Podcast appearances and mentions of john they

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I discuss John Marvin's transformative leadership journey as CEO and President of Texas State Optical (TSO). Founded in 1936 by the Rogers brothers, TSO evolved into a franchise operation spearheaded by John starting in the 1990s. Hear John's compelling account of reviving the brand, establishing the franchise association, and guiding the innovative physician-owned business model that has empowered young optometrists for decades. With the evolving eyewear landscape, our conversation analyzes consumer behavior shifts and their implications for strategic competition amid growing online retailers. We also explore the importance of supporting TSO's physician member network through mentorship and partnerships, especially given industry consolidation challenges. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS John D Marvin shares the history of Texas State Optical (TSO), founded by the Rogers brothers in 1936, and its growth into a franchise operation. We discuss how John Marvin revitalized TSO in the 1990s and his journey to becoming the president of the company in 2001. The episode explores the challenges and strategies involved in competing with online retailers in the eyewear industry, emphasizing the importance of convenience and well-stocked dispensaries. John describes the shift in optometry ownership trends, with fewer young optometrists interested in private practice, paralleling broader healthcare industry trends. We examine the strategic importance of building a physician member network to support optometrists and the criteria for network inclusion. The episode delves into leadership principles inspired by John C. Maxwell, highlighting the role of influence, trust, and accountability in effective leadership. John reflects on the transformative impact of setbacks, such as being fired, and how these experiences shape one's leadership journey. We explore the importance of forming strategic vendor partnerships and the role of mutual accountability in maintaining long-lasting business relationships. John emphasizes the need to adapt to industry shifts, including the rise of artificial intelligence, while fostering an innovative mindset among optometrists. The episode concludes with a discussion on the significance of understanding and meeting customer needs through effective consumer research, as a universal business strategy. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Texas State Optical GUESTS John D MarvinAbout John TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet John Marvin, ceo and President of Texas State Optical. John shares his views on how the fundamentals of leadership boil down to influencing and how having mutual accountability in your business relationships create win situations. John, I want to thank you for taking the time to join me today. It's really been a pleasure to get to know you before we got started here. John: Well, Chris, I appreciate the opportunity to sit down. I always love talking about business. Chris: Well, that's good, that's what we're going to do. So you're the CEO and president of Texas State Optical, or most people know it as TSO. That's right. Tell us a little more detail about what is the company, what does it do and what is it really known for in the market. John: Okay Well, texas State Optical was founded in 1936 by four brothers the Rogers brothers, in Beaumont, texas, and anybody who's been to Beaumont or familiar with Beaumont knows of the impact those four brothers had on that community and then in turn throughout Texas. Two of the brothers were optometrists and they opened pretty traditional optometry practice. And if you'll think about what else was going on in 1936 in Beaumont, it was the oil boom that was just blowing up, and so the one that originally came to Texas from Chicago all four of them were from Chicago called back home and said boys, you need to move down here. We got a big opportunity and they did, and consequently, over the next several years they built a large retail optical chain they called Texas State Optical, and one time in the early 60s it had reached over 300 locations. And one time in the early 60s it had reached over 300 locations and those were in New Mexico, oklahoma, arkansas, louisiana and Texas, and so that went on until, due to some legal issues with the state optometric group, who decided that they didn't want someone in the state running 300 locations, they passed some legislation that limited optometrists to only three locations and so they could subsequently, after a long legal battle had to sell off most of their property, but they kept the core of the business of the optical lab. They kept that and kind of a condition of buying. The practice was that you obligated yourself to continue to purchase items from them. But then in the late 60s the Rogers, having gone through this process of dissolving their ownership in it, decided to turn their attention towards real estate development and at one point they owned 25% of Caesars Palace in Vegas. They just got involved in other things and then consequently in the early 70s they sold the company to a large pharmaceutical company, gd Searle, who then subsequently sold the company in the early 80s to Pearl Vision. Most people are familiar with Pearl Vision, most people are familiar with ProVision and ran that until the late 80s when they sold it to a group of kind of investors who wanted to own it. They didn't really know how to run it than investors. So in I got involved in 1993 doing consumer research for the corporate office. My background at the time I had a company marketing management group and based here in Houston and it was a small marketing management and consumer research group and was doing work in other areas. But picked them up as a client and began to do a lot of consumer study for them and learned about the business. At that time it was somewhat distressed because of the leadership that had taken over from the Pearl Vision taken over from Pearl, and so there was a lot of unrest among the franchisees because at that time TSO was a franchise operation and so I helped them form a franchise association and then kind of on a part-time arrangement took on an executive director position within that while maintaining my consumer study and research stuff. And so that happened until the late nineties, when everyone was planning for the great millennium you know, the 2000 and Y2, right, right. And so we gathered everybody in my conference room over here and how, booty building, and down here in the galleria and they started you know, flip chart sheets, what do we want to accomplish? And blah, blah, blah, and and that the result of that was really, guys, you're not going to get any of this done unless you own it. And so we began to have some discussions about them buying the company, the, the franchisor, and that took about a year to negotiate, and during that process I was asked to come on as the new president and since and then we closed in June of 2001, and since that time I've been the acting and operational by president and CEO of the company, and one of the reasons that it appealed to me was it was the ultimate fixer-upper, because the company had really was kind of loosely held together but had an iconic brand, and so we started opening new locations with Young Optometrist and we're a brand license company. So we knew that the only way we could pick up a new customer, if you would be, if a young OD wanted to open their own practice and then we could help them do that. People that were established at the time and successful weren't interested in converting to a retail trade name, so we did. We opened up about 80 new locations and helped a lot of young ODs live a dream and had put together a whole turnkey system commercial realty contractors the whole nine yards. Chris: That's a fascinating history, you know, to kind of just see it grow so big in the beginning, get broken down and then almost come back together. Yeah with, I guess in 2001 you said, with these individual practice owners or franchisees becoming owners. John: That's, you know, kind of unique, especially for doctors yeah, it was a different approach to it, one of the reasons we can set it as a now. We never incorporated it as a cooperative, we incorporated it as for-profit. We simply chose to run it as a cooperative, which, by its nature of co-op, isn't intended to make money, right? So we could keep the services and the value of what we offer members very high because we priced it at a break-even point, and so it was very appealing to a lot of young ODs who needed that help without any experience knowing what to do. And, of course, we then had a retail trade name that had market appeal. So a lot of them benefited greatly by, as opposed, to, opening up under their own name and unknown in a community. Chris: Yeah, it gives it instant credibility with the brand name right. That's right. What are some of the things I guess that you know since that time in 2001, that you do and your team around you, to kind of help preserve that brand value, to make it marketable and enticing to these doctors. John: Well, part of it is the importance. An optometry practice as a small business has a very defined marketplace of about three radium miles Okay, so one. That's part of that is because there are so many options and the profession is a licensed profession and so there's a little bit of perception by consumers that it's a commodity. In other words, anybody who's got a license will be able to give you a good exam. Consumers at one time back in the 60s and 70s, thought mostly of wherever they got their exams. That's where they purchased their eyewear. Chris: Out of convenience, right Out of convenience. John: That's right. And in the 80s you had a much more proliferation of retail optical chains like LensCrafters and EyeMasters at the time and Pearl Vision, which were creating an awareness among consumers that you know what, I can get my exam in one location and I can buy my eyewear in another location, and so that added to that sense of commodity. And so what we've done is focus on a three mile marketplace. So instead of running one advertising campaign in Houston, we run 50 around each of our locations, and those are largely driven through community involvement, pay-per-click, you know, today pay-per-click In the beginning though, a lot of it was just getting to know your school nurse, getting to know the coaches in the league ball game, and so from a marketing strategy it was always hyper-local standpoint. And so if you go into some neighborhoods, everyone knows the TSO. If you go into an neighborhood where we have no location, maybe not so much, and that was done probably more just from a practical standpoint of cost than it was anything else, because you know Houston and Dallas. Where we're at in San Antonio, they're very expensive media markets and so if you've only got, you know, 20 locations in the DFW market to go in and try to buy television, advertising or something more traditional is prohibited, and so it makes a lot more sense because that's where people live and work. People ask me sometimes how do you go about picking your locations, your real estate stuff? And I said we tend to let Kroger and HEB do that for us. So, wherever they're at, we want to be close because that's a neighborhood. Chris: That's right. You figured they thought there were enough households to support a grocery store. So I like that, you know, uh, you know. There's a lesson there, though, for a business owner, an entrepreneur, in that you don't necessarily have to do all your own organic research if you don't know, aware what's going on, you can, you know, let someone else do some of that and just make sure that their end users look like yours, and that's right. John: They do a tremendous job, both of those companies, at understanding the market before they ever buy land or pour concrete. I'd hate to insult them by not taking advantage of all that good work they do. Chris: They're genius right, they're genius, that's right. You just mentioned, you said 30 different or 50 different marketing campaigns in Houston alone. I mean, how do you go about figuring out you know the right message for the right place? That must take a lot of work. John: Well, not so much I mean because the message in Sugar Land is the same as the message in the Woodlands. I mean people. While we, as as in our profession, try to complicate this, it's pretty simple from a consumer standpoint. They're looking for a place where they can get their eyes checked and buy a pair of glasses. But probably two-thirds of all of our revenue today come from a third-party payer. So that changes kind of the basic consumer behavior dynamic. But by putting out a message that really is focused on that group of people in terms of maximizing the value of those coverage benefits, that becomes real consistent and then it's a matter of just being louder than anybody else. Chris: Sure, while we're on the subject of that consumer and consumer behavior, what are some of the things that you have done over the last 10, 15 years to either combat the online competition, as you mentioned, because people get their eyes examined and they either go online or do something. How are you managing that and what are some of the strategies you found to be successful? John: Well, first of all, consumers are driven, and I think this may be generally true, but certainly our consumers are driven with the priority on convenience, and one of the reasons the online marketing purchase of eyewear is so appealing is its convenience, and oftentimes it's not a price issue as much as it is a convenience issue and assortment and selection. So one of the things that we focus on is to make sure that our retail dispensary that's what we call the retail store aspect of a practice is well inventoried with product and assortment price points, and then the ultimate differentiation is customer service and knowledgeable people, and so if you have selection pricing and knowledgeable people, it's a home run and you don't have to worry about it, because if you can make it convenient for them, then they're not tempted to go online. And because there's a lot of I don't know if you've ever bought a pair of shoes online, but all you need to do is have one bad experience with that and have to turn around, send them back and so forth and so on that people would really prefer to get it locally, where I got my, where they received their exam, and it's kind of hours to lose. So we try to make sure we don't give them a reason to leave. Chris: Yeah Well, it's an interesting analogy with the shoes, because I can relate to that and see that people like to try on shoes but also glasses right. John: What are these going to look? Chris: like, and if you're at a store with a good selection, it's all right there as opposed to ordering one or two online and knowing you're going to be returning something. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at BoyerMillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. That's right, yes, well, that's it. So let's shift now kind of to this physician member network. What do you look for, if anything, as far as qualifying people to come into the brand, and then how do you help, kind of manage and support once they're in the network, if you will, to make sure that you're doing all you can to help them be successful? John: It's an interesting change we're seeing right now, especially in the last five to 10 years, and that is, the number of young optometrists who have an interest in owning their own practice is going away. Chris: It's really an interesting thing. John: One. It's very similar to what's going on in healthcare in general. You know, I was just talking to some people last week and I said you know when was the last time I asked them? I said do you have children? Yes, do you have a pediatrician? Yes, is that pediatrician private practice? Chris: No. John: It's owned by some big organization like Texas Children's, and what you're seeing in healthcare delivery at the provider level is a consolidation of these organizations and the disappearing of private practice, and we're seeing that now in optometry. And another big dynamic is 85% of all optometry graduates today are female, and in the 80s that number was just the opposite. It was very unusual in the 80s and early 90s to see women in optometry school. I mean they certainly didn't represent the majority. And so with that comes different priorities of practice. You know you don't have the hard-charging young guy who wants to go into small-town Texas and really build up a big practice or even a metro area. You have people that are much more interested in part-time, that I want to be able to step aside, raise my family, then maybe come back later, and so there's a whole different culture among the providers now coming in. So our organization as a business model relies on young optometrists wanting to own their own practice, and if that category is declining we've got to come up with some other plan here to maintain Sure. So one the opportunities we have are less. The vetting process is largely a discussion with very successful people. Our board of directors consists of nine doctors and three outside directors, but the nine doctors are all very successful. And so a young person does approach me and we talk, I want them to speak to one of our successful guys, and then their job is to kind of assess and come back to me and say, John, I don't know if she's ready, I don't know if he can do this, or I think this is a home run, let's go. And with their input and my discussion I've been doing it now long enough that I kind of get a feel for it Then we'll say let's go. And really it's a matter of they own everything. It's a matter of us guiding them through the process and then supporting them with just the knowledge they don't have about building a practice afterwards, and then lots of follow-up and hand-holding. Chris: And it's done. I think you said just as, basically a license agreement where they're licensing the name and brand and they get some support as a result of that as well. John: I mean contractually, I'm not obligated to support anything. Contractually I'm not obligated to support anything. All I'm obligated to do is to keep the value of the brand consistent with what they're paying for it. But I realized that if they're not successful, my brand value suffers. So we do all that we can to support them and help them be successful. Chris: So let's talk a little bit about your internal team. I mean, you've got a team I think you said 12, that's kind of help support you, that support these members. What have you found to be successful as you've gone through maybe trials and tribulations of hiring the right people, making sure you've got the right people in the right seat to kind of support the business and the brand? John: You know, that's a great question, because I, up until about 2015, I took a whole different approach to personnel than I did 2015 and on, and it was like I learned something, and that is I put together a group of really knowledgeable people in terms of their expertise in certain areas, but the quality that I had not paid attention to prior to that was they also had to be connectors. They had to be the kind of people that could say hey, chris, I know somebody you ought to talk to. And so because when a non-doctor walks into a doctor's office, even with the responsibility of helping, they carry a different level of credibility with that doctor than if a doctor told them something. If we go in and say, hey, listen, you need to be open Saturdays, because there's a lot of business on Saturdays, I don't want to do it. But if a doctor tells them, oh man, you got to be open Saturday, they'll listen to it. But if a doctor tells them, oh man, you've got to be open Saturday, they'll listen to it. And so our guys who are in the field, they do tactical training and support for staff, but when a doctor is facing an issue that they know the answer to, they in turn, seek out other leadership in the doctor community to say would you mind giving so-and-so a call Because I think you could help them get through whatever issue they're dealing with. And so that quality and frankly it's, you know it requires someone who doesn't have much of an ego. Sure, because you know I say this all the time like my old friend Ronald Reagan used to say, there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Chris: Yeah. John: And so we take that approach, and ours isn't about trying to get a bunch of credit. Ours is about trying to lift up this organization and get these guys successful, and if we're simply a facilitator in information to how to do that, we don't have to be the initial provider of that information. Even if we know it, it comes much better from a colleague, and so that's one of the things that we put a lot of emphasis on is helping the network, help each other. Chris: So you know you were very quick to say 2015. Have you seen a dramatic improvement in the performance of the overall business since making that change and kind of focusing on the connector quality as being an additional important quality in the people you bring on? John: Very much so, because what Texas State Optical was in the beginning was a doctor-owned organization and doctors working with other doctors to help them grow a network and large business. We're trying to replicate that from the standpoint of, especially as the business, the structure we use I mentioned earlier as a cooperative. It requires doctor leadership to be active and engaged in running their own company, their owners of the company, and so, while I have certainly an important role in that, the more doctors that engage in the leadership of the organization, the better it is overall. And since we took that intentional effort in 2015, a couple of things too. We had a kind of an evolution of membership. I mean, we had a lot of our older doctors retire and sell practices, and then we had a whole influx of young doctors, and so we ended up in 2015 with an organization that was significantly different demographically, both age and gender. That was significantly different demographically, both age and gender. But we thought they need mentorship among the leadership in the organization, and so we worked at creating that for them, and it impacts not just clinical I mean, there's also that aspect of it they're learning clinically from friends but operationally, and so it made a big difference Very good. Chris: I know that you have supply agreements with certain labs and other things. Let's talk about some of the things that you found to be successful in maintaining, I guess, forming those kind of key strategic relationships for the business, and maybe some of the things you do to make sure that you foster and keep them strong of the things you do to make sure that you foster and keep them strong. John: Well, in the vendor-doctor community there is a kind of an assumption made by both sides, and one is the doctor assumes that the vendor's got more money than they know how to spend or what they've got all this money to spend, and the vendor assumes the doctor's not going to follow through on all the promises they make. So that's kind of where we start at the table, and so I think it's important and what we've worked at bringing to our relationships is mutual accountability, and we have found our vendor partners to be extremely invested in our success, but at the same time they've got a business to run as well, and so our success with them and that dynamic of that exchange or relationship cannot be at the vendor's expense. It's gotta be the classic cliche win type of thing, but you only get win if you have mutual accountability. And so in every agreement we have, here's what the vendor commits to and here's what the doctor community commits to. And then we have business reviews where we sit down and say here's where we're dropping the ball or here's where you're dropping the ball, and we hold that accountability does a long goes a long way to not only making the relationship productive but also building trust and longevity into those partnerships, because if you're making money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, right, you know? And that goes both ways If you're a doctor making money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, and if money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, and if you're a partner, you don't want to stop. So I found that type of mutual accountability and the willingness to be held accountable is critical to those relationships Very good. Chris: So you know. Talk a little bit about leadership. You've been running this organization for a long time now. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's evolved over time? John: well, I would. I don't know if I've ever been asked to describe it, but I would say it's Maxwellian. Okay, and that means John C Maxwell, who is an author, has written a number of books on leadership and, in my opinion, probably is the most the best leadership author. I'm biased, of course, but I think he is. Forbes Magazine said that a few years ago, but basically his definition of leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just influence. And an example of that is if you walk into a room of people, you're naturally going to notice someone who's exercising influence on others, and it isn't an authoritarian way, it's in a trust and credibility way. And so if you're influencing, you're leading. If you're not, it doesn no matter what title you have. So an example is my when I explained how we use doctors to help influence other doctors. So that's a level of influence that doesn't come because I require somebody to do something. It it occurs because you're able to influence others to to make a difference. So I would. I'm a big believer in that. I'll plug his book. There are 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. It's a classic, and so that's like a Bible. It's my business Bible in terms of leadership style. Chris: I was going to use that word because others and it's fair to plug books, because sometimes I ask people what's a book you would recommend. We hear a lot of good to great from people Sure, jim Collins. But what I love what you said if you're influencing, you're leading, because I say a lot of times a true leader leads without a title. John: Right, you're actually doing things without the title to demonstrate leadership, which is what you're talking about Exactly, and if you do have the title and can influence, it's a home run. It's a home run, yeah. Chris: So you've learned that through lots of trials and tribulations. I think we all learn through mistakes or setbacks Anything you could share with the listeners about a decision made that didn't go the way you thought but you learned from it and that learning kind of catapulted you made you better because of it. Setback, failure whatever word you want to describe Anything you could you care to share in that realm. John: Sure the. So I came to Houston. I was born and raised in Western Kansas and I was in Wichita born and raised in western Kansas, and I was in Wichita, kansas, in 1989, excuse me, in the late 80s, 84, 89 era and I was working for a large ophthalmology practice up there as a marketing administrator and in that role I attended a lot of national meetings in ophthalmology and during that meeting I met an owner of a large Houston ophthalmology and during that meeting I met an owner of a large Houston ophthalmology group who ended up offering me a job and I came to Texas. Due to some marketing challenges we were facing at that practice, I was introduced to Texas State Optical while I was at that practice and then left after about four years, left that practice and went to a consumer research firm here in Stafford and quickly turned around and went to Texas State Optical to see if they would like to buy some insurance I'm not insurance, buy some research and they did so. I ended up doing this large project for them but also ended up doing a ton of work for HLMP. During the time they were prepared to try to go to battle with Enron and this was like early nineties, right, and so everything was going well. And then I get fired from the research thing. Now I moved my family down from Kansas. I've been in the state about five and a half years and I get fired. I've been in the state about five and a half years and I get fired. And that was a big you know. Anytime you've been fired, that kind of devastates you Right, it shakes you up. Chris: Yeah, it does. John: But had that not happened, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing Right, and so I have learned, and what pulled me through that is faith, Faith in God and faith in myself is faith, faith in God and faith in myself, and I felt like I can do, kind of what. There was a part of it, chris, that was liberating, because that was like, instead of thinking now what am I going to do, I was thinking now what am I going to do. I mean, it was a whole different frame of attitude and that subsequently ended up leading to the position I have today, through working with franchisees at Texas State Optical and so forth. Chris: That's a great story. Thank you for sharing. You bet A lot of people don't want to talk about, especially if they've been fired for something. But to your point on that, these other opportunities would have never presented themselves right, because you likely stayed in the comfort of the job and seeing where that takes you. You know there's so much that can come. John: Actually, I'd gone to that research firm. The owner of it had brought me there with the promise implied I mean not implied, but it wasn't in writing but the idea was that I would take over that firm at some point and it turned out that didn't work out Well you know a lot of what you, I think, describe. Chris: The undertone to that is the mindset you had in the wake of that setback. You know you didn't let it take you down. You're like like you said what am I going to go? Do I got all these opportunities and go? Explore and figure it out. John: So I had about 30 days before the next house payment came, so that you were acting quick, got to be decisive man. Chris: You can't be stewing on decisions forever, for sure, well, that and so you know that leadership, you know is forged and helped you get to where you are today. You know, when you, when you think about applying that mindset and that leadership kind of style, how does it help you kind of navigate the ups and downs of the economic cycles that we've experienced over the last 20 plus years? John: Well, you know, first of all is to understand which of these cycles are cyclical. That's a little redundant, but I mean, what is it we're going through that's cyclical. That you can. You know, business loves a stable and predictable environment. Right Now, the reality is it's ups and downs. But if it's ups and downs within a certain range of up and down, it's stable right, and you can prepare for it Certain tolerances right, yeah certain tolerances. What we've seen, not only in the economy and that's a whole different issue but what we've seen in the profession itself and the consolidation of private practice by private equity that's come into the marketplace, is we're seeing disruption like we haven't seen before. And I was talking to one of our board members doctor board members about it and we were just, you know, he was pointing out all of the things that are kind of out without from under excuse me, out of our control, and as we were talking about it, I had this thought and I told him. I said it's a great time to be alive and that because we're the ones that get to go through this, and in many ways I believe that our profession is going through a transformation that will take probably a 20 year period of time. But 40 years from now, optometry, I don't think, will look anything like it does today, and it's always bumpy to be in the middle of that turbulent transformation. The 80s were very steady, the 90s were pretty steady. It was in starting about 2010, 2000, that things started rapidly changing and then the acceleration with just technology and everything else is just gone, and then you've got now the whole world of artificial intelligence coming into play and it's. I consider it exciting, invigorating, challenging, but I mean what's? The alternative is to be bored right. Chris: Well, if you don't adopt and if you're not using it, you die use it you die, that's right. So I mean, you know, kind of it's a great segue to what are some of the things you do to kind of foster that maybe innovative mindset of how you're going to embrace the technological changes and use them in the business model to further the brand and the business. John: So I there's very little I can do without the support of the doctor, owner, community right. And sometimes there's a lot of indecision, because when you're not sure what to do, you're scared of doing the wrong thing. Chris: Sure, Well, it seems like you got a lot of opinions that out there too, right? John: You got a lot of them, and so what I have to do is to influence them through other people and through information, to get them to a point of being open enough to consider ideas that they might consider kind of sacrilege in some case. For instance, what is real common in most optometry practices today is what's called an autorefractor. It's a machine that people go through and it gives you a prescription, and the prescription is used by the doctor to zero in on where your visual acuity is right. Well, when that first came out, optometrists thought that was the end of the profession. Here's a machine that'll do what I'm doing. Optometrists thought that was the end of the profession. Here's a machine that'll do what I'm doing. And so there's a fear oftentimes of innovation. Right, that you have to assure people that there's a way to use this to our benefit, and that's what we're going through with artificial intelligence right now. One group is scared to death. It's going to replace them. The other group is glad they're old enough, they're probably not going to have to go through with it. And then you're looking for those people who say, hey, how can we utilize this to really to our benefit? Yeah, and once people feel that's safe enough to kind of try. Then the people realize that the fear is misplaced. Chris: So true, right, but it takes education, information and influence, as you said, to get people to get there so that they can adopt it One of the things that I teach my team to say. John: I mean to believe, and I say it all the time is we believe in everybody's right to make a bad decision. So if someone listens to us and they choose not to do what we're recommending and we know it's a good decision what we're recommending and they choose not to, it's their right. You know, I mean everybody's right to waste their own money. So that kind of patience is necessary with a group like ours. In many ways it's like working with a volunteer organization. Chris: Yeah, well, lots of challenges there, I'm sure. Well, john, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you sharing everything I want to ask you, I guess, going back to your days, you know, I guess growing up in Kansas what was your first job? John: A drugstore Rexall drugstore and I grew up in a town of 2000 people and my dad was the family physician of the community and so of course in a town like that in western Kansas the doctor and the pharmacist are close relationship. And so I got my first job at a drugstore, working a soda fountain, delivering prescriptions, restocking things. Like that had a blast and that really I learned a lot in that, not just like everybody learns a lot from their first job, but understanding. I was intrigued by Rexall. I don't know how familiar you are with Rexall, but Rexall was a national organization that gave private ownership of drugstores the purchasing power of a large corporate chain, and so my employer was the pharmacist. He owned the drug store and he stood up in the stand in the dais every day counting pills and chatting with people. So that was my first job. Chris: Very good. Well, you've been in Texas now since what the late? John: 80s. Chris: So do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue Barbecue? Okay. John: Barbecue Very good. My waistline prefers barbecue. Chris: And last thing if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? I don't know, Probably nuts. John: I just I've got to be engaged and I mean I don't have to be. I'm not select. I love business and I love the challenge it has. So I'm not I don't. You said earlier in our discussion about you were describing about the law firm. When I was doing consumer research, I did some healthcare work 12 Oaks Hospital was a client and so but I would tell people, is I specialize in a process, not an industry, because the process is the same and I would say that's what I really love about business, because when you boil it down to what I do and what you do and others that run businesses, it's the same process. It's understanding your customer and then directing how your services or products benefit that customer and communicating and the whole marketing scheme of promotion, price, product and place applies to every industry. And so I'd probably do something if I had 30 days. Like I said, I'd go nuts. Chris: Well, but I think what you just said there in the end is you have great insight and learning for business owners and entrepreneurs out there. You're trying to find their way. It's it is figure out what the consumer that you're catering to really wants and then deliver that as efficient as best you can that's why you know my, when I first got into consumer research, I thought this is like cheating. John: I mean you're actually going out and saying what do you want? They tell you, and then you give it to them. I mean it's like, it's amazing. Chris: Yeah, right, so well, this has been great, John. Thanks again for taking the time. You bet I really appreciate your invitation. Special Guest: John D Marvin.

