, start giving these negative things, a positive meaning in their lives. And it will make all the difference to them. It soundsAri Gronich 18:05  like like, from pain to purpose is you know, a distill it of what you just said, right? You take the pain and you turn it into a purpose. So in my life, you know, I do a lot of work with athletes who are injured with emotional release work with I've worked a lot with vets and PTSD, because of the experiences that I had growing up. So I turned my pain into purpose. And that allows me to and it may be a slow, maybe a slow healing, but it allows me to heal me as I turn that purpose on to other people. And, and it's kind of interesting that that you've stated that, you know, I feel like everybody needs to turn their pain into a purpose and then act on it. So that's the next step is now that they have that purpose now that that pain is rewired in their head. Have this happened for me and not to me, then lovely. Yeah.Nelson tessler 19:17  Yeah. No, and I mean, the one thing that you think a pain, you think, well pains there, it can be there to help us right. If you get too close to a fire or, you know, something that pain, you know, lets you know, Hey, get back. And again, it's it's the meaning that you're willing to give it and it's not that the pains not there. It's that you're giving it a different meaning you're giving it a positive spin, you're giving it you know, a meaning to where it's going to motivate you to help others who are maybe going through that and look at it a little bit differently. It doesn't take it away. It doesn't take away all the bad things that have happened to you. It It's just, you know, I love that you said, you know, this isn't happening to you, it's happening for you. And when you start to look at things that way is like, Why is this here? Why is this here? What is it here to show me teach me, help me strengthen me, when you start to look at it that way, then you gain energy from it you gained, you know, a way to bring it into your life and really, you know, propel your success as opposed to, you know, shackling you to, you know, a bad situation that, you know, is going to kind of keep you tethered, where you are right now.Ari Gronich 20:39  Yeah, you know, it's funny, Jim Rohn I like to kind of quote Jim Rohn a bit and Buckminster Fuller was the inspiration for the book a new tomorrow. And you know, Bucky already,Nelson tessler 20:51  I think you've froze, can you hear me?Ari Gronich 20:53  I can hear you. Yeah, I can hear you.Nelson tessler 20:56  Okay, great.Ari Gronich 20:57  We can always pause because the editor can, you know, take out stuff. So. Okay, so, editor, take out the blanks in the phrasings. What was I saying?Nelson tessler 21:13  Jim Rohn,Ari Gronich 21:14  Jim Rohn, Jim Rohn, Buckminster Fuller. So Bucky, who was one of the inspirations for the book, a new tomorrow, found himself in his late 20s, at the edge of the Detroit Lake, I guess, and Michigan, and he was about to walk in and kill himself. And something said to him while he was knee deep in water, no, not the right thing to do. And he ended up turning that pain into a purpose. He became one of the greatest thought leaders of the last century, created the geodesic dome, I mean, just he contributed a massive amount to society. And as I was saying, Jim Rohn, who says things like, you can't change the wind, don't change the rain, don't change the sunshine. Yep. And you learn to change yourself. Everything gets better. And this is obviously a paraphrase of what Jim Rohn says, but the other part of what what he talks about is that kind of mentality is, he'll say, in the first five years of my career, I was penniless and broke and working really hard. And the next five years ago, five years, I became a millionaire. And he says, do that, you know, he asks kind of satirically, do the next five years have to be like the previous five years, no, because we are humans, and we can change the course of our lives forever by making different decisions. And he says the number one thing that he did is worked on himself, and not his business, he worked on himself. And that is what made the difference in his business and in his entire life to where he could become this very sought after consultant, speaker and so on. So it sounds kind of like similar to what you're saying. So Well, yeah,Nelson tessler 23:31  I love Jim Rohn. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.Ari Gronich 23:34  Let's get back into that somebody wants to change themselves. Where would you say that they should start?Nelson tessler 23:42  Right where they're at. I mean, that's where we all have to start. And I think a lot of people want to be in a certain situation, or wait for a certain time. You know, wait next week, next month, next year, whatever. But start right where you're at. You know, that one of my other favorite quotes is, we don't necessarily have a knowledge problem, we know what we need to do, we have an execution problem, we just don't do what we know we need to do when we need to do it. And, you know, start where you're at. And, you know, you know what, that one thing that you can do, no matter how small it is, just do it. And it's kind of like walking through a thick cloud of fog, you really can't see too far ahead of you until you take one step. And then all of a sudden, you can see one more step in front of you. And we can't let that wall of fog stop us because we we don't see what's beyond it. What when you will see beyond it is as you continue to take those small steps. And you start to see a little further and a little further and a little further. So start exactly where you're at. And you know, again, you don't have a knowledge problem. You have an execution problem. You're just not following through with what you need to know. If you if you really do feel like you have a knowledge problem, go to Google, and you'll have a billion results in less than a second. Pick one of those things and just start working on it now.Ari Gronich 25:12  Yeah, so you know that we I call it Dr. Google these days, because that's how people are finding out about medicine. Yeah. You know, if I, if I were to get a billion results, asking, you know, how do I change my life today? What would be some specific phrases that you might want to use to narrow down the search? Because people are going to get a billion responses with a billion different ideas? Yeah. And so I, you know, the suggestion that I have, and I would ask you this is, what do we choose? I'm overwhelmed. There's too many choices.Nelson tessler 25:54  Yeah. Well, I mean, you touched on it. And, and I use a lot of Jim roans, theories and thoughts. I've loved him for 20 years. So you'll see a lot of that stuff and my stuff. But working on yourself is absolutely the place to start. I mean, Jim Rohn is exactly right. I mean, if, if you want something better, you need to become better. And I've, I've used goals in every area of my life. I mean, I became obsessed after you know, graduating from college, I became obsessed with goals and personal development, and really thinking about, you know, the version of myself that I had been, and then act, actually realizing that, you know, this version of me is not necessarily the version of me, that needs to continue, that I could get better that I could figure out things in. And as I worked on myself, you know, all of a sudden, the things that you want, actually start to come to you because you're becoming that person that can realize those goals. So where I would tell people to start is get crystal clear on what you want, like, know exactly what you want in your life, know, know what that is, and then be crystal clear on what it's going to take to achieve it. And then pick small steps and start working on it every single day. And there's, you're going to struggle, you're going to fall down, you're going to forget about it for a day or a week, or maybe even a month, but then get back up and keep going. Because time is our most precious resource. I mean, there's nothing we can ever do to get a second of it back. So I mean, I try to live my life where I don't waste any time. And I give time that reverence that it is I mean, without it, there's nothing we can do. So use it. It's, you know, times the great equalizer to everybody gets the same 24 hours in a day. It's it depends on what you're willing to do with it. That's gonna make or you know, make your life the way that your life ends up being.Ari Gronich 27:59  Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to pause for a second. So hold on one second, I'm just going to pause the recording, please at my door. All right. So I wanted to start somewhere, you. I think that from what you said, start with the goal, I want to take it a step back. And my suggestion is to start where you're at meaning to write down every single thing that you feel good, bad, ugly, about yourself about where you're at, and get really clear, crystal clear, like you said, on where you are, and in place where you want to go, and what is stopping you in the middle, right? So where's the barrier between where you want to be and where you are now. But I feel like if if people start just with the goal, then they may not get to the things that are stopping them. Because they're there, they're not going to identify those things. So that would be the only caveat I would say to what you were you were talking about is that you might want to start with just writing a list. Here's where I'm at, here's my history, and get it down on paper. Because it's going to be your origin story, kind of like you have for when you are in a completely different space. So it's going to be the thing that inspires you. It's going to be the thing that moves you forward. It's going to be the thing that is going to allow others to really connect with you as you're moving towards those goals.Nelson tessler 29:52  Yeah, and I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, you know, not to promote my program, but I got smarter. The Oh, and I got smarter, you know, stands for the obstacles that you're going to run into. And we all kind of know what, where our struggles are and, and what's going to happen that could kind of knock us off, you know, reaching our goals. So it's so important to kind of write out those obstacles before you come to them. So that when you do come to them, you know, exactly, oh, here's this obstacle, you know, I knew this was going to happen. And here's what I said I was going to do when it popped up. And now you don't have to kind of rethink it, or, you know, be shocked that all of a sudden, this popped up, but you know, it's like watching that horror movie, you know, for the first time, it's gonna, you know, somebody pops out and scares you, you know, it's gonna scare you and kind of knock you off your game. But if you've watched that movie five times, and you know, this is the scene that's gonna pop up and scare you, you're, it's not going to affect you the same way. It's the same thought process is, I know, this obstacle is going to come You know, whatever it is, and, and here's how I'm going to overcome it when it does come.Ari Gronich 31:03  Yeah, the other thing that that I, I would just kind of just popped in my head, as you're, as you're saying, that is journaling on a regular basis, and saying to yourself writing in here, I had this reaction to this person's doing this thing, or this thing's doing this thing. And this was the reaction and then try to trace back to where you first had that reaction, or why you might have had that reaction, because that would at least give you a little more clarity on where it is that you're, you're tending to be in reaction versus response, and, you know, and so on, but that was just something that like said, It popped up when you were as you were saying that, but try to write down. Here's what happened as a fact, like, my car's tire got got a nail in it, for instance. Yeah, I reacted, like why me? This is always happening to me. And then what is it that caused that reaction in you instead of Hey, I Oh, I needed a new tire. I mean, this is perfect opportunity. Right? You can see it those different ways.Nelson tessler 32:19  Yeah. I mean, the gold program, you know, that that I've touched on, it has that journal every night, your your journaling, and every night you're having, you know, our evening ritual is reflecting upon what happened in the day. And, you know, what went well, what didn't go well, and how you reacted, I mean, it's all about being very mindful of what's going on in your life. And that way, when you're mindful when, when you know what's going on, when you know what's happened, when you know what you you know how you reacted to it, then you can take steps to really react in a way that's going to fulfill your goals, as opposed to, if you're just kind of going through life without purpose, and without really reflecting upon what's going on, all of a sudden, you wake up, and it's 10 years later, and you're like, crap, you know, I thought I would be so much further ahead, I thought I would be here, I thought I would be there. Because, you know, you weren't, you weren't really living life with purpose, you weren't reflecting upon your life each day and realizing that, you know, things are happening to me, and I have control of them.Ari Gronich 33:28  Right. So, you know, listening to you and like, think about for the audience, think about a boat that is floating out to sea, and it has no one at the helm. So the rudder is just kind of moving you every which way with the waves, right? And then imagine that you have the GPS and you have it set to course. You still have to set and reset and assess, are you on course, but at least you have a trajectory of where you're going to go. I think that the like planes are almost like 80% off course for their entire flight. But because they have that trajectory of this is where I'm going. They always know how to get back on course. And if you don't have that trajectory, there's no course so you can arrive at an undesigned destination. This is another Jim Rohn or a well designed destination. And the idea is that we're going to arrive at well designed destinations because that's what we plug into our GPS.Nelson tessler 34:42  Yeah, I mean, that's a great analogy. I mean, you can just kind of be thrown from wave to wave you know, as you live your life or you can have that crystal clear destination that you want to reach. And just like you said, I mean with an airplane, you might fall A course or things might not go the way that you want them to. And it's, you know, if you want to get to a certain area in your life, you're going to have to make course corrections. And that's the great thing when you have concrete goals is that you can make those course corrections. But if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know what your goals are, it's impossible to make a course correction, when you don't know where you're going. And that's what goals do for you is they give you that destination. This is where I want to be this is when I want to be there. This is why I want to be there. And now all of a sudden, as the world tosses, you, and you have those ebbs and flows in your life, you can make those course corrections, whether there's very small ones, or they're big ones, but you're going to end up there, no matter how much you were off course, on your journey, you're eventually going to make it there if you don't quit. Right, soAri Gronich 35:54  let me ask you this. You mentioned in your history, four years of Air Force, so I just want to know how that influenced this kind of part of your thinking. And, and what you what you are, the benefits of your experience in the airforce gave you towards making this, you know, next journey in your life?Nelson tessler 36:19  Yeah, I mean, the Air Force checked a lot of boxes for me. I mean, the reason that I joined the Air Force was I, you know, I went to I went away to college, to I played football. And but I couldn't afford to go back, you know, I got a couple bills in the mail and wasn't able to, to pay them. And, you know, I knew what I