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Step into the heart of an ancient woodland as we explore Ashenbank Wood, a Site of Special Scientific Interest rich in history and teeming with wildlife. Woodland has stood here for centuries, but this haven is under threat. A proposed tunnel project, the Lower Thames Crossing, could harm the irreplaceable ecosystem and ancient trees here. Jack, leader of our woods under threat team, explains what's at stake and the challenges and strategies involved in trying to maintain a delicate balance between development and nature. A decision on whether the project goes ahead is due from Government in May 2025. We also meet estate manager Clive, who delves into Ashenbank Wood's history, tells us more about why ancient woodland is so important and shows us the unusual approach of strapping deadwood to trees. Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people to enjoy, to fight climate change and to help wildlife thrive.  Adam: Today I am at a site of Special Scientific Interest in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is teeming with extraordinary wildlife, and I'm told you can stand in the shadows of gnarled veteran trees and even spot some shy dormice, rare bats, and woodland wildflowers if you're there at the right time of year. But it is also a site under threat. National Highways propose to build a new tunnel linking Essex and Kent under the River Thames, and many feel that that will create a threat to the trees and wildlife here. So I've come not just for a walk, but to chat to experts and the first is the man responsible for coordinating the Woodland Trust response to big infrastructure projects and to chat to him about how infrastructure and nature can live hand in hand.  Jack: So I'm Jack Taylor, I'm the programme lead for the woods under threat team at the Woodland Trust.  Adam: Brilliant. And we're at Ashenbank Woods?  Jack: We are indeed.  Adam: Good, OK, sorry, yeah *laughs* I know I should sound more sure, we are at Ashenbank Woods.  Jack: I think its full title might be Ashenbank Woods SSSI, site of special scientific interest.  Adam: Oh right yes, yes. And we're going to see a bit later a colleague of yours, Clive, who will tell us more about the details of this woodland. But the reason why I wanted to talk to you first as we walk through, what is a lovely, actually dappled, dappled bit of woodland here is about your role in protecting places like this from development because, so what, what is your job?  Jack: Yeah, it's beautiful. That's a good question *laughs* what is my job? I I suppose the the base of it, the basis of it, the foundation really is about trying to protect ancient woods and ancient and veteran trees from forms of development, but also from other threats outside of that as well. So non-development threats like air pollution, pests and diseases, deer overbrowsing. Most of my work does focus on working within the development sector and trying to protect against those development threats.  Adam: Right, and you're the project lead.   Jack: Yeah.  Adam: When I first saw that, I thought you meant you're the project lead for this woodland, but you are not. You are the project lead for all development threatening woodlands throughout the UK. This is an extraordinary, I mean that's quite a job.  Jack: Yeah, it's it's a lot. There are a lot of threats to have to deal with across the UK because we're always building always sort of growing as a nation. We always need sort of new forms of infrastructure and new sort of housing. We recognise that. But all of that does come with the added impact of having threats on our ancient woods and ancient and veteran trees, so we have a team of myself and my my wonderful team of four as well.  Adam: Alright. Yeah, it's not big.  Jack: No, it's not big, but they they are enthusiastic and they're great at what they do.  Adam: So this is quite a political area because we've got a new government which has promised to improve lots of things, get the country working, build lots of homes. I think, I think the Prime Minister only recently talked about, you know, we're going to get spades in the ground, we're going to be doing stuff. Well, is it your job to stop all of that, I mean, or how do you balance what needs to be done for the country and what needs to be done to protect woodlands?  Jack: Yeah. So it's so none of this is really about stopping development from from happening and we we have to be sort of quite clear that that's not what we're set out to do as an organisation. It's about trying to ensure that where development is happening. It's not going to impact on our most important and our most valuable woods and trees and that's why we do have a focus specifically on ancient woodland, but and then also on ancient and veteran trees as well, because we know that for the most part, there are lots of really valuable woods and wooded and wooded habitats and trees that are plenty sort of valuable and important. But we know that ancient words and ancient and veteran trees are likely to be our most important sites. We have to focus on protecting those. So we do have to object to some developments where we think the harm is gonna be too great, but we're never really looking to stop them from happening, unless the harm is too great.  Adam: OK. Which way?  Jack: Umm, I think right.   Adam: OK. So one of the things I've noticed before, I mean, when I was following the HS2 debate, was politicians were going ‘it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. We'll cut this down, we're going to replace them. I tell you what, we'll do you a deal, we'll plant two for every one we cut down.' On the face of it that sounds reasonable?  Jack: OK. Yeah, not to us.   Adam: Why not?   Jack: Well, I think if you're, if you're looking at ancient woodlands and ancient and veteran trees, you're looking at something that is an irreplaceable habitat. There is no sort of recreating that habitat in in one space again, once it's been lost and the reason for that is these things take centuries to evolve and develop to create those sort of vital links between animals, plants, fungi, the soils as well. So ancient woodlands are especially important for their soils. So you can't really just take those soils and put them elsewhere because once that happens you completely disturb the relationships that have built up over centuries within them. And ancient and veteran trees, so you're talking about trees that for the most part are going to be centuries years old. How do you how do you replace centuries of development creating these wonderful sort of niche habitats for different parts of our ecosystems?   Adam: And is it, you said quite clearly that it's not your job or the Trust's job just to stop development, just to sort of blanket go, ‘hey, stop building' so is it about going, ‘don't build here' or is it about saying, ‘if you're gonna build here, this is how to do it with the least amount of impact'? What's the sort of your approach?  Jack: Yeah. In some cases it is about saying not, not building here. It depends what we're dealing with, I suppose so it's different if you're dealing with, say, housing developments or leisure facilities as opposed to something like rail infrastructure or road infrastructure, which is quite linear in nature, so they can only really go in one place to deliver its purpose, whereas housing is not as locationally dependent.  Adam: I see. So you feel you've got a better argument if it's a housing project, cause you can go, ‘put it somewhere else', but the train journey from A to B has to sort of go through this area. You're you're on a loser there are you?  Jack: Well, sometimes, but there are there are ways of of getting around sort of kind of impact. I mean it doesn't have to go absolutely sort of A to B in one way. You can think very carefully about the design to try and minimise impact on ancient woods. You can also look at alternative solutions, engineering solutions like tunnelling for example, so HS2 is a good example of that. The Phase One section which is going ahead between London and Birmingham, they actually put in a tunnel under the Chilterns, which saved about 14 hectares of woodland saved these three really good prime areas of ancient wood. And of course the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty came into that in a way, and they were trying to protect that also. But that was one solution to stop wildlife and nature being harmed.  Adam: Right. So that's, was this, were you involved with that?   Jack: Yeah, yeah.   Adam: Amazing. So how difficult was that to get that that project through and try to avoid the destruction of all that woodland?  Jack: Well, a lot a lot of destruction still is happening from High Speed 2. So about 20 hectares of ancient woodland has been destroyed at this stage now. A lot of the sort of preparation works for the Phase One section, that London to Birmingham bit, are now complete. So it it was difficult, but it it the way in which we were involved is we really brought ancient woodland to the table and put it at the forefront of considerations and and gave it a voice I suppose. It's not that it wasn't being looked at at all, but not nearly to the degree that we thought it needed to be looked at. And so we sort of kind of introduced that idea of well look, there's ancient woodland here, you need to be thinking carefully about the design and, you know, you think you're talking about halving the impacts on ancient woodlands from from our sort of kind of involvement and involvement of other conservation organisations in there as well.  Adam: So a lot of it is trying to say, to make the argument, but also to raise the profile of that argument,   Jack: Sure.  Adam: To bring, population and say this is actually a loss. You know, cutting it down is is a loss. So how much harder or easier has it got for you to make that argument?   Jack: Well, do you know, interestingly, I I would probably say that projects like High Speed 2, where there is such a big argument around the ancient woodland has raised the profile of ancient woodland itself. That's one of the sort of silver linings of that project for us, it's put sort of ancient woodland on the map in terms of habitat that needs to and is worthy of protection. So I think a lot of people now understand ancient woodland a bit better and what it is. There's still lots of awareness to do, you know, people just think of ancient woodlands as bluebells, big large oaks and it's not quite there. I mean, they're all so kind of varied in their nature and geographically across the country, but it's got people thinking about them.  Adam: So that was something of a success, although I know more complicated than just ‘yes, we won that'.   Jack: Sure, yeah.   Adam: Any areas you feel you really lost that, you know, keep you up at night, you go, that was that was a failure and you know, we've lost that woodland?  Jack: Yeah. I mean, there've been, there've been some over the years. Back in 2012 a a large quarry was built on an area of woodland called Oaken Wood in Kent, probably taking about out about 30 to 35 hectares of ancient woodland which is massive, massive amounts, I mean, you're talking about in the region it's like 40 to 50 football fields and and and we're actually dealing with another threat to that woodland from an expansion of that same quarry. So yeah, you know that that one is one that gnaws gnaws at us, is that, you know, we don't want to see that happening anymore.  Adam: Are you getting more optimistic that you know the public are more on your side that this is at least something that plays in policymakers' decisions now?  Jack: I I actually think the public have always really been on our side. I think if you ask the the general public, they would probably say to you, we do not want to see ancient woodlands subject to any loss or deterioration, whatever the cause.  Adam: Yeah, I think you're right. But they also say, yeah, but we like cheaper housing and want better transport links so.  Jack: Yeah. Well, I mean the Lower Thames Crossing, which is going to be affecting this site that we're in now, Ashenbank Wood is sort of a prime example of that the the intention of that project is to relieve traffic congestion on the existing Dartford Crossing.  Adam: Which I think actually I can hear in my headphones this, although we are, I mean it looks beautiful, there's quite a lot of background traffic noise. So we can't be that far away actually from from transport, from big roads. So explain to me you say this this particular site, Ashenbank Woods which is a site of Special Scientific Interest, so it's not just any old woods, this is a really special place, is under threat. What is the threat here?   Jack: So the threat here is partially there will be some loss to the wider SSSI ancient woodland in the area when you're losing sort of kind of, Ashenbank Wood itself is not going to be subject to much loss, although there is a cycle route diversion going through the woods that might impact on some of its special features.  Adam: Oh one second just, we've we've just turned off the path, we're just, oops crawling under some trees. I don't quite know why we've come, we we seem to have chosen the most difficult route. Well, it is beautiful because we've come off the path right into a magic dell.   Jack: There we go.  Adam: Oh, look, there's obviously some, I think, probably some kids have built a sort of camp, tent out of fallen branches. OK, so sorry so I understand that this is under threat from development, the the development plan though is what? What are they trying to do here?  Jack: So so what they're doing is they're building a new crossing further to the east of Dartford Crossing, but that's going to involve connecting...  Adam: A river crossing, a tunnel?  Jack: Yes a river crossing.   Adam: But it's a tunnel.   Jack: Yeah, it's a tunnel.  Adam: Why would that? That's that's great, surely?  Jack: Well, the tunnel goes under the Thames. But in order to connect the A2/M2 to the to the sort of tunnel portal, they're going to be going through a lot of ancient woodlands as a result. So just down the way Clay Lane Wood is one that's going to be heavily impacted by by the proposals, you know several hectares of ancient woodland loss there, but in terms of our wood itself, you're you're gonna have impacts on some of the veteran trees from some of the works that are required in here. But you're also sort of increasing the traffic around the area on A2/M2. And as you can hear, there's already quite loud background noise from the traffic. If that becomes louder, it further reduces the suitability of this habitat for a lot of species.  Adam: Right. So what are your, what are you doing?  Jack: Well we're campaigning against it for one thing. So we've been campaigning against it since 2016, trying to bring those bring those sort of impacts down as far as possible. At this point in time, I would probably say that it's unfeasible, that it could go ahead without causing loss or damage to ancient woodland and veteran trees, and that's something that we have to oppose as an organisation. So we're working with other environmental NGOs, conservation orgs like RSPB, Buglife, Wildlife Trust, CPRE to to oppose this scheme.  Adam: So, and if people want to keep an eye on the sort of campaigns you're running, and the sort of live issues around the country, where can they get that information?  Jack: They can go along to woodlandtrust.org.uk/campaigns and they'll be able to find out about what we're doing in terms of campaigning for protection of ancient woods and veteran trees. We've got a really great campaign at the moment, all about protecting ancient and veteran trees and we're stood in in front of one of these at the moment, we call them Living Legends.   Adam: Right OK, what a lovely link, because I I was gonna say you've brought me to a stand. It looks like a sculpture this, so what, so let me just briefly describe this. I mean, it's a hollowed out tree. There's, it almost looks like there's 3 or 4 bits of different trees supporting each other, and you can go hide in the middle. I mean, there's, I'd, I couldn't spread my arms in the middle, but I mean almost, you know, there's probably, I don't know, 4 or 5 foot wide in the middle. It's most extraordinary. What is this? What's going on here?  Jack: So I would probably say this is an ancient ash tree. As trees sort of grow older, they they have to sort of kind of allow their heartwood to to rot away because that's what keeps them sort of stable and secure and in doing so that creates really important habitat for wildlife. And so this is what has happened to this ash tree effectively, its heartwood has sort of rotted away, it's still got this kind of all important surrounding ripewood to be able to support the rest of the tree.  Adam: That's extraordinary. So the the, the, the wood at the centre of the tree, the heartwood has gone?  Jack: Yes, yeah, yeah, cause it it's not it's not really useful for for trees at that sort of point. It's it's no longer the part of the wood that's carrying the sort of the water and nutrients up the tree. That's what the sort of outer ripewood does. So the heartwood decays away as they as they grow older.  Adam: And that's just ash trees is it?  Jack: No, that's that's pretty much all. Yeah.  Adam: How ignorant am I? OK, fine. OK. I didn't realise that that happens to all trees. And it looks like that would cause an instability problem, but this looks actually fairly fairly stable, it's fine.  Jack: It it's it's actually it's actually the other way they do it because it allows them to remain as stable as possible. And I I mean this one it doesn't, it doesn't look in the best sort of structural condition does it, but they need to do that for their sort of physiological condition because if they have if they're trying to support too much sort of heartwood then it affects the trees energy balances. And I mean that there's actual sort of scientific things here between the kinetic and the potential energy in a tree and why why they do this but all old trees do it and in turn it creates this amazing habitat, so you can see all these little holes in the in the sort of kind of inside wood and the decaying wood as well, where insects have sort of burrowed into it, where birds would be, woodpeckers, you know would be would be accessing that as well.   Adam: Yeah. Amazing   Jack: Amazing structures, aren't they?  Adam: And so I'm going to meet now, one of the people responsible for actually managing woods such as Ashenbank, and he's waiting for me a bit further into the woods.  Clive: OK, I'm Clive, Clive Steward, I'm one of the estate managers for the Woodland Trust working in the South East.  Adam: So what is important about this site? What makes this wood special?  Clive: What makes this site special is that it's ancient woodland or partly ancient woodland, but it's also managed as a wood pasture or has been managed as a wood pasture in the past, and because of that habitat it has lots and lots of old trees and old trees is very important in terms of what they support in terms of dead and decaying habitats.  Adam: Right, so well we're standing by this extraordinary ash tree, I mean, it's extraordinary that there's an ash tree at all, given ash dieback, but it's extraordinary for all sorts of other reasons. But is ash a big part of this woodland?  Clive: In terms of its name, Ashenbank, you you think it should be but but it's it is a component of the site but it's not, the majority species is not ash.   Adam: What is this site then?  Clive: So mostly sycamore and we're in the northern part of Ashenbank where we've got a lot of sycamore and we've got some really big old sweet chestnuts, but there are lovely old oak trees and hornbeam trees.  Adam: Right. And so when we talk about ancient woodland, it's always worth, I suppose, explaining a bit about what we mean because clearly will go, well, that's old. But old for trees can be a whole different sort of thing. So how, what, what, what do you mean when you're talking about ancient woodlands?  Clive: Well, when we say ancient woodland ancient woodland is defined as areas which have been permanently wooded since 1600AD. That's the sort of the the the date.  Adam: Oh right, I didn't realise it was that precise.  Clive: Well, it well, yes, it's roughly when big old estates used to produce maps, so they discovered paper and started drawing maps of what they owned but prior so before this this, the assumption is that if it's wooded then it would have been wooded ever since the Ice Age retreated but managed by mankind for for thousands of years.  Adam: So we're, we're assuming actually that ancient woodland is all it's probably been here since the Ice Age?  Clive: Yes. Yeah.  Adam: So that's why I mean that's it's worth I think pausing on that because it's why when we're talking about ‘oh, we'll have to destroy a bit of woodland for a tree, for a road' sorry, we're talking about taking away a bit of the landscape, which has been there since the Ice Age probably. So that's quite a big deal to have done that.  Clive: Yeah, yeah. It is. It is. Yeah. The the other part of Ashenbank, which is the bit we're in is a more recently wooded area, probably about 200 years old. I have a a map here which is not good for a podcast, but I can show you a map.  Adam: Go on go on, we can describe this. Hold on. I'll hold the microphone and you can describe what we're seeing. So go on, yes.  Clive: So we have a a map here of Ashenbank Wood dating from 1797, which shows the woodland it used to be. I have another map showing the wood as it is today. So here's a map from a couple of years ago, but we're we're actually up here, which in the 1797 map shows fields. And now, now, now it's woods. So so basically, what's happened this Ashenbank used to be owned by Cobham Hall, which is a big estate to the east of Halfpence Lane, so this used to be partly of Cobham Hall Estate and in 1790, as many of these big old estates houses used to do, they used used they they employed a landscape architect to make their their grounds nicer as it were. So it wasn't Capability Brown, but it was a chap called Humphrey Repton who worked on this site from 1790 to about 1880, when he died 1818 when he died. And he landscaped the estate and the view from the house over to here looking west to what is now Ashenbank Wood was obviously important to him. So they actually planted a lot of these big old chestnuts which we walked past, which date from 200 years ago.  Adam: Which is very nice and we often hear about cutting trees down and looking at old maps going ‘oh, we've lost all that wood', here's an example of the reverse to actually that's a good nature story.  Clive: Yeah, yeah, definitely it is. Yes. As you get older, as they get older, these trees there are microhabitats which develop rot pockets, branches fall off, they they rot, big holes develop and that that's these microhabitats which are home to what's called saproxylic species.   Adam: OK, that's a new word, saproxylic?  Clive: Saproxylic. So saproxylics are are basically insects and beetles and flies which only exist in dead and decaying wood. So if these big old trees weren't around, they've got nowhere to live.  Adam: Right, which is why it's useful to have deadwood on the ground. It's not so, it looks untidy, but actually that's often the richest place.  Clive: Indeed. Yeah, yes, but often, but often these insects and beetles are actually in the living tree, not in the in the horizontal, dead and dying stuff. And it's the living trees, which are are why this habitat is so important.  Adam: But I thought you said you said they're living in the living trees, but but saproxylic means they're living in the dead trees?  Clive: But within these big old trees, there are these rot holes and pockets and little microhabitats within the tree...  Adam: Yes, which are dead and that's where they live?   Clive: Where they live yeah that's right.  Adam: Right OK. Yeah, very interesting. OK, very interesting. Now, there's also, I knew I was told, but I'm completely confused by, an idea that I'm told that goes on here of strapping deadwood to live trees. Did I did I misunderstand that?  Clive: No, no, you you didn't misunderstand it. No.   Adam: OK and you're going to show me where this is ?  Clive: Yep. Shall we shall we go, we'll we'll walk there, have a look.  Adam: Alright. Brilliant. So you've taken me to this tree, a very substantial tree, but next to it, this is the a bit of, what, you better explain, because this is really odd and I don't really understand what I'm looking at.  Clive: Right. Well, going back to 1999 when High Speed One was being built, they took out three hectares of Ashenbank Wood along with lots of other woodland in the area. And fortunately, somebody had the idea of of suggesting that we could save some of those big trees they felled and reerecting them against living trees to help them degrade and and become part of the habitat.  Adam: So I mean to describe this, we've got a very big tree. What sort of tree is this?  Clive: So you've got a big, big oak tree.  Adam: That's a big oak, and next to it is 6, 12, I don't know, 30 foot, 40 foot high dead tree, bit of bark. But it's it's not like a small, it's a 40 foot bit of bark which you have propped onto the living tree. Why is it better to have done that than just to leave it on the ground?  Clive: Well, it's about these microhabitats. So I mean, it's not just propped up it's actually strapped to it, so it's actually quite secure.  Adam: It is secure, that's y your health and safety hat on.  Clive: We had to make sure it was strapped up, but vertical dead or decaying wood is equally as important as horizontal, dead and decaying wood.  Adam: OK. Is it different? What, does it do different things?  Clive: The wood doesn't but it attracts different insects and species so that that that's why so. But in most in most woodlands you'll see deadwood as being felled trees which are lying or windblown. You don't often see dead vertical trees.  Adam: I've never seen that.  Clive: Well, they're often well, they're often felled and taken out for firewood or something but they are important as as a sort of microhabitat for these saproxylics. That that's purely why.  Adam: So the saproxylics which are insects which live on deadwood prefer, some prefer the high rise living of the vertical tree rather than the low level bungalow type living. But what what sort of, do you do, don't worry if you don't know, but do you know which insects prefer living vertically?   Clive: I I don't know that.  Adam: You don't. Somebody will, somebody will.  Clive: Yeah somebody will. But if you look at that tree, you'll see that it's a there's a there's a U-shaped crook 2/3 way up and in that there's there's a there's a hole which has probably got water in it. So water gathers from rain and that's that that little microhabitat will be, something will live in it. And if that was horizontal, it wouldn't be there.  Adam: Right, yes, yes. Well that I think this must be, I mean, we've been doing this for a few years. I've never seen that. So that is amazing. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. So I know that the history of this site goes back quite a long way, not just the natural history, but the human history as well, and am I right in saying there's quite quite a lot of sort of Bronze Age heritage here?  Clive: Well, we've got a Scheduled Ancient Monument which has been dated to between 2000 and 1500 BC, which is a big burial mount and it is scheduled and it's, you know, English Heritage monitor it and we have to make sure it's free of trees and it's there to see.  Adam: Right. Wow. And it's interesting you talk about it's there to see because we came and parked in the Woodland Trust car park. Free parking, as is normal in Woodland Trust places, first time though a full car park. We are here midweek during the day. I was surprised to see it's full so talking about visitors, this is clearly a, I mean have I just come at a weird time, have they all come to see the Woodland Trust podcast being made, it's right, it's a popular site. That always feels like contention to me because I know you want to encourage people to come, on the other hand, coming in a sort of, destroys a bit of what we see. How much of a problem are the level of visitors?  Clive: Well, we basically have a path network through Ashenbank Wood which we maintain, we mow, we make sure it's open and safe. So most people walk on those those paths which steers people around the the wood, as it were, so and we we don't stop people from walking off the path but most people don't cause it's, you know, nettles or brambles or whatever. It's difficult to do.  Adam: Right, yes. And keeping dogs on the lead and everything. You've been with the Trust for a long time, haven't you, really. What sort of change have you seen in the the the debate around the natural world in your time here?  Clive: That's a big question.  Adam: Have you, I mean, sort of, it assumes you have seen a change, you might not have seen a change. I mean I the reason I ask it is because it feels to me it's gone up the political agenda, that it's not just, you know, people dismissively talking about crazy tree huggers and let them onto their own thing. It's become more mainstream. Do you think that that's it's become more optimistic, do you think it's become more pessimistic, do you think, you you know, it's become more informed, I suppose?  Clive: Well, I think there's a growing recognition that ancient woodland is a special habitat, but it hasn't quite gone far enough to get total protection. But I think there's a growing realisation that ancient woodland is special and we need to look after it. And I think the politicians probably do understand it, but maybe can't quite make that move to legislate against total protection.  Adam: Yeah. And I think that's part of the Living Legend campaign that the Woodland Trust is organising, isn't it?  Clive: Definitely is. Yeah. Yeah, very much so.  Adam: Well, there were two websites we talked about today. So if you want to get involved in a local campaign, search for ‘Woodland Trust campaigns' and you can find out more about the attempts to get better legal protection for ancient and veteran trees by searching for the Living Legends campaign and of course I hope you get a chance to visit Ashenbank Woods yourself. So until next time, happy wandering.  Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks. Join us next month when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners and volunteers. And don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes or wherever you are listening. And do give us a review and a rating. If you want to find out more about our woods and those that are close to you, check out the Woodland Trust website. Just head to the visiting woods pages. Thank you. 

Why Are Young People Avoiding Committed Romantic Relationships? – Interview with Jack KammerIntro: According to a report from the Pew Research Center, a random sampling of nearly 5,000 adults in the U.S., showed that 50 percent of single people are not interested in committed romantic relationships, and are not even interested in dating. Another 10 percent want nothing more than casual dates. This trend has been true for at least the past 15 YearsHere to help us understand this trend is Jack Kammer, who has a passion of helping people see and understand the connection between gender issues and some of America's social problems. Jack has talked about issues between the sexes on radio, publications, podcasts and in person. He's even appeared before both houses in Congress! His book called “Good Will Toward Men attempts to help us understand the breakdown is between men and women, and what to bring a balance of power between the sexes. Today, we hope to have an honest conversation about why young people are avoiding committed romantic relationships, and to help them feel more comfortable and safe about pursuing committed, romantic relationships in the future. I. This is the chaos: Half of single people don't want a relationship, or even to date!Jack • It's not necessarily that men and women don't want to be in relationship. Men and women don't want to be in a certain KIND of relationship• What does commitment by a man to a woman look like? What does commitment by a woman to a man look like?• Equality in a relationship as an example: “Who should pay for the first date?”• Many men DO want an equal relationship…and…what does that look like and what are the expectations?II. Tracy• Most of the people who present themselves for psychotherapy are dissatisfied with their relationships III. Jack – A Message to the Pew People (Researchers)• “They are not capturing what is on men's minds”• Timestamp 7:37 Jack's mission: To try and articulate in a friendly way the male perspective, and to try and help people understand the male perspective.• INCELs (Involuntary Celibate) and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) are commonly associated with anger, which is a secondary emotion. “There's probably something they felt before they felt angry.”• Call to action: For men to put into words what they feel and discuss it in a friendly way, to women who are wiling to discuss it in a friendly way. Timestamp 9:45: “It makes perfect sense why men don't want relationship because the idea of a relationship has been so distorted. Men don't want the trouble with a “relationship,” and would rather have the freedom to not be in a relationship. However….most men want to be loved, valued and appreciated. So they DO want relationships!• Tracy: “What questions should the Pew Center have asked on the survey?”• Jack: “Would you like to have a happy, committed relationship with a woman who loves you?”The social media algorithm: When they want men to click, they show horrible visions of women. When they want women to click, they show horrible visions of men. • Tracy: What about a relationship that is physically and emotionally and “Safe• Jack: Better to say to be in a relationship where you feel appreciated and understood. www.noreallyiinsist.com: Jack's Dating App Questions, concerning work-life balanceMen want more!INCELs – 18:24 “Involuntarily Celibate” (See Elliot Rodger) He killed 6 people, 2 women and 4 men in Isla Vista California on 5/23/14. “I don't think he does a good job of representing men who want to get laid.”Video: Dramatization on INCELs (See full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NJois4JMGU&t=5s• Jack: “I'm not sure Elliot Rodger is the best example of an INCEL.” “He was a sick, sick person.”• Tracy: “What do you think the couple could have done...

The summer is the perfect time for reconnecting with friends, loved ones, peers, and colleagues. On this episode of GoalChat, host Debra Eckerling discusses reconnecting with Jack Gelley, Senior Marketing Strategist, iHeartMedia; Judy Herman, Relationship Wellness; and Robbie Samuels, Business and Book Launch Strategist. Jack, Judy, and Robbie talked about the benefits of connecting and reconnecting, as well as best practices for staying in touch. They also shared some great reconnecting anecdotes. Goals - Robbie: Wake up your network. Before launching your next offer, look in your existing network to find the champions/research/resources for your next offer - Robbie's Bonus Goal: If you are feeling stuck, do something nice for 5 people - Judy: Make sure you take care of yourself; plan a trip/retreat to replenish your spirit - Jack: Be intentionally more vulnerable. It builds trust Final Thoughts - Judy: You are worth it - Jack: It's just as easy to make stuff up good in your mind than bad stuff; focus on the good. - Robbie: You already met 80% of the people you need to know to be successful. Spend 80 % of your networking time reconnecting and the other 20% meeting new people. Learn More About Jack Gelley: iHeartMedia.com Judy K Herman: JudyCounselor.com Robbie Samuels: RobbieSamuels.com Debra Eckerling: TheDEBMethod.com/blog Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sexual Chaos: Discussion on Male Sexual Expression – Interview with Jack KammerIntro: Have you ever wondered why Calming the Chaos Podcast hasn't talked specifically about the topic of sex? It's because nobody has asked me to! Until now. In this podcast, I talk with Jack Kammer, an Author and commentator on issues between men and women. Jack has a passion of helping policy makers see and understand the connection between male gender issues and some of America's social problems. Join us for an open, fair, friendly and respectful discussion about the sexual expression of men and boys today, and what we can do to calm the sexual chaos.I. The Male Point Of View (Jack)II. The definition of Male Sexual Expression (per Chat GPT) Male sexual expression refers to the various ways in which individuals who identify as male express their sexuality, desires, and preferences in a manner that is authentic to them. It encompasses a wide range of behaviors, feelings, and identities related to sexual attraction, arousal, and intimate relationships. Male sexual expression can include aspects such as communication, consent, self-discovery, and the ability to express one's desires and boundaries in a healthy and respectful manner. It is important to recognize that male sexual expression is diverse and can vary greatly among individuals, reflecting the complexity of human sexuality.What is true? How are men “allowed” to express their sexuality? Male Stereotypes. Confusion. Tracy: Does this mean “Free the nip” and “Free the tip?”Jack: It depends on the where, when, with what expectation and intention (context)III. Young men have a difficult time because “Women have the power” • How many times per day do men think about having sex?• How many times per day do women think about being sexy?IV. A Seat at the Table – “Men get cast away from the discussion” (Jack)• Why aren't men included? “Because they are seen as the enemy” (Jack)• Why would we want to attract the enemy? (Tracy)• Historic context, including feminine and masculine roles, and “EP” (Earning Potential) V. This is the chaos!• Tracy: Both male and female traits can be expressed and they are okay. Be yourself!• Jack: Women have a lot of latitude in their self-expression, men don't Are men “subservient, second class, unimportant and inferior?The hope is that females would be aware of their feminine power and I'm respectful, aware and mindful of the needs of men and boys. • Tracy: We all have personal power. Be aware and use it mindfully. • Jack: Let's have open, fair, friendly and respectful discussions. Invite men to a seat at the table! VI. The PatriarchyVII. The Persona and the ShadowVIII. The Alpha Male vs. “The Alphabet Male”IX. What can females do?• Don't laugh at sexist jokes about how clueless men are• Try not to assume male stereotypes• Acknowledge your ideas of superiority over menX. Free the nip and the tip? “Maybe we're not ready for that yet”XI. Sample social media ads that are geared toward making men sufferXII. Impromptu Fun with the two R's: Red Shoe Diaries and Russell BrandXIII. Contact Jack:• Website / Blog: https://malefriendlymedia.medium.com/• Twitter: https://twitter.com/counterfemsw?lang=en• More information: https://on-boys.blubrry.net/jack-kammer-boys-are-affected-by-sexism-too/#sexualexpression #society #feminism

Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at Uptycs, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a conversation about security awareness, ChatGPT, and more. Jack describes some of the recent developments at Uptycs, which leads to fascinating insights about the paradox of scaling engineering teams large and small. Jack also shares how his prior experience working with AskJeeves.com has informed his perspective on ChatGPT and its potential threat to Google. Jack and Corey also discuss the evolution of Reddit, and the nuances of developing security awareness trainings that are approachable and effective.About JackJack has been passionate about (obsessed with) information security and privacy since he was a child. Attending 2600 meetings before reaching his teenage years, and DEF CON conferences shortly after, he quickly turned an obsession into a career. He began his first professional, full-time information-security role at the world's first internet privacy company; focusing on direct-to-consumer privacy. After working the startup scene in the 90's, Jack realized that true growth required a renaissance education. He enrolled in college, completing almost six years of coursework in a two-year period. Studying a variety of disciplines, before focusing on obtaining his two computer science degrees. University taught humility, and empathy. These were key to pursuing and achieving a career as a CSO lasting over ten years. Jack primarily focuses his efforts on mentoring his peers (as well as them mentoring him), advising young companies (especially in the information security and privacy space), and investing in businesses that he believes are both innovative, and ethical.Links Referenced: Uptycs: https://www.uptycs.com/ jack@jackroehrig.com: mailto:jack@jackroehrig.com jroehrig@uptycs.com: mailto:jroehrig@uptycs.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey:  LANs of the late 90's and early 2000's were a magical place to learn about computers, hang out with your friends, and do cool stuff like share files, run websites & game servers, and occasionally bring the whole thing down with some ill-conceived software or network configuration. That's not how things are done anymore, but what if we could have a 90's style LAN experience along with the best parts of the 21st century internet? (Most of which are very hard to find these days.) Tailscale thinks we can, and I'm inclined to agree. With Tailscale I can use trusted identity providers like Google, or Okta, or GitHub to authenticate users, and automatically generate & rotate keys to authenticate devices I've added to my network. I can also share access to those devices with friends and teammates, or tag devices to give my team broader access. And that's the magic of it, your data is protected by the simple yet powerful social dynamics of small groups that you trust. Try now - it's free forever for personal use. I've been using it for almost two years personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven't attempted to charge me for what's become an absolutely-essential-to-my-workflow service.Corey: Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com, and see why companies like Zoom, Twitch, New Relic, Box, Ebay, Viasat, GoDaddy, booking.com, and many, many more choose Kentik as their network observability platform. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at Uptycs and they have once again subjected Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist, to the slings, arrows, and other various implements of misfortune that I like to hurl at people. Jack, thanks for coming back. Brave of you.Jack: I am brave [laugh]. Thanks for having me. Honestly, it was a blast last time and I'm looking forward to having fun this time, too.Corey: It's been a month or two, ish. Basically, the passing of time is one of those things that is challenging for me to wrap my head around in this era. What have you folks been up to? What's changed since the last time we've spoken? What's coming out of Uptycs? What's new? What's exciting? Or what's old with a new and exciting description?Jack: Well, we've GA'ed our agentless architecture scanning system. So, this is one of the reasons why I joined Uptycs that was so fascinating to me is they had kind of nailed XDR. And I love the acronyms: XDR and CNAPP is what we're going with right now. You know, and we have to use these acronyms so that people can understand what we do without me speaking for hours about it. But in short, our agentless system looks at the current resting risk state of production environment without the need to deploy agents, you know, as we talked about last time.And then the XDR piece, that's the thing that you get to justify the extra money on once you go to your CTO or whoever your boss is and show them all that risk that you've uncovered with our agentless piece. It's something I've done in the past with technologies that were similar, but Uptycs is continuously improving, our anomaly detection is getting better, our threat intel team is getting better. I looked at our engineering team the other day. I think we have over 300 engineers or over 250 at least. That's a lot.Corey: It's always wild for folks who work in small shops to imagine what that number of engineers could possibly be working on. Then you go and look at some of the bigger shops and you talk to them and you hear about all the different ways their stuff is built and how they all integrate together and you come away, on some level, surprised that they're able to work with that few engineers. So, it feels like there's a different perspective on scale. And no one has it right, but it is easy, I think, in the layperson's mindset to hear that a company like Twitter, for example, before it got destroyed, had 5000 engineers. And, “What are they all doing?” And, “Well, I can see where that question comes from and the answer is complicated and nuanced, which means that no one is going to want to hear it if it doesn't fit into a tweet itself.” But once you get into the space, you start realizing that everything is way more complicated than it looks.Jack: It is. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you mention that about Twitter. I used to work for a company called Interactive Corporation. And Interactive Corporation is an internet conglomerate that owns a lot of those things that are at the corners of the internet that not many people know about. And also, like, the entire online dating space. So, I mean, it was a blast working there, but at one point in my career, I got heavily involved in M&A. And I was given the nickname Jack the RIFer. RIF standing for Reduction In Force.Corey: Oof.Jack: So, Jack the RIFer was—yeah [laugh] I know, right?Corey: It's like Buzzsaw Ted. Like, when you bring in the CEO with the nickname of Buzzsaw in there, it's like, “Hmm, I wonder who's going to hire a lot of extra people?” Not so much.Jack: [laugh]. Right? It's like, hey, they said they were sending, “Jack out to hang out with us,” you know, in whatever country we're based out of. And I go out there and I would drink them under the table. And I'd find out the dirty secrets, you know.We would be buying these companies because they would need optimized. But it would be amazing to me to see some of these companies that were massive and they produced what I thought was so little, and then to go on to analyze everybody's job and see that they were also intimately necessary.Corey: Yeah. And the question then becomes, if you were to redesign what that company did from scratch. Which again, is sort of an architectural canard; it was the easiest thing in the world to do is to design an architecture from scratch on a whiteboard with almost an arbitrary number of constraints. The problem is that most companies grow organically and in order to get to that idealized architecture, you've got to turn everything off and rebuild it from scratch. The problem is getting to something that's better without taking 18 months of downtime while you rebuild everything. Most companies cannot and will not sustain that.Jack: Right. And there's another way of looking at it, too, which is something that's been kind of a thought experiment for me for a long time. One of the companies that I worked with back at IC was Ask Jeeves. Remember Ask Jeeves?Corey: Oh, yes. That was sort of the closest thing we had at the time to natural language search.Jack: Right. That was the whole selling point. But I don't believe we actually did any natural language processing back then [laugh]. So, back in those days, it was just a search index. And if you wanted to redefine search right now and you wanted to find something that was like truly a great search engine, what would you do differently?If you look at the space right now with ChatGPT and with Google, and there's all this talk about, well, ChatGPT is the next Google killer. And then people, like, “Well, Google has Lambda.” What are they worried about ChatGPT for? And then you've got the folks at Google who are saying, “ChatGPT is going to destroy us,” and the folks in Google who are saying, “ChatGPT's got nothing on us.” So, if I had to go and do it all over from scratch for search, it wouldn't have anything to do with ChatGPT. I would go back and make a directed, cyclical graph and I would use node weight assignments based on outbound links. Which is exactly what Google was with the original PageRank algorithm, right [laugh]?Corey: I've heard this described as almost a vector database in various terms depending upon what it is that—how it is you're structuring this and what it looks like. It's beyond my ken personally, but I do see that there's an awful lot of hype around ChatGPT these days, and I am finding myself getting professionally—how do I put it—annoyed by most of it. I think that's probably the best way to frame it.Jack: Isn't it annoying?Corey: It is because it's—people ask, “Oh, are you worried that it's going to take over what you do?” And my answer is, “No. I'm worried it's going to make my job harder more than anything else.” Because back when I was a terrible student, great, write an essay on this thing, or write a paper on this. It needs to be five pages long.And I would write what I thought was a decent coverage of it and it turned out to be a page-and-a-half. And oh, great. What I need now is a whole bunch of filler fluff that winds up taking up space and word count but doesn't actually get us to anywhere—Jack: [laugh].Corey: —that is meaningful or useful. And it feels like that is what GPT excels at. If I worked in corporate PR for a lot of these companies, I would worry because it takes an announcement that fits in a tweet—again, another reference to that ailing social network—and then it turns it into an arbitrary length number of pages. And it's frustrating for me just because that's a lot more nonsense I have to sift through in order to get the actual, viable answer to whatever it is I'm going for here.Jack: Well, look at that viable answer. That's a really interesting point you're making. That fluff, right, when you're writing that essay. Yeah, that one-and-a-half pages out. That's gold. That one-and-a-half pages, that's the shit. That's the stuff you want, right? That's the good shit [laugh]. Excuse my French. But ChatGPT is what's going to give you that filler, right? The GPT-3 dataset, I believe, was [laugh] I think it was—there's a lot of Reddit question-and-answers that were used to train it. And it was trained, I believe—the data that it was trained with ceased to be recent in 2021, right? It's already over a year old. So, if your teacher asked you to write a very contemporary essay, ChatGPT might not be able to help you out much. But I don't think that that kind of gets the whole thing because you just said filler, right? You can get it to write that extra three-and-a-half pages from that five pages you're required to write. Well, hey, teachers shouldn't be demanding that you write five pages anyways. I once heard, a friend of mine arguing about one presidential candidate saying, “This presidential candidate speaks at a third-grade level.” And the other person said, “Well, your presidential candidate speaks at a fourth-grade level.” And I said, “I wish I could convey presidential ideas at a level that a third or a fourth grader could understand” You know? Right?Corey: On some level, it's actually not a terrible thing because if you can only convey a concept at an extremely advanced reading level, then how well do you understand—it felt for a long time like that was the problem with AI itself and machine-learning and the rest. The only value I saw was when certain large companies would trot out someone who was themselves deep into the space and their first language was obviously math and they spoke with a heavy math accent through everything that they had to say. And at the end of it, I didn't feel like I understood what they were talking about any better than I had at the start. And in time, it took things like ChatGPT to say, “Oh, this is awesome.” People made fun of the Hot Dog/Not A Hot Dog App, but that made it understandable and accessible to people. And I really think that step is not given nearly enough credit.Jack: Yeah. That's a good point. And it's funny, you mentioned that because I started off talking about search and redefining search, and I think I use the word digraph for—you know, directed gra—that's like a stupid math concept; nobody understands what that is. I learned that in discrete mathematics a million years ago in college, right? I mean, I'm one of the few people that remembers it because I worked in search for so long.Corey: Is that the same thing is a directed acyclic graph, or am I thinking of something else?Jack: Ah you're—that's, you know, close. A directed acyclic graph has no cycles. So, that means you'll never go around in a loop. But of course, if you're just mapping links from one website to another website, A can link from B, which can then link back to A, so that creates a cycle, right? So, an acyclic graph is something that doesn't have that cycle capability in it.Corey: Got it. Yeah. Obviously, my higher math is somewhat limited. It turns out that cloud economics doesn't generally tend to go too far past basic arithmetic. But don't tell them. That's the secret of cloud economics.Jack: I think that's most everything, I mean, even in search nowadays. People aren't familiar with graph theory. I'll tell you what people are familiar with. They're familiar with Google. And they're familiar with going to Google and Googling for something, and when you Google for something, you typically want results that are recent.And if you're going to write an essay, you typically don't care because only the best teachers out there who might not be tricked by ChatGPT—honestly, they probably would be, but the best teachers are the ones that are going to be writing the syllabi that require the recency. Almost nobody's going to be writing syllabi that requires essay recency. They're going to reuse the same syllabus they've been using for ten years.Corey: And even that is an interesting question there because if we talk about the results people want from search, you're right, I have to imagine the majority of cases absolutely care about recency. But I can think of a tremendous number of counterexamples where I have been looking for things explicitly and I do not want recent results, sometimes explicitly. Other times because no, I'm looking for something that was talked about heavily in the 1960s and not a lot since. I don't want to basically turn up a bunch of SEO garbage that trawled it from who knows where. I want to turn up some of the stuff that was digitized and then put forward. And that can be a deceptively challenging problem in its own right.Jack: Well, if you're looking for stuff has been digitized, you could use archive.org or one of the web archive projects. But if you look into the web archive community, you will notice that they're very secretive about their data set. I think one of the best archive internet search indices that I know of is in Portugal. It's a Portuguese project.I can't recall the name of it. But yeah, there's a Portuguese project that is probably like the axiomatic standard or like the ultimate prototype of how internet archiving should be done. Search nowadays, though, when you say things like, “I want explicitly to get this result,” search does not want to show you explicitly what you want. Search wants to show you whatever is going to generate them the most advertising revenue. And I remember back in the early search engine marketing days, back in the algorithmic trading days of search engine marketing keywords, you could spend $4 on an ad for flowers and if you typed the word flowers into Google, you just—I mean, it was just ad city.You typed the word rehabilitation clinic into Google, advertisements everywhere, right? And then you could type certain other things into Google and you would receive a curated list. These things are obvious things that are identified as flaws in the secrecy of the PageRank algorithm, but I always thought it was interesting because ChatGPT takes care of a lot of the stuff that you don't want to be recent, right? It provides this whole other end to this idea that we've been trained not to use search for, right?So, I was reviewing a contract the other day. I had this virtual assistant and English is not her first language. And she and I red-lined this contract for four hours. It was brutal because I kept on having to Google—for lack of a better word—I had to Google all these different terms to try and make sense of it. Two days later, I'm playing around with ChatGPT and I start typing some very abstract commands to it and I swear to you, it generated that same contract I was red-lining. Verbatim. I was able to get into generating multiple [laugh] clauses in the contract. And by changing the wording in ChatGPT to save, “Create it, you know, more plaintiff-friendly,” [laugh] that contract all of a sudden, was red-lined in a way that I wanted it to be [laugh].Corey: This is a fascinating example of this because I'm married to a corporate attorney who does this for a living, and talking to her and other folks in her orbit, the problem they have with it is that it works to a point, on a limited basis, but it then veers very quickly into terms that are nonsensical, terms that would absolutely not pass muster, but sound like something a lawyer would write. And realistically, it feels like what we've built is basically the distillation of a loud, overconfident white guy in tech because—Jack: Yes.Corey: —they don't know exactly what they're talking about, but by God is it confident when it says it.Jack: [laugh]. Yes. You hit the nail on that. Ah, thank you. Thank you.Corey: And there's as an easy way to prove this is pick any topic in the world in which you are either an expert or damn close to it or know more than the average bear about and ask ChatGPT to explain that to you. And then notice all the things that glosses over or what it gets subtly wrong or is outright wrong about, but it doesn't ever call that out. It just says it with the same confident air of a failing interview candidate who gets nine out of ten questions absolutely right, but the one they don't know they bluff on, and at that point, you realize you can't trust them because you never know if they're bluffing or they genuinely know the answer.Jack: Wow, that is a great analogy. I love that. You know, I mentioned earlier that the—I believe the part of the big portion of the GPT-3 training data was based on Reddit questions and answers. And now you can't categorize Reddit into a single community, of course; that would be just as bad as the way Reddit categories [laugh] our community, but Reddit did have a problem a wh—I remember, there was the Ellen Pao debacle for Reddit. And I don't know if it was so much of a debacle if it was more of a scapegoat situation, but—Corey: I'm very much left with a sense that it's the scapegoat. But still, continue.Jack: Yeah, we're adults. We know what happened here, right? Ellen Pao is somebody who is going through some very difficult times in her career. She's hired to be a martyr. They had a community called fatpeoplehate, right?I mean, like, Reddit had become a bizarre place. I used Reddit when I was younger and it didn't have subreddits. It was mostly about programming. It was more like Hacker News. And then I remember all these people went to Hacker News, and a bunch of them stayed at Reddit and there was this weird limbo of, like, the super pretentious people over at Hacker News.And then Reddit started to just get weirder and weirder. And then you just described ChatGPT in a way that just struck me as so Reddit, you know? It's like some guy mansplaining some answer. It starts off good and then it's overconfidently continues to state nonsensical things.Corey: Oh yeah, I was a moderator of the legal advice and personal finance subreddits for years, and—Jack: No way. Were you really?Corey: Oh, absolutely. Those corners were relatively reasonable. And like, “Well, wait a minute, you're not a lawyer. You're correct and I'm also not a financial advisor.” However, in both of those scenarios, what people were really asking for was, “How do I be a functional adult in society?”In high school curricula in the United States, we insist that people go through four years of English literature class, but we don't ever sit down and tell them how to file their taxes or how to navigate large transactions that are going to be the sort of thing that you encounter in adulthood: buying a car, signing a lease. And it's more or less yeah, at some point, you wind up seeing someone with a circumstance that yeah, talk to a lawyer. Don't take advice on the internet for this. But other times, it's no, “You cannot sue a dog. You have to learn to interact with people as a grown-up. Here's how to approach that.” And that manifests as legal questions or finance questions, but it all comes down to I have been left on prepared for the world I live in by the school system. How do I wind up addressing these things? And that is what I really enjoyed.Jack: That's just prolifically, prolifically sound. I'm almost speechless. You're a hundred percent correct. I remember those two subreddits. It always amazes me when I talk to my friends about finances.I'm not a financial person. I mean, I'm an investor, right, I'm a private equity investor. And I was on a call with a young CEO that I've been advising for while. He runs a security awareness training company, and he's like, you know, you've made 39% off of your investment three months. And I said, “I haven't made anything off of my investment.”I bought a safe and, you know—it's like, this is conversion equity. And I'm sitting here thinking, like, I don't know any of the stuff. And I'm like, I talk to my buddies in the—you know, that are financial planners and I ask them about finances, and it's—that's also interesting to me because financial planning is really just about when are you going to buy a car? When are you going to buy a house? When are you going to retire? And what are the things, the securities, the companies, what should you do with your money rather than store it under your mattress?And I didn't really think about money being stored under a mattress until the first time I went to Eastern Europe where I am now. I'm in Hungary right now. And first time I went to Eastern Europe, I think I was in Belgrade in Serbia. And my uncle at the time, he was talking about how he kept all of his money in cash in a bank account. In Serbian Dinar.And Serbian Dinar had already gone through hyperinflation, like, ten years prior. Or no, it went through hyperinflation in 1996. So, it was not—it hadn't been that long [laugh]. And he was asking me for financial advice. And here I am, I'm like, you know, in my early-20s.And I'm like, I don't know what you should do with your money, but don't put it under your mattress. And that's the kind of data that Reddit—that ChatGPT seems to have been trained on, this GPT-3 data, it seems like a lot of [laugh] Redditors, specifically Redditors sub-2001. I haven't used Reddit very much in the last half a decade or so.Corey: Yeah, I mean, I still use it in a variety of different ways, but I got out of both of those cases, primarily due to both time constraints, as well as my circumstances changed to a point where the things I spent my time thinking about in a personal finance sense, no longer applied to an awful lot of folk because the common wisdom is aimed at folks who are generally on a something that resembles a recurring salary where they can calculate in a certain percentage raises, in most cases, for the rest of their life, plan for other things. But when I started the company, a lot of the financial best practices changed significantly. And what makes sense for me to do becomes actively harmful for folks who are not in similar situations. And I just became further and further attenuated from the way that you generally want to give common case advice. So, it wasn't particularly useful at that point anymore.Jack: Very. Yeah, that's very well put. I went through a similar thing. I watched Reddit quite a bit through the Ellen Pao thing because I thought it was a very interesting lesson in business and in social engineering in general, right? And we saw this huge community, this huge community of people, and some of these people were ridiculously toxic.And you saw a lot of groupthink, you saw a lot of manipulation. There was a lot of heavy-handed moderation, there was a lot of too-late moderation. And then Ellen Pao comes in and I'm, like, who the heck is Ellen Pao? Oh, Ellen Pao is this person who has some corporate scandal going on. Oh, Ellen Pao is a scapegoat.And here we are, watching a community being socially engineered, right, into hating the CEO who's just going to be let go or step down anyways. And now they ha—their conversations have been used to train intelligence, which is being used to socially engineer people [laugh] into [crosstalk 00:22:13].Corey: I mean you just listed something else that's been top-of-mind for me lately, where it is time once again here at The Duckbill Group for us to go through our annual security awareness training. And our previous vendor has not been terrific, so I start looking to see what else is available in that space. And I see that the world basically divides into two factions when it comes to this. The first is something that is designed to check the compliance boxes at big companies. And some of the advice that those things give is actively harmful as in, when I've used things like that in the past, I would have an addenda that I would send out to the team. “Yeah, ignore this part and this part and this part because it does not work for us.”And there are other things that start trying to surface it all the time as it becomes a constant awareness thing, which makes sense, but it also doesn't necessarily check any contractual boxes. So it's, isn't there something in between that makes sense? I found one company that offered a Slackbot that did this, which sounded interesting. The problem is it was the most condescendingly rude and infuriatingly slow experience that I've had. It demanded itself a whole bunch of permissions to the Slack workspace just to try it out, so I had to spin up a false Slack workspace for testing just to see what happens, and it was, start to finish, the sort of thing that I would not inflict upon my team. So, the hell with it and I moved over to other stuff now. And I'm still looking, but it's the sort of thing where I almost feel like, this is something ChatGPT could have built and cool, give me something that sounds confident, but it's often wrong. Go.Jack: [laugh]. Yeah, Uptycs actually is—we have something called a Otto M8—spelled O-T-T-O space M and then the number eight—and I personally think that's the cutest name ever for Slackbot. I don't have a picture of him to show you, but I would personally give him a bit of a makeover. He's a little nerdy for my likes. But he's got—it's one of those Slackbots.And I'm a huge compliance geek. I was a CISO for over a decade and I know exactly what you mean with that security awareness training and ticking those boxes because I was the guy who wrote the boxes that needed to be ticked because I wrote those control frameworks. And I'm not a CISO anymore because I've already subjected myself to an absolute living hell for long enough, at least for now [laugh]. So, I quit the CISO world.Corey: Oh yeah.Jack: Yeah.Corey: And so, much of it also assumes certain things like I've had people reach out to me trying to shill whatever it is they've built in this space. And okay, great. The problem is that they've built something that is aligned at engineers and developers. Go, here you go. And that's awesome, but we are really an engineering-first company.Yes, most people here have an engineering background and we build some internal tooling, but we don't need an entire curriculum on how to secure the tools that we're building as web interfaces and public-facing SaaS because that's not what we do. Not to mention, what am I supposed to do with the accountants in the sales folks and the marketing staff that wind up working on a lot of these things that need to also go through training? Do I want to sit here and teach them about SQL injection attacks? No, Jack. I do not want to teach them that.Jack: No you don't.Corey: I want them to not plug random USB things into the work laptop and to use a password manager. I'm not here trying to turn them into security engineers.Jack: I used to give a presentation and I onboarded every single employee personally for security. And in the presentation, I would talk about password security. And I would have all these complex passwords up. But, like, “You know what? Let me just show you what a hacker does.”And I'd go and load up dhash and I'd type in my old email address. And oh, there's my password, right? And then I would—I copied the cryptographic hash from dhash and I'd paste that into Google. And I'd be like, “And that's how you crack passwords.” Is you Google the cryptographic hash, the insecure cryptographic hash and hope somebody else has already cracked it.But yeah, it's interesting. The security awareness training is absolutely something that's supposed to be guided for the very fundamental everyman employee. It should not be something entirely technical. I worked at a company where—and I love this, by the way; this is one of the best things I've ever read on Slack—and it was not a message that I was privy to. I had to have the IT team pull the Slack logs so that I could read these direct communications. But it was from one—I think it was the controller to the Vice President of accounting, and the VP of accounting says how could I have done this after all of those phishing emails that Jack sent [laugh]?Corey: Oh God, the phishing emails drives me up a wall, too. It's you're basically training your staff not to trust you and waste their time and playing gotcha. It really creates an adversarial culture. I refuse to do that stuff, too.Jack: My phishing emails are fun, all right? I did one where I pretended that I installed a camera in the break room refrigerator, and I said, we've had a problem with food theft out of the Oakland refrigerator and so I've we've installed this webcam. Log into the sketchy website with your username and password. And I got, like, a 14% phish rate. I've used this campaign at multinational companies.I used to travel around the world and I'd grab a mic at the offices that wanted me to speak there and I'd put the mic real close to my head and I say, “Why did you guys click on the link to the Oakland refrigerator?” [laugh]. I said, “You're in Stockholm for God's sake.” Like, it works. Phishing campaigns work.They just don't work if they're dumb, honestly. There's a lot of things that do work in the security awareness space. One of the biggest problems with security awareness is that people seem to think that there's some minimum amount of time an employee should have to spend on security awareness training, which is just—Corey: Right. Like, for example, here in California, we're required to spend two hours on harassment training every so often—I think it's every two years—and—Jack: Every two years. Yes.Corey: —at least for managerial staff. And it's great, but that leads to things such as, “Oh, we're not going to give you a transcript if you can read the video more effectively. You have to listen to it and make sure it takes enough time.” And it's maddening to me just because that is how the law is written. And yes, it's important to obey the law, don't get me wrong, but at the same time, it just feels like it's an intentional time suck.Jack: It is. It is an intentional time suck. I think what happens is a lot of people find ways to game the system. Look, when I did security awareness training, my controls, the way I worded them, didn't require people to take any training whatsoever. The phishing emails themselves satisfied it completely.I worded that into my control framework. I still held the trainings, they still made people take them seriously. And then if we have a—you know, if somebody got phished horrifically, and let's say wired $2 million to Hong Kong—you know who I'm talking about, all right, person who might is probably not listening to this, thankfully—but [laugh] she did. And I know she didn't complete my awareness training. I know she never took any of it.She also wired $2 million to Hong Kong. Well, we never got that money back. But we sure did spend a lot of executive time trying to. I spent a lot of time on the phone, getting passed around from department to department at the FBI. Obviously, the FBI couldn't help us.It was wired from Mexico to Hong Kong. Like the FBI doesn't have anything to do with it. You know, bless them for taking their time to humor me because I needed to humor my CEO. But, you know, I use those awareness training things as a way to enforce the Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct requiring disciplinary action for people who didn't follow the security awareness training.If you had taken the 15 minutes of awareness training that I had asked people to do—I mean, I told them to do it; it was the Code of Conduct; they had to—then there would be no disciplinary action for accidentally wiring that money. But people are pretty darn diligent on not doing things like that. It's just a select few that seems to be the ones that get repeatedly—Corey: And then you have the group conversations. One person screws something up and then you wind up with the emails to everyone. And then you have the people who are basically doing the right thing thinking they're being singled out. And—ugh, management is hard, people is hard, but it feels like a lot of these things could be a lot less hard.Jack: You know, I don't think management is hard. I think management is about empathy. And management is really about just positive reinforce—you know what management is? This is going to sound real pretentious. Management's kind of like raising a kid, you know? You want to have a really well-adjusted kid? Every time that kid says, “Hey, Dad,” answer. [crosstalk 00:30:28]—Corey: Yeah, that's a good—that's a good approach.Jack: I mean, just be there. Be clear, consistent, let them know what to expect. People loved my security program at the places that I've implemented it because it was very clear, it was concise, it was easy to understand, and I was very approachable. If anybody had a security concern and they came to me about it, they would [laugh] not get any shame. They certainly wouldn't get ignored.I don't care if they were reporting the same email I had had reported to me 50 times that day. I would personally thank them. And, you know what I learned? I learned that from raising a kid, you know? It was interesting because it was like, the kid I was raising, when he would ask me a question, I would give him the same answer every time in the same tone. He'd be like, “Hey, Jack, can I have a piece of candy?” Like, “No, your mom says you can't have any candy today.” They'd be like, “Oh, okay.” “Can I have a piece of candy?” And I would be like, “No, your mom says you can't have any candy today.” “Can I have a piece of candy, Jack?” I said, “No. Your mom says he can't have any candy.” And I'd just be like a broken record.And he immediately wouldn't ask me for a piece of candy six different times. And I realized the reason why he was asking me for a piece of candy six different times is because he would get a different response the sixth time or the third time or the second time. It was the inconsistency. Providing consistency and predictability in the workforce is key to management and it's key to keeping things safe and secure.Corey: I think there's a lot of truth to that. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to talk to me about think topics ranging from GPT and ethics to parenting. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Jack: I'm jack@jackroehrig.com, and I'm also jroehrig@uptycs.com. My last name is spelled—heh, no, I'm kidding. It's a J-A-C-K-R-O-E-H-R-I-G dot com. So yeah, hit me up. You will get a response from me.Corey: Excellent. And I will of course include links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Jack: Likewise.Corey: This promoted guest episode has been brought to us by our friends at Uptycs, featuring Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at same. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment ghostwritten for you by ChatGPT so it has absolutely no content worth reading.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