Remember the thrill of shaking a Magic 8 Ball to get answers to your childhood questions? Would we ace that math test? Would we be famous someday? Well, today, we're bringing a bit of that magic back. But instead of asking about pop quizzes and playground crushes, we're turning to the Magic 8 Ball for advice on something much more important: your retirement planning! What would the Magic 8 Ball have to say about these common retirement questions if it had the wisdom of a financial advisor?   Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com   Disclaimer: Speaker 1: PFG, Private Wealth Management LLC is an SEC registered investment advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance insurance. Products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents. Speaker 1: You all remember that thrill of shaking the Magic Eight Ball to get answers to those childhood questions we couldn't wait to find out? Would we ace that math test or be famous someday? All those crazy fun questions we had when we were kids. Well, this week on the podcast, we're going to do the Magic Eight Balls Guide to Retirement Planning with John and Nick here on Retirement Planning Redefined. What's going on everybody? Welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with John and Nick and myself as we talk investing, finance, and retirement. And we're going back to our childhood with the Magic Eight Ball. Going to have a little fun with these things and shake it up and see what kind of answers we get for retirement. Then of course, let the guys give us some proper answers just in case the Magic Eight Ball gets it wrong. But guys, what's going on this week? Good to talk with you as always. Nick, how are you buddy? Nick: Good, thanks. Just staying busy. Speaker 1: Staying busy, rocking and rolling. Very good. John, my friend, how are you? John: I'm doing all right. Getting ready for this upcoming storm we have, so. Speaker 1: Oh, big fun. Yeah. John: Getting to the grocery store quick, so all the crazies don't run me over. Speaker 1: Nice. Now you got little ones. Do they still sell the Magic Eight Balls in the store? I think they still make them. Don't they? John: They do. I think we had one at one point. Speaker 1: Nice. John: And it didn't work very well, so anytime they asked a question, it would end up on the side and they're like, what does it say? And I don't know. Speaker 1: I can't see it. You got to reshake. John: It was definitely something good that entertained them for a little bit. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: But like any little kid nowadays, it lasted all for about 20 minutes. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. John: Like, all right,- Speaker 1: Well I'm a wee little kid of the 70s, so I thought they were great. That and the Etch A Sketch and the Stretch Armstrong, I was a happy dude, so. But anyway, let's have a little fun with this, this week here and I'll toss you guys out a question. You kind of give us the Magic Eight Ball and your answer to it, or at least what it maybe should be, so to speak. Right. So we'll make it easy to kind of get things started. John, I'll toss this one to you. Should I start saving for retirement now? What's the Magic Eight Ball say? John: Magic Eight Ball is going to say yes, definitely. The sooner you can start the better. And that goes for anybody, whether that's you in your 20s. I have some clients that right out of college started and now they're in their late 30s, and when we do reviews occasionally, it's always like, "Hey, really appreciate you kind of getting on me for starting to save," because as life happens, expenses are going up, they have kids and stuff like that, it's harder to save. But when they didn't have too much going on in their early 20s expense wise, they were definitely built up a nest egg, so. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: If you haven't started at any point, wherever you are, 20, 30, 40, it's good idea to start. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean 50 as well, right? I mean it doesn't make a difference at this point. Waiting yet another day only causes you more problems, right? So should you start now? Definitely. And I'll give you guys kind of a little primer on the Magic Eight Ball. So we kind of looked through some of the stuff. They have, I guess what you'd call the green, kind of the positive answers, right? Stuff like the one John just got there, yes, definitely, most likely, out look good, that kind of stuff. Then they had that kind of middle of the road, nah, not so sure, right? Reply hazy, ask again later, better not tell you now, that kind of thing. And then of course they had the negatives, which was my reply is, no, very doubtful, don't count on it. So on and so forth. So we'll use those answers to kind of kick things off with each one of these episodes and then let the guys expand on it like John just did. All right Nick, so your turn, give it a go. Is a million dollars enough to retire on? What says the Magic Eight Ball? Nick: That's definitely a reply hazy, try again answer on that one. A consistent conversation that we have with people, whether it's somebody that we've worked with for a while or somebody that has come to us and we're kind of taking them through the planning process is that everybody's situation is different. Speaker 1: Sure. Nick: People love to compare things with each other, whether it's cars, houses, finances, whatever. And we try to make sure that people understand that comparing themselves even to a sibling or a neighbor or friend doesn't necessarily make sense. Some of the most common examples that we'll see are people that maybe they have pension plans because of the sort of job that they have. Speaker 1: Yeah, they saved a million, but they got a pension versus someone who saved a million and doesn't. That's a dramatically different setup, right? Nick: Correct. Speaker 1: Yeah. Nick: Correct. Yeah. And so assets are important obviously, but really the end game for assets in retirement is to generate income. So ideally people will have the combination of both, but having an arbitrary number like a million dollars is something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I know that recently there's been some kind of articles in the news about, I think we just hit the highest percentage of millionaires in the US. Speaker 1: Right. Nick: And even from that perspective, dependent upon the situation, again, a million dollars isn't what it used to be. So it really just all depends. We've had clients that have had five or $6 million going into retirement that when we look at their plan, they're going to burn through that in 15 years because they spend too much. And we've had clients that are retired with five or 600,000, but they have their expenses very much in check, they have no debt and they live within their means and their plan looks great. Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. I mean there's three of us here on this podcast and it might take a million for one and 500,000 for the other and two and a half million for the other. Right. It all just depends on where you live, how you live, all those sorts of things. So yeah, reply hazy, try again. And really what it comes down to is get a strategy, get a plan, and get the numbers crunched for your specific situation and then you're going to understand exactly what you need to get to. You're going to have a better outline versus just kind of a shaking the Magic Eight Ball. And I think the idea behind some of this too was fun. You know how you guys in the industry know this. There seems like there's always advisors out there that have a little crystal ball on their desk and they like to say, "Let me check the crystal ball," when somebody asks them a question and they're like, "Well it doesn't work today." And that's because it's not a sound way of doing things. So we thought we'd take that kind of analogy and apply it to this week's podcast. So back to you, John. Can I rely on social security for my retirement? John: Say out look not so good. Speaker 1: Right. John: Yeah, definitely not what you want to be banking on. It's a good source to have. Speaker 1: Sure. John: But you do not want it to be your only source. Speaker 1: It's big dollars. I mean it can be big dollars for a lot of people. And I think an interesting question, and I put it this way, is I've got a family member, a loved one who totally survives on social security only, but it's not what she wanted, right? So could you do it? Yes. But is it ideal? No. John: Yeah, no. I think on average social security covers maybe 30, 40% of someone's retirement income. So you have to look at where's the other money coming from. So just planning on social security I would say is not a very good plan. Speaker 1: Very true, very true. Well following that up there, Nick, give us the Magic Eight Ball answer here. Is it wise then to have multiple sources of retirement income? Nick: It is absolutely as imperative as you can get to try to have different sources of income. A conversation that we have with people consistently is that from the perspective of planning, the one thing that we know and that we can absolutely count on every single year, year after year, is that there's going to be change. And so anything that you can do to build in options, build in flexibility, allow yourself to adapt and pivot to what's going on is essential. And part of that is income streams, not only diversifying assets, but diversifying income streams. Speaker 1: Definitely. Right. So you definitely want to have those. Social security is a big piece of it, but it doesn't need to be the only one. You need to have multiple sources of income streams. All right, John, back to you. Can I expect to have fewer expenses in retirement compared to when I'm working? What's the Magic Eight Ball say? John: I'd say don't count on it. Again, I don't know, we've kind of preface this quite a bit and we've even said it today, everyone's different. So we've had some people where expenses have gone up during retirement because they want to vacation more, they want to do more things with the family. So I wouldn't say plan on that necessarily. And the only way to really find out is to do a comprehensive plan, but then there's going to be curveballs that come at you, whether it's health expenses. That tends to not go down as we get older. So maybe something could be dropping off. Speaker 1: Right. Right. John: But you never know what's going to get added. So do your plan as best you can and try to be as accurate as can. But I wouldn't have that be like the bulletproof, like, hey, my expenses are going to drop so I should be good. Speaker 1: Well, that's a great point because a lot of times people say, hey, here's our back of the napkin math. We think if we curtail this a little bit and this a little bit, we can make it work. Right. We can kind of squeak into retirement. But then you get there and you think, I don't want to do that, right? And there's certainly a lot of conversation around regrets that people have when they're talking once they get to retirement and they go, boy, I wish I would've spent more in those early years when my body would've let me go out and do some things that I wanted to. Right. So can I expect fewer expenses? Yeah, probably not, right? Because like you said, things are going to drop off, but other things are going to add and of course don't count on it. I think that was the answer Rhonda Thomas gave me when I asked her to the seventh grade dance, I think she said don't count on it. I think she must have got that from Magic Eight Ball as well. Nick: That's stuck with you. Speaker 1: Yeah, right. Exactly. It stuck with me. I'm still wounded Rhonda, if you're listening. All right, so let's do the next one here. Should I review my retirement plan annually? Nick, what says the Magic Eight Ball? Nick: Without a doubt on that one. Going back to what we talked about earlier, things constantly change. So updating the plan is really important. The most recent example of why that's important has been inflation over the last couple of years. So when we do a plan and we put in an inflation increase every year in expenses, the software still requires us to kind of update those baseline numbers. And so what we found and what we've tried to emphasize to people is that us capturing and updating those baseline numbers every two or three years is really important and gives us a much more accurate projection from the perspective of planning. So,- Speaker 1: Gotcha. Nick: Those annual reviews are important. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's how you kind of keep track of the expense changes or the income source changes or added a grandchild, want to change this, whatever the case is. So all those annual things are certainly important. Your life's going to change, your plan has to change along with it. All right, John, will my retirement plan be affected by future changes in tax laws? Not to get political, but you have to talk policy and certainly when it comes to taxation, that's going to be part of the conversation. I mean, seems like everything is political these days, but if you're thinking about future changes in tax laws, you're going to have to certainly think along those lines as well. So what says the Magic Eight Ball when it comes to will your plan be affected by it? John: Signs point to yes. Speaker 1: 35 trillion? Maybe. Yeah. John: Yeah. So you definitely want to take that into account. I mean if you look at maybe people that retired in the 70s and then all of a sudden the 80s, your social security is getting taxed, you weren't really anticipating that happening and then,- Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the IRMAA tax, right? That gets a lot of people blindsided. John: Yeah. So you could count on taxes changing. Whether it's going to go up or down, again, we don't have our crystal ball, but we have the Magic Eight Ball here. Something's going to happen and you should be planning for that. One thing you could do when you're running retirement plans is you can have the ability to stress test it, to take a look at it. So definitely plan on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you figure, look, regardless of where your political bent is, we've got a lot of debt and so taxes are going to have to change. And even if it's not this particular administration change, this current election, right, God willing, you live long enough in retirement. If you last 20, 25, 30 years in retirement, you're going to see multiple administrations come and go. And that's going to mean multiple tax law changes because they do that every so often. Right. So the odds of that happening are pretty great. So signs point to yes, you should consider how taxation is going to affect you because it is one of the biggest pieces of your retirement strategy. What is that old saying? It's not what you make, it's what you keep, right? So make sure you're talking with qualified professionals like John and Nick when it comes to dealing with all this stuff. Let's do one or two more and then we'll wrap it up. Nick, let's toss this over to you. Let's see here. Should I focus on paying off debt before increasing retirement contributions? Nick: So I would say depending upon the debt, most likely. Speaker 1: Okay. Nick: From the perspective of consumer debt like credit cards, all that kind of stuff,- Speaker 1: Bad debt, right? Nick: That can absolutely, it's hard to argue that that's not unimportant. One thing that can be a slippery slope for people is it kind of tends to depend on their behaviors. We've had clients that have been good income earners but have at different times had debt problems. And in certain ways, whenever they pay off the debt, the debt comes back up and then they kind of find themselves not saving at all. So it's oftentimes kind of a balance of both. One of the most common sorts of comparisons from a perspective of debt is mortgage. We found that over, we had a lot of those conversations when interest rates were really low and we kind of emphasized with people to take advantage of those low rates and that's come to be a pretty beneficial sort of decision. So I would say in order, consumer debt for sure, trying to do both consecutively, both at the same time, obviously ideal, and then just kind of working through the plan and prioritizing what makes the most sense and how to deploy the money. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, right? I mean, debt's going to be a big component of that as well, and certainly getting rid of that, the higher interest stuff is always a good idea. So the final piece then here guys, and John, we'll let you wrap it up since you started it. Should I consider working with a financial professional as I near retirement? This is kind of a layup for you, but I'll give it to you anyway. What do you think? John: Appreciate that layup. Answer is yes. As you're getting closer to retirement, it becomes even more important to make sure you're working with someone to update the plan or start a plan and take a look at it. I would say you don't have to wait until you're near retirement. I think the answer is yes at any point. Speaker 1: Yeah. John: Even my younger clients, they always appreciate having someone they could talk to and bounce some ideas off of, whether it's not always comprehensive planning, but it's someone you could talk to discuss things. Speaker 1: Exactly. Because there's so many nuances out there and it just continues to grow and get more complex. So certainly not a bad idea at all to get qualified professionals on your side. So if you need some help, reach out to the team at Pfgprivatewealth.com. That's Pfgprivatewealth.com and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple and Spotify or whatever platform you like using. It's Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth. And we'll see you next time here on the show and enjoy the Magic Eight Ball. We'll catch you later.   Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk, and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Insurance products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents.  

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher on Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, favorite mysteries and more!LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Jeffrey Hatcher Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.hatcher.3/The Good Liar (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ljKzFGpPHhwMr. Holmes (Trailer): https://youtu.be/0G1lIBgk4PAStage Beauty (Trailer): https://youtu.be/-uc6xEBfdD0Columbo Clips from “Ashes to Ashes”Clip One: https://youtu.be/OCKECiaFsMQClip Two: https://youtu.be/BbO9SDz9FEcClip Three: https://youtu.be/GlNDAVAwMCIEli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: Can you remember your very first mystery, a movie, book, TV show, play, a mystery that really captured your imagination? Jeffrey: You know, I was thinking about this, and what came to mind was a Disney movie called Emile and the Detectives from 1964. So, I would have been six or seven years old. It's based on a series of German books by Eric Kastner about a young man named Emile and his group of friends who think of themselves as detectives. So, I remember that—I know that might've been the first film. And obviously it's not a play because, you know, little kids don't tend to go to stage thrillers or mysteries and, “Daddy, please take me to Sleuth.But there was a show called Burke's Law that I really loved. Gene Barry played Captain Amos Burke of the Homicide Division in Los Angeles, and he was very rich. That was the bit. The bit was that Captain Burke drove around in a gorgeous Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and he had a chauffeur. And every mystery was structured classically as a whodunit.In fact, I think every title of every episode was “Who Killed Cock Robin?” “Who Killed Johnny Friendly?” that kind of thing. And they would have a cast of well-known Hollywood actors, so they were all of equal status. Because I always think that's one of the easiest ways to guess the killer is if it's like: Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy, Derek Jacobi, Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy. It's always going to be Derek Jacobi. John: Yeah, it's true. I remember that show. He was really cool. Jim: Well, now I'm going to have to look that up.Jeffrey: It had a great score, and he would gather all of the suspects, you know, at the end of the thing. I think my favorite was when he caught Paul Lynde as a murderer. And, of course, Paul Lynde, you know, kept it very low key when he was dragged off. He did his Alice Ghostly impersonation as he was taken away.John: They did have very similar vocal patterns, those two.Jeffrey: Yep. They're kind of the exact same person. Jim: I never saw them together. John: You might have on Bewitched. Jim: You're probably right.Jeffrey: Well, I might be wrong about this, either Alice Ghostly or Charlotte Ray went to school with Paul Lynde. And Charlotte Ray has that same sound too. You know, kind of warbly thing. Yes. I think they all went to Northwestern in the late 40s and early 50s. So maybe that was a way that they taught actors back then. John: They learned it all from Marion Horne, who had the very same warble in her voice. So, as you got a little older, were there other mysteries that you were attracted to?Jeffrey: Yeah. Luckily, my parents were very liberal about letting me see things that other people probably shouldn't have. I remember late in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I was reading Casino Royale. And one of the teachers said, “Well, you know, most kids, we wouldn't want to have read this, but it's okay if you do.”And I thought, what's that? And I'm so not dangerous; other kids are, well they would be affected oddly by James Bond? But yeah, I, I love spy stuff. You know, The Man from Uncle and The Wild Wild West, all those kind of things. I love James Bond. And very quickly I started reading the major mysteries. I think probably the first big book that I remember, the first novel, was The Hound of the Baskervilles. That's probably an entrance point for a lot of kids. So that's what comes in mind immediately. Jim: I certainly revisit that on—if not yearly basis, at least every few years I will reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Love that story. That's good. Do you have, Jeffrey, favorite mystery fiction writers?Jeffrey: Oh, sure. But none of them are, you know, bizarre Japanese, Santa Domingo kind of writers that people always pull out of their back pockets to prove how cool they are. I mean, they're the usual suspects. Conan Doyle and Christie and Chandler and Hammett, you know, all of those. John Dickson Carr, all the locked room mysteries, that kind of thing. I can't say that I go very far off in one direction or another to pick up somebody who's completely bizarre. But if you go all the way back, I love reading Wilkie Collins.I've adapted at least one Wilkie Collins, and they read beautifully. You know, terrifically put together, and they've got a lot of blood and thunder to them. I think he called them sensation novels as opposed to mysteries, but they always have some mystery element. And he was, you know, a close friend of Charles Dickens and Dickens said that there were some things that Collins taught him about construction. In those days, they would write their novels in installments for magazines. So, you know, the desire or the need, frankly, to create a cliffhanger at the end of every episode or every chapter seems to have been born then from a capitalist instinct. John: Jeff, I know you studied acting. What inspired the move into playwriting?Jeffrey: I don't think I was a very good actor. I was the kind of actor who always played older, middle aged or older characters in college and high school, like Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, those kind of people. My dream back in those days was to play Dr. Dysart in Equus and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. So, I mean, that was my target. And then I moved to New York, and I auditioned for things and casting directors would say, “Well, you know, we actually do have 50 year old actors in New York and we don't need to put white gunk in their hair or anything like that. So, why don't you play your own age, 22 or 23?” And I was not very good at playing 22 or 23. But I'd always done some writing, and a friend of mine, Graham Slayton, who was out at the Playwrights Center here, and we'd gone to college together. He encouraged me to write a play, you know, write one act, and then write a full length. So, I always say this, I think most people go into the theater to be an actor, you know, probably 98%, and then bit by bit, we, you know, we peel off. We either leave the profession completely or we become directors, designers, writers, what have you. So, I don't think it's unnatural what I did. It's very rare to be like a Tom Stoppard who never wanted to act. It's a lot more normal to find the Harold Pinter who, you know, acted a lot in regional theaters in England before he wrote The Caretaker.Jim: Fascinating. Can we talk about Columbo?Jeffrey: Oh, yes, please. Jim: This is where I am so tickled pink for this conversation, because I was a huge and am a huge Peter Falk Columbo fan. I went back and watched the episode Ashes To Ashes, with Patrick McGowan that you created. Tell us how that came about. Jeffrey: I too was a huge fan of Columbo in the 70s. I remember for most of its run, it was on Sunday nights. It was part of that murder mystery wheel with things like Hec Ramsey and McCloud, right? But Columbo was the best of those, obviously. Everything, from the structure—the inverted mystery—to thw guest star of the week. Sometimes it was somebody very big and exciting, like Donald Pleasence or Ruth Gordon, but often it was slightly TV stars on the skids.John: Jack Cassidy, Jim: I was just going to say Jack Cassidy.Jeffrey: But at any rate, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I remembered in high school, a friend and I doing a parody of Columbo where he played Columbo and I played the murderer of the week. And so many years later, when they rebooted the show in the nineties, my father died and I spent a lot of time at the funeral home with the funeral director. And having nothing to say to the funeral director one day, I said, “Have you got the good stories?”And he told me all these great stories about, you know, bodies that weren't really in the casket and what you can't cremate, et cetera. So, I suddenly had this idea of a Hollywood funeral director to the stars. And, via my agent, I knew Dan Luria, the actor. He's a close friend or was a close friend of Peter's. And so, he was able to take this one-page idea and show it to Peter. And then, one day, I get a phone call and it's, “Uh, hello Jeff, this is Peter Falk calling. I want to talk to you about your idea.” And they flew me out there. It was great fun, because Falk really ran the show. He was the executive producer at that point. He always kind of ran the show. I think he only wrote one episode, the one with Faye Dunaway, but he liked the idea.I spent a lot of time with him, I'd go to his house where he would do his drawings back in the studio and all that. But what he said he liked about it was he liked a new setting, they always liked a murderer and a setting that was special, with clues that are connected to, say, the murderer's profession. So, the Donald Pleasant one about the wine connoisseur and all the clues are about wine. Or the Dick Van Dyke one, where he's a photographer and most of the clues are about photography. So, he really liked that. And he said, “You gotta have that first clue and you gotta have the pop at the end.”So, and we worked on the treatment and then I wrote the screenplay. And then he asked McGoohan if he would do it, and McGoohan said, “Well, if I can direct it too.” And, you know, I've adored McGoohan from, you know, Secret Agent and The Prisoner. I mean, I'd say The Prisoner is like one of my favorite television shows ever. So, the idea that the two of them were going to work together on that script was just, you know, it was incredible. John: Were you able to be there during production at all? Jeffrey: No, I went out there about four times to write, because it took like a year or so. It was a kind of laborious process with ABC and all that, but I didn't go out during the shooting.Occasionally, this was, you know, the days of faxes, I'd get a phone call: “Can you redo something here?” And then I'd fax it out. So, I never met McGoohan. I would only fax with him. But they built this whole Hollywood crematorium thing on the set. And Falk was saying at one point, “I'm getting pushback from Universal that we've got to do all this stuff. We've got to build everything.” And I was saying, “Well, you know, 60 percent of the script takes place there. If you're going to try to find a funeral home like it, you're going to have all that hassle.” And eventually they made the point that, yeah, to build this is going to cost less than searching around Hollywood for the right crematorium, And it had a great cast, you know, it had Richard Libertini and Sally Kellerman, and Rue McClanahan was our murder victim.Jim: I'll tell you every scene that Peter Falk and Mr. McGoohan had together. They looked to me as an actor, like they were having a blast being on together. Jeffrey: They really loved each other. They first met when McGoohan did that episode, By Dawn's Early Light, where he played the head of the military school. It's a terrific episode. It was a great performance. And although their acting styles are completely different, You know, Falk much more, you know, fifties, methody, shambolic. And McGoohan very, you know, his voice cracking, you know, and very affected and brittle. But they really loved each other and they liked to throw each other curveballs.There are things in the, in the show that are ad libs that they throw. There's one bit, I think it's hilarious. It's when Columbo tells the murderer that basically knows he did it, but he doesn't have a way to nail him. And, McGoohan is saying, “So then I suppose you have no case, do you?” And Falk says, “Ah, no, sir, I don't.” And he walks right off camera, you know, like down a hallway. And McGoohan stares off and says, “Have you gone?” And none of that was scripted. Peter just walks off set. And if you watch the episode, they had to dub in McGoohan saying, “Have you gone,” because the crew was laughing at the fact that Peter just strolled away. So McGoohan adlibs that and then they had to cover it later to make sure the sound wasn't screwed up. Jim: Fantastic. John: Kudos to you for that script, because every piece is there. Every clue is there. Everything pays off. It's just it is so tight, and it has that pop at the end that he wanted. It's really an excellent, excellent mystery.Jim: And a terrific closing line. Terrific closing line. Jeffrey: Yeah, that I did right. That was not an ad lib. Jim: It's a fantastic moment. And he, Peter Falk, looks just almost right at the camera and delivers that line as if it's, Hey, check this line out. It was great. Enjoyed every minute of it. Can we, um, can I ask some questions about Sherlock Holmes now?Jeffrey: Oh, yes. Jim: So, I enjoyed immensely Holmes and Watson that I saw a couple summers ago at Park Square. I was completely riveted and had no, absolutely no idea how it was going to pay off or who was who or what. And when it became clear, it was so much fun for me as an audience member. So I know that you have done a number of Holmes adaptations.There's Larry Millet, a St. Paul writer here and I know you adapted him, but as far as I can tell this one, pillar to post was all you. This wasn't an adaptation. You created this out of whole cloth. Am I right on that? Jeffrey: Yes. The, the idea came from doing the Larry Millet one, actually, because Steve Hendrickson was playing Holmes. And on opening night—the day of opening night—he had an aortic aneurysm, which they had to repair. And so, he wasn't able to do the show. And Peter Moore, the director, he went in and played Holmes for a couple of performances. And then I played Holmes for like three performances until Steve could get back. But in the interim, we've sat around saying, “All right, who can we get to play the role for like a week?” And we thought about all of the usual suspects, by which I mean, tall, ascetic looking actors. And everybody was booked, everybody was busy. Nobody could do it. So that's why Peter did it, and then I did it.But it struck me in thinking about casting Holmes, that there are a bunch of actors that you would say, you are a Holmes type. You are Sherlock Holmes. And it suddenly struck me, okay, back in the day, if Holmes were real, if he died—if he'd gone over to the falls of Reichenbach—people probably showed up and say, “Well, I'm Sherlock Holmes.”So, I thought, well, let's take that idea of casting Holmes to its logical conclusion: That a couple of people would come forward and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes,” and then we'd wrap it together into another mystery. And we're sitting around—Bob Davis was playing Watson. And I said, “So, maybe, they're all in a hospital and Watson has to come to figure out which is which. And Bob said, “Oh, of course, Watson's gonna know which one is Holmes.”And that's what immediately gave me the idea for the twist at the end, why Watson wouldn't know which one was Holmes. So, I'm very grateful whenever an idea comes quickly like that, but it depends on Steve getting sick usually. Jim: Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it's ever staged again anywhere, I will go. There was so much lovely about that show, just in terms of it being a mystery. And I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I don't want to give too much away in case people are seeing this at some point, but when it starts to be revealed—when Pierce's character starts talking about the reviews that he got in, in the West End—I I almost wet myself with laughter. It was so perfectly delivered and well written. I had just a great time at the theater that night. Jeffrey: It's one of those things where, well, you know how it is. You get an idea for something, and you pray to God that nobody else has done it. And I couldn't think of anybody having done this bit. I mean, some people have joked and said, it's kind of To Tell the Truth, isn't it? Because you have three people who come on and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” Now surely somebody has done this before, but Nobody had. Jim: Well, it's wonderful. John: It's all in the timing. So, what is the, what's the hardest part about adapting Holmes to this stage?Jeffrey: Well, I suppose from a purist point of view‑by which I mean people like the Baker Street Irregulars and other organizations like that, the Norwegian Explorers here in Minnesota‑is can you fit your own‑they always call them pastiches, even if they're not comic‑can you fit your own Holmes pastiche into the canon?People spend a lot of time working out exactly where Holmes and Watson were on any given day between 1878 and 1930. So, one of the nice things about Holmes and Watson was, okay, so we're going to make it take place during the three-year interregnum when Holmes is pretending to be dead. And it works if you fit Holmes and Watson in between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House, it works. And that's hard to do. I would say, I mean, I really love Larry Millett's book and all that, but I'm sure it doesn't fit, so to speak. But that's up to you to care. If you're not a purist, you can fiddle around any old way you like. But I think it's kind of great to, to, to have the, the BSI types, the Baker Street Irregular types say, “Yes, this clicked into place.”Jim: So that's the most difficult thing. What's the easiest part?Jeffrey: Well, I think it's frankly the language, the dialogue. Somebody pointed out that Holmes is the most dramatically depicted character in history. More than Robin Hood, more than Jesus Christ. There are more actor versions of Holmes than any other fictional character.We've been surrounded by Holmes speak. Either if we've read the books or seen the movies or seen any of the plays for over 140 years. Right. So, in a way, if you're like me, you kind of absorb that language by osmosis. So, for some reason, it's very easy for me to click into the way I think Holmes talks. That very cerebral, very fast, sometimes complicated syntax. That I find probably the easiest part. Working out the plots, you want them to be Holmesian. You don't want them to be plots from, you know, don't want the case to be solved in a way that Sam Spade would, or Philip Marlowe would. And that takes a little bit of work. But for whatever reason, it's the actor in you, it's saying, all right, if you have to ad lib or improv your way of Sherlock Holmes this afternoon, you know, you'd be able to do it, right? I mean, he really has permeated our culture, no matter who the actor is.Jim: Speaking of great actors that have played Sherlock Holmes, you adapted a movie that Ian McKellen played, and I just watched it recently in preparation for this interview.Having not seen it before, I was riveted by it. His performance is terrific and heartbreaking at the same time. Can we talk about that? How did you come to that project? And just give us everything.Jeffrey: Well, it's based on a book called A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen, and it's about a very old Sherlock Holmes in Surrey, tending to his bees, as people in Holmesland know that he retired to do. And it involves a couple of cases, one in Japan and one about 20 years earlier in his life that he's trying to remember. And it also has to do with his relationship with his housekeeper and the housekeeper's son. The book was given to me by Anne Carey, the producer, and I worked on it probably off and on for about five years.A lot of time was spent talking about casting, because you had to have somebody play very old. I remember I went to meet with Ralph Fiennes once because we thought, well, Ralph Fiennes could play him at his own age,‑then probably his forties‑and with makeup in the nineties.And Ralph said‑Ralph was in another film that I'd done‑and he said, “Oh, I don't wear all that makeup. That's just far too much.” And I said, “Well, you did in Harry Potter and The English Patient, you kind of looked like a melted candle.” And he said, “Yes, and I don't want to do that again.” So, we always had a very short list of actors, probably like six actors in the whole world And McKellen was one of them and we waited for him to become available And yeah, he was terrific. I'll tell you one funny story: One day, he had a lot of prosthetics, not a lot, but enough. He wanted to build up his cheekbones and his nose a bit. He wanted a bit, he thought his own nose was a bit too potatoish. So, he wanted a more Roman nose. So, he was taking a nap one day between takes. And they brought him in, said, “Ian, it's time for you to do the, this scene,” and he'd been sleeping, I guess, on one side, and his fake cheek and his nose had moved up his face. But he hadn't looked in the mirror, and he didn't know. So he came on and said, “Very well, I'm all ready to go.” And it was like Quasimodo.It's like 5:52 and they're supposed to stop shooting at six. And there was a mad panic of, Fix Ian's face! Get that cheekbone back where it's supposed to be! Knock that nose into place! A six o'clock, we go into overtime!” But it was very funny that he hadn't noticed it. You kind of think you'd feel if your own nose or cheekbone had been crushed, but of course it was a makeup. So, he didn't feel anything. Jim: This is just the, uh, the actor fan boy in me. I'm an enormous fan of his work straight across the board. Did you have much interaction with him and what kind of fella is he just in general?Jeffrey: He's a hoot. Bill Condon, the director, said, “Ian is kind of methody. So, when you see him on set, he'll be very decorous, you know, he'll be kind of like Sherlock Holmes.” And it was true, he goes, “Oh, Jeffrey Hatcher, it's very good to meet you.” And he was kind of slow talking, all that. Ian was like 72 then, so he wasn't that old. But then when it was all over, they were doing all those--remember those ice Dumps, where people dump a tub of ice on you? You have these challenges? A the end of shooting, they had this challenge, and Ian comes out in short shorts, and a bunch of ballet dancers surrounds him. And he's like, “Alright, everyone, let's do the ice challenge.” And, he turned into this bright dancer. He's kind of a gay poster boy, you know, ever since he was one of the most famous coming out of the last 20 some years. So, you know, he was suddenly bright and splashy and, you know, all that old stuff dropped away. He has all of his headgear at his house and his townhouse. He had a party for us at the end of shooting. And so, there's a Gandalf's weird hat and there's Magneto's helmet, you know, along with top hats and things like that. And they're all kind of lined up there. And then people in the crew would say, can I take a picture of you as Gandalf? “Well, why, of course,” and he does all that stuff. So no, he's wonderful. Jim: You do a very good impression as well. That was great. Now, how did you come to the project, The Good Liar, which again, I watched in preparation for this and was mesmerized by the whole thing, especially the mystery part of it, the ending, it was brilliant.How did you come to that project?Jeffrey: Well, again, it was a book and Warner Brothers had the rights to it. And because Bill and I had worked on Mr. Holmes--Bill Condon--Bill was attached to direct. And so I went in to talk about how to adapt it.This is kind of odd. It's again based in McKellen. In the meeting room at Warner Brothers, there was a life size version of Ian as Gandalf done in Legos. So, it was always, it'll be Ian McKellen and somebody in The Good Liar. Ian as the con man. And that one kind of moved very quickly, because something changed in Bill Condon's schedule. Then they asked Helen Mirren, and she said yes very quickly.And it's a very interesting book, but it had to be condensed rather a lot. There's a lot of flashbacks and going back and forth in time. And we all decided that the main story had to be about this one con that had a weird connection to the past. So, a lot of that kind of adaptation work is deciding what not to include, so you can't really be completely faithful to a book that way. But I do take the point with certain books. When my son was young, he'd go to a Harry Potter movie, and he'd get all pissed off. Pissed off because he'd say Dobby the Elf did a lot more in the book.But if it's a book that's not quite so well-known—The Good Liar isn't a terribly well-known book, nor was A Slight Trick of the Mind--you're able to have a lot more room to play. Jim: It's a very twisty story. Now that you're talking about the book, I'll probably have to go get the book and read it just for comparison. But what I saw on the screen, how did you keep it--because it was very clear at the end--it hits you like a freight train when it all sort of unravels and you start seeing all of these things. How did you keep that so clear for an audience? Because I'll admit, I'm not a huge mystery guy, and I'm not the brightest human, and yet I was able to follow that story completely.Jeffrey: Well, again, I think it's mostly about cutting things, I'm sure. And there are various versions of the script where there are a lot of other details. There's probably too much of one thing or another. And then of course, you know, you get in the editing room and you lose a couple of scenes too. These kinds of things are very tricky. I'm not sure that we were entirely successful in doing it, because you say, which is more important, surprise or suspense? Hitchcock used to have that line about, suspense is knowing there's a bomb under the table. And you watch the characters gather at the table. As opposed to simply having a bomb blow up and you didn't know about it.So, we often went back and forth about Should we reveal that the Helen Mirren character knows that Ian's character is doing something bad? Or do we try to keep it a secret until the end? But do you risk the audience getting ahead of you? I don't mind if the audience is slightly ahead. You know, it's that feeling you get in the theater where there's a reveal and you hear a couple of people say, “Oh, I knew it and they guessed it may be a minute before. But you don't want to get to the point where the audience is, you know, 20 minutes or a half an hour ahead of you.Jim: I certainly was not, I was not in any way. It unfolded perfectly for me in terms of it being a mystery and how it paid off. And Helen Mirren was brilliant. In fact, for a long time during it, I thought they were dueling con men, the way it was set up in the beginning where they were both entering their information and altering facts about themselves.I thought, “Oh, well, they're both con men and, and now we're going to see who is the better con man in the end.” And so. when it paid off. In a way different sort of way, it was terrific for me. Absolutely. Jeffrey: Well, and I thank you. But in a way, they were both con men. Jim: Yes, yes. But she wasn't a professional con man.Jeffrey: She wasn't just out to steal the money from him. She was out for something else. She was out for vengeance. Jim: Yes. Very good. Very, if you haven't seen it, The Good Liar folks, don't wait. I got it on Amazon prime and so can you.Jeffrey: I watched them do a scene, I was over there for about five days during the shooting.And watching the two of them work together was just unbelievable. The textures, the tones, the little lifts of the eyebrow, the shading on one word versus another. Just wonderful, wonderful stuff. Jim: Yeah. I will say I am a huge Marvel Cinematic Universe fan along with my son. We came to those together and I'm a big fan of that sort of movie. So I was delighted by this, because it was such a taut story. And I was involved in every second of what was going on and couldn't quite tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and how is this going to work and who's working with who?And it was great. And in my head, I was comparing my love for that sort of big blow it up with rayguns story to this very cerebral, internal. And I loved it, I guess is what I'm saying. And, I am, I think, as close to middle America as you're going to find in terms of a moviegoer. And I thought it was just dynamite. Jeffrey: It was very successful during the pandemic--so many things were when people were streaming--but it was weirdly successful when it hit Amazon or Netflix or whatever it was. And, I think you don't have to be British to understand two elderly people trying to find a relationship. And then it turns out that they both have reasons to hate and kill each other. But nonetheless, there is still a relationship there. So, I pictured a lot of lonely people watching The Good Liar and saying, “Yeah, I'd hang out with Ian McKellen, even if he did steal all my money.” John: Well, speaking of movies, I am occasionally handed notes here while we're live on the air from my wife. And she wants you to just say something about the adaptation you did of your play, Stage Beauty, and what that process was like and how, how that process went.Jeffrey: That was terrific because, primarily Richard Eyre--the director who used to run the National Theater and all that--because he's a theater man and the play's about theater. I love working with Bill Condon and I've loved working with Lassa Hallstrom and other people, but Richard was the first person to direct a film of any of my stuff. And he would call me up and say, “Well, we're thinking of offering it to Claire Danes.” or we're thinking…And usually you just hear later, Oh, somebody else got this role. But the relationship was more like a theater director and a playwright. I was there on set for rehearsals and all that.Which I haven't in the others. No, it was a wonderful experience, but I think primarily because the, the culture of theater saturated the process of making it and the process of rehearsing it and—again--his level of respect. It's different in Hollywood, everybody's very polite, they know they can fire you and you know, they can fire you and they're going to have somebody else write the dialogue if you're not going to do it, or if you don't do it well enough. In the theater, we just don't do that. It's a different world, a different culture, different kind of contracts too. But Richard really made that wonderful. And again, the cast that he put together: Billy Crudup and Claire and Rupert Everett and Edward Fox and Richard Griffiths. I remember one day when I was about to fly home, I told Richard Griffiths what a fan Evan-- my son, Evan--was of him in the Harry Potter movie. And he made his wife drive an hour to come to Shepperton with a photograph of him as Mr. Dursley that he could autograph for my son. John: Well, speaking of stage and adaptations, before we go into our lightning round here, you did two recent adaptations of existing thrillers--not necessarily mysteries, but thrillers--one of which Hitchcock made into a movie, which are Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. And I'm just wondering what was that process for you? Why changes need to be made? And what kind of changes did you make?Jeffrey: Well, in both cases, I think you could argue that no, changes don't need to be made. They're wildly successful plays by Frederick Knott, and they've been successful for, you know, alternately 70 or 60 years.But in both cases, I got a call from a director or an artistic director saying, “We'd like to do it, but we'd like to change this or that.” And I'm a huge fan of Frederick Knott. He put things together beautifully. The intricacies of Dial M for Murder, you don't want to screw around with. And there are things in Wait Until Dark having to do just with the way he describes the set, you don't want to change anything or else the rather famous ending won't work. But in both cases, the women are probably not the most well drawn characters that he ever came up with. And Wait Until Dark, oddly, they're in a Greenwich Village apartment, but it always feels like they're really in Westchester or in Terre Haute, Indiana. It doesn't feel like you're in Greenwich Village in the 60s, especially not in the movie version with Audrey Hepburn. So, the director, Matt Shackman, said, why don't we throw it back into the 40s and see if we can have fun with that. And so it played out: The whole war and noir setting allowed me to play around with who the main character was. And I know this is a cliche to say, well, you know, can we find more agency for female characters in old plays or old films? But in a sense, it's true, because if you're going to ask an actress to play blind for two hours a night for a couple of months, it can't just be, I'm a blind victim. And I got lucky and killed the guy. You've got a somewhat better dialogue and maybe some other twists and turns. nSo that's what we did with Wait Until Dark. And then at The Old Globe, Barry Edelstein said, “well, you did Wait Until Dark. What about Dial? And I said, “Well, I don't think we can update it, because nothing will work. You know, the phones, the keys. And he said, “No, I'll keep it, keep it in the fifties. But what else could you What else could you do with the lover?”And he suggested--so I credit Barry on this--why don't you turn the lover played by Robert Cummings in the movie into a woman and make it a lesbian relationship? And that really opened all sorts of doors. It made the relationship scarier, something that you really want to keep a secret, 1953. And I was luckily able to find a couple of other plot twists that didn't interfere with any of Knott's original plot.So, in both cases, I think it's like you go into a watch. And the watch works great, but you want the watch to have a different appearance and a different feel when you put it on and tick a little differently. John: We've kept you for a way long time. So, let's do this as a speed round. And I know that these questions are the sorts that will change from day to day for some people, but I thought each of us could talk about our favorite mysteries in four different mediums. So, Jeff, your favorite mystery novel”Jeffrey: And Then There Were None. That's an easy one for me. John: That is. Jim, do you have one?Jim: Yeah, yeah, I don't read a lot of mysteries. I really enjoyed a Stephen King book called Mr. Mercedes, which was a cat and mouse game, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. That's only top of mind because I finished it recently.John: That counts. Jim: Does it? John: Yeah. That'll count. Jim: You're going to find that I am so middle America in my answers. John: That's okay. Mine is--I'm going to cheat a little bit and do a short story--which the original Don't Look Now that Daphne du Murier wrote, because as a mystery, it ties itself up. Like I said earlier, I like stuff that ties up right at the end. And it literally is in the last two or three sentences of that short story where everything falls into place. Jeff, your favorite mystery play? I can be one of yours if you want. Jeffrey: It's a battle between Sleuth or Dial M for Murder. Maybe Sleuth because I always wanted to be in it, but it's probably Dial M. But it's also followed up very quickly by Death Trap, which is a great comedy-mystery-thriller. It's kind of a post-modern, Meta play, but it's a play about the play you're watching. John: Excellent choices. My choice is Sleuth. You did have a chance to be in Sleuth because when I directed it, you're the first person I asked. But your schedule wouldn't let you do it. But you would have been a fantastic Andrew Wyke. I'm sorry our timing didn't work on that. Jeffrey: And you got a terrific Andrew in Julian Bailey, but if you wanted to do it again, I'm available. John: Jim, you hear that? Jim: I did hear that. Yes, I did hear that. John: Jim, do you have a favorite mystery play?Jim: You know, it's gonna sound like I'm sucking up, but I don't see a lot of mystery plays. There was a version of Gaslight that I saw with Jim Stoll as the lead. And he was terrific.But I so thoroughly enjoyed Holmes and Watson and would love the opportunity to see that a second time. I saw it so late in the run and it was so sold out that there was no coming back at that point to see it again. But I would love to see it a second time and think to myself, well, now that you know what you know, is it all there? Because my belief is it is all there. John: Yeah. Okay. Jeff, your favorite TV mystery?Jeffrey: Oh, Columbo. That's easy. Columbo.John: I'm gonna go with Poker Face, just because the pace on Poker Face is so much faster than Columbo, even though it's clearly based on Columbo. Jim, a favorite TV mystery?Jim: The Rockford Files, hands down. John: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Last question all around. Jeff, your favorite mystery movie? Jeffrey: Laura. Jim: Ah, good one. John: I'm going to go with The Last of Sheila. If you haven't seen The Last of Sheila, it's a terrific mystery directed by Herbert Ross, written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. Fun little Stephen Sondheim trivia. The character of Andrew Wyke and his house were based on Stephen Sondheim. Jeffrey: Sondheim's townhouse has been for sale recently. I don't know if somebody bought it, but for a cool seven point something million, you're going to get it. John: All right. Let's maybe pool our money. Jim, your favorite mystery movie.Jim: I'm walking into the lion's den here with this one. Jeffrey, I hope this is okay, but I really enjoyed the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. And I revisit the second one in that series on a fairly regular basis, The Game of Shadows. I thought I enjoyed that a lot. Your thoughts on those movies quickly? Jeffrey: My only feeling about those is that I felt they were trying a little too hard not to do some of the traditional stuff. I got it, you know, like no deer stalker, that kind of thing. But I thought it was just trying a tad too hard to be You know, everybody's very good at Kung Fu, that kind of thing.Jim: Yes. And it's Sherlock Holmes as a superhero, which, uh, appeals to me. Jeffrey: I know the producer of those, and I know Guy Ritchie a little bit. And, I know they're still trying to get out a third one. Jim: Well, I hope they do. I really hope they do. Cause I enjoyed that version of Sherlock Holmes quite a bit. I thought it was funny and all of the clues were there and it paid off in the end as a mystery, but fun all along the road.Jeffrey: And the main thing they got right was the Holmes and Watson relationship, which, you know, as anybody will tell you, you can get a lot of things wrong, but get that right and you're more than two thirds there.