wanted, I wanted a college degree. And so I had to figure out a way to pay for it. And the Air Force was kind of that way the GI Bill. But the Air Force also checked the box that got me out of that small town that I was in to where I had so much baggage and represented, you know, so much stuff that I had to overcome. So when I joined the Air Force, I figured out how to get money for school, and then it got me away from that town. And all of a sudden, what I realized is I could be anybody that I wanted to be because there was no more, you know, that kid, you know, who was involved in all that stuff, I literally could be come Nelson, nobody, I could become whoever I wanted to be. So there was that. And then, you know, the Air Force taught me so many things. I mean, it taught you discipline, it taught you responsibility, you know, it opened your eyes to contrast, like a whole big world out there, you know, I was over in Saudi Arabia, and got to see how those cultures lived in over in Turkey and see how that culture live. So the Air Force was, you know, definitely a great decision for me, and definitely changed the direction of my life and gave me a lot of tools and knowledge that, you know, I eventually ended up using and continue to use to this day.Ari Gronich 38:00  So when you were overseas and experiencing these different cultures, especially in kind of war torn countries, what was your experience of, of the people there and how they dealt with the the kind of stresses of life that that war? And obviously, there's a little more control from the society? You know, yeah, that kind of thing.Nelson tessler 38:31  Yeah, I mean, it was eye opening, because, you know, I'm this, you know, I'm this young guy from a small little town, and haven't been exposed to a lot of stuff. And then you go over to Saudi Arabia, and you see, you know, the way that women have to dress and act and, you know, I remember being in a convenience store and walking down an aisle and, you know, there were these women in their black robes, you know, with only the slit in their eyes showing and, and as soon as I walked into that aisle, they literally ran for me, and you know, come to find out that they they can be nowhere near another man or let alone a US servicemen. So, you know, that that was eye opening to me, you know, the different ways that you know, people were treated. And, you know, when I went to Turkey, you know, a lot of poverty in Turkey. And, you know, I would see young boys, you know, literally 567 years old, who were orphans, you know, out there begging on the street for survival to get food to, to eat another day. And believe me, I mean, that was a slap in the face, you know, because I was probably still in a little bit of victim mode and thinking about my childhood and what I had to deal with and, you know, to see these guys, it kind of put me in my place and you always realize that no matter what situation you're in, there is always somebody praying to be in your exact situation. Because as bad as you know, as bad as our situation is so kind of having that mindset. So, yeah, I learned all that stuff. And I think the biggest thing was contrast. You know, it gave me that contrast of the life that I was living, to the things that were out there, in contrast, can help you in so many different ways. I mean, it can help you to show you that there's a lot worse things out there. But it also can show you that there's a lot better things out there that maybe you can strive to, to realize those things. So contrast is a great thing in your life.Ari Gronich 40:35  It's awesome. That's awesome. What What kinds of things do you suggest nowadays, like that you might have not suggested 10 years ago that you've learned in the last 10 years about yourself and about how to do what you're what you're doing, which is changing the world. So how can you take that focus of I've been here, I'm now here, and I'm going there. And make it concrete? For people?Nelson tessler 41:11  Yeah, I mean, that I think the biggest thing is to do it. I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about being clear on what your vision is, I mean, you can't really reach a destination, if you're not clear where you want to go. So that's, that's the first step is to sit down and really figure out what you want to do with your life, what direction you want your life to go, and make that crystal clear. And then figure out why you want that and make sure that it's a strong why. And then, you know, setting out and just starting, I mean, there's so many people that want to wait until all the traffic lights are green before they start on their journey. And that never happens. I mean, you know, it's kind of a paralysis by analysis, if you've ever heard that where people, you know, they sit there and they want to make sure that all the T's are crossed, and the i's are dotted. And you know, I'm in the exact right situation to start this. Don't do it. You know what, take that first step, you know where you want to go, you know why you want to go there, take that first step and start don't wait. Because there are so many people that are just sitting back waiting for that perfect situation, to start doing what they want to do. And I just wrote about this today. I mean, today is pretend you are a time traveler day. And, you know, one of the things that that I kind of thought of when I saw that was Somebody once told me the definition of Hell is when the person that you could have became, in this life meets the person that you did become. And that's the definition of hell. And I think we're all going to end up there one day, we're all going to end up at the end of our lives, and we're going to look back, and you know, we all hear it. You know, your so many people are there, they don't have regrets over what they did. They have regrets over what they didn't do. And you know, we're all going to have a life with some regrets. But, you know, try not to have that regret that you are afraid to go after your goals and your dreams.Ari Gronich 43:23  Yeah, so let's see. Ready, fire. Aim, Aim. Fire ready?Nelson tessler 43:27  That's my motto right there, baby. Ready?Ari Gronich 43:32  Which one? Is it? Fire aim? Ready?Nelson tessler 43:34  It's ready fire aim.Ari Gronich 43:36  Okay. So, you know, some people will say the opposite, which is fire, aim ready, or Aim Fire ready, at least so that you're getting at least the action moving and then you can get ready for what you just did. But yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting way of looking at it. Because if you're a perfectionist, you're going to ready, but you're going to ready and you're never going to fire and you're never going to aim because you're still trying to get ready. Yep. If if you're on that mid range, you might aim and then fire and then get ready. And if you're on the other side, you're gonna fire before you do anything aim and ready. And and, you know, the truth is I've had friends business, you know, in business that that were that fire, aim ready. And they would always do this spike, right? So because they did massive action, no matter what, they would have a spike of results, and then it would fall and then another spike of results and then it would fall because they at least got something out there. Instead of that analysis paralysis. Instead of That that need for perfection, I know I'm I have that need for perfection a bit in me, I want to make sure that the grammar is correct. And the commas are in the right place and that the words flow properly and all the spelling is proper. And, you know, I had somebody tell me once said, you know, proper spelling has has never made me money.Nelson tessler 45:25  Thank goodness for that, because I still can't spell.Ari Gronich 45:28  That's what you said at the beginning. And I wanted to latch on to that a little bit. So what what would you consider to be the biggest asset that somebody can can take from the words that you're using, from the things than the thoughts that you're saying, if somebody was listening to this and going, Okay, I'm kind of getting that I'm understanding what he's saying. But the execution side, I'm not really sure how to execute the concepts that are in my head. So if that's the biggest portion, that's that's needed to happen to get the results? How do you get somebody from concept to action?Nelson tessler 46:18  Well, I mean, what one of the things that I use in my program is a success partner, I mean, you might tell yourself, you want to do something, you might tell yourself, I'm going to do this every single day. And you might, but a lot of times, people who keep their goals to themselves, when something pops up, you know, they they fall short. But as soon as you introduce somebody else who knows about that goal, who knows what your dreams are, and what your plans are, now, all of a sudden, there's somebody else out there that you've told, you're going to do this, and in the back of your mind, you know, you don't want to let them down, you don't want them to see that you're going to fail. And, you know, that's kind of the secret sauce that I think is, you know, we call them success partners, because they're not there to hold us accountable. You know, you the only thing that you're doing it, accountability is you want to be accountable to do the things that you said, you're gonna do. And that's what this success partners there for. They're there to encourage you, to motivate you to know that you're not in this alone, and you're there to do the same for them. So you're both, you know, seeking and striving to achieve your goals. And it's that support system. And there's been studies out there that you're 95% more likely to achieve your goals or to do what you said you were going to do as soon as somebody else knows about them, and you have that kind of success partner in your corner. Okay, soAri Gronich 47:47  I'm going to caveat that as well. Because, you know, that's what I like to do. I'm a little I'm a little bit of a contract contrarian. So there's a theory that if you put something out that you're going to have the success be at a percentage higher, because you put the thing out there. And now you have to keep your word because you put it out there. There's another theory that says that you want to hold back on telling people because then you don't want to dissipate the energy that is going towards that goal. And then there's a yet another thing about the crab box, which is if you tell people where you're going, they're going to try to hold you down and hold you back, and you're going to create more obstacles. caveat that I'm putting forth is when you talk to somebody about what it is that you're doing. You need to make sure that you're telling the right person and the right people who aren't who are going to be the supportive people versus the people who are going to kind of be those crabs in the crab box holding you back and telling you all the reasons why not?Nelson tessler 49:08  Yeah, yeah. And I love that. I love the crab bucket, man. You know, I use that in my book. So, you know, I told with my family, I kind of use that to where I got accepted into college, and I got all kinds of mixed results where oh, you know, you know, or you can't even spell How the heck are you going to go to college? Or, you know, I guess they're letting anybody in the college who has a check, they better try cashing your check first. So I got all of that stuff. And, you know, I talked a little bit about why people act that way. But what again, we talked about that what meaning Are you going to give that I mean, you know what, tell me I can't do something, tell me that I'm not good enough, or I'm going to fail and I'm going to show you that. I'm going to I'm not only going to do it, I'm going to do it much, much better just to show you so what mindset are you bringing when Pete when you have those haters, and, you know, you got to understand what haters are, you know, a lot of times the haters, it has nothing to do with you or what you're doing it has to do with them and what they're doing. And when you kind of realize that, then it actually strengthens you, and it gives you fuel to reach your goals. And that's how I look at it. And as far as the other theories of keeping everything to yourself, you know what I can, I can kind of see how people can think that. I don't agree with it at all. I mean, I've done I've done it both ways in my life. And I mean, I've set goals, and no one's known who they are, I've written them all down. And no one knows when I when I've accomplished them, no one knows if I failed at them. But as soon as I kind of brought a group together, and everybody knew everybody's goals, and they knew what you were shooting for, all of a sudden, I knew I was going to have to see those people. And I knew they were going to ask me, hey, how's this going? And how's that going? And all of a sudden, now I'm just not responsible to myself, I'm responsible to them. And no one wants to no one wants to fail. And when there's somebody out there, who knows what you're working at, now, all of a sudden, there's somebody who, who knows if you're going to fail or not, and not in a bad way. I mean, these people don't want to see you fail, because they want you to be successful. And we can talk about surrounding yourself with like minded people and people who have your back and who are there to support you and understand that, you know, there's more than enough success out there in the universe to go around 100 times. And just because you're successful, doesn't mean that takes away from my pie of success. So there's all those different strategies and techniques and thoughts to think about as well.Ari Gronich 51:51  Yeah, absolutely. One of one of my, my guests. Bert Oliva is he's a mindset guy. He's been around 20 plus years does fire walks and, you know, glass walking and, and all those kinds of things, human human potential expert, and he says, you want to go out and you want to five, find five haters a day? Because if you're finding five haters, you're gonna find at least that or more who are supporters? Oh, yeah. Oh, the idea isn't to avoid the haters, it's to seek them out. Which is kind of like what I why I like doing the show because it's a very contrary you know, polarizing show, in some cases, because we believe in nuanced thinking minutiae. Instead of absolutes, of, of extremism, you know, on either side, okay, let's look at the data. Let's look at it and, and let's find out what it is that that we're trying to accomplish and do it. So it was it was a good reminder, what you were just saying, about finding the haters, because it's okay to polarize. The only part of that that's the problem is the, the mindset and what it is that you make that mean, which we are, you know, meaning making machines, human beings are mean, meaning making machines, we can make meaning out of anything. And if you're somebody who had been built bullied in the past, if you're somebody who had been, you know, taken advantage of, or whatever, you could have it mean, that you're not being liked. Or you could have it mean that I'm getting stuff done, that the rest of the population isn't getting done. And so they may not understand it right now. But in 10 years, they're gonna be like, why don't I get on that bandwagon?Nelson tessler 53:46  Yeah. And, and I love that you brought up haters, I mean, because, you know, when you put yourself out there, like, I had been really close knit, you know, a lot of the businesses that I own people didn't even know that I own them. You know, I was just that kind of guy. I never wanted to be out there. And then when I published this book, all of a sudden you are out there and the haters came out of the woodwork, you know, people that you knew and family and but you know, and I really started looking at it and what why haters are out there and what they represent. But haters don't hate on things that aren't significant. So if you do have haters out there, look at it as Hey, I'm on the right path here because haters aren't hating people who aren't successful, who aren't significant, who aren't out there doing something