About JackJack is Uptycs' outspoken technology evangelist. Jack is a lifelong information security executive with over 25 years of professional experience. He started his career managing security and operations at the world's first Internet data privacy company. He has since led unified Security and DevOps organizations as Global CSO for large conglomerates. This role involved individually servicing dozens of industry-diverse, mid-market portfolio companies.Jack's breadth of experience has given him a unique insight into leadership and mentorship. Most importantly, it fostered professional creativity, which he believes is direly needed in the security industry. Jack focuses his extra time mentoring, advising, and investing. He is an active leader in the ISLF, a partner in the SVCI, and an outspoken privacy activist. Links Referenced: UptycsSecretMenu.com: https://www.uptycssecretmenu.com Jack's email: jroehrig@uptycs.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Uptycs. And they have sent me their Technology Evangelist, Jack Charles Roehrig. Jack, thanks for joining me.Jack: Absolutely. Happy to spread the good news.Corey: So, I have to start. When you call yourself a technology evangelist, I feel—just based upon my own position in this ecosystem—the need to ask, I guess, the obvious question of, do you actually work there, or have you done what I do with AWS and basically inflicted yourself upon a company. Like, well, “I speak for you now.” The running gag that becomes more true every year is that I'm AWS's chief marketing officer.Jack: So, that is a great question. I take it seriously. When I say technology evangelist, you're speaking to Jack Roehrig. I'm a weird guy. So, I quit my job as CISO. I left a CISO career. For, like, ten years, I was a CISO. Before that, 17 years doing stuff. Started my own thing, secondaries, investments, whatever.Elias Terman, he hits me up and he says, “Hey, do you want this job?” It was an executive job, and I said, “I'm not working for anybody.” And he says, “What about a technology evangelist?” And I was like, “That's weird.” “Check out the software.”So, I'm going to check out the software. I went online, I looked at it. I had been very passionate about the space, and I was like, “How does this company exist in doing this?” So, I called him right back up, and I said, “I think I am.” He said, “You think you are?” I said, “Yeah, I think I'm your evangelist. Like, I think I have to do this.” I mean, it really was like that.Corey: Yeah. It's like, “Well, we have an interview process and the rest.” You're like, “Yeah, I have a goldfish. Now that we're done talking about stuff that doesn't matter, I'll start Monday.” Yeah, I like the approach.Jack: Yeah. It was more like I had found my calling. It was bizarre. I negotiated a contract with him that said, “Look, I can't just work for Uptycs and be your evangelist. That doesn't make any sense.” So, I advise companies, I'm part of the SVCI, I do secondaries, investment, I mentor, I'm a steering committee member of the ISLF. We mentor security leaders.And I said, “I'm going to continue doing all of these things because you don't want an evangelist who's just an Uptycs evangelist.” I have to know the space. I have to have my ear to the ground. And I said, “And here's the other thing, Elias. I will only be your evangelist while I'm your evangelist. I can't be your evangelist when I lose passion. I don't think I'm going to.”Corey: The way I see it, authenticity matters in this space. You can sell out exactly once, so make it count because you're never going to be trusted again to do it a second time. It keeps people honest, at least the ones you actually want to be doing work with. So, you've been in the space a long time, 20 years give or take, and you've seen an awful lot. So, I'm curious, given that I tend to see about, you know, six or seven different companies in the RSA Sponsor Hall every year selling things because you know, sure hundreds of booths, bunch of different marketing logos and products, but it all distills down to the same five or six things.What did you see about Uptycs that made you say, “This is different?” Because to be very direct, looking at the website, it's, “Oh, what do you sell?” “Acronyms. A whole bunch of acronyms that, because I don't eat, sleep, and breathe security for a living, I don't know what most of them mean, but I'm sure they're very impressive and important.” What does it actually do, for those of us who are practitioners, but not swimming in the security vendor stream?Jack: So, I've been obsessed with this space and I've seen the acronyms change over and over and over again. I'm always the first one to say, “What does that mean?” As the senior guy in the room a lot of time. So, acronyms. What does Uptycs do? What drew me into them? They did HIDS, Host Intrusion Detection System. I don't know if you remember that. Turned into—Corey: Oh, yeah. OSSEC was the one I always wound up using, the open-source version. OSSEC [kids 00:04:10]. It's like, oh, instead of paying a vendor, you can contribute it yourself because your time is free, right? Free as in puppy, or these days free as in tier when it comes to cloud.Jack: Oh, I like that. So, yeah, I became obsessed with this HIDS stuff. I think it was evident I was doing it, that it was threat [unintelligible 00:04:27]. And these companies, great companies. I started this new job in an education technology company and I needed a lot of work, so I started to play around with more sophisticated HIDS systems, and I fell in love with it. I absolutely fell in love with it.But there are all these limitations. I couldn't find this company that would build it right. And Uptycs has this reputation as being not very sexy, you know? People telling me, “Uptycs? You're going to Uptycs?” Yeah—I'm like, “Yeah. They're doing really cool stuff.”So, Uptycs has, like, this brand name and I had referred Uptycs before without even knowing what it was. So, here I am, like, one of the biggest XDR, I hope to say, activists in the industry, and I didn't know about Uptycs. I felt humiliated. When I heard about what they were doing, I felt like I wasted my career.Corey: Well, that's a strong statement. Let's begin with XDR. To my understanding, that some form of audio cable standard that I use to plug into my microphone. Some would say it, “X-L-R.” I would say sounds like the same thing. What is XDR?Jack: What is it, right? So, [audio break 00:05:27] implement it, but you install an agent, typically on a system, and that agent collects data on the system: what processes are running, right? Well, maybe it's system calls, maybe it's [unintelligible 00:05:37] as regular system calls. Some of them use the extended Berkeley Packet Filter daemon to get stuff, but one of the problems is that we are obtaining low-level data on an operating system, it's got to be highly specific. So, you collect all this data, who's logging in, which passwords are changing, all the stuff that a hacker would do as you're typing on the computer. You're maybe monitoring vulnerabilities, it's a ton of data that you're monitoring.Well, one of the problems that these companies face is they try to monitor too much. Then some came around and they tried to monitor too little, so they weren't as real-time.Corey: Sounds like a little pig story here.Jack: Yeah [laugh], exactly. Another company came along with a fantastic team, but you know, I think they came in a little late in the game, and it looks like they're folding now. They were wonderful company, but the one of the biggest problems I saw was the agent, the compatibility. You know, it was difficult to deploy. I ran DevOps and security and my DevOps team uninstalled the agent because they thought there was a problem with it, we proved there wasn't and four months later, they hadn't completely reinstall it.So, a CISO who manages the DevOps org couldn't get his own DevOps guy to install this agent. For good reason, right? So, this is kind of where I'm going with all of this XDR stuff. What is XDR? It's an agent on a machine that produces a ton of data.I—it's like omniscience. Yes, I started to turn it in, I would ping developers, I was like, “Why did you just run sudo on that machine?” Right. I mean, I knew everything was going on in the space, I had a good intro to all the assets, they technically run on the on-premise data center and the quote-unquote, “Cloud.” I like to just say the production estate. But it's omniscience. It's insights, you can create rules, it's one of the most powerful security tools that exists.Corey: I think there's a definite gap as far as—let's narrow this down to cloud for just a second before we expand this into the joy that has data centers—where you can instrument a whole bunch of different security services in any cloud provider—I'm going to pick on AWS because they're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and frankly, they could use taking down a peg or two by and large—and you wind up configuring all the different security services that in some cases seem totally unaware of each other, but that's the AWS product portfolio for you. And you do the math out and realize that it theoretically would cost you—to enable all these things—about three times as much as the actual data breach you're ideally trying to prevent against. So, on some level, it feels like, “Heads, I win; tails, you lose,” style scenario.And the answer that people have started reaching out to third-party vendors to wind up tying all of this together into some form of cohesive narrative that a human being has a hope in hell of understanding. But everything I've tried to this point still feels like it is relatively siloed, focused on the whole fear, uncertainty, and doubt that is so inherent to so much of the security world's marketing. And it's almost like cost control where you can spend almost limitless amount of time, energy, money, et cetera, trying to fix these things, but it doesn't advance your company to the next milestone. It's like buying fire insurance on your building. You can spend all the money on fire insurance. Great, it doesn't get you to the next milestone that propels your company forward. It's all reactive instead of proactive. So, it feels like it is never the exciting, number-one priority for companies until right after it should have been higher in the list than it was.Jack: So, when I worked at Turnitin, we had saturated the market. And we worked in education, technology space globally. Compliance everywhere. So, I just worked on the Australian Data Infrastructure Act of 2020. I'm very familiar with the 27 data privacy regulations that are [laugh] in scope for schools. I'm a FERPA expert, right? I know that there's only one P in HIPAA [laugh].So, all of these compliance regulations drove schools and universities, consortiums, government agencies to say, “You need to be secure.” So, security at Turnitin was the number one—number one—key performance indicator of the company for one-and-a-half years. And these cloud security initiatives didn't just make things more secure. They also allowed me to implement a reasonable control framework to get various compliance certifications. So, I'm directly driving sales by deploying these security tools.And the reason why that worked out so great is, by getting the certifications and by building a sensible control framework layer, I was taking these compliance requirements and translating them into real mitigations of business risk. So, the customers are driving security as they should. I'm implementing sane security controls by acting as the chief security officer, company becomes more secure, I save money by using the correct toolset, and we increased our business by, like, 40% in a year. This is a multibillion-dollar company.Corey: That is definitely a story that resonates, especially with organizations that are—or they should be—compliance-forward and having to care about the nature of what it is that they're doing. But I have a somewhat storied history in working in FinTech and large-scale financial services. One of the nice things about that job, which is sort of a weird thing to say there if you don't want to get ejected from the room, has been, “Yeah well, it's only money,” in the final analysis. Because yeah, no one dies if you wind up screwing that up. People's kids don't get exposed.It's just okay, people have to fill out a bunch of forms and you get sued into oblivion and you're not there anymore because the first role of a CISO is to be ablative and get burned away whenever there's a problem. But it still doesn't feel like it does more for a number of clients than, on some level, checking a box that they feel needs to be checked. Not that it shouldn't be, necessarily, but I have a hard time finding people that get passionately excited about security capabilities. Where are they hiding?Jack: So, one of the biggest problems that you're going to face is there are a lot of security people that have moved up in the ranks through technology and not through compliance and technology. These people will implement control frameworks based on audit requirements that are not bespoke to their company. They're doing it wrong. So, we're not ticking boxes; I'm creating boxes that need to be ticked to secure the infrastructure. And at Turnitin, Turnitin was a company that people were forced to use to submit their works in the school.So, imagine that you have to submit a sensitive essay, right? And that sensitive essay goes to this large database. We have the Taiwanese government submitting confidential data there. I had the chief scientist at NASA submitting in pre-publication data there. We've got corporate trade secrets that are popped in there. We have all kinds of FDA pre-approval stuff. This is a plagiarism detection software being used by large companies, governments, and 12-year-old girls, right, who don't want their data leaked.So, if you look at it, like, this is an ethical thing that is required for us to do, our customers drive that, but truly, I think it's ethics that drive it. So, when we implemented a control framework, I didn't do the minimum, I didn't run an [unintelligible 00:12:15] scan that nobody ran. I looked for tools that satisfied many boxes. And one of the things about the telemetry at scale, [unintelligible 00:12:22], XDR, whatever want to call it, right? But the agent-based systems that monitor for all of us this run-state data, is they can take a lot of your technical SOC controls.Furthermore, you can use these tools to improve your processes like incident response, right? You can use them to log things. You can eliminate your SIEM by using this for your DLP. The problem of companies in the past is they wouldn't deploy on the entire infrastructure. So, you'd get one company, it would just be on-prem, or one company that would just run on CentOS.One of the reasons why I really liked this Uptycs company is because they built it on an osquery. Now, if you mention osquery, a lot of people glaze over, myself included before I worked at Uptycs. But apparently what it is, is it's this platform to collect a ton of data on the run state of a machine in real-time, pop it into a normalized SQL database, and it runs on a ton of stuff: Mac OS, Windows, like, tons of version of Linux because it's open-source, so people are porting it to their infrastructure. And that was one of these unique differentiators is, what is the cloud? I mean, AWS is a place where you can rapidly prototype, there's tons of automation, you can go in and you build something quickly and then it scales.But I view the cloud as just a simple abstraction to refer to all of my assets, be them POPS, on-premise data machines, you know, the corporate environment, laptops, desktops, the stuff that we buy in the public clouds, right? These things are all part of the greater cloud. So, when I think cloud security, I want something that does it all. That's very difficult because if you had one tool run on your cloud, one tool to run on your corporate environment, and one tool to run for your production environment, those tools are difficult to manage. And the data needs to be ETL, you know? It needs to be normalized. And that's very difficult to do.Our company is doing [unintelligible 00:14:07] security right now as a company that's taking all these data signals, and they're normalizing them, right, so that you can have one dashboard. That's a big trend in security right now. Because we're buying too many tools. So, I guess the answer that really is, I don't see the cloud is just AWS. I think AWS is not just data—they shouldn't call themselves the cloud. They call themselves the cloud with everything. You can come in, you can rapidly prototype your software, and you know what? You want to run to the largest scale possible? You can do that too. It's just the governance problem that we run into.Corey: Oh, yes. The AWS product strategy is pretty clearly, in a word, “Yes,” written on a Post-it note somewhere. That's the easiest job in the world is running their strategy. The challenge, too, is that we don't live in a world where monocultures are a thing anymore because regardless—if you use AWS for the underlying infrastructure, great, that makes a lot of sense. Use it for a lot of the higher-up the stack, SaaS-y type things that you don't want to have to build yourself from—by going to Home Depot and picking up components, you're doing something relatively foolish in most cases.They're a plumbing company not a porcelain company, in many respects. And regardless of what your intention is around multiple clouds, people wind up using different things. In most cases, you're going to be storing your source code in GitHub, not in AWS CodeCommit because CodeCommit doesn't really have any customers, for reasons that become blindingly apparent the first time you try to use it for something. So, you always wind up with these cross-cloud, cross-infrastructure stories. For any company that had the temerity to be founded before 2010, they probably have an on-premises data center as well—or six or more—and you're starting to try to wind up having a whole bunch of different abstractions viewed through the same lenses in terms of either observability or control plane or governance, or—dare I say it—security. And it feels like there are multiple approaches, all of which have their drawbacks, which of course means, it's complicated. What's your take on it?Jack: So, I think it was two years ago we started to see tools to do signal consumption. They would aggregate those signals and they would try and produce meaningful results that were actionable rather than you having to go and look at all this granular data. And I think that's phenomenal. I think a lot of companies are going to start to do that more and more. One of the other trends people do is they eliminated data and they went machine-learning and anomaly detection. And that didn't work.It missed a lot of things, right, or generated a lot of false positive. I think that one of the next big technologies—and I know it's been done for two years—but I think we're the next things we're going to see is the axonius of the consumption of events, the categorization into alerts-based synthetic data classification policies, and we're going to look at the severity classifications of those, they're going to be actionable in a priority queue, and we're going to eliminate the need for people that don't like their jobs and sit at a SOC all day and analyze a SIEM. I don't ever run a SIEM, but I think that this diversity can be a good thing. So, sometimes it's turned out to be a bad thing, right? We wanted to diversity, we don't want all the data to be homogenous. We don't need data standards because that limits things. But we do want competition. But I would ask you this, Corey, why do you think AWS? We remember 2007, right?Corey: I do. Oh, I've been around at least that long.Jack: Yeah, you remember when S3 came up. Was that 2007?Corey: I want to say 2004, 2005 in beta, and then relaunched as the first general available service. The first beta service was SQS, so there's always some question about which one was first. I don't get in the middle of those fights because all I'm going to do is upset people.Jack: But S3 was awesome. It still is awesome, right?Corey: Oh yes.Jack: And you know what I saw? I worked for a very older company with very strict governance. You know with SOX compliance, which is a joke, but we also had SOC compliance. I did HIPAA compliance for them. Tons of compliance to this.I'm not a compliance off, too, by trade. So, I started seeing [x cards 00:17:54], you know, these company personal cards, and people would go out and [unintelligible 00:17:57] platform because if they worked with my teams internally, if they wanted to get a small app deployed, it was like a two, three-month process. That process was long because of CFO overhead, approvals, vendor data security vetting, racking machines. It wasn't a problem that was inherent to the technology. I actually built a self-service cloud in that company. The problem was governance. It was financial approvals, it was product justification.So, I think AWS is really what made the internet inflect and scale and innovate amazingly. But I think that one of the things that it sacrificed was governance. So, if you tie a lot of what we're saying back together, by using some sort of tool that you can pop into a cloud environment and they can access a hundred percent of the infrastructure and look for risks, what you're doing is you're kind of X-Ray visioning into all these nodes that were deployed rapidly and kept around because they were crown jewels, and you're determining the risks that lie on them. So, let's say that 10 or 15% of your estate is prototype things that grew at a scale and we can't pull back into our governance infrastructure. A lot of times people think that those types of team machines are probably pretty locked down and they're probably low risk.If you throw a company on the side scanner or something like that, you'll see they have 90% of the risk, 80% of the risk. They're unpatched and they're old. So, I remember at one point in my career, right, I'm thinking Amazon's great. I'm—[unintelligible 00:19:20] on Amazon because they've made the internet go, they influxed. I mean, they've scaled us up like crazy.Corey: Oh, the capability store is phenomenal. No argument there.Jack: Yeah. The governance problem, though, you know, the government, there's a lot of hacks because of people using AWS poorly.Corey: And to be clear, that's everyone. We all are. I take a look at some of the horrible technical decisions I made even a couple of years ago, based upon what I know now, it's difficult to back out and wind up doing things the proper way. I wrote an article a while back, “17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” and listed all the services. And I think it was a little on the nose, but then I wrote 17, “More Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” but different services. And I'm about three-quarters of the way through the third in the sequel. I just need a couple more releases and we're good to go.Jack: The more and more complexity you add, the more security risk exists. And I've heard horror stories. Dictionary.com lost a lot of business once because a couple of former contractors deleted some instances in AWS. Before that, they had a secret machine they turned into a pixel [unintelligible 00:20:18] and had take down their iPhone app.I've seen some stuff. But one of the interesting things about deploying one of these tools in AWS, they can just, you know, look X-Ray vision on into all your compute, all your storage and say, “You have PIIs stored here, you have personal data stored here, you have this vulnerability, that vulnerability, this machine has already been compromised,” is you can take that to your CEO as a CISO and say, “Look, we were wrong, there's a lot of risk here.” And then what I've done in the past is I've used that to deploy HIDS—XDR, telemetry at scale, whatever you want to call it—these agent-based solutions, I've used that to justification for them. Now, the problem with this solutions that use agentless is almost all of them are just in the cloud. So, just a portion of your infrastructure.So, if your hybrid environment, you have data centers, you're ignoring the data centers. So, it's interesting because I've seen these companies position themselves as competitors when really, they're in complementary spaces, but one of them justified the other for me. So, I mean, what do you think about that awkward competition? Why was this competition exists between these people if they do completely different things?Corey: I'll take it a step further. I'm a big believer that security for the cloud providers should not be a revenue generator in any meaningful sense because at that point, they wind up with an inherent conflict of interest, where when they start charging, especially trying to do value-based pricing as they move up the stack, what they're inherently saying is, great, you can get our version of our services that is less secure, so that they're what they're doing is they're making security on their platform an inherent investment decision. And I've never been a big believer in that approach.Jack: The SSO tax.Corey: Oh, yes. And many others.Jack: Yeah. So, I was one of the first SSO tax contributors. That started it.Corey: You want data plane audit logging? Great, that'll cost you. But they finally gave in a couple of years back and made the first management trail for CloudTrail audit logging free for everyone. And people still advertently built second ones and then wonder why they're paying through the nose. Like, “Oh, that's 40 grand a month. That should be zero.” Great. Send that to your SIEM and then have that pass it out to where it needs to go. But so much of it is just these weird configuration taxes that people aren't fully aware exist.Jack: It's the market, right? The market is—so look at Amazon's IAM. It is amazing, right? It's totally robust, who is using it correctly? I know a lot of people are. I've been the CISO for over 100 companies and IAM is was one of those things that people don't know how to use, and I think the reason is because people aren't paying for it, so AWS can continue to innovate on it.So, we find ourselves with this huge influx of IAM tools in the startup scene. We all know Uptycs does some CIAM and some identity management stuff. But that's a great example of what you're talking about, right? These cloud companies are not making the things inherently secure, but they are giving some optionality. The products don't grow because they're not being consumed.And AWS doesn't tend to advertise them as much as the folks in the security industry. It's been one complaint of mine, right? And I absolutely agree with you. Most of the breaches are coming out of AWS. That's not AWS's fault. AWS's infrastructure isn't getting breached.It's the way that the customers are configuring the infrastructure. That's going to change a lot soon. We're starting to see a lot of change. But the fundamental issue here is that security needs to be invested in for short-term initiatives, not just for long-term initiatives. Customers need to care about security, not compliance. Customers need to see proof of security. A customer should be demanding that they're using a secure company. If you've ever been on the vendor approval side, you'll see it's very hard to push back on an insecure company going through the vendor process.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: Oh, yes. I wound up giving probably about 100 companies now S3 Bucket Negligence Awards for being public about failing to secure their data and put that out into the world. I had one physical bucket made, the S3 Bucket Responsibility Award and presented it to their then director of security over at the Pokémon Company because there was a Wall Street Journal article talking about how their security review—given the fact that they are a gaming company that has children as their primary customer—they take it very seriously. And they cited the reason they're not to do business with one unnamed vendor was in part due to the lackadaisical approach around S3 bucket control. So, that was the one time I've seen in public a reference where, “Yeah, we were going to use a vendor and their security story was terrible, and we decided not to.”It's, why is that news? That should be a much more common story, but these days, it feels like procurement is rubber-stamping it and, like, “Okay, great. Fill out the form.” And, “Okay, you gave some wrong answers on the form. Try it again and tell the story differently until it gets shoved through.” It feels like it's a rubber stamp rather than a meaningful control.Jack: It's not a rubber stamp for me when I worked in it. And I'm a big guy, so they come to me, you know, like—that's how being, like, career law, it's just being big and intimidating. Because that's—I mean security kind of is that way. But, you know, I've got a story for you. This one's a little more bleak.I don't know if there's a company called Ask.fm—and I'll mention them by name—right, because, well, I worked for a company that did, like, a hostile takeover this company. And that's when I started working with [unintelligible 00:25:23]. [unintelligible 00:25:24]. I speak Russian and I learned it for work. I'm not Russian, but I learned the language so that I could do my job.And I was working for a company with a similar name. And we were in board meetings and we were crying, literally shedding tears in the boardroom because this other company was being mistaken for us. And the reason why we were shedding tears is because young women—you know, 11 to 13—were committing suicide because of online bullying. They had no health and safety department, no security department. We were furious.So, the company was hosted in Latvia, and we went over there and we installed one I lived in Latvia for quite a bit, working as the CISO to install a security program along with the health and safety person to install the moderation team. This is what we need to do in the industry, especially when it comes to children, right? Well, regulation solve it? I don't know.But what you're talking about the Pokémon video game, I remember that right? We can't have that kind of data being leaked. These are children. We need to protect them with information security. And in education technology, I'll tell you, it's just not a budget priority.So, the parents need to demand the security, we need to demand these audit certifications, and we need to demand that our audit firms are audited better. Our audit firms need to be explaining to security leaders that the control frameworks are something that they're responsible for creating bespoke. I did a presentation with Al Kingsley recently about security compliance, comparing FERPA and COPPA to the GDPR. And it was very interesting because FERPA has very little teeth, it's very long code and GDPR is relatively brilliant. GDPR made some changes. FERPA was so ambiguous and vague, it made a lot of changes, but they were kind of like, in any direction ever because nobody knows FERPA is. So, I don't know, what's the answer to that? What do we do?Corey: Yeah. The challenge is, you can see a lot of companies in specific areas doing the right thing, when they're intentionally going out on day one to, for example, service kids as a primary user base demographic. The challenge that you see with this is that, that's great, but then you have things that are not starting off with that point of view. And they started running into population limits and realize, okay, we've got to start expanding our user base somewhere, and then they went a bolting on those things is almost as an afterthought, where, “Oh, well, we've been basically misusing people's data for our entire existence, but now—now—we're suddenly magically going to do the right thing where kids are concerned.” I wish, but unfortunate that philosophy assumes a better take of humanity than is readily apparent.Jack: I wonder why they do that though, right? Something's got to, you know, news happened or something and that's why they're doing it. And that's not okay. But I have seen companies, one of the founders of Scantron—do you know what a Scantron is?Corey: Oh, yes. I'm much older than I look.Jack: Yeah, I'm much older than I look, too. I like to think that. But for those that don't know, a scantron, use a number two pencil and you filled in these little dots. And it was for taking tests. So, the guy who started Scantron, created a small two-person company.And AWS did something magnificent. They recognized that it was an education technology company, and they gave them, for free, security consultation services, security implementation services. And when we bought this company—I'm heavily involved in M&A, right—I'm sitting down with the two founders of the company, and my jaw is on the desk. They were more secure than a lot of the companies that I've worked with that had robust security departments. And I said, “How did you do this?”They said, “AWS provided us with this free service because we're education technology.” I teared up. My heart was—you know, that's amazing. So, there are companies that are doing this right, but then again, look at Grammarly. I hate to pick on Grammarly. LanguageTool is an open-source I believe, privacy-centric Grammarly competitor, but Grammarly, invest in your security a little more, man. Y'all were breached. They store a lot of data, they [unintelligible 00:29:10] lot of the data.Corey: Oh, and it scared the living hell out of companies realizing that they had business users using Grammarly as an extension to work on internal documents and just sending proprietary data to some third-party service that they clicked through the terms on and I don't know that it was ever shown the Grammarly was misusing any of that, but the potential for that is massive.Jack: Do you know what they were doing with it?Corey: Well, using AI to learn these things. Yeah, but it's the supervision story always involves humans reading it.Jack: They were building a—and I think—nobody knows the rumor, but I've worked in the industry, right, pretty heavily. They're doing something great for the world. I believe they're building a database of works submitted to do various things with them. One of those things is plagiarism detection. So, in order to do that they got to store, like, all of the data that they're processing.Well, if you have all the data that you've done for your company that's sitting in this Grammarly database and they get hacked—luckily, that's a lot of data. Maybe you'll be overlooked. But I've data breach database sitting here on my desk. Do you know how many rows it's got? [pause]. Yes, breach database.Corey: Oh, I wouldn't even begin to guess. I know the data volumes that Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned? Site winds up dealing with and it is… significant.Jack: How many billions of rows do you think it is?Corey: Ah, I'd say 20 as an argument?Jack: 34.Corey: Okay. Yeah, directionally right. Fermi estimation saves us yet again.Jack: [laugh]. The reason I build this breach database is because I thought Covid would slow down and I wanted it to do executive protection. Companies in the education space also suffer from [active 00:30:42] shooters and that sort of thing. So, that's another thing about security, too, is it transcends all these interesting areas, right? Like here, I'm doing executive risk protection by looking at open-source data.Protect the executives, show the executives that security is a concern, these executives that'll realize security's real. Then these past that security down in the list of priorities, and next thing you know, the 50 million active students that are using Turnitin are getting better security. Because an executive realized, “Hey, wait a minute, this is a real thing.” So, there's a lot of ways around this, but I don't know, it's a big space, there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of companies that are coming in and flashing out of the pan.A lot of companies are coming in and building snake oil. How do people know how to determine the right things to use? How do people don't want to implement? How do people understand that when they deploy a program that only applies to their cloud environment it doesn't touch there on-prem where a lot of data might be a risk? And how do we work together? How do we get teams like DevOps, IT, SecOps, to not fight each other for installing an agent for doing this?Now, when I looked at Uptycs, I said, “Well, it does the EDR for corp stuff, it does the host intrusion detection, you know, the agent-based stuff, I think, for the well because it uses a buzzword I don't like to use, osquery. It's got a bunch of cloud security configuration on it, which is pretty commoditized. It does agentless cloud scanning.” And it—really, I spent a lot of my career just struggling to find these tools. I've written some myself.And when I saw Uptycs, I was—I felt stupid. I couldn't believe that I hadn't used this tool, I think maybe they've increased substantially their capabilities, but it was kind of amazing to me that I had spent so much of my time and energy and hadn't found them. Luckily, I decided to joi—actually I didn't decide to join; they kind of decided for me—and they started giving it away for free. But I found that Uptycs needs a, you know, they need a brand refresh. People need to come and take a look and say, “Hey, this isn't the old Uptycs. Take a look.”And maybe I'm wrong, but I'm here as a technology evangelist, and I'll tell you right now, the minute I no longer am evangelists for this technology, the minute I'm no longer passionate about it, I can't do my job. I'm going to go do something else. So, I'm the one guy who will put it to your brass tacks. I want this thing to be the thing I've been passionate about for a long time. I want people to use it.Contact me directly. Tell me what's wrong with it. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm right. I really just want to wrap my head around this from the industry perspective, and say, “Hey, I think that these guys are willing to make the best thing ever.” And I'm the craziest person in security. Now, Corey, who's the craziest person security?Corey: That is a difficult question with many wrong answers.Jack: No, I'm not talking about McAfee, all right. I'm not that level of crazy. But I'm talking about, I was obsessed with this XDR, CDR, all the acronyms. You know, we call it HIDS, I was obsessed with it for years. I worked for all these companies.I quit doing, you know, a lot of very good entrepreneurial work to come work at this company. So, I really do think that they can fix a lot of this stuff. I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm still staying involved in other things to make these technologies better. And the software's security space is going all over the place. Sometimes it's going bad direction, sometimes it's going to good directions. But I agree with you about Amazon producing tools. I think it's just all market-based. People aren't going to use the complex tools of Amazon when there's all this other flashy stuff being advertised.Corey: It all comes down to marketing budget, and AWS has always struggled with telling a story. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Jack: Oh, gosh, everywhere. But if you want to learn more about Uptycs, why don't you just email me?Corey: We will, of course, put your email address into the show notes.Jack: Yeah, we'll do it.Corey: Don't offer if you're not serious. There's also uptycssecretmenu.com, which is apparently not much of a secret, given the large banner all over Uptycs' website.Jack: Have you seen this? Let me just tell you about this. This is not a catch. I was blown away by this; it's one of the reasons I joined. For a buck, if you have between 100 and 1000 nodes, right, you get our agentless system and our agent-based system, right?I think it's only on AWS. But that's, like, what, $150, $180,000 value? You get it for a full year. You don't have to sign a contract to renew or anything. Like, you just get it for a buck. If anybody who doesn't go on to the secret menu website and pay $1 and check out this agentless solution that deploys in two minutes, come on, man.I challenge everybody, go on there, do that, and tell me what's wrong with it. Go on there, do that, and give me the feedback. And I promise you I'll do everything in my best efforts to make it the best. I saw the engineering team in this company, they care. Ganesh, the CEO, he is not your average CEO.This guy is in tinkerers. He's on there, hands on keyboard. He responds to me in the middle of night. He's a geek just like me. But we need users to give us feedback. So, you got this dollar menu, you sign up before the 31st, right? You get the product for buck. Deploy the thing in two minutes.Then if you want to do the XDR, this agent-based system, you can deploy that at your leisure across whichever areas you want. Maybe you want a corporate network on laptops and desktops, your production infrastructure, your compute in the cloud, deploy it, take a look at it, tell me what's wrong with it, tell me what's right with it. Let's go in there and look at it together. This is my job. I want this company to work, not because they're Uptycs but because I think that they can do it.And this is my personal passion. So, if people hit me up directly, let's chat. We can build a Slack, Uptycs skunkworks. Let's get this stuff perfect. And we're also going to try and get some advisory boards together, like, maybe a CISO advisory board, and just to get more feedback from folks because I think the Uptycs brand has made a huge shift in a really positive direction.And if you look at the great thing here, they're unifying this whole agentless and agent-based stuff. And a lot of companies are saying that they're competing with that, those two things need to be run together, right? They need to be run together. So, I think the next steps here, check out that dollar menu. It's unbelievable. I can't believe that they're doing it.I think people think it's too good to be true. Y'all got nothing to lose. It's a buck. But if you sign up for it right now, before the December 31st, you can just wait and act on it any month later. So, just if you sign up for it, you're just locked into the pricing. And then you want to hit me up and talk about it. Is it three in the morning? You got me. It's it eight in the morning? You got me.Corey: You're more generous than I am. It's why I work on AWS bills. It's strictly a business-hours problem.Jack: This is not something that they pay me for. This is just part of my personal passion. I have struggled to get this thing built correctly because I truly believe not only is it really cool—and I'm not talking about Uptycs, I mean all the companies that are out there—but I think that this could be the most powerful tool in security that makes the world more secure. Like, in a way that keeps up with the security risks increasing.We just need to get customers, we need to get critics, and if you're somebody who wants to come in and prove me wrong, I need help. I need people to take a look at it for me. So, it's free. And if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and you give me some good feedback and all that, I'll take you out to dinner, I'll introduce you to startup companies that I think, you know, you might want to advise. I'll help out your career.Corey: So, it truly is dollar menu then.Jack: Well, I'm paying for the dinner out my personal thing.Corey: Exactly. Well, again, you're also paying for the infrastructure required to provide the service, so, you know, one way or another, it's all the best—it's just like Cloud, there is no cloud. It's just someone else's cost center. I like that.Jack: Well, yeah, we're paying for a ton of data hosting. This is a huge loss leader. Uptycs has a lot of money in the bank, I think, so they're able to do this. Uptycs just needs to get a little more bold in their marketing because I think they've spent so much time building an awesome product, it's time that we get people to see it. That's why I did this.My career was going phenomenally. I was traveling the world, traveling the country promoting things, just getting deals left and right and then Elias—my buddy over at Orca; Elias, one of the best marketing guys I've ever met—I've never done marketing before. I love this. It's not just marketing. It's like I get to take feedback from people and make the product better and this is what I've been trying to do.So, you're talking to a crazy person in security. I will go well above and beyond. Sign up for that dollar menu. I'm telling you, it is no commitment, maybe you'll get some spam email or something like that. Email me directly, I'll kill the spam email.You can do it anytime before the end of 2023. But it's only for 2023. So, you got a full year of the services for free. For free, right? And one of them takes two minutes to deploy, so start with that one. Let me know what you think. These guys ideate and they pivot very quickly. I would love to work on this. This is why I came here.So, I haven't had a lot of opportunity to work with the practitioners. I'm there for you. I'll create a Slack, we can all work together. I'll invite you to my Slack if you want to get involved in secondaries investing and startup advisory. I'm a mentor and a leader in this space, so for me to be able to stay active, this is like a quid pro quo with me working for this company.Uptycs is the company that I've chosen now because I think that they're the ones that are doing this. But I'm doing this because I think I found the opportunity to get it done right, and I think it's going to be the one thing in security that when it is perfected, has the biggest impact.Corey: We'll see how it goes out over the coming year, I'm sure. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Jack: I like you. I like you, Corey.Corey: I like me too.Jack: Yeah? All right. Okay. I'm telling [unintelligible 00:39:51] something. You and I are very weird.Corey: It works out.Jack: Yeah.Corey: Jack Charles Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at Uptycs. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment that we're going to be able to pull the exact details of where you left it from because your podcast platform of choice clearly just treated security as a box check.Jack: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode of the Noob School podcast, John Sterling's son, Jack Sterling comes back to discuss why or why not getting a Master in Business Administration is the right track for you. Jack, who himself got his MBA after getting out of the Navy talks about the benefits of securing the degree, and also talks about when it might not be worth it.  HIGHLIGHTSWhen an MBA might be worth it It's best to start a small business while studying   The two businesses that Jack started during his MBA yearsWhen an MBA might NOT be worth itHave a good reason to get an MBA  QUOTESJohn on why an MBA can be worth getting for veterans: "Coming out of the military, they certainly didn't teach you business. They taught you a lot of other things but not business. So great to get a primer on business, I would think."Jack on the ideal business to run while studying for an MBA: "It doesn't have to be the big, all or nothing hairy idea like you talked about. It can be something small that just makes a little bit of money and you just keep adding on to it."When an MBA might not make sense, says Jack: "It's not gonna be the end-all, be-all whether you do or don't do an MBA. If you're one to start a business and be entrepreneurial, [an] MBA is probably not the right track for you. Unless it's something like Clemson's MBA Entrepreneurship track." Follow Jack through the link below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksterling/ Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