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with the writer of a great new book, “London After Midnight: The Lost Film,” a book about the classic lost Lon Chaney film.LINKS A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Daniel's Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/p/London-After-Midnight-The-Lost-Film-100075993768254/Buy the Book “London After Midnight: The Lost Film”: https://www.amazon.com/London-After-Midnight-Lost-Film/dp/1399939890Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: So, Daniel, when did you first become aware of London After Midnight? Daniel: I was about seven years old when I first stumbled into Lon Chaney through my love of all things Universal horror, and just that whole plethora of characters and actors that you just knew by name, but hadn't necessarily seen away from the many still photographs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the Phantom was the one to really spark my interest. But this was prior to eBay. I couldn't see the film of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera for a year. So, I kind of had the ultimate build to books and documentaries, just teasing me, teasing me all the time. And when I eventually did watch a few documentaries, the one thing that they all had in common was the name Lon Chaney. I just thought I need to learn more about this character Lon Chaney, because he just found someone of superhuman proportions just who have done all of these crazy diverse characters. And, that's where London After Midnight eventually peeked out at me and, occupied a separate interest as all the Chaney characterizations do.John: So how did you get into the Universal films? Were you watching them on VHS? Were they on tv? Did the DVDs happen by then?Daniel: I was still in the VHS days. My dad is a real big fan of all this as well. So he first saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on TV when he was a kid. And prior to me being born he had amassed a huge VHS collection and a lot of those had Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Hull, Claude Rains, Vincent Price, what have you.And a lot of them were dedicated to Universal horrors. And as a young curious kid, my eyes eventually crossed these beautiful cases and I really wanted to watch them. I think my first one I ever watched was The Mummy's Tomb or Curse of the Mummy. And it's just grown ever since, really.John: You're starting at the lesser end of the Universal monsters. It's like someone's starting the Marx Brothers at The Big Store and going, "oh, these are great. I wonder if there's anything better?" Jim: Well, I kinda like the fact that you have come by this fascination, honestly, as my father would say. You sort of inherited the family business, if you will. The book is great. The book is just great. And I'll be honest, I had no, except for recording the novel that John wrote, I really had no frame of reference for London after Midnight.John: Well, Jim, were you a monster guy? Were you a Universal Monster kid?Jim: Oh yeah. I mean, I had all the models. I love all of that, and certainly knew about Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I knew he was the man with a thousand faces. I knew he, when he died, he wrote JR. on his makeup kit and gave it to his kid. So, I knew stuff. But London after Midnight I didn't know at all, except for the sort of iconic makeup and that image, which I was familiar with. What was the inspiration for you in terms of writing this book?Daniel: Like you say, I really had no immediate go-to reference for London after Midnight, away from one or two images in a book. Really clearly they were very impactful images of Chaney, skulking around the old haunted mansion with Edna Tichenor by his side with the lantern, the eyes, the teeth, the cloak, the top hat, the webs, everything. Pretty much everything that embodies a good atmospheric horror movie, but obviously we couldn't see it.So that is all its fangs had deepened itself into my bloodstream at that point, just like, why is it lost? Why can't I see it? And again, the term lost film was an alien concept to me at a young age. I've always been a very curious child. Anything that I don't know or understand that much, even things I do understand that well, I always have to try to find out more, 'cause I just can't accept that it's like a bookend process. It begins and then it ends. And that was the thing with London after Midnight. Everything I found in books or in little interviews, they were just all a bit too brief. And I just thought there has to be a deeper history here, as there are with many of the greatest movies of all time. But same with the movies that are more obscure. There is a full history there somewhere because, 'cause a film takes months to a year to complete.It was definitely a good challenge for me. When we first had our first home computer, it was one of those very few early subjects I was typing in like crazy to try to find out everything that I could. And, that all incubated in my little filing cabinet, which I was able to call upon years later.Some things which were redundant, some things which I had the only links to that I had printed off in advance quite, sensibly so, but then there were certain things that just had lots of question marks to me. Like, what year did the film perish? How did it perish? The people who saw the film originally?And unlike a lot of Chaney films, which have been covered in immense detail, London after Midnight, considering it's the most famous of all lost films, still for me, had major holes in it that I just, really wanted to know the answers to. A lot of those answers, eventually, I found, even people who knew and institutions that knew information to key events like famous MGM Fire, they were hard pressed to connect anything up, in regards to the film. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had all these amazing facts. However, none of them kind of made sense with each other.My favorite thing is researching and finding the outcomes to these things. So that's originally what spiraled me into the storm of crafting this, initial dissertation that I set myself, which eventually became so large. I had to do it as a book despite, I'd always wanted to do a book as a kid.When you see people that you idolize for some reason, you just want to write a book on them. Despite, there had been several books on Lon Chaney. But I just always knew from my childhood that I always wanted to contribute a printed volume either on Chaney or a particular film, and London after Midnight seemed to present the opportunity to me.I really just didn't want it to be a rehash of everything that we had seen before or read before in other accounts or in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, but just with a new cover. So, I thought I would only do a book if I could really contribute a fresh new perspective on the subject, which I hope hopefully did.John: Oh, you absolutely did. And this is an exhaustive book and a little exhausting. There's a ton of stuff in here. You mentioned Famous Monster of the Filmland, which is where I first saw that image. There's at least one cover of the magazine that used that image. And Forrest Ackerman had some good photos and would use them whenever he could and also would compare them to Mark the Vampire, the remake, partially because I think Carol Borland was still alive and he could interview her. And he talked about that remake quite a bit. But that iconic image that he put on the cover and whenever he could in the magazine-- Jim and I were talking before you came on, Daniel, about in my mind when you think of Lon Chaney, there's three images that come to mind: Phantom of the Opera, Quasimoto, and this one. And I think this one, the Man in the Beaver hat probably is the most iconic of his makeups, because, 'cause it is, it's somehow it got adopted into the culture as this is what you go to when it's a creepy guy walking around. And that's the one that everyone remembers. Do you have any idea, specifically what his process was for making that look, because it, it is I think ultimately a fairly simple design. It's just really clever.Daniel: Yes, it probably does fall into the category of his more simplistic makeups. But, again, Chaney did a lot of things simplistic-- today --were never seen back then in say, 1927. Particularly in the Phantom of the Opera's case in 1925, in which a lot of that makeup today would be done through CG, in terms of trying to eliminate the nose or to make your lips move to express dialogue. Chaney was very fortunate to have lived in the pantomime era, where he didn't have to rely on how his voice would sound, trying to talk through those dentures, in which case the makeup would probably have to have been more tamed to allow audio recorded dialogue to properly come through.But with regards to the beaver hat makeup, he had thin wires that fitted around his eyes to give it a more hypnotic stare. The teeth, which he had constructed by a personal dentist, eventually had a wire attached to the very top that held the corners of his mouth, opening to a nice curved, fixated, almost joker like grin.You can imagine with the monocles around his eyes, he was thankful there probably wasn't that much wind on a closed set, because he probably couldn't have closed his eyes that many times. But a lot of these things become spoken about and detailed over time with mythic status. That he had to have his eyes operated on to achieve the constant widening of his eyelids. Or the teeth -- he could only wear the teeth for certain periods of time before accidentally biting his tongue or his lips, et cetera. But Chaney certainly wasn't a sadist, with himself, with his makeups. He was very professional. Although he did go through undoubtedly a lot of discomfort, especially probably the most, explicit case would be for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which his whole body is crooked down into a stooped position.But, with London After Midnight, I do highly suspect that the inspiration for that makeup in general came from the Dracula novel. And because MGM had not acquired the rights to the Dracula novel, unlike how Universal acquired the rights of the Hunchback or, more importantly, Phantom of the Opera, by which point Gaston Leroux was still alive.It was just a loose adaptation of Dracula. But nevertheless, when you read the description of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, he does bear a similarity to Chaney's vampire, in which it's the long hair, a mouth full of sharp teeth, a ghastly pale palor and just dressed all in black and carries around a lantern.Whereas Bela Lugosi takes extraordinary leaps and turns away from the Stoker novel. But it must have definitely had an impact at the time, enough for MGM to over-market the image of Chaney's vampire, which only appears in the film for probably just under four minutes, compared to his detective disguise, which is the real main character of the film.Although the thing we all wanna see is Cheney moving about as the vampire and what facial expressions he pulled. It's just something that we just want to see because it's Lon Chaney.John: Right. And it makes you wonder if he had lived and had gotten to play Dracula, he kind of boxed himself into a corner, then if he'd already used the look from the book, you wonder what he would've come up with, if Lugosi hadn't done it, and if Chaney had had been our first Dracula.Jim: You know, the other thing that I think of strictly like through my actor filter is here's a guy who -- take Hunchback or Phantom or even this thing -- whatever process he went through to put that makeup on, you know, was hours of work, I'm sure. Hunchback several hours of work to get to that, that he did himself, and then they'd film all day.So, on top of, I mean, I just think that that's like, wow, when you think about today where somebody might go into a makeup chair and have two or three people working on them to get the look they want. Even if it took a few hours, that person is just sitting there getting the makeup done. He's doing all of this, and then turns in a full day, uh, in front of the cameras, which to me is like, wow, that's incredible.Daniel: Definitely, it's like two jobs in one. I imagine for an actor it must be really grueling in adapting to a makeup, especially if it's a heavy makeup where it covers the whole of your head or crushes down your nose, changes your lips, the fumes of chemicals going into your eyes.But then by the end of it, I imagine you are quite exhausted from just your head adapting to that. But then you have to go out and act as well. With Chaney, I suppose he could be more of a perfectionist than take as much time as he wanted within reason. And then once he came to the grueling end of it all, he's actually gotta go out and act countless takes. Probably repair a lot of the makeup as well after, after a couple of takes, certainly with things like the Hunchback or the Phantom of the Opera.John: And, you know, it's not only is he doing the makeup and acting, but in, you know, not so much in London After Midnight, but in Phantom of the Opera, he is quite athletic. When the phantom moves, he really moves. He's not stooped. He's got a lot of energy to him and he's got a makeup on that, unlike the Quasimoto makeup, what he's attempting to do with the phantom is, reductive. He's trying to take things away from his face.Daniel: Mm-hmm.John: And he's using all the tricks he knows and lighting to make that happen, but that means he's gotta hit particular marks for the light to hit it just right. And for you to see that his face is as, you know, skull-like as he made it. When you see him, you know, in London After Midnight as the professor inspector character, he has got a normal full man's face. It's a real face. Much like his son, he had a kind of a full face and what he was able to do with a phantom and take all that away, and be as physical as he was, is just phenomenal. I mean, he was a really, besides the makeup, he was a really good actor.Daniel: Oh, definitely. Jim: I agree with that completely. I kind of in what I watched, I wonder if he was the makeup artist, but not the actor and he did exactly the same makeup on somebody else. And so we had the same image. If those things would've resonated with us the way they do today. I think it had everything to do with who he was and his abilities in addition to the incredible makeup. He was just a tremendous performer.Daniel: Absolutely. He was a true multitasker. In his early days of theater, he was not only an actor, but he was a choreographer. He had a lot of jobs behind the scenes as well. Even when he had become a star in his own time, he would still help actors find the character within them. like Norma Sheera, et cetera. People who were kind of new to the movie making scene and the directors didn't really have that much patience with young actors or actresses. Whereas Chaney, because of his clout in the industry, no one really interfered with Chaney's authority on set. But he would really help actors find the character, find the emotion, 'cause it was just all about how well you translate it over for the audience, as opposed to the actor feeling a certain way that convinces themselves that they're the character. Chaney always tried to get the emotions across to the audience. Patsy Ruth Miller, who played Esemerelda in in the Hunchback, said that Chaney directed the film more than the director actually did.The director was actually even suggested by Chaney. So, Chaney really had his hands everywhere in the making of a film. And Patsy Ruth Miller said the thing that she learned from him was that it's the actress's job to make the audience feel how the character's meant to be feeling, and not necessarily the actor to feel what they should be feeling based on the script and the settings and everything.So I think, that's why Chaney in particular stands out, among all of the actors of his time.John: I think he would've transitioned really well into sound. I think, he had everything necessary to make that transition.Jim: There's one sound picture with him in it, isn't there, doesn't he? Doesn't he play a ventriloquist? John: I believe so.Daniel: Yes, it was a remake of The Unholy Three that he had made in 1925 as Echo the ventriloquist, and the gangster. And yes, by the time MGM had decided to pursue talkies -- also, funny enough, they were one of the last studios to transition to, just because they were the most, one, probably the most dominant studio in all of Hollywood, that they didn't feel the pressure to compete with the burgeoning talkie revolution.So they could afford to take their time, they could release a talkie, but then they could release several silent films and the revenue would still be amazing for the studio. Whereas other studios probably had to conform really quick just because they didn't have the star system, that MGM shamelessly flaunted. And several Chaney films had been transitioned to sound at this point with or without Chaney. But for Chaney himself, because he himself was the special effect, it was guaranteed to be a winner even if it had been an original story that isn't as remembered today strictly because people get to hear the thing that's been denied them for all this time, which is Chaney's voice. And he would've transitioned very easily to talkies is because he had a very rich, deep voice, which, coming from theater, he had to have had, in terms of doing dialogue. He wasn't someone like a lot of younger actors who had started out predominantly in feature films who could only pantomime lines. Chaney actually knew how to deliver dialogue, so it did feel natural and it didn't feel read off the page.And he does about five voices in The Unholy Three. So MGM was truly trying to market, his voice for everything that they could. As Mrs. O'Grady, his natural voice, he imitates a parrot and a girl. And yeah, he really would've flourished in the sound era. Jim: Yeah. John: Any surprises, as it sounds like you were researching this for virtually your whole life, but were there any surprises that you came across, as you really dug in about the film?Daniel: With regards to London after Midnight, the main surprise was undoubtedly the -- probably the star chapter of the whole thing -- which is the nitrate frames from an actual destroyed print of the film itself, which sounds crazy to even being able to say it. But, yeah the nitrate frames themselves presented a quandary of questions that just sent me into a whole nother research mode trying to find out where these impossible images came from, who they belonged to, why they even existed, why they specifically existed.Because, looking for something that, you know, you are told doesn't exist. And then to find it, you kind of think someone is watching over you, planting this stuff as though it's the ultimate tease. To find a foreign movie poster for London After Midnight would be one thing, but to find actual pieces of the lost film itself. It was certainly the most out of body experience I've ever had. Just to find something that I set out to find, but then you find it and you still can't believe that you've actually found it.John: How did you find it?Daniel: I had connections with a few foreign archives who would befriend me and took to my enthusiasm with the silent era, and specifically Chaney and all the stars connected to Chaney films.And, quite early on I was told that there were a few photo albums that had various snippets of silent films from Chaney. They didn't really go into what titles these were, 'cause they were just all a jumble. All I knew is that they came from (garbled) widow. And he had acquired prints of the whole films from various, I suppose, junk stores in Spain.But not being a projectionist, he just purely took them at the face value that he just taken the images and snipping them up and putting them in photo albums, like how you would just do with photographs. And then the rest of the material was sadly discarded by fire. So, all we were left with were these snipped relics, survivors almost to several Chaney lost films. Some of them not lost, but there were films like The Phantom of the Opera in there, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mockery, The Unknown. But then there were several lost films such as London After Midnight, the Big City, Thunder. And All the Brothers were Valiant, which are mainly other than Thunder are all totally complete lost films.So, to find this little treasure trove, it was just finding out what the images meant and connecting them up, trying to put them in some sort of chronological scholarly order. Grueling, but it was very fun at the same time. And because I had identified myself with all of these surviving production stills from the film -- a lot of them, which formed the basis of the 2002 reconstruction by Turner Classic Movies -- it didn't take me too long to identify what scenes these surviving nitrate frames were from. But there were several frames which had sets that I recognized and costumes that I recognized, but in the photographic stills, they don't occupy the same space at the same time. So, it's like the two separate elements had crossed over. So that left me with a scholarly, question of what I was looking at. I was able to go back and, sort of rectify certain wrongs that have been accepted throughout the sixties as being the original, say, opening to London after Midnight. So I've, been able to disprove a few things that have made the film, I suppose, a bit more puzzling to audiences. Some audiences didn't really get what the plot was to begin with. So, it was nice to actually put a bit more order to the madness finally.John: At what point did you come across the original treatment and the script?Daniel: The treatment and the script, they came from a private collector who had bought them at auction a number of years ago who I was able to thankfully contact, and they still had the two documents in question. I had learned through Philip J Riley's previous books on London after Midnight that he had the two latter drafts of the script, the second edition and the third draft edition.And, again, the question of why and where. I just always wondered where that first draft of the script was, hoping it would contain new scenes, and open new questions for me and to study. And once I've managed to find those two documents, they did present a lot of new, perspectives and material that added to the fuller plot of the original hypnotist scenario, as opposed to the shortened, time efficient London After Midnight film that was ultimately delivered to audiences. So again, it helped to put a little bit more order to the madness.Jim: You found an actual piece of the film that you were able to, somebody got images from it? And then you found the scripts? But the images are terrific and they're all in your book. They came from what exactly?Daniel: The just below 20 images of the film came from originally a distribution print, a Spanish distribution print, from about 1928. Originally, they were on 35 millimeter indicating that they were from the studio and as is with a lot of silent films that have been found in foreign archives.Normally when a film is done with its distribution, it would have to be returned to the original studio to be destroyed, except for the original negative and a studio print, because there is no reason why a studio would need to keep the thousands of prints when they have the pristine copy in their vault. But, in a lot of smaller theater cases, in order to save money on the postage of the shipping, they would just basically declare that they had destroyed the film on the studio's behalf. There was no record system with this stuff and that's how a lot of these films ended up in the basements of old theaters, which are eventually when they closed, the assets were sold off to collectors or traveling showmen. And eventually these films found their ways into archives or again, private collections. Some of which people know what they have.A lot of times they don't know what they have because they're more obsessed with, naturally, more dedicated to preserving the films of their own culture that was shown at the time, as opposed to a foreign American title, which they probably assume they already have a copy of. But it's how a lot of these films get found.And, with the London After Midnight, example, there were the images that I found spanned the entire seven reels, because they came from different points in the film. It wasn't a single strip of film, of a particular scene. Having thankfully the main source that we have for London After Midnight is the cutting continuity, which is the actual film edited down shot for shot, length for length.And it describes, briefly, although descriptive enough, what is actually in each and every single shot of the film. And comparing the single frame images from the film with this document, I was able to identify at what point these frames came from during the film, which again spanned the entire seven reels, indicating that a complete seven reel version of the film had gotten out under the studio system at one point.As is the case, I'm assuming, 'cause these came from the same collection, I'm assuming it was the same with the other lost Chaney films that again, sadly only survive in snippet form.John: It's like somebody was a collector and his wife said, "well, we don't have room for all this. Just take the frames you like and we'll get rid of the rest of it." So, you mentioned in passing the 2002 reconstruction that Turner Classic Movies did using the existing stills. I don't know if they were working from any of the scripts or not. That was the version I originally saw when I was working on writing, those portions of The Misers Dream that mentioned London After Midnight. Based on what you know now, how close is that reconstruction and where do you think they got it right and where'd they get it wrong?Daniel: The 2002, reconstruction, while a very commendable production, it does stray from the original edited film script. Again, the problem that they clearly faced on that production is that there were not enough photographed scenes to convey all the photographed scenes from the film. So what they eventually fell into the trap of doing was having to reuse the same photograph to sometimes convey two separate scenes, sometimes flipping the image to appear on the opposite side of the camera. And, because of the certain lack of stills in certain scenes cases, they had to rewrite them.And sometimes a visual scene had to have been replaced with an inter-title card, merely describing what had happened or describing a certain period in time, as opposed to showing a photograph of what we're meant to be seeing as opposed to just reading. So, they did the best with what they had.But since then, there have been several more images crop up in private collections or in the archives. So, unless a version of the film gets found, it's certainly an endeavor that could be revisited, I think, and either do a new visual reconstruction of sort, or attempt some sort remake of the film even.Jim: That's an idea. John: They certainly have the materials to do that. I've got an odd question. There's one famous image, a still image from the film, showing Chaney as Professor Burke, and he is reaching out to the man in the beaver hat whose back is to us. Is that a promo photo? Spoiler alert, Burke is playing the vampire in the movie. He admits that that's him. So, he never would've met the character. What is the story behind that photo?Daniel: There are actually three photographs depicting that, those characters that you described. There are the two photographs which show Chaney in the Balfor mansion seemingly directing a cloaked, top hatted figure with long hair, with its back towards us. And then there is another photograph of Chaney in the man in the beaver hat disguise with a seemingly twin right beside him outside of a door.Basically the scenes in the film in which Chaney appear to the Hamlin residents, the people who are being preyed upon by the alleged vampires, the scenes where Chaney and the vampire need to coexist in the same space or either appear to be in the same vicinity to affect other characters while at the same time interrogating others, Chaney's character of Burke employs a series of assistants to either dress up as vampires or at certain times dress up as his version of the vampire to parade around and pretend that they are the man in the beaver hat. Those particular shots, though, the vampire was always, photographed from behind rather than the front.The very famous scene, which was the scene that got first got me interested in London After Midnight, in which the maidm played by Polly Moran is in the chair shrieking at Chaney's winged self, hovering over her. It was unfortunate to me to realize that that was actually a flashback scene told from the maid's perspective.And by the end of the film, the maid is revealed to be an informant of Burke, a secret detective also. So, it's really a strong suspension of disbelief has to be employed because the whole scene of Chaney chasing the maid through the house and appearing under the door, that was clearly just the MGMs marketing at work just to show Chaney off in a bizarre makeup with a fantastic costume.Whereas he is predominantly the detective and the scenes where he's not needed to hypnotize a character in the full vampire makeup, he just employs an assistant who parades around in the house as him, all the times with his back turned so that the audience can't latch on as to who the character actually is, 'cause it must have posed quite a fun confusion that how can Chaney be a detective in this room where the maid has just ran from the Vampire, which is also Chaney?John: Yeah, and it doesn't help that the plot is fairly convoluted anyway, and then you add that layer. So, do you think we'll ever see a copy of it? Do you think it's in a basement somewhere?Daniel: I've always personally believed that the film does exist. Not personally out of just an unfounded fanboy wish, but just based on the evidence and examples of other films that have been found throughout time. Metropolis being probably the most prominent case. But, at one point there was nothing on London After Midnight and now there is just short of 20 frames for the film. So, if that can exist currently now in the year 2023, what makes us think that more footage can't be found by, say, 2030? I think with fans, there's such a high expectation that if it's not found in their own lifetime or in their own convenience space of time, it must not exist. There's still a lot of silent lost treasures that just have not been found at all that do exist though. So, with London After Midnight, from a purely realistic standpoint, I've always theorized myself that the film probably does exist in an archive somewhere, but it would probably be a very abridged, foreign condensed version, as opposed to a pristine 35-millimeter print that someone had ripped to safety stock because they knew in the future the film would become the most coveted of all lost films. So, I do believe it does exist. The whole theory of it existing in a private collection and someone's waiting to claim the newfound copyright on it, I think after December of last year, I think it's finally put that theory to rest. I don't think a collector consciously knows they have a copy of it. So, I think it's lost until found personally, but probably within an archive.Jim: Lost until found. That's a great title for a book. I like that a lot. What do you think of the remake, Mark of the Vampire and in your opinion, what does it tell us about, London After Midnight?Daniel: Well, Mark of the Vampire came about again, part of the Sound Revolution. It was one of those because it was Chaney and Todd Browning's most successful film for the studio. And Browning was currently, being held on a tight leash by MGM because of his shocking disaster film Freaks, I suppose they were a little bit nervous about giving him the reign to do what he wanted again. So, looking through their backlog of smash silent hits, London After Midnight seemed the most logical choice to remake, just simply because it was their most, successful collaboration. Had it have been The Unholy Three, I'm sure? Oh no, we already had The Unholy Three, but had it have been another Browning Chaney collaboration, it might have been The Unknown, otherwise. So, I suppose that's why London After Midnight was selected and eventually turned into Mark of the Vampire. The story does not stray too much from London After Midnight, although they seem to complicate it a little bit more by taking the Burke vampire character and turning it this time into three characters played by three different actors, all of which happened to be in cahoots with one another in trying to solve an old murder mystery.It's very atmospherical. You can definitely tell it's got Todd Browning signature on it. It's more pondering with this one why they just did not opt to make a legit, supernatural film, rather than go in the pseudo vampire arena that they pursued in 1927. Where audiences had by now become accustomed to the supernatural with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, which no longer relied on a detective trying to find out a certain mystery and has to disguise themselves as a monster.The monster was actually now a real thing in the movies. So I think if Bela Lugosi had been given the chance to have played a real Count Mora as a real vampire, I think it would've been slightly better received as opposed to a dated approach that was clearly now not the fashionable thing to do.I suppose again, because Browning was treading a very thin line with MGM, I suppose he couldn't really stray too far from the original source material. But I find it a very atmospherical film, although I think the story works better as a silent film than it does as a sound film, because there's a lot of silent scenes in that film, away from owls, hooting and armadillos scurrying about and winds. But I do think, based on things like The Cat and The Canary from 1927 and The Last Warning, I just think that detective sleuth with horror overtones serves better to the silent world than it does the sound world away from the legit, supernatural.John: So, if Chaney hadn't died, do you think he would have played Dracula? Do you think he would've been in Freaks? Would Freaks have been more normalized because it had a big name in it like that?Daniel: It would've been interesting if Chaney had played in Freaks. I think because Todd Browning used the kinds of individuals that he used for Freaks, maybe Chaney would've, for a change, had been the most outta place.John: Mm-hmm.Daniel: I do think he might have played Dracula. I think Universal would've had a hell of a time trying to get him over because he had just signed a new contract with MGM, whereas Todd Browning had transferred over to Universal by 1930 and really wanted to make Dracula for many years and probably discussed it with Chaney as far back as 1920.But certainly MGM would not have permitted Chaney to have gone over to Universal, even for a temporary period, without probably demanding a large piece of the action, in a financial sense, because Universal had acquired the rights to Dracula at this point. And, based on the stage play that had, come out on Broadway, it was probably assured that it was going to be a giant moneymaker, based on the success of the Dracula play.But because of Cheney's, status as a, I suppose retrospectively now, as a horror actor, he was probably the first person to be considered for that role by Carl Laemmle, senior and Junior for that matter. And Chaney gone by 1930, it did pose a puzzle as to who could take over these kinds of roles.Chaney was probably the only one to really successfully do it and make the monster an actual box office ingredient more than any other actor at that time, as he did with. Phantom, Blind Bargain and London After Midnight. So, I think to have pursued Chaney for a legit, supernatural film would've had enormous possibilities for Browning and Chaney himself.You can kind of see a trend, a trilogy forming, with Browning, from London After Midnight, in which he incorporates things he used in Dracula in London After Midnight. So, he kind of had this imagery quite early on. So, to go from – despite it's not in that order -- but to have London After Midnight, Mark of the Vampire, and he also did Dracula, he clearly was obsessed with the story. And I think Chaney was probably the, best actor for someone like Browning who complimented his way of thinking and approach to things like silence. As opposed to needing dialogue all the time, loud commotions. So, I think they dovetailed each other quite well, and that's why their ten year director actor relationship was as groundbreaking as it was.Jim: If the film does surface, if we find the film, what do you think people, how are they gonna react to the movie when they see it? What do you think? What's gonna be the reaction if it does surface?Daniel: Well, the lure of London After Midnight, the power in the film is its lost status rather than its widespread availability. I think it could never live up to the expectation that we've built up in our heads over the past 40 to 60 years. It was truly people, fans like Forrest J Ackerman that introduced and reignited the interest in Chaney's career by the late fifties and 1960s. That's when London After Midnight started to make the rounds in rumor, the rumors of a potential print existing, despite the film had not long been destroyed at that point. So, it was always a big mystery. There were always people who wanted to see the film, but with no access to home video, or et cetera, the only way you could probably see the film would've been at the studio who held everything. And, by the time the TV was coming out, a lot of silent films didn't make it to TV. So again, it has just germinated in people's heads probably in a better form than what they actually remembered. But, the true reality of London After Midnight is one more closer to the ground than it is in it's people are probably expecting to see something very supernatural on par with Dracula, whereas it's more so a Sherlock Holmes story with mild horrorish overtones to it that you can kind of see better examples of later on in Dracula in 1930 and in Mark of the Vampire.It's a film purely, I think for Lon Chaney fans. For myself, having read everything I can on the film, everything I've seen on the film, I personally love silent, detective stories, all with a touch of horror. So, I personally would know what I am going in to see. I'm not going in to see Chaney battling a Van Helsing like figure and turn to dust at the very end or turning to a bat. I'm going to see a detective melodrama that happens to have what looks like a vampire. So, it certainly couldn't live up to the expectations in people's minds and it's probably the only film to have had the greatest cheapest, marketing in history, I would think. It's one of those films, if it was discovered, you really would not have to do much marketing to promote it.It's one of those that in every fanzine, magazine, documentary referenced in pop. It has really marketed itself into becoming what I always call the mascot of the genre. There are other more important lost films that have been lost to us. The main one again, which has been found in its more complete form, was Metropolis, which is a better movie.But unlike Metropolis, London After Midnight has a lot more famous ingredients to it. It has a very famous director. It has a very famous actor whose process was legendary even during then. And it's actually the only film in which he actually has his make-up case make a cameo appearance by the very end. And it goes on the thing that everyone in every culture loves, which is the vampirism, the dark tales and folklore. So, when you say it, it just gets your imagination going. Whereas I think if you are watching it, it's probably you'll be looking over the projector to see if something even better is going to happen.The film had its mixed reactions when it originally came out. People liked it because it gave them that cheap thrill of being a very atmospherical, haunted house with the creepy figures of Chaney walking across those dusty hallways. But then the more important story is a murder mystery.It's not Dracula, but it has its own things going for it. I always kind of harken it back to the search for the Lochness Monster or Bigfoot. It has more power in your mind than it does in an aquarium or in a zoo. Hearing someone say that they think they saw something moving around in Lochness, but there's no photographic evidence, you just have the oral story, that is much more tangible in a way than actually seeing it in an aquarium where you can take it for granted. And it's the same with London After Midnight, and I think that's why a lot of hoaxster and pranksters tend to say that they have seen London After Midnight more than any other lost film.Jim: For a film that I would say the majority of the world does not have any frame of reference, and I'm using myself as the sort of blueprint for that, no frame of reference for this film. That image is iconic in a way that has been, I mean, it at first glance could be Jack the Ripper. I was talking to John before we started the podcast, once I locked in on that image, then I started to think, oh, the ghosts in Disney's Haunted Mansion, there's a couple of ghosts that have elements of that. I mean, it was so perfectly done, even though we don't, I bet you nine out ten people don't know the title London After Midnight, but I bet you seven outta ten people know this image.Daniel: Definitely, it has certainly made its mark on pop culture, again, I think because I think it's such a beautiful, simplistic design. Everything from the simplistically [garbled] to the bulging eyes and the very nice top hat as well, which is in itself today considered a very odd accessory for a grotesque, vampire character.But it's one of those things that has really carried over. It's influenced what the movies and artists. It was one of the influences for the Babadook creation for that particular monster. It was an influence on the Black Phone. It's just a perfect frame of reference for movie makers and sculptors and artists to keep taking from.John: Yep. It's, it'll live long beyond us. Daniel, one last question. I read somewhere or heard somewhere. You're next gonna tackle James Whale, is that correct? Daniel: James Whale is a subject, again, coming from, I happen to come from the exact same town that he was born and raised in, in Dudley, England. So, it's always been a subject close to home for me, which is quite convenient because I love his movies. So, I'm hoping to eventually, hopefully plan a documentary feature on him, based on a lot of family material in the surrounding areas that I was able to hunt down, and forgotten histories about him and just put it together in some form, hopefully in the future.John: That would be fantastic, and we'll have you back at that point.Jim: So, let's pretend for a minute that the audience is me, and they'd have absolutely no idea who James Whale is or what he's done. Just for a minute, let's pretend.John: Pretend that you don't know that?Jim: Yeah.Daniel: James Whale is the most known for his work for directing Frankenstein with Boris Karloff in 1931. But he also directed probably some of the most important horror films that have ever existed in the history of motion pictures. The Old Dark House, which can be cited with its very atmospherical, and black comedy tones, The Invisible Man with Claude Rains and Gloria Stewart in 1933. And, the most important one, which is probably the grand jewel in the whole of the Universal Monsters Empire, which is Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, which is the ultimate, example of everything that he had studied, everything that he'd learned with regards to cinema and comedy, life and death, and just making a very delicious cocktail of a movie in all of its black comedy, horrific, forms that we're still asking questions about today. One of his first films that he did was for Howard Hughes Hell's Angels, in which -- because he'd coming over from theater -- when again, films in America were taken off with the sound revolution. They all of a sudden needed British directors to translate English dialogue better than the actors could convey.So, James Whale was one of many to be taken over to America when he had a hit play called Journeys End, which became the most successful war play at that point. And he did his own film adaptation of Journeys End. He also did a really remarkable film called Showboat, which is another very iconic film.And again, someone with James Whale's horror credentials, you just think, how could someone who directed Frankenstein directed Showboat? But, clearly a very, very talented director who clearly could not be pigeonholed at the time as a strictly horror director, despite it is the horror films in which he is remembered for, understandably so, just because they contain his very individualistic wit and humor and his outlooks on life and politics. And being an openly gay director at the time, he really was a force unto himself. He was a very modern man even then.