that's changing things because there's no need for it. And, you know, again, you realize why haters are doing it, you realize it has really little to do about you and much to do about them. But yeah, I mean, it's not easy to have people out there. But when you look at it that way, again, giving it that meaning is if there's haters out there, I must be on the right track. I must be doing something that's going to you know, change that thing. And another analogy that I love is, you know, the guy talked about the Coast Guard swimmers who jumped out of these helicopters to save a boat crash. And typically there's way more people to be rescued, then they can rescue. And when they jump in the water, he's like, Do you know who they go and save first, it's the people who are swimming towards them. It's not the people who are fighting them. It's not the people splashing stuff in their face. It's not, it's the people who are swimming towards them. And that's the motto that I took when I put myself out there now is I'm not out there for the haters. I'm not out there for the people who are going to splash water in my face and tell me I'm not doing something right. I'm out there for the people who are swimming towards me and want to hear it and who I connect with. And that's who I'm going to try to say that's who I'm going to try to help them, you know, change their lives and help them live better lives.Ari Gronich 56:01  That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, we're getting ready to do a promotion for the show. And it's a mastermind group that we're calling the Create a new tomorrow mastermind. And part of the premise of this is a lot of what we've been talking about, which is doing your 100, year, 50, year, 25, year, 10 year, five year one year plans. And I know that sounds a lot to some people, but until you know where you're going, you know, and where you've been, you're never going to be able to accomplish the goals that have set out for you. And we're doing this a little bit differently. Because we address the health concerns as well as the business concerns as well as the life concerns. It's kind of an all encompassing, kind of a life mastermind versus just generalized specific to, to business or those kinds of topics. But you know, it's funny to me, because throughout my life, there's been things that I have not wanted to put out. And I haven't wanted to put out because I was afraid that somebody might steal the idea or do something with it that I don't want it to do, or they might ruin the thought of it, you know, but I learned recently, just through my own processes that I put things out, because nowadays, I don't care if somebody steals my idea, as long as the idea gets done. And the reason I'm doing this show is because so many of the things that I'm thinking about, I can't do them all on my own. So if I give the ideas away, they'll get done, and then I will be calmer because the things that I want to see in the world are going to be happening more. Yeah, I just kind of want to throw that out to the universe into the audience that you want to get started. And who cares? Who gets the credit, frankly, you know,Nelson tessler 58:11  I mean, you know, Tesla. Sorry, Tesla did the same thing. Didn't he give away all of his patents? And, you know, it wasn't about the money it was about, you know, getting that out in there into the world. So I mean, that was like, that was like mind blowing to me.Ari Gronich 58:27  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, somebody who could literally the the patents and the trademarks. And the those things are the intellectual property of this company and of this person, and yet, what he's giving them away and open sourcing them and tell and encouraging people to use them in their projects and in what they're doing. I mean, that alone, you may not like Ilan Musk, you may love him, you may not like Tesla's you might love Tesla's who knows what, what your feeling is. But the idea is that what he's doing is moving the world forward by the actions that he's taken, which is trustingUnknown Speaker 59:09  thatAri Gronich 59:11  the idea is going to get out. And that's going to make the world better. So who cares? Who owns it and gets credit for it?Nelson tessler 59:18  Yeah, that's amazing. Amazing that he was willing to do that.Ari Gronich 59:21  Yeah, absolutely. And if more companies were to do that, guess what? We'd be able to move this world forward faster, fail forward fast, but move forward fast. And, again, shift the world create a new tomorrow, activate your vision for a better world, but do it now versus later because I think so many people are so stuck on what their obligations and response abilities are, versus what they're how their ability to respond is and what they're doing about it, how their execution is, right.Nelson tessler 59:58  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think we all have that fear, when we have that great idea, that idea that's going to change everything that we want to hold on to it. But another thing that I found in my you know, in my life is ideas, you know, aren't where it's at, it's, it's the execution on it, and you can give somebody the best idea in the world. And chances are, you know, 99% of those people are never going to act on it anyhow. So I would be a little less fearful of somebody stealing your idea. Because, you know, there's just not that many people out there that are willing to put in the time and the effort, and, you know, to bring it to fruition,Ari Gronich 1:00:42  right. So just as a recap of that, for the audience, put yourself and your stuff out there, who cares, who gets the credit for it, as long as it's getting done. So let's, uh, let's just finish this up. Because we've had a great conversation. And I really appreciate you. So as I do with every episode, three to four actionable tips and tricks that the audience can do to create a new tomorrow today. And while we've already given them 100 of them during this, this interview, you know, let's kind of condense them and give them very specific so that they can take it and do it.Nelson tessler 1:01:27  Yeah, I mean, the first I'll go back, you know, things only have the meaning you're willing to give them I think that concept in and of itself, will change your life quicker than anything else, look for the good and things. And then, you know, my next concept is, you know, be crystal clear on what you want in your life. You know, know exactly what it is know, when you want to have it, know why you want to do it. And then you know that that's the way that you come up with a plan to actually achieve it. And understand that, you know, we there's going to be obstacles, there's going to be struggles in your life, that's that's the way life is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be easy. So understand that those obstacles are going to come. And then don't, don't be willing to give up on your dreams and your goals and your hopes and the life that you want to live because of obstacles, get around it. It, you know, they too will pass and just know the circumstances that you're in right now are not going to be the circumstances that you're going to be in next week, next month, next year. So you know, if you're in some rough circumstances, right now know that they too will pass. But at the same time, you know, success is not an event success is a process and it's never ending. And you were always continuing to work on ourselves and continue to strive to become that best version of yourself that you possibly can. And, you know, you owe it to the world to become the best version of yourself that you possibly can. And to be out there and and give more than you take.Ari Gronich 1:03:09  Awesome, thank you so much for being here, Nelson, I really appreciate it. I know the audience has gotten a lot out of this, if not just you know, the success from beginnings that you've created in your life, and the fact that you've turned it into a purpose to help other people do the same thing. That's just it's an amazing thing. How can people get ahold of you? Where can they find you? And I do want to promote your book and your your app? So why don't you tell them what that is? Just a little bit about it? And how they can find it. AndNelson tessler 1:03:45  sure, yeah, thank you. Um, you can go to Nelson Trusler calm, everything is there. My book, The on lucky sperm club, you're not a victim of your circumstances. But a product of your choices is available everywhere books are sold, Amazon's probably the easiest place to get it. And then the app is called the I got smarter app. And it is on all the app sites. And you can download it and right now we're giving away 30 free days. So that you can try it out and make sure it's for you. And then it's only you know, 999 thereafter. I mean, there's no excuses. If you want to change your life and you want help doing it and a plan to do it. That app is that's why I started that app.Ari Gronich 1:04:28  Yes. So just give me a little bit more on the app and what its function is so that sure we'll go there. They know what they're going there for.Nelson tessler 1:04:37  Yeah, so that the app is a goal fulfillment program. It's everything that I've learned over the last 25 years that I've you know, been a goal and personal development junkie, but you know, there's your crystal clear, you do a self assessment to make sure you know what your goals are going to be. And then there's all the concepts and the theories that I've used. I mean, you know, we have a morning ritual To where you're giving gratitude, you're grateful for the circumstances you're in, you're not satisfied, but you're grateful. And you're learning personal development strategies throughout the app, you review your goals every single day, you know, we only work on three goals at a time. And, you know, so but you're designing what you're going to do that day, and the app automatically populates your task list through this morning ritual. So when you're finished, that you've got a list of the things that you need to do specific to your goal, the most important thing of the day, you know, all those things. So there's never a day if you do your morning ritual that you don't know what you need to do to accomplish your goals. And then the app, you know, has an evening ritual where you're reflecting upon your day, what worked, what didn't work, you know, what did you learn from it? What were your biggest successes, and like I touched on before, you know, the secret sauce is that opportunity to work with a success partner who's also trying to achieve their goals and support and encourage each other through the app real time so that you actually see your goals through to the end.Ari Gronich 1:06:07  Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. And I know the audience is going to get a lot from that and from from listening to this episode. So thank you again. This has been another episode of create a new tomorrow I am your host are Ari Gronich, and just wanted to remind you about the mastermind program that we're getting ready to launch if you're interested in it, you're more than welcome to message me comment to me, you know anywhere below the videos that are going to be here or on the podcast pages. And, and remember to LIKE subscribe, read, comment, rate, review, do all those things that you know helps move this conversation forward because we love having these conversations and helping you guys so that you can create a new tomorrow today. Activate your vision for a better world. And we will see you next time. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you. If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world. Go to the website, create a new tomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you just for checking it out and look forward to seeing you take the leap and joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The Psychedelic Space 0:33 Hey Jose, how's it going? Jose Martinez 0:35 Good morning. How are you? The Psychedelic Space 0:37 So good. So since we've got a couple minutes, so we're gonna start I'm gonna play a song. And we can ping some folks in for the next three or so minutes and then we'll jump into it sound good? Jose Martinez 0:49 Awesome. Unknown Speaker 0:50 Awesome. Jose Martinez 1:03 So you don't God Unknown Speaker 1:07 the people didn't make me nervous. Unknown Speaker 1:21 The best Jose Martinez 1:45 every Joe. All right, The Psychedelic Space 3:27 that pretty much brings us right to 1230 Central time. And I am so excited Jose to have you here today. For anyone chiming in right now I'm really excited for y'all to meet Jose, besides being incredibly just like, the word that I'm looking for is like enthusiastic, but like you're the characteristics that you exhibit are so extraordinary, that I'm excited for people to get to know you a little better, just from what I've heard you so far. So just to kick us off, Jose, can you just tell us a little bit about you. And we're just going to kind of go into conversation, I do want everyone to know this session is being recorded. So if you decide you want to come up on stage, if you go to my profile, and scroll down to the little red dots, you can text the word consent to 22999, that'll ask you a couple questions just to get consent for you to be on the recording. And then we'll have a point where you could come up and also talk to Jose or ask questions or just interact. So Jose, let's start just by how do you identify currently in your life? Who is Jose today? Jose Martinez 4:45 Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be on stage with you. I'm currently I was actually asking myself this about a month ago, like how do I see myself now. So the way I describe myself is I'm Triple amputee Parris server. I am currently ranked third in the world as an adaptive surfer, surfing for Team USA. And guy. I became this way, I guess after being hurt in Afghanistan, I stepped on the 60 pound ID that almost took my life away, it instantly took both my right and left leg and snapped off. Pretty much a little bit above the elbow on my right arm. I describe myself as inspirational human, I want to continue to motivate and inspire people that feel like they're at the verge of jumping off a cliff. I just want to help. I want to help those that feel like they're, they're done with the world, I want to help those see the beauty in life all over again. And the only way I know how to do that is by showing the world. After I woke up, I was told that I'll never have the life I have. I used to have. I mean, he told me never walk again. They told me I'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. They pretty much just slapped me with reality. I mean, their reality, because that's how they've, they've seen humans, but I guess they've never seen the human like me. And I know humans like me exist, we just, we have a hard shell and exterior that we're afraid to actually push out of. And I'm here just to try to help motivate the world to see a beauty and perspective in life. The Psychedelic Space 6:46 Thank you, Jose, I think that, you know, the opportunity that people have just to hear individual story stories puts things in perspective a bit. You know, it's been 20 years since I woke up from a coma. And I flatlined on the table, and I had many times in my life, especially back then I was dealing with a lot of trauma and nothing remotely close to yours, as far as the the after effects. But in that time, it took me almost eight years to actually find gratitude for even still being alive, because I didn't want to. And there was a lot of even anger at moments of why did they recessives hate me, because it took the paddles and I flatlined a few times and all of that stuff. And so as you were going through this, who was Jose before this happened, like was there a lot of stuff going on in your life that how would you have identified yourself before this happened? Who was Jose then if you were just gonna come up with some version of it. Jose Martinez 7:49 To be realistic with you, I was absolutely lost. In all reality, I had just lost my job. I was a human