In this special episode of The A to Z English Podcast, we talk with Jonathan from Costa Rica, a dedicated English student and an active member of our Whatsapp group. (Link here: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7)Website Link: https://atozenglishpodcast.com/?p=1739It's a great conversation, so you won't want to miss it!Share your thoughts about today's interview in our Whatsapp group or tell us if you think you have something interesting to talk about. Perhaps you could be our next guest on the podcast!If you could take a minute and complete a short survey about the podcast, we would be very appreciative. You can find the survey here: https://forms.gle/HHNnnqU6U8W3DodK8We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes.Intro/Outro Music by Eaters: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eaters/the-astronomers-office/agents-in-coffee-shops/Full Transcript: Jonathan from Costa RicaKevin: Welcome to an A to Z English listener interview. Today we're talking with Jonathan Gutierrez who is in Costa Rica and is one of our listeners. And he's going to tell us today about his English learning experience using A to Z English and all of the other sources that he did. So Jonathan, nice to see you. it's night time there right?Jonathan: Okay, it's nice to see you guys. So um thank you for having me here.Kevin: Oh you're welcome. it's great to have you on the show. Jack: Yeah thanks for coming and I appreciate it. Kevin: Yeah it's already evening there. Did you have your dinner tonight?Jonathan: Uh not yet. I just arrived at home a few minutes ago.Kevin: Yeah?Jonathan: I was working today, so I just arrived at home maybe 10 or 15 minutes ago. But it's okay.Kevin: Well thank you for finding time to join us then for us it's Monday daytime of course time zones are funny, so Jonathan you're in Costa Rica.I've never been to Costa Rica though I have had a couple of friends that went there. Actually one of my good friends from university, he and his uh girlfriend at the time, now wife, they went to Costa Rica many years ago, maybe almost 20 years ago and they were teaching English for six months or a year, so I know English education is quite big in Costa Rica. How, where or when did you first start learning English? Was it in schools or did you have a tutor or just the internet or where did you start? Jonathan: Yeah I started when I in high school. Okay so I'm learning a few things in high school. Maybe I don't uh that I feel for example um I love the idiom or stuff like that. Sure maybe a couple years ago that I started to return again to learning English and I joined what's the room with Robin Shaw? So I started my new challenge. I changed my mind because I want um to get a bilingual job and I think I start to practice a little bit more. I forgot all the rules and English grammars. I love vocabulary so it was a little bit insane you know. Maybe not because I forgot so a lot of things um so it was something new for me. Let's start again. They start with uh maybe kids stuff um and it was pretty good. Robin helped me a lot. Kevin: I'm curious. if you said you started again because you forgot everything, I actually I know Costa Rica is a Spanish-speaking country and I used to speak a little bit of Spanish. I studied Spanish in university. But like you I stopped using it and I totally forgot everything once you started to study again. Was it easier than the first time? Did you start to remember things?Jonathan: Yeah it's quite something funny because when I'm trying to learn again um I remember oh I remember this but how can we use everything. So I forgot for example um singular verbs, plural, past tense and stuff like that. Yeah so it started again. I practiced a lot um every day and yeah I found a bunch of friends and I tried to do my best every day to learn English and my one of my goals was get bilingual because I am native speaker Spanish speaker all right good yeah. it was a big challenge you know. it was pretty awesome. I was excited to learn again English, so I decided to start again and practice and practice every day. Jack: That's great! Yeah do you use English in your job right now? Jonathan: Yes I've been working in a call center for around five months oh nice and is for um I am customer service agent for us company so it's something new for me and I'm taking calls every day for…Jack: So are the people that calling you are they they're Americans then?Jonathan: Yes.Kevin: And I know speaking another language over the phone can sometimes be more difficult than speaking together with a person because you can't see them. You don't know what their facial expressions or what their body is doing. What things have been the hardest for you doing a phone job where you're only listening to people speaking English and Americans have many different styles of English. Some are very fast. Some are very slow. What was what's the hardest thing for you in in your job?Jonathan: All right um I guess that's the listening stuff because when the customer speaks.Kevin: They start to speak and start to speak uh faster right?Jonathan: Faster and you need to get all the information in a few seconds and trying to avoid. Kevin: Do you mean trying umJonathan: Yeah trying I need to improve a lot my listening skills to avoid this kind of situation because it's a customer service job I mean right we need to focus on listening and try to get the best message with the customer and assist the customer and sometimes we can hear um maybe i'll set customers and we need to okay slow down, take it easy and assist the customer.Kevin: Well that sounds like our podcast would be helpful for listening skills. Then so I'm hopeful that we are helping you. There that's great yeah what was the…Jack: Uh could you could you give us an example of maybe like a very challenging phone call or a uh experience that you've had at the call center? Is there one memorable experience? Jonathan: Yeah we got a lot of accents from us so maybe for example when I try to speak uh when a customer uh he got access from example for Texas or um it's so hard to understand but I try to do my best and when decide to speak it faster and faster, it's hard to understand. But I always do my best every day.Jack: Yeah so like a southern Texas accent would be hard to understand but like in eastern in the east uh people speak quite quickly in New York and yeah Massachusetts in that area yeah people speak very fast, very quickly. Jonathan: You got it uh by the way um well our customers are from the east coast uh Massachusetts, Boston, New York and New Jersey yeah and Philadelphia um and I find that listening also can sometimes be more difficult than speaking because there's so many ways to say the same thing and one person says it this way, another person says it a different way and you know one way to say it and so you're correct you know how to do it but they use a different or a different way and so it can be very confusing. It's like oh I know what that means I know what you're saying but I don't know that way of saying it. Yeah all this comes with more and more practice. Kevin: Yeah exactly in the second part is the most important trying to explain the situation with the customer because it's a technical vocabulary so you need to explain some things from to someone that never uses uh technical vocabulary. That's really interesting. You need me to focus uh in something easy right to say to another person that's really interesting because then you are listening to an american a native speaker and you're speaking back to them and you're using words that they don't know so you know more English in some ways than they do. It's just that technical language. What a unique experience to know more English than a native speaker but having to change it for them to understand.Jonathan: Yeah it's a challenge because every day you need to focus on trying to explain yourself something easy about technical vocabulary so maybe it's easy, maybe sometimes it's uh difficult because you need to guess what the customer needs and sometimes it's hard because the customer is trying to explain something and you need to all right. Did you need uh this? You need this all right. I got it and this is the result.Jack: So uh you so you need to practice um your English and you use uh Shaw English and you listen to the A to Z English Podcast but um at your work do you also speak English to your co-workers, your colleagues. Do you practice even though you can both of you speak Spanish as a first language? Do you ever communicate in English with your colleagues just for practice?Jonathan: Yes a few things we need to uh speak English with another uh co-workers or maybe when you need to target another department, it's always speaking English and we always needs to be focused in speaking English together and it's more easy to end of the day for the end of the day. Yeah so when you go to work you basically switch your mind to English. You just say when I'm at work I'm using English and then when I get home I use Spanish.Jack: Is that right?Jonathan: Yeah but it's funny because for me I try to get involved um always in English environment so when I arrive at home I turn on my tv and find um series on Netflix and in English and or are you going to when i'm going to work i'm going to listen to music or listen to your podcast on my cell phone so I trying to always um thinking English, do something in English.Kevin: Cool! That's awesome! Yeah that's more and more practice. So of all of those things that you do the last question I like to ask people that we talk to is if you could give a tip to other listeners, what one thing do you think would be the most useful to practice English? Or what do you do that you think is the most useful? Jonathan: All right for me um I guess um you need to practice every day. It's not my magical poison you know or something like that but the first thing you need to change your mind, uh you need to start to focus in English uh think in English. Uh do exercise practice speak with friends uh maybe international friends is the best way because you never need to speak in another language, just holding in English because if I have a friend here, I can speak Spanish. But for example, if I got a friend on in Malaysia and another person doesn't know anything about the Spanish so you need to focus almost in English.Jack: That's a nice tip! Kevin: Nice! Well Malaysia is good. We talked to Mei Fong last week, so maybe if you talk to her, then you can practice as well. Yeah but that's a great tip getting your mind around English that's yeah a great thing. Just practice, practice, practice. Jonathan: Yeah a lot of practice and uh one thing, it's helped me a lot, is this shadowing technique.Kevin: Uh shadowing uh yeah watching videos on YouTube and practice is a bit aloud and yeah if you can't practice with a friend, you can still do something alone. Just listen and repeat and listen, repeat it does help. It helps you sound more natural in the language that's really fantastic.Kevin: You sound like you work really hard at your English and we're talking to you here, so it's having good results. Jack: Good job! Absolutely. Yeah thanks a lot Jonathan. We really appreciate it.Kevin: Yeah Jonathan. Thanks for sharing your story with us. It's very cool and now you've got to get some dinner. It's late there. You must be very hungry. Jonathan: Yeah a little bit. Kevin: Nice well thank you for coming and talking to us.Jonathan: Thanks to you guys. I really appreciate it. Jack: It's our pleasure. Kevin: Yyeah have a great evening.Jonathan: Same to you and take care and I hope I'll see you soon again. Kevin: All right thank you.Jack: Thanks Jonathan bye bye. Jonathan: See ya. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode, Kevin and Jack talk about going to camp as a kid. They share some stories and fun memories of things they did there. Share your answers to the discussion questions in our WhatsApp group chat! https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Website link: https://atozenglishpodcast.com/did-you-go-to-camp/With listener mail from episode 6: https://atozenglishpodcast.com/do-you-have-any-pets/If you could take a minute and complete a short survey about the podcast, we would be very appreciative. You can find the survey here: https://forms.gle/HHNnnqU6U8W3DodK8We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes.Intro/Outro Music by Eaters:https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eaters/the-astronomers-office/agents-in-coffee-shops/Key Words: Write the definitions of the key words. Dribble:Scrimmage:Camp Counsellor:Certificate:Skull:Discussion Questions:Did you go to summer camp when you were young?What did you do at camp?Describe your favorite activity at camp.Describe your least favorite activity at camp?Full Transcript: Kevin: Welcome to an A to Z English quick chat we're gonna surprise each other with a topic for the day and then see where the conversation goes. Check our website for a study guide with vocabulary notes, discussion questions and more as well as links to our Whatsapp, Facebook pages and other social media where you can join in the conversation. Our topic for today, Jack, I just yesterday I, I finished teaching a kids camp of an English kids camp and it got me thinking about camps that I did when I was a kid and you must have done some camps in school or in summer vacation or winter vacation.Jack: I did a lot of uh, I did summer camps when I was a kid, especially in elementary school. Yeah like a week or two weeks, something like that.Kevin: Oh two weeks. That's quite, that's quite a long one. I don't remember well I guess it depends on the camp. I can think of two that I did when I was young. One was a field trip camp. My school went to an island in California and that was probably pretty short, maybe three nights, three or four nights, yeah that's a pretty short one.Jack: Exactly.Kevin: Yeah, but then I did another. I did a basketball camp when I was in elementary school and that was probably longer. That was probably two or three weeks but that was not sleeping at the camp, you know, I'd go from my home to the school and play basketball and go home every day.Jack: Yeah, I did the same thing in elementary school and middle school. We had a uh, our high school basketball coach would run in a summer basketball camp, but yeah it was only…Kevin: You said you were a basketball player.Jack: Yeah, I played basketball in high school and in college, so um yeah, we would uh, we'd go learn the techniques and then play and then go home, eat dinner, sleep, and then go back again the next day. Basketball all day every day, yeah at that time, basketball all day every day was heaven for me you know. That's all we wanted to do. I mean, we, that's what we did when we couldn't get into the gym. We went to the park and we played basketball. I mean that's all we, that's all we wanted to do.Kevin: Yeah, and how, what did the coaches do to keep it fun for the kids all day. It's not just play basketball, it's not just go go go go go. Like they organized things. I'm sure they you have to organize things.Jack: It's more difficult, the younger, so for the younger kids, um, I think it's more, they can't do as much, so they, it's a lot of like technique and just dribble down, go between the cones, you know just zig zag and then come back and pass the ball to your friend and then that person runs a drill and they zig zag through the cones and then they come back and so it's just a lot of that kind of stuff, very simple games. But when we got older, um, the, all we wanted to do was to uh, I'll use a maybe a new word here for our listeners is scrimmage and scrimmage is a word that means to play a game. But it's not an official game. It's just a practice game so that's all we wanted to do was basically we do all the technique and the practice but what we really want to do is play basketball and play yeah yeah and so that would always come at the end of the day, so in the beginning, you do the annoying hard work stuff and then later as a reward, then you then you get to play, scrimmage, you get to or you get to scrimmage. You get to play games, okay yeah, with each other so that makes sense.Kevin: I mean the camp that I just did was an English camp of course and so they did the kind of similar things. We did the boring class in the morning for the kids you know. Let's learn English and let's listen to the story and blah blah blah but then the afternoon was the fun stuff with the teachers. It was go play a sport or make some pizzas or something you do. Some games, still English, for the kids to practice it's an English camp, but you know, do the boring stuff in the morning and have the fun stuff in in the afternoon before dinner. Did you ever go to any just like fun camps?Jack: I went to a couple summer camps that were just all about fun activities. There was no English. There was no basketball, um, you know. We could play basketball if we wanted to, but they weren't teaching us how to play basketball, and I remember going to one of those camps and that was really fun because we were yeah…Kevin: I want you to tell me a story from one because I can think of one like I said I went to an island in in California with my school when I was it was maybe fifth or sixth grade so like upper elementary school, I don't remember. This was a long time ago of course, but we went to this island with the class and that was just yeah, just a fun camp, and I remember, what do I remember, it was so long ago…I remember we went kayaking which was really cool because we were on an island, and then I remember also doing like a night hike like walking with all of your friends in the night time through the forest and that was really funny because it was kind of scary, and it was very dark, like some people had flashlights. But not everyone, and so I remember we were walking and we would hold hands of the person in front and behind you so that we wouldn't get lost of course because losing a kid in the forest in the dark is bad. Yeah, but we would um, when you're walking, you would have to be careful because there's many things in the forest to fall over, to trip over, yeah and so we would spend…we would send like a message back in the line saying like step up or step down or go right or things to tell the person behind you. Like what's about to happen, but because I was you know a little troublemaker kid sometimes I would just tell the person behind me, step up or step down, even though there was nothing, there's no rock or anything, and so they would almost fall over and then I would laugh and keep walking so that was their teamwork. Uh it was a teamwork exercise, but yeah.Jack You weren't being a very good teammate huh?Kevin: I was breaking the team. Um where did you go? What was your fun camp?Jack: My fun camp was called uh camp Shamineau, and there's a good Native American name because it's named after a lake, yeah.Kevin: Where was this?Jack: Um this is in northern Minnesota, so lots of forests and as I mentioned in one of our earlier podcasts uh Minnesota is famous for its number of lakes. It's called ‘the land of 10000 lakes' right? There's a lot up there. There are so many lakes, and there's a lot of camps uh that are on you know kind of built on lakes so that you can go, yeah, you could go swimming, and I remember uh there was a there was a uh a challenge. It's called the I swam sham challenge and so okay uh the um… what do you… I'm blanking on the word right now, counselors, the camp counselors, camp counselors yeah.Kevin: Like, high school kids right?Jack: Yeah like high school kids or college kids and we were in elementary school and they would uh, they'd take you on one side of the lake and then they're in a boat and then you swim across the lake and if you make it all the way across the lake without getting into the boat or asking for help or anything, then you get a certificate that says I swam sham and uh so a few of us that were…Kevin: Did you make it?Jack: I made it absolutely. Yes, I was, I'm a strong swimmer. Uh not a, I'm not a particularly fast swimmer, but I very, I'm very familiar with the water, so and comfortable in the water, so for me it was you know, it was pretty easy, but I just remember feeling you know quite proud to have swam or swum across a lake that was pretty cool. So yeah, definitely, and it's something that especially when not all the kids can do it, when some of the kids are going up into the boat and you're like I did it, yeah, they managed to finish. They didn't make it or they're too afraid to try or something, so right, yeah it was kind of a point. It's a good feeling.Kevin: Yeah? Nice. That's very cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. These kids camps are really fun. Swimming across lakes actually reminds me a little bit off topic, one day, I really want to swim across the Han River here in Seoul.Jack: Oh really? Is that something that you can do?Kevin: There's actually, there actually, are people who've done it. I've looked it up before, but you have to choose like when to go because before the rainy season, before it gets crazy, yeah, and under some people say things like that quite dirty and stuff, so, but I think that would be really fun because I love being in the water as well yeahJack: And you're a strong swimmer. That's something that you do as a hobby.Kevin: Yeah, swimming is my exercise, so that's what I would love to get into.Jack: Yeah, um, there's you know, another uh aspect of that camp that I remember was uh the night games.Kevin: Like you did a night hike?Jack: We would play a game called capture the flag. You have two teams and one team has a flag and the other team has a flag and they hide it somewhere in the forest or on the campgrounds and then at night, you have to go and catch the other team's flag. And I remember uh how exciting and scary and fun that was because it kind of kind of feels like you're part of a battle or in kind of a war zone or something like that. So it's a very fun.Kevin: Uh night time that would be really cool to do. Yeah I remember one of our things, I don't remember how it works, but with our night hike, what we did, the reason we did it so dark was because then at the end, we turned off our lights. And you know, um, lifesavers candy? Lkke it's a little like just chewable candy. It's like shaped like a circle. Something that the camp counselors gave us was like mint flavored candies, mint flavored lifesavers and there was something in the mint flavored lifesavers that when you would bite into it, crunch down into it, if your mouth was open it would actually flash like a light.Jack: Yeah?Kevin: And I don't remember how but I just remember this this this activity when I was a kid because all of us, all of our friends got in a big circle and they gave us each a candy and we would all just crunch down on this candy and all of our mouths were just going likeJack: So there's some kind of light or fluorescence like coming?Kevin: There's something in that candy at least there was maybe it was some crazy chemical that was okay in the 1990s and they took it out now but there was there was something in the candy that that made it light up and that was the really exciting part of the trip.Jack: Wow that's a fascinating…I did not expect you to tell that story.Kevin: So I yeah it's something I just remembered, candy, that just remembered.Jack: Yeah that's fascinating.Kevin: Other things those camps are always really fun because you do like science experiments or random things. Another thing actually I that I just remembered we opened up um what are they called owl drop not just owl droppings but like there's a specific word for it where when an owl you know would like eat a mouse or whatever and then they poop it out and it falls to the ground. It's not like normal bird poo where it's just you know like white splattering on your shirt. It's like a small, like it looks like a small piece of dirt but then you can open it up with some tools and inside it there's like a mouse skull and some other bones and things like that so you can see what the owl ate because when owls eat mice, they just basically gulp it whole down and then they digest itJack: But they can't digest the bones.Kevin: So right so then the bones just getting pooped out.Jack: Wow that's yeah those are the things that I really enjoyed about uh you know being in elementary school and going to camps and doing science experiments and you know just uh and playing those games. I don't think I as an adult I don't think I've ever had as much fun and joy as I'd had when I was just a kid you know, and that's what camps do I think is that they just they really bring a lot of joy and happiness to children and I think it's something that you have to that you can you can't really hold on to as you get older and…Kevin: So yeah, and there's definitely a lot of memories that the kids make, especially if it's one where you're staying there for two, three, four nights or longer. And I think you know like a good place to wrap up for here when I was just finishing these camps with these kids. At the last day of camp, some of the kids are really emotional. I got kind of emotional. Like you've been spending you know a week just with these same group of kids all day and then these kids also are with me, the teacher, but more so with our camp counselors. And some of the kids were really sad to go home they were like I'm gonna miss you teacher and especially to those who like, I'm the teacher you know, so I'm happy, I'm having fun of course but the counselors, they're like teacher slash friend and so some of the kids were really sad to go home because they really made strong memories and some good friends and hopefully, they had a lot of fun at our camp and hopefully they'll come back.Jack: Yeah, when I went to camp Shamineau, I just, I'll this would be my last statement here, but I cried twice: I cried the first day because I was going to miss my parents and I was feeling homesick, and I cried on the last day of camp because I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to…Kevin: Yeah, that's so, that sounds like a pretty perfect camp experience where you're nervous to go but then you have so much fun that you don't want to leave, that you just want to stay there to last forever. Yeah, nice that's, great yeah, camps are fun and I would love to hear what kind of camps our listeners are doing out there in other parts of the world, you know, what are they learning? What are they doing? What kind of activities do you do in camps or what memories do you have?Jack: Yeah, tell us about those.Kevin: for sure, yeah, it's a fun a fun thing to relive that that happy part of your life when you were a kid or it was just all fun and games. But nice! So, for today though to wrap up I know we've got some listener mail from a couple of our previous episodes so what have, we got for today, Jack, yeah so we have uh some discussion question answers from Anna Maria and Anna Maria is from Colombia and this one was about pets. And the question was, “Do you have a pet?” And Anna Maria says yes. She has a dog named Tomate which, help me out Kevin, is that uh tomato and…Kevin: I think that is. I think that is tomato.Jack: Yeah, okay, so her dog is Tomato.Kevin: That is a cute name for a dog.Jack: I agree. And the second question was, “Is uh is your dog a good watchdog?” And a watchdog is like a protector, and she says uh yes, he barks a lot when a stranger is close to my house and he's always alert with strangers, so she actually feels safer uh having Tomate you know in her life in uh in her apartment or in her house so I think that's uh that's pretty cool. So, we'll give a shout out to uh Anna Maria and Tomate.Kevin: Nice, and the pets episode, that was our Quick Chat number six for anyone else who wants to go back and check that one out, so yeah, pets are pets are great. Tomate I love I love the name yeah.Jack: I love different dog and pets. It's fun to hear the different names that people give their dogs around, especially in other parts of the world. It's really interesting.Kevin: Yeah yeah yeah, definitely some names here in Korea are like normal people names and some names are just totally random.Jack: If you name your dog Frank, uh it's not, it doesn't really uh you know doesn't capture that.Kevin: I don't know any Frank dogs. That's a bit funny, but anyway, that was a great one, so thanks Anna Maria and everybody, well thanks for tuning in. Please remember to leave us a review if you can on Apple Podcasts and a five-star rating. That would be, that would be super helpful and also you can check our Whatsapp group. It's linked on the webpage or down in the show notes where you can come and join us in the conversation, so we'll talk to you there have a good one all right.Jack: Bye bye!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this special episode of The A to Z English Podcast, we talk with May, a dedicated English student and an active member of our Whatsapp group. (Link here: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7)It's a great conversation, so you won't want to miss it!https://atozenglishpodcast.com/interview-with-may-fong/If you could take a minute and complete a short survey about the podcast, we would be very appreciative. You can find the survey here: https://forms.gle/HHNnnqU6U8W3DodK8We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes.Intro/Outro Music by Eaters: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eaters/the-astronomers-office/agents-in-coffee-shops/Listener Interview 001: May from MalaysiaFull TranscriptKevin: Hi everybody! Welcome to A to Z English. Today Jack and I are trying something new. We're gonna be starting to interview our listeners and we have our first listener today who is May Fong from Malaysia actually and May hi.May: Good evening!Jack: Hi!May: Good evening!Jack: Thank you for joining us. This is very cool.Kevin: Yes, thank you.May: Thank you for inviting me too!Jack: It's our pleasure yeah well yeah yeah.Kevin: I agree and because we are on an English podcast of course I'd like to know well how long have you been studying English for?May: Um yeah, obviously I'm learning English from school during my school time. That means from primary until secondary school but then um after study I have honestly I've forgotten most of my English like grammar tenses and all that okay and then I started to reinforce all my English language skills since 2020.Kevin: Oh, so just a couple years?May: Yeah. Where at that time I got a study grant from Malaysia okay it's it is basically a three-month English course so yeah I studied it and with one um e-learning company so okay yeahKevin: That's great and it's a Malaysian company?May: It is not a Malaysian company actually, it's um I can call it national company. Jack: So how long was the gap where you stopped studying English and then you started again? Was it like five years or longer than that?May: Honestly, I had not been studying English since the day I left school. I should say that so yeah I'm speaking English on a daily basis but then I just I just speak. I don't know whether what or whatever I speak is correct or not and why do we why do I say things in such a way, so yeah, I just speak English but uh I understand.Jack: So after school you continued to use English? You spoke English but you weren't studying formally until 2020? You started studying again more formally?May: Okay yeah for me I study again.Kevin: Okay and so you if you started studying a couple years ago again and first you started studying with that program right with that three-month course which is great, but now you listen to podcasts and thank you for listening to our podcast of course but what other, how do you self-study? What do you do to = help you improve?May: Okay. I will watch videos on YouTube okay basically where the moment I finished that the online class so I did I did not stop there so uh every day I will go to YouTube and then I will search for whatever video that I think interesting and important for me to learn.Kevin: Yeah and are these videos specifically English videos like English grammar pronunciation or is it just some other random video that you're interested in but it's in English?May: Um I started learning grammar learning then from there and then I search for also search for listening daily conversation vocabulary lessons and anything any I mean almost anything just anything that English language.Kevin: Sure okay and I'm curious to ask, you said you watch a lot of YouTube videos but something that you have told us is that you are visually impaired right? It's hard for you to see the screen and you have a voice screen reader reading to you which is very cool. So what do you find useful about YouTube? You're not really watching the videos, right? You're just listening to them.May: Okay on YouTube all the videos okay I can see all the video most of the video come with audio so I will just listen to the audio and then whenever there is a word that I don't understand I will read this subtitle. From there I can pick up the words. Then I will go and look into the dictionary. That's how I learn.Jack: Oh wow, so you as you watch the videos, everything that you understand you keep running the video but if you find a word that you that you're not familiar with you will look it up and find the definition and then go back to the video and then finish the video?May: Yes correct. I will pause the video and then I will check it out on the dictionary. I'll check it out in the dictionary then that's how I live.Jack: That's great! A great way to do it is checking the dictionary for anyone yeah.Kevin: Did you learn any interesting words today?May: Um not today.Kevin: That's okay, um but soon.May: Usually I will do my, I'll start learning at night time like um after 8 00 pm okay 8 pm so I'll go on YouTube and see what is interesting.Jack: And how many hours do you spend every day on learning English and watching videos or podcasts?May: Um I have no specific hours of day. About one or two hours.Kevin:  Nice! Wow, that's great. One or two hours every day is very good. I need to do more Korean every day, I do maybe two minutes, very small. That's funny, um, so May you're very busy on our Whatsapp group. How and and that's great we we love to encourage our listeners to participate I in the website. It's good to see.Jack: Yeah it's great to see and um how as uh um as a person who is visually impaired, how do you how do you do that? How do you participate do you um do you record your voice usually or do you type? I mean how does what does the what is the technology that you use to interact on our Whatsapp group?May: Okay there's a software. Basically, it's a screen reader okay um different type of software like on my laptop the software I use is called NVDA basically this this software will read whatever things appear on the screen okay. Let's say when I'm browsing a website so when I move the cursor around the software read for me okay what is currently showing on the screen whether it's a link it's a heading it's a there's some chat box of um something that I can click on to get more details things.Kevin: So, you move the cursor around the screen and it gives you a kind of uh um of mental a mental picture mental like information so you can kind of get an idea of what is on the screen well what about images. Does it also describe images as well?May: Okay it is depends on the website and the apps created by the provider. KSM created it in a very friendly way of redline user where they labels all the images with proper words so for that kind of a picture. Yes the system or the screen reader will describe but sometimes they are also challenges for me as a blind user where the I mean the provider did not label all the images graphic so that is the challenge for me.Kevin: Yeah may that's something that I've seen because for our website our A to Z English podcast website I'm the person who makes the website and so I've seen when I put up a picture or when I put something up it often tells me make a good description for blind people and so I have to remember so if if my website is not good enough yet please tell me and I will go add better descriptions but we don't have too many pictures yet.May: It is good if you can consider this people with disability. I mean the need of people with disabilities so that you know yes can also read whatever on your website.Kevin: So it is actually good. Yeah I will I will keep that in mind for people like you so thank you for the reminder.Jack: Yeah I noticed that you also like to post memes as well and uh is that is that a challenge to because uh it seems like you have you're really good at uh posting memes as well is that because the picture description is really good or okay?May: For the picture that I posted, I mean, they're all the pictures that I post every morning. I got it from a Facebook page okay yeah I mean on Facebook what I most of the picture and it can be I mean the screen reader can describe it properly so that's how I got it and I post it in the group. I share it in the group.Jack: So you search on Facebook and you find something that's funny and and interesting and then you put it into the Whatsapp group.May: Yeah I shared it if there was a group and also some of my friends like morning greetings.Kevin: That's great and why do you enjoy using our English Whatsapp group? How is that helpful for you?May: Every day okay actually I was learning English with Robin's channel. like Shaw English Daily English homework.Kevin: Yeah he's great.May: That's all very good. So from there I was you guys who always joined the what's up good job there was some bro so I I clicked the link to join the group and that's how I come into the group yeahJack: How do you uh how do you listen to the podcast? Do you listen to it on your smartphone or do you listen to it on the computer? I'm just curious. What's your favorite way to listen to a podcast?May: It can be done in both way actually but most of the time I'll listen at home. That means I will use my laptop to listen.Kevin: Uh so are you listening from our webpage?May: Yes from your webpage.Kevin: Oh that's great! That means I need to make the webpage better if you're using your own page.Jack: Blame Kevin blame Kevin.Kevin: Yes that's my um that's for me you you said that you have this special software that helps you describe the screen.Jack: And how like how long have like what was the process I I'm guess I'm wondering like when did you how long have you been visually impaired is this something that was from the time you were born or did it happen later in life? Did you lose your sight later?May: I was blind since I was born so that means when I was kid I started to learn I mean at that time there is no computer no internet right I think so we will learn for blind people. We will learn some uh braille. Have you heard about it?Kevin: Yes of course.May: Braille is a method for to assist blind people to read. It's a traditional way actually. It's a traditional way and actually it's um we are still using it until it until now the only thing is nowadays we have computer so we have um screen readers so most of the time we are using them.Kevin: Yeah and I know Jack and I talked in an episode not too long ago about technology and it's so amazing because when I was a kid the technology would be impossible for blind people to use the internet and now you browse the internet just as well as anyone else.Jack: You're a pro internet user and meme sharer and on social networks. I'm sure you're much better than I am at browsing the internet. I'm not very good with computers to be honest.Kevin: Yeah we're we're old people.May: Yeah okay they're actually this can do most of the things for blind like the light useronly sometimes there are challenges but of course overall it helps.Jack: Yeah that's what fantastic to hear. Yeah what is the what's maybe the biggest challenge um when using a screen reader? It's something that you if you if you could design your own software is there something you would change to improve it?May: The biggest challenge I could say will be when the provider created the website um as I mentioned earlier not friendly to blind users like they didn't label the image and the graphic and then one more thing is um they I mean uh for your information blind user doesn't use a mouse when navigate while navigating a computer all right so yeah so we use only keyboard only keyboard that means we have to remember most of the keyboard commands.Kevin: So you do know all of the pro commands, at least the main keyboard command the important ones?May: Right of course you'll need oh yeah when something is created on they created something where we can only click by the mouse or move around by the mouse that is the biggest challenge sureKevin: Interesting right yeah well May this is all very interesting to hear. It's so very cool that you're able even without being able to see the internet you're able to watch YouTube's from Robin's channel and you're able to listen to our podcast. That's so fantastic what the internet does for you today. I have one final question for you if because again we're an English learning podcast if you could give everyone a tip, what would you tell someone who wants to learn English how can they how can they learn what do you think was helpful?May: Um well there's a lot there's a there are a lot of free um learning channel learning tips learning exercises learning lessons on the internet so you just have to browse through it that's all you can learn okay actually yeah like The A to Z English Podcast.Kevin: Yep of course. Yeah that's great, so May, thank you very much for joining and for everyone else out there who's listening, we have a Whatsapp channel that we were talking about here and if you want to come and talk to us in our Whatsapp channel and maybe even talk to us here on an interview episode you can find all of the links and everything from our hopefully friendly website absolutely thanks very much nice to talk to you!Jack: thank you so muchWhatsapp Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H4LaiLAUc5SEiaxBp16aEpSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Rob's guest today is Jack Russell, retired cricketer, cricket coach, goalkeeping coach and artist.  Jack is a retired international English cricketer. Born in Gloucestershire he played for his home county from 1981 to 2004. Starting as a fast bowler he was soon inspired to try his hand at wicket keeping and become one of England's finest. Known for archetypically being his ‘own man' following a stellar career Jack went on to coach goalkeeping in professional football.  The seeds of his post cricket life were being well sown during his playing days and since hanging up his gloves Jack has become an artist of renown, painting many famous images of his beloved sport and environment. Jack and Rob talk about his childhood and initial interest in cricket, his career and mentors, his understanding of performance and training and some of his biggest and most important experiences in cricket.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Jack started playing cricket at his fathers village club when he was eight or nine years old. He always competed against older children or adults.  Andy Brassington of Gloucestershire County Cricket was one of Jacks strongest and earliest mentors in the game of cricket. Understanding the mind and its thought processes is as essential as understanding the physics of cricket. Being a perfectionist can result in being counterproductive. On his first day with England at Lords Jack tried a bit too hard and dropped two catches. Pressure made him lose his focus..   In his latest book Jack expresses some of his experiences in cricket “18 Counties ; A Personal Journey” by painting all the cricket grounds he played while with Gloucester.   BEST MOMENTS ‘It was just a really sport orientated household. I just grew up with it so the love of sport came from there.' - Jack ‘There's something about people being challenged with older siblings and parents in sport.' – Rob ‘He (Andy Brassington) coached me to perform better to help me take his job. How many people would do that? So eventually I replaced him in the team.' – Jack ‘You can be such a perfectionist you end up destroying yourself and you end up destroying the end product.' – Jack ‘It didn't go according to plan, the first day, but I came out of it with reasonable flying colours.' – Jack ‘When I wrote about playing at Old Trafford, it's a book of sketches and paintings, but the double page spread where I write about that incident, I've not put any sketches, it's just black and white.' - Jack  GUEST RESOURCES https://jackrussell.co.uk   VALUABLE RESOURCES Leader Manager Coach Podcast      ABOUT THE HOST Rob Ryles is a UEFA A licensed coach with a League Managers Association qualification and a science and medicine background. He has worked in the football industry in Europe, USA and Africa; at International, Premiership, League, Non-League and grassroots levels with both World Cup and European Championship experience Rob Ryles prides himself on having a forward thinking and progressive approach to the game built through his own experience as well as lessons learned from a number of highly successful managers and coaches. The Leader Manager Coach Podcast is where we take a deep dive examining knowledge, philosophies, wisdom and insight to help you lead, manage and coach in football, sport and life.    CONTACT METHOD https://www.robryles.co.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMPYDVzZVnA https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertryles/?originalSubdomain=ukSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/robrylesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Summary: Singer-songwriter and self-described modern-day troubadour, Jack Stafford joins the show to share his passion for creating good songs for good causes. Jack is the host of Podsongs, a unique podcast where musicians interview inspirational people, in service to others, as inspiration for brand new songs. Today, Harry and Jack share in a rich discussion about spirituality, the motivation behind creation and the importance of preserving knowledge for future generations. Jack shares his musical background and why the COVID lockdowns led him unexpectedly to podcasting. Now Jack is on a new mission entirely as he discusses his future endeavors and what he hopes to achieve through podcasting. Episode Sponsors: Focusrite –http://pcjk.es/focusrite ( http://pcjk.es/focusrite) FullCast –https://fullcast.co/ ( https://fullcast.co/) Key Takeaways: 06:28 – Jack Stafford talks about his passion for making music, his background as a songwriter and music producer and what inspired him to launch Podsongs 15:56 – From musician to copywriter 19:10 – Preserving knowledge across generations 24:16 – Prep work and research that goes into each interview 32:32 – The motivation of creation 35:26 – The Aetherius Society and Jack's spiritual journey 43:57 – What's next for Jack and his podcast 52:24 – Harry thanks Jack for joining the show and let's listeners know where they can connect with him Tweetable Quotes: “Over the past year, the most rewarding interviews have been the ones not when someone's written a book, but when they've done it for a good cause like air quality or air pollution, something to save the planet or humanity.” (14:00) (Jack) “It goes back to the copywriting background where you get this brief which is this very complicated, boring document and you're supposed to pull out the benefits from the features. So, when I interviewed a sleep doctor, he talked about how there are these different chronotypes and we're all a different chronotype and you can sleep based on your type of biorhythm. So, if I put that in a song, more people will hear about it and more people will study his book.” (19:55) (Jack) “Ignorance is the only crime on the Earth. And if we can solve this, all the other problems will be solved.” (34:55) (Jack) “It will have this trickle-down effect because most people listening to this will just roll their eyes, but because we're in this reincarnation cycle where, along the other realms, the membership is much higher. So, when you're born back on this realm, there are some people that it will take just one word to connect.” (47:34) (Jack) Links Mentioned: FullCast Website –https://fullcast.co/ ( https://fullcast.co/) Podcast Junkies Junkies Facebook Group –https://www.facebook.com/groups/podcastjunkiesjunkies/ ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/podcastjunkiesjunkies/) Link to Podfest Expo Virtual Summit –https://podfestexpo.com/ ( https://podfestexpo.com/) Link to The Podosphere - https://www.thepodosphere.com/ (https://www.thepodosphere.com/) Link to Aetherius Society - https://www.aetherius.org/ (https://www.aetherius.org/) Link to Descript - https://www.descript.com/ (https://www.descript.com/) Jack's Website - https://podsongs.com/ (https://podsongs.com/) Podsongs Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/podsongs/ (https://www.instagram.com/podsongs/) Podsongs Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/podsongs/ (https://www.facebook.com/podsongs/) Podsongs Twitter - https://twitter.com/podsongs?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor (https://twitter.com/podsongs?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Jack's Podcasts: Mysticast – https://open.spotify.com/show/7Ct8dufDZMUmM24CD2FQnA (https://open.spotify.com/show/7Ct8dufDZMUmM24CD2FQnA) Podsongs – https://podsongs.com/ (https://podsongs.com/)

Agriculture is Montana's—and Yellowstone County's—number one industry! With the NILE fully underway this week, we felt that now is the perfect time to give you some basics of the agriculture industry. We sat down with Callie Coolie with MSU Extension and Bonnie Deverniero with the NILE to talk all things ag.MSU ExtensionNorthern International Livestock ExpositionBillings Chamber Ag CommitteeIf you would like to advertise with us, suggest an episode, or ask a question, please feel free to email us at podcast@billingschamber.com.Marya and Jack's answers to this week's questions.1. What is your earliest ag memory?Marya: My earliest at memory is when I was able to bottle feed a new lamb.Jack: I have been helping out on my family ranch since before I can remember. I have a lot of fuzzy childhood memories of sorting cattle on foot.2. How do you like your steak cooked? Marya: I prefer my steak medium rare.Jack: It should be noted that it depends on the cut, but I also like my steak medium. I prefer the texture of a medium steak to a medium-rare.3. What is the best Halloween costume you have ever come up with? Marya: My best Halloween costume was when I dressed up as Cruella Deville.Jack: I also had a horseback Halloween costume. I was the headless horseman.4. Do you like candy corn? Marya: I do not like candy corn.Jack: I wouldn't eat it all year, but the Halloween season isn't complete unless you eat at least one of those pumpkins.

August bring us a dear friend, JACK-IT, with his great techhouse selection will pump up your tanning session on the beach. Tracklist 1) Jaded - Bang Bang (Extended Mix) 2) John Summit - Deep End (Extended Mix) 3) Lil' Mo' Yin Yang - Reach (Wh0's Thumping Remix) 4) Paul Sirrell - Dub Number 7 (Original Mix) 5) Andrea Raffa - Hit with Barbara (Alex Kenji Remix) 6) Sinner & James - I Need U (Original Mix) 7) Bob Sinclar - I Feel for You (Mercer Extended Remix) 8) Kafzon - Pink Sherbet (Original Mix) 9) Barbara Tucker - You Want Me Back (Dennis Quin Extended Mix) 10) Lee Foss, Martin Ikin, Hayley May - Gravity (MI Dub) 11) Michael Gray - The Weekend (Low Steppa Remix) 12) PAX - To the Drum 13) Everything feat. Meggy (Mark Fanciulli Remix)

August bring us a dear friend, JACK-IT, with his great techhouse selection will pump up your tanning session on the beach. Tracklist 1) Jaded - Bang Bang (Extended Mix) 2) John Summit - Deep End (Extended Mix) 3) Lil' Mo' Yin Yang - Reach (Wh0's Thumping Remix) 4) Paul Sirrell - Dub Number 7 (Original Mix) 5) Andrea Raffa - Hit with Barbara (Alex Kenji Remix) 6) Sinner & James - I Need U (Original Mix) 7) Bob Sinclar - I Feel for You (Mercer Extended Remix) 8) Kafzon - Pink Sherbet (Original Mix) 9) Barbara Tucker - You Want Me Back (Dennis Quin Extended Mix) 10) Lee Foss, Martin Ikin, Hayley May - Gravity (MI Dub) 11) Michael Gray - The Weekend (Low Steppa Remix) 12) PAX - To the Drum 13) Everything feat. Meggy (Mark Fanciulli Remix)

August bring us a dear friend, JACK-IT, with his great techhouse selection will pump up your tanning session on the beach. Tracklist 1) Jaded - Bang Bang (Extended Mix) 2) John Summit - Deep End (Extended Mix) 3) Lil' Mo' Yin Yang - Reach (Wh0's Thumping Remix) 4) Paul Sirrell - Dub Number 7 (Original Mix) 5) Andrea Raffa - Hit with Barbara (Alex Kenji Remix) 6) Sinner & James - I Need U (Original Mix) 7) Bob Sinclar - I Feel for You (Mercer Extended Remix) 8) Kafzon - Pink Sherbet (Original Mix) 9) Barbara Tucker - You Want Me Back (Dennis Quin Extended Mix) 10) Lee Foss, Martin Ikin, Hayley May - Gravity (MI Dub) 11) Michael Gray - The Weekend (Low Steppa Remix) 12) PAX - To the Drum 13) Everything feat. Meggy (Mark Fanciulli Remix)

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We discussed Iran, The Broadcom chipset in cable modems that makes them vulnerable to attack, How Amazon is changing it's delivery model and most importantly if you use Firefox, the Patch that is available. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Transcript: Craig We are going to have to be prepared for and expect this as it is not just an aberration, nor was the SARS concern or is any outbreak, right. Craig Peterson  Good morning, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. I don't know about you, but I'm concerned about the coronavirus. So let's get into it. I discussed it with Jack Heath this morning. Here we go. Jack Heath The coronavirus is traveling worldwide, and I'm going to ask our next guest just about it on the technology side of things. If technology can help speed up, for example, a vaccine for this coronavirus. Still, it's interesting that this has affected our financial markets so much. Is it due to the global implications on the spread of it or just a reaction to all the news reports recently? We haven't had spent a quiet period with the whole Iranian situation, whether it was a Qasem Soleimani twos weeks ago or all the impeachment stuff or that coronavirus is responsible for market impacts or could it be the markets are jittery after the announcement that a Massachusetts company is working among many on a possible vaccine. Here is Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy, and who has a show on Saturday on these iHeart news-talk stations. Craig, in this fast-moving era, coming out of China, the source but also as it spreads and mutates, I guess a few thousand people may have been affected by this virus. The question is, can technology help curb it? Craig Peterson Good morning. It is a very, very big problem they've got in China right now. Of course, one of the significant issues we've had over the years with China when it comes to these diseases is that they've been so tight-lipped about it. So there is a doctor who is working up in Toronto, and he did some fantastic stuff. He founded this company called Blue Dot and previously involved with the SARS outbreak. Now, you might remember that back in 2003, it was an epidemic, and it spread from China and, ultimately, all around the world. Yeah, it was a huge deal. And these types of flu can, of course, cripple hospitals. China is building a hospital right now. Another one. In fact, during the SARS epidemic, they constructed a 1000 bed hospital in six days total to help handle those people. So he was working as an epidemiologist during the SARS whole outbreak. He wanted a better way to figure out what was going on. And he did. That's what blue.is he got about $10 million worth of funding when he first launched a few years ago. And he and blue dot were able to predict on December 31, and they told their customers who are all major countries. So December 31, he said everybody, hey, we see the spread. Now what they do, Jack and it is rather interesting. There's they're looking at things like global airline ticketing data to help calculate the spread based on travel by residents. It monitors newspapers in 65 different languages. And it's using a form of artificial intelligence to figure it out. So he was able to correctly predicted the virus would jump from Juan to Bangkok to Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo. And he got it 100%. Right. So that's one piece of technology that's an amazing blue dot. And then just for the regular stuff, if you're interested in watching what's happening with the usual slews, you can go ahead online and go to google.com or google.org slash Flu Trends. And Google's tracking it as well. But Google's paying a little more attention to some of the social media and some of the other things that are going on, but they've got the public Data Explorer, you'll find there and many other things. And we're using that we're also using some of these devices. Is that we wear the monitor our heart rates, but also can monitor our body temperature. They're also using the collected data at airports, watching people thermally for diseases, we've been doing that for quite a while. There's a lot of technology involved. Well, back up to December 31, he said his data showed -- hey, we've got an outbreak, it's going to spread. The US Centers for Disease Control warned us on January six, but they'd already gotten notification from Blue Dot, and the World Health Organization was January 9. So basically, right now, we had about a one week jump on everything else knowing what was going to be happening. Jack It's interesting because you mentioned the SARS epidemic, and I'm not sure if that, you know, it's a good thing if these things don't pan out. Justin did allude earlier with the traditional strains that are not the current strain right now of flu that is out there. Now is the height of the flu season. Due to the potency of this virus and the lack of a valid vaccine, this could get dangerous. We must be prepared for and expect that this is not just an aberration, nor was a SARS concern or nor is any outbreak. Craig Yeah, you're right. It is something that could kill a lot of people. You might remember the Spanish flu back in 1918. And that killed millions of people worldwide. And that's all it takes. So getting this little bit of early warning, knowing where it might be coming from in a country like China, of course, they just shut down all travel for the rest of us a little bit more complicated but knowing it's out there, being able to take the next step. There's also new technology when you talk about the shots for like the flu that we get. Right now. Its kind of against most of our seasonal flu, do come from Asia, and it seems to have to do with the handling of everything over there, poultry, pork products, etc. Were there live at the markets Not just mentioned just the sheer population. I mean, you know, you gotta look at how many people are in China. Jack Jack You make fun of me for being a vegetarian see, they're still going to make you sick Justin on the universal flu shot and showing a lot of promise, and it's already entered into the trial. So you know, who knows what we'll be talking about next year during flu season, Craig Peterson. Craig   Hey, as always, I try and give you some tips and things to do the obvious stuff. Well, according to the officials right now would have slowed down or even stopped entirely the spread of this virus. and that is to wash your hands and don't touch your face with your hand, especially during flu season. You know, make sure if you have a cough, you cough into your elbow. Hopefully, you've got a long sleeve shirt on, and that'll help stop the spread. So basic. Things will help a whole lot. You don't need high tech for any of that stuff. All right, take care, guys. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow, Karen and I and the rest of the team. we're busy, busy getting everything ready for you guys. So we'll let you know when that's all set. Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