Mark 1:16-20 How many in this room would call themselves followers of Jesus? How many in this room would call themselves Christians? How many in this room would call themselves Disciples? All four Gospels and Acts include Jesus calling the first disciples and who they were.  Mark 1:16-20 Matthew 4:18-22 Luke 5:4-11 John 1:29-2:2, John never names all the disciples in full. Acts 1:13 names all the disciples except Judas Iscariot since he betrayed Jesus and killed himself. The men at the heart of the verses we are looking at here in Mark…at the point of these verses already knew who Jesus was, heard of Him, seen Him and were following Jesus.  The point of these verses in Mark is this… These four men (Simon, Andrew, James, and John) They are already followers, or “disciples” of Jesus, and now being called into action. They now had to choose obedience to the Lord or to themselves. They now had to choose Jesus above all. This couldn't have been easy because Jesus was setting out to shake things up. Jesus was healing people on the Sabbath Healing diseased people like lepers Causing a ruckus and turning over money-changers tables in the temple Casting out demons Jesus wasn't playing around. So who did Jesus get to be followers, or disciples for Him? Fisherman Tax Collector Zealot who supported anarchy, and plotted to overthrow Roman rule Treasurer, dealt with money (and stole it) So mostly fisherman and a few with less than desirable resumes. Who did Jesus not call? Jesus didn't call the Pharisees, Sadducees, or the Scribes. Jesus didn't call those who were actively in schools or seminaries. Jesus didn't call those who were rich and could provide for His ideas. Jesus didn't call those who were perfect and had everything figured out. Jesus called on those who would follow Him! Three places in the NT that mention the word Christian and this is where we get our understanding of what it means to be a Christian: Acts 11:19-26 1 Peter 4:14, 16 Acts 26:28-29 Being a Christian is the same as being a disciple. There is no difference. When one professes faith in and receives Salvation through Jesus Christ they are at that moment disciples. On the C.S. Lewis Institute website there is an article by Thomas A Tarrants from June 5, 2014 titled: ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN OR A DISCIPLE? IS THERE A DIFFERENCE? WHY IT MATTERS! In this article “Noted New Testament scholar Michael Wilkins is quoted as saying, “a disciple is “one who has come to Jesus for eternal life, has claimed Jesus as Savior and God, and has embarked on the life of following Jesus.” So the definition of a follower of Jesus is really a Disciple of Jesus, which is also a Christian! Who here today would agree that we who profess to be Christians are to observe the command given us in Matthew 28:19-20? How can one who is not a disciple of Jesus, go and make disciples for Jesus? When Jesus called to Simon, Andrew, James, and John they responded immediately. They left their boats, left their family and went walked with Jesus. I wonder if there are some in this church who are being called? Are you responding immediately? How are we as Christians living today? Just showing up to church constitutes being a Christian? Better yet some don't even go to church, the just claim the word Christian! Remember that being a Christian is following Jesus, it's being a disciple! It's living like Jesus and doing what He would do. Is that you? Are you ready to give up everything and follow Jesus who gave up everything for you? Are you ready to begin living out your Christianity and become true disciples of Jesus? Cite from CS Lewis Website: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/are-you-a-christian-or-a-disciple-is-there-a-difference-why-it-matters/ 14. William L. Kynes, PhD, New Testament scholar, pastor, and currently moderator of the Evangelical Free Church of America, in private correspondence with author.

Here are 2 quick and tame excerpts from this eye-opening conversation with JP Goodwin, Senior Director of HSUS Stop Puppy Mill Campaign, and Liz Menegon, Founder of Hands2Paws. John: ... one year ago, there was a major push by some people in the pet industry to say that there was a dog shortage. Do you remember that?" Tazz: Ohhh I saw those articles. I was livid. John: They wanted to drive people towards more of the commercial breeding side of the industry for acquiring dogs and cats...it's kind of funny. I spoke with one of the people who was a big driver of that messaging for that pet shortage messaging. and this was just last year and he said..." Tazz: No, the greenwashing of the pet industry is just unbelievable with foods, with products, with supplements, and with animal welfare. It's just nonstop. It's frustrating. I am scared sometimes. John: But there's good people in the industry, too... Most of the retailers don't sell puppies. Many of them endorse efforts to stop the sale of puppies in pet stores. Want to know what you can do to be a part of the solution? Listen to & share this episode with anyone who has a pet or is looking to bring one into their lives and then send them to the shelters and while you're at it have them get pet insurance...the cost of health care for these animals is skyrocketing making the cost to care for them unaffordable. Contact Liz Menegon for partnerships, to stop backyard breeders and puppy mills at the grassroots level: or at NoLease4Paws Support HSUS and its Campaigns here Subscribe and follow The Petropolist Podcast --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tazz-thepetropolist/message

Galatians   Talk 4   Galatians 2 So far in this series we have seen that Paul's purpose in writing Galatians was to correct a serious doctrinal error. Some were teaching that faith in Christ was not sufficient for salvation and that obedience to the law of the Old Testament, especially with regard to circumcision, was required as well. The situation was so serious that Paul went so far as to say that if anybody preached a gospel other than the one that he had preached and which the Galatians had accepted, they should be eternally condemned!   If this seems rather strong, we need to remember that our only hope of salvation is through believing that Jesus took the punishment our sins deserved when he died on the cross. This and this alone is all that is necessary for salvation. To teach that something else is necessary is to deny the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice (v21) and encourages people to put their hope in a false ‘gospel' by trying to get right with God by our own good works.   In defence of the gospel he preached, Paul begins in chapter 1 by making it clear to his readers that: ·       He had not received it from any human source. ·       He had received it from Jesus Christ himself by personal revelation. And as we saw last time, Paul's determination not only to preach that message, but also to defend it at all costs, was emboldened by three things: 1.     He remembered the futility of his old way of life 2.     His sole desire was to please God 3.     He knew God had called him. Now, as we move into chapter 2, Paul continues to speak of his own experience (1-10). He bases his argument against the need for circumcision on the fact that when he had gone up to Jerusalem to visit Peter, James and John:   ·       They had not compelled Titus to be circumcised although he was Gentile (3) ·       They had added nothing to his message (6) ·       They had endorsed his ministry to the Gentiles (7-10). It was important for Paul to stress these things because the Judaizers, with their insistence on obedience to the Jewish law,  probably felt a loyalty to the apostles in Jerusalem and he needed to make it clear that they had endorsed his message. These points will become clear as we now read verses 1-10, which I shall read without further comment.   Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. 2  I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain. 3 Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek.   4 [This matter arose] because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. 5 We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you. 6 As for those who seemed to be important - whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance - those men added nothing to my message.   7 On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been to the Jews. 8 For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9 James, Peter and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. 10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.   However, although Paul was glad of the approval of these brothers, he was not afraid to point out the inconsistency of Peter on these matters. In verses 11-13 he says:   11 When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. 12 Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. 13  The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. 14 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?   Peter Peter was afraid and hypocritical. He was not infallible. He was in the wrong. He was still capable of giving in to the fear of what others might think of him (cf. his denial of Jesus). This was after Jesus had forgiven him and after he had been filled with the Spirit at Pentecost. This shows that the baptism in the Spirit is not an experience of entire sanctification, as some have taught. If our actions are not consistent with our professed beliefs, we may lead others astray.   Paul Paul was not afraid to confront Peter publicly. He opposed him to his face (not behind his back). He told Peter first, before telling others about it (e.g. writing to the Galatians). Confronting people when they are in the wrong takes courage. But if we don't speak up, we may be guilty of condoning their attitude and actions by our silence.   The beginning of the theological argument (15-21) Having made his case from his own personal experience, Paul now uses the substance of what he had said to Peter to begin his theological argument.   "We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' 16  know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. 17 "If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! 18 If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. 19  For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21  I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"   I'm not intending to deal with all these verses in detail. We'll be concentrating on verses 19-20. But first my attempt at a paraphrase of verses 15-18, the meaning of which is not immediately clear.   15-16 Paul appeals to the experience of his Jewish Christian readers. They have put their faith in Jesus Christ and they know that no one can be saved by observing the law.   17 But that doesn't mean that, although we still sometimes sin after we are saved, the gospel of salvation through faith in Christ is promoting sin (cf. Romans 6:1).   18 If we rebuild the law after we have rejected it as a way of salvation, by our inability to keep it we will only prove that we are breakers of the law.   But now let's turn our attention to verses 19-20.   19  For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God.   What does Paul mean by died to the law? It's probably best to understand this as meaning that Paul started to think of himself as dead as far as the law was concerned. Compare Romans 6:11, where he says something similar:   In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.   As we shall see later in the series, the law was given to make us aware of our need of Christ because of our inability to keep it in its entirety. We are to think of ourselves as dead to the law because obedience to it cannot save us.   When Paul was confronted by the risen Christ on the Damascus Road, the direction of his life was completely changed. Until then he had been preoccupied with obedience to the law and his understanding of it had led him to persecute Christ's followers (Acts 22:3-4). But once he had met Christ he began to see himself as dead as far as the law was concerned because now he was to live in obedience to Christ. His question in Acts 22:10, Lord, what shall I do? makes this clear. And when we come to chapter 5 we'll see how all this works out in practice.   Like Paul we are to think of ourselves as dead to the law and dead to sin. This is because of what Paul says in verse 20:   I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.   The Greek verb that's used here is sustauroo. It's the same verb as is used in the Gospels where we're told that there were two thieves crucified with Jesus (Matthew 27:44). The Greek word for cross is stauros and stauroo means to crucify. The prefix su- or sun- means with. So sustauroo means to crucify with… Now there are at least ten Greek verbs in the New Testament that begin with the prefix su- or sun- and which speak of different aspects of our relationship or identification with Christ.   This would be a whole series of studies in itself, but here's a quick summary. The New Testament teaches that we:   ·       Were crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20, Romans 6:6) ·       Were buried with Christ (in baptism) (Colossians 2:12, Romans 6:4) ·       Have been raised with Christ (Ephesians 2:6, Colossians 2:12, 3:1) ·       Have been made alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:5, Colossians 2:13) ·       Are seated with Christ (Ephesians 2:6) ·       Are joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17) ·       Suffer with Christ (Romans 8:17) ·       Will reign with Christ (2 Timothy 2:12) ·       Will be glorified with Christ (Romans 8:17). At first sight, this subject of our identification with Christ is rather difficult to understand. So let me explain it like this. When Jesus came to earth he identified himself with humanity. At his baptism, although he was sinless, he identified himself with sinners. At Calvary he offered himself as a sacrifice for our sin. He was, in effect, saying to God, Let my death count as their death. The penalty for sin is death (Romans 6:23), but because Jesus' death counts as ours, the penalty has already been paid. By faith we are made righteous in God's sight. He sees us as he sees Jesus. By his death on the cross Jesus identified himself with us. When we believe this and accept him as our Saviour, we identify ourselves with him.   With this in mind, let's go back to Galatians 2:20   20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.   Because Jesus loved us and gave himself for us, and because we have put our faith in him, we are identified with him. We are in Christ and Christ lives in us. By accepting him as our Saviour we accepted his death as our death (and that's why our sins are all forgiven). So if his death was our death, we're dead! We no longer live, but Christ lives in us.   And finally in verse 21 Paul makes the obvious point in defence of his gospel, if it were possible to be saved by obeying the law, there was no point in Christ dying for us.   But thank God, he did. And because he did, and because by accepting him we identified ourselves with him, we should think of ourselves as dead. Dead to thinking that we can save ourselves by our good works. And dead to sin, because Christ now lives within us.   How can we live our lives by faith in the Son of God? By remembering that he loved us and gave himself for us. That's my motivation for living. I hope it's yours too.

 Explore more of the tools and systems that you ACTUALLY need just for the price of less Find out how to own your platform and make it extraordinarily YOU Discover why you should become more aware of the tools and platforms you invest in Resources/Links: Want more free tips on how to own your platform at the cost of less? Click here: http://wpalchemy.io/ownit/ Summary Do you want to learn how to run your own system or platform at the cost of less and more flexibility? Freeing yourself from the typical and curating a unique way of hosting your products is crucial to making your business stand out. John Mac is a self-made Norwegian online entrepreneur, mindset coach, and Web Designer specializing in Oxygen Builder for WordPress. He is also a Shopify Expert and Partner. Listen in to what John has to say about owning your own platform, building it extraordinarily, and curating a perfect and uniquely you hosting with it at a cost of less. Check out these episode highlights: 01:13 - John's ideal client: I would say small and medium businesses who I've been working with, and I would say this is clients and customers with clever minds that actually think for themselves and are looking for something different. 01:50 - The problem he helps solve: First of all, except for helping to shape people's mindset, a kind of freedom from bondage from stuff they have been using before or thinking about before. 02:37 - The symptoms of the problem: First of all, it's the lack of awareness, It's awareness of where they are with the mindset and the tools they use. So I would say the feeling of something not working in their business, overwhelm, and focusing on too many things at one time. 03:05 - Clients' common mistakes before consulting John: They're trying to, first of all, figure things out themselves. 03:54 - John's Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, I'm an advocate for owning a platform. People are paying too much for renting expensive monthly platforms. One thing I would recommend to do is review, what are you paying for? 05:10 - John's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Want more free tips on how to own your platform at the cost of less? Click here: http://wpalchemy.io/ownit/ 05:51 - A: We usually come down back to hosting, actually, because that's basically it, that's the fundamental part for everybody's business. Everybody has a business online now, a website, or maybe other apps and solutions but they run it on terrible hosting. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “I'm an advocate for owning a platform. Review what you are paying for, and what type of platforms you are on that you can free yourself from.” -John MacClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Greetings, everyone, and a warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible, joined today by John Mac. John, good day from Down Under, sir. A very warm welcome! Where are you hanging out? John Mac 00:20 I am in Thailand. It's hot here, but it's pretty wonderful. I'm up north in Chiang Mai. Beautiful place to be in. Tom Poland 00:28 It's a pretty laid-back area of Thailand, I'm informed. A nice part of the world to be in. John, for those of you who don't know John, he's a self-made Norwegian online entrepreneur. He's a mindset coach. He has a real specialty as a web designer, specializing in Oxygen Builder for WordPress. And there are some absolutely extraordinary things you can do with WordPress in terms of not just setting up websites, but attracting traffic and converting traffic. He's also a Shopify Expert and Partner, so really knows his way around the internet. Our title today is, "How to Stand Out and Make Customers Love You". John,

 Discover how to free yourself from your business while still being IN the business Learn why you should stop doing more of what you're doing and get yourself out of the hamster wheel Understand why systematizing your business is crucial to making your business, and even YOU, prosper Resources/Links: To get more advice on how to free yourself from your business, click here: w5coaching.com/freedom-eBook Summary Do you find yourself doing everything in your business that it's hard for you to free yourself? To have a successful business, it must survive without you in it. Humanize systems and systemize your business. John Nieuwenburg is an award-winning Business Coach who has worked with hundreds of clients. John coaches in 3 primary areas– business, personal growth, and accountability. In this episode, John shares his insights on how to continuously generate profits without the stress of being everywhere by creating efficient systems and routines. Check out these episode highlights: 01:00 - John's ideal client: There are typically two cohorts. So, one is their professional advisors, lawyers, accountants, and health practitioners. We all provide professional advice. The advice is different, but the business is the same. 01:24 - The problem he helps solve: Well, generally, their challenges around time, team, or money. So, time sounds like, "I've got too much to do and not enough time to do it. I can't get it done. I don't know, won't get done." Team, nowadays, is- top of the list is recruiting. It's very hard to find good people. 02:17 - The symptoms of the problem: Well, typically, the manifestations are in their business, but the real problems are in their life. If you're working 50, 70, or 80 hours a week, it's going to show up in your home life. You know, you're not going to your kids' games. 03:28 - Clients' common mistakes before consulting John: “They generally do more of whatever it is they're currently doing. And because they don't know that there are other options, and so that's the part where they eventually, the metaphor I use is "They're hitting their head against the ceiling of their business or the ceiling of their capabilities", and they don't know any other way to go.” 04:23 - John's Valuable Free Action (VFA): You know, one of the common things I do when I first start with a business owner is work through an exercise to help them identify five to seven hours, 10 hours a week of work they do they shouldn't be doing. And there's a bit of a survey or an audit they can do or there's a hack. 05:47 - John's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): To get more advice on how to free yourself from your business, click here: w5coaching.com/freedom-eBook 06:42 - Q: Business, you would go down the right path if you use this three-legged stool. A: Number one, systems run your business, people run your systems, and you lead your people. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “Systematize the routine, humanize the exception.” -John NieuwenburgClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Welcome, everyone, to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. It's my pleasure to have John Nieuwenburg back again. John, many happy returns. It's been a couple of years since we saw, a lot of COVID under the bridge since then. Welcome back! John Nieuwenburg 00:22 Thank you very much. It's a pleasure! Tom Poland 00:24 Where are you based, John? John Nieuwenburg 00:25 Vancouver, British Columbia, which is on the west coast of Canada. Tom Poland 00:25 While watching in the morning, and skiing in the afternoon. Beautiful! John Nieuwenburg 00:25 Yes, we brag about that. Tom Poland 00:27