resource manager for a staffing agency, I did a lot of hiring and firing little did a lot of accounts payable, accounts receivable. And in 2008, because I didn't have a diploma I was let go. And I was absolutely lost. I didn't know what to do. Now, I didn't have enough money to go back to school because I had my own place that I had to take care of. I was taking care of my brother trying to help him finish up with high school because he was a football and basketball player. So I was trying to help make sure he had all the stuff that he needed shoes. uniform, whatever the case may be. So I tried to help my mom as much as possible. To be honest with you, I came from a very, very broken home. My dad was an abusive alcoholic. He left my mother and I pregnant when I was five years old. And I remember being homeless I remember not having a dad to be honest with you. I didn't have a guidance, I didn't have a lot of help. I felt lost most of my life to be honest with you. And a it was crushing. I felt completely lost when I was on my way to Afghanistan. In reality, I was hoping that maybe my life would be taken away so they could tell my mom that I'm a hero. So she could know that all the energy, the time that she put in coming from a third world country to try to live a better life here. It wasn't wasted and I didn't waste your time and I felt I felt worthless to be honest with you on my way to Afghanistan. And I no one knew this. I mean, all I would do is work out I I used to run 12 miles a day before we actually went to war. It was my way to keep my own sanity. I would just talk to myself and and tell myself Today's not the day to die, you know, I was scared that if I let myself go that I was just gonna either drink myself to death, and the driving off a cliff or something from being drunk. And I didn't want to hurt anybody. So I was, I would try to just keep my mind constantly running. And the only way I knew how to keep a calm was by writing. So I would run 12 miles a day and try to keep myself sane. No one. None of my brothers that were at war with me ever knew stuff like this. I just kept myself pretty calm, I was always happy. But it was all up front, because I knew that if I was in a bad mood, then a lot of us would end up being in the bad mood, a lot of my guys look to me for just for a sense of hope, to be honest with you. I mean, I, I've been in some bad stuff before. And I know how to get out of bad situations, you know, so a lot of people ended up looking at me for a sense of hope, because I mean, that war were in horrible, horrible situation. So I was completely lost, I was hoping that I would actually die. And when they revived me and I came back, and I woke up 10 days later in the hospital, back in Walter Reed in Baltimore, Maryland. I, I, I was kind of upset. I remember actually closing my eyes. And just really wishing that I was back in Afghanistan, hoping that everything was just a dream. Because I remember everything I remember, to finish what happened. I remember the pain. I remember the conversations that I was having with one of my brothers, I remember that all the conversations that I was having with all my brothers, to the point where actually, I was just talking to one of my boys the other day, that got hurt with me. And he was telling me, he told me, he goes, Martinez, I saw you die three times. And I saw them bring you back to life three times in the helicopter. I couldn't believe it. You know, and I, I had known that they really tried reviving me a couple of times, I didn't know how severe the it really was. And when I woke up, and I realized that my right arm was missing. And I realized that everything was not a dream. And it was actually reality. I I felt even more worthless. I felt like I I couldn't go out there and die. I couldn't go out there and come back all all in one piece. Like I in a sense, I mean, I don't know if you guys believe in God, but I felt like God was just slapping me in the face kind of laughing at me. At least that's the mentality that I had after I got hurt. And it was absolutely overwhelming and depressing. I became so depressed I I was scared, I started getting scared I I was lost for a very, very long time. And it like you said, it took you a very long time to appreciate life. And I felt all up until I'm actually celebrating nine years as of tomorrow to the date of my accident. And I guess it's taken me a good four years out of those nine years to be grateful, and to really, really start appreciating life the way I really should. The Psychedelic Space 13:37 Right. So as a first of all, thank you for I mean, you really just went there, you know, like it is clear your commitment to really showing up for people in the way you're allowing yourself to fully be seen. And I think that's something that isn't discussed very often is some of the conditions of our soldiers before they even go into war. You know, because so many I have so many friends that went to war as well, because they were at risk youth. Because I was an at risk youth I went to at risk schools, which also means most of my friends, right? We were kind of we were on our the last hope of society with the schools we went to or the programs we were a part of, and recruiters would come to our school and offer to expunge your record if you signed up for the military. And so I had many friends going that we're coming from really, really traumatic childhoods and so we're sending, you know, young folks out to war that have been raised in war their entire life emotionally, physically, environmentally, and a lot of times we talk about, you know, our soldiers, our soldiers post war, but we don't talk about what was all happening before. Then you send people into very traumatic environments where it just compounds so it's no wonder that so many comeback just really feeling fractured and splintered and, and lost. What drove you to join the military? Was it the, you know, the helping to support your mom? What was that process to get you to go towards joining the military to begin with? Jose Martinez 15:19 I i've growing up in LA, I've always known how to hustle and always make money. So I was really, really tired of just trying to make ends meet and just trying to live off the next dollar or whatnot. It was to the point where greed started becoming a factor in my life. And I started absolutely hating myself I, I, I started hating while I was becoming Knight, I didn't realize what I was doing over money thinking that this is what was going to solve all my problems. So I figured I'm like, you know what, the military doesn't pay much. It's gonna, if I use the military, right, it's gonna allow me to actually take care of the schooling because I wasn't an action. I actually graduated a semester early for my high school, I graduated with AP and honors, I numbers is my thing. So I actually did almost six years of math in high school, I think I went all the way to like, calculus, two or something like some something above trigonometry, if I remember if I'm correct. I, I was a smart kid, I just because of my situations, I started becoming bad. And I started becoming really good at being bad. To the point where cops pulled me over. There was stuff in the car or whatnot, and I just talked my way out of it. And I started scaring myself, I didn't want to become someone that my mom absolutely despised. So I told myself, like, you know, what, the military is gonna make me go into a hole, because they're not gonna pay me anything. So I'm naturally going to be nothing. It's going to give me a place to live, it's gonna give me some food. And it's, again, like I said, if I use it, right, it's gonna allow me to advance somewhere in life. And I figured if I do like it, I would love to do 20 to 30 years in the military, because I started realizing what they actually do, they wake up and work out. So they make sure that they're taken care of before everything else gets taken care of. And that's a system that I started employing after I joined the military. So it's, it's mental structure, and I knew that that was going to happen, because I filed back, I was either gonna get beat up. I'm from all the movies that I've seen, I didn't know exactly how the military works, and, or, they were going to kick me out. And that was going to be worse. So that was gonna be like, if I went to a job, and then just messed everything up in there. I didn't want something like that in my record. So I figured if I can do something that's going to bring me down to life, it's going to make me restructure myself, then, by all means, let's do it. And by the way, I really didn't like myself. So if we're gonna go to war, literally see if I'm even worth living here. And that was honestly, my mentality. It was I wanted to see if I was worth living. The funny thing about when I stepped on the IED two weeks before that, I remember like, kind of realizing what life is truly about. And it's honestly about just living in the moment, at least for me, is living in the moment, enjoying your surroundings and trying to lift those around us. I would see a lot of the local people that we were around a lot of Afghani people, they all they needed were their cattle, their crops, and their loved ones. And they're really, really happy. And they're absolutely in the middle of nowhere. And I started realizing that you can be joyful no matter where you are. And it's a state of mind. So I told myself two weeks before actually step on the ID, that if I do make it back, then I'm going to try my best to change my aspect of life and try to try to be the best person that I can be. So that was a promise that I made. Two weeks later, I stepped on an ID. And again, I don't know if you guys believe in God or whatnot, but that was kind of my test, or his type to me was alright, well let you if you really mean that let's give you another little battle and see if you're really worth your own words, you know, and so that's why I say something I feel like God was slapping me in the face, but it's just a little test that he's been giving me because I i I'm saying it out loud what I really want and he's testing me to see if I'm worthy. The Psychedelic Space 19:58 As a you said, So much there, you know, when I really when I sit and consider just some of the the tragedies and, you know, again, I still on the other side of my traumas have all of my lens and when I hear, and when I have the privilege of having you just to converse and for other people to consider, it is perspective that allows us to make different choices, right. And it's like for me, aside from I did have pretty I mean, I had significant brain injury from my coma just from losing oxygen. And that was a couple year process. But again, it's something that I that I could entirely heal with time and intention and attention. And so after, after this happened, what tools and resources Did you find as far as community or support or prayer or? Because I, what I cannot imagine is reconciling that because again, just looking at it, where my mind was after my coma, like I can't even consider because I don't know where I was, if I, I had already, you know, had suicide attempts. And so I don't know if I would have been as strong as you are back then. And that's like being honest, that's not like in a consideration, but just seeing how I barely was there to begin with, Unknown Speaker 21:25 what, The Psychedelic Space 21:26 what decision did you make to stay? What was it that got you to decide to find some way to keep going, what was it for you? Jose Martinez 21:37 Be honest with you, it was a mixture of a lot of things. So at the time, I was speaking to my wife, which was my girlfriend at the time. And she was one of the persons one of the persons that actually never left my side. So I remember having what was it 15 surgeries. And then after all my surgeries, they allowed me to come to the west coast. And I remember the first time coming into San Diego, when I was recovering at the Naval Medical Center, one of the first he came over and she never left my side. That was one key. I feel like having a good support system behind you is always a key and recovering. I had my best friend that was actually seeing everything he's been with me since I was 1213 years old. And he would go over when I was still at Walter Reed, like, visit me and try to see me as much as possible every other weekend. I remember waking up after all of this and thinking like, there's no way I'm alive. Like there's no way this is actually true. Like there's there's absolutely no way you know, and it got scary for a moment because i i i was becoming aggravate more and more aggravated more mean, I remember I I would kick out my therapist, every single time I would see a male therapist going into my room, I would just absolutely obliterate Lee cussed them out to the point where they felt scared and threatened. They're like, Alright, Jose, like you got to really, really stop like this is extreme. And I thought and I would tell them, I was like, just don't send any guys to my room, please. So they started sending women to my room. And of course, I my mom has taught me how to be respectful. Since I've been growing up and to a female, I can't be a jerk. I mean, guys can take it, you know, they know I don't really mean it. But I feel like if I would tell some of the things that I would say to a female, it would actually really change their perspective of wanting to help. So they tricked me. And they just started they kept sending emails over to to help me recover. And I just gave him I'm like, you know what? Screw it. They want to help. I don't know how far this is gonna help but I mean, let's see how far we can go. Yeah, I what I started doing was just getting in I I realized that a lot of the things that I was making decisions for where the wrong decisions because of the state of mind that I was in. So at that point in time, I figured I'm like I'm not even in the state of mind to even try to understand how to recover and help myself. So why not just allow the people that want the best for me, helped me recover. So that was always a key factor for me. And to be honest with you, I actually became addicted to opiates. I I was on 50 to 100 plus pills on a daily basis just to try to subside all my pain. My pain was extremely matriculating. If you touch your butt cheek, and you touch the bone that you have on that budget on my right side, I don't have anything past that. So Even to sit on a wheelchair, I'm sitting on a wheelchair for 1012 plus hours a day, sometimes my back is absolutely in pain, I feel everything. I I, even to this day, there's times where I wake up randomly, or sometimes I snap into it and start feeling everything go off, all my nerves go off and start remembering the pain of the day that I got hurt. I it's, it's such an extreme pain that it's an instant pain. It's like someone putting a torch to your legs, someone just sticking a knife right through your back. Anything that you would think excruciating, I like to explain it to people that have given birth. Just picture yourself giving birth, and I'm pretty sure that's probably some of the pain that I've gone through on a daily basis. You know, specifically like around 10 o'clock at night, when my body's really, really starting to relax. It's an extreme and excruciating pain that I go through. So I at the time, I was taking so many pills that I started becoming a zombie. I started having all these suicidal thoughts all over again, more and more and more. And I, I hated myself all over again, I, I hated the person that I had become, I felt like an absolute failure. And I was telling my Dad, I'm like, I need to get off of these things. You know, I need to get off of the lyric, I need to get off of the oxy I need to get off of all these, all these meds that just keep messing me up. And I remember going to the doctor and the doctor telling me Well, before you get off of it, you have to make your dose go up a bit higher, and then you lower it. And my thought process was you're going to give a crackhead more crack before you tell him to get off of the crack. To me, it made no sense. But that's what they said. And in all