[Jack wakes with a start and runs to the mirror, he reaches to stroke his once unfamiliar long, white beard only to realize it’s gone! He examines his face from every angle, and looks down at his stomach: sizable but not rotund! A jaunty Christmas tune begins to play in the background as Jack runs into the kitchen to see his beautiful wife looking sad and cooking eggs. Jack skips to her and grabs hold of her waist spinning her in a dancers twirl.] Jack: “Cait! Cait! Get out the decorations, it’s Christmas Eve!” Cait: “But Jack you banned all Christmas from the house, the night before last!” Jack: ”That’s in the past Cait! I had this wonderful dream last night you see, and you were there and Kenny was there and...Bah! Who cares it doesn't matter now, because, I..I..” [jaunty Christmas tune gets louder] Jack: [singing] “I think that I love Christmas, more than yester-year! And I don’t want a Christmas, to miss us! This year!” Cait: “Wait what’s going on here, are you singing right now? Where did that music come from, and [gasps] those decorations! Jack how are you doing all this?” Jack: ”It's all gravy Cait-y! Just got a little holiday magic left in me is all, and we’re gonna need every bit of it y’know! [whispers] For what comes next...” Cait: Wait! What comes next? Jack: “Well the second verse of course! “ Cait: ”Now hold on just a sec—“ Jack:[singing] ”So bring out all the presents!...“ Cait: “Woah where did those come from, and did you just wrap these!?” Jack:[singing] “Loved ones and good cheer!...“ Cait:”Mom? Dad? And all my friends!? Where did you...How did you all just?—“ Jack[singing]: “Cus I don’t want a Christmas, to miss us! This year!” Cait: “Okay! this is all just too much, where’s Kenny? I need to lie down.” Jack: “No Cait! We need you to sing, the last verse requires all of us!’ Cait: “What does that even mean? Besides I don’t even know the words!” Jack: ”You do Cait, they’ve been in your heart this whole time. I’m sorry I broke your Christmas spirit, but that was the old Jack! So please, won’t you let the new Jack help you fix it?” Cait: [nods] Jack: “Okay then, take my hand and close your eyes.” Everyone: [singing] “For in our hearts there’s ringing, joyful loud and clear! That we don't want a Christmas, to miss us! This year!” Jack: “Cait you did it!” Cait: “I can't believe it! The words just came right out! Thank you Jack, this is the best Christmas gift ever! But I didn’t get you anything!” Jack: “Well...let's not be too sure about that..” [Cait looks up to see Jack’s hand hovering mistletoe over their heads] Jack: [waggles eyebrows] Cait: [eye rolls] “Oh brother...” -THE END- Today’s topics include: Who’s Running, SNL Cold Open, CaitCait Siwa and the Calliday-special! Episode aired on Twitch, Monday 12/23/19 - VOD link for this episode here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/525334433 Subscribe to Celeb News Ride Home!: https://www.ridehome.info/podcast/celeb-news-ride-home/ Buy JackAM merch: https://jackam.tv/shop/ Donate!: https://streamelements.com/jackam/tip A safe and wonderful Holiday season to all my Slurp-siblings who celebrate! -

James: Hey, audience. Welcome to Achieve Wealth podcast. Achieve Wealth podcast focuses on value add real estate investing. I'm James Kandasamy. Today I have an accomplished couple, Jack and Michelle Bosch. And Jack and Michelle Bosch have done more than 4000 land flips across the nation. Land flips is something very interesting to me. And, you know, it's an asset class, or an asset class, which I think is very interesting. And you can learn how we make money out of it. They've done a lot of single-family houses. And they also have done apartments; 330 units apartments. And, you know, they are continuing to look for more and apartments as well, but I think they are the masters of land flip. Hey Jack and Michelle, welcome to the show. Michelle: Thank you so much for having us, James we're excited to be here. Jack: Thank you for having us, James. James: Tell me, did I miss out anything in your credentials or you know, did I -- Jack: No, other than we're both immigrants, we both came from other countries. So we started here with, just like you, just came over from another country and so we have that in common. But now we flip now 4000 pieces of land. We teach it now; so we have seminars on that. But then for asset allocation, basically the money we make for land flips and whichever way rental properties now, we rolled that into more and more two apartments now. Michelle: Yes. James: Got it. Michelle: To produce what we call one-time cash with the land flips like you work for a once and you get paid once. We're also able to produce some cash flow because we are also able to sell those properties using seller financing, you know. James: Got it. Michelle: And so you do get some mailbox money, but those notes usually come to an end once the property is paid off. And so, we're always in the back of our minds is okay, let's roll cash profits and cash flow into what we call forever cash, which would be a partner. James: Got it. Before we go into the detail of land flipping, I want to understand your background because I know all of us are immigrants So can you tell me when did you guys move to the country? And how did you move? Were you already successful on the day that you land in this country? Michelle: Oh no. Jack: Of course, we're like, we're a billionaire. James: Did you find gold outside the boat? Jack: No. So, Michelle… Michelle: Yes, for me I came from Honduras here in 1995 to study. I came to a tiny little town like about three hours South-West of Chicago called McComb, Illinois, that's where I met this man in the middle of the cornfields. It's basically university town, you know, and nothing else to do.I came here for a business degree, my undergrad, and I was in my senior year there, my third and last year when I met Jack. We shared some upper finance courses together because he was here for an MBA, 10 months. He met me and then he couldn't leave anymore. James: Got stuck, you got stuck in the US. Jack: She's right. She summarized it. I came in 1997, Michelle was in her last year in undergrad. I did come in for a Masters to that same university that had an exchange program with the university I used to go to Germany. And I was kind of like be able to kind of accomplish three goals in one year. Number one; I was able to get an MBA in the United States because it was an accredited school and I was studying business Germany. Already had enough credits and I just needed these 10 months, was enough to give me the American MBA. They give me, I tested out and all of these other things. Number two, I was able to get credit for the missing classes in Germany. So with that, I didn't have to go back to Germany to do more classes. I completed my degree in Germany, those same classes gave me the MBA. Also helped me complete my degree in Germany and improve my English. And the fourth and most important thing, I met this one. Michelle: But to answer your question as to whether we came here successful, absolutely not. I came in with two suitcases to my name, Jack pretty much the same. You know, I was raised by a single mom and my father passed away when we were very, you know when I was very young. And it was, you know, she was sending me here to study with a lot of sacrifices. I had to take several courses, you know, take seven courses per semester, like advanced as much as possible, because I couldn't afford to be in the US for more than two and a half, three years, you know what I mean? And eating soup towards the end of the semester when you run out of money. And, but I didn't have, I did have in the back of my mind the thought that real estate has been incredibly good for my family. You know, before my father passed, he had made an amazing decision. And it was to buy a piece of commercial property that to this day spits out cash, you know, for my mother. And so -- Jack: And that piece of property brought her to college here in the -- Michelle: Got me through college. Jack: And still sustains her mom over there. Yes, in my case and my dad's, again the same thing my mom, not the same thing but similar. My dad is a high school teacher, retired now. My mom's a stay at home mom. So no, I came here with student debt. I came here with enough money to pay for one semester, I didn't have, really didn't have a clue, how I would even pay for the second semester. Luckily, I got a job at school. The first car that I bought in the US was a $900 old Chevy caprice, like the old [inaudible05:31] car that they use to drive around -- James: It had four wheels, right? Four wheels? Jack: Four wheels, yes. Michelle: And I was like Jack, why did you get this, I mean, there are so many cars, why did you get this car? And his answer was like, cars in Germany are so tiny, I was looking for the biggest car possible in the US. Jack: Like Germans and every single one of them bought the biggest car that they could find. James: That's good. That's good. Yes, I like to, that's a very interesting story from both of you, right. So I like to, I mean before we go into the technicality of the commercial real estate and all that, I like to understand a lot about the thought process and you know, the people behind it, right. Because I think that's what makes everybody successful. It's not about the tool like real estate, right. So tell me about what was your family thinking when looking about the US from outside, right? Did they think the US is the land of opportunity, easy to get rich? Or how I mean, can you talk about the process that when families outside of the country when they want to send their children to the US, what do they usually think, you know, what do they think that you kids will get here? Jack: Well, I think Michelle's mom was perhaps not thrilled that she would stay here. Michelle: Yes. James: But not thrilled? Michelle: No, yes. James: Okay. Michelle: The whole point was to come here, study, not find a husband, go back home and basically help her manage, you know, this piece of real estate and hopefully, you know, continue growing the legacy that was left to us. James: Okay. Jack: Next, get a job, right? Michelle: Yes, yes. Jack: Same thing here. My parents were absolutely not thrilled that I was staying here behind. They, I literally had the job lined up in Germany. I had the, I just put my student furniture in my parents' basement. I had a good degree from a good university and good things and they're like, what are you doing? What are you staying there? What's going on there, you're so far away. In particular, my mom had a really hard time with it for several years. But then once they saw our success, particularly once we entered real estate, and once we saw success and what that success actually means for them too and for us. It's like we don't, we see our parents, this year we see my parents three or four times even though they live in Germany. And it's like, and they, we support them a little bit financially. They get to come here and they get to spend time here. And they see that they don't have to worry about us like we're the one or like, we're my, Michelle and our family, they don't, they're like a peace of mind. They're okay. They're good. They're happy financially, they're good. So, you know what as a parent you wonder, you want to have that feeling. So they know, ultimately, it's a good decision and took them like 15 years to say that, but they did. Michelle: Yes, I mean, we also contributed to, you know, being able to retire Jack's dad before time. You know, a couple of years before he had been working as a school teacher for many, many years. And he was just at the point where he just didn't want to do it anymore but he couldn't leave it because, you know, that involved a big reduction in his pension if he did. And so we put the pedal to the metal back then and it was just through land flipping, to be able to make up for that, you know, for those two years of early retirement and being able to retire him early. So -- Jack: So he ended up retiring a year and a half, two and a half years early because of that and James: Wow, awesome. Jack: And so overall so now they totally have changed. Michelle: Yes, so family has been always I think also big why for us, a big driver to get things done. James: Got it. That's absolutely what happened, you can come here and help out your family back home. It's just sometimes people, I mean sometimes they think that okay we want to come to the US and stay here but that was not the case for both of you, right? I mean, you came to study and you're supposed to go back. But you got stuck with each other. Jack: The United States is a wonderful country to be. But then we also, we realized, I don't want to live in Honduras, Michelle didn't want to live in Germany. Nothing wrong with these two countries, they are beautiful countries but language barriers, cultural barriers [inaudible09:40] we're already here, let's try to make this work here. We got lucky, we both got jobs here. We got the job that got the visa, the h1B visa, took five and a half years to get to that process. Michelle: And it was a job, jobs we both hated. But we were handcuffed because of the, you know, green card situation. And so we had to stay but -- Jack: Yes, but yes, it was just something, let's see if we can make this work here because we like it here. And we -- James: Got it. Jack: Beautiful neutral ground also for us. James: So do you think that as an immigrant, did that whole life situation gave you a boost, a reason for you to be successful in the US? Michelle: Absolutely, it like, I think it was incredible, it gives you an incredible drive and hunger. Like I don't come from a wealthy society like Jack's, you know. I was going back to a third world country, you know, yes, from a middle-class family, but still to a very poor society. And so for me, yes, that, you know, that was an incredible drive, you know. You still go back home and those wealth disparities between the haves and have nots are brutal. And so you definitely don't want to be caught in the haves not part. You want to be caught in the other group of people. So, yes, that was definitely a big, big drive for me for sure. Jack: Yes, absolutely, yes, same here. I mean, but a different way. Here, it's more like I could, anytime I could have left and go to Germany, first-class country, Mercedes Benz, would've gotten a good job with a BMW as a business car and expense budget and staying in nice hotels and all those kind of stuff. But the overall I mean, there's something really amazing about the US and I keep saying and it's not like blind nationalism. It's just for business and for success and for comfort, and for just that particular business. It's just an amazing country. It's like so once we started setting our eyes on that, it's like, it's so easy to do this. And definitely helps to be an immigrant, I don't know if the hardship helps if you use them, right. Michelle: Yes. Jack: So we use them as fuel. We used them as a reason why we needed to succeed because we did not want to live a life like I was travelling 100%. I mean, sounds glamorous, like I was jumping the plane on Monday morning going somewhere. But I was staying in Holiday Inn Express where ants were crawling up the walls. And in some cases, and usually, in small towns, where there are five restaurants, three of them are fast foods and I was like working in some companies up till midnight and I didn't enjoy it. So I use those things as fuel to say okay, I really got to do something extra in order to succeed. Now, having said that, being an immigrant here, which as you can probably confirm, is you start, you see way more opportunity that the non-immigrant see. Because it's not normal to you, what you see around you is all new. So as it's new, you look at it from a different angle and you see the holes in it, based on compared to what you see in other places in the world. And it's like well, and any kind of opportunity that ever existed is really masking itself as a problem. So you see, like anything that created like glasses, have been created because people don't see up with eyesight anymore. The problem is the eyesight gives is the solution. So anything even multifamily is the solution to a problem. You take a problem, you take a problem property that's been run down and you make it into the prettiest property in the neighbourhood. You provide a solution for people who want to save, solid, good well-working place, affordable place to live you can make something out of that. And it's true for everything and as an immigrant, I have a feeling you see that much more than then if you're born and raised here and it's everything is just normal. James: Yes, yes. Hey, I had a friend from the UK and he left the UK came to the US and he kept on telling me this. I don't know whether the UK or entire Europe, right, I mean it's a well to do country, it's a rich country but there's no easy part to break out from your circle.You can't break out as a breakout and go to the next level, you’re always within that, you're probably working, you're earning, you're learning, you are living an average life like everybody else, but you can't break out to the next level. So I'm not sure how is that in Germany, but in the US. Jack: Plus Germans, they don't move a lot. So you're on top of it, almost like down by your social circles, that like there's a party, a thing and a friendship. So if you start breaking out, you become you're almost alienating the people around you. Michelle: An anomaly. Jack: An anomaly. James: Okay. Jack: And if you don't have the stamina to keep that off and build a new circle of friendships or so, then you're going to be pulled back down. And that's another benefit as an immigrant, it's like, hey, it's like you didn't burn the boat but you cut the ties. It's a brand new world, it's a brand new opportunity, you associate yourself and make friends with those people that you want to make friends with. And it's just a, it's almost, it's a brand new world. It's a different thing. James: Got it. Michelle: I think especially in Jack's case, you know, resonates with that because he comes from a very small town in Germany. And he's like, there are some people that even though I didn't want to socialize, I had to because it was such a small town. James: Yes, that's true. Jack: Once when I was younger I was in college, I went to study in Spain for half a year. I came back went to my favourite bar and they just asked me, hey you looked tan, what do you want to drink? So nothing changed in like eight months or so. And not a single thing had changed, the same people were sitting at the same desk, tables, in the same bar, drinking the same drink. And 20 years later, still is nothing has changed. It's still, you know, look older and unhealthier but other than that it's the same thing. James: Yes. That's maybe that's why the index happiness index is much higher in some European country. People are just happy with the way they are, right? Jack: Yes, and there's no judgment in that. Michelle: Yes. James: Why do you want to rush? Why do you want to rush? Why do you want to get rich just leave as it is, right so? Jack: Yes, there's nothing set to be there but if you have ambitions if you enjoy growth, like a bit like we enjoy personal growth. We're really on a personal growth journey, it comes with challenges, it comes with new hurdles, it comes with expansion and so it wouldn't be my work. Michelle: And those challenges, you know, are our part, we know are part of the journey. And you think that the goal is you know, a worth goal, but it's really, the goal is a being on a constant process of becoming, an expansion kinda like what Jack said. Jack: And the wealth comes as a side benefit of that. James: Got it. Got it. So let's go to your businesses. So you guys, you had your green card, you came here. You worked for how many years did you work on a corporate life? Jack: Five and a half. Michelle: Five and a half. James: Five and a half, so what happened after five and a half? When did you start your land flipping thing? Jack: Well, the land business, we started about three years in or two years in we realized this is not what we want to do with this job thing. So we started dabbling with real estate. And we really didn't find success until about four years into it, until the end of 2002. So -- James: Hold on, on the two years that you realize that your work is not the thing that you all wanting to do, right? Jack: Right. James: What was that ah-ha moment, say that? Jack: The ah-ha moment was actually, for me was the first particular day that the company of 7000 people, let go a 1000 people in one day. Michelle: Right after September 11. Jack: And the economy did a massive shift downwards, the software company that had grown from 500 people when I joined them to 7000 people, three years later to two or three years later, we're starting to go back down from 7000 to 4000 people. And they did that in one year. As a matter of fact, it was within three days, during that one year. James: Wow. Jack: So one day 1000, another day 1000, another day 1000. These cuts were like for a few months apart from each other. But the first time that happened was when they literally, left and right when they when we were at the customer side, there was a software company. But I don't know anything about software and just wasn't a business, account department. They, business analyst, we were so worried about the customer side, that the phone would ring and our network was shut down. Usually, connect the internet to our corporate networks to get to files and stuff, all of a sudden, nobody could get into the network. It's like, oh, you get it, you get it. Michelle: You know what's happening, right? Jack: We started calling people in other offices, what's going on, you get in, no, nobody could get in. It's like oh, our network is down. Next thing you know, few of them, was over the phone rings, the guy picks up and all the colour leaves his face. And three minutes later, he picks up, he grabs his stuff and says, hey guys, nice meeting you. I was just fired. And he basically picks up his stuff and leaves. And that's it. And I was like, what you mean that's it? Like, again, Germany, if somebody fires you, they have to give you three months, -- Michelle: Three months. Jack: Three months notice. James: I thought it was 12 months notice. Michelle: Yes, so then you can actually train your replacement. Jack: Train your replacement and so on and or least have to pay for three months, some company say go home, but they have to pay for three months. Here, you're off and they gave him I think of four weeks severance if they signed something that they wouldn't sue the company. So and then during the course of the day, a whole bunch of people that I knew were let go. And I was sweating bullets, obviously, you know, we both were sweating bullets, because obviously, we work -- Michelle: And at that point, I had joined actually Jack's immigration, you know, files and paperwork because we figured, okay, there are very few people trying to emigrate from Germany. And there's so many more coming from south of the border, that stuck on Jack's application. And so we were both, you know, on his paperwork. Jack: So if I would have lost that job, we would have 60 days to find another job or leave the country. So at that moment, we realized, okay, this is, we're so breaking replaceable here, we're just a number in this big wheel of 7000 people. And after the day only 6000 people were like, okay, we got it, we got to do something else. We don't like it. After five and a half in an industry, you're almost like pigeonholed in that industry. I didn't want to stay for the rest of my career in that industry. So we wanted to get out. And we didn't know how to do that we just looked around. And after a few months or weeks of looking, we came across real estate, tried all kinds of different things, but couldn't get anything to work until we came across land flip. Michelle: And I think the land flipping thing was even, like falling forward. Jack: Yes, like pure coincidences, just like -- Michelle: We're looking into taxing and taxing you know, taxing investing. And I had gone up to somewhere in Northern California to a taxing option and stumbled upon, you know, a piece of land, a lady that owned a piece of land and we auction it off. And we're like, oh my gosh, you know, how could we do something like this? But instead of waiting until an auction happens, you know, how can we get to people much, much sooner. And because if she's a, you know, an owner of vacant land and wanted out, there must be other people. Jack: So we started sending direct mail to owners of real estate who have back taxes. And only people that own land, call us back. And -- James: You know what, that is exactly happened to me. I was trying to look for houses and all the people with land call me back. I said I don't want land, I want houses. Jack: There you go, you just missed out on a big opportunity right there. James: Yes, I should have known you guys. Jack: And then one guy had a property, it was worth about $8,000. But he hadn't done it, what's called a percolation test to make sure to put a septic tank in there, to see how the water, how fast the water sinks in the ground and it hasn't passed the septic test. So to him, it was worthless and he was leaving the state and he was wanting to leave. And he's like you guys can have that thing. And it's like, well, how about $400, he's like take it. So we got this thing for $400. And we sold it literally the next day to the neighbor across the street for $4000. James: Wow. Jack: And that became the beginning -- Michelle: And that's because our negotiation skills sucked. We were, the neighbor shows up Jack: And they just offered 4000 and we said, yes. Michelle: We were ecstatic, you know. Jack: Instead of like negotiating, we're just like -- James: You were like 10 times more, that's it, done, right? Jack: Right. And then the next deal was 10,000, the next deal, babe then we got to deal with like 21 properties for $30,000 that we sold for over $100,000. And then all of a sudden things started working. And then we also realize that most people that want to get rid of these properties don't actually even own property taxes. So now we go after all the general land and we generated millions of dollars, and we started doing this part-time then. Then Michelle quit her job because she was on the visa, started this full time. And then in March of 2003, I got, we got the green card. And then a few months later we felt comfortable. Michelle: I retire again. Jack: Retire, exactly. James: So my wife styles me. Jack: Then so in October of 2003, we quit our job, but it just we stumbled into that, bonded, built it up. And then for several years, we put the blinders on and all we did was land flipping. We only put our head up when the market crashed and everyone around us was losing money and we're still making lots of money. And then that's when we started buying single families and then later apartments. Michelle: Because we could buy houses here for forty, fifty thousand dollars, you know, with five grand in repairs and rent them for anywhere between $900 to $1100. James: Yes. Michelle: So you know, it made sense. And we had all the cash profits, you know, from the land business, because that land business actually, we're able to grow it very rapidly to almost an eight-figure business. You know, the first year we did about 60 deals, the second year, we did about 120 deals, 130. Jack: The third deal, 3800 deals. Michelle: Because we use them, we figured out a way to flush a lot of these properties. And by using auctions. So we used to have big live auctions, you know, we advertise on TV, radio, billboards, periodicals, online flyers. And get like 600 people to a room here in the Phoenix Convention Center, and sell them in one day 250, 200 to 250 parcels. And so we were quickly able to scale that and -- Jack: Build a bigger operation then, with like 40 full-time people. At the auction days, we had 120 people work for us, it was a big operation and we built them. And then we use those profits to then get into the forever cash market meaning buy, put asset allocation, as I call it, take the money we made and roll it over into something that brings cash flow for the rest of our lives. Now we have like 50, completely free and clear rental properties, which now have quadrupled in value. And we still own. James: That's awesome. Awesome. It's very interesting on how you stumble upon doing yellow letters. So that's how, I mean, I was looking for houses. And I believe I look at tax lien lease, if I'm not mistaken, people who didn't pay tax because most of the people who have an empty land, they don't want to pay the tax, right? Jack: Right. James: Because I think there's no cash flow, there's nothing coming. So Jack: Exactly. James: So many calls coming back, I was surprised at the number of response, people calling, but was calling all for empty land. And I say, I'm not going to buy that. So but looks like you guys monetize that I, I should have known that. Michelle: And you know, and even there, it's like in our countries, there's no way that you're going to lose your property over for taxes. But here in the US, you do, you know, the tax lien foreclosure method or through the tax [inaudible 0:25:16]. So those are opportunities that perhaps we were able to really, you know, hold on to because neither of our country's -- Jack: We would like, it blows away that people would even let these properties go for taxes, it was a perfect opening for us. And yes, so we monetize it in two ways. We learn, we wholesale them, we wholesale them. And we still do that, we just sold one week, actually two last week and, I don't know, every week there are sales. And we wholesale them, basically we buy something for $2,000 and go sell it for 10, that's not a bad profit, right? James: Absolutely. Jack: You can live off that. And plus, they're very affordable these properties. Or what we also do is we sell a seller financing. So a couple of months ago, there was one particular deal I want to highlight, is we bought the property for $5,000, an empty lot here in the city of Phoenix. And we sold it for $64,000 with a $6,500 down payment. So if you do the math, we paid five for them, and we got 6,500. So we got all ready -- Michelle: Our money is back. Jack: The moment we sell the property, our money is back. And now for the next 20 years, we get $500 a month and we'll make over $112,000 total on a property that we have zero money in, the moment we sold it. James: That's awesome. That's awesome. So let's walk through the land, the best land flipping strategy. Right? Jack: Okay. James: Because you guys have done it many times, right? So first is where do you get the list of landowners? What the, where's the best place to find? Michelle: So there are three possible places, we are still in love with a more difficult one. Because the harder it is for me, the harder it is for everyone else. James: Correct. Michelle: So there are places like Rebel gateway or Agent Pro, where you can get lists. And I think these two -- Jack: Lists services. Michelle: List services that basically, Jack: Online lists services, James: Lists source, right? Is it list source or -- Jack: List source or logic or agent pro 24/7.com. There's a whole host of different websites. James: What kind of list should we look for? Jack: We're looking for land lists, ones with value James: Other criteria, right? Jack: Yes, land, the other criteria is that the land value is below $100,000. Typically, because we found that to be our sweet spot, now you can go up above, but then your response rates are going to drop. [inaudible27:41] the pay for these properties just skyrockets and so on. But you can do those deals like we have a student the other day that made $192,000 flipping a deal that he put on the contract for much more than we usually put the properties under contract for. It went for 80 and he sold then for, what is that, close to 270 or something or 300. And then he made his offer to closing costs 192,000. But usually beyond that, we like out of state owners, but they don't have to be out of state. So there's a couple of other criteria. Then once you get that list, -- Michelle: You send them you know, you send them a letter and you can either you know printing stuff and stamped and lick all your envelopes and your letters. Or you can send it through a mailing house if you want to outsource that and send out letters and just hold on to your seat because you're going to get -- James: You're gonna get a lot of calls. Michelle: A lot of calls. Jack: Right, you're going to get a lot of calls, exactly. We did, for example, yes, when you send out these letters also, so we don't use the yellow letter, we've developed our own letter and split tested that hundreds of times until we got it to a point where we could not improve the performance of it anymore. And so our letter sometimes, there are a few counties where you get lower response rates, but usually, you get at least a four or five, six percent response rate. And it can go as high as 15 to 20%. James: So let's say now someone calling you, say I will land to sell, can you buy from me? What are the things you look for, to see whether you want to take down their number and follow up with them? Jack: First thing is motivation. Michelle: Yes. Jack: Because almost any kind of land sells, it's just if you get it cheap enough. Now, having said that, there are certain areas, certain pockets that we don't buy. I mean, there are areas in Arizona, where its land, an acre of land is worth $500, that's not worth pursuing. So the value needs to be there. So we typically don't just go below $100,000. We also start above 10,000. So that we have, -- Michelle: So you don't get crap. Jack: So you don't get crap. Michelle: Yes. Jack: So good language here. So you gotta get you together, you don't get junk land. James: Thanks for being nice. Jack: Yes, we have that ongoing, she's the foul mouth in the family. Michelle: Hey, you throw me under the bus. Jack: So then you, yes, you sent out these letters, I thin I forget the question. James: The question is, once they call, what are the criteria -- Jack: You asked them a few questions, you go through a list of questions that we created the script for and asked like if there's early access, if there is utility to the properties, and none of those things is a deal-breaker, they just determine how much you ultimately going to offer for property. James: Got it. And how do you determine what you gonna offer? Jack: Comparables, you run for market comparables similar to houses plus there are a few extra ways, like for example, particularly in rural areas, there might not be comparables of the same size. So if you're looking at five acre parcel, and you only have like 10 and 20 acre parcels, and there's no other five acres to sold or listed, you gotta adjust for size sometimes. So basically, a 10-acre parcel is listed or sold for $30,000. Well, five acres, not automatically worth 15, it's more worth a little bit more, because in rural areas, the smaller the parcel, the higher the price per acre. Michelle: Yes. Jack: So you get down, it's like the other way around, the bigger you go, the more kind of volume discount you get on the acreage. So going from 20 to 40 is not a doubling, it's more like a one and a half times in value. James: Got it. Jack: So 20 is, so the value over 20 years because of comparable shows you that's $40,000 and an 80 is not a 20 to 40 or 40-acre parcel is not $80,000. It's more like $60,000. So there's kind of you can adjust for those things. But the nice part is we buy our properties for five to 25 cents on the dollar. So that's the key to this entire thing. Because when you buy at 10, 15, 20 cents on the dollar, you can be off in your analysis and still make money. And you can make money by selling the reseller of financing and getting a down payment that pays for the property. And you have so much margin of error and so much offer in there that it's almost impossible and I'm not saying it is but it's almost impossible to screw up. James: Yes, yes. And what tool do you use to find those comparables? Jack: We use, we go on Zillow, we go on Redfin, we go on realtor.com, we go on landwatch.com, the same free websites, because I ideally go on the MLS, but the MLS only has, doesn't have all the land is allowed land it sells like owner to owner. And also even if you have access to the MLS, we do deals from Hawaii to Florida. Our students do deals out of the country, you usually only have access to the MLS in one little pocket. So it's impossible to almost have access to the MLS all over the country. Michelle: And it's relatively easy to do the comparable analysis we develop, like our own proprietary software that basically connects through you know, to Zillow, Redfin and all these services. So when I'm at a record, you know, and I'm looking at it immediately it populates for me, you know, whatever comparables. And if it's a little bit, you know, more, if it takes a little bit longer for me to do that, it's maybe eight to 10 minutes, you know, to look up a record elsewhere, specifically, like if it's an info lot, and it's completely built out, you kind of have to like back into the value of the land by figuring out, you know, what are the average, you know, prices in homes in this area? What is the average square foot? How much would it take a builder to, you know, building your house and, and kind of that way back into the value by -- Jack: So we build five methods to the value of the thing, not less, not the least is actually assessed value, any counties the assessed value as a relationship to the market value. And if you can prove over the first 10, 20 analysis that you do that this relationship is reliable, and you can just use the assessed value too for evaluation. Michelle: In a particular county. Yes. James: So you have to pay property tax on all this land, right? Do you try to flip it within the year so that you don't pay property taxes? Jack: As a matter of fact, the way most of our students are doing this is that they don't actually ever buy the property. What they do is that they put the property on a contract and then go market the property right away, and then either do an assignment or do it what's called a double closing, where they use the same day transaction where they buy it and sell it both in the same day. And the buyer brings up all the funds that pays everyone. So -- James: That's a wholesaling technique, right? Jack: It's a wholesaling technique, James: Yes, like in houses, that's what -- Jack: Exactly it's same, the same technique just that we use land for it. And the nice part about land is there's no tenants, no toilets, no termites, there's no repairs. There's no you don't have to show anyone the property. Michelle: James and in the competition -- Jack: Is almost none. James: That's why so many people call me. Jack: Somebody on this podcast just told us that he walked away from owning land because he didn't know -- James: I know. You know, I was thinking that time why are these people selling all their land. I mean, there must be some business here. But I was so busy looking at houses, right. And I thought… Jack: Right and that's the normal thing. So there's almost no competition. And for the last 12 years, we have done this entirely, virtually we have not looked at a single piece of land ourselves. James: Yes. Jack: Google Maps, Google Earth, you can see it all, you don't, Google Street View, you can just drive by your lot, take pictures. And it's all there, no reason to get dirty and dusty out there. Michelle: And that's another thing that I think I want to add in terms of like how simple it is. And now that we've like perfected our system, how predictable it is, you know, is that when we started looking into real estate, because we're both not from here, we had no clue completely clueless about construction, about estimating repairs for kitchen or bathrooms, for flooring, for roofing, we had no idea. And you don't have to deal with any contractors, any, you don't have to deal with any of those headaches that usually you have to deal with improve property when you're dealing with land. So that's something else we forgot to mention. Jack: And that's actually why we also, the main reason why we didn't jump from that multifamily right away, but we took the bridge of single families because we first needed to learn the details of how much does it cost to rehab a kitchen and the bathroom, and the flooring and windows and things like that. We didn't want to tackle a $10 million project first. We wanted to go, start small, so we bought some rental houses with their own money so if we make mistakes, it costs us money and not our investors. And little by little we then learned and after realizing that we can manage those also remotely because our houses are in three different markets; Phoenix, Cleveland, Omaha and an even though new houses in Cleveland, I just hold a show last week. I may have a few houses that I couldn't even find anymore because I haven't, the last time I saw them was like eight years ago, and they spit out cash flow every month. The property management companies who charge them, everything is good. So after that experience was like we're ready for a step up and now buy the bigger buildings and manage them. And we can also do that remotely. James: Okay, that's awesome. So I'm thinking why did I miss this opportunity, right? And I think the answer to my question was, I do not know who to sell to. So how did y'all solve the problem? How do you go to market, okay, today you get land, how do you go and find the seller? Jack: So initially, we started with eBay and newspapers and then we figured out this big land auctions. But the big land auction stopped working about 2007, 2008. Michelle: And started doing online auctions. Jack: And then we started doing online auctions, we shifted, started everything online. So since about 2008, the middle of 2008 now, we have been pursuing and we have been selling all our land online through websites like Craigslist, through Zillow, through MLS. If you own the property, if you have a paragraph in it, it's just that you're allowed to market it. You can even a property if you own it, it's easy to sell it on the MLS anyway, if you don't own it, you can have a paragraph in your contract which we have, that allows you to market this then you can put it off to the brokerlessMLS.com for $99 goes on the MLS. Again, but in other, this land specific websites like land watch, landfliprealtor.com again, land of America and the biggest one that is right now driving the most traffic for us and everyone else is the Facebook marketplace. James: So they are people looking to buy land from people? Jack: Oh, lots of people like -- Michelle: Facebook marketplace and Facebook groups land, land groups. Jack: Yes, Facebook land groups. Yes, there's a big market. I mean, we focus on three kinds of land. Number one [inaudible 0:38:34] lots, can sell immediately to a builder. Number two, the lots in the outskirts of town, right, if this is the city right on the outskirts of the city, that's where we still buy land because it's in the path of growth. Cities like San Antonio, cities like Austin, cities like Dallas, cities like Phoenix, cities like LA, like Denver, all over the country, they're growing, their growing infill. They're there. They're growing in the outskirts of town we're there and there are two ways and the third way is we're focusing on larger acreage in the more rural areas. And that is for the multi-billion dollar market off RV, ATV's, hunters, campers, how would you love to have a 40-acre ranch out into the hills of East Texas, right? Wouldn't that be beautiful? James: Yes. Absolutely, Jack: Yes. And there's millions of people that are looking for that. And then we put the one on top because we get so cheap. If you offer those properties with seller financing, they sell very quickly. Michelle: Or a discount -- Jack: Or discount or market value, wholesale, there is price, will advertise it's a good property, it sells very quickly. And for example, one of our students just posted something that they put, they put an ad on the Facebook marketplace and within 24 hours that has 4250 people look at it and comment and message them. And obviously, they had to take the ad down and had multiple offers on the ads in one day. Now that's not necessarily typical, it might take a few weeks for the property to sell. But there are buyers with it's a b2c market right, we're the business to the consumer market. And the end consumer buys a lot of these lots and the [inaudible40:18] lots are B2B to the builders. Michelle: Yes. James: And how do you check the entitlement of the land? What is it zoned and all that? Jack: There's another company, Michelle: Yes, so you go through a title company, make sure titles free and clear. Jack: There are title companies that we use are not the same companies, different department that we use when buying a $10 million apartment complex than when we buy for it for a $30,000 piece of land. Obviously, the cost is different because they charge us a minimum cost, which is usually anywhere between $700 and $1200 a deal. But if you're about to make $50,000 on there, you can pay $800 and then make 14,200, still okay. James: What about land, which has a utility or going to get utilities, is that much higher price than? Jack: Usually it is and usually it's already, Michelle you can. Michelle: Go ahead. Jack: Usually, it's already in the assessed value included, occasionally it's not because the assessors like a year or two behind. But it's definitely already when you run your comparables, it's already in the market because that word is out and then other properties in the market are going to be listed higher, which tells you, okay, or listed or sold higher, which shows you the market value is higher. So your offer is going to be higher and the seller is going to be happy to accept it. And you make more money in the process. Michelle: And it's much more attractive to buyers too. Jack: And it sells quicker. Yes. James: Yes. So I can see people like me doing this, right, because I already have done the yellow letter marketing, I know all the languages and you know all that. But so anybody can do that, right? It's a simple business, which makes a lot of money. And you are basically bridging the gap between people who need the land versus marketing to their direct seller who is in a distressed situation or who just want to get out from. Most of the time they inherited the land, they don't want to pay tax and they just get rid of it. Jack: Looks like you talk to a few of them. James: I did, talk to a few of them. A lot of them said hey, you know, my mom gave me and she died and now I have to pay property tax on it. And can you buy it or not? Jack: Exactly right. Michelle: So you're helping them and then you're helping your buyers too. And I think the how quickly you sell the property has a lot to do with how you market the property, how what kind of listing you create, you know. There's a lot of crap where you just show a piece of dirt and no, you need to dream it, you know, you have a catchy headline. I mean, you have to understand a little bit of marketing and copy and grabbing people's attention and so on and so forth. But nothing that you can't learn. James: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And what do you think? I mean, you have a property software on it, right? What problem does it solve? Michelle: So what that does is, so back in the day, when we were starting, and we were doing in just a few deals, you know, we could manage to keep our stuff, you know, on paper, on an Excel spreadsheet. But the moment we basically started really scaling this, you know, at the point that we started doing the auctions, we could no longer continue using Excel spreadsheets, we really needed you know, a CRM. And not just a CRM to keep track of our buyers and our sellers, but to keep us organized in our process flow. From the moment that the mailing went out to the inbound call being received to are we ready on the status where we've done research and ready to send an offer, has the offer come back, accept it and we sent this out to title escrow, is it back? Is it ready to be put into the catalogue for the auction, you know, for sale? And so it basically it's a process deal flow from beginning to end for land specifically. Jack: And we build the software in-house that guides you along step by step through the process of buying a property, keep them organized, like statistics, as tax, there is a built-in buyers website, seller's website, calculator for the numbers and things like that. James: So why do you need like, you know, like you said, you have like 15 staffs, right, you have the CRM, what function does the staff do? Jack: The staff does the work, I mean, the CRM organize to work for you, but somebody needs to put in the data. And somebody really needs to press the buttons and do the -- Michelle: And somebody needs to pick up the calls from the buyers. Like we have a lady that is just in charge of that as of this position, basically, there are other people making sure that the phone rings and she's just answering them. Jack: But having said that, this is us, right, we want to spend our time with our 11-year-old daughter travelling the world. We want to spend our time focusing on apartment complexes and not focusing but spending our time, we love learning right and looking at complex deals and things like that. So after building our land business to the level that wanted to build it, we started putting a team in place of it. Having said that, we have many students that run one of them, at the top of the head, I think of one of them is also a coaching organization. He is on track this year to do 120 deals alone with one assistant with one virtual assistant. So the thing is, because it's simple because you don't have to rehab anything, because if you don't have to do anything like that, he can do a, he can do 120 deals just as a two-man or a man and woman, kind of show. And so you don't need a big staff is a point, we have a staff of like somebody picks up the phone calls, answer them they, you can outsource everything. So we use a mailing and a call center to take the phone calls, we use a mailing house to send out the letters. So what we have inhouse is somebody does the deal analysis to figure out what the properties are worth, and somebody who team of two people that prepare the listings and go sell the properties. Anything else you don't really need, anything else you can do, you can outsource. Michelle: And documentation, unless you like to work with documents, paperwork. Jack: But all of that is electronic. Again, it comes in we have buyers signed by DocuSign. We have, we scan things, we put it on to Dropbox, we use different files. We attach them to our CRM and stuff. But it doesn't require a lot of people to do this, which makes it even more profitable. James: Yes, yes. I mean, I think you've sequence it very nicely so that you can scale gracefully and you can have your own time too, awesome. Jack: Probably the biggest thing I think that this business because there's no competition and as you said the sellers have people that are, there are people that inherited this property, they're not getting 25 letters a week, like the hospitals. They're getting nothing a week, so when your letter comes in and when you make that offer, we sent the offer by mail to them, we give them 10 days to actually accept the offer. Then when we buy it, we get a contract and we have three months or four months or six months, whichever we want to close on it. So it destresses the entire thing. That means we can design this business around our lives. And so the life designing with a life -- Michelle: Retrofitting it into the business, Jack: Yes, determining when we have free time. So it's truly a business that can be done based on everyone's work schedule and in full time can be designed such that you work with around the things that are important in your life. James: So does it still work now in this economic cycle? Jack: It's actually right now is the best market that we have seen in probably 15 years. Michelle: Yes. James: Why is that? Jack: Because the market is up so it means that buyers are, still buyers will, the sellers will always be there. James: Sellers always be there, yes. Jack: There's always going to be people that inherited the property and don't want it anymore. But the buyers are right out there, right now out there in the market. They're positive, they're upbeat, they want to buy these properties. They want to take them up, take their RV's up there. Michelle: Ride their RTV's. Jack: Ride their RTV's, spilled something on it so the properties are flying off the shelves, and probably the big right now our properties and our students' properties, we see the highest margins that we've probably seen since we teach this. James: Awesome, awesome. Michelle: We have people that are doing this that are you know, stay at home moms, single moms to Rob, who's a dentist, he no longer is a, well, he will always be a dentist, I guess. But he sold his practice because, you know, 10 months into the land flip he's like, I don't need to be behind the chair anymore. And now his wife who is also a dentist is looking to sell her practice as well, to people that are having a job still in parallel because they, you know, they are already 30 something years in it. And they're like they have just one more year for their pension. So they don't want to go back and are doing it in parallel. I mean, we have -- Jack: It's across the board. Michelle: It's across the broad, from all works of life. James: Yeah, I can see anybody doing this, right? It doesn't take a lot of time and effort, not like house flipping or even rentals or… Michelle: Yes, in the house flipping world, you get a call from a seller and he says I'm interested. I mean, you better meet him at the property, like within a few hours, because you're going to have two or three people that are chasing the same house. James: Yes, yes, yes. That's what happened to me. I missed out on the land flipping, I went house flipping, life has become so busy. So coming back to the next level commercial asset, not the next level. I mean, the other commercial asset class that you guys are doing, which is multifamily, right. And you said you're doing it so can you explain that to me why you're doing that? Jack: Yes, we're doing that for long term generational wealth. So in other words, right now we do syndicate deals. So we have some deals that we make very good money, but and we have our assets and our paid-off properties. But so we wanted to take the next step in complexity, the next step and leverage the next step in personal growth. So we -- Michelle: Exactly, I think our investing has really followed our own personal journey, you know, of development and growth. So Jack: Right, so one of the things, so we started buying these properties. And the first one, we realized, we syndicate it with our investors. And then the second one, the first few we syndicate investors. As a matter of fact, the first one we came in as a junior partner. So we raised the thing, the guy that couldn't raise all the money. And the moment he was about to lose this deal and he basically said, like, if you guys raise half of the money, you get half of the deal, which is obviously a great, great deal. I've never come across that. Michelle: And we're gonna learn how to do it, as he has been doing this for many years. I'm like, that sounds like a perfect situation. Jack: But we also needed to put in $80,000 in escrow deposit, which we could have lost. So it was, he asks for something and he gave something, was a great deal. So we came in, we ended up raising 60% of the money. And doesn't matter, we didn't get more than 50% of the deal. We got in we learned a ton and then we started doing this on our own. And the first few deals like there was just, we have a lot of income, but we have like your cash availability is not always $3 million, right? So we basically looked at it as like we needed $3 million. Let's put some money in ourselves and let's raise the rest through syndications. So we did a syndication for the last few deals. And at some point of time, we might transition into doing deals without investors, the reading hold on for the long term, 10, 20, 30 years, and then our daughter can potentially then inherit and she can keep them or sell them and upgrade them and so on. But in essence, it's a way to, what attracted us to it over the single families is that there's another layer of management, another layer of separation between us and the actual issues on the problem. Michelle: Yes, because now all of a sudden, you know, when you're looking at 100 doors at a time, and that scale allows you to have you know, on the ground, a full time, you know, leasing person, a full-time person for repairs or maintenance. Another one that is turning units around, you know, we have the regional director with, you know, with the property management. And so for us, it's really a lot of asset management, but not the everyday thing of like, would you approve, you know, the repair on a toilet or on this, small things-- Jack: Which, today, I got two more in our single families because they have an authorization limit of $500 on me there because I don't trust them with more. So on a single family, so everything over $500 goes to me, which is literally something three or four things a week that happen especially in summer when it's hot, and AC breaks and so on, that are just like driving me crazy. Because every single time it's like they don't give you the information you need. They don't give you the details you need, you have to jump on the phone call, you have to email back a few times. They don't follow the instructions and how to submit it versus when you operate on a larger property, you can distance, you're removed from these things. You get a status report, you can dive in with your expert partner on the deal, I mean, the regional manager into it. And more than anything, the other thing we realized is you very well know, you can force appreciation and you can force value increase rent, which on the single-family house, you can just, you just cannot do. Michelle: Yes. And elevation is not based on the income but it's fixed but based on other properties. James: Yes, yes I always say that you can build a house, painted with gold, on real gold but the value is still going to be following the other houses surrounding it. Jack: Exactly. James: Are you guys using the depreciation from multifamily to offset the active income on your land? Jack: Yes. Of course, yes. Big time. I mean we -- Jame: That's double right. Jack: We have done on all the units we have, we have done the cost segregation study, and it is literally. Michelle: It shows a lot of the profits from the land flipping even from the educational business, you know, it's a very purpose-driven business for [inaudible 0:54:03] and it throws a nice chunk of cash. And I'm like, we need to, you know, protect that. And so we're, it feels like, you know, with apartment investing, we get to have the cake and eat it too, in terms of, you know, getting the cash flow in. Jack: We get cash flow, we get income, any cash flow, we get appreciation and we get the tax benefits that wipes out almost the entire income of the other things that we do. So it's a it's like a dream come true. Yes. James: Yes. So you want to consider real estate professional, not because of the land, but because of that single-family homes? Jack: Because of really everything I mean, Michelle: That's all we do. James: If you do just land, are you considering real estate professional? Jack: Yes, the land is real estate. As a matter of fact, I always say that when somebody says I've never dealt with land, only do houses. I said like, it's actually I said, it is actually an incorrect statement. Because you have never bought a house -- James: Without the land? Jack: What you buy is the land and the house on it. James: Yes, correct. Jack: That's truly a land transaction that had a house on it. The legal description of the property is not the house, it doesn't say it's a four-bedroom, three bath house, no, you're buying this lot, lot number 23 with whatever it happens to be on it. And what is on it is a luxury house or a dump is just defines the value differences. But so with a real estate professional, doesn't have to be defined by analysis, or commercial, or you can be land too James: Got it, got it. So let's go to a bit more personal side of it. So no technicals? So why do you guys do what you do? Michelle: I think for me, you know, in the beginning, it was about us having freedom of money, time, you know, relationships. And right now, it's about freedom of purpose, you know. It has you kind of like, you know, when you're struggling, somebody is listening to this, they're struggling, or they have a job they hate or whatever, the very first thing that you look at is how can you take care of your immediate family? When you have that taken care of, then you start looking at, okay, how can I, you know, start, you know, helping them my church or helping in my community or helping on a much, much larger scale. So for me, you know, a lot of my, you know, what drives me right now, and my purpose and my why is to become a mentor and a leader. You know, for other women to start investing in real estate, to start, you know, having their money work for them, for example, and set an example, you know, I want to be a hero for my daughter. And I want her to also grow into a lady that you know, knows how to manage your finances, that is very comfortable with investments, whether small or large and so on. So, Jack: For me, along the similar lines, I remember the year 2007, when we were and we had accomplished our first major, big financial goal, which was a certain number, I feel everyone has their number and goal in mind. And we had just moved into a gorgeous, semi-custom home that we designed from scratch up and all of a sudden, we're like, you reach those goals, and you almost like fall into a hole. And we fall in that hole because you expect to be like all candy and rainbows and everything and unicorns, but actually the quite opposite of that. But it's like for a moment you celebrate and then you're like, what now, right? So we basically sat down and was like, okay, so we can sit down now and we can go retire in essence, we can go sit down, we can do nothing. But we realized, for example, there's a charity in Michelle's home country Honduras, that we said we could go work in charities, in charitable work. But we realized, we're really very good at getting businesses to a profitable stage, we're good at kind of creating money, Michelle: That's kind of like our genius. Jack: And so that we are not the person that's going to live in the Honduran in rain forest jungle and feeding the poor, so but it's close to our heart. So why don't we stick to what we love doing Michelle: Our strength. Jack: So that we generate the money that we can be more impactful in those kinds of things. And as a side thing, I love real estate, I mean, I don't see myself not doing real estate ever. I mean, I hate it the entire the IT industry. I'm not personally involved in the continuous development of our software, because I'm kind of scarred from that time in the IT industry. I get involved into the what the vision is of it, but, and then we have a great guy that drives the implementation of these things. But we focus on deals, we focus on and if I can focus deals for the rest of my life and opportunities then I'm a happy camper, it's just what I love doing. So and it throws off money and that allows us to help more people, that is awesome. Michelle: And be transformational in the way, you know, and the way we treat our investors and the way that you know, people that want to participate in our deals. Jack: So the teaching side of things, we started the teaching side of things also kind of like almost like a mission kind of the point of view that not that we need the rest to save the world. But there are so many people out there that do real estate either the wrong way or that they don't know that there's an easier and simpler way that you can do real estate. And learn and grow build the confidence and capability in your life that then allows you to do whatever the heck you want to do afterwards that we feel like I was called to teach this and show the land flipping part of things to people. So they can also get on their own feet. And we have had years where we lost money in that business where we put it on their own pocket for and it was still fulfilling because we see the difference that it makes in the people's life. So we were committed and our core values are to be transformational. Michelle: Yes. And it's not just walking a person through a deal by really sculpting someone's spirit you know, someone's confidence, someone's courage through the process of a real estate deal. So it's incredibly rewarding work for sure. James: Okay, okay. So why don't you tell about how to find you guys. How can the listeners find you? Jack: Easiest way to find us on the land flipping side is to go to landprofitgenerator.com and you can also go to www.orbitinvestments.com, there's a link over to the land flipping side. There's a couple of other links on too. James: Okay. Michelle: I'm on Facebook Michelle Bosch, Instagram michelleboschofficial. Jack: And again on the land site we since we don't teach the apartment complex things, you do that. We have no educational things about that, we just, we do syndicate with investors. We do probably similar deals and but on our website like all the educational things all about land flipping. So we have a Facebook group called Land Profit Generator Real Estate Group. So everything we do on the land side is called land profit generator. So you look for land profit generator, you find us and orbit investments is more like the overall holding company above everything else with links to all the different pieces that we do. James: Awesome. Well, Jack and Michelle, thanks for coming in. I learned so much and I learned what I didn't miss too, but I'm sure the listeners learned a lot of things from today's podcast. Thank you for coming in. Michelle: Thank you so much for having us, absolutely. Jack: Looking forward to seeing you at the next mastermind. James: Absolutely. Thank you Michelle: Thank you, bye.