Welcome to January 9th, 2023 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate clearing space and reaching great heights.  Anna: Marlo, I know you don't make New Year's resolutions but I have a challenge for you right now, can you see the top of your desk? Marlo: Kind of. Anna: Well, you know I've heard this new thing about feng shui that if you're living in a messy world you're just going to feel more messy. I actually took that to heart and switched things up. John: Okay you're officially a weirdo. Anna: Okay but hear this out; if you look at your quadrants in your house my office is in the wealth corner and it was an absolute mess like a year ago and I'm cleaning that up and things are happening. I'm just saying. Marlo: You have quadrants in your house? Anna: Yeah, Yeah I could come over and read your office, Marlo... John: They don't have Visas though, Marlo. Marlo: That's good to know. Anna: On National Clean Off Your Desk Day find out how much more productive you are with a little less clutter. The first manned balloon flight in America took place on January 9, 1793. Jean Pierre Blanchard, ascended to a height of nearly 6,000 feet in a hydrogen filled balloon and then made a successful landing in New Jersey. Almost 200 years later, another aeronaut made a spectacular, but less famous flight in California. Larry Walters attached 42 weather balloons to an aluminum lawn chair, pumped them full of helium and sailed off into the air. Unfortunately, he had not planned his flight very carefully and soon found himself 16,000 feet above the ground. Walters stayed there for nearly 2 hours before he got cold and descended by popping balloons with a pellet gun. On National Balloon Ascension Day, celebrate by taking a balloon ride but please leave the piloting to the professionals. I'm Anna Devere and I'm Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "How Academia Shapes Manufacturing". Our guest is John Hart (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajhart/), Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director at the Center for Advanced Production Technologies at MIT. In this conversation, we talk about John's research on micro and nanotechnology and material science, which universities and colleges that teach manufacturing, the role of MIT in this ecosystem, and why now is a key moment in manufacturing history. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 92 on Emerging Interfaces for Human Augmentation (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/92). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: There has never been a more interesting time to be in manufacturing or to watch manufacturing. The tremendous breakthroughs that we are about to witness have been made possible by a confluence of emerging technologies and startup innovations, as well as a growing awareness of the importance of building human-centric technologies. We are indeed at a crossroads with profound challenges in the growing talent shortage, the need for workforce training, an aging industrial base, and the demands for manufacturing competency from the wider innovation ecosystem. We have to make progress fast, and innovations are just maturing to be able to do so at the scale and pace required. It will, again, be amazing to watch the manufacturing industry. Parts of it will perhaps, again, become the industry of industries. Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What's next in the digital factory, and who is leading the change? And what are the skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is How Academia Shapes Manufacturing. Our guest is John Hart, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director at the Center for Advanced Production Technologies at MIT. In this conversation, we talk about John's research on micro and nanotechnology and material science, which universities and colleges that teach manufacturing, the role of MIT in this ecosystem, and why now is a key moment in manufacturing history. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, for process engineers, and for shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. John, how are you? Welcome. JOHN: I'm well, Trond. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. TROND: Well, I'm excited to have you talking about...well, hopefully, a lot of different things, but how academia gets to shape manufacturing, this fascinating venture that is manufacturing. But you yourself, John, you grew up in Michigan, is that right? You were close to this from an early age. JOHN: I was close to it. Yeah, I grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb north of Detroit. If you know the Detroit Metro area, there are the mile roads, and the Detroit River is sort of Zero Mile. And I grew up between 14 and 15 Mile Roads, so in the hotbed of the good, old U.S. auto industry. TROND: Well, exactly. Because looking a little bit at your background here, you spent quite a few years as a summer intern at General Motors before you got yourself to...or actually perhaps in the beginning, in your undergrad years from UMichigan, is that right? JOHN: I did. After my first year at UofM, I worked as a summer intern at GM and went back a few years in a row in different roles in different areas. And honestly, when I decided to pursue a graduate degree and ended up at MIT, I thought I might just get my master's and go back and work in the auto industry, but things changed, and here we are today. TROND: Well, here we are today. You got yourself an undergrad from UMichigan. And you worked there for a little while, I believe, but then came to MIT with a master's, Ph.D. This is way back. But you won the prize for the best doctoral thesis in micro and nanotechnology. So that set you off on the path to rediscover nanomaterials, I guess. JOHN: Yeah, well, it's a really maybe exotic combination of topics. My master's thesis was on precision machine design, the design of these large mechanical couplings for industrial robots. And then, for my Ph.D., with the same advisor, I worked on carbon nanotube synthesis. But there you have the dipoles of manufacturing research, materials, processing, and mechanical design that have shaped how I've taken things forward since then. TROND: Well, but it is in these unique combinations that innovation starts to occur, right? JOHN: Yeah, exactly, combining different topics. And that's one reason I love manufacturing is that it is the union of materials processing, and automation, and software, and now also getting more interested in the organizational workforce aspects. It's a very rich, multidisciplinary layered topic. TROND: Yeah. And we'll explore this both from the organizational angle, and, indeed, I'm super interested in this material angle on things because it seems to me like you're exploring the very, very small nanostructures, but then you're then printing them on the very large canvas. So you're exploring materials from one extreme to the other. JOHN: Yeah. Well, it depends on your objective and what topic you're working on. There are cases in our research where we need to understand the formation of materials, not quite from the atom up but from the nanoscale or microscale up. And there are cases where we more or less abstract or coarse grain those link scales and focus on macroscale properties. TROND: Well, and then you also focus quite a bit on teaching. I noticed that you actually launched the first massive online course on manufacturing processes, and hopefully, we'll get to this a little bit as well. JOHN: Sure. TROND: But teaching and basically working on the next generation of manufacturers, whether they be the engineers or really anybody else, has certainly been one of the big challenges in manufacturing really forever. What is it that fascinates you so much about teaching this to a grander audience than the usual university audience? JOHN: Well, first, I'll say I believe that the top priority of universities, including in the area of manufacturing, is to educate future leaders and engineers. That said, the number of people we educate on our campus is a small fraction of those who could really benefit from what we teach and the way we teach. And that's not just geographically, but it's also in terms of their role in the workforce. So I believe manufacturing education should address all levels of the workforce. And to get at your question more directly, when I came to MIT, I was asked to take over our core undergraduate manufacturing class in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. And as I learned to teach the class for myself, I was intrigued by this emerging trend of digital learning, and this was 2015, 2016. And I was able to get some funding from MIT internally to create an online version of the course that would be offered free to the world, and probably 100,000 People have taken it so far. And it's been a great experience and evidence of how there is very broad interest in manufacturing really across the world. TROND: 100,000 people have taken this course. JOHN: Yeah. Well, I'll say 100,000 people have signed up for the course. This is the classic trade-off with online courses. It doesn't mean 100,000 people complete the course. It means that number signs up and hopefully took something away from it. It also speaks to the flexibility. You can sign up for a course and maybe just listen to one lecture, but if you take something valuable away from it, that's great. TROND: So I wanted to talk a little bit about how academia shapes manufacturing. And I know that there are, you know, you and I work at MIT, and you've had experiences obviously at University of Michigan. But there are other manufacturing centers and institutes all around the world. Could you lay out this landscape a little bit for us so that we get a sense of where the excellent centers of manufacturing are located? I mean, one structure, just to pick that, is manufacturing institutes, and I know that's sort of dear to your heart for a couple of different reasons that we'll get into. But what are some of the centers beyond MIT where there is activity that is organized in a way that really is something to focus on? JOHN: First, I think of in the U.S., Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Michigan, Stanford, places that have defined manufacturing centers or have a body of work that relates to manufacturing that I would say there's a critical mass of faculty, and students, and affiliation with industry. Also, Penn State in the area of additive manufacturing and product design. It's hard to be comprehensive. I don't want to forget anyone big, but that's a sample of some of the notable ones. Internationally, a lot of activity in Europe; I admire the University of Cambridge, the Institute for Manufacturing there, where manufacturing is more or less a department, or it's within the Department of Engineering, which is analogous to what we would say is a school or college of engineering here in the U.S. And they have a broad set of activities that have been there for decades focused on manufacturing at the IFM. TROND: And if you think about the best schools to get educated in this topic, is it necessarily only the top brands? I mean, certainly, they have different roles. So when it comes to undergrads or even shorter, or I guess even community colleges have a really fundamental role in the formation of this sector, can you talk a little bit about that? JOHN: Oh, for sure. When you think of manufacturing education, we must think of the full stack of institutions that educate the workforce, from vocational institutions to community colleges where the student's goal may just be to complete a vocational program or complete a two-year degree and then exit the workforce, all the way to the four-year degrees, advanced degrees, and executive education. And given how manufacturing is paramount in the workforce and the economy, we need to educate folks at all those levels. But by far, the largest number of people are at those vocational community college levels and then to the bachelor's level. So I have a Ph.D. I love to mentor Ph.D. students. But that's a small fraction of the manufacturing workforce. TROND: What about in the U.S. setting? There's something called the Manufacturing USA, and there are these institutes that have sponsorship from various government agencies, most of them through the Department of Defense. But there's also a bunch at the Department of Energy and one, I guess, from the Department of Commerce. What is the role of basically government-sponsored sort of research and innovation activities in this field? It would strike me, I guess, that historically, it's quite important. JOHN: Certainly. You're alluding to the manufacturing innovation institutes, the MIIs that were started during President Obama's administration. Actually, MIT's work, the Production in the Innovation Economy study, and the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which emerged from that, was key in scoping the MIIs, and now there are 16 or so around the country. It's one example of public-private partnership. Public-private partnership is key to cultivating interest in manufacturing and also providing resources for technology translation and commercialization. I think the MIIs have had a great impact on awareness of manufacturing, on R&D, and really applied research in some critical technology areas. But it's only a small part of what we need to do to regrow and expand our industrial base in the U.S. TROND: So I want to move us shortly to MIT to discuss both your own research activity and how extensively you are now aiming to take a more organizing role to kind of get more out of all of the exciting work that's happening at MIT. But before that, I just spotted perhaps an older project of yours that I thought was extremely cool. You were once called a nanoartist, and you had this NanoArt Nanobliss gallery with visualizations. You previously mentioned Obama. I believe you made a NanoArt structure called Nanobama or something of that sort. How did this come about? And, again, I mean, I'm guessing this just sort of testifies to your interest in science communication as much as in the depths of science, which we'll get into in a moment. JOHN: You got it. The inspiration was how do we communicate what we're doing in the lab to broader audiences just to make them aware of what's happening in new technology, new materials? In that case, it was nanotechnology. If you don't mind, I'll tell you a bit more of the story. When I was an assistant professor at Michigan, we were doing a lot of work on carbon nanotube manufacturing, which was a follow-on from my graduate work at MIT. And I admired President Obama, or he was a presidential candidate at that time. And without implying a political inclination, I somehow put together the words nano and Obama in my mind. TROND: [laughs] JOHN: And I said, wow, it would be cool to have a Nanobama. So one thing led to another, and I actually worked with some students in my group to fabricate these little portraits out of carbon nanotubes representing Shepard Fairey's portrait of Obama that was used widely during that first presidential campaign. And I just posted it online, I think one day after the election, and it took off. It went viral, so to say, and was featured as Nature's Image of the Year. It was printed on the newspapers you used to get as you walk onto the subway in the morning around the world. There was a company that would syndicate this stuff, and they just sent it around. So it got a lot of attention. And it showed me the power of an image in communicating something. And, of course, President Obama, that was a historic election. The play on words was exciting, and also the fact that it was a little bit intriguing science and technology that was nano was interesting. And one more thing, a colleague of mine at Michigan then was working in the White House, and he said, "Hey, can you send us a Nanobama?" So I made this frame with a little piece of the real material, and a picture of it from the microscope sent it to Washington. I didn't hear anything about it until I got a call from the White House asking me to declare the value for the President's tax return because he decided to keep it; I kid you not. And then, after Obama left office, I was with my family at a bookstore in Wellesley, and I saw the book, the retrospective book of Pete Souza, the White House photographer. And I opened up the book, and I see a picture of Obama and John Boehner in the Oval Office in the middle of this book. And right on the doorframe is the Nanobama. So it actually made it to the White House, which was a pretty awesome feeling. TROND: It must be an awesome feeling, and, again, I think that, especially in this field of manufacturing which is so challenged at times, right? And people are talking about how these factories are greedy, or is this a great job, or whatnot. And there have been all of these historical moments. But then there is also this fascination around the topic of certainly of technologies and the excitement around it. Why don't we continue a little bit on this strand before we get into sort of the overall role of MIT? I'm really curious about how your research has evolved. So generally, I get that you're combining these nanostructures with manufacturing and materials research, and certainly, you have applied it to additive manufacturing. How would you say that your research has evolved over these years? What are the things that you have been doing? I've picked up on a few things that I definitely wanted to cover. I mean, certainly, you've been working on this industrialization of 3D printing, both as a research area and as a commercial area. Carbon nanotubes must have been kind of where you started. I'm curious where that work is going. And then I saw that very recently, with a student, you've been doing some work that I'm personally very enthused about, which is a plant-derived composite that might replace, hopefully, plastics with sort of a hardness and stiffness that is somewhere at the boundary between conventional plastics and metals. I mean, for me, I don't quite see how all of these things are intimately connected. Where do you go for, you know, where's my next proposal here, and where's my next patent? JOHN: They aren't necessarily closely connected. But I like to say that the themes are typically one or more of materials, manufacturing, and mechanical systems or automation. And what I love about manufacturing, especially in the materials domain, is to control a process, to understand a process, and then to do something new, you need to investigate its fundamentals. And sometimes, you need to design a new instrument or machine to get the job done. So our work is often problem-inspired or opportunity-inspired. Like, the cellulose work that you mentioned recently was actually sponsored by a large consumer products company interested in a more sustainable composite material that could be used in packaging. And we looked at potential routes to formulating different materials, and we landed on cellulose. And then, we developed a formulation, a mixture of cellulose nanocrystals and polymers that ended up having exciting mechanical properties, particularly very high hardness, and toughness, more so than existing polymers. And another unifying theme is scalability. It's important not to worry too much about scalability in the early stage of research, and there's lots of amazing research that's just for science. But we like to do things that we hope will be scalable one day, so choosing ingredients that would be cost-effective or using techniques that could be industrialized, even if the techniques look very different in the lab. And maybe I've lacked to give a precise definition or focus, but I think it's also indicative of the broad span of manufacturing. And manufacturing has many, many dimensions beyond the ones that we work on in my lab at MIT. TROND: Well, you kind of answered a question that I was going to ask, too, which is it doesn't seem like you start in a linear fashion, you know, in other words, you start with some sort of basic problem that everybody in their literature has established and then you move to this, that, or the other. Sometimes it comes from a company. The challenge comes from a company, but you formulate the solution completely. It seems to me that students also have lots of ideas and kind of formulate projects. Talk to me a little bit about this process of where the problem comes from versus where the solution and impact comes from because you seem to...sometimes the output truly is just, you know, like, in this case, art or a physical prototype, and you're sort of happy with that outcome. Other times, you're actually delivering something into, presumably, eventually, an assembly line. JOHN: Yeah. And we work as hard as we can on technology translation, both in terms of the knowledge that we publish but also in terms of the steps that we take to spin technology out. You're right; the early stage is very important. And I like to often see the early stage as a collaboration between myself and the researchers. And in many cases, the core idea we end up pursuing comes largely from the research or the research team. In many cases, it might be seeded by the interest of a sponsor or an idea I have, and then we work together on actually figuring out what's the approach, what are the outcomes, and what's the path to success. MID-ROLL AD: In the new book from Wiley, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of when, how, and why to augment your workforce with technology, and how to do it in a way that scales, maintains innovation, and allows the organization to thrive. The key thing is to prioritize humans over machines. Here's what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, says about the book: "Augmented Lean is an important puzzle piece in the fourth industrial revolution." Find out more on www.augmentedlean.com, and pick up the book in a bookstore near you. TROND: You have commercialized at least two ventures together with others at MIT and external people as well that I know about for sure. I wanted to just briefly mention both Desktop Metal and VulcanForms. Let's perhaps cover Desktop Metal first, so that's a 3D printing company. Tell me how that got started and what your role was there. JOHN: So I was very fortunate to be a member of the founding team of Desktop Metal. So there were seven co-founders, and we launched the company in early fall of 2015. And Ric Fulop, who's the lead founder and CEO, approached me at that time, and he heard that I was interested in working on 3D printing and, of course, knew a bit about my background in manufacturing and machine design and asked me to jump on board. And funny story, how just connections persist over the years; I actually knew Ric when I was a grad student because I was doing my carbon nanotube work using the space of now my colleague, Yet-Ming Chiang. And at that time, Yet and Ric were launching A123 Systems, a successful battery company. So that was a reason why I think Ric knew to get in touch with me when he heard about me. And serendipity was a great experience. TROND: Serendipity when you are in the right places, right? If you're hanging around Yet-Ming Chang, yeah, that's right, very special serendipity. Tell me a little bit about VulcanForms. Until very recently, you couldn't talk so much about it. Nowadays, you did go out in New York Times. I've read that piece. So there is a little bit more detail around it. Let me ask a very basic and perhaps dumb question, large-scale metal 3D printing, what's the big deal there? I thought didn't Desktop Metal do 3D printing? So it's kind of a dumb question. Why is there a second company? Is there really such a variety? I think that the regular person just thinks 3D printing is 3D printing. JOHN: 3D printing is a broad and deep subject. Like, first of all, 3D printing processes exist for polymers, for metals, for many other materials. And there are even several 3D printing technologies for metals. I'll tell the origin story for VulcanForms quickly if that's okay, and then get back to the question. So when I came to MIT as faculty in 2013, I had been a professor at Michigan for a few years. And I landed, and one of the topics I thought of looking into was 3D printing. I was actually asked by a colleague to teach a class not on 3D printing, but I was able to propose the topic. And in that class, there were many incredible students. One of them, named Martin, stuck around at MIT after finishing his master's in manufacturing, and we ended up comparing notes and launching VulcanForms in 2015, a little bit before Desktop Metal came to be, but not that long before. And we stayed quiet for seven years. We raised our seed round a couple of years ago. And the focus of the company is number one, laser-based metal additive manufacturing. And second, while we've built our own additive technology, we're a manufacturing company. So we produce parts at scale, and that is a real need and has been a barrier to growth of the additive industry. There's so much interest and uptake in additive. But the ability to achieve high-quality production using additive as the formative step in the process at scale has largely been untouched. So from the early days, we thought that we could approach the market with that plan to become a manufacturing company. TROND: Staying quiet for seven years that can't have been [laughs] particularly easy. JOHN: Yeah, it's not easy, but it's very, very worth it because we got to focus. And also, there are different boundary conditions that allow you to keep your head down and get work done, and one of them is having great and patient investors who believe in your approach and who see the progress behind the curtain. And as a result, we felt we would hold off launch. And we were fortunate to get picked up by the New York Times earlier this summer. And now we're excited to talk about what we do. TROND: Yeah, that article did hint a little bit at what your printers can print that others cannot and kind of at what scale. Can you give some examples of the kinds of things that you are now contracted to print or are perhaps already printing? JOHN: So the company is focused on a variety of industries, generally industries where high-value metal parts are difficult to manufacture and where there is a real pent-up need for more agile, high-value manufacturing medical devices such as medical implants, semiconductor components, not microchips but cooling devices for various computer systems. We have a lot of business in the aerospace and defense area, working with several of the defense primes, both on additive parts and on machining, honestly. The company, as described in the New York Times article, we acquired a machine shop in Newburyport, Massachusetts, earlier this year. And that was twofold, one because in order to deliver finished parts, you need to often integrate additive with machining. So it's not just 3D printing; it's building a stack of software and physical processes to create a finished part. Second, advanced machining is also a digital manufacturing technology, and as a company, we're very interested in applying our capabilities as a digital manufacturing organization to the area of CNC machining as well. TROND: So, taking that experience then from these two companies and your vast interest and research area plus your interest in communication, what is it that you're now focused on at MIT more largely? That's another kind of secret that's slowly being let out. But you have had this notion and have shared this with me and others, obviously. There was a seminar open to whoever was invited, I think, but not a full public launch. Manufacturing at MIT has historically been quite important, but you think that there's even more, to be done. You lined up a couple of the projects, but there are many more things that MIT has done. Could you maybe just briefly address the role of MIT historically in influencing manufacturing? And what else is it that you now want to accomplish? JOHN: Yeah, for sure. And since I came to MIT nine years ago, I've learned of the incredibly rich history that the institute has in manufacturing, both on the technology side, you know, in the mid-1950s, building among the first CNC machines, ultimately transformed commercial aviation in 1980 building one of the first 3D printers in the world, and so on. But not only that, but also, historic accomplishments in the social sciences, understanding the globalization of manufacturing, you know, what delineated the U.S. versus the Japanese auto industry in the 1980s. What is the intrinsic role of manufacturing in innovation, the production, and innovation economy led by my colleague Suzanne Berger in around 2010. And then broader than manufacturing, though, the work of the future study just a couple of years ago looking at the connection between technology and work. So looking at all those accomplishments and understanding the present moment that we're in, which I can also reflect on later, I've been exploring how to create a new presence for manufacturing at MIT. And the term manufacturing at MIT is more or less a placeholder representing the community of faculty and students across disciplines, both technology and social sciences, that touch on all the dimensions of manufacturing. So as we've returned from Zoom life to more in-person life, I've been making my way around campus and building a team of folks, faculty advisors, external advisors, industry partners, and so on to hopefully put forward a new center at MIT that has a focus on manufacturing across the disciplines. And this is not to replace existing activities but just to augment those activities and bring industry together with us to support research, to lean deeply into workforce training programs, to collaborate with public organizations at the state and federal level and internationally, and also hope to cultivate more entrepreneurship. Because my experience, fortunate experience as an entrepreneur over the past several years tells me that there's opportunity for more new companies that contribute to the future of manufacturing, whether they're manufacturing companies actually making stuff, whether they be software and services companies. Or perhaps the biggest need is hardware companies for whom manufacturing is a route to success. So you may not be manufacturing something yourself, or you may not be manufacturing goods for others, but understanding manufacturing and scaling a process is really key. And that intellectual DNA of manufacturing is more cross-disciplinary than ever. And I've observed over my nine years at MIT how there's just more engagement in manufacturing as a discipline, as this cross-disciplinary theme. And that's an area where I feel such a center can really play a role by adding something to the intellectual community across the institute. TROND: There are so many things that come to mind when you produce this narrative because, I guess, on the one hand, manufacturing is a little bit of everything. On the other hand, it is clearly very delineated because it's all about making things and making them at scale. And there's a whole industry, but, of course, every industry almost has a manufacturing arm. How do you delineate the subject of manufacturing? And I'm sort of curious, you know, at MIT, if you use a broad church definition, almost everybody there contributes to manufacturing. So that would be both a challenge and an opportunity, I guess. JOHN: Yeah, you're exactly right. So, first, within MIT, we have many collaborations with different departments and other research centers. And the nature of the collaboration depends on what the focus is. Second, when it comes to interfacing with industry, I've come to look at industry as kind of a grid where you could say the columns are the end users, say, aviation and space or consumer or construction. And then, the horizontal lines in the grid are technologies, robotics and automation, 3D printing, software and IT, et cetera. And getting a little bit in the weeds of the organization here, so first, we're working on launching a flagship industry consortium, or we're recruiting flagship industry partners for a new center. And those will be companies, world-leading manufacturing companies across the grid. Second, we will operate consortia in different technology in industry areas that may be located within our center that may be in collaboration with others around MIT to really drive focus. And when industry comes and interacts with us, I want them to understand how their business fits into the broader spectrum. And we find particularly in the work related to 3D printing that companies appreciate being connected with peers across the value chain. They say 3D printing is materials at the frontend and finished parts at the backend, and there are some machines and software, and so on. When you bring companies together across their value chain, across their supply chain, under the umbrella of an academic organization with this sort of problem-solving mindset, we find that that can be valuable to the companies that we partner with. TROND: And, John, there's obviously a scale at MIT that's hard to replicate for any university or school just because there are so many people involved in technical innovation. But on the other hand, I would say there has been a sense that other sectors if you could call them that, have always been moving much faster than manufacturing. And, you know, okay, fine, there are industrial revolutions, but the ones we talk about now as industrial revolutions are more, you know, they are maybe on the software side and stuff, but that the core of manufacturing it may be because of its inherent nature. It's complex; it's about physical infrastructure, at least a lot of it still. So it's hard to innovate in that sector. Would you say that one of the ambitions you have with this manufacturing at MIT initiative is to speed up that innovation? And if so, what are the mechanisms that would bring manufacturing as a whole, I guess, on an even faster sort of clip? JOHN: First, if I look within MIT, we see the opportunity to combine the physical side, the mechanical engineering, the material science, with the digital side, with software, and controls, and computation. And that's an area where it's clear that new technologies can be de-risked, can be scaled more quickly. And it really requires this symbiosis of the physical processes and the digital intelligence. Second, I think we can do better research. I can do better research by understanding where the big problems and opportunities are. And by connecting closely with industry, forming networks with various stakeholders, we can define better problems that we can ask our students to solve. And third, I've noticed, especially over the past year with all the geopolitical discussions and the imperative for sustainability, that we're at a time where there's this alignment between industry and government and the investment community and manufacturing, physical manufacturing, physical industry is vital. We can't do enough there to catch up, to grow. And I think that's a real opportune moment to recognize that while I think the pendulum has swung to the digital world and software over the past 10, 20 years, life has changed for the better in so many ways. We have to focus on the physical world now, especially to address the climate crisis, and also think of how we can improve economic equality across our communities, how we can provide better job opportunities, how we can deliver education to individuals who don't have the opportunity to go to university or don't have the resources to travel, all those things. So that's another reason why, one, I see manufacturing as this rich, cross-disciplinary topic that I can file a patent and write some exciting papers and graduate with a Ph.D., but it means so much more to feel technology at scale. And second, you need the intersection of these disciplines to understand not just technology but organizations and human dynamics to create change and create positive impact. TROND: So I realized that we're going to have to cover... there are so many other questions I have for you is what I'm trying to say here. But my last question in this round, I think, is going to be one on...we briefly mentioned, or you briefly talked about augmentation. And you know that I have a special interest; obviously, the topic of the podcast and the title is augmentation. So there is something here about the tension, perhaps between augmentation and automation. How do you see that tension or the relationship between working from the human-centric perspective that technologies are in service to perhaps augment people and processes versus this automation perspective which maybe takes, and I'm paraphrasing here, a little bit more of an efficiency approach and tries to go for machine scale first and then just adjust everything later? How do you see those two things now, as perhaps, you know, manufacturing is coming into another kind of growth moment? JOHN: If I understood you correctly, I don't think they're mutually exclusive, right? Certainly -- TROND: No. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. JOHN: Certainly, manufacturing will become more automated in places where automation makes sense. Certainly, automation is challenging to implement to scale, to get right. But in some cases, the driver to more efficient technology-first manufacturing is automation. In other cases, and hand in hand with that, human workers and businesses, organizations can only become more effective and efficient, working in synergy with data and automation. I'll use the example of someone overseeing a 3D printer, a state-of-the-art 3D printer, and watching the screens to make sure everything is going well and doing a better job by being presented with information that shows, hey, this might be a problem, or there are no problems here, but being empowered to make that data-driven decision. And also, from my work outside of MIT, we find that folks who do best operating that advanced equipment with digital data might have a machining background. They might also have a passion for gaming on the side. So they might be used to sensing and responding to dynamic digital events. And that's another comment on skills evolving in the workforce too. TROND: Well, I mean, one thing that is for certain is that if MIT gets its act together on manufacturing, things will happen. I trust that we're going to have to come back and talk about a lot of emerging projects here in the coming years if you get people lined up. So very exciting. Thank you for speaking to me. Is there sort of a challenge that you want out there to the community when it comes to how, you know, not just academics can contribute to shaping manufacturing but how we all should think of these manufacturing challenges? Is it something that we should leave to experts right now because it's so complicated? Or are there ways that the broader interested public can get engaged in this problem? Is it possible to engage, and where should one engage? JOHN: That's a great question. First, to the general public, I'd say stop and think about what manufacturing means to you, or find one of your favorite things and look up how it's manufactured. Imagine the life, the journey of the product as it comes to your door. And second, I'd say the area where most of us can make an impact is in education and learning and contributing to our communities. Perhaps if you're an engineer working somewhere, you might want to teach at a community college one night a week if you have time in a future semester or explore ways that you can bring new knowledge, new technology to your organization if it makes sense. TROND: Exciting challenges. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit of what you're up to with us, John. JOHN: Thank you, Trond. TROND: You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was How Academia Shapes Manufacturing. Our guest was John Hart, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director at the Center for Advanced Production Technologies at MIT. In this conversation, we talk about John's research on micro and nanotechnology and material science, which universities and colleges that teach manufacturing, the role of MIT in this ecosystem, and why now is a key moment in manufacturing history. My takeaway is that there has never been a more interesting time to be in manufacturing or to watch manufacturing. The tremendous breakthroughs that we are about to witness have been made possible by a confluence of emerging technologies and startup innovations, as well as a growing awareness of the importance of building human-centric technologies. We are indeed at a crossroads with profound challenges in the growing talent shortage, the need for workforce training, an aging industrial base, and the demands for manufacturing competency from the wider innovation ecosystem. We have to make progress fast, and innovations are just maturing to be able to do so at the scale and pace required. It will, again, be amazing to watch the manufacturing industry. Parts of it will perhaps, again, become the industry of industries. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 92 on Emerging Interfaces for Human Augmentation. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes, and if so, do let us know by messaging us. We would love to share your thoughts with other listeners. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and systems used in a production or a logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring, and you can find Tulip at tulip.co. To find us on social media is easy; we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time. Special Guest: John Hart.

In this episode of ALPS In Brief, Mark and the founders of Sensei Enterprises discuss cybersecurity options and support for solo and small law firms. Somebody's got to take care of you and that's just what they do. Transcript: MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Hello, I am Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at ALPS, and welcome to ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I am back from a trip into the home office in Missoula, and back in the satellite office here in Florida, and have with me two folks that I've just had the joy and pleasure of getting to know over the years, and the privilege to work with a few times over the years at various ABA events, and it's just been a lot of fun. MARK: Please help me in welcoming Sharon Nelson and John Simek. Sharon and John are President and Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, which is really the heart of the topic we're going to talk about today. Before we jump into some of the questions and things I'd like us to visit about Sharon and John, may I have each of you take a couple of minutes and share whatever you'd like to share about yourselves? What would help our listeners get to know you a bit better? SHARON NELSON: I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to John. What we do at Sensei Enterprise is managed information technology, managed cybersecurity services, and digital forensics. We have three branches, and that means we're running a fire station without a Dalmatian here, so there's always emergencies. It gets very difficult to keep all the balls in the air. We are also married with six children and 10 grandchildren. We're together all day and all night too. MARK: I love it. JOHN SIMEK: You didn't tell [inaudible 00:01:53], you're a lawyer though. SHARON: Oh well. JOHN: Do they care? SHARON: Maybe. John is the veteran technologist and I am the lawyer, and that's why we decided to work together when we started the company some 25 years ago, more than that now, just a little bit. John was the talent and I was the lawyer/marketer who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, so that worked out really well for us both. JOHN: I'm not a lawyer, as you can probably tell. I'm an engineer by degree, and been involved in technology informally even before the internet. I remember that presidential candidate that was trying to create [inaudible 00:02:40]. Whatever, but back in the days of the modems and all that stuff. But I have a lot of technical certifications, formal training as well. I guess a lot of people think that I should be wearing a pocket protector and have a propeller head. But yeah, as Sharon said, I do the technology stuff, testifying expert as well, because of the forensics and all that. I just got done with a deposition a couple weeks ago that was really entertaining, at least to me, but not for the other attorney. SHARON: That's how it's always supposed to turn out. I forgot to say Mark, that I was the President of the Virginia State Bar a few years ago. That was [inaudible 00:03:25]. JOHN: That's how we ended up in Montana one year. SHARON: Yeah, that's how we ended up coming to see you folks out in Montana. MARK: Indeed. That's right. That was a good time. SHARON: It was a wonderful time. JOHN: I did go fishing when we were out there. MARK: There we go. Boy, there's no place better. You want to talk about some quiet country time on the river with a fly? A lot of fun. One of the things that I've never really visited with you guys about, I'm genuinely very interested. Sharon, you've talked, years ago, you've been a lawyer for quite some time. How did you make this jump? Was that always the plan to go into this Sensei Enterprise type business, the alternative practice, a non-traditional track if you will? How did this all come about? SHARON: Life is full of accidents. As I was a young [inaudible 00:04:22]. JOHN: We're experts at that. SHARON: Oh yeah. When my first child was born, her condition required me to stay home through several surgeries and several years. She's fine, but I ended up working from home as a lawyer. And then, later on after I had been a lawyer and been seriously involved in the Bar Association, I had this very nice man who taught technology to anyone at colleges, and he was helping me computerize my law practice back in the '80s. I was pretty wired up for a solo. But then, he got relocated because of his job, and I said, "What am I going to do without you?" And he said, "Well, I've got this friend down the street, and he's really brilliant, but he's a pain in the butt." And he said, "But I'll set up a lunch, and if you can stand him, then he could do a better job even than me." SHARON: I met him for lunch, I could stand him, and so, we started out with him helping me with my law practice technology. Ultimately, he had always wanted his own company, and he just looked at me one day and said, "You know, I could be the talent of a company, and you're a lawyer, and you can sell anybody anything, so why don't we hook up and form a company?" And that's how we got started. MARK: Wow. That's awesome. I love that. I love that. Oh my. Can you tell me a little bit about the types of services? You can a little highlight or overview, but can we dig in a little bit in terms of the types of services that you offer? I'm also interested, how would you describe your typical client? I know that you do a lot of work I think with businesses that are not just... You're not limiting your services in other words to law firms. Is what you have to offer, would it be useful, beneficial to solo small firm lawyers around the country? SHARON: We actually are devoted to solo small firm lawyers, not that they are an exclusive client roster. We have a client that has over a thousand people. JOHN: Not a legal entity. SHARON: No, not a legal entity. But in any event, we do all sizes. But we have a special feeling in our hearts for the needs of the solo small, because most companies are not interested in them. They don't really want them, because they can't get much of a profit out of them. JOHN: They might have some minimum. Unless you've got 10 bodies or more, they're not interested to even talk to you. SHARON: And so, somebody has got to take care of these people, so we really specialize in finding cost-effective things that they can use to do what they need to do. That's been something that we've been celebrated for, is that we do take care of solo and smalls along with the bigger firms. It's been a mix, Mark, and I really feel strongly about that because I was a solo myself, and I know how hard it was to get competent help and to get things that you could afford. And now that cybersecurity is so important, it's really critical that the solo and small firms have people to guide them in a way that's budget-friendly, because this stuff can be really expensive. MARK: Yeah, I'm well aware. What types of services can you help? If I'm just a solo stuck here in Florida, or Montana, or Iowa, what can you do for me? JOHN: Basically, we do an assessment, an initial assessment, come in there to see what you've got going, and is it appropriate? Should we forklift some things? Are you in the Cloud even? Because today, it's so much more affordable and flexible to be in the Cloud. SHARON: And secure, more secure. JOHN: Maybe you should be considering that. We do have some clients that are remote, up in Massachusetts as well as down the coast, and we can do a lot of things remotely. Sometimes though, you do have to have boots on the ground, and some folks might have a local person if they need hands-on to something. But generally no, we can get equipment, we can figure it, we can ship it, do all that. But essentially, get you in a position where you're a heck of a lot more secure with your technology. SHARON: And you're getting good recommendations from us about what [inaudible 00:09:08]. JOHN: Stability, backup. SHARON: Practice management systems, document management. We can help them work with the companies who have appropriate pricing for solo and small. That's really our niche, is to be able to do that for those people. The solo and smalls are really neglected. JOHN: But it really is a unique thing though, because there's not a template. You can't go to the green drawer and pull out a system for a solo. SHARON: No. I mean, they all have different needs. JOHN: They've got different needs, different things that are important to them, different types of practice, their workflows are different. We really do try to, as Sharon said, customize and make sure that they do have a cost-effective solution. The other advantage I think we have is that we know a lot about the law, and a lot about what lawyers' responsibilities are, and what their- SHARON: And what's ethical. And what's ethical has changed, Mark. In today's world, you have to take reasonable measures to protect client data and confidential data. These days, we have gotten to the point where one reasonable measure is having two-factor authentication, because it's almost always free. It comes with Office 365, which so many solo smalls use. You just have to turn it on. That's where of course the problem comes. JOHN: That's got to be really hard. SHARON: It's the convenience factor, though. They want to get right in. They don't want to have to get a text on their phone, or push a button on their phone. JOHN: Type a code. SHARON: Type a code, and whatever it is. There's all kinds of two-factor authentication obviously, and you have to help them get past the I don't want the extra step to, I have to have the extra step, because ethics demands this of me, because multifactor authentication stops almost 100% of credential-based account attacks. You don't get us that much better than that. JOHN: Especially not when it's free. SHARON: Yes, especially when it's free to do. You just have to put up with one little annoying thing that you have to do. JOHN: You can trust devices too, so it's not every time. You don't have to do this 30 days, or whatever it is, whatever the period of time is. A lot of folks I don't think realize that. They think when they hear this, they go, "No, I'm not going to do this every darn time I connect." You don't have to. SHARON: You said, tell a story. Here's a story. We've been able to successfully convince most of our law firm clients that they must ethically do this. There were several who protested, and they dragged their feet, and they dragged their feet, and then one of them got hit by ransomware. That's what happens when you don't take some advice. First thing they said was, "Okay, we got hit. We were attacked. I guess you were right about that 2FA thing, so could you come back and fix that for us now?" MARK: Hard lesson learned, but boy is it a good lesson once they understand it. I'm hearing you can do lots of advising and guidance on terms of how to become secure, taking into consideration regulations we're subject to, the ethical rules, et cetera. I just had somebody call me up yesterday about, they were talking about some other things, and a side question came out. It's a solo setting up her own firm, and she's interested, are there services and people out there that can help monitor the systems to give you a heads up? Her question was, how do I know if I'm breached? Can you help them answer that, or help them deal with that risk? SHARON: You have today an ethical obligation to monitor for a breach. That's pretty much been established. Now that you know you have to monitor, that's one reason why we are a managed service provider, because we have all sorts of alarms, and alerts, and we check things like backups to make sure everything is going the way it should. JOHN: There's a lot of automation. SHARON: There's a lot of automation. The thing is, when something goes wrong, we'll get a notice, so the lawyer is protected by having the managed services and the alerts that will go to their provider. That way, they know right away, they can usually fix it right away, or if the power is out or something like that, they have to wait until power comes back obviously. But that's why you want someone watching over all of this for you, because the average lawyer has no idea what any of these alerts mean. These things go off, and they're clueless. You want that in the hands of a professional, and it's not very expensive to get it. And so, this idea of endpoint detection and response, this is another thing that we would say is reasonably required in order for you to monitor for those breaches. JOHN: It's not just monitoring, it's also- SHARON: React. JOHN: Yeah, it reacts to it. Artificial intelligence is a part of what the tool uses, in conjunction with human beings in a security operation center. If you get a ransomware attack as an example, or there's some rogue process that comes and starts and the system sees that, wait a minute, this is outside of baseline operation, and it can even automatically take the device off the wire, off the network. But they have, at least the solutions that we're implementing for our clients, it has a rollback capability. If it's got a problem, and you say, "Shoot, you know what? Let's go back to 30 minutes ago," and put your system back into a state before this happened, and we've got that ability. SHARON: It's really kind of magic to lawyers. As much as we try to explain it, and John did in fairly simple terms, they really don't get it. They just get that the magic works. MARK: Right. That's okay. They don't need to get it. If they have somebody like you behind the scenes taking care of it, they just need to make sure these kinds of things are in play or in place. May I also assume that if I have, I do stupid on my laptop, and I get hit with something that we talk about ransomware as a classic example, are you also offering services to help me address and deal with these kinds of breaches? SHARON: Absolutely. That's what you do. JOHN: I do want to point out though Mark, all the technology and things that we do do, you cannot fix a human being. MARK: Right. Oh boy. SHARON: Who clicks on a phishing email or a phishing text? JOHN: Sharon talked about a story. We had a story from... What's today? Thursday. I think it was either Friday, or it was no longer than a week ago. We've got all these things in place, the software, [inaudible 00:16:33], whatever, and yet we've got a lawyer that gets this message, and then he actually initiates a phone call- SHARON: To the bad guys. JOHN: To the bad guys, and then is carrying on this conversation, and under his own ID, he's opening up his machine to this caller, and I'm going, "I can't stop that." SHARON: They finally asked him to enter some bank information- JOHN: And he got suspicious. SHARON: Then he finally got suspicious and severed the connection. JOHN: He called us and we said, "Whoa, hold on." SHARON: But that kind of thing happens a whole lot. People do stupid stuff, and of course now everybody is on their phone a lot, and so the phishing via text has become a big deal. They call that smishing. People will fall for that. They'll get something that says, "You just made a purchase for $500, and if you didn't make this purchase, you've got to do this, or call there." JOHN: Click here or whatever. SHARON: Whatever. Don't click. Don't call. People are not thinking. MARK: I'm hearing we have full service, which I'm not surprised, but I just want to underscore all of this. John, you raised a very, very good point. I'm often writing and lecturing about some similar things. Regardless of what IT does, we still have to deal with the reality of the human factor. You can't patch that. You can't. We have to do some training here. Is that something you guys do as well? Are there any training resources available for solo small firms? SHARON: The best training resource I know of is somebody who is not in your own company, in your own law firm. It's somebody from the outside who carries a bigger bat and has a reputation. That's why we started out long ago doing cybersecurity awareness training for law firm employees, and we do it remotely, which of course people have gotten used to that now. We have a PowerPoint, and we talk through the PowerPoint. We only charge $500 for an hour. Trust me, they can't absorb more than one hour, because this stuff is complicated, and they have to pay attention. An hour is about right. You might want to do it more than once a year. You might want to do it twice a year. At $500, most law firms can afford that, even the solos and the small firms, because it's a whole firm price. We're there for an hour, and we answer questions as we go along, but we can show them the phishing emails and all the stuff. We talk about social engineering, and all the stupid stuff they do, like sharing and reusing passwords. JOHN: The latest attacks. SHARON: The latest attacks. We [inaudible 00:19:30] the latest information. Nonetheless, people forget. The stat that's most interesting to me, Mark, is that over 80% of successful attacks involve a human in some way or another. MARK: Right. Good stuff. One of the reasons I really was excited about visiting with the two of you again, is to try to find or create awareness about resources that are out there, because there are so many places where there is, if you will, nothing locally. When you talk about this preventative educational piece, just as an example, at $500 a pop, I sit here and say, as a risk guy, two or three times a year? That's chump change, and absolutely essential to do in my mind, when I compare the potential loss of time, worry, money, data, all kinds of things, if somebody just does something stupid and clicks on the wrong thing, and we get hit with ransomware, and it's all gone, locked up. JOHN: I think the other requirements you're going to have Mark too though, and what we're seeing a lot of, is that the cyberinsurance carriers are now in their renewals and in their applications, they want to know, are you getting training for your employees? SHARON: That's one of the questions, and they don't want to hear no, or they might charge you more, or they might offer you less coverage. We've seen it all. Cyberinsurance is driving the solo and small firms crazy. MARK: Here's one as a side comment following up on that, please folks, if you're filling out these applications, don't lie. If you say you're doing something, and a policy is issued based on those representations, it's just the same as malpractice insurance or anything else. If it turns out you aren't having these trainings and you don't do these other things that you say you are doing or have in place, that's going to jeopardize coverage. Just a little side note there, be very careful and honest about answering this. I don't want to keep you too much longer, and I really, really appreciate you taking some time today. Could we close maybe with some thoughts about what are the top two or three things that you think lawyers in this space need to be concerned about, focused on perhaps, and/or a tip or two to address these kinds of things? Just a quick wrap. SHARON: Are you talking about cybersecurity in particular, Mark? MARK: Yes. JOHN: I think Sharon has talked about the things that certainly are really high on my list, and that's the multifactor authentication, the EDR systems, endpoint detection response. SHARON: And an incident response plan, which only 36% of attorneys have an incident response plan, and it is so critical, because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. That's an old chestnut of a line, but it's really true. You have got to have a plan, and you probably need somebody to consult with you a little bit, because there's no absolute template out there that fits everybody. You can start with one, but you really need to have somebody who knows what they're doing help you out with developing a plan. It's not all that hard, it's just that people don't do it. And then, if they do do it, then they leave it to molder, and of course nothing stays the same in this world, especially cybersecurity. In a year, if you haven't looked at it and done anything with it, some portion of it is probably quite obsolete. JOHN: But I think the critical foundation for that whole thing, before you even get down to saying, how am I going to respond, what does my IRP look like, is inventorying your assets and your data. If you don't know you have it, you can't protect it. MARK: That is an excellent point. Yes. That's absolutely an excellent point. I appreciate your time here. Before we wrap it up, I do want to give you a moment to share. If any of our listeners have a need and desire to reach out to you to discuss the kinds of things that you can help them out with, how can they get a hold of you guys? SHARON: Our phone number is 703-359-0700, and our website is senseient.com, or of course you could search Sensei Enterprises. We have all different kinds of folks in the office, and we'll funnel you to the right people. Very happy to do that, and always happy to have a no-cost consult if people have some questions they'd like to ask. We do a lot of that at the beginning, and then it turns out that they do in fact have a need, which is harmonious for us both. But if it doesn't work out, at least we've tried to help. And so, we would encourage that, Mark. I hope that's helpful. MARK: Yes, it is very much so. To those of you listening, I hope you found something of value out of today's podcast. My intent again today, I just am trying to find solutions. I get so many calls of, who do I turn to? This is a rough space at times, and lawyers just feel left out and unsure who to reach to. I assure you, these two and the business they have, these are good folk, and it's a great business. I would not hesitate reaching out at any time. John, Sharon, thank you very much for joining me today. John, good fishing, and hope you guys take care of those grandkids and kids. Boy, that's a busy, crazy life, but I'm sure it's exciting. That's just awesome. I'll let you get back to it, guys. Thank you for listening. Bye-bye, all. SHARON: Thank you very much. JOHN: Bye-bye. MARK: Bye-bye.