honesty, I have an addictive personality. So I know if I have one, I'm not going to stop myself from having 234 10 1520 you know, so what I did was grabbed all the pills, threw them all away. And I went through the battle. I remember going through the cold sweats feeling like I'm gonna die. I felt like a drug addict, I I never done any type of pills. I've never done any type of drugs. I smoke cannabis. And that's as far as I take it. But I don't do any of these other things that have absolutely shutting down your nervous system and stuff like that. And I realized that I was actually an addicted person, because of all the pills that I was on. And once I got off of them, I got out of the military. The first thing I did, I started smoking cannabis. I started taking cannabis, I knew that that was gonna help me. There's no way that we're allowed to grow something this beautiful, beautiful plant allowed to grow all over California beautifully, you know, and not have some beneficial factors. And the minute I started showing everybody that you can actually live a beautiful life toll free, actually live it consciously free and not being on pills. I mean, I started breaking a lot of people's stigma, I started breaking a lot of people's barriers, I started to help others that really needed help. I told them, Look, this isn't the answer. But it's an absolute guide to help you get to where you need to be in order for all that pain to just subside. So my pain goes from really painful hurt to when I'm on cannabis. It's kind of like an itch that I can't scratch. It's just bothersome. But it doesn't really affect anything that I have to do. And and that's what I've been doing slowly is trying to to help others try to help myself continuously to see how far we can go. I mean, I'm still free. Nine years later, I'm still moving. I feel like the strongest I've ever been in my life. I've changed my diet. I got married. I have a beautiful home. I mean, I don't know what else life could really ask for, you know? Well, I The Psychedelic Space 29:17 think the beautiful thing is Jose is that you're just getting started. When I see your videos and seeing you work out and you know, for anyone that's just been tuning in, let's take one deep collective breath just together, inhaling because it's a lot you know, and it can be triggering for some people to hear if you've lost people in your family or if you've experienced trauma. Just remember as you hear other people's stories to breathe, and release the story on the exhale to ensure that you're not taking any of it on. I can assure you that you carrying any part of Jose's story is not going to help him. It's not going to help me and it's not really not going to help yourself. And Jose is something that is really incredible. And I'd love to hear how this even came to be. As you became a surfing athlete, what was that process? What led you to go towards? Getting towards Team USA? And surfing? How did that even come to be as an option? Did you surf before the military? Or was this all post military? Jose Martinez 30:27 So this is all post military. There's an incredible human being by the name of Betty, that is a therapist in the Naval Medical Center. And she is absolutely stubborn. And when I mean stubborn, I mean, the most stubborn human being you'll ever meet. I remember her coming up to me while I was in therapy and saying she does a lot of the aquatics, aerobics, yoga, surfing, she does all that for therapy for the veterans. And I remember her coming into the PT room and saying, Hey, you know, what I think will benefit us swimming. And at the time, I had a colostomy bag. And that was my perfect excuse for me not to do anything extra. You know, I was tired at the time. And I didn't think anything was going to really help me. Especially because of the mindset that I had. So I would just tell her like, Yeah, when they do the reversal, if they ever do it, I'll meet you at the at the pool, I promise. No. And I remember, I think, three or four months before I actually got out of the military, I was ready to just blow my head off. I remember going up to the doctor and telling them all right, sir. If you don't try to remove this cost me bag, and the next day or so you're not going to see me ever again for the rest of my life. Like it's we're done. I'm done with life. I don't understand how 23 years old and I have a colostomy bag, and I lost all these limbs. I just I can't do this. Please tell me that you can at least help me reverses and give me some type of hope. And he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, Jose, calm down. He goes, can be telling me these things. I was like, dude, I'm just being real with you. I was like, I I'm just done. I'm fed up with this. I don't understand how, why what I nothing, I don't understand anything. So that they started doing all the tests, and they did the reversal. Well, the reversal went wrong. Wrong to the point where they actually didn't allow me to eat for three months. And my wife, which was my girlfriend at the time, was injecting me with nutrients and water because I can take anything to my mouth. I remember. I remember laying in bed and not being able to eat anything and her crying because anytime she would bring food to the room to eat. She saw me look over and smell and just wonder how she knew how much I wanted just a bite. I wanted to just live I wanted just to just to just to try all over again, you know. And eventually, all of this worked out. Well. I ended up getting it fixed. The reversal worked fine. And the very next day when I went into PT Betty was there waiting for me. And she said, So are you ready to go into the water? And I said Damn. I was like, I can't get away from this lady. So yes, I told her I'm like, Alright, well, I guess I'll meet you tomorrow at 7am. And it was a 50 meter pool. I remember jumping in the water and I'm like, I got this. There's no way this is gonna take a long time and jumped in the water. It took me two hours to go down 50 meters. And that absolutely lit a fire under me. I'm like, there's no way I can crawl faster than this. Like there is no way. It took me that long to start swimming. So I started going every day more and more, more and more to the point where she's like, Alright, Jose, like it looks like you need to even more so she gave me a swimming coach. And the swimming coach from there was telling her how much I was improving. A month later, she came and told me she goes Have you ever served like Betty? Are you kidding me? I was like, Can you imagine me being out there in the wetsuit looking like a like a seal that's hurt. You know, only halfway there are sharks gonna come take me down and she goes, don't worry about it. There's a lot more people out there. They're not going to look for the little guy. I'm like, hey. So I told her I was like, You know what? I trust you at this point. She goes, we've been using this therapy since 2006. So the military actually Okay, Betty. She was one of the first persons to start pushing this as an actual therapeutical way for veterans to recover. Ever back when everybody was coming back all hurt. So in 2006, she got the official word from VA and from the military to allow this to be an actual therapeutical thing for vets. So she started telling me of how everything was helpful. And until there was like, You know what, I trust you at this point. So she ended up taking me out, I've never served ever in my life before I actually went out with Betty. And I remember, she took me on a big giant foam board, and introduced me to this amazing gentleman named Darren classen. And he's always out apparently, he's been helping out just as long as Betty has been out. And he was the one that took me out, pushed me on to one of my first waves. And we continue to use that as therapy. After I got out of the military, I started growing cannabis for therapy reasons, I just wanted to my dreams were always to have my own cannabis room, my own grow my own way of taking care of myself. So when I got out of the military, I started growing a big amount of cannabis. Unfortunately, I got robbed. And I did not want to go to my old ways. I didn't want to become an investigator and find out who it was, and then do some mean things or whatnot. So I remember sitting on the pavement on my house and just saying, like, you know, God, is this another slap in the face, or you just tested me again. And I remember just hysterically laughing like the Joker from Batman just hysterically laughing. And I told myself, right time to wipe my hands and start to start something new. I know I'm going to be amazing. And I know there's something more I'm just scared to start it. So I called the one person that I knew was going to help me. Allow me to kind of forget about what had just happened. So I called the Betty and I told her Hey, like, are you guys still surfing? Are we still doing this thing? She goes, Yeah, come over. We do it every Thursday at Del Mar in San Diego. And I ended up showing up the very next week that I showed up again, she started talking to me about Hey, do you know that there's competition going on? You know, there's other adaptive surfers that are trying to do the same thing you're doing and trying to push the boundary? And that's all there is like there's no way like there's no way there's other guys like me like I've never seen anybody like me really like trying to compete No. And jenica telling me she goes look sign up for this contest. And it was I didn't know what contest that was. And it was it is one of the biggest adaptive contests we have here in Oceanside, California. It is about 100 adaptive surfers in different categories, anywhere from blind to quadriplegic, all kinds of different capabilities. I like to say capabilities because no one's really handicapped to be honest with you. Yes, the state, it's a state of mind. The Psychedelic Space 38:11 Will you say a little bit more about that. Because I think that is really important that the construct of someone being disabled, versus they are able to do the things that they do the way that they do it. Because I find that that is I would love to hear you, before you even carry on in this story, say a little bit more around that from your perspective. Because I think that it's a really powerful reframe it for for really, everyone. Jose Martinez 38:36 Absolutely. So this is what I like, I like to mess around with anybody that's handi capable, that has the capability just like myself, I show them the handicap placard, and I tell them look, this is just used for parking, okay, so we can get into the front of the row that's always used for it. Besides that, it's a state of mind. Don't ever think that because someone told you Oh, you can't do this, or you can't do that. But it's impossible. No, it's absolutely possible. Just like the military, you have to adapt and overcome. But just people are scared to either help you, either. This is the way I take it, you either gonna help me get to my destination, or you need to just get out of my way. So I can show you how to get to my way so I can show you how to get to my destination. And that's the mentality that I tried to show all my friends in all various different situations. I mean, there's brands that I have that have full body, and I feel like they're handicapped just because of the mindset that they have. They're always on the negative Nancy type of attitude, you know, you got to think of it in a positive way every single day you wake up, you have a breath, that you're able to get a drink of water that you're able to do absolutely something for yourself. You're absolutely should be grateful every single day because you have an ability to change something that you don't like in your life and that day that you woke up. So if you're not taking advantage of your situation, then it's a state of mind. And that's what I like to tell all my friends of everybody that I know that has a capability that they have to overcome or whatnot, their chargers. I mean, I have one of my really, really good friends Her name is Quinn, I'm always reposting her because she is absolutely amazing. She doesn't let anybody stop her. She doesn't let anything stop her. She's been at the gym, this whole time that quarantine has been going on, she's been trying to get stronger. And that's kind of the things that we want to keep doing is just showing people that have gone through trauma that have have or feel like they they can't do it. We're just trying to show them and remind them like, Look, it's this easy. Sometimes it just takes an adaptive moment that we have to make, sometimes we got to do it on the floor. Sometimes we got to do it in a different manner, because it doesn't work that way for us. And that's absolutely fine. You just got to either do it yourself, because you know, you can do it, or find the person that's going to help you advance to that, to that place. Just this last year, I found an amazing trainer that has been helping, that's the guy that you've if you guys go on my social media, I've been posting a lot of workouts and a lot of things like that. And it's just us trying to be in the gym, adapting to what's there and what we can do if we're working out a certain body group. I don't want to miss out because oh, we think we can't do it. So we've been trying to push boundaries even to get up on leg presses and stuff like that. You guys can go on my social media and see that I've been trying to do squats. You know, if they're gonna fall, it feels like it's gonna hurt. But there's someone always are trying to help me out. And that's the best thing that we could find. And please, please, please, don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't let the ego get in the way. Please, please, Jose, not The Psychedelic Space 41:55 only are you lifting weights and stuff on your Instagram, you're shooting archery, you're fishing. You're like, I think I saw like zip lining searching. I mean, this is one of those the zip line they threw Jose Martinez 42:08 me on there. Okay, they made me because me not thinking they're like, Alright, Jose, go up there first, because you know, you need a little extra help. And when I got there, they said, Well, since you're here first might as well throw you first and I look back, my wife was right behind me. I can't was out. I was I was made. So yeah, there's certain things. Because of the people you have around, they're gonna make you do things that get you uncomfortable. So get uncomfortable, it's okay. Unknown Speaker 42:38 That is stunning. The You know, The Psychedelic Space 42:43 I think that this is forever going to be one of those interviews that I go back to the when my friends are like, I don't want to get up that early. I'm gonna be like this. I'm not gonna finish that word, but you can fill in the blank, because it is one of those things that on some level, this idea of what we can't do is complete and utter shit. Just in case people have their kids or something listening. Because, ultimately, Jose, like, again, I encourage anyone that's listening right now, to go to Jose's Instagram, it's roll with guru. And on those days that you're questioning something that you're doing, get yourself a little bit of perspective. And so what I really want to do, I've got some people that do want to come up, either offer contributions or questions as a whole group. Again, let's take a nice, deep breath, Inhale in, Unknown Speaker 43:39 exhale out. The Psychedelic Space 43:41 And remember, you know, to mind your mind and these conversations and if you notice something is bringing a little bit of a charge that as you go through these clubhouse rooms, to also be sovereign in your experience. And if things feel a little too much for anyone system at any time, please take self responsibility to get what you need to get out in the sun, go walk, stand up, stretch, whatever it is, as we kind of shift things up a little bit. I've got two people that would like to come up not looks like we're at one if anyone would like to come up, because this is being recorded. I want to get your consent. So if you would like to come on stage, that's beautiful. Just please