Ruminate was a spoken word event organised by Poet X in February 2017 where we showcased among the biggest talents of the contemporary poetry scene. Muhammad Zhafir was the opening act for Ruminate and proceeded to set the stage and standard for the night. From the onset, Zhafir blew the audience away with his focus on rhyme schemes and wordplay. Zhafir represents the groundbreaking poetry collective called MicJackers, organisers of the monthly poetry event called Jack It!. He has performed at various stages throughout Kuala Lumpur like the Cooler Lumpur Fest, The Flame by MAPS, If Walls Could Talk, Arts for Grabs, TEDxINTI Subang and Festival Boco Puisi in Ipoh. He has also featured alongside National Laureate A. Samad Said and rapper Altimet. Facebook: facebook.com/poetxpodcast Instagram: @poetxpodcast

In this episode, we talk about the meltdown in professional sports and what needs to change to fix it. We tackle the light issue of how to improve government. Chad proposes the correct answers and Tony strangely disagrees. Finally, we then play a new game called Jack vs Jack? It is easy to follow along and see if you can do better than Tony. All this and more on tonight’s show. Join us.

Jill's Advice Corner Transcript:  Jack:                     Jack and Jill here. Jill:                        Hi. Jack:                     Welcome to the Jack Jill show. It's here that we provide entertaining real estate investment advice. I'm Jack Butala. Jill:                        And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California. Jack:                     Today, Jill and I talk about what's in Jill's advice corner this week? Jill:                        You know what's funny? Every time it's sunny, it really is sunny. Someday I'm going to actually say it's overcast or rainy, but I don't have one. That's one of the beauties about being here. Yes, it's December and it's still sunny southern California. We're still recovering from some fires. Jack:                     Yeah. Personally looking forward to this show because I can't wait to hear what advice you have for us this week on staying motivated and whatever else it is that goes on in your office and your zip code. It's very different from my work. Jill:                        My zip code in a different office. Different office, different zip code. That's how you get it together. Jack:                     Before we get into Jill's advice, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the JackJill.com online community. It's free. Jill:                        Okay, cool. Now, this question I noticed is our producers added this in and it's someone who is not a member in our community. I mean, you don't have to be a member to post in our online community. That's the whole point. I know there's a lot of people in our online community that come to us from all different places and stuff, but we're all still doing kind of the same thing, obviously. Jack:                     The whole point is for new people to ask questions and for seasoned people to respond and that's what's going to happen here. Jill:                        Exactly. It's so good, too. It's so nice. I've had people say, "Everyone helped me out, so now I'm paying it forward and helping that person out, somebody else out." It's so nice. Adam O. asks, "Hi all, I have sent out three mailers so far, about a hundred each mailing. The first two that I sent out, I followed the program to the letter." It's all free. It's not our program, obviously, because we don't send out that few. Jack:                     It's someone else's program. This guy's not a member. Jill:                        Exactly. Jack:                     We'd never, ever advocate, sorry to interrupt, sending out a hundred leads. Jill:                        Sending out that few. You're not going to get a good response with that many. Jack:                     Yeah. Jill:                        Okay, anyway. I followed their program to the letter, offering $500 in my first mailer. Jack:                     We don't advocate that. Jill:                        Right, exactly. Yielded five total responses, but all five were insulted by my offer and would not even consider talking to me further. That's what can happen. Jack:                     This is how not to do this. Jill:                        All right. Sounds like something might've worked out, so we'll see. You said no problem. Today I just received my first phone call from my second mailer and it got the same result, another mad person on the line. The second mailer, I offered a thousand dollars, not $500, so I anticipated the same general responses from my second mailer. Okay, here we go. Now we have two fails, okay. My third mailer that went out this week, it's only 300 units. This is not a lot of units. Jack:                     There's just no way. Jill:                        You're just not getting the traction you need. That's a big thing. My third mailer that went out this week, I tweaked the offer letter to an open, oh gosh, an open offer format. Okay, Adam, we can so help you.

Stay Motivated by Jill (CFFL 580) Transcript:  Jack:                     Jack and Jill here. Jill:                        Hi. Jack:                     Welcome to the show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about staying motivated by Jill. Jill:                        By Jill. Jack:                     Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                        Okay, Jarrett asked, "In the yellow letter/postcard world, many times I tell you to send out letters seven times to get the best responses. I was wondering if any of you have done multiple mailers with unsolicited offers. If so, have you seen any success with doing that?" Well, first of all, we don't like ... I mean, okay, wait. I let me back up here. That's not the way we roll. We were talking about this a few minutes ago. We actually have not done this because you know why? I mean, we've been doing this so long. We have such a good strike percentage that we don't feel a need to hit the area again. We move onto the next area. So, now, Jack brought up a funny point about the people that might be telling you to send out multiple offers. Do you want to add about that, jack? Jack:                     Well, yeah. Jill:                        Multiple letters. Jack:                     It does [crosstalk 00:01:09] yellow letters thing. There's a website called yellowletters.com. They advocate for handwritten letters to make it look like you hand wrote a letter, like you're some little old lady with a light bulb hanging from a string sitting at a table- Jill:                        And nothing else to do. Jack:                     ... innocently. Which, first of all, now you're starting out with a lie. You're starting out with dishonesty. So, I don't advocate that. What Jill's point is, whoever owns Yellow Letters, I really doubt that they've done 15,000 transactions like we have. I question their credibility as a real estate investor. They might be the greatest printers in the world, but for them to say, "We really suggest that you send out seven ... " The fact is this. Repetition in advertising works. You've seen Pepsi and Coke. How many times is it the same car commercial did you see in last week's football game? Over and over again. Jill:                        We could all talk about the Lincoln commercial. We all know exactly how it's going to go. We know he's going to walk up now and the door's going to open and the Lincoln symbol is going to be on crown. We've all seen that. Jack:                     In the same commercial over and over again to the point where it's nauseous. It works. These people ... it's been going on since we were all kids. So, repetition in advertising works. I personally can't stand it. So, we don't. To answer your question, have we seen any success doing that? No. We don't teach that and we don't do it. I've never sent a followup mail. The biggest reason is because we've never needed to. Our striking yield percentages on a single offer are extremely high by anybody's standards. So, I've never had to or really even thought about setting up a followup letter campaign. Jill:                        Well, here's one. Jack:                     You could try it. Jill:                        I mean, well, here's one of the things too. When you send out the right letter, like we do, we've had years of tracking this stuff. How do I know? because I still get calls from 2007 from someone that has our letter and we only sent him one. It's very interesting. Jack:                     [inaudible 00:03:12] they got multiple letters since really '04. Jill:                        Right. Jack:                     Why did they call us back? I'll tell you why, because we write a professional business letter- Jill:                        Bingo. Jack:                     ... with respect.

Self Confident Offer Campaign Pricing (CFFL 564) Transcript: Jack:                      Jack and Jill here. Jill:                          Hi. Jack:                      Welcome to the show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: self-confident offer campaign pricing. It will make or break your real estate career. Oh, that sounds heavy Jack. Jill:                          It does sound heavy. Jack:                      Oh no. Jill:                          I know. Jack:                      It's actually a really positive thing. Jill:                          Right. Jack:                      Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It's free and fun. Jill:                          Free and fun. Yes, making money is fun. That's true. Matt asks- Jack:                      What's more fun that making money? Jill:                          Not much. I agree. Jack:                      And doing it on your own terms and stuff. Jill:                          Yeah, if you don't get a kick out of watching your bank balance go up, there's something goofy there. Jack:                      Yeah . Jill:                          Alright, hey guys. I did a few searches on the forums and couldn't find anything specific about the topic of how to build a buyers list. Jack:                      What? Jill:                          I know. I've heard mention of manually pulling emails of LandWatch users, those are the signature people, in your areas and asking if they'd be interested in being buyers. I personally don't ask by the way, I just kind of put them in- Jack:                      I send a deal to them. Jill:                          Thank you, there you go. I just kind of assume it. I've heard mentions ... There's one of the answers right there. I've heard mention of people systemizing the process of scraping those emails. Yeah. It looks like it may be a good idea to keep one property up on eBay at all times. This is not crazy, too. And adding those people to the buyers list. Jack:                      Isn't it great where these ... Matt you are so smart. You're answering your own questions. Jill:                          You're answering your own questions. Jack:                      I love it. Jill:                          I know. It looks like managing your buyers list through Aweber is currently the best option. Again, right on. I wasn't able to find any definitive this is the best way to do it, other than the thing that you just wrote, or do these three things every week. Jack:                      That's it. Jill:                          I'm sure I'm not the only one who would benefit from this thread. Hopefully the group is getting some good actionable items from this thread. So my question to everyone is, if you were to build a buyers list from scratch today, how would you do it and how would you structure emails to your buyers list? Jack:                      First thing I want you to do, Matt, is go into our YouTube channel and type in how to build a buyers list. I have a couple videos on there, and they are very short and very effective, on how to pull email contact information out of LandWatch, number one. That will get you a lot of world class investors, land buying investors. Number two ... And everything you said is correct, by the way. I want you to memorize this concept, alright. Stop what you're doing and please listen. People who buy real estate, the vast majority of the people who buy real estate, already own real estate in the area where the property is. If you've got a 40 acre property in Mojave, Arizona, and you send a little note to everybody that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mile radius around there that says something like, I notice that you have real estate near my property that I just bought,