Our first course of the day is the words of our Lord Jesus served from John 18:36: Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would fight so that I might not be delivered to the Jews. But now My kingdom is not from here. Twice, He states that His Kingdom does not originate in this world. And our second course is also His words taken from John 8:23: And He said to them, You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. Our Lord Jesus knew where He was not from because He knew where He was from. He declared that He was from Above. And He also knew His Root was not in this world. He, therefore, stated unequivocally that He was not of this world. In John 3:13, our Lord gave the specific location of where He came from, saying: And no one has ascended up to Heaven except He who came down from Heaven, the Son of Man who is in Heaven. He knew and declared that He came down from Heaven. And in John 17:8, He would reveal His consciousness of His Root amongst these words: For I have given to them the Words which You gave Me, and they have received them and have known surely that I came out from You. And they have believed that You sent Me. Our Lord Jesus knew not only that He was from Heaven, but He also knew that He came out of God. He had this consciousness in Himself that He came out of God from Heaven.No doubt, He walked in the light of this awareness. And if you and I would not be defined, and consequently, be characterized by the values and pursuits of where we do not originate from, we, also, must know without any shadow of a doubt The Spring of our being, and know where we are from. Therefore the question is where are we, His disciples, from? Our Lord Jesus spoke these words concerning His disciples in John chapter 15:19: If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. He said His disciples do not originate from the world. And in John 17:14, He said these words to His Father about us: I have given them Your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. He repeated His words in verse 16 of the seventeenth chapter of John: They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. He not only stated that believers do not have their origin in this world, but He put us at equality with Himself when He said, “even as I am not of the world”. This parity with He, Who came out of God from Heaven, is the answer to the question of where you and I originate from. In other words, we also came out of God from Heaven, for we were in Christ, even as the woman was in the first man prior to God creating her out of Him. Regardless of the sufficiency of the testimony of our Lord Jesus, we will look to His supplementary witnesses to testify to our origin. We pray that the Spirit of Truth will enlighten your heart and mind as you continue to listen, Amen. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-table-with-bro-joshua/message

We all have something we want to pursue, a goal or an objective we want to reach. We might not always know what it is from the get-go, but as we go on, we can find what we value doing the most. Now, there may be obstacles in our paths, making it feel like our goals are but unachievable and improbable dreams. However, when you are pursuing what you value, nothing can stop you from achieving your destiny.   In this episode, world-renowned human behaviour specialist Dr John Demartini joins us to inspire you to start pursuing what you value. He shares advice and a range of wonderful stories on this topic. Learning about delegation can greatly help you with pursuing what you value. We also talk about the neuroscience of flow states and getting people to understand the quality of your work. If you're mulling over starting your journey to doing what you love, listen to this episode! This might be the push you need to reach for what you've thought was improbable.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition, and mental performance to your specific genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training and coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com. We can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books, Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, dramatically decreases over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting-edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost NAD+ levels in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity, rigorously tested by an independent, third-party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third-party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop Now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500 mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust: NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting-edge science) combats the effects of ageing and is designed to boost NAD+ levels. The NMN capsules are manufactured in an ISO 9001-certified facility. Boost Your NAD+ Levels: Healthy Ageing Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn about delegation and how you can utilise it to make the most out of your job. Discover the two different flow states that come into play when you're doing what you love best. Listen to a variety of enlightening stories that show how pursuing what you value can change your life.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to the Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes: #198: How to Prioritise and Reach Your Goals with Dr John Demartini Connect with Dr Demartini: Website | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube Check out Elon Musk's interview on 60 Minutes. A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!      Episode Highlights [04:21] Achieving the Improbable No matter what obstacles you face, you will get up again if you have a big enough reason. Each of us has a set of priorities. At the very top is our destiny, which is non-negotiable. When you're pursuing what you value, you'll continue regardless of pleasure or pain.  By delegating low-priority things, you can go on pursuing what you value.  [09:20] The Importance of Delegation As long as you're doing your top priority, something that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Delegation frees up your time so you can pursue something that makes more income. However, when you don't recruit the right person, you end up losing money because you're having to micromanage and getting distracted.  [14:07] Hiring the Right People  Do the basics, such as references and background checks. Dr Demartini specifically asks what applicants would do if they never had to work another day in their life.  If they don't answer something close to the job description, he turns them down.  Don't hire somebody who can't see how the job you're offering can fulfil their highest value. Tune in to the full episode to hear how Dr Demartini helped one of his applicants pursue what they value! [26:06] Job Security vs. Pursuing What You Value Dr Demartini shares a story about how he guided a young man to chase after his dreams. He sees this man eight years later, the owner of eight franchises. Many people stay in their jobs because of security. However, quitting work and pursuing what you value is your choice. Dr Demartini's recalls a time when he accompanied a ditch digger to work. He was so proud of his job, as he brings water—and life—to people. It doesn't matter if the job seems small, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  [44:30] Taking Pride in What You Do When your identity revolves around pursuing what you value, the higher your pride is in your workmanship. You'll excel in whatever you do, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  People who are pursuing what they value go beyond what is expected of them. Whether you start early or late, you can always begin pursuing what you value.  Master planning is a way to get there quickly. [46:26] The Neuroscience of Flow States There are two flow states. The manic flow state is a high that does not last long, as it is driven by the amygdala and dopamine. You get into your real flow state when you are pursuing what you value—something truly inspiring and meaningful.  In the real flow state, you're willing to embrace both pain and pleasure while you are pursuing what you value. Dr Demartini likens the two states to infatuation versus love. Infatuation is short-lived and only sees the positives; love endures even the negatives.  Manic flow is transient; real flow is eternal. [53:33] Finding the Middle and Paying for Quality You shouldn't get over-excited about good things and over-depressed about bad ones. Stay in the middle. Looking at the downsides isn't cynicism. It shows that you have grounded objectives. Dr Demartini's father, who is in the plumbing business, carefully considers all variables before taking on a project. As such, he charges more than competitors. People will be more willing to pay for your work once you explain what sets it apart from others. If you get defensive about your work, you start to sound arrogant. Instead, try to be informative about the value of what you offer. [1:03:32] Staying Stable and Flexible  Dr Demartini is neither excited nor fearful about the future.  He looks at both sides so that he does not become too elated or depressed. Emulating this can help you be stable enough to keep pursuing what you value. Over support leads to juvenile dependency, while challenges encourage independence.  Adapt and do what needs to be done. If you can't delegate it to others, learn to do it yourself.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode [05:34] ‘Nothing mortal, can interfere with an immortal vision.' [07:00] ‘There's wisdom in not doing low priority things; there's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you.' [23:18] ‘Don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want can help them fulfil their highest value.' [44:37] ‘The pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most.' [50:26] ‘Fantasies aren't obtainable, objectives are.' [54:31] ‘If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside.' [1:06:22] ‘People can be really resourceful if somebody doesn't rescue them.'   About Dr Demartini Dr John Demartini has been a public speaker for nearly 50 years. He is a world-renowned specialist in human behaviour, researcher, author, and educator. He empowers people from all walks of life by sharing his knowledge on self-development and financial wellness. One of his fields of interest is personal development where he has developed a curriculum of programs. One of his seminars, The Breakthrough Experience, uses his revolutionary techniques, the Demartini Method and the Demartini Value Determination Process.  If you want to learn more about Dr Demartini and his work, you may visit his website. You can also see him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you were inspired to start pursuing what you value, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they too can be pushed to go after their passion. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: I want to welcome you back to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. Now you may recognise that latter name. He's been on the show before. And he's definitely one that I want to have him back on again. He is an incredible teacher, and educator, and author of I don't know how many dozens of books. He's been working in the personal development in space for 50 years, I think. Incredible man.  I hope you enjoy part two of this very in-depth conversation about upgrading your life–how to grow your businesses. We talk about also how to reach your full potential. And what sort of things we put in our own way. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Dr John. Also, I would like to let you know we have a Boost Camp coming up. This is a, not a boot camp. It's all about upgrading your life. This is all about being the best version of yourself that you can be, upgrading everything in your life from your health fundamentals to things like sleep, and understanding your brain better your mood and behaviour. Lots and lots of science, and lots of information, and stuff that's going to be actually practical stuff that you can implement in your life to improve how you're performing your health, your vision and purpose in life. And aligning all of these things together.  I hope you'll come and join us. This is an eight-week program that is live with Neil Wagstaff and myself. Neil is my longtime coach and business partner. And he runs all the programs with me that we do with epigenetics, with running hot coaching, and so on. And he is an incredible teacher. I do hope you'll check it out. You can go to peakwellnessco.co.nz, peakwellness, p-e-a-k, peak wellness dot co dot NZ forward-slash boost camp, b-o-o-s-t-c-a-m-p. To find out more, and come and join us, it's going to be a fantastic writer and you're going to learn an awful lot and get to hang out with a whole bunch of people while you're doing it. So check that out.  I also like to remind you too, of our Patron program. We have a Patron program for the podcast to help us keep this on-air, keep us great content, to help us keep the mission going. If you're into doing that, please, for the price of a coffee or a month. Sorry, a coffee a month, you can be involved in this project. And you can also get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits for your troubles. So check all that out at patron.lisatamati.com, p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisa tamati dot com. Right. Now, over to the show with Dr John Demartini.  Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Pushing The Limits. I'm super excited to have an amazing name back again for a second round, Dr John Demartini. Welcome to the show, Dr John. It's fabulous to have you back again.  Dr John: Demartini: Yes, thank you for having me back.  Lisa: It's just–I was so blown away by our conversation last time. And I know you do thousands of these interviews and in the work that you do that you probably can't even remember what you talked about. But it was a real life-changing episode that ended up– we dived into some of your medical work earlier. We went all over the place with your breakthrough experience. I just felt like we didn't quite cover all the bases that I want to tap into your great knowledge.  Having you back again today, and today I thought we'd look at things like I want to dive into things like, ‘How do we achieve the impossible?' I've been doing a lot of work and researching around, what is it that makes incredible people incredible? And that they had the ability to overcome incredible odds and difficulties and obstacles in order to achieve some possible things. And I'm pretty much into a lot of the big thinkers out there. So I wanted to start directly if that's okay. How do we achieve the impossible, Dr John?  Dr John: Well, I don't know. Maybe that's a bit of a metaphor–the impossible is impossible.  Lisa: But yeah, it's a metaphor.  Dr John: Improbable, the improbable.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr John: When the why is big enough the hows take care of thems elves. When you have a big enough reason for doing something, no matter how many obstacles you face, you get up again. And there was an interview. There was an interview by a gentleman I think from 60 minutes with Elon Musk. And they asked him after having three launches explode back to back. ‘You ever think about giving up?' He looked at the guy and he says, ‘I never give up. I'd have to be incapacitated.' Meaning that his mission to go to Mars is too important for any obstacle that might arise to stop it. I would say nothing mortal can interfere with an immortal vision.  Each of us, as you know, have a set of priorities. And the very top, top, top priority is non-negotiable. It's where human sovereignty and divine providence come together, where you feel that it's impossible for you not to fulfil your true destiny. I feel that way with my mission of speaking. I just felt that that was my destiny when I was 17. And I've been doing it 48 plus years now, be soon 49 in a few months. So if you'd have a big enough reason for doing it, you'll see the challenges on the way, not in the way. It's like Edison, a thousand ways to that didn't work for the light bulb to get the light bulb. There was no option about getting a light bulb, he knew he would come up with an answer, he just kept, ‘Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, next. That one doesn't work, next.'  When things are lower on your value, you'll do it if there's pleasure; you'll stop doing it if there's pain. When something's tying your value, you'll do it regardless of pleasure or pain. And you'll see both of them on the way, not in the way. So there's wisdom in not doing low-priority things. There's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you. People who do that build incremental momentum that reaches an unstoppable state, an inertia that's unstoppable. That's the key to extraordinary things. And when it's truly aligned with your value, your identity revolves around it, you feel it's impossible for you not to do it. It's not an option; it's who you are. Lisa: So this involves looking at your values determination, how to sort out what your real– because I think this is where a lot of us come unstuck. We have lots of things we want to do, and we're curious about lots of things and have lots of passions, and it's sorting out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in order, distilling down that vision so that you're actually hyper-focused and being able to concentrate on the things that you need to concentrate on. I know that's something that I definitely struggle with, when you have so many things that you're interested in. But you're really right when you say like, for me, with my story with my mom, if you remember bringing her back from the mess of aneurysm, there was a non-negotiable. We were doing it, and I was going to get her back or die trying was the attitude that I went inwards. That means sacrificing whatever it took to get to that place. And then we do get there, you know?  Dr John: Well, the thing is not to pursue low-priority things, and to know what those are, and say and delegate everything other than what's important. I don't do anything but research, write, teach. Those are the three things I love doing. But it's all about educating people in human behaviour. So that's the one thing that is non-negotiable that I do. Then I delegate everything else away. That way, you don't have to be distracted and run down. What drains you is doing low priority things. Lisa: Yeah. And this is a lot– yeah, this is a lot that a lot of people, especially startup entrepreneurs, and people that are just getting there, finding your way, are struggling with: the whole delegation thing when they don't have a team around them. What sort of advice do you want to give to people who are at the beginning of their career and don't have a team yet around them to help do all those aspects of it that are draining the hell out of their lives? Dr John: Well, what you do is you ask the question, ‘How is doing this action temporarily until I can find somebody to delegate it to helping me fulfil my mission?' Link it to your brain. Reframe its words. You see it on the way, not in a way, with the knowing that you're going to delegate it. And then, it doesn't cost to delegate. It costs not to. As long as you're doing what's highest in priority that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Because you're releasing yourself to do the most important thing that produces the most income that produces more than the cost of the delegation, and that they can produce. And yet the person that would love to do that inspired to do that but doesn't have to be motivated to do that. They will spontaneously do it without even thinking about it, you can free yourself up. In 1982, end of 1982, I hired somebody to take care of my financial things: paying payroll, paying bills, bank reconciliations, all that stuff. Because I was sitting there in October of 1982. I was sitting there doing a bank balance, like, ‘What on earth am I doing?' I didn't want to do it. It was distracting, time-consuming. And while I was doing it, I didn't want to think about clients because it was interfering. I needed to get this done, and I'm pushing clients away. I freed that up, and I have not gone back, nor even seen a chequebook. That's 1982. Lisa: Gosh I would love that.  Dr John: I can't even tell you what a chequebook in my company looks like. Lisa: Or accounting or any software.  Dr John: I don't have any of that stuff. I have somebody that does that. That's their job. I– because that's a 20 to $50 an hour job. And why do I value my time? Well, I can make thousands per hour, and tens of thousands per hour. Lisa: But what about the people that can't make the ten thousands of per hour or the thousands per hour, and there's still a net, they're still in taking that leap into getting the first person in the team on board and the second person. I think there's a lot of people in that, jumping from, say, the $100,000 mark to the million-dollar mark of a turnover in a company where it's chaos. I think it's chaos beyond that as well. But it's that getting the initial, taking that risk when you don't have a solid income yet, and yet, you're taking a risk on hiring a business manager or hiring whatever, even assistants. Dr John: If you have a clear job description and you have a clear actions that you can do that can produce more per hour than having to do those things, and you can see, ‘Well, I'm doing five hours a day doing trivial. If I had those five hours, could I go out and close deals?' If you're willing to do that it doesn't cost, ever cost, to hire people.  Lisa: Yeah. So it's a mindset shift, really?  Dr John: Yeah. Because what happens is you think, well, if you're not going to be productive, and they're now, you're just going to pay somebody to do something you were doing, and you're not going to go produce more per hour than it's going to cost. But it frees you up to do something that closes a deal or makes a bigger deal. Makes more income. You're insane not to do it. Now, in my situation, I saw that if I was out doing presentations and taking care of clients, I can make more than tenfold what is going to cost, 20-fold to 100-fold what I was going to pay somebody to do it. It's a no-brainer.  It doesn't cost to hire somebody. Unless you do it ineffectively. You are somebody who doesn't love doing it, you're pushing him uphill, is not inspired by it, and you have the skill by it, and you're micromanaging him and you're having to distract yourself, and you're not doing the thing that produces. That's why it costs money. Not because of delegation, but inadequate delegation. Lisa: So in other words, recruiting the right people to your team is a huge piece of this and getting the right— So what are some of the things that you do when you're analysing somebody to take on into your team? What are some of the processes that you go through from an entrepreneurial standpoint? Dr John: Well, I do all the basics: references and checks and those things. But I just sit them down when I meet them if they get through the screening. I sit down with them. I said, ‘If I was to write a check right now for $10 million and handed it to you, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do with your life?' If they're, they don't say what the job is or close to it, I say, ‘Thank you very much.' I walk away.  Lisa: Right? Because they're not. That's not the key thing.  Dr John: That's not their dream. Can I share an interesting story? I don't think I shared this before. Sorry. If I had, just tell me, cut me off. When I was in practice many years ago, I was hiring a manager, and I was scaling up and delegating more and more. We were down to two people's potentials: one was a woman, one was a man. And the man was in for that evening, about five o'clock. I worked till six, usually, but at five, I was telling my patients, five o'clock, this gentleman comes in. He had passed much of the things I thought. But he came into my office. He had a little briefcase, is about 54, looks like a violator jet, this guy. He comes in, sits down on the edge of his chair, and he says, ‘Wow, this is a great opportunity. I've had the opportunity to work with your company would be fantastic. I'm awe-inspired.' I said, ‘Great. Hope you don't mind. But I just got a few questions.' And I had a check. This is back before I got rid of my checks. I got a check that my lady at the front organised. I had the check in front of me. And I said, ‘Your proper name is?' I put his name on the cheque. I wrote 10 million US dollars.  Lisa: It was a real piece?  Dr John: I didn't sign it, but I just put it there. I made sure he saw it. Because any facade he might have, if he saw a check with $10 million on it, his name on it, that's going to distract him. Because the infatuation of that's going to throw any facade that he might try to put on me, ultimately. So I said, ‘If I was to hand you this cheque,' and I showed him the cheque. ‘And I gave you $10 million upfront, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do?'  Lisa: What did he say?  Dr John: And he leaned back in his chair like this. He goes, he relaxed a second. He goes, ‘Wow, if I had $10 million. What would I do? I would manufacture furniture. I have a hobby. I love making furniture. I'd make furniture and open up furniture companies.' I said, I got up. I said, ‘Thanks very much.' He stood up and he was like, ‘What?' He said, ‘Well, did I get the job?' I said, ‘No.' ‘Do you mind if I ask why?' I said, ‘Very simple. I'm hiring you for a management position. You said if you had $10 million, you'd love to make furniture. If you're a great manager, how come you haven't managed your life in such a way where you can do what you love?' He just looked at me and he just paused because that's a very good question. ‘And I have nothing I could say, except, you just woke me up.' I said, ‘Thank you,' and I escort him out.  I watched him walk with his head down slowly to his car and sit in his car for a few minutes to just process that. He's like going, ‘Whoa. I thought I'm looking for a job. I'm enthused, I'm really excited, everything else. And I just got slammed with a reality check of what was really important to me. And the real truth was, is I love making furniture.' So he sat in that car, and finally slowly drove off and we ruled him out. We ruled the girl out. So we had to go through another round. Yeah.  Lisa: And so this is part of the process.  Dr John: Three weeks had gone by. And all of a sudden my assistant said. ‘Dr Demartini, there's a gentleman here a few weeks ago that was looking for a job. He's back.' ‘Alright, okay.' He said, she said ‘Should I just sent him back in?' I said, ‘Yeah.' I come down to the same office, same thing, comes in. I'm sitting in the same place, you sit in the same place. But this time, he walks in with a paper bag, a big paper bag, large paper bag with handles on. He said, ‘Dr Demartini,' shook my hand. He said, ‘Dr Demartini. I was here a few weeks ago,' I said, ‘Oh. Yeah, I remember you.' He said, ‘You changed my life.' I said, ‘How so?' He said, ‘When I was enthusiastic looking for the job, I've been looking for a job for three months. I didn't find one. I thought when you said, if I'm such a good manager, how come I haven't managed my own life? And you nailed me. I was a bit depressed after that, and I had a soul searching, and I had a conversation with my wife. Part of the reasons I was taking on jobs is for security instead of doing what I really love to do. And so after that conversation, I told my wife that and I said, “If I was to go out and try to build my own company in furniture manufacturing, would you endure the, whatever we go through to get there?” And she hugged him, and she says, “That's what you've always wanted to do. We'll make ends meet. We'll find a way.”'  He started his company. He started telling people he's there to make furniture and he started making pieces of furniture. He made a bed, and he made a dresser, and he started making furniture and stuff. He also made it available that he could do interior in homes that were being built. He started letting people know in his network. So he's back in my office three weeks later, and he told me that that's the best thing ever happened to his life. He says, ‘I've already got commissioned $5,400 worth of product with the furniture, and that's in three weeks. I'm on track, probably for making $10,000 to my first month now. And that's more than what I was probably going to get paid.'  I said, ‘Congratulations.' And this is what he said to me. He said, ‘You have no idea how much more energy I have, how inspired I am. I don't care about how many hours it is I'm working. I'm staying up, and I'm a different man. I'm loving it. I'm in, I now understand what an entrepreneur is, a bit.' And he said, ‘But this is what I want to do. Because you gave me such a gift. When I came in your office, I noticed the wood. Because you filter with your polar nuclei of your diencephalonic thalamus. You put, you filter reality coin, what you value most. So he noticed the wood in my office.  He said, ‘And I noticed that you had Kleenex boxes sitting on these little rolling carts. It would really be honourable for me if I could actually take those little Kleenex boxes, and melt my Kleenex box systems on your wall that match your wood. All you do is lift them up on a hinge, put the Kleenex box and pull the tissue, put it back down to replace it. And then you have more space on your thing, because I noticed you had less space on there than probably ideal. It really means a lot to me if I can put them in all your rooms.' I said, ‘I would be honoured to have those in there. And I want you to do me a favour. I want you to put your card on the bottom of each one. So I can, for referrals.' He said, ‘I would be glad to do that.' He said, ‘But that would mean a lot. Because you just changed my life.'  He ended up doing what he really loved to do, grew his business. I got complimentary things in all my rooms, which was an added bonus. But it just goes to show that people, when they're doing something that's deeply meaningful, truly inspiring, high in priority, they excel. So don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want to help them fulfil their highest value. Lisa: Be it personal and be it roles. And not this division of the company. Dr John: The actual actions. So you make sure you have a job description with all the actions and you ask your potential candidate: ‘How specifically is doing this actually going to help you fulfil what's most deeply meaningful to you?' If they can't answer it, don't hire them. If they answer with enthusiasm on all those things, you get them, grab them. If they don't, don't worry because they're going to be microman— you're gonna have to motivate them. Motivation is a symptom, never a solution to humanity. Lisa: And in changing that, I've got a friend Joe Polish. If you know Joe, he's a very famous marketing man and an incredible connector and so on. He talks about, he was talking about entrepreneurship one day, I forget the context of the situation. But he teaches about entrepreneurial things, how to do it. He's hugely successful. Someone said to him once, ‘You've had the same assistant for the last 21 years, for how many years, a lot of years. If she's been hearing you talk about how wonderful it is to be an entrepreneur to do all these things, how come she hasn't gotten that information and runoff and become her own entrepreneur?'  He called the lady over and he said, ‘Why is it that you still with me?' He knew the answer. But she answered, ‘Because I don't want to take on the risk. That's not my job. That's not my passion. My passion is to serve Joe and be the person in the backstage setting all those things up. That is my highest power. That is what I love. That's why I'm still here. I love working with Joe, and I love his mission. And that's what I'm happy doing.' That's the key, is not everybody should be an entrepreneur. Or everybody should be having the same mission. It's that she understands what her passions, what the job is. Dr John: If everybody was an entrepreneur, who would be working for him? Lisa: Yeah. We'd have a hell of a mess. And being an entrepreneur is a long, arduous, often difficult, lonely road full of holes, along the way, potholes. It isn't for everybody, but for people like you and for me, it's, I can go for it. I've got to be running my own ship. And learning from people like you is great for me because then I can see what helps my next steps and what I should be doing. Instead of—  Dr John: Can I share another story?  Lisa: Go for it. Dr John: So, right about the same time when I was hiring that other person, a young gentleman, late 20s, I'm guessing, mid to late 20s, came into my office, and asked if he could have a meeting with me. And he worked with Yellow Pages. There used to be a thing called Yellow Page.  Lisa: Yeah. I'm old enough.  Dr John: They were ads, telephone ads. You put a listing, it's free. But if you put a listing with a little box or a little ad in it, it's a little bit more. You bought the Yellow Page ad. So he was trying to sell Yellow Page ad. So he sat in my office. And he started to do this little spiel. And I had the time. So I took a moment to do it. Because I was curious what the prices were. And at the end of his little spiel, and not even to the end, three quarters through, I stopped him. I said ‘Stop. Just stop.' That was the worst presentation. That was so off. I said, ‘This is not what you want to do in life. What do you really want to do in life?' And he looked at me and he goes, ‘That bad?' And I said, ‘It was bad.' ‘I bet you haven't sold anything.' He says, ‘No, I haven't.' I said, ‘This is not you. What's your heart? Where's your heart? What do you really, really, really, really dream about doing in your career?' He said, ‘I want to be in the restaurant business.' I said, ‘Go to a restaurant today to get a job there, and work your way up until you own your restaurant.' He goes, ‘Well, I needed to hear that. Because I respect you and I needed to hear that from you.' And then I sold him a little audio cassette tape that I'd done, called The Psychology of Attainment. And he bought it, it was only 10 bucks.  He walked out with his $10 thing to listen to because I knew if he listened to it, it would encourage him to keep it going. He left there. Eight years go by, never seen the guy again. Eight years go by. I had moved to a new office. And I was on my way to go have lunch with my CPA. He picked me up. I came downstairs, he picked me up, took me to this little Super Salad restaurant nearby because we both had less than an hour to eat. So it's quick. Get in there and get a salad. You walk in and this Super Salad is a thing where you get a tray, and it's got a whole bunch of foods. And whatever it is they weigh it, and they charge you the acquired weight. So you get salad. You pay less if you get something with it.  As I walked in, and we started going to the line, I saw that young man grown up eight years older in this suit, talking to another man in a suit. And I said, ‘If you don't mind going get me a tray. And I'll catch up. I see someone I must say hi to.' I walk over to this guy. He's talking this man. He's not paying attention to me. I'm standing right next to him. And as he's talking I'm just standing there waiting for him to finish. All of a sudden he finishes, the guy starts to walk off he turns around as if he's going to say, ‘Can I help you?'  Lisa: Yeah, he didn't realise this.  Dr John: And obviously he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh my god. Wow, wow.' He shook my hand, and ran off and got the other guy to come here, ‘This is the guy I told you about.' And he told him, ‘This is the guy.' And the guy said, ‘Oh, thank you. I'd love to meet you. He's told me all about you, he said you changed his life.' And I said, ‘Well didn't know until today. What impact– Lisa: What are you doing? Yeah. Dr John: But the guy told me, he says, ‘I have eight franchises. I come into my restaurant. That was the manager. I'm checking up on my restaurants and I'll go to the next one. I check them out once a week, I go make my rounds.' He said, ‘That day, I got me a job at Super Salad. I worked myself into a management position for over two years. As I was saving the heck out of my money, which your tape set said to do, I bought into the franchises and I got eight franchises.' Lisa: Jesus! Just from that one tape, that one conversation, see this is the impact– Dr John: I said to him, ‘You just inspired me.' It brought a tear to my eye to know that– because I thought maybe I was a bit tough on you. He said, ‘Sir, you did the most amazing thing to my life that day. Because the truth is, I wanted to be in the restaurant business. And now I am.' Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing The Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a Patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisatamati dot com. We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us, everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us.  Lisa: You've encouraged him basically to have faith in the dream and to– because everybody else, like your family, often your friends, often are, ‘You can't leave that safe job.' I've had this conversation with my husband who's a firefighter. And he says like, ‘I can never leave the fire brigade because it's what I've always done. And that's how I've always, you know, it was my passion,' and so on. And I said, ‘Yes, but you don't have to stay there. That's your choice. Opt for security and– If you want security, if you want to do something, then do it. Life is short.' Dr John: All I know is that if you're not doing something you're inspired by, life can be pretty horrible. I see people. I didn't, I used to get, I lived in New York for a while. And we lived in Trump Tower there, fifty-sixth and fifth, right underneath Donald, so I knew Donald. So I live there for 29 years. And sometimes, you can take taxi. Sometimes, you take, when we're going in the airport, I got a limo. But just going around the city, sometimes I'd have a taxi. I get in the taxi and I– if there was a mess, sometimes I'd pass it by. I go, ‘No, smelly. No, no respect.' But again, in a taxi– if I'm in a hurry, it's hard to get, right? It's 3:30 to 4 o'clock march, I get in whatever I get, because I don't want to wait another 20 minutes. But I get it and I go, ‘How long have you been driving a taxi?' And they'll say a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever it may be. I said, ‘Do you love it?' Some will look in the mirror and go, ‘Pays the bills, man.' And I said, ‘But do you love it?' He goes, ‘Are you kidding, man? If I got a thing in New York, you got to be nuts.' And they have that attitude.  Of course, the car is usually a mess. It's got ripped holes in it. It's got cigarette burns. It's got a little bit of an odour. You know it's not taken cared of; it's not clean. But then you get in another car. And, ‘How long have you driven a taxi?' ‘28 years.' I said, ‘Do you love it?' ‘I love it. I get to meet people like yourself. I meet the most amazing people every day. My father was a taxi driver. My grandfather was a taxi driver in New York. I know every city, every street, I know every part of the city. Here's my card. You want some water?' ‘Sure.' ‘Anything you need to let, give me feedback about my car, please tell me. If there's something not in order, if somebody left something there, if it's dirty, let me know. I'd like to make sure that everybody gets a good experience in my car. If you want to know about the city, you just ask me. Anytime you want to go anywhere in the city, you contact me. And there's my card, I will take you, and I'll make sure you got the best thing, and I'll be on time for you.' He was just engaged. And he loved it. And of course, I got his card. And I called him. And sometimes when I was going around the city, I would use him. He would even come back and pick me up. Lisa: And it shows you that it doesn't matter if you're cleaning toilets or you're a taxi driver or you're at the garbage disposal. Whatever job you're doing, do it well, for starters. That can be your mission in life, is to provide that service. It doesn't have to be taking on the world and flying to Mars like Elon Musk. It's just, do your job; do it well. I don't, I just– I have issue too, with people who just doing the job, getting the paycheck, not doing the job with passion.  You can tell. I walk into my gym and there's a new lady on reception who is just beaming from ear to ear, fully enthusiastic. I see her training; she trains like a maniac. She's just always happy and positive. When somebody comes into that gym now, they get a positive smiley receptionist. ‘Come in' and ‘How was your day?' The contrast to the other person that works at the gym who's surly looking, never smiles. And if you, say ‘Hello, how are you doing?' It's like, ‘Mmm.' And you think, ‘Wow, that is just the difference between someone who's just, “I'm so lucky to be here” and “I'm working.”'  Dr John: They're engaged versus disengaged. Can I share another story?  Lisa: This is great.  Dr John: Right. My father, I started working for my father when I was four. He owned a plumbing business. He wasn't a plumber. He's an engineer, but he had plumbers working for him. And my job was to clean the nipples. And they sound a little sexual, but it's actually, these little pipes and couplings, so it's interesting. But I used to scrape them out with a brush and oil them to make sure they would be preserved because they'll get a little rusty sitting around. Then, my dad would then, every once while, not every day, but most of the time, would give me the opportunity to go out with the plumbers to go on calls to learn plumbing. Everyone, so he would say, ‘Well, you're going to go with Joe today. You're going to go with Bob. You're going to go with Warren. You're going to go with…' And this one day, he said, ‘You're going to go with Jesse.'  I spend part of the day with Jesse. And Jesse was a ditch digger. He was an Afro-American man that was a ditch digger. And I said, ‘You want me to go with Jessie, am I going to dig a ditch?' He said, ‘Yes. I want you to go with Jesse.' I said, ‘Why?' He said, ‘You'll know when you get back.' ‘Okay.' So I go out with Jesse. We drive to this house that is about a 35-year-old house that needs a new water main from the street, the main from the street up to the house. And so he got a T-bar out, and he got a hose, and he got some paper, and he got a sharpshooter, which is a special shovel, and a little round-headed shovel, and a level and a string. This long string thing wrapped up on this piece of wood. And some, and another stick. The stick that had string around it where there are two sticks on either end. You could open them up unravelling. He stayed one at one place, stayed the other place, exactly where the line is going to go. Then he took a T-bar and went down into the ground to make sure there's no roots, no rocks, no anything that might interfere with the laying of a pipe. Then he watered it to make sure that you could go and if you dug it, it was just wet enough that it wouldn't crumble if you turn the sod over. And then he lined paper on one side of it. And then he showed me how to dig the ditch. I would go down to exactly the width of the sharpshooter, which is how deep it had to go. And then we would turn it over onto the paper. And that meant that the grass wasn't even cut, it was just folded over. Right. And we had a perfectly straight ditch. And then he showed me how to create the ditch with this other little thing. And it would go on top of the sides. It wouldn't fall off into the grass. It would just be on top of the paper, and on the inside. Then he took the level and he made sure that the grade was perfectly level from one place to the other because if you have a dip in it, water will sit there and rust and it'll wear out quicker. But if it flows exactly in line, you don't get as many rusting. We put this pipe down, pretty perfectly clear, perfectly graded. We levelled it, made sure it was perfectly level. We installed it to the house, into the main. We then put some of the dirt back over it. Put the sod back on, patted it down, watered it, squished it down, loosened up the grass so you couldn't even tell it had ever been done now. And we had a brand new waterline done. And when you're done, you could not, until you could walk around, you couldn't tell it was done. It was perfect. And then we got in the truck and started to drive off. And I asked, you know, Jesse, his name was. I said, ‘That was neat.' You know, I'm a young kid. And I said, ‘Call me J for John.' He said, ‘J, I have the greatest job on this planet, the greatest job a man could ever, ever, ever ask for.' And I said, ‘What do you mean?' I thought he's a ditch digger. He said, ‘Without water, people die. I bring life to people. My job is the most important job. They can't bathe. They can't drink. They can't make food. They can't do anything without my water pipe. I had the most important job on this planet. And I bring water to people. Without water people die.' And I thought, ‘Whoa.' And I came back and he said to me, ‘My job is to do such an amazing job that they call the office and complain that we never came.'  Lisa: Because they can't see where he's been!  Dr John: It's so immaculate. They don't believe that somebody came and they'll call and cuss out your dad. “Why is it not, why did you not do the main?” And your dad knows. Tell them, “If you don't mind just walk out. They will see that the main is there.”' They're unbelievably astonished that there was no mess and it's perfect. And he didn't tell us about Jesse, and the respect he does when he does water main. He knew that if I would go out there and learn from him, here's a man that does what he loves. Yeah, and he's the ditch digger. And in those days, you didn't make a little bit, you didn't make a lot of money. Lisa: And I love that. And it just reminds me of my dad. He was always cleaning up at the garden. He was a firefighter professionally, but he would be, every spare moment, gardening somebody's garden, cleaning up, landscaping, doing it. And he worked on films as a landscape artist and so on. He was always the one that was cleaning everything up, everything was immaculate by the end of the day. Whereas every, all the other workers were just, ‘Down tools. It's five o'clock, we're off,' sort of thing. Drop it and run. Everything was always a mess.  My dad, he always had everything perfectly done. And was, always came home satisfied because he'd spent, when he wasn't at the fire brigade, he spends his day with his hands in the dirt, out on the sun, physically working in nature, and loving it and doing a proper job of it. So yeah, it just reminded me because he taught us all those things as we were growing up too. And would take us and teach us how to paint and teach us how to, all of these things.  Dr John: The more something is high on your value that you're doing, your identity revolves around your highest value. Whatever is highest on your value, your identity revolves around. As a result of it, the pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most. Because you're inspired and love doing it. And it's, your identity goes around it. So my identity would rather revolve around teaching. So I'm inspired to do teaching. I can't wait to do it.  Whatever high an individual's values is what they're going to excel at most. And they are wanting to do it not because they have to, but because they love to. People do something they love to, completely do a different job than people that have to. They're creative, innovative. They go out of their way. They don't care if they have to work extra time. They don't care about those things because they're doing what they love. Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. You have some fabulous stories to illustrate the point. So whatever you're doing people, do it properly, and do it with passion, and try to get to where you want to. You might, this just takes time to get to where you want to go. You come out of school, you're not going to end up being near the top of your game. But you have to start somewhere and head towards what your passion is. I wanted to figure— Dr John: If you start out right at the very beginning, master planning, you can get there pretty quick. In 18 months, I went from doing everything, to do the two or three things that I did most effectively. I delegated the rest away. But my income went up tenfold.  Lisa: Wow. Yeah. Because you were actually doing the things that mattered the most. Dr John: Me going out and speaking and me doing the clinical work was the two things that I was, because that's the thing I went to school for. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do the administrative or I didn't want to do all that other stuff. Hire people to do that. That freed me up. Lisa: Yeah, it's a fantastic message. Now, I wanted to flip directions on you if I could, and I've been doing a lot of study around flow states and optimising. How do we build into ourselves this ability to be operating at our best, which we've been talking a little bit about? What neurotransmitters are at play when we're in a flow state? How do we maintain this over time to remain inspired and not be worn down?  We think about flow state or I don't know how to put this into words, people. By that I mean, it's that state where you're just on fire, where everything's happening really well, you're at your genius place, your talents are being expressed properly, and you're just in it. I would get that when I'm running, or when I was making jewellery and I would, time would disappear, and I'd be just in this otherworldly place, almost sometimes. How do we tap into that? Because that is where we as human beings can be our optimal, be our best. Have you got any ideas around that as far as the neurotransmitters and the neuroscience of flow states? Dr John: Yes. It boils down to the very same thing I was saying a moment ago: not doing low priority things. There's two flow states though, and they get confused. Maybe people have confused a manic elated, utopic, euphoric high, which is a fantasy of all positives, no negatives in the brain that makes you manic. That flow state is a hypocriticality, amygdala-driven, dopamine-driven fantasy high that won't last.  Then there's a real flow state. When you're doing something that's truly inspiring and deeply meaningful, you get tears in your eyes getting to do it. You're not having a hypocriticality, you're having a supercriticality, where the very frontal cortex is actually activated, not the lateral but the medial one, and you're now present. It's the gratitude centre; it's grace. There you're in the flow because you're doing something you really love to do that you feel is your identity. That's where time stops.  Some people confuse a manic episode with that state. But a manic episode crashes. But the real flow state is inspired. That's when you're able to do what you love doing consistently. When Warren Buffett is doing, reading business statements, and financial statements, and deciding what companies to buy, this is what he loves doing. For me, I'm studying human behaviour and anything to do with the brain, and mind, and potential, and awareness. I'm that way. I can lose track of all time and just be doing it for hours. It's not a manic state. That's an inspired state. An inspired state is an intrinsically driven state where you're willing to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of it.  You love tackling challenges and solving problems, and you'll just research and research or do whatever you're doing, and you just keep doing it because you won't stop. That's not a manic episode. Although manics can look similar, there's a difference. Though a manic state comes from the dopamine, you got a high dopamine, usually high serotonin, you got encapsulants, endorphins. But you also don't have, you're not perceiving the downsides. You're just seeing all upsides. You are blinded by little fantasy about what's going to happen. And that eventually catches you, because that it's not obtainable. Fantasies are not obtainable, objectives are.  Eventually, the other side comes in, and osteocalcins comes in and norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol, the stress responses. Because all of, all of a sudden your fantasy's not being met. But when you think you're going after the fantasy, just think of it this way: when you're infatuated with somebody, you're enamoured. You're in this euphoria. All you see is the upside, and you're blind to the downside. Actually, at this time, you say, ‘I'm in love.' No, you're infatuated. And then when weeks go by, and months go by, you start to find out, ‘Oh, I was fooled. That person I thought was there is not who I thought.' And you find out about this person. And that's short-lived. Yeah.  When you actually know that human beings can have both sides, and you don't have a fantasy of one side, but you embrace both sides, and know that they're a human being with a set of values. If you can communicate and articulate what you want in terms of those values, you now have a fulfilling relationship. It's a long term relationship. It's not volatile. It's not manic depressive. It's just steady. That's the one that's the flow. That's what allows the relationship to grow. The manic thing is transient. The real flow is eternal. Lisa: So it's the difference between being in love, and infatuated, and being in actual true real long-term love. Dr John: Well, infatuation, people confuse with love. If I have an expectation on you to be nice, never mean; kind, never cruel; positive, never negative; peaceful, never wrathful, giving, never taking; generous, never stingy; considerate, never inconsiderate. If I have a fantasy about who you are and I'm high because I think I've found this person, that's ‘Oh, well, it's all one-sided.' It's not sustainable. No one's gonna live that way. But if I have an expectation, if they're a human being with a set of values, I can rely on them to do what's highest on their value, and nothing more. I respect their value, I see how it's serving my value, and I can appreciate what they're committed to, and don't have any expectation except them to do what they do. They won't let me down. And I'll be grateful for them. Lisa: Why didn't you tell her that when I was a 20-year-old finding the wrong people in my life? Relationship-wise, are you going after the wrong types of people? Dr John: If you go after it a little infatuation, you have to pay with a broken crush. You never have a broken heart; you have a broken fantasy. Eventually, it helps you actually learn to go after what's in your heart. Lisa: And value what is really important. Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to have had never met a lot sooner? Dr John: There's no mistake, so much happened, because you wouldn't be doing this project. Lisa: No. Then this is what every piece of crap that's ever come your way in life has got an upside and a downside. Because I hear in one of your lectures talking about this: don't get ever overexcited, and don't get really depressed. It's always in the middle. You put it so eloquently, it was, whenever something good happens to you, don't get too overly excited about it. And whenever something bad happens to you, don't get overly depressed about it. Because there's something in the middle of there. You're not seeing the downsides of that good thing, and you're not seeing the upsides.  I've actually integrated that now into my life. When something good, I used to have this thing, ‘Oh my god, I have this breakthrough. I've had this breakthrough.' And ‘This happened to me.' And then I'll go and talk about it. And, because I'm a very open person and I found actually that's not good in a couple of ways. Because I'm overexcited about it. I've ticked it off in my brain almost as being happened. Dr John: If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside. Lisa: Yeah. And you think it's already happened. Say you meet someone, new possible job, or it's a possible contract, or something like that. And you got all excited about it. Because you've got you've initiated the process, but in your brain, you've already ticked that box and got the job and you're off.  Dr John: Then you undermine it. And you said it's related about a job opportunity. You usually have it taken away from you. You're mostly unready for it. If you're really ready for the job opportunity, you're going to know what it's going to take workwise to be able to get paid. You'll already get the downside and your objective. And know, ‘Oh, that's gonna be 28 hours of work here.'  Lisa: That's not cynical, that's not cynicism. That's actually not realism.  Dr John: It's grounded objectives. People who keep grounded objectives don't have job opportunities taken away from them. But people who get elated about it, brag about it, talk about it, almost inevitably disappears. Lisa: Wow. Okay. And so you got to be looking at, I've elated— a couple of opportunities come up that are possibly I'm thinking about doing. I'm like, ‘That one's gonna take so much work in this direction. That means going to be the sacrifice for you.' And the old me would have just gone, ‘Yeah. Let's do it, jump in. And I'm like, ‘Am I just getting old or is this actually a better way to be?' Dr John: My dad taught me something as a plumbing industry. He'd have to, they'd say, ‘Okay, we're going to build this house. Here's all the plumbing that's going to be involved in it.' They'd see the plans. He'd have to do an estimate. What would it cost to produce all that, put that together? If he got elated and he didn't do his cost, by the time he finishes, he didn't make any profit. But if he does his due diligence and knows all the responsibilities, what happens if it rains? What happens if there's delays? What happens if the permits are delayed? He puts all the variables in there and checks it all off. He then goes in to the customer and says, ‘This is what it's going to cost.'  He said, sometimes the customer would come to him and say, ‘Well, yeah. But this other one came in at $10,000 cheaper.' My dad would sit there and he would say to him, he said, ‘I want to show you something. I guarantee you, the man that comes in at $10,000 cheaper, is not going to be thinking of all the variables. You're going to end up not having the job that we're going to do. Let me make sure you understand this. You may not hire me, and that's okay. But I want to make sure you're informed you make a wise decision. Because if you don't, you're going to go pay that side to save $10,000, it's going to cost you an extra 10.'  Lisa: Yep. Been there, done that. Dr John: Well, my dad used to go through it, and with a fine-tooth comb, he explained all the different variables. He says, ‘Now, what I want you to do is go back to the person that's giving you those things and ask them all those questions. If they didn't think about it, they're going to either not make money off you and they're not going to want to continue to do the work. Or they're not going to do a great job because they're losing money. Or you're going to end up getting a thing done, then they're never going to want to do follow up and take care of you again as a customer. So here's what it costs. I've been doing this a long time. I know what it costs. I know what the property is. So I'd rather you know the facts, and be a little bit more and make sure it's done properly. Then go and save a few bucks and find out the hard way.' Here's the questions they go check. They came back to my dad.  Lisa: Yep. When they understood that whole thing. And I think this is a good thing in every piece of, every part of life. It's not always the cheapest offering that's the best offering, which you learn the hard way. Dr John: I had somebody come to me not too long ago, maybe four months ago, earlier this year. And said, ‘I go to so and so's seminar for almost half the price of your seminar. Why would I go to your seminar?' And I said, ‘That's like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Volkswagen.' I said, ‘So let me explain what you're going to get here. Let me explain what you're going to get here. Then you can make a decision. If you want that Volkswagen outcome, that's fantastic. If you want a Rolls Royce, I'm on the Rolls Royce. I'm going to give you something about here.' And once you explain it, and make the distinctions, people will pay the difference.  Lisa: Yeah. And that's– in a business, you have to be able to explain to them as well. When I was a jeweller, when I started, I was a goldsmith in a previous life. And we used to make everything by hand and it was all custom jewellery, etcetera, back before China and the mass production and huge factories and economies of scale really blew the industry to pieces. For a long time you were actually in that hanging on to one of those and not transitioning into the mass production side of it because I didn't want to, but not being able to represent the value that actually what you were producing: the customisation, the personalisation, the handmade, and people wouldn't understand that.  You end up chopping your own prices down and down and down to the point where it no longer became a viable business. And that was the state of the industry and so on and so forth. But people could not see the difference between this silver ring and that silver ring. That one's a customised, handmade, personalised piece that took X amount of hours to produce. And this is something they got spit out of a production line at a team and other people are wearing. But people can't see the value difference. Dr John: Yeah, you have to, you're responsible for bringing it to their awareness. If you've been to a sushi restaurant, they have this egg that's in layers. I noticed that to get some nigiri with an egg on it with a little seaweed wrapped around it, it was like $4 per piece. And the other sushi was like $2 at the time. I thought, just an egg. Why would it be that much? And then I thought, and then I watched him prepare one, and how many hours it took to prepare one of those slabs of egg because he had to do it in layers. We had to loony take a pan, take an egg, poured in the egg, cook it just a certain level. And then lay that, scramble it, laid on top layer to time while it's hot, and layer by layer by layer by layer and cut it and everything else to make that thing. And I realised that is an individual egg-layered piece of egg. And I realised after seeing him I go, ‘That's a $10 egg.'  Lisa: This is cheap.  Dr John: I was thinking, ‘How the heck does he do that for four bucks? How did he make any profit out of it?' I never questioned it after th