text, the word consent to 22999. That'll give you a couple of questionnaires to fill out and then it'll ping me you completed the form. And I'm here talking to Jose Martinez. So we've been hearing from Jose who is a wounded Well, not anymore, was wounded in combat triple amputee, who now is a Paris surfer are currently third in the world and I'm sure is ready to get back out and into the competitions but in the meantime is lifting and doing weights and surfing and all of these incredible have incredible assets, we were just talking about discomfort and things that make you uncomfortable or things that, you know, make you a little bit afraid. For you, Jose, what's exciting you about life? I mean, right as you are getting into all this fun surfing, then the world kind of shut down, which I'm sure then shut down competitions. What's exciting for you actually, there's a two part question, Jose. One, what's exciting you right now in your life? And the other question is, how can we support you? Whether that's, you know, if you've got merged, or if you're looking to coach people, or you have some way that anyone listening here can support you? What would that be? So those two questions I'd love to hear. Jose Martinez 45:43 So the things that are getting me excited right now, honestly, I'm just, I'm living freely on a day to day basis. And it feels absolutely amazing to be able to share this with the world I can ever ask for is for people to, if they're really having a tough time, if they need someone to talk to just, I hope they understand and know that I continue to push as much as I do on my social media so they can reach out I've had very many, so many people throughout the world to be honest with you that I continue to talk to on my DMS on a daily basis on a weekly basis on a monthly basis that I just check in and make sure that they're doing okay, I want them to understand that they're not alone in this world, I'm constantly fighting a depressional battle with myself and with the world. Depression just doesn't go away. Because today I feel better and it's gone. It's something that we're continuously trying to adjust the way we talk to each other, the way we the way we react to some of the things that we do. So I just want them to know, and understand that there is a lot of people that wants to help that are here to help and they're very helpful. The reason why I have my social media is because I help a lot of people and I don't want to let those people down. I'm constantly talking to different various peoples from all over the world. Because of that, I'm no doctor and nothing like that. But I know how it feels to be alone. I know how it feels like to go through trauma and feel like no one can understand the pain that you're going through. And to be honest with you, the way anybody can help me as you continue to repose show this to other friends that need some help and need a lift. I have a link on my bio that has my merch and all I ever pushed it out for was to help me specially after last year, because of COVID we were on a championship run and because of COVID that completely stopped everything. And we I had to find a different way to be able to get wetsuits to make sure that all my stuff is taken care of in the water all last year, I was freezing my butt off. So I created a little bit of mark that way when you guys put it on, you feel a bit inspired and motivated to actually go live your best unfulfilled life. But if you cannot help with any of that I also have a nonprofit organization that I started called for season fighters. And it's based out of Washington State. If you know anybody with land that wants to take people out on boats to take a fishing to allow us to go camping, hunting whatever the case may be. I started the me and three of my other friends started this nonprofit to help out veterans that have been wounded in combat or have been hurt in some type of way while selflessly serving our country. First Responder, policemen, firemen, all kinds of people that are selflessly helping in our community. And we made it a point to be able to help all of those people if you guys don't know, firemen are second in line with the highest suicide rate because of their job. They answer every single call that they have to go to. And a lot of the times they don't have the ability to help or they go to a scene where there's death and I'm coming from a place where I know a lot of my veterans became fired and then I got to make sure we continued helping cycle so I just wanted to continue to push out as much help as possible. I feel like I've taken enough from this world and done my my harm that now all I need to do is continue to help others that really need the help and continue to inspire and motivate and show you how easy it is to live a beautiful life. The Psychedelic Space 49:54 Stunning Do you have a website for the nonprofit or maybe if I miss Jose Martinez 50:01 Yes, so the website for the nonprofit is for season fighters.org. It's a 501 C, three seats. So everything that we get goes directly straight to whoever we're taking out, we try to give them gear. So if they want to hunt, fish surf, do whatever it is outdoorsy that they'll need. We want to make sure that we set them, we don't just take them out one time. And that's it. We want to make sure that they have the ability to either help others help themselves or continue to show the rest of the world how it's done. Unknown Speaker 50:34 Yeah, The Psychedelic Space 50:34 I am, I Oh, can definitely rally some folks around that as well. Thank you, Jose, for continuing to serve the way that you do. It's stunning. And I think it's a beautiful, beautiful example of what's possible. And like I said, I think that you're just getting started. I've got Dr. Lola here, who is a healthcare professional, alternative medicine, cannabis educator. Welcome to this stage, Dr. O. Would love to hear any thoughts, contributions, let us know a little bit a little bit about who you are. And then any questions for Jose or comments. Unknown Speaker 51:14 Hi, hi, Kole thank you so much for this platform, or your platform is just amazing. And I'm very, very grateful for what you do. On this platform, I really am. Or say, I just want to say thank you, not just what you have given to our country. But what you're doing for for the handicapped community. This is this is huge. This is huge. A lot about me on on my bio, just a little bit, I'm gonna chop in right quick to say, I am so grateful. For your courage, this was the courage I did not have growing up as a child. I was I had polio when I was probably about two years old. And I had to work within limb. I remember I never even used to want to go out. I never used to want to wear wear dresses. Because often now I actually have a wish on dresses, you know, cuz I want to show my leg. But for you to be out there doing what you do. This is amazing. And I just want to tell you guys in the in the in the on the audience, that what he said is really true. Why are we focusing on ourselves last could be worse. And I'm very, very grateful to you. We all can contribute to the society, we don't have an excuse. And I'm very grateful for what you're doing. And I already followed you. And I'm gonna see whatever I can do to support whatever course you're doing, if you ever need me for anything. I'm here. I'm a plant medicine specialist. And I also know a lot about 30 disease states. That's my field. So what I'm doing is bringing those mediums together to educate people. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. Appreciate you, my sister. The Psychedelic Space 53:30 Always good to see you. Always, always. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us here. We do still have about 10 minutes. So we could probably take one more person if anyone wants to join the stage. You just text the word consent to 22999. And that'll ping me that you consent for the recording. This is going on The Psychedelic Space podcast. So if you want to catch the recording, it takes about a week for it to come up. And Rachel Good to see you. Welcome to the stage thoughts contributions little bit about you and anything for Jose. Thanks, Kole. Unknown Speaker 54:11 You know, I was going to shoot Jose a DM and let him know what this meant to me and that I just really felt called to voice it. Unknown Speaker 54:19 Actually, Unknown Speaker 54:20 I'm teaching a class right now and I gave my class an extra video to watch because I just felt like I just needed to verbalize this but I just want to say thank you for challenging me and for sharing your story. And just for your willingness to do exactly what you said and drop the ego. I actually had a permanent colostomy bag put in at 23 as well. And when you are sharing just I just related to that in a way that few people you know I understand and it's been almost 10 years, it'll be 10 years next February for me. And I do some mentoring. And I've been feeling a lot more challenged lately to share more about my story, but I had no idea about that part of your story. But just hearing everything that you shared today, I just want to say thank you for putting yourself out there. When I first saw you in a room, I was just floored by your story floored by your, your attitude. And I just want to also validate those hard days. And thanks for acknowledging, you know, that side of it, you're so positive, and you, you know, wear your heart on your sleeve. But I think it's also really important to, you know, remind folks that they're still hard days. And similarly, when I was 16, I had two strokes. And I'm 32 now, and have had a lot of things contribute to my healing, therapy, psychedelics, meditation, yoga. But the big acceptance piece for me it was really through psychedelics, and probably yoga. But I just really value your voice. And I just want to say thank you. And on those hard days, don't be afraid to reach out to anyone. Also, because, you know, that is part of this journey. But yeah, I just want to say thank you, and thank you, Kole, for having him. And, yeah, your blessing. Jose Martinez 56:41 Thank you so much ratio for sharing your story. Um, to be honest with you, I, I like to share my story about the colossal bag, because it, I really felt like that was the tip of the iceberg for me. I mean, there's no way that I was in all this pain. And yet, I still couldn't do stuff, right. And I still couldn't even do this, right. And I wish I would have known more people that, at the time, had it or I didn't even know about it, though. We're waking up to be honest with you. And I woke up to, I didn't know that. That's what that was. And I just wish I would have known more people. So please don't ever be afraid to, to continue your journey and share your story with others. And just like you said it. The way I've been helping myself is through psychedelics through cannabis. And that's the only way I've been really, really able to help myself because I feel like I can finally accept myself and love myself. You know, I every day more and more stronger, because of all the practice that I have, with positivity. To the point where I, I stopped using the word hate. If the word hate ever comes out of my mouth, I absolutely have to apologize to the world and say I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that. I dislike this. So please keep sharing your story with us keep keep going on this amazing journey because we need amazing humans like yourself. Thank you so much for sharing. Unknown Speaker 58:10 That's beautiful. Unknown Speaker 58:10 And I'll just add real quick what you mentioned about cannabis. I also suffering from chronic pain and was handed you know, all these opioids, and for years that was just what Duke hospital was giving me, you know, for these things, and I appreciate your perspective on you know, what cannabis can do for you know, pain control. And I think that's a really important message that needs to get out there as well. And you know, what you said about complaining, I heard a quote, like pretty recently that you know, don't even let yourself hear yourself complain. You know, it is a you know, it's dishonouring. But yeah, it's how you hit the nail on the head. That's perfectly said. So, thanks. The Psychedelic Space 58:57 Thank you so much, Rachel. Doctor. Oh, did you have something, Lola? No, Unknown Speaker 59:02 I was just clapping just acknowledging what Rachel and Lucille were saying. I mean, if sometimes we make excuses about them. I mean, we sometimes I just don't even want to say it's like complaining about working from home. Just don't even make sense. You know? The Psychedelic Space 59:25 And acknowledging that you know, sometimes we have rough days to end finding compassion and grace for ourselves in those moments I found that I was redirecting self hate into myself work where I'm not even self working right or I'm not doing positive right or, oh, I messed up again are not supposed to say that and, you know, giving ourselves like grace and kindness through this process. It took us how many years to get to where we are, mentally takes a lot to unravel. I have an ask from everyone listening Right now, if you're by your phone, if you can click Jose's picture, go to his Instagram. Take a screenshot of his Instagram and share it to your stories, letting people know more about Jose so we can spread not only his message, but also the work for his nonprofit, the people that he's serving, if we're going to have the conversations around plant medicine, psychedelics, spiritual work. It's not about doing it later. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll support people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I care. Yeah, yeah, yeah, accessibility. Right now, Jose Martinez 1:00:37 take The Psychedelic Space 1:00:38 five seconds to come over to your phone. When click on Jose's picture, or if you're listening on the podcast, it's roll with Guru is the handle, screenshot, Jose, or maybe there's a post that's particularly potent for you, and share it roll with guru and let people know about how we can contribute. One of my commitments on this platform is to continue to increase accessibility. What that means is, even as we're speaking right now, this is being transcribed in real time, so that on the psychedelic podcast.com, the website, it's not ready yet still working on it. But all the transcripts will be available in by next week. All of these will be viewable on zoom with live transcription. So that people that may have that don't have the ability to hit these small buttons, for whatever reason, are able to still have access to these conversations. Because we if we look at what people are up against the accessibility component, I don't wait for an app to come out with it. I don't wait for the government to come out with it. If we're going to be about it here in the psychedelic clubhouse, then it starts now. Not when things are legalized, and I'm not giving, I'm not condoning any illegal activity or the usage of illicit substances that are illegal where you are. What I'm saying is that we cannot wait to go from the top down for resources for support and for accessibility. So take this moment to really get involved. Jose's doing incredible work, there's the veteran walk in talk that Colin wells is doing, there's amazing opportunities to be giving back to people that have given so much already. And so I really need you to take this time right now, in this moment, not when you're off of work, not when you take a break, it'll take you five seconds just to take some small action. Even if you can't financially support in some way today, if you share it, someone else may be able to. For me, it's an exchange of energy. And Jose's shown up tremendously today, that even in just sharing his story where if you've got a podcast, please hit Jose up on Instagram, up lift his voice so that other people that are going through a challenging time, can find that Lighthouse for themselves, help by merchant financially support because Jose can't be the same lighthouse if he can't keep his lights on. This is where community can really come together to make a huge impact in this moment. So Jose, thank you so much for your time and for your love. I do have a few people that want to speak. So I'm going to have you say a final word for the podcast. That way I can just bring people up without having the consent to record. So what are some final thoughts just for the podcast recording that you would like to leave and then we'll snag a couple more of these questions after if you've got some time. Jose Martinez 1:03:46 I just wanted to say thank you all for listening on final words for the podcast. I hope you all are having an amazing day. I hope you all understand that we need each other, especially in times like this even more so now than ever. And I hope you understand that you're absolutely beautiful. And you are important to this world. So don't let anybody else tell you otherwise. I promise you, I personally need you. The person next to you needs you and the persons around you need you either to become the lighthouse to be the showmanship to the lighthouse, or the guidance to the lighthouse. But you are all important and you're absolutely loved.   