In this episode, I interviewed Jack Pringle. Jack Pringle is a partner with Adams and Reese in Columbia, South Carolina, and focuses his practice on privacy, information security, and information governance; administrative and regulatory law; public utilities; land use litigation; and class action litigation. Jack and I discuss the important connection between a healthy mind, spirit, and body and how to achieve a balance in such a turbulent field of work. Topics covered: How he started and maintained his yoga practice and helped him become better at his career. Understanding the importance of a nimble mind. Defining yoga and how to begin practicing. You can learn more about Jack at http://www.adamsandreese.com/jack-pringle/ Find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jjpringlesc And read some of the things he writes at https://pringlepracticeblog.blogspot.com/ or https://medium.com/@jjpringlesc   Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I'm creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 5-week program. Spend just 6 minutes everyday to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/gLlo7b Sponsor: Spotlight Branding provides internet marketing services exclusively for solo & small law firms. Unlike most internet marketing firms, they do NOT focus on SEO. Instead, they specialize in branding their clients as trusted, credible experts, increasing referrals, and ultimately driving growth. For our listeners, Spotlight Branding is offering a complimentary website review. Go to: SpotlightBranding.com/trl Check out this episode! Transcript Jack: In order to be effective, whether it's oppose and holding oppose or going a little bit farther, it can't be accomplished by having every muscle in your body being tensed. You've got to figure out how to relax. Intro: Welcome to the Resilient Lawyer Podcast, brought to you by Start Here HQ -- a consulting company that works with lawyers to create a purpose driven and sustainable legal career. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. Now your host, Jeena Cho. Jeena: Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Lawyer Podcast. Today, I am so happy to have Jack Pringle back on the show. For those listeners that's been listening to this podcast for awhile, you'll remember that I interviewed Jack Pringle while I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. Jack Pringle is a partner with Adams and Reese in Columbia, South Carolina and he focuses his practice on privacy, information security, and information governance. But the thing that I really love about Jack is that he has this really interesting balance between his law practice and also, perhaps, what I would consider to be a more of a spiritual practice. He has a regular meditation practice and a yoga practice. In this episode we'll chat about both and how those practices actually helps him to be a better lawyer. But before we get to the episode, I want to share a couple of exciting upcoming event. The first is a retreat. I've been having this daydream about having a retreat, just for lawyers, where we can truly unplug, restore, and rejuvenate. So I put a link to a quick survey in the show note. If you're interested in joining me for a weekend retreat, it will be sometime next year -- most likely in the April or May time period -- please complete the survey and I will be in touch with you. The other program that I have coming up will start on October 9th and this will be a 6-week mindful pause program. This program is really designed to offer you bite-size actionable tips and tools and practices that you can do every single day. So the challenge is to spend 6 minutes really focusing on yourself and your well-being. The intention behind the 6-week program is that we're really going to look at our life a little bit more closely, with a little more introspection. And actually think about how to structure it so that we can find more ease and joy and actually have more satisfaction in our life. Again, if you're interested in the upcoming retreat or the 6-week mindful pause program, just look in the show notes. With that, here's Jack Pringle. Jeena: Jack, welcome back to the show. I am so happy to have you back. Jack: It is my pleasure to be back talking to you, Jeena. Jeena: I think it was just about 2 years ago when we first met each other at the World Domination Summit. Jack: That's exactly right. As I've described that experience, and no disrespect to the conference and its organizers -- it's interesting name, great experience because that name was off-putting to some when they heard it. I can't believe it's been 2 years. Jeena: I know, yeah. For the listeners, you can go back to episode #21. It was released on July 24, 2015. So it's really fun to have you back on the show. Of course we've stayed in touch through all the various social media and we even got to do a presentation together for the Canadian Bar Association so that was really interesting. Jack: That was and that was about a year ago. And then, of course, you were kind enough to come and speak to a overflow room at the South Carolina Bar Convention in Greenville earlier this year. That was tremendously well-received and I was proud to mention to everybody that I knew you before you got all famous. Jeena: Maybe for those listeners who didn't hear the first episode, you can just give us a little bit of an introduction to who you are and what you do. Jack: Sure. Well, I am a partner with the firm of Adams and Reese LLP and I'm located in Columbia, South Carolina. Our firm is located throughout the southeast, generally speaking, plus Washington DC. My practice day-to-day, in large part, is information technology and information governance which includes a fair bit of privacy and information security. I also do what can be best characterized as a lot of regulatory law. And, as we'll talk about, I've had the benefit of having a pretty consistent yoga and mindfulness practice for a number of years which, as we'll also discuss, has been pretty helpful in my law practice day-to-day. Jeena: Let's just jump right in and talk about yoga. How did you start your journey to practicing yoga? How long have you been practicing it and why did you get started? Jack: Well, oddly enough, after I graduated from college in 1990 -- which, I guess, is really beginning to date me -- I moved up to Washington DC to look for a job on Capitol Hill or in government affairs. A number of my friends were moving up there with me. As a lot of people were in that timeframe, I was pretty, pretty anxious and pretty much in my head worried about getting a job, not so happy to be out of college, and thrown in to the world. I actually saw in the back of the -- what was then the Capitol Hill paper/newspaper called Roll Call, there was an ad asking if I was stressed or anxious or wanted to try something that might help deal with day-to-day stresses and anxieties. It was a insight mindfulness class that was taught in Northern Virginia by someone named Tara Brock who went on to, and has gone on, to have quite an active and notable practice. It was, at that point, that I had the opportunity to begin the movement of yoga and service, at that time, of actually trying to do vipassana insight meditation to use some movement in order to help me and others in the class sit for long periods of time. And to practice the mindfulness and focus practices that now seem to have come into the culture a little bit more fully. That was, and ever since then, and it sort of waxed and waned at times, law school, professionally and with children. But have developed a fairly regular practice that combines some amount of yoga along with sitting, trying to sit still for a certain amount of time every morning. Again, it hasn't been… certainly hasn't been consistent and unbroken since 1990 or 1991 but at least, as of right now, it's become a pretty regular part of my routine. Jeena: I think that's such an interesting point that yoga isn't or wasn't started as sort of an aerobics or an exercise practice that really where yoga stems from is to actually ready the body so that we can sit and meditate. Jack: Absolutely. I come off sounding like a scold when I mention that from time to time because someone will tell me these things are all true and are all reasons to do yoga by themselves but they'll say, “Wow, I'm so relaxed” or, “It makes me feel so flexible” or, “I feel three-quarters of an inch taller” or, “It really helped me deal with some anxiety.” I then respond and say, “Well, it really makes sense to do it as a prelude or as preparation for sitting still.” Because I remember when I started sitting and as with Tara's classes and things, there were actually sittings that took place for… sometimes even several hours at a time. I remember, in that timeframe being so painful to -- it's still even for a few minutes -- and recognizing the benefits of some of those postures and practices and service of being able to sit still or still enough in order to start to try some of those mindfulness practices was really helpful and, without being too clichéd about it, eye-opening or enlightening in terms of… Because, the truth is, sometimes if your body is too rigid and if you're holding too much pain, it can be a very, very hard row to hoe to ask somebody “Well, just sit still.” That can be too difficult, in some instances, and so it's another one of these wonderful paradoxes about doing some movement in order to be able to sit still. But it's pretty profound. Jeena: What does your day-to-day or, let's say, an average week of yoga practice look like for you? Jack: Well, sometimes it involves actually going to a studio, City Yoga, here in Columbia, Stacy Millner-Collins' studio. But, I guess, ever since children came along and professional obligations become more and more prevalent, I've developed a daily practice on my own that involves waking up and having some coffee and then really doing a series of poses or series of movements not set amount of time. And then followed by, actually sitting using, say, headspace or sometimes just my own stopwatch to try to be still and then you use any number of those types of sitting techniques whether it's counting the breath, or visualizing, or just letting the mind wonder. Jeena: How does yoga help you to be a better lawyer? Does it help you be a better lawyer? Jack: Well, I think it certainly does. Purely on the physical plain, I think it's being shown over and over again that regular movement and, specifically in yoga, being able to sort of be a little bit of a student of your own body is extraordinarily helpful in managing the aches and pains and difficulties that tend to happen as one agent. Or, frankly, just as one as you exist. Jeena: Yeah. Jack: Learning to notice where you're holding tension and, as you're aware, there's a fair amount of tension that can exist and build up in the law practice or in any profession where there are high steaks, ore there are raw emotions, or there are deadlines. In the first instance, learning to recognize that and a way to deal with it; to be able to, frankly, know where your core is and know how you're moving. The way you can hold yourself and stand and sit, move in order to kind of minimize the stresses that inevitably come. In terms of the mind and the thinking, you and I have talked about this before, the ability to see, or to get a little bit of a sense when you're being set off, or when you're becoming distressed, or when things aren't going well and to use the breath as an anchor. Something you can just come back to notice that you're getting a little bit upset or you're getting distracted. Or someone or something is throwing you off your game is extraordinarily important and extraordinarily useful in terms of, “Well, what am I doing?” Come back to what's important here. “What are my themes? What's going on with me and how can I come back to the focus on where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing right now.” That sense of whether you call it insight, or perspective, or context and seeing the way your own brain and mind work, I think is invaluable when you're dealing with other people, dealing with decision-makers, dealing with the myriad tasks and challenges that you have in a given day. It's hard to measure it but I would say that just that ability to be somewhat flexible and the way you think and the way you respond is very important in this business. Jeena: Yeah. Do you think there's a correlation between having the body be more flexible and the mind becoming more nimble? Jack: Without question. That's one of the ways that yoga is such a good metaphor. You can see this in athletics too. I used to play a fair amount of sports and still try to although it looks a little comical as I get grayer and older. But is recognizing that in whether -- and yoga is a good example of this. In order to be effective in whether it's oppose and holding oppose or going a little bit farther, it can't be accomplished by having every muscle and your body being tensed. You've got to figure out how to relax in order to really focus and extend. Likewise, I think it's taking it to the professional realm. I can't remember if it was David Allan who said that if you want to be effective, truly effective, you have to relax and figuring out how to have a relaxed mind that is receptive and nimble. The other way that I connected back to technology where I spent a lot of my days and this… I happen to see this. I read Kevin Kelly's book which is called The Inevitable. It's about the technologies that are going to change our world. He said that because of the pace of change that we're all going to have to be and we are going to be perpetual newbies meaning always learning things for the first time. Always having to have the ability and that just… you make a direct line between that and the idea of beginner's mind. Being able to see things without undo bias, or prejudice, or routine and to see things with a fresh outlook that you'll need to solve problems when you're seeing new things for which you don't necessarily have a framework to evaluate them anyway. So, I think, it really does help with that idea of a nimble mind that can be, certainly, somewhat fresh, somewhat rested, and somewhat capable of seeing things for the first time or in a way that's not blundered or too encumbered by other things. Whether those things are the past, or the future, or the stresses of your life, or making America great again, or whatever might be… Jeena: Sure. Jack: …on your mind. Jeena: Yeah, so true. One of the things that I often hear in yoga classes, or even in a lot of meditation teachers, is that the body has a wisdom and that by practicing yoga we can tap into that wisdom that's contained in the body. Talk a little bit about that. Jack: Well, I think that's absolutely true and it sort of helps me remember or recognize that the… just how connected the mind and the body are. As somebody, and lawyers aren't the only… or the law isn't the only profession that has this but you end up spending a lot of time in your head and thinking about a lot of things over and over again. Starting to tap into the body and recognize what the body does in certain situations and what you're thinking can affect the way you act and the way you hold yourself and vice versa is extraordinarily important. Your body will often tell you lots of things about the kind of day you're having. I don't know whether I've told you about this but -- and this is a pretty simple example but it's telling to me, if I manage to notice, that if I'm on a phone call or if I'm even in a courtroom or in a deposition and I'm standing there with my fist balled up, there's definitely some wisdom in that, at least in terms of where my body is going or where my mind is telling my body to go. We can have a conversation for days about that chick and egg process but learning to recognize. Another area where the wisdom of the body or where either body propels mind or vice versa is -- and this is something I've been tremendously focused on is trying to become or improve the act of listening; this concept of active listening and actually leaning in. I've spent a good part of my career and I'm a little bit sheepish to admit this but it's not just my career but in my life I've spent a lot of time waiting for somebody to finish their sentence so I could start talking again and talk about how smart I think I am and recognizing that. The body's a big part of that. Really learning to listen in a way that involves your body, not just turning your ear but leaning your body in. The body language that you bring to listening to somebody and really trying to understand them rather than as just a means to an end is extraordinarily important. And particularly important for lawyers, for clients, for people on the jury, for judges. If you're not listening to questions, if this is just your ball game and you're trying to get your oral argument out or say what you want to say, you're going to miss a whole heck of a lot in not understanding your audience or the person who's going to be deciding your case. Learning to cultivate those practices that give you a little bit more awareness of your surroundings and the context in which you're presenting or interacting is extraordinarily important. Jeena: Yeah. I think mindfulness really teaches us to be better listeners. I think lawyers, in particular, do this and we're trained to do this is that we listen so we can respond or react but we're not very good at listening just to simply understand or to sort of open ourselves to what the other person is saying. Like kind of absorbing what they're saying. We're very hardwired to kind of check out as the other person is speaking, at some point, so we can prepare our response and kind of becoming aware of that, right? And I think the body is a great place to notice is because the other person is speaking and you can almost feel that tension building up in your body where it's like “Oh, I want to speak. I have something to add. I want to contribute. I want to interrupt.” And then noticing that and going “Oh, isn't that interesting?” Rather than just sort of almost automatically reacting to that impulse to interrupt or to interject or just sort of that natural, habitual pattern. How we communicate with each other all the time. Jack: Sure, without question. Part of that is because I think about it in the appellate argument context. You've only got a certain amount of time that you're before a panel of judges or justices. So part of you wants to make sure that you say as much as you can, that you get through your argument, that you don't leave anything out. The other part of that in wanting to respond quickly is that there's some sense of “Wait a minute, this thought just came in my head and if I don't respond immediately, I might forget it. This is urgent. This is urgent.” But the problem with that, as we've already discussed, if you're not paying attention to the question that you're getting and the nuance that might be involved in that and reading the cues of those around you, it really does become all about you. I hate to break it to everybody but it's not all about you or me. That's one of the things, you know, you and I have talked about this before is when you see the way your mind works, you can't help but be a little bit humble and recognize that you're not the only game in town and that there's things to be learned from those around you, especially by listening and taking in a scene or a context. Jeena: Maybe we can back up a little bit and talk about kind of starting to practice yoga. When they talk about practicing yoga, particularly to people that aren't familiar with the practice, they immediately think of sort of contorting your body into these impossible positions through doing handstands. What advice would you offer to someone that's brand new to yoga and doesn't have any exposure to it? Jack: Well, I think the first point, and that is to as what just about anything, is to take it easy and to start fairly slowly and to avoid biting off more than you're ready to chew. It's somewhat a can to the kinds of things that happen when you make grand pronouncements about beginning and exercise program or that you're going to start running again and you remember that you ran regular 15 years ago and you go out and run 4 miles for the first time after you haven't been running at all. You get too tired and you get too sore. The good news is there are many different studios and places to practice yoga, offering yoga at all levels. There are also YouTube and all of the other video platforms are full of tutorials. There are different ways to figure out how to dip your toe in if you're not ready to march down to the studio and stand in front of other people and sit in front of other people. I think it's important to recognize that you're always going to stay within yourself and start slowly and figure out how to do it in a way that is comfortable to you and to where you can learn somewhat gradually. I think the other thing I like to tell people is that when somebody says he or she is good at yoga, that's a dead giveaway because it's… Again, there certainly are people who can do amazing poses and do things and showing off but that's not what it's about. It's all about having the opportunity to watch what's going on in your own body, to learn or to practice that breathing and to see how that works, and then proceed at your own pace. Having said that, it did take me a long time to stop looking at everybody in the room to see, “Oh gosh, am I doing this as well as or more poorly than someone else?” But I think too easy does it and to find somebody from whom you can take a class, somebody that you trust, and maybe as with lots of these different practices and routines to maybe have a buddy that you go with that will hold you to that decision to go from time to time. The other piece of advice and, again, without biting off more than you can chew, is to see if you can make something a daily practice. I've read or seen that 5 minutes a day, 7 days a week might be more beneficial than one hour on Saturday and not on any other days. I'm a huge fan of routines and practices, especially in the early morning, and I think there's something really to be said for doing some movement in the early morning to prepare you for your day; to get your body moving and your brain or mind still. If you can, even for a very short period of time do that, I think it will pay big dividends and enable you to incrementally do more if you want to. There's always more that you can do if you want to get into serious backbends and acro yoga and bikram and all of these things now. Those are always there. But you need to have those core practices where you get to be a student of your body and to see what you're capable of. Jeena: Yeah. I think it's so important to find a teacher that you resonate with. Also just… maybe finding a teacher whose philosophy sort of aligns with yours. I love going to yoga classes where the teacher really focuses on Savasana. So it's not just like 30 seconds of Savasana but we actually have maybe 5 to 10 minutes of like cooling down and just kind of paying attention to the mind. I'm also like just immediately turned off by any teachers that kind of pushes you to get into a form that the body is just not ready for because I think that's also a way that you can easily injure yourself. Also, it doesn't make the practice all that fun. Like I had one teacher say “Well, if it's not hurting, you're not doing it right.” I was like, “No, this is not for me. Jack: Right. That makes perfect sense. Again, there are ways -- and it all depends on your preference. There are ways to ease somebody and to pushing out beyond their edge a little bit that isn't necessarily, you know, no pain, no gain, or if you can walk you can pose. I'm not sure that Vince Lombardi was a yogi and I'm not sure mixing those two things but I agree with you. Likewise, you have to decide, for whatever reason, in the West not everybody is necessarily comfortable with chanting Sanskrit or those kinds of things although… I mean from my perspective, I don't see any problem with that at all but you can find your level of that plus the extent to which a teacher is doing some talking or some inspiration throughout the class. That's, like I said, that's the good news. There are so many different disciplines and ways of approaching this that you can find your level. But you most certainly should not take your wanna-be-a-hero sort of approach that you might have had in sports into that. Because just like any other physical exercise, there can be injuries if you're not paying attention and you're not being guided properly. Jeena: Yeah. I want to go back a little bit and talk about the judging mind. So you were just talking about being in the studio and seeing everyone else in the room and comparing your posture, comparing your practice to others. What are some ways of sort of working with a judging mind? Jack: Well, there's any number of them. I mean one, of course, is just having the capability to notice when you're doing it. To see that it's happening. It certainly doesn't just happen in a yoga class. For me it happens on the basketball court, it happens in court. Let's be honest, there's nobody who's better looking than I am. But if there were, I might look at somebody in kind of a jealous way. I think the first is to recognize that it's happening and to see if you're rationalizing it in some way. That's why, going back to the kind of humility that comes with these practices, is that overtime you see that, yes, everybody has silly thoughts and things that would not be so flattering, for example, if they were being shown on a video screen as you were having them. But recognizing it and seeing that, well, everybody has thoughts like that from time to time. Whether you decide at that point, if you're on the yoga mat to, well, go back to your breath, focus on what you're doing or just recognize that it's something that happens from time to time. And then if you can understand why you might be doing it or that's what's so fascinating is to see, well, why is this person setting me off? Or why does this person appear to be pressing my buttons? What is it about that behavior or this context? It doesn't mean that you don't respond or it doesn't have some effect but recognizing it a couple of times when it happens can lead to, I think, a fairly substantial amount of insight into why it happens and what you do to try to just keep moving and recognize that if you just let a little time past that thought, by and large, is going to go its way and then you'll be thinking about 1975, or 2022, or this brief you have to finish or how you're going to meet your goal or what you're going to have for dinner at night. It's just one of many thoughts that presumably will come and go and that's part of this practice is recognizing that that does happen and trying to avoid where you can getting stuck on certain thoughts or ideas or emotions. Jeena: Yeah. I was a very dedicated bikram yoga student for probably about a year. Bikram for those folks that aren't familiar with it, are 26th postures done at a really hot room. I think it's like 110 degrees with something like 56% humidity. But the interesting thing about doing the 26th posture over and over and over again is that you can really see where you're at and see the improvement, the incremental improvement overtime. But what I found to be so fascinating is that there were days where I can just nail the posture. Where I can actually get my head to the ground while I'm sort of standing there with my legs spread apart. And then the next day, I couldn't nail that posture again. At some point, I realize, “Oh, my body is different every single day.” That was so eye-opening for me and, I think, that's one of the things that yoga teaches us is to sort of accept ourselves as we are. That's not an easy practice to do by any measure. I think that's such a beautiful practice because it helps us to just see where our body is, where our mind is. I mean there'll be days where I get on the yoga mat and my mind is going 150 miles per hour -- I have the monkey mind -- and I spend the entire hour thinking about my to-do list, right? Jack: Oh yeah. Jeena: There are other days where I get on the mat and it's just like this blissful experience. Not to judge those experience, not to say “Oh that one was so great and this one is so terrible” but just kind of using it as like data gathering. Jack: Right. That's being in somewhat of the same set of postures or the same situation on a fairly regular basis does give you the insight. What's a little bit different today? Where am I feeling this a little bit differently? Or why am I having these thoughts over and over again that I can't necessarily resolve? You and I have talked about this and we probably talked about it last time but I think it was Kelly McGonigal and the Willpower Instinct who said that that's one of the main benefits of meditation, oddly enough, paradoxically is that it shows you where your distractions are. It sort of helps you key in on those things, to some extent, that you can't necessarily resolve or that are cycling over and over and over again in your brain. And maybe you can get a little bit of an objective since of, well, what's going on here and why is this bothering me so much? Or why is this taking so much of my attention. Jeena: Jack, you're telling me that you are now teaching yoga which, I think, is really exciting. Tell me about teaching yoga. What has that experience been like? Jack: Well, let me frame it a little bit. I'm not doing any formal teaching. I don't have any teacher certifications other than the numbers of years that I've practiced. But I did have the opportunity recently to get ask to lead a class over at the University of South Carolina Law School. We have a brand new law school that has a big courtyard which is a perfect place to practice yoga, with the possible exception of how hot it is here in the summer. I agree to get in the sun which maybe experience a little bit bikramesque for me. Jeena: Yeah. Jack: It was a tremendous experience in part because -- and I notice this when… now that I've had the opportunity to do some speaking and to teach on certain subjects and other context whether it's information security or any of the other number topics is the act of teaching is very, very difficult. This is, I guess, is fairly obvious but the act of standing in front of people and actually leading the class as oppose to just going long for the ride as a participant is very challenging but as is often the case, the flip side of that is extraordinarily rewarding because of the opportunity to see, well, how well do I know this and how well can I convey these concepts or these ideas in an hour-long class? So I came away from it having been really challenged and also feeling some sense of satisfaction as well as that humility of, “Well, I talk a big game but maybe I don't know this quite as well as I thought I did. Maybe back to the mat, back to the drawing board.” But extraordinary and what I think was a pretty meaningful experience, I hope the folks that were there learned a little something or at least had a decent time. But it's something that I'm happy to have the opportunity to do and we look forward to doing that in the future. What was interesting about it, and I told several of the participants this in preparation and the run up to it, I was having the same sort of stress that you'd have before an oral argument like “Oh goodness, I need to make sure I don't leave this out. Am I going to be able to get it all in there? I don't want to be wrong. I don't want to look silly. Let's add this or let's add this.” Just as with PowerPoint presentations or other oral argument outlines, I realize that I packed way too much information in there that I needed to just take the foot off the gas and recognize that, at some point, you just have to have a little faith in the process. It was not going to be about spouting off every pithy line I'd ever read about yoga or something like that. But it's interesting to see that pattern manifesting itself again when you get nervous and when you feel like you're going to be assessed or judged. It does lead you to the “Well, I want to look good. I want to make sure that I impress” when that's not really the aim at all. Jeena: Yeah. So you had an opportunity to practice mindfulness. Jack: Absolutely and to recognize, “Look, I'm doing it again.” Jeena: Yeah. Jack: I'm going overboard with this when I really just need to take a step back and call on the mind and body's wisdom to just lead. Because, honestly, if I didn't have that stuff well before the class, it was not like learning it in the last 10 minutes before I talk in the class was going to make the light go on for me or anybody else. It was really eye-opening. I like having experiences like that that either push me or force me sometimes into situations that are uncomfortable and that are new and give me a chance to take that challenge on. I think that's going to continue to be important for all of us as the world keeps changing and to find ways to get out of our comfort zone and do things that help us grow and learn. Jeena: Yeah. I think that's the perfect place to wrap things up. Jack, thank you so much for joining me. It was so much fun to chat with you and I hope to have you back on the show soon. Jack: Well, anytime and I really appreciate the opportunity and look forward to seeing you soon.   Closing Thanks for joining us on the Resilient Lawyer Podcast. If you'd like to build a more profitable and purpose driven law practice, learn more about us at startherehq.com. If you've enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. It's really the best way to grow the show. To leave us a review on iTunes, search for the Resilient Lawyer and give us your honest feedback. It goes a long way to help with our visibility when you do that so we really appreciate it. As always, we'd love to hear from you and you can drop us an email anytime at hi@startherehq.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing you next week.

Our New JackJill Show - You Tell Us What You Want (CFFL 534) Transcript: Jack:                      Jack Butala with Jill Dewitt. Jill:                          Hi. Jack:                      Welcome to our show today, in this episode, Jill and I talk about our new Jack Jill show. This is all about ... Jill:                          What's coming. Jack:                      What's coming, and what you think the show should be about. Before we get into it, let's take a question, posted by one of our members on the land investors dot com. Online community. It's free. Jill:                          Okay, Allen asks, "is anyone else having problems posting property on land pin?" This is funny. Oops! How'd this get in there? Wow, all right. This is good. I fill out the new listing info and when I click the save button, the website grays out and just says "saving". This is hilarious. I have tried to list this one property four times now and the same thing keeps happening. All right, so we just got a tech support question that made it into our show. So, I'm ... Jack:                      I'm gonna answer it. Jill:                          All right, tech support Jack. Go for it. Jack:                      It has to do with how you signed up. And so there's no way you could know this. It happens to like, three people of the ... I think that site has a thousands of people so ... Jill:                          That's hilarious. Jack:                      Please email Erin at land academy dot com if you're having issues. She's the manager of that whole line of business and she'll get you straightened out real quick. In fact, chances are Allen, you're way past. By the time this airs, you know, you'll be all set. Jill:                          It's fixed, that's hilarious. Jack:                      This does bring up a good point though. Jill:                          I think this is really funny, I feel like somebody wanted to get this ... someone's like frustrated and put this in there on purpose. Jack:                      This does bring up a great point, so, and the point is ... Jill and I, we start these lines of businesses like land pan, parcel fact, land crowd fund, land tank, and on and on and on, there's a bunch of them. And, we put a manager at the top of it and that person runs that line like it's their own business. With their own plans, and Jill and I just kind of help out. So, all kidding aside, this kind of just snuck in here and I'm glad it did. Jill:                          I think it's hilarious. Jack:                      It gave us an opportunity today ... Jill:                          To see what's going on in our business. Jack:                      It gave us an opportunity to talk about our business structure and stuff. And we modeled this whole ... built a moat around it. Jill, as Jill calls it, "built a moat around these lines". They're separate companies; after Berkshire Hathaway. That's what they do. He doesn't go to ... You don't go visit the company every day that you own. Especially if you own 50 of them; In fact you probably don't ever go. Jill:                          You can't, it's not possible. Jack:                      Warren Buffet doesn't sit around and talk about Sees Candy. Jill:                          It's even ... Just within your business, you don't spend ... You're not sitting with the accounting people one hour every day, and then the billing people an hour every day, and the customer service people an hour every day. You have to put them in place with the right tools and the right resources and trust them and let them go. Jack:                      And the right manager. Jill:                          Yeah. Jack:                      You have to put the right manager in, and hold that manger accountable. Jill:                          Yep. Jack:                      So there's clearly,

How To Call An Interested Seller (CFFL 524) Transcript: Jack:                      Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill:                          Hey there! Jack:                      Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how to call an interested seller back. Man, this is so important, and I'm looking forward to it, because I want to hear from the expert, Jill. Jill:                          Thank you very much. Jack:                      Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community, it's free. Jill:                          OK, this is a little bit lengthy one, so I'm gonna preface that. So, new member here, in our group, Shammgod. This is [inaudible 00:00:32], shares. "Agreed on my first deal today. I figure I'd post it here, just to write out my thought process and so that if I'm missing anything, someone will hopefully correct me. Details: Seller and his father are both on the deed. He sent me a copy. I couldn't locate it exactly on the map, but agreed on a price way below anything on the market." Jack:                      Red flag. Jill:                          "I talked to the recorder and they verified things, and talked to the treasurer and the taxes are good." Jack:                      This is good. Jill:                          "Next steps: getting them a contract. I'm planning on sending them a small deposit because I don't think it's valid without one." Jack:                      Not necessary. Jill:                          I would just say weird. "This is a small deal so I'm planning on doing title myself." Jack:                      Awesome. Jill:                          "I think that I need to get notaries for both the father and son because they live in different states." Jack:                      Yes. This is boring. Jill:                          It's distracting. Jack:                      It's distracting, am I stealing your thunder? Jill:                          Just a tad. Jack:                      It's sad? Jill:                          Just a tad. No, you are, like every time I take a breath. Jack:                      Are you sad today? Jill:                          It's like darn don't pause, Jack's gonna throw something in there. Jack:                      Jack you're sad. Jill:                          I'm not sad. Jack:                      Jack, you're a sad little real estate investor. Jill:                          I'm just trying to share a story. Can I just share a story? Alright, where was I? Jack:                      "My biggest question..." Jill:                          Oh shoot, no I'm sorry wait, I totally, as we say that I just lost my place. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Jack:                      "My biggest question..." Jill:                          OK, "my biggest" ... do you want to finish this? Jack:                      "My biggest question around title or having the notary hand them the cheque is-" Jill:                          Too bad. [inaudible 00:02:19] I want to be Jack, this is good. Jack:                      "My biggest question around title or having the notary hand them the cheque is, what if I mess something up on the deed and I find out afterward it wasn't done correctly?" Jill:                          Boo hoo. Jack:                      "The seller would have already had the money." Jill:                          Uh-oh. Jack:                      Oh my god, sound effects Jill. Jill:                          Well this is what it's like. Jack:                      "I feel like there's probably a step here where I should make sure this doesn't happen if we're using a title company. That's a ... you know ... but I'm not sure what it is." Jill:                          Alright, I'm taking back over. "What's the play there?

Number One Reason People Fail (CFFL 450) Jack:                     Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill:                        Good Day. Jack:                     Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about the number one reason people fail. Jill:                        Okay, I have to say something. So ... Jack:                     We're not even into it yet! Jill:                        No, no, no ... I just have to say something about this real quick because my assistant was going, "what is the number one reason?" I'm like, where are you reading that? What are you talking about? She goes, no it's a show you have coming up. I'm like ... Oh, that's a really good question. I think I know what he's gonna say, but I don't know what he's gonna say. So I think ... I told her I'll let you know. Jack:                     Because God forbid she listens to the show. Jill:                        No I know. They usually don't listen to our show. That's what's so funny. Everybody that works here does not listen to our show. Jack:                     Everybody who works with us has no interest in real estate. Jill:                        I know. Jack:                     And doesn't listen to our show. Jill:                        Well she does interest in real estate. Jack:                     It's just funny. Jill:                        I know. Jack:                     I don't know why. Jill:                        It's hilarious. Okay. So, I think I'm going to quietly ... You know like you're writing when you cover your hand I'm gonna write what I think it's about and I want you to tell me what you think it's about. Jack:                     Before we get into it even though Jill just did. Let's take a question posted by one of our members on landinvenstors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                        Okay. Claire asks, "Is there any special way to frame offers to owners of multiple parcels in the same subdivision?" Jack:                     Claire I am so proud of you. You are one of our original members and you're just killin it. And this is yet another incredibly intelligent question from you. Yes, this is what we do. It gets complicated, but I will tell you for the more sophisticated database people out there that are in our group or not in our group doesn't matter this is how you do it ... In a whole subdivision we'll use a thousand property example. There's a thousand properties in a subdivision and let's say two people own, you know, a ton of them. Which this is a real life example. It happens all the time. Usually the people who own a ton of them are like Jill and I. So you don't want to waste fifty cents on sending duplicate offers at all. You never want to do that. So you run through the mail merge or you call somebody at offerstoowners.com, which is one of our companies. They'll do it for you. You run a mail merge that says ... With all the single property owners, right, and now you're done with that and you get the offers in the mail. And now what you have in the tech world or the database world is an exception. You deal with these exceptions at the end. And so if there's those two people that own a ton of properties ... If you're brand new or if you're new to data, you can manually just copy and paste them in or you can run a duplicate data base filter which creates a separate type of offer and now you're only spending fifty cents to send an offer and it adds it all up for you. Fifty properties, or eighty properties, or a hundred properties. So, Claire reach out to me. I'll help ya. We have a little custom application that we wrote a lot of years ago that we run the data through and it separates the two. It's on my list to share with everyone. Jill:                        I love it. This is so good. This is a really great example of how quickly you can go from flipping your first deal to this stuff.

What Land Buyers Really Want Jack Butala: What Land Buyers Really Want. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hey. Jack: Welcome to our show today. This episode Jill and I talk about what land buyers really want. Jill: Can you tell me what I want, what they really really want? Sorry just thought about that. Jack: First let's take a question posted by one of our members. That was a blast from the 80s. No like the 90s that's the Spice Girls. Jill: Yeah it was. Jack: Let's take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com our free online community. Jill: By the way I think one of the Spice Girls lives really close to us in LA and we'll leave it at that. Jack: Really? Jill: Yeah she's married to a soccer player. Jack: Oh. Oh yeah. Jill: Yeah. Speaking of Spice Girls. It's not like I see her in the grocery store but she's there. Okay. So Chris asked, "I have purchased my first properties and the notaries have the put the signed deed to the mill to me." Yay. Jack: Awesome Chris congratulations. Jill: "I should have them in a few days. Can I start marketing the properties right now or do I need to wait until the deeds are recorded at the county office?" Oh, I like these questions. Jack: Can you answer that? Jill: Absolutely. Jack: Without putting us in prison. Jill: You're so silly. You know me so well. Of course. When the deeds are signed the ink can actually still be wet but they are signed. The property is yours Chris. Market away. You are only recording them now. You can get these deeds back and put them in your safe and then record them like later on like right when you get to sell them. Jack: Please don't do that. Jill: No I know. But I'm just saying don't do that but you could do that. Jack: Legally and philosophically one hundred percent correct and ethically correct. Jill: Right. The point is ... Jack: It just causes problems. Jill: You're having it recorded. It's signed in your hands and that's your proof that you own the property. You have it recorded so it's public knowledge. That's the key and you want the assessor to know where to send the proper tax bills. You don't want to have the old owner be still be getting the tax information when it's really now your responsibility. Jack: Yeah, see that's why. Jill: So you want to catch all that up. But the big picture is, okay now can I really go out there and put it on my website and start selling it? Do I really own it now? Is it okay for me to do that? The answer is yes and heck yeah and you better do that. That's the goal. You want to do that. You want to have it in a perfect world it might even be sold before you even have a chance to get it recorded. Jack: Good point. Jill: Because that's the goal here and that's what Jack and I do sometimes. It's great when that happens. It's nothing better than sending in two deeds to be recorded at the same time like here's the deed for when I bought it. Oh, then number two now please record this one second because here's the deed of me selling it. How cool. Jack: Now keep doing exactly what you're doing because you're headed right down the right path. eventually you're going to have a group of A list buyers like Jill and I have. I don't know there's probably ten of them maybe a little bit less. When we get a deal in when the mail comes back and we have a signed offer, what we do is actually I'll make a phone call or send an email out to one of our A list buyers whose bought property just like that in the past, and I'll say hey we've got some more. I trust you so here's the APNs, we haven't purchased them yet, we're not fending it off. They're coming in we're just about to move forward on it but I want to let you know first and see if you want to buy all the properties and I'll put you...

What Land Buyers Really Want Jack Butala: What Land Buyers Really Want. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hey. Jack: Welcome to our show today. This episode Jill and I talk about what land buyers really want. Jill: Can you tell me what I want, what they really really want? Sorry just thought about that. Jack: First let's take a question posted by one of our members. That was a blast from the 80s. No like the 90s that's the Spice Girls. Jill: Yeah it was. Jack: Let's take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com our free online community. Jill: By the way I think one of the Spice Girls lives really close to us in LA and we'll leave it at that. Jack: Really? Jill: Yeah she's married to a soccer player. Jack: Oh. Oh yeah. Jill: Yeah. Speaking of Spice Girls. It's not like I see her in the grocery store but she's there. Okay. So Chris asked, "I have purchased my first properties and the notaries have the put the signed deed to the mill to me." Yay. Jack: Awesome Chris congratulations. Jill: "I should have them in a few days. Can I start marketing the properties right now or do I need to wait until the deeds are recorded at the county office?" Oh, I like these questions. Jack: Can you answer that? Jill: Absolutely. Jack: Without putting us in prison. Jill: You're so silly. You know me so well. Of course. When the deeds are signed the ink can actually still be wet but they are signed. The property is yours Chris. Market away. You are only recording them now. You can get these deeds back and put them in your safe and then record them like later on like right when you get to sell them. Jack: Please don't do that. Jill: No I know. But I'm just saying don't do that but you could do that. Jack: Legally and philosophically one hundred percent correct and ethically correct. Jill: Right. The point is ... Jack: It just causes problems. Jill: You're having it recorded. It's signed in your hands and that's your proof that you own the property. You have it recorded so it's public knowledge. That's the key and you want the assessor to know where to send the proper tax bills. You don't want to have the old owner be still be getting the tax information when it's really now your responsibility. Jack: Yeah, see that's why. Jill: So you want to catch all that up. But the big picture is, okay now can I really go out there and put it on my website and start selling it? Do I really own it now? Is it okay for me to do that? The answer is yes and heck yeah and you better do that. That's the goal. You want to do that. You want to have it in a perfect world it might even be sold before you even have a chance to get it recorded. Jack: Good point. Jill: Because that's the goal here and that's what Jack and I do sometimes. It's great when that happens. It's nothing better than sending in two deeds to be recorded at the same time like here's the deed for when I bought it. Oh, then number two now please record this one second because here's the deed of me selling it. How cool. Jack: Now keep doing exactly what you're doing because you're headed right down the right path. eventually you're going to have a group of A list buyers like Jill and I have. I don't know there's probably ten of them maybe a little bit less. When we get a deal in when the mail comes back and we have a signed offer, what we do is actually I'll make a phone call or send an email out to one of our A list buyers whose bought property just like that in the past, and I'll say hey we've got some more. I trust you so here's the APNs, we haven't purchased them yet, we're not fending it off. They're coming in we're just about to move forward on it but I want to let you know first and see if you want to buy all the properties and I'll put you...