About JohnJohn Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John's publications include the books The Art of Capacity Planning (2009) and Web Operations (2010) as well as the forward to “The DevOps Handbook.”  His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” helped start the DevOps movement.John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund UniversityLinks: The Art of Capacity Planning: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling-Resources/dp/1491939206/ Web Operations: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/1449377440/ The DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ Adaptive Capacity Labs: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com John Allspaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/allspaw Richard Cook Twitter: https://twitter.com/ri_cook Dave Woods Twitter: https://twitter.com/ddwoods2 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: Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by CircleCI. CircleCI is the leading platform for software innovation at scale. With intelligent automation and delivery tools, more than 25,000 engineering organizations worldwide—including most of the ones that you've heard of—are using CircleCI to radically reduce the time from idea to execution to—if you were Google—deprecating the entire product. Check out CircleCI and stop trying to build these things yourself from scratch, when people are solving this problem better than you are internally. I promise. To learn more, visit circleci.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by John Allspaw, who's—well, he's done a lot of things. He was one of the founders of the DevOps movement—although I'm sure someone's going to argue with that—he's also written a couple of books, The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations and the foreword of The DevOps Handbook. But he's also been the CTO at Etsy and has gotten his Master's in Human Factors and System Safety from Lund University before it was the cool thing to do. And these days, he is the founder and principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John, thanks for joining me.Corey: And now for something completely different!John: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you, Corey.Corey: So, let's start at the beginning here. So, what is Adaptive Capacity Labs? It sounds like an experiment in auto-scaling, as is every use of auto-scaling, but that's neither here nor there. I'm guessing it goes deeper.John: Yeah. So, I managed to trick, or let's say convince some of my heroes, Dr. Richard Cook and Dr. David Woods, these folks are what you would call heavies in the human factors, system safety, and resilience engineering world, Dave Woods is credited with creating the field of resilience engineering. And so what we've been doing for the past—since I left Etsy is bringing perspectives, techniques, approaches to the software world that are, I guess, some of the most progressive practices that saved other safety, critical domains, like aviation, and power plants, and all of the stuff that makes news.And the way we've been doing that is largely through the lens of incidents. And so we do a whole bunch of different things, but that's the core of what we do is activities and projects for clients that have a concern around incidents; both, are we learning well? Can you tell us that? Or can you tell us how to understand incidents and analyze them in such a way that we can learn from them effectively?Corey: Generally speaking, my naive guess, based upon the times I spent working in various operations role has been, “Great. So, how do we learn from incidents?” Well, if you're like most of the industry, you really don't. You wind up blaming someone in a meeting that's called blameless, so instead of using the person's name, you use a team or a role name, and then you wind up effectively doing a whole bunch of reactive process work that in long enough timeline and enough incidents ossifies you into a whole bunch of processes and procedure that is just horrible. And then how do you learn from this?Well, by the time it actually becomes a problem, you've rotated CIOs four times and there's no real institutional memory here. Great. That's my cynical approach, and I suspect it's not entirely yours because if it were, you wouldn't be doing a business in this because otherwise, it would be this wonderful choreographed song-and-dance number of, “Doesn't it suck to be you? Da-da.” And that's it. I suspect you do more as a consultant than that. So, what does my lived experience of terrible companies differing in what respects from the folks you talk to?John: Oh, well, I mean, just to be blunt, you're absolutely spot on. [laugh]. The industry is terrible at this.Corey: Well, crap.John: I mean, look, the good news is, there are inklings, there are signals for some organizations that have been doing the things that they've been told to do by some book or website that they read, and they're doing all the things and they realize, “All right, well, whatever we're doing doesn't seem to be—it doesn't feel—we're doing all the things, checking the boxes, but we're having incidents”—and even more disturbing to them is we're having incidents that seem as if—it'd be one thing to have incidents that were really difficult, hairy, complicated, and complex, and certainly those happen, but there is a view that they're just simply not getting as much out of these sometimes pretty traumatic events as they could be. And that's all that's needed, yeah.Corey: In most companies, it seems like, on some level, you're dealing with every incident that looks a lot like that. Sure, it was a certificate expired, but then you wind up tying into all the relevant things that are touching that. It seems like it's an easy, logical conclusion. Oh, wow. It turns out in big enterprises, nothing is straightforward or simple.Everything becomes complicated, and issues like that happen frequently enough that it seems like the entire career can be spent in pure firefighting reactive mode.John: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I would say that just like these other domains that I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of, sort of, intuitive perspectives that are, let's just say, sort of unproductive. And so in software, we write software; it makes sense if all of our discussions after an incident trying to make sense of it, is entirely focused on the software did this, and Postgres has this weird thing, and Kafka has this tricky bit here. But the fact of the matter is, people and—engineers and non-engineers—are struggling when an incident arises, both in terms of what the hell is happening, and generating hypotheses, and working through whether the hypothesis is valid or not, adjusting it if signals show up that it's not, and what can we do, what are some options? If we do feel like we're on a good [unintelligible 00:06:09] productive thread about what's happening, what are some options that we can take?That opens up a doorway for a whole variation of other questions. But the fact of the matter is, handling incidents, understanding really, effectively, time-pressured problem solving, almost always amongst multiple people with different views, different expertise, and piecing together across that group what's happening, and what to do about it, and what are the ramifications of doing this thing versus that thing? This is all what we would call above-the-line work. This is expertise. It shows up in how people weigh ambiguities, and things are uncertain.And that doesn't get this lived experience that people have, it just we're not used to talking about—we're used to talking about networks, and applications, and code, and network. We're not used to talking about and even have vocabulary for what makes something confusing? What makes something ambiguous? And that is what makes for effective incident analysis.Corey: Do you find that most of the people who are confused about these things tend to be more aligned with being individual contributor type engineers, who are effectively boots-on-the-ground, for lack of a better term? Is it high-level executives who are trying to understand why it seems like they're constantly getting paraded in the press? Or is it often folks somewhere between the two?John: Yes.Corey: [laugh].John: Right? Like there is something that you point out, which is this contrast between boots-on-the-ground, hands-on keyboard, folks who are resolving incidents, who are wrestling with these problems, and leadership. And sometimes leadership who remember their glory days of being an individual contributor sometimes are a bit miscalibrated. They still believe they have a sufficient understanding of all the messy details when they don't. And so, I mean, the fact of the matter is, there's the age-old story of Timmy stuck in a well, right?There's the people trying to get Timmy out of the well, and then there's what to do about all of the news reporters surrounding the well asking for updates and questions, and how did Timmy get in the well? These are two different activities. And I'll tell you pretty confidently, if you get Timmy out of the well, pretty fluidly, if you can set situations up where people who ostensibly would get Timmy out of the well are better prepared with anticipating Timmy is going to be in the well, and understanding all the various options and tools to get Timmy out of the well, the more you can set up those and have those conditions be in place, there's a whole host of other problems that simply don't go away. And so, these things kind of get a bit muddled. And so when you say ‘learning from incidents,' I would separate that very much from what you tell the world externally from your company about the incident because they're not at all the same.Public write-ups about an incident are not the results of an analysis. It's not the same as an internal review, were the review to be effective. Why? Well, first thing is you never see apologies on internal post-incident reviews because who are you going to apologize to?Corey: It's always fun watching the certain level of escalating transparency as you go up through the spectrum of the public explanation of an outage, to ones you put internal customers, to ones you show under NDA to special customers, to the ones who are basically partners who are going to fire you contractually if you don't, to the actual internal discussion about it. And watching that play out is really interesting. As you wind up seeing the things that are buried deeper and deeper, yeah, you wind up with this flowery language on the outside, and it gets more and more transparent, and at the end, it's, “Someone tripped and hit the emergency power switch in a data center.” And it's this great list of how this stuff works.John: Yeah. And to be honest, it would be strange and shocking if they weren't different. Because like I said, the purpose of a public write-up is entirely different than an internal write-up and the audience is entirely different. And so that's why they're cherry-picked. There's a whole bunch of things that aren't included in public write-up because the purpose is, “I want a customer or potential customer to read this and feel at least a little bit better.”Or really, I want them to at least get this notion that we've got a handle on it. “Wow, that was really bad, but nothing to see here, folks. It's all been taken care of.” But again, this is very different, the people inside the organization, even if it's just sort of tacit, they've got a knowledge. Tenured people who have been there for some time, see connections, even if they're not made explicit, between one incident to another incident.To that one that happened—“Remember that one that happened three years ago, that big one? Oh, sorry, you're new. Oh, let me tell you the story. Oh, it's about this and blah, blah, blah. And who knew that Unix pipes only passes 4k across it.” Blah, blah, blah, something—some weird, esoteric thing.And so our focus, largely, although we have done projects with companies about trying to be better about their external language about it, the vast majority of what we do and where our focuses is, is to capture the richest understanding of an incident for the broadest audience. And like I said at the very beginning, the bar is real low. There's a lot of, I don't want to say falsehoods, but certainly a lot of myths that just don't play out in the data about whether people are learning. Whenever we have a call with a potential client, we always ask the same question. Ask them about what their post-incident activities look like, and they tell us and throw in some cliches, and everyone—never want a crisis go to waste.And, “Oh, yes. And we always try to capture the learnings and we put them in a document.” And we always ask the same question, which is, “Oh. So, you put these documents, these write-ups in an area?” Oh, yes, we want that to be shared as much as possible.And then we say, “Who reads them?” And that tends to put a bit of a pause because most people have no idea whether they're being read or not. And the fact is, when we look, very few of these write-ups are being read. Why? I'll be blunt: because they're terrible. [laugh].There's not much to learn from there because they're not written to be read. They're written to be filed. And so we're looking to change that. And there's a whole bunch of other things that are unintuitive, but just like all of the perspective shifts, DevOps, and continuous deployment, they sound obvious, but only in hindsight after you get it. That's characterization of our work.Corey: It's easy to wind up, from the outside, seeing a scenario where things go super well in an environment like that, where, okay, we brought you in as a consultant, suddenly, we have better understanding about our outages. Awesome. But outages still happen. And it's easy to take a cynical view of, okay, so other than talking to you a lot, we say the right things, but how do we know that companies are actually learning from what happened as opposed to just being able to tell better stories about pretending to learn?John: Yeah, yeah. And this is, I think, where the world of software has some advantages over other domains. And the fact is, software engineers don't pay any attention to anything they don't think the attention is warranted, or they're not being judged, or scored, or rewarded for. And so there's no single signal that accompanies learning from incidents. It's more like a constellation, like, a bunch of smaller signals.So, for example, if more people are reading the write-ups. If more people are attending group review meetings. In organizations that do this really well, engineers who start attending meetings, we ask them, “Well, why are you going to this meeting?” And they'll report, “Well, because I can learn stuff here that I can't learn anywhere else. Can't read about it in a runbook, can't read about it on the wiki, can't read about it in an email, or hear about it in an all-hands.”And that they can see a connection between, even incidents handled in some distant group, they can see a connection to their own work. And so those are the sort of signals—we've written about this on our blog—those are the sort of signals that we know that progress is building momentum. But a big part of that is capturing this, again, this experience. Usually, we'll see, there's a timeline, and this is when memcached did X, and this alert happened, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?But very rarely are captured the things that, when you ask an engineer, “Tell me your favorite incident story.” People who will even describe themselves, “Oh, I'm not really a storyteller, but listen to this.” And they'll include parts that make for a good story. Social construct is, if you're going to tell a story, you've got the attention of other people, you're going to include the stuff that was not usually kept or captured in write-ups. For example, like, what was confusing?A story that tells about what was confusing, well—“And then we looked, and it said, ‘zero tests failed.'”—this is an actual case that we looked at—“It says ‘zero tests failed.' And so, okay. So, then I deployed. Well, the site went down.” “Okay, well, so what's the story there?” “Well, listen to this. As it turns out, at a fixed font, zeros, like, in Courier or whatever, have a slash through it and at a small enough font, a zero with a slash through it looks a lot like an eight. There were eight tests failed, not zero.” So, that's about the display. And so those are the types of things that make a good story. We all know stories like this, right? The Norway problem with YAML. You ever heard of that Norway problem?Corey: Not exactly. I'm hoping you'll tell me.John: Well, so lay [laugh] it's excellent, and of course it works out that the spec for YAML will evaluate the value no—N-O—to false as if it was a boolean. Yes, for true. Well, but if your YAML contains a list of abbreviations for countries, then you might have Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, US, false instead of Norway. And so that's just an unintuitive surprise. And so, those are the types of things that don't typically get captured in incident writeups.There might be a sentence like, “There was a lack of understanding.” Well, that's unhelpful. At best. Don't tell me what wasn't there. Tell me what was there. “There was confusion.” Great. “What made it confusing?” “Oh, yeah. N-O is both ‘no' and the abbreviation for Norway.”Red herrings is another great example. Red herrings happen a lot; they tend to stick in people's memories; and yet, they never really get captured. But it's, like, one of the most salient aspects of the case that ought to be captured. People don't follow red herrings because they know they're a red herring. They follow red herrings because they think it's going to be productive.So therefore, you better describe for all your colleagues what brought you to believe that this was productive. Turns out later—you find out later that it wasn't productive. Those are some of the examples. And so if you can capture what's difficult, what's ambiguous, what's uncertain, and what made it difficult, ambiguous, or uncertain, that makes for good stories. If you can enrich these documents, it means people who maybe don't even work there yet, when they start working there, they'll be interested; they have a set expectation they'll learn something by reading these things.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: There's an inherent cynicism around… well, from at least from my side of the world, around any third-party that claims to fundamentally shift significant aspects of company culture, and if the counter-argument to that is that you and DORA and a whole bunch of other folks have had significant success with doing it, it's just very hard to see that from the outside. So, I'm curious as to how you wind up telling stories about that because the problem is inherently whenever you have an outsider coming into an enterprise-style environment, is, “Oh, cool. What are they going to be able to change?” And it's hard to articulate that value, and not—well, given what you do, to be direct—come across as an engineering apologist, where it's well, “Engineers are just misunderstood, so they need empathy, and psychological safety, and blameless post-mortems.” And it sounds to crappy executives, if I'm being direct, that, “Oh, in other words, I just can't ever do anything negative to engineers who, from my perspective, just failed me or are invisible, and there's nothing else in my relationship with them.” Or am I oversimplifying?John: No, no. I actually think you're spot on. I mean, that's the thing is that if you're talking with leaders—remember, a.k.a. People who are, even though they're tasked with providing the resources and setting conditions for practitioners—the hands-on folks who get their work done—they're quite happy to talk about these sort of abstract concepts, like psychological safety and insert other sorts of hand-wavy stuff.What is actually pretty magical about incidents is that these are grounded, concrete, messy phenomena that practitioners have, and will remember; they're sometimes visceral experiences. And so that's why we don't do theory at Adaptive Capacity Labs. We understand the theory, happy to talk to you about it, but it doesn't mean as much without the practicality. And the fact of the matter is that the engineer apologist is, “If you didn't have the engineers, would you have a business?” That's at the flip side; this is, like, the core unintuitive part of the field of resilience engineering, which is that Murphy's Law is wrong.What could go wrong almost never does, but we don't pay much attention to that. And the reason why you're not having nearly as many incidents as you could be is because, despite the fact that you make it hard to learn from incidents, people are actually learning. But they're just learning out of view from leaders. When we go to an organization and we see that most of the people who are attending post-incident review meetings are managers, that has a very particular signal. That tells me that the real post-incident review is happening outside that meeting, it probably happened before that meeting, and those people are there to make sure that whatever group that they represent in their organization isn't unnecessarily given the brunt of the bottom of a bus.And so it's a political due diligence. But the notion that you shouldn't punish or be harsh on engineers for making mistakes completely misses the point. The point is to set up the conditions so that engineers can understand the work that they do. And if you can amplify that, as Andrew Schaffer has said, “You're either building a learning organization, or you're losing to someone who is.” And a big part of that is you need people; you have to set up conditions for people to give detailed story about their work, what's hard.This part of the codebase is really scary, right? All engineers have these notions: this part is really scary, this part is really not that big of a deal, this part is somewhere in between. But there's no place for that outside of the informal discussions. But I would assert that if you can capture that, the organization will be better prepared. The thing that I would end on that is that it's a bit of a rhetorical device to get this across, but one of the questions we'll ask is, “How can you tell the difference between a difficult case—a difficult incident—handled well, or a straightforward incident handled poorly?”Corey: And from the outside, it's very hard to tell the difference.John: Oh, yeah. Well, certainly if what you're doing is averaging how long these things take. But the fact of the matter is that all the people who were involved in that, they know the difference between a difficult case handled well, and a straightforward one handled poorly. They know it, but there's nowhere, there's no place to give voice to that lived experience.Corey: So, on the whole, what is the tech industry missing when it comes to learning effectively from the incidents that we all continually experience and what feels to be far too frequently?John: They're missing what is captured in that age-old parable of the blind men and the elephant. And I would assert that these blind men that the king sends out—“Go find an elephant and come back and tell me about the elephant”—they come back and they all have—they're all valid perspectives, and they argue about, “No, an elephant is this big flexible thing,” and other one is, “Oh, no, an elephant is this big wall,” and, “No, an elephant is a big flappy thing.” If you were to make a synthesis of their different perspectives, then you'd have a richer picture and understanding of an elephant. You cannot legislate—and this is where what you brought up—you cannot set ahead, a priori, some amount of time and effort. And quite often what we see are leaders saying, “Okay, we need to have some sort of root cause analysis done within 72 hours of an event.” Well, if your goal is to find gaps, and come up with remediation items, that's what you're going to get. Remediation items might actually not be that good because you've basically contained the analysis time.Corey: Which does sort of feel, on some level, like it's very much aligned as—from a viewpoint of, yeah, remediation items may not be useful as far as driving lasting change, but without remediation items, good luck explaining to your customers that will never ever, ever happen again.John: Right, yeah. Of course. Well, you'll notice something about those public write-ups; you'll notice that they don't tend to link to previous incidents that have similarities to them because that would undermine the whole purpose, which is to provide confidence. And a reader might actually follow a hyperlink to say, “Wait a minute. You said this wouldn't happen again.”Turns out it would. Of course, that's horseshit. But you're right. And there's nothing wrong with remediation items, but if that's the goal, then that goal is—you know, what you look for is what you find, and what you find is what you fix. If I said, “Here's this really complicated problem and I'm only giving you an hour to describe it,” and it took you eight hours to figure out the solution.Well then, what you come up with in an hour is not actually going to be all that good. So, then the question is, how good are the remediation items? Quite often what we see is—and I'm sure you've had this experience—an incident's been resolved and you and your colleagues are like, “Wow, that was a huge pain in the ass. Oh, dude. I didn't see that coming. That was weird. Yeah.” And one of you might say, “You know what? I'm just going to make this change because I don't want to be woken up tonight, or I know that making this change is going to help things. I'm not waiting for the post-mortem. We're just going to do that.” “Is that good?” “Yep.” “Okay, yeah, please do it.”Quite frequently, those things, those actions, those aren't listed as action items, and yet it was a thing so important that it couldn't wait for the post-mortem—arguably the most important action item—and it doesn't get captured that way. We've seen this take place. And so again, in the end, it's about those who have the lived experience. The live experience is what fuels how reliable you are today.You don't go to your senior technical people and say, “Hey, listen. We got to do this project. We don't know how. I want you to figure out—we're going to—let's say we're going to move away from this legacy thing, so I want you to get in a room, come up with two or three options. Gather a group of folks who know what they're talking about. Get some options, and then show me what the options. Oh, and by the way, I'm prohibiting you from taking into account any experience you've ever had with incidents.” It sounds ridiculous when you would say that, and yet, that is what [unintelligible 00:27:54].So, if you can fuel people's memory, you can't say you've learned something if you can't remember it. At least that's what my kids' teachers tell me. And so yeah, you have to capture the lived experience, and including what was hard for people to understand. And those make for good stories. That makes for people reading them. That makes for people to have better questions about it. That's what learning looks like.Corey: If people want to learn more about what you have to say and how you view these things, where can they find you?John: You can find me and my colleagues at adaptivecapacitylabs.com where we talk all about the stuff on our blog. And myself, and Richard Cook, and Dave Woods are also on Twitter, as well.Corey: And we'll, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:28:42]. John, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.John: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm honored.Corey: John Allspaw, co-founder and principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. 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 hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment giving me a list of suggested remediation actions that I can take to make sure it never happens again.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.