In this ask us anything we cover questions from a recent webinar on funds needed to get started, different tax treatments from state to state, loan specifics comparing local to national lending and the topic of getting a loan after you have 10 open, and finally COVID related tenant issues.   Submit Questions here: https://linktr.ee/remoterealestateinvestor   --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On this episode, we're doing another ama. We recently did a webinar with roofstock and got a ton of great questions that we weren't able to get all of them. So we're gonna do it right now. All right, let's do it.   Gentlemen, co hosts What's going on? Who do I have on the line with me now,   Michael: Michael Albaum,   Emil: and Emil shore,   Tom: Before we get into the AMA, what's what's going on, guys? Is everything going?   Michael: Everything's good. I got my six unit that I've been trying to sell for well under contract out in the Midwest. Finally, that's super exciting. And then I'm just about to list a Southern California condo for sale as well on the MLS. So that'll be very exciting as well. And the list price that we're going out on is pretty strong. So I'm, I'm excited about all of those things, and then trying to get the I also got on the Portugal property, we're getting 3d renderings done to show furniture as opposed to just buying and spending a ton of cash to buy furniture or rent furniture. So hopefully, the renderings are going to work because nobody can travel anyhow. So fingers crossed, that gets listed and sold quickly as well.   Tom: Very cool. So they superimpose the furniture on the property when they're marketing   Michael: exactly as let's just do like a 3d rendering. So people can do like a 3d walkthrough and see furniture and then those will be the list photos will look stage. But that'll be not real furniture. It'll be CGI, so they can do like Jar Jar Binks sitting in the living room.   Tom: It's like, it's like Farmville.   Emil: Congrats on the six unit. That's that one's been a long time coming.   Michael: Yeah, it's been a long time coming. So it's been cash flowing this whole time, which has been helpful, but excited to get that under contract. And on to the next endeavor.   Emil: Yeah, good luck, man.   Michael: Thanks, appreciate, I'll keep I'll keep you all posted. It's a 60. Day close. So a lot can happen in between now and then. But I'm hopefully optimistic.   Tom: So that seems like a little bit of a longer closer, I guess, is that common?   Michael: It is a little bit common. I was pushing for 45 days, but the buyer is seeking this up with another purchase. And so they're getting financing for both simultaneously. So that's why   Tom: I got it. Awesome. And yourself Emil?     Emil: I am the only activity for me right now I am actually in the process of changing property management companies in St. Louis company I started out with on that three unit I bought, was not very happy with their service. And they were charging me all these weird fees. And I'm about jumping ship. So identified someone new in St. Louis, that I'm much more hopeful on and will transition the three units to them at the end of this month. So working with them to make sure that goes smoothly.   And then my property in Indianapolis, I am also looking to change property management companies there so that while we're not doing Oh, we're looking for acquisitions, just doing some housekeeping stuff with property management companies that I haven't been super happy with for a while. So using the downtime to make those moves.   Tom: Also good podcast episode fodder. So we're, we're talking before we started recording meals, like I got, I got an episode idea changing property managers   Michael: How to fire your property manager.   Emil: Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about how do you find one but like, you know, it doesn't always work out. So yeah. What does that look like? I think all of us have done it for one reason or another. So I think it'd be cool to go over. Why were we unhappy? What were the things we saw that we didn't like, and how do we go about finding a new property management?   MIcheal: I love that idea. Let's totally do that. Another episode.   Emil: Let's do it. What about Tom? What's going on?   Tom: Oh, what's going on with me? Not a ton. I Oh, I just had a fairly short vacancies, like roughly 30 days, I'm one of the properties and the rent came back. And it's like $200, higher, they went from like $100 to 14 something. So honestly, one of the best things as an investor, having your basis stay flat, and your yield jump up by like a pretty significant margin. So Yippie!   Still working on my reinsurance, I guess from a while ago, but I have my insurance in flight of updating those. So I've just to hold myself accountable. will want to talk about next week that I have confirmed my new property insurance.   Michael: Oh, good. That's exciting. Tom, you tell us what the turn costs on that unit was?   Tom: Oh, I think it was like the property was in reasonably good shape. So I think it was 20 $500 maybe $3,000. I don't have this specific number off the top of my head. But I start kind of like ticking my head up and making note of it. Like when it starts heading north of five for the turn cost just in budgeting roughly 500 bucks a month, and my dog, Bodie. He heard that high number so he's getting fired up!   Michael: It's like, get out of here.   Tom: Get out of here. No. So But no, the term cost was I think fairly expected fairly proforma   Michael: Okay, cool.   Emil: Did you guys make improvements to the property to get $200 more in rent, or was it just a property that you had a tenant for a while didn't raise rent on them and now that it's vacant, you're bringing it up to market?   Tom: You know, I think there was a weird bump. I didn't have a tenant They're for that long, you know, two years.   But I mean, I guess there's been a lot of rental appreciation over the past two years, but something about just a lovely little pop and it was in eastern Atlanta kind of in the woods, that stone Stone Mountain area. Yep. And just had just a man north of 10% bump in rent. So anyways, fired up about that.   Emil: That is awesome.   Michael: Way to be.   Tom: Way to be alright guys, let's jump into the AMA part of the episode The meat of it. So, as I mentioned, we had a webinar a little bit ago, a lot of great questions, and we're gonna try to tackle the ones that we didn't get a lot of these questions, I'll put in a couple of categories. One is more starting out, some are lending related, some are strategy related. And then we've got a couple on Roofstock Academy that we'll touch on at the end. So the first one, I'm going to send this to a meal, what's the average initial investment for a first time investor?   Emil: Oh, that is probably a…   Michael: 1 million dollars!   Emil: That is a it depends question. Are you investing in the Midwest, the southeast, if you're investing on the coasts, it's obviously going to be, you know, making your first investment in Los Angeles is going to be way different of a cost than if you're investing in the Midwest. So I don't have a good answer. I don't have like a 50,000 bucks. I mean, if you look at a lot of people on roof stock, and the properties on roof stock, most people's initial investment with down payment closing costs, all that is probably 25 to $30,000 is where people are starting.   Michael: Could you do it with less?   Emil: The thing is like once you start getting into properties that are like let's say 60 or $70,000 or less, there aren't many banks, where you know, where your downpayment would be, what's what's 20% of that 15 k ish 1215 K and then closing costs are like 20 K or less 1520 k all in to start and a lot of banks aren't going to even lend on a on a loan that small, right? If it's a $70,000 property, your downpayment 14 K. So like a $56,000 loan.   Actually, I bought a $63,000 property, and I found a bank that would loan on it, but you just have to call around. Not all banks will do it. But yes, you can. You can buy homes for maybe like 20, k all and 1520 k all in as your down payment and closing costs.   Michael: Awesome.   Tom: I like it.   Michael: I love how you have a personal experience that immediately contradicted yourself.   Emil: Yeah, exactly. That's the fun thing about doing these live right. Like, Oh, wait, I'm actually sorry.   Michael: Keeps you on your toes.   Emil: Actually, what am I saying? He has a property we sold. So it's not really in my like, front of mine? Yeah, exactly. I don't think about it too much anymore. But yeah, good question.   Tom: Yeah, I'd say the same for a lot of investors that you know, 20%, down on a 100 or 150, or an $80,000 property, or you can buy all cash and make it a lot more. Go ahead, Michael, I hear you're wiggling around.   Michael: Oh, just something else to think about is I know a lot of first time investors house hack. So they'll buy owner occupant primary residence and then rent out the other rooms. And there's all kinds of programs out there to help limit the amount of downpayment you need FHA is one of those programs where I think it's three and a half percent down, you have to put so if you're buying $100,000 house, you could be in at 3500, which is pretty amazing. So all kinds of things to look into, based on what type of investing you're doing and geographically where you're located as well.   Tom: And I know that we have some military listeners of VA loans. I mean, I think you can go 0% so with a house hack, like whoa, yeah.   Michael: Pretty amazing stuff. Alright, so     Tom: The next question, I'll pass this over to Michael, this is related to taxes. How do we find out if the state charges higher property taxes for non residents, so not getting that owner occupied? tax benefit?   Michael: Yeah, this is a great question. And something I talked about with a lot of students in the academy, whenever we're talking about property taxes, is call the county assessor. Call the county assessor call the county assessor call the county assessor for whatever county you're interested in investing in because property taxes are levied. at the county level, not at the state level, the state might set a minimum threshold like California, for instance, minimum 1% of the sale price, and then counties can have an excess above that.   So you just want to look to understand how it works in your specific County. And if there is an owner occupant exemption, or what you know how property taxes are calculated, so call the county assessor and ask them how you calculate your after sale property taxes as an investor, because there's often a big distinguishment. Between owner occupant versus investor. Great question.   Tom: I think for most of them….   Michael: No no no, I think Emil  has something to say.   Tom: Okay, go ahead. I'll get the back of the line.   EmiL: No, I was just like me raising my hand, like to call on me. There's another thing I'm finding after years of ownership also very important to ask how often is your property tax reassessed. There's some places where whatever you buy it at, okay, here's your new property tax level in California. I'm pretty sure it stays at that level until you sell right a new person takes over   Michael: Yeah, there's like minor increases incrementally.   Emil: Exactly. But Indianapolis I believe does every year they reassess Okay, what is the property value now and what does that mean for property tax? St. Louis, where I invest, I think they do it every other year. So if property value goes up, they're charging you more in property tax. This is something you probably don't think about when you're first getting started. And it's, you know, it's another variable to consider and would probably stop, a lot of people are just, I don't know, make it more confusing and harder to predict. But something to know as well with property taxes. So ask the county assessor how often they reassess property value and change the property tax on there as well. It's good to know.     Michael: Great point.   Tom: Excellent, I'd say the most of the properties that I own would have a homeowner's exemption. If I was a homeowner, you know, I'd say most areas do offer some sort of like, owner occupied discount. So when you're looking at last year's taxes, that can definitely be confusing. If there is like a, you know, an owner, discount owner occupied discount.   Okay, now on to the next one. So this is a lending question. I'm going to circle this back to Emil. When applying for a loan out of state property, a remote investor, are lenders weary of out of state property owners? Can we use local lenders to buy properties in other states? Emil, why don't you take the first job of this one?   Emil: It's a good question. I am sure there are some lenders who don't want to lend to out of state if they're local. I've never had it be an issue personally. I talked to them. And they're like, oh, you're out of state, sorry, as long as the property is in that state where they lend. It's okay, if you live in another state, right. So it's like, if you talk to St. Louis, a bank that will lend in Missouri, they won't lend in Indiana, but they don't really care where you are. So that's the only thing I've run into. See, they're like national local lender, Michael wagging your finger.   Michael: Haha. Yeah. See, I have had that unfortunate run in where they said, Oh, where's the property? locally? Where are you California? No, thank you. So those tend to be smaller, more community banks, credit union type of institutions   Emil: Was that conventional or commercial?   Michael: Conventional, I think I don't really remember that specific instance. But I wasn't gonna say I did just run into this with a commercial loan as well. There was an out of state buyer looking to buy my six unit, and they reached out to actually a national bank. But because they didn't have a footprint in this local market, the bank wasn't willing to lend to them. And I think that they've become more stringent with their lending practices and criteria because of COVID. And so I think that could be a big part of it. But I was quite surprised that for a commercial property with a national lender, that they wouldn't lend to this person, because they were not local, there didn't have a local footprint.   So it's hit and miss. So just ask the question. And the fact that there are banks and lenders that exist, that will lend to you even out of state just means you have to go find them. So if it's not the first one, or the second one, a third one, just keep calling around and ask for recommendations from either, you know, your local network or from other investors.   Tom: There's a lot of lenders out there. Yeah. I mean, there's local, there's national, and I think that's an important part of the process is on turning those rocks and having those questions to ask, and being transparent, and all that good stuff. So yeah, hit and miss.   All right, Michael, I got the next lending related question for you. You have some experience with this. Can you explain how commercial loans work a bit more? Do all have balloon payments?   