Jack Butala: Automate Everything Except Personal Seller Contact. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hello. Jack: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how to automate everything except personal seller contact, maybe the most important piece of all of this. Before we get started, Jill, let's take a question posted by one of our members on Land Academy's online community support group. Jill: You've got it. Michel asks, I have a 36-acre property the seller agreed to option. I'm going to use the form in the program, our program. As a seller, since it's not actually mine, how do you market it when you get the question from potential buyers who do some research and see the deed is not in your name? Good question. Jack: You're more qualified to answer this than I am. Jill: For starters, you might actually own the property and have owned it for even six months and it still might not show in their name. Jack: The property, it never shows in your name in our business. We sell it so fast, the assessor can't keep up. Jill: Exactly. That's exactly right. Some of the counties, they're faster and some of them are really slow and some just have a system, so don't even worry about that. Jack: Practice a speech. Jill: I just explain it to people and they're good with it. Jack: Give us the speech, Jill. Jill: That's exactly the speech. Jack: Even if you do buy the 36-acre property and then you start marketing it and you own it, it's not going to be in your name for quite some time, sometimes two years. So what's the speech when the buyer says, you don't even own this property. Why are you selling a piece of property that you don't even own? Jill: Like they say that. They don't say that. Jack: You are a crook. Jill: You're so gully. You know what? Jack, maybe that happens to you but it doesn't happen to me. You know how they say it to me? They're like, tell me again in that voice. Jack: Oh my gosh, Jill, you're making me feel uncomfortable. You're making my stomach hurt a little bit. Ooh, talk like that a little more. Jill: Tingly. Jack: Give us a little pillow talk, Jill. Jill: Her's how I explain it. This is really good. Well, Michel, here's why ... Jack: Michel's a guy, by the way. Jill: Yes, it is. Here's why it's not in my name yet. Jack: It would be cool if she was a she, though. Imagine that. I like this even more. Jill: Michel could be a man or a woman the way I do it. Are you a little tingly now? Jack: Man, this is my favorite show so far. Jill: I totally forgot about what the question was. Jack: What is this business that we're in? Jill: I don't know. I'm all tingly. Jack: All kidding aside, you have to have a little speech for this because it comes up a lot. Not a lot. It comes up once in a while, especially when you're new and your internet presence is not like ours. Jill: Do you know what I do? Here's what I really do, for real. In a very nice way, I don't make my person on the other end sound silly or like they're not smart but I say, let me tell you how these assessors work. Some counties are good and some counties are not good. The recorders even ... It can take days, it can take weeks, it can take months. Once you really explain that, it's good. I've never had a person come back to me and say, you need to send me a copy of the recorded deed ahead of time so I know you really own it. Jack: I've never had that either. Jill: They never do that. Once you just explain it, they go, oh, okay, and they move on. Yeah, I just got this. It's awesome. You're getting a great deal and, yeah, it's going to take some time, and by the way,

Jack Butala: Automate Everything Except Personal Seller Contact. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hello. Jack: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how to automate everything except personal seller contact, maybe the most important piece of all of this. Before we get started, Jill, let's take a question posted by one of our members on Land Academy's online community support group. Jill: You've got it. Michel asks, I have a 36-acre property the seller agreed to option. I'm going to use the form in the program, our program. As a seller, since it's not actually mine, how do you market it when you get the question from potential buyers who do some research and see the deed is not in your name? Good question. Jack: You're more qualified to answer this than I am. Jill: For starters, you might actually own the property and have owned it for even six months and it still might not show in their name. Jack: The property, it never shows in your name in our business. We sell it so fast, the assessor can't keep up. Jill: Exactly. That's exactly right. Some of the counties, they're faster and some of them are really slow and some just have a system, so don't even worry about that. Jack: Practice a speech. Jill: I just explain it to people and they're good with it. Jack: Give us the speech, Jill. Jill: That's exactly the speech. Jack: Even if you do buy the 36-acre property and then you start marketing it and you own it, it's not going to be in your name for quite some time, sometimes two years. So what's the speech when the buyer says, you don't even own this property. Why are you selling a piece of property that you don't even own? Jill: Like they say that. They don't say that. Jack: You are a crook. Jill: You're so gully. You know what? Jack, maybe that happens to you but it doesn't happen to me. You know how they say it to me? They're like, tell me again in that voice. Jack: Oh my gosh, Jill, you're making me feel uncomfortable. You're making my stomach hurt a little bit. Ooh, talk like that a little more. Jill: Tingly. Jack: Give us a little pillow talk, Jill. Jill: Her's how I explain it. This is really good. Well, Michel, here's why ... Jack: Michel's a guy, by the way. Jill: Yes, it is. Here's why it's not in my name yet. Jack: It would be cool if she was a she, though. Imagine that. I like this even more. Jill: Michel could be a man or a woman the way I do it. Are you a little tingly now? Jack: Man, this is my favorite show so far. Jill: I totally forgot about what the question was. Jack: What is this business that we're in? Jill: I don't know. I'm all tingly. Jack: All kidding aside, you have to have a little speech for this because it comes up a lot. Not a lot. It comes up once in a while, especially when you're new and your internet presence is not like ours. Jill: Do you know what I do? Here's what I really do, for real. In a very nice way, I don't make my person on the other end sound silly or like they're not smart but I say, let me tell you how these assessors work. Some counties are good and some counties are not good. The recorders even ... It can take days, it can take weeks, it can take months. Once you really explain that, it's good. I've never had a person come back to me and say, you need to send me a copy of the recorded deed ahead of time so I know you really own it. Jack: I've never had that either. Jill: They never do that. Once you just explain it, they go, oh, okay, and they move on. Yeah, I just got this. It's awesome. You're getting a great deal and, yeah, it's going to take some time, and by the way,

Why You Don't Need a Purchase Agreement Jack Butala: Why You Don't Need a Purchase Agreement. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala, with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hi. Jack: Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about why you don't need a purchase agreement all the time. Great show today Jill. Before we get started, let's share something funny that, or interesting, I should say, that happened to us recently. Jill: You know, I wanted to share a really, really, really cool email that I got from somebody. I was going to point out a couple of little things in here. I love when I get these. This is interesting to me. I got to tell you, I read these, and I need to share it, so here I am sharing it. I mean, it's just so good, the feedback that we get. This individual ... I haven't asked, so I have to kind of ... can't drop some names here, but I can share some of it though. It says: "Hey. Hi, Jill. I just wanted to drop a note of thanks to you and Jack, having joined a few weeks ago. Although I have already been running a profitable land business, my methods have been rather than systematic." Jack: Yeah. Jill: Isn't that great? Jack: Yeah. Jill: He says, "I'm going through everything. It's so thoroughly done and it really does leave no stone unturned. I am smitten." Jack: Wow. Jill: Isn't that great? He said, "To offer perspective ... Jack: Smitten with you. Jill: ... I have actually been" ... Thank you. Jack: Jill smitten. Jill: Thank you. Jack: Dot com. Jill smitten dot com. Jill: You're so sweet. I have a quote here at the end I was going to save for you. My quote for you is, "This show may or may not appeal to you." You said that ... Jack: Make fun of Jack dot com. Jill: What you said the other day ... Yeah. No, but he's ... We're not his first go around here, but it sounds like we're his last go around. Jack: Awe. Jill: It basically ... His whole thing was we taught him how to web base this whole thing. He says ... Here's his ending, "Within a few weeks I intend to have a fully functioning, automated, web based selling properties. I love the idea of selling properties this way. I'm so thankful to have found you two. I look forward to tomorrow's podcast. Laughing along with you as I gain new insights." Jack: Awesome. What a compliment. That's great. Jill: Thank you. Isn't that cool? Jack: It really is I mean ... Jill: Took a few pieces out of that, but ... Jack: You can't buy that kind of stuff. Jill smitten. Jill: You're so funny. Thank you. Jack: I'm going to see if that's available. Jill: Jill smitten dot com. Jack: I'm serious. Jill: The crap Jack says dot com. Jack: I just ... I got an email for somebody recently. They said, "You know, once in a while you talk about a calendar. Can you please put a calendar together that shows the path that you can take. You know, what I'm suppose to do on Saturday. What I'm suppose to do on Sunday because I got to work Monday through Friday." and on and on, so I did. I put a calendar together and we're going to publish it. I mean I won't ... We're going to publish with your sales. Whenever you tell us to, but ... Jill: Okay. Jack: I finally ... I've been threatening to do that for quite some time. It actually turned out really cool. Jill: Threatening. Jack: No, a lot of people say, look, I get it. You guys are doing great. I see all these members doing it but I just need one step more. I need you to tell me. When I ... All right, let's say I start the thing on Thursday, how much time do I need? Well it takes this much time to go through the program, then this much time to learn the data, then on Saturday you start just do the mail,

Why You Don't Need a Purchase Agreement Jack Butala: Why You Don't Need a Purchase Agreement. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: Jack Butala, with Jill DeWit. Jill: Hi. Jack: Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about why you don't need a purchase agreement all the time. Great show today Jill. Before we get started, let's share something funny that, or interesting, I should say, that happened to us recently. Jill: You know, I wanted to share a really, really, really cool email that I got from somebody. I was going to point out a couple of little things in here. I love when I get these. This is interesting to me. I got to tell you, I read these, and I need to share it, so here I am sharing it. I mean, it's just so good, the feedback that we get. This individual ... I haven't asked, so I have to kind of ... can't drop some names here, but I can share some of it though. It says: "Hey. Hi, Jill. I just wanted to drop a note of thanks to you and Jack, having joined a few weeks ago. Although I have already been running a profitable land business, my methods have been rather than systematic." Jack: Yeah. Jill: Isn't that great? Jack: Yeah. Jill: He says, "I'm going through everything. It's so thoroughly done and it really does leave no stone unturned. I am smitten." Jack: Wow. Jill: Isn't that great? He said, "To offer perspective ... Jack: Smitten with you. Jill: ... I have actually been" ... Thank you. Jack: Jill smitten. Jill: Thank you. Jack: Dot com. Jill smitten dot com. Jill: You're so sweet. I have a quote here at the end I was going to save for you. My quote for you is, "This show may or may not appeal to you." You said that ... Jack: Make fun of Jack dot com. Jill: What you said the other day ... Yeah. No, but he's ... We're not his first go around here, but it sounds like we're his last go around. Jack: Awe. Jill: It basically ... His whole thing was we taught him how to web base this whole thing. He says ... Here's his ending, "Within a few weeks I intend to have a fully functioning, automated, web based selling properties. I love the idea of selling properties this way. I'm so thankful to have found you two. I look forward to tomorrow's podcast. Laughing along with you as I gain new insights." Jack: Awesome. What a compliment. That's great. Jill: Thank you. Isn't that cool? Jack: It really is I mean ... Jill: Took a few pieces out of that, but ... Jack: You can't buy that kind of stuff. Jill smitten. Jill: You're so funny. Thank you. Jack: I'm going to see if that's available. Jill: Jill smitten dot com. Jack: I'm serious. Jill: The crap Jack says dot com. Jack: I just ... I got an email for somebody recently. They said, "You know, once in a while you talk about a calendar. Can you please put a calendar together that shows the path that you can take. You know, what I'm suppose to do on Saturday. What I'm suppose to do on Sunday because I got to work Monday through Friday." and on and on, so I did. I put a calendar together and we're going to publish it. I mean I won't ... We're going to publish with your sales. Whenever you tell us to, but ... Jill: Okay. Jack: I finally ... I've been threatening to do that for quite some time. It actually turned out really cool. Jill: Threatening. Jack: No, a lot of people say, look, I get it. You guys are doing great. I see all these members doing it but I just need one step more. I need you to tell me. When I ... All right, let's say I start the thing on Thursday, how much time do I need? Well it takes this much time to go through the program, then this much time to learn the data, then on Saturday you start just do the mail,

Flip Houses 3 of 3 Mail Merge Print and Send Jack Butala: Flip Houses 3 of 3 Mail Merge Print and Send. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: It's Jack Butella for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cashflow from Land show. We show you how to buy property for half of what it's worth and resell it the very next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me. Jill: And inspiration from Jill. That's me. Jack: There's some funny stuff that happened to us recently. Jill, I can't believe that an Uber driver can tell you their whole life story in 6 minutes flat. Jill: Isn't it hilarious? It's so funny. Jack: We had an Uber driver last night and she was from Germany. She got married to an American and lives here now, lives in California. She told us her whole life story. Jill: It's hilarious. Jack: What it ended up being, her whole life story, the differences the way people drive in Europe and the way that people drive in California. I have to say, I think she was right. Jill: I totally agree. The whole valet parking thing I thought was really funny, too. I'll add that. Jack: Yeah, go ahead. It's the pass left thing that'll stick with me forever. Jill: The pass left? Jack: The left lane is for passing. Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jack: I'm from Detroit, that's how we learn it there too. Jill: Exactly. Jack: It's not for driving on. Jill: Exactly. Jack: If you have a white minivan and 430 people in your care and you're driving in the left lane and 45 miles an hour, this is for you. Jill: Watch out. Jack: Please don't do that. Jill: I love it. Oh my gosh. Jack: The Uber driver felt the same way. Jill: Right. That's so funny. Yeah, this was 6 minutes of a lot of laughing. It was hilarious. My favorite story was when she talked about her dad coming over. Her dad was appalled at the valet parking. Wait a minute, you mean I'm coming to your restaurant and I have to pay to leave my car to go to your restaurant? I'm like, "You know, I never really thought about it. I'm just kind of used to it." The dad was pissed off about that. Jack: He was. Jill: It was really funny. Jack: You know what my response is? I think he's probably right. Jill: I think he's right, too. Jack: Why am I paying to park if I'm coming to your place? Jill: Exactly. It was so darn funny. That was just a thing that just got to him. What was so cute too was I kind of felt bad for her, it sounds like her family came out and they visited and they're not coming back. Jack: Yeah. She said, "I think that's about it." Jill: Yeah, I guess she's got to go visit them there. For some people, that's okay. Jack: Right. Hey, in this episode, Jill and I talk about flipping houses. This is little mini episode 3 of 3. It's called Mail, Merge, Print, and Send. It's a piece of this that I don't think it's talked about enough and we don't get enough questions about it. It seems just, I guess, a mechanical piece. I'm going to try to make this as fun as possible, okay Jill? Jill: Got it. Jack: Great show. Before we start, let's take a question posted by one of our members on successplan.com, our free online community. Jill: Jason from Michigan called in and asked: I have your Day to Doorstep program and I'm amazed at the amount of data available. Jack: I like where this is going. Jill: I like this, too. It's very true. It's awesome. How to remove the houses with mortgages, is there a place to get an overview on this product? Nice question. Jack: How do you move all the houses with mortgages?

Flip Houses 3 of 3 Mail Merge Print and Send Jack Butala: Flip Houses 3 of 3 Mail Merge Print and Send. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: It's Jack Butella for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cashflow from Land show. We show you how to buy property for half of what it's worth and resell it the very next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me. Jill: And inspiration from Jill. That's me. Jack: There's some funny stuff that happened to us recently. Jill, I can't believe that an Uber driver can tell you their whole life story in 6 minutes flat. Jill: Isn't it hilarious? It's so funny. Jack: We had an Uber driver last night and she was from Germany. She got married to an American and lives here now, lives in California. She told us her whole life story. Jill: It's hilarious. Jack: What it ended up being, her whole life story, the differences the way people drive in Europe and the way that people drive in California. I have to say, I think she was right. Jill: I totally agree. The whole valet parking thing I thought was really funny, too. I'll add that. Jack: Yeah, go ahead. It's the pass left thing that'll stick with me forever. Jill: The pass left? Jack: The left lane is for passing. Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jack: I'm from Detroit, that's how we learn it there too. Jill: Exactly. Jack: It's not for driving on. Jill: Exactly. Jack: If you have a white minivan and 430 people in your care and you're driving in the left lane and 45 miles an hour, this is for you. Jill: Watch out. Jack: Please don't do that. Jill: I love it. Oh my gosh. Jack: The Uber driver felt the same way. Jill: Right. That's so funny. Yeah, this was 6 minutes of a lot of laughing. It was hilarious. My favorite story was when she talked about her dad coming over. Her dad was appalled at the valet parking. Wait a minute, you mean I'm coming to your restaurant and I have to pay to leave my car to go to your restaurant? I'm like, "You know, I never really thought about it. I'm just kind of used to it." The dad was pissed off about that. Jack: He was. Jill: It was really funny. Jack: You know what my response is? I think he's probably right. Jill: I think he's right, too. Jack: Why am I paying to park if I'm coming to your place? Jill: Exactly. It was so darn funny. That was just a thing that just got to him. What was so cute too was I kind of felt bad for her, it sounds like her family came out and they visited and they're not coming back. Jack: Yeah. She said, "I think that's about it." Jill: Yeah, I guess she's got to go visit them there. For some people, that's okay. Jack: Right. Hey, in this episode, Jill and I talk about flipping houses. This is little mini episode 3 of 3. It's called Mail, Merge, Print, and Send. It's a piece of this that I don't think it's talked about enough and we don't get enough questions about it. It seems just, I guess, a mechanical piece. I'm going to try to make this as fun as possible, okay Jill? Jill: Got it. Jack: Great show. Before we start, let's take a question posted by one of our members on successplan.com, our free online community. Jill: Jason from Michigan called in and asked: I have your Day to Doorstep program and I'm amazed at the amount of data available. Jack: I like where this is going. Jill: I like this, too. It's very true. It's awesome. How to remove the houses with mortgages, is there a place to get an overview on this product? Nice question. Jack: How do you move all the houses with mortgages?

Knock it Off - You Got This Jack Butala: Knock it Off - You Got This. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: As Jack Butala for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow from Land Show. We show you how to buy property for half of what it's worth and resell it the next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me. Jill: Inspiration from Jill, that's me. Jack: Here's some funny stuff that happened to both of us recently. Jill: Somebody decided Steven should be on a skateboard instead of his Cannondale. Jack: Oh my gosh. Jill: I'm sorry. I hope it's not too soon. Jack: You know what's not healthy? We should not have something funny happen to us every single day. Jill: I know. Okay, let me back up- Jack: What if we just- Jill: Two nights ago- Jack: Sit on the couch more. Jill: We went downstairs. We were walking to a restaurant. We're here at the beach, and we're walking to a restaurant. We walked past our vehicle only to notice that someone had cut the lock, taken off my bike and put it to the side. Jack: Neatly put it to the side and stole my bike. Jill: Steven's bike, which was the second one again. Wait, it gets better. They left their skateboard. Jack: They upgraded their transportation situation. Jill: Exactly. I'm so sorry. Jack: They did everything except leave a thank you note. Jill: I know. I'm so sorry. It is so not funny, and I'm so sorry that that happened Steven. I've got to say, I really do feel bad. Jack: It was a sweet Cannondale racing bike that I exercise on. Now I've got to go replace that, and- Jill: I know. Jack: It's just ... No, it's not too soon man. Honestly, do you know what would have really sucked? If they stole your bike because you have a love affair with that bike. Jill: I do have a love affair with my bike. Jack: I can replace my stuff. I don't have any emotion about it at all. It's just an inconvenience. That for me, that's where it ends. I have no emotion about it. Now I have to go buy another bike, put the lights on it, bright seat, and the whole thing. It's not convenient. Jill: What I thought was so funny is the conversation you and I had about it later about, "Wow, how weird is ... What do you feel bad so you leave your skateboard? 'Hey I'm stealing your bike, but I'm not really that bad of a person, so I'm leaving you my skateboard.'" What the heck? Jack: It cracks me up man. Jill: I know, I'm sure they could've got home with their skateboard too. I don't get it. It's so funny. Jack: If you're listening to this show, and you have a purple Cannondale that you just bought off of Craigslist it's my bike. Jill: Exactly. Jack: You know what? Keep it. It's my gift to you. Jill: You know what? This stuff happens. Jack: Yeah. Jill: That's the better thing, how you and I choose to react about this stuff is important. Jack: Yeah. Jill: We can be all calling the police. You know what I mean? I thought about that. We could've called the police and filed the report, whatever, and done the insurance thing, but that's not ... We're not doing that. Jack: No. Jill: Just replace it and move on. Jack: Yeah. Jill: You've got a skateboard now. Jack: My second thought was, "Man, I'm getting a new bike." Jill: Yeah. I love it. I love how you roll Jack. Jack: In this episode Jill and I talk about knocking it off, you've got this. Jill, great show today. Before we start let's take a question posted by one of our members on successplan.com. It's our free online community where everybody collaborate...

Knock it Off - You Got This Jack Butala: Knock it Off - You Got This. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Jack: As Jack Butala for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow from Land Show. We show you how to buy property for half of what it's worth and resell it the next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me. Jill: Inspiration from Jill, that's me. Jack: Here's some funny stuff that happened to both of us recently. Jill: Somebody decided Steven should be on a skateboard instead of his Cannondale. Jack: Oh my gosh. Jill: I'm sorry. I hope it's not too soon. Jack: You know what's not healthy? We should not have something funny happen to us every single day. Jill: I know. Okay, let me back up- Jack: What if we just- Jill: Two nights ago- Jack: Sit on the couch more. Jill: We went downstairs. We were walking to a restaurant. We're here at the beach, and we're walking to a restaurant. We walked past our vehicle only to notice that someone had cut the lock, taken off my bike and put it to the side. Jack: Neatly put it to the side and stole my bike. Jill: Steven's bike, which was the second one again. Wait, it gets better. They left their skateboard. Jack: They upgraded their transportation situation. Jill: Exactly. I'm so sorry. Jack: They did everything except leave a thank you note. Jill: I know. I'm so sorry. It is so not funny, and I'm so sorry that that happened Steven. I've got to say, I really do feel bad. Jack: It was a sweet Cannondale racing bike that I exercise on. Now I've got to go replace that, and- Jill: I know. Jack: It's just ... No, it's not too soon man. Honestly, do you know what would have really sucked? If they stole your bike because you have a love affair with that bike. Jill: I do have a love affair with my bike. Jack: I can replace my stuff. I don't have any emotion about it at all. It's just an inconvenience. That for me, that's where it ends. I have no emotion about it. Now I have to go buy another bike, put the lights on it, bright seat, and the whole thing. It's not convenient. Jill: What I thought was so funny is the conversation you and I had about it later about, "Wow, how weird is ... What do you feel bad so you leave your skateboard? 'Hey I'm stealing your bike, but I'm not really that bad of a person, so I'm leaving you my skateboard.'" What the heck? Jack: It cracks me up man. Jill: I know, I'm sure they could've got home with their skateboard too. I don't get it. It's so funny. Jack: If you're listening to this show, and you have a purple Cannondale that you just bought off of Craigslist it's my bike. Jill: Exactly. Jack: You know what? Keep it. It's my gift to you. Jill: You know what? This stuff happens. Jack: Yeah. Jill: That's the better thing, how you and I choose to react about this stuff is important. Jack: Yeah. Jill: We can be all calling the police. You know what I mean? I thought about that. We could've called the police and filed the report, whatever, and done the insurance thing, but that's not ... We're not doing that. Jack: No. Jill: Just replace it and move on. Jack: Yeah. Jill: You've got a skateboard now. Jack: My second thought was, "Man, I'm getting a new bike." Jill: Yeah. I love it. I love how you roll Jack. Jack: In this episode Jill and I talk about knocking it off, you've got this. Jill, great show today. Before we start let's take a question posted by one of our members on successplan.com. It's our free online community where everybody collaborate...

Today's host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Matt Williams Today's guest(s): Dr. Ray Guarendi, Carol Pirillo, and Christopher Harding Links from today's show: Today's topics: Pastoring three parishes, Dr. Ray Guarendi, Cards Behind Bars Summary of today's show: It's a feast of topics today. Scot Landry and Fr. Matt Williams continue the discussion of the proposed pastoral plan for the Archdiocese of Boston presented to priests on Monday, by listening to a talk given by Fr. Jack Ahern on lessons learned pastoring three parishes. Then Scot welcomes Dr. Ray Guarendi, host of his own show on WQOM and one of the presenters at this Saturday's WQOM conference in Lowell. Finally, Scot talks with Chris Harding and Carol Pirillo of the Cards Behind Bars ministry, which provides Christmas cards to prisoners to send to their families. 1st segment: Scot said to Fr. Matt that not only is it the beginning of Advent with the new Roman Missal translation, the God of This City tour last week, a Priests' Convocation on Monday, a Sister Olga's new religious community on Friday, and the WQOM conference on Saturday. Fr. Matt recapped the God of This City tour which had over 2,000 people take part over four nights. Friday evening was the culminating event at the Cathedral. They had five priests for confession and all night long the line was over 20 to 30 people deep. Some priests heard confessions for over 4 hours. It shows the need for more priests, but it also shows how the tour brings people to a deeper relationship with the Lord. Scot will begin today with a continuation of the conversation about this past Monday's priest convocation. Among the speakers on Monday was Fr. Jack Ahern, about what it is like to be the first pastor in the Archdiocese to serve three parishes at once as pastor. His reflections moved the priests who were present. Fr. Jack Ahern: On his first day in Dorchester, following Mass, the lector asked to speak to him. He asked Fr. Jack why the cardinal would send a liberal elite to their parish. He said he must be liberal elite because he's from Brookline and the Boston Globe likes him. It went down from there. There were painful decisions related to hiring and firing staff, adjusting the schedules and programs for each of the three parishes. Most people recognized the need for change, but the vocal minority made life difficult sometimes. One woman had Bishop Hennessey on speed-dial and called him at least once per week. Scot said when a pastor takes on three parishes you meet it with everything you have and most people embrace the priest and the change necessary. Fr. Matt said in a new assignment you expect to be welcomed with open arms. He suspects it was complicated by the changes that had already occurred in Dorchester. He said it's difficult for the priest too because you want to shepherd these people and to experience this right at the beginning puts you on your heels. You can lose perspective in that the vocal minority can monopolize your attention. Scot said Fr. Jack was speaking to the concerns of the priests in the room who had not pastored more than one parish at a time. Fr. Jack delineated the challenges they would face. Fr. Jack: It hasn't been easy, but it's true for all the priests. For himself and his vicars, they have sometimes shown up at the right time but the wrong church for Mass. The schedules don't always allow them to be together as one in all activities. It's an adjustment for the parishioners who do not understand why you cannot be present. Combining programs and celebrations is a slow process. The most difficult adjustment for the priests is that the parishioners are used to seeing their priests each and every week. They would sometimes not see one of the priests for one or two weeks. At times he feels like an absentee father. He misses the intimacies involved in being pastor of one parish. Scot said a key point was the challenge for priests who miss seeing the same people every day or every week when they serve multiple communities. Fr. Matt said what father isn't present for his family? It's ingrained in us from a natural level. Fr. Matt said it beckons us to consider Jesus as an itinerant preacher, who never stayed in one place for very long. It's a greater sacrifice of self for the priest. Scot reiterated that the future pastoral plan is a proposal right now in which all will be asked to give their feedback before Cardinal Seán makes a final decision. The current proposal is for a Pastoral Service Team of one pastor and one or more parochial vicars and assistants to serve two or three parishes. Fr. Jack: Unable to be present with one parish week in and week out, without the intimacy for the parish priest, it's not easy to move into. The one consolation that has come his way is that he's been graced with a deeper intimacy with Jesus. Scot said Fr. Jack has relied more on Jesus to balance the demands of three parishes which has given him great joy and peace. Fr. Matt said that God can never be outdone in generosity. Scot said Cardinal Seán and the commission recognize that its better for priests to live in community. Fr. Jack: Regarding living with priests, Fr. Doc Conway who works with Fr. Jack has come to recognize the joy of living with other priests, having served his last few assignments alone. Fr. Jack said he's having the time of his life and the other two priests who live with him are too, which makes an incredible difference for the parishes and their own lives as well. Fr. Matt said there is a rich sharing between three men of such different ages and backgrounds. Fr. Doc is older, Fr. Jack is in about his mid-50s, and Fr. Huy is newly ordained. He said there's so much a young priest can learn from older priests when they live with them. Scot said when he encounters Fr. Jack, who not only serves in a community that has gone through rough times, but serves three parishes, he is struck by how joy-filled he is. Fr. Jack: As of today, there are 26 situations where priests and pastoral staffs are responsible for multiple parishes and more with multiple worship sites. This proposal recognizes that reality and calls us to get ahead of the curve in such a way that together with him we can bring more energy and life to our parishes, provide a greater sense of stability to the people, and do the work of Christ with the people in new creative and life-giving ways. The future is unknown, but as we move forward in the power of the Holy Spirit we do so with great confidence that great things will happen. Scot said that was the conclusion of Fr. Jack's address. Fr. Matt said we have to shift from maintenance to mission. Cardinal Sean is moving us to intentionally live mission and be about the work of evangelization. The new structure will allow priests to be shepherds of the community. Scot encouraged everyone to go to Planning2012.org and read the documents and watch the videos and then give feedback when it's requested. 2nd segment: It's time to announce this week's winner of the WQOM Benefactor Raffle. Our prizes this week are , A CD of Christmas music; a $15 gift card; a box of Chocolate Butter Nut Much, made by the Nuns of Mount Saint Mary Abbey, whose candy is available from . This week's benefactor card raffle winner is Gerard Hubbard from Braintree, MA. Congratulation, Gerard! If you would like to be eligible to win in an upcoming week, please visit . For a one-time $30 donation, you'll receive the Station of the Cross benefactor card and key tag, making you eligible for WQOM's weekly raffle of books, DVDs, CDs and religious items. We'll be announcing the winner each Wednesday during “The Good Catholic Life” program. 3rd segment: Scot welcomed Dr. Ray Guarendi to the show. He will be a speaker at the WQOM conference on Saturday. Scot asked him last time he was in Boston. Dr. Ray used to be a regular guest on a morning TV show on Channel 7. Scot asked him why Catholic radio is such a wonderful tool of evangelization. Dr. Ray said it's because it works and works for so little money. Radio is everywhere and you can listen to it whatever you're doing. It's very inexpensive compared to TV. You can acquire new listeners just by scraping them up as they run up and down the dial. Dr. Ray's show is heard throughout the US and even people around the world will send him emails, having listened to his show via the computer. He's also on SiriusXM satellite radio's channel 130, the Catholic Channel. Dr. Ray's talk on Saturday will be called, “Laughter: The Sanity of the Family.” Dr. Ray promised attendees will laugh and will leave standing stronger in their faith. They will feel more confident in their authority and less nervous as parents. Scot said Dr. Ray has spoken in about 2,000 venues. Why is it important for people to come and hear the presentations versus just listening on the radio. Dr. Ray said people tell him he's very different in person than on the radio. On the air he's limited by the topics and callers. when first asked to do Catholic radio, he said No because he was so busy with his live speaking. What happened was he tried it on a trial basis and was so moved by the power of radio to bring people back to the faith and change lives, that he said he couldn't refuse. He will be bringing his books and tapes to sell. He notes that in most conferences people wait to hear him before buying his materials. But at Catholic conferences people will buy his books and tapes first. 4th segment: Scot welcomed Chris Harding and Carol Pirillo from the Cards Behind Bars ministry. Scot said Carol has been involved in the ministry since 1978 and Chris has been involved for the past four years. Chris said prisoners are so disempowered, especially around Christmas, and parents couldn't make cards for children or friends. They have been working chaplains to make available excess cards from donations to prisoners. Chris said we have to remember Christ's words that we are to visit the imprisoned as a period of trial and regeneration. It's incumbent upon everyone to put Christ back in Christmas to make these cards available and make them feel again like citizens and good parents. Scot asked what standards they have for the Christmas cards? Chris said they encourage people to, in their parishes, to get donations of Christmas cards. A large majority are unused cards sent by religious orders soliciting donations. But what they really look for are people to shop after Christmas, especially Spanish language cards, for cards that will be heavily discounted. Chris suggested people call him at 617-282-3521 or via the link at the top of this page. Carol said she's collected more than 8,000 cards over the years. They give each man 10 cards. Most of them men have no access to cards and they couldn't afford to buy them even if they were available. In the past, the prisoners have swapped contraband in order to get their access to cards. Chris said it makes prisoners feel like valuable citizens and part of the greater Catholic community. Scot said it nurtures the relationships that can keep them out of prison when their time is up. Scot said most Catholic households receive a number of unsolicited cards at their home and buying discounted cards is a low-cost way to be thoughtful to those who have far less than we have. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us to be mindful of the imprisoned and be with them as if we were imprisoned with them. Scot reminded listeners that tomorrow is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and a holy day of obligation. There will be Masses tonight, tomorrow morning and even tomorrow evening in most parishes. Fr. Matt said Friday is the deadline for anyone who wants to go on the youth and young adult pilgrimage to the March for Life. There are tracks for middle school, high school, and young adults. They will stay for varying lengths of time in DC. Register at . Last year more than 300 went and this year they're anticipating more than 400 so they need to make plans for travel and accommodations.

TIN DOG INTRO MUSIC   To celebrate the first birthday of the Doctor Who TIN DOG Podcast (and my own birthday on March 4th), I present a short episode of Torchwood for your enjoyment. And thanks for listening to me ramble on for a year.   TIN DOG: This story is meant with the greatest and fondest respect to the works of Oliver Postgate , Peter Firmin, Russel T Davies and everyone else who has kept the blue light flashing. No breach of copyright is meant in any way. Please enjoy this special anniversary story to celebrate the Tin Dog Podcasts first Birthday. I present a one of Audio story with those lovely people from the popular secret organisation “Torchwood?.   NARRATOR: In the bottom left hand comer of Wales, a meeting is taking place around an ikea table. Lets listen in…   IANTO: “I have been monitoring activity around the hell mouth... er anomaly.. erm... I mean.. Rift and its been surprisingly quiet which means we can re-investigate some of the unsolved Torchwood files.?   NARRATOR: The thin one with the dry whit gets out a file and blows dust off it in the sort of way Eric Morecambe would look at Ernie Wises wallet.   GRAMS FX- blow... cough   IANTO: This is one that dates back decades. The winged monsters of Tan-y-gwlch.     OWEN “you know the rules we do not investigate anything we can't have sex with... apples and pares – queen mother – gawd bless her.   IANTO: ah but.. Monkey boy... but this is season two and we seem to be moving away from pointless sex scenes so I thought we might look at this.   GWEN: BUT this isn't happening in Cardiff... and you know the only time we leave Cardiff's in unseen adventures and spin off novels... oh and Audio Books... as a rule we don't ever set foot outside Cardiff... Couldn't we just send UNIT?   NARRATOR said Gwen   IANTO: This IS an Audio adventure which gives us an unlimited travel budget.. I have rang UNIT and they are apparently busy denying any links with the United Nations then they are all booked up recording a spin off story for Big Finish... which only leaves only US... Jack do you want to do the voice over?   JACK: Torchwood. Outside the Government, Beyond the police, Of Junction 21 next door to Comet electrical.   IANTO: Quickly... to the Torchwood Mobile... and on to North Wales. GRAMS MUSIC: Ivor the engine Music.   NARRATOR: Oh hello ivor..   IVOR: Ba Baaaa!   NARRATOR: Having a busy day   IVOR: Ba Baaaa!   NARRATOR: What are you upto today? Taking coal to grumby town? New shoes for a new hat for Mrs Dinwiddy? Saving sheep from the snow?   IVOR: Ba Baaaa!   NARRATOR: Oh I see... You're off to see your friends Idris and Blodwin the dragons.   NARRATOR: Oh look Ivor... you have visitors...   IVOR: bo bo bbbooooo...   NARRATOR: No there not the English coming to stay in their cottage for one week of the year and drive up house prices... its those pesky Torchwood lot... yes Ivor the famous secret organisation.   IVOR: ba ba   JONES THE STEAM: Oh hello Mister Harkness. Can I ask you a question   NARATOR: asked the hither too silent Jones the Steam   JACK: Sure   JONES THE STEAM: How come you get to walk the streets with a Webly Mark Four on your hip and no one bats an eyelid. This is the Wales after all you know not down town LA or something.     JACK: It helps us sell the show to Americans. I mean who would watch a show where the heroes didn't have a gun and solved things using their intellect and cunning...   GRAMS: FX Few bars of Doctor Who music   JONES THE STEAM: Oh I guess you have a point. I just assumed you were over compensating for something. How can I help you today?   GWEN: Flying Lizards   JONES THE STEAM: Ah you mean the Dragons...   IVOR: Booo Baa Baaa..   JONES THE STEAM: Quite right Ivor... I mean you mean the non-excitant Dragons on the extinct volcano.   IVOR: Booo Baa Baaa..     JONES THE STEAM: Oh you and your fast talking city ways. I obviously mean the non-existent dragons that defiantly don't live anywhere round here…because they're not real...   JACK: How are we doing for time Gwen?   GWEN: Well were past over half way through the episode... so I think were just about to come up with a working hypothesis. So I recon that the Dragons are real and that they are in the extinct volcano... the one over there in fact – Boyo.   OWEN: Jack. I hate to be the one to say this but theres been no homosexualist kissing so far...Apples and pairs   JONES THE STEAM: Oh is that what you think? Me and Di station have been doing little Britain “only gay in the village? jokes all morning... mind you I'm sure you lot do those all the time down there in Cardiff... and not you lot are here its just going to become a joke too far if I bring that up again.   DI STATION: Good point Jones.     JACK: Lets go to the mountain.   IVOR: Booo Baa Baaa..   JONES THE STEAM: Ivor says he can give you a lift if you want... I must say thats very good of you Ivor.   IVOR: Booo Baa Baaa..   JONES THE STEAM: ah... so you think the plot is flagging and you want to move things along.   JACK Lets leave the Torchwood Mobile here and head out.   GRAMS: Ivor travel music.   JONES THE STEAM: Gwen. I have a question for you. “Why doesnt your hair EVER move? Is it a wig? Come on you can tell me... Oh. look ivor.. were here.   GRAMS : steam fx   JACK: Tosh. You've been quiet… Oh you have a sore thought and the narrator doest think he is up to doing your voice, well he is butchering any attempt at mine. Anything on the tricorder… I mean non copyright breaching scaning device?.. GRAMS FX – Bleeping   JONES THE STEAM: Do you think its noticed those dragons?   GWEN: What the red heraldic ones spinning meters above us?   JACK: Gwen? What's that flashing? is it one of those anomalies from primeval?   GWEN: No it's a tourists camera.   JONES THE STEAM: Ah so you have found out our little secret. Every so often the dragons come out for the tourists and get their photo taken. The pictures are blurred because they move so fast so there's not actual risk of anyone believing the pictures are real.  Those dragons saved out town.  You're not going to take them away from us are you Mister Harness?       JACK No but it is likely that Owen will try and snog one of them   OWEN I'd resent that remark if I hadn't seen the rest of the story ark.   JONES THE STEAM: Look Mister Harkness one of them wants to ask you a question.   IDRIS THE DRAGON: (as sample) “do you know land of my fathers?   JACK: No it's abide with me or nothing   GWEN: You know that still doesn't solve the real mystery.   JACK: You mean  how Ivor – a steam engine – speak?   IANTO: oh that's easy.  Ivor was made from a living  metal that came through the rift at the end of the tea time war. IANTO: sorry...   JONES THE STEAM: Did i say too much?  I mean he is magic.   GWEN: Ahhh.   JONES THE STEAM: Tell you what…lets all go home for a nice cup of tea.   OWEN: That's hardly a satisfying end to the narrative. Can't we blow something up? or lose a loved one through time.   JONES THE STEAM: if you like   IANTO: will that help with the fan base?   JONES THE STEAM: No not really….  Ill just go and  put the kettle on   IVOR: boo baaaa.   MUSIC. (Ivor the engine theme as base under the narrators final speech)   NARRATOR: And so we must leave this quiet corner of Wales and journey back to podcast land thanks for listening to my pointless ramblings over this last year.   Be seeing you   MUSIC TDP Closing music NOTE: Some of you have never seen Ivor the Engine and this wont have helped so here is a youtube First Episode for you to enjoy!