Michael: No. To the first part, I can't explain. Yeah, of course.   So there's all kinds of different products out there, there's probably I would gather that there's more types of variables with commercial loans than there are with traditional residential loans, traditional, you know, being fixed debt, over 15 or 30 years commercial, you can have all kinds of different stuff. So I've got commercial loans. I'll give you an example. I have one that's fixed for 10 years on a 25 year amortization. And there's a balloon payment at the end of that 10 year period.   I also have another commercial loan, that's a 20 year amortization, fixed for five years, and then resets every five years with a minimum floor. And so those are two different types, the balloon payment loan, I'll obviously have to refinance, because that loan is essentially due in full at the end of 10 years. And so unless I have the cash sitting and want to pay that off, I'll need to refinance that at some point in between now, and then, versus my other loan that's not fully due, there's no balloon payment, that'll just readjust. And assuming that the interest rate that that current lender gives me at the end of that five year period is still reasonable, no reason to move or jump ship, but something I just did recently, actually was I was looking at refinancing a portfolio loan I have that sits across two properties. And the rate was, I think, four and three quarters. And so I reached out to a commercial lender and I said, Hey, this is what I've got what you do. And so they were going to give me a seven one arm, amortized over 25 years, which means it's fixed for seven years, then it'll adjust every year after that at four and a quarter. And then there was all these fees and points associated with doing that. And it was going to be a whole thing.   And so I took that back to my current lender, I said, Hey, I got this quote, can you beat it? And they said, Yeah, we'll just drop the rate to four and a quarter for like 2000 bucks for a one time fee. I was like, sweet, that's like a six month payback based on that loan size. And now that's fixed for this. next five years. And so that'll adjust again at the end of that five year period, but there's no balloon payment on that. So that was a super long rant. I know. Hopefully that answers the question.   The short story long is that no, not all commercial loans have balloon payments? Some of them do some of them, don't, you just need to understand the terms and intricacies of your specific product that you're either have or investigating.   Tom: That's great. And, yeah, definitely a more advanced topic where it's not necessary. If you're kind of earlier in your days of building your portfolio. Speaking of building your portfolio, Emil next question for you. So within the webinar that we receive these questions, it was about building a passive income flow of $100,000. And in that process, you're going to go well over 10 properties. And the question is, how do you get so many loans when you get above that magic number 10, which is limited by Fannie if you're just getting standard loans, go ahead Emil.   Michael: Before you jump in, I will just say, Tom, that we just had Chad Carson on the podcast recently, and we were talking about going lean and small as opposed to big and deep in your portfolio. And I think that you can absolutely structure a portfolio with paid off properties and only need 10 to hit your $100,000 passive income. So I think a lot of people get disgruntled or disheartened when they see the amount of leveraged properties that they need to purchase or having their portfolio to hit their income goals. But I would encourage people to look at the unleveraged amount of cash flow is the number one concern, and you're less concerned about the return metric itself, it can totally be done. So I would say look to structure what makes the most sense for you as an individual investor.   Tom: Great point. Shout out Chad. Yeah, front of the pod. Go ahead Emil.   Michael: Friend of the pod sorry Emil, all you man.   Emil: That was a great episode, good shout out.   So one thing you can do is if you are married, your spouse can start taking on loans, right. So like, what I've been doing is, you know, is buying properties even before we were married. But now even though we're married, I still get these loans in my personal name. So it doesn't go my wife's name at all. The reason for that was, we can get more loans together if each loan goes on one person's name than if every loan goes on both of our names. So my plan was to load up on loans in my personal name. And then once that, once banks are like, Nope, sorry, we won't give you any more conventional, start putting them in my wife's name. So that's, that's one way people get around it.   The other one is you just start going into different loan products. I was listening to a BiggerPockets episode recently. And they were talking about this how everyone asks this question, what do I do when I get to 10. And once you get to 10, everyone realizes it's not as hard as you think, to go out and just you go get a commercial loan, you talk to private banks, you just get a different loan type, you're not going to get the amazing terms. But it's not hard to go out and get loans on cash flowing properties.       Tom: We've had a couple of episodes interviewing private lenders, and that industry has come such a long ways of like a meal said, where it's not that daunting to get these private loans. So yeah, check out some of the I think I've been our two episodes ago, or actually might actually be coming out this previous episode. I'm sorry, I'm in a time warp right now thinking about when we're recording goes out.   Michael: Back to the Future.   Tom: All right. So my next question I have is COVID related. So we had a couple of questions. Are you guys having tenant rent payment issues during COVID? tenants are protected from eviction in many areas? Michael's turned to take the first stab at this question.   Michael: Yeah, sure. So I've been very fortunate knock on wood, that I really haven't experienced the mass lack of payments that I think everybody was anticipating in March and April, I have had one tenant stop paying in a Southern California property that I own, which is a higher end rental, and so they lost their job. So actually, two rentals in Southern California, one stop paying almost entirely close of job, another Ask for rent reduction, just kind of indefinitely, which I was happy to accommodate both of those things.   Thankfully, there was some rental assistance programs that my property manager helped the tenant who stopped paying qualify for it. And so we've been able to recoup some of those. And then I think there was just some new legislation passed recently, that is also going to allow some rental assistance funds to be made available. And so we'll likely be able to take advantage of though well, but by and large, I just haven't seen people stop paying you do here every now and again of people trying to take advantage of the system because they understand or they're professional tenants. That's more so in my experience been the one off by no means is that the vast majority.   So I consider myself very lucky. But I think we've been proactive with working with our tenants and trying to stay ahead of the eight ball as opposed to trying to be reactive finding out Oh, by the way, I'm not paying. Yeah just for whatever that's worth just haven't seen that come to fruition. Thankfully. What about you, Tom, have you?   Tom: I haven't, you know, of the bigger companies that manage a lot of properties I've heard there's like, maybe been like a little bit of a downtick in vacancy. I guess that would be an uptick of more vacant homes, but it hasn't hit quite as hard and I think single family rentals is has been a little bit insulated. from some of the challenges as well, this is just my personal opinions and talking to people. But I haven't been hit. As I mentioned, I did have a tenant move out, but it wasn't necessarily COVID related, and I have a new one coming in. So at least so far knock on wood, like you said, it's been kind of business as normal, haven't been impacted by it or really much at all. Go ahead Emil.   Emil: Same, I think I had one tenant who they were always on time with payments. And now they're a little bit behind here and there, but they're always catching up and making payments. Michael, it's funny that you mentioned California because I watch Michaels Zuber's, YouTube channel a lot. And he's mentioned, a lot of hit, you know, a section of his point of I don't know what it was, like 510 percent of his portfolio has like stopped paying, and his whole portfolio is in California, too. So I don't know if it's more a California thing. And maybe in the Midwest where, you know, rents and everything aren't as high. It's not being impacted as much. But that was interesting that you mentioned that your California stuff is what's been impacted the most.   Tom: Okay, so who's up? Now? I think a meal is up. This is a acquisition underwriting question. Do you advise on buying properties when the existing tenants are behind on rent?   Emil: That's a good question I have bought.   Tom: And as always, these are all just our personal kind of opinion, this is not investing advice. Go ahead.   Emil: I have bought properties where the existing tenant was late or like, you know, you can see the rent ledger, and they were consistently late, like if they haven't paid for two months, okay, now, now, that's something but if it's like, they're consistently late, but they always end up paying, that doesn't determine too much, especially if it's a property where I'm like, oh, man, look at market rent is way higher than it is with the current tenant. And they're three months away from renewal. So like, you know, maybe we'll just get a new tenant in here once that's time, so doesn't usually deter me. How about you guys?   Tom: Michael, I thought…   Michael: Kind of was interesting to note, it depends how habitual The problem is. I had a tenant that was late every single month, and so paid me an extra $100 a month, that's an extra 1200 bucks, cash flow on that property. So that was like, Alright, and once I learned that, that he was gonna make rent, he just stopped worrying about it his Yep, it's gonna be late this month. Okay. If someone hasn't paid at all, that's probably a bit more of an indication that there's a bigger issue going on. And so buying a property with that tenant in place would be a bit cause for concern. In that instance, I might ask the seller for some concessions, like, hey, pay me three months rent in advance, or put it in an escrow account. And you know, guaranteed me that this renter is going to make rent. And if you put your money where your mouth is, if they pay rent, great, you don't lose anything. But if they don't, now you've got me covered. So I'll only buy the property under that circumstance.   So the kind of things like that you can be a little bit creative with hedging your bets a little bit.   Emil: It's a little bit harder to do that right now, just given how crazy the market is an unlimited supply is.   Michael: Things are flying off the shelf. So contingencies tend to steer sellers away from going towards those offers. Absolutely. I mean, it's all one of those things, you got to be as aggressive as whatever makes you comfortable, but fully understand the market conditions and where you're operating in. You might be a bit unrealistic for your current market, given the situation we're in.   Tom: Yeah, I'll add in a couple of comments on that on tenants being late to as a meal was alluding to like looking at the kind of history one thing that's cool with Roofstock, at least you can see that ledger. And when the ledgers are ran, sometimes there can be a delay of when payments are processed. So the process so I'm looking at a ledger that was pulled on the fifth of the month, but the payment hasn't been processed yet, it could be kind of misleading. So like knowing that.   And looking into the history, there's this term and tax called Sally same as last year, I think I said that right, you can kind of think of when you look back at month after month after month, you can kind of infer some similar things. So if there's a history of late payment, or inconsistent, or what they call not secured NSF funding, like that's a bit of a red flag. But if someone is oftentimes a little bit late, and perhaps they're incurring a late payment fee, and another potential upside in that, if that's what you're about.   So I would say, I look at the payment history. Also, how long have they been living there could be telling if they've only been there for a little bit, and they're already having some late payments issues, that could be a major issue, because what I think about is a big risk costs outside of property condition is kind of going through an eviction. So doing what I can to avoid going through that legal costs and all that rigmarole. So at a high level, like a lot of these questions, it really depends and looking at the context of the situation.   Excellent. So we just got a few minutes left in today's episode, so I'm gonna hit real quick, some of these Roofstock Academy questions just talk about those. So someone had asked is that is Roofstock Academy at one time fears that a subscription model is a one time fee that is backed by a lifetime full refund guarantee, so have a risk free. It's not a hotel ballroom where they bring you in and keep upselling you new things. It's your pay once in your in.   And somebody also asked is the cost of Roofstock Academy tax deductible? I'm not a tax advisor, you should talk to tax advisor we did an episode with a tax advisor who mentioned that, you know, there's ways that he has put these type of costs either as business develop Men are startup costs. So again, I'm not giving you tax advice with this, but we have heard from a tax advisor     Michael: They said yes!   Tom: But yeah. Talk to your tax advisor, talk to your tax advisor. So another question for roofs Academy Can I buy now and take the course in a few months? I'm going through a bunch of stuff right now. But I want to like kind of lock this in at the current pricing? And the answer is yes, you can sign up and almost all of the aspects of it, you get lifetime access to it, lifetime access to all the lectures, all the group coaching Slack channel, the one thing we do limit is the one on one coaching and what's for a year, and we start that when you do your first coaching session, so you can sign up, you're in awesome access to everything. But if you you know, want to get started in like a month or two months or three months, whatever, you can start the clock on the coaching when you do that very first session.   So yes, other questions is do you get access to the Roofstock Excel export so this is one of the cool little hidden features about resect Academy where our members can export the full listings on the retail side on rootstock into evaluate an Excel which me I like working in Excel, you can evaluate a ton of properties and whittle down a list to a more manageable ones to go in and, and dig into the specific listings.   Alright, guys, I think we I wanted to get to those ones real quick. But I think we got a good episode. There's still actually quite a few questions. So we'll have another ama for us soon. Any final thoughts? Emil, Michael?   Michael: No these are all great questions. So keep them coming, please. And leave us a rating review comment. If you have additional questions as well. It's a great way to get in touch with us for the podcast specific.   Emil: Yeah and an even easier way. We have a link tree link in the show notes where you can click on that it'll take you to a couple different places, but one of the links will be where you can submit questions if you want to stack on a future episode. So that's another easy way to send us questions.   Tom: Awesome. Thanks for listening. Happy investing.   Emil: Happy investing.   Michael: Happy investing!