Do you feel like you're nowhere near your goals? Do you want something so badly but think that it's impossible to achieve? Having goals in life gives us a sense of purpose. Whether they're for our career or relationships, goals push us to give our best. However, we sometimes set too many goals and find ourselves stuck. We can also feel discouraged from pursuing our dreams because we subject ourselves to other people’s standards. But while our plans may sometimes seem impossible, we have everything we need. If you can stay determined and learn how to prioritise, we can have our breakthrough. In this episode, Dr John Demartini joins us to talk about living your best life by structuring it. Learn how to prioritise and you can achieve anything. He shares the philosophy of the Breakthrough Experience, which has miraculously helped thousands of people reach their goals. John also discusses how to make decisions based on priorities, not emotions and instincts. If you want to learn how to prioritise and stick to your top priorities, then this episode is for you.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa’s Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn about the Breakthrough Experience and how it has changed thousands of lives. Discover how to prioritise and determine your top priorities. John shares his secret to retaining Information in the quickest way possible.   Episode Highlights [05:00] About John Dr John is an educator, researcher and writer. He has spent over 48 years helping people maximise their potential. John wanted to know what allows people to do extraordinary things. That's why he distilled information from great minds throughout history. He made them into practical things that people today can use.  John had speech and learning challenges as a kid. At a doctor’s recommendation, his parents took him out of school and put him into sports. After having a near-death experience at 17, Paul Bragg inspired John to overcome his learning problems. With the help of his mom, he eventually learned how to read.  Listen to the full episode to learn more about John's inspiring story! [15:42] How Surfing Changed John’s Mindset Surfing has taught John that people are not going to excel without perseverance and commitment.  John converted his determination for surfing into persistence in reading.  [17:57] The Breakthrough Experience The Breakthrough Experience is a philosophy and program changing lives globally.  This system teaches you how to prioritise and structures life by priority. It breaks through limitations and helps achieve life goals.  John teaches people to use any experience, even challenges. These are catalysts for transformation and progress.  John has helped people learn how to prioritise to get their breakthrough experience in different areas of life. These include businesses, careers, health, relationships, among others. Lisa relates the Breakthrough Experience philosophy to when her mom had a severe aneurysm. [24:14] John Shares a Miraculous Experience At 27 years old, John handled a family with a son in a three-year coma. The family went to different hospitals in Mexico and the United States. However, they found none to help their son. They then went to John, and he thought of a maneuver to help the child. However, the treatment also came with significant risk. Listen to the full episode to find out how John helped a child get out of a three-year coma. [33:34] Jesse Billauer’s Breakthrough Experience Jesse Billauer, a surfer, decided to go to the Breakthrough Experience after a surfing accident.  At the time, he was depressed because he was physically unable to surf.  After the Breakthrough Experience, he learned how to prioritise and what his top priority was. Jesse became determined not to let anything stop him from surfing. Jesse developed a way to surf as a quadriplegic person. He taught others how to do the same.  [38:58] Herd Mentality in the Sciences New ideas are violently opposed and ridiculed. That's why people fear going against the norm. People who aim to survive follow the multitude. People who want to thrive create a new paradigm.  Each person can excel at anything if they focus on that, not on others' opinions.  [41:37] How to Prioritise John made a list of every single thing he does in a day over three months. He then placed multiple columns next to that list. The first column contains how much money each task produces per hour. The second column contains how much a job inspires him on a scale of 1-10. He also considered the cost and the time spent on each activity.  After doing that, he prioritised the activities that made thousands of dollars. He also focused on ones that scored ten on the inspiration scale.   John hired people for the low-priority tasks. This choice allowed him to be more productive in his top priorities. Within 18 months, his business increased tenfold. Listen to the full episode to learn how to prioritise and about investing in your top priority.  [56:19] How John Stays Looking Young John is almost 67 years old. However, Lisa describes him as someone who looks like a teenager. John doesn't eat junk. He drinks a lot of water, has never had coffee in his life and hasn't had alcohol in over 48 years. Doing what you love every day also slows down the aging process.  [58:03] Some Lessons from the Breakthrough Experience Nothing is missing in you. When you compare yourself to others, you'll try to live by their values or get them to live by yours. Both of these are futile.  Sticking to your values and priorities is key to resilience and success. People are different from each other, but no one is better than the other.  If you don't empower your own life, others will overpower you.   Your mission is something that you're willing to get through any means necessary. [1:06:38] How to Get Your Amygdala Under Control The amygdala is associated with emotions and the "fight-or-flight" response. Because we have neuroplasticity, we can remodel our internal system.  Perceiving challenges and feeling shame and guilt trigger an autoimmune reaction that attacks your body. Every time we choose to live by the highest priority, the amygdala calms down. The prefrontal cortex is reinforced. [1:12:03] The Mind-Body Connection Our psychological processes also affect our physiological processes.  People are used to blaming external factors. They don't take accountability for the things they experience.  John uses the example of when people get symptoms after eating unhealthy food. They don't face the fact that they brought it upon themselves.  Our bodies do an excellent job of guiding us. That's why we should learn how to listen to them. [1:18:13] The Journey to Financial Independence There is nothing evil about having money.  John believes that you can be a slave to money, or you can be a master of it.  Nothing is stopping you from doing what you love to do. [1:21:28] How to Retain Information Teaching what you've learned is the key to retention. Teaching compels your mind to organise ideas and reinforce them.  Teach the concepts as soon as you've discovered them. Don't wait until you're an expert on the subject. Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! You can choose between being an official or VIP patron for $7 and $15 NZD per month, respectively. Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-ageing and longevity with NMN Bio. Related Pushing the Limits Episodes 135: How To Make Better Decisions Consistently 183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Elena Seranova 189: Increasing Your Longevity with Elena Seranova Connect with John: Website | Facebook | Linkedin | YouTube | Instagram ‎The Demartini Show Demartini Value Determination Process The Breakthrough Experience program Join John's The Mind-Body Connection course Learn more about Jesse Billauer and his story. High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers by Tim Baker The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management by Alec Mackenzie and Pat Nickerson  Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness by David and Austin Perlmutter The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing by Bronnie Ware   7 Powerful Quotes ‘I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential.’ ‘I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things and then passing that on.” “I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey.’ ‘No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. And my teacher and my parents come to the school and said, ‘You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively’ because I wrote kind of backwards.’ ‘Well, I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. Yes, that's the move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.’ ‘And so the Breakthrough Experience is about accessing that state. And breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind and transforming whatever experiences you have into “on the way” not “in the way”.’ ‘She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling — like I had a power of a Mack truck. And me? I don't know how to describe it.’   About Dr John Dr John Demartini is an author, researcher, global educator and world-renowned human behaviour specialist. Making self-development programs and relationship solutions is part of his job. Among his most popular programs is the Breakthrough Experience. It is a personal development course that aims to help individuals achieve whatever goal they have. As a child, Dr John had learning challenges and could not read and write well until 18 years old. He has now distilled information from over 30,000 books across all academic disciplines and shares them online and on stage in over 100 countries.  Interested in knowing more about Dr John and his work? You may visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Instagram.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can achieve their life goals by learning how to prioritise. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.  Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. He is a world renowned speaker, teacher, educator, researcher, medical doctor. He's written I don't know how many books, countless, countless books. He's an incredible, incredible man who teaches literally thousands and thousands of people every year in his breakthrough experience. The information that you're going to get in this podcast could change your life. So I've given you a fair warning. He's an amazing, incredible man that, and I've talked to a lot of incredible people but this one is really next level, he started out as a big wave surfer in Hawaii, way back in the day. Even knew Laird Hamilton and people like that. Had learning disabilities and could hardly read or write, and yet managed to overcome all these things to become one of the greatest scholars that there is. He's read over 30,000 books. He has distilled the knowledge from people right through the ages, through leaders and philosophers and stoics and scientists. He's an expert in so many different areas. He teaches people in business, he teaches people how to overcome massive challenges in their life. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. It is going to get uncomfortable in places because we’ll talk about really being accountable, really understanding our own physiology, and just so much more. An absolutely amazing interview. So I hope you enjoy it.  Before we head over to the show, just reminder, we have our patron membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits. If you want to join our VIP tribe, we would love you to come and do that. It's about the price of a cup of coffee a month or two. If you want to join on the premium level, we would love you to come and join us. Support the show. Help us get this work out there. We are passionate about what we do. We want to change lives, we want to improve your life, we want to improve the lives of others. And we need your help to do that to keep the show going. So please, head over to patron.lisatamati.com. Check out all the premium VIP member benefits here, and support the show. Be a part of this community, be a part of this tribe. Help support us and reach out to me or the team. If you have any questions around any of the topics or any of the guests that have come up. We would love to hear from you. Any feedback is always welcome. Please always give a rating and review to the show as well on iTunes or whatever platform that you listen to. That is really, really helpful as well. We do appreciate you doing that. And as a reminder, please also check out our epigenetics program. We have a system now that can personalise and optimise your entire life to your genetics. So check out our program, what it's all about. This is based on the work of hundreds of scientists, not our work. It has been developed over the last 20 years, from 15 different science disciplines all working in collaborating together on this one technology platform that will help you understand your genes and apply the information to your life. So check that out. Go to lisatamati.com and hit the Work With Us button and you'll see their Peak Epigenetics, check out that program. And while you're there, if you're a runner, check out our Running Hot Coaching program as well. Customised, personalised training plans made specifically for you, for your goals. You get a video analysis, you get a consultation with me and it's all in a very well-priced package. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.  Now over to the show with Dr John Demartini. Well, Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing The Limits. Today, I am super excited for my guest. My guest is an absolute superstar. Welcome to the show. Firstly and foremostly, thank you very much for taking the time out today. Dr John, I'm just really excited to have you. Whereabouts are you sitting in the world? Dr John: I am in Houston, Texas. I'm in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, even though it shows that I've got a library.  Lisa: Yeah,I love that background. That is a fantastic background. Really great. Well, greetings to Texas and I hope that everything is going well over there for you. Today, I wanted to talk about you, your work, the breakthrough experience. Some of the learnings and the exciting mission that you've been on for now. For 47 years, I believe. Something crazy like that. So Dr John, can you just give us a little bit of a background on you and your life and what you do on a day to day basis? Big question. Dr John: I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now, over 48 years, on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential, their awareness potential, and achieve whatever it is that they're inspired to achieve. So that could be raising a beautiful family to building a massive business to becoming fortunate or celebrity, doesn't matter. It's whatever it is that inspires them. I've been studying human behaviour and anything and everything I can get my hands on for the last 48 years to assist people in mastering a lot. That's what I love doing. I do it every day. I can't think of any else I'd rather be doing. So I just do it. Lisa: It's a bit of a role model for me, Dr John, because I think what you have achieved in this time, the way you've distilled information, I mean, you've studied, last time I looked on one of your podcasts, that was over 30,000 books, probably more now. And you've distilled the information from great masters throughout history into practical things that humans today can actually benefit from. Is that a good assessment of what you basically have done? Dr John: I'm writing right now a 1200 page textbook on philosophers and great minds through the ages. I summarise it. I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things, and then passing that on. So yes. Right now, I'm actually, I just finished, I’m just finishing up Albert Einstein, which is one of my heroes. I had a dream when I was young. When I saw that E = mc² drawn on that board, I wanted to find out where that board was. I went to Princeton, and met with Freeman Dyson, who took over his position at Princeton in 1955. Spent part of the day with him and we're talking on cosmology. I wrote my formula on that same board, exactly the same place, because that was a dream that I had since I was probably 18, 19. Lisa: Wow, and you got to fulfill it and actually love it. Dr John: Yeah. Took me a bit of time. So what? But yeah, I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey and their thinking. That's every Nobel Prize winner I've gone through and every great philosopher and thinker and business leader and financially or spiritually, to try to find out and distill out what is the very essence that drives human beings? And what is it that allows them to do extraordinary things? So I wanted to do that with my life. Most of the people I get in front of want to feel like they want to make a massive difference. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to do something that’s deeply meaningful, inspiring. And so yeah, we're not 'put your head in the product glue and let the glue stick' and then pass it on.  Lisa: Instead of having to reinvent the world, why not? So Dr John, can you give us a little bit of history though, because you're obviously an incredible scholar,have an incredible mind. But as a child, you struggled with learning and with reading and writing.Can you give us a little, how the heck did you go from being this kid that struggled with all of that to where you are today? One of the greatest minds out there.  Dr John:  Yeah, I definitely had some learning challenges. I had a speech challenge when I was a year and a half old to four, I had to wear buttons in my mouth and put strings in my mouth and practice using all kinds of muscles. Went to a speech pathologist. When I was in first grade. No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. My teacher, and my parents would come to the school and said, 'You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively,' because I wrote kind of backwards. 'I don't think he's going to mountain and go very far in life, put him into sport.' Because I like to run. And I did sports there for a while. But then I went from baseball to surfing. I hitchhiked out to California and down Mexico and then made it over to Hawaii so I could ride big waves and I was doing big wave and stuff when I was a teenager. So I didn't have academics. I dropped out of school. I was a street kid from 13 to 18. But then right before 18 I nearly died. That's when I met Paul Bragg, who inspired me one night in a presentation. That night I got so inspired that I thought, 'Maybe I could overcome my learning problems by applying what this man just taught me. And maybe someday I could learn to read and write and speak properly.' That was such an inspiration, such a moment of inspiration that it changed the course of my life. I had to go back. And with the help of my mum, I went and got a dictionary out, started to read a dictionary and memorise 30 words a day until my vocabulary. I had to spell the word, pronounce the word, use it with a meaningful sentence, and develop a vocabulary. Eventually doing that 30 we would, we wouldn't go to bed. I didn't go to bed until I had 30 new words, really inculcated. My vocabulary grew. And I started to learn how to do the reading. It was not an easy project. But, man, once I got a hold of it, I never stopped. Lisa: And once you started to read, you didn’t stop. Dr John: I've never stopped. I've been a voluminous reader now. You know, 48 years. Lisa: That’s just incredible. Dr John: I can’t complain. Lisa: So was it a dyslexia or learning disability? I just asked because my mum was a teacher of children with dyslexia and things like that. Was there specific ways that you were able to overcome the disability so to speak? Dr John: Yeah, I just, sheer persistence and determination to want to read and learn. I remember, I took my first, I took a GED test, a general education high school equivalency test. And I guessed, literally guessed, I close my eyes. I said this little affirmation that Paul Bragg gave me that, 'I'm a genius, and I apply my wisdom.' And some miraculous thing made me pass that test. I didn't know how to read half the stuff that was on it. I just went with my intuition and guessed. And I tried to go to college, after taking that test and had the test. I failed. And I remember driving home crying because I had this idea that I was going to learn how to teach and become intelligent. Then when I got a 27, everybody else got 75 and above. I got a 27 and I thought, 'Well, there's no way it's going to work.' But then I sat there and I cried and my mum came home from shopping, and she saw me crying on the living room floor. She said, ‘Son, what happened? What's wrong?’ I said, ‘Mum, I failed the test. I guess I don't have what it takes.’ And I repeated what the first grade teacher said, 'I guess I'll never read or write or communicate effectively, or amount too much. I guess I'll go back to Hawaii and make surfboards and surf. Because I was pretty good at that.' And she said to me something that was a real mind bender. She put her hand on me and she said, ‘Son, whether you become a great teacher, philosopher and travel the world like your dream, whether return to Hawaii and ride giant waves like you've done, return to the streets and panhandle like you've done. I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what you do.’ Lisa: Wow, what a mum. Dr John: That was an amazing moment. When she said that, my hand went into a fist of determination. And I said to myself, ‘I'm gonna match this thing called reading and studying and learning. I'm gonna match this thing called teaching and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes, I'm going to travel whatever distance, I'm gonna pay whatever price, to give my source of love across this planet.’ I got up and I hugged her. And I said to myself, ‘I'm not gonna let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself.’ I got out of my room. And that's when I decided with her help to do the dictionary. That was an amazing turning point. Lisa: And I can feel it, the emotion and what a wonderful mum you had. I mean, what a perfect thing to say when someone's down. Dr John: It was the most. If she hadn't said that, I might’ve come back to surfing. I might  be a surfer today. Lisa: Which would have been a good thing as well, probably because surfing is great. Dr John: It didn’t make money in those days. I'm in the mid 60s and 70s, early 70s. But,, now, the guys I served with, Laird Hamilton and- Lisa: Wow. He's a hero is amazing.  Dr John: Both Ben Aipa, Gerry Lopez, and these guys, those are the guys I served with. And so those guys went on to be incredible. Lisa: I wasn't aware of that. Dr John: I lived at the same beach park in Haleiwa, where Ehukai Beach Park is, near Pipeline, between Rocky Point and Pipeline. Laird Hamilton was dropped off by his mother there and lived there on the beach. I lived up on where the park bench was. We lived right there and I saw him on the beach each morning. He was seven, I was 16. He was going on seven, I was almost 17. We live there at the same place and Bill Hamilton saw him out there and grabbed him and took him in and trained them on surfing and found his mum and then married the mum. That's how I became. I hung out with those characters. Lisa: Legends. You became a legend in this direction and they have become a legend in a different direction. Dr John: Well, there's a book out called The High Surf by Tim Baker. That’s from Australia. He wrote a book on people that rode big waves. And he said, 'I'd like to put you in there.' I said, 'Well, I didn't go on to be the superstar in that area like these other guys.' He said, 'But I want you in there because you became a legend. Lisa: Became a superstar. Dr John: Yeah Lisa: Do you think that there's, you know, I come from a surfing family. My brother's a big wave surfer in New Zealand. I've tried and failed miserably, stuck to running. I was better at it. But do you think there's a correlation between the mindset that you developed as a surfer? Because going in those big waves is scary. It's daunting. It's frightening. It's challenging. It's teaching you a lot. Is there a lot that you took from that for this journey that you've been on? Dr John: Yeah, I didn't surf anything more than 40-foot waves. So I think that was about as good as about as big as you get back in the 70s. At 70s is when I was- Lisa: Oh, just a mere 40, it’s okay. Dr John: Well, 40-foot waves was the biggest thing out in outer reef pipeline was the big thing. They hadn't had tow-in surfing yet. That was just, that wasn't begun yet. So there was that idea, we had to catch those waves. That was not easy because they're too big to catch. you got to have big long boards, and you got to really paddle to get into those waves, and it's usually too late. But I think some of those, I used to surf 11 hours a day sometimes. When you're really, really committed to doing something, that's... Einstein said perseverance is the key to making things happen and if you just stay with something. So, if you're not inspired to do something, enough to put in the hours and put in the effort, and you don't have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of, kind of mentoring you, you probably are not going to excel as much. But I did that. And then I just converted that over into breeding 18 to 20 hours a day, feeding once I learned to read, so I just and I still voluminously read I mean, I read every single day. Lisa: That is incredible. And so you've taken that big wave mindset a little bit over into something else. So obviously, everything you, do you do to the nth degree, we can probably agree on that one. Dr John: I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. I move from water waves into electromagnetic waves. Lisa: Wow. Now, you run something called The Breakthrough Experience, which you've been doing now for 40 something years. This is a philosophy and a system and a program that really changes lives and has changed lives all over the planet. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've distilled from all this information that you have in your incredible mind? And what you teach in this course, and how this can actually help people? Today, right now listening to this? Dr John: Well, the breakthrough experiences, sort of my attempt to do with what that gentleman did to me when I was 17. I've done it 1121 times into that course. I keep records, and I'm a metric freak. Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important. Lisa: Podcast life. Dr John: Welcome to it. I thought that was off, but I didn't quite get it off. But whatever is highest on the person's values, priorities, whatever is truly deeply meaningful to them, the thing that is spontaneously inspiring for them to that they can't wait to get up the morning and do.If they identify that and structure their life by priority, delegating the lower priority things and getting on with doing that, they will build momentum, incremental momentum and start to excel and build what we could say is a legacy in the world. And so, the breakthrough experience is about accessing that state, and breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind,  transforming whatever experiences you have into 'on the way' not 'in the way.' So no matter what goes on in your life, you can use it to catalyse a transformation and movement towards what it is that you're committed to. And if you're not clear about it, we'll show you how to do it because many people subordinate to people around them. Cloud the clarity of what's really really inspiring from within them, and they let the herd instinct stop them from being heard.  I think that The Breakthrough Experiences is my attempt to do whatever I can, with all the tools that I've been blessed to gather to assist people in creating a life that is extraordinary, inspiring and amazing for them. And if I don't do whatever it takes in the program, I don't know when it's going to be. I've seen six year olds in there write books afterwards. I've seen nine year olds go on to get a deal with Disney for $2.2 million dollars. I've seen people in business break through plateaus. I’ve people have major issues with relationships break, too. I don't know what's gonna be. I've seen celebrities go to new levels. I've seen people that have health issues that heal. I mean, every imaginable thing, I’ve breaking through. I've seen it in that course. And it's the same principles applied now into different areas of life. In any other area of our life, if we don't empower, the world's going to overpower something. And I'm showing I want to show people how to not let anything on the outside world interfere with what's inside. Lisa: And you talk about, it's on the way, the challenges that we have to look at the challenges that we have and ask how is this going to actually help me get wherever I am. And this is something that I've managed to do a couple of times in my life really well, other times not so good. But where I've taken a really massive challenge, I had my own listeners, I had a mum who had a massive aneurysm five years ago, and we were told she would never have any quality of life again, massive brain damage. We know that's not happening on my watch. I'm going to, there is somebody in something in the world that can help with her. And this became my mantra that I was going to get back or die trying. That was that total dedication that I brought to her because of love. When you love someone, you're able to mobilise for the last resources that you have. And that nearly bloody killed me as far as the whole effort that went on to it, and the cost and the emotional costs, and the physical and the health and all the rest of it. It took me three years to get it back to health, full health. She's now got a full driver's license back and a full independent life back and as my wonderful mum again. And that was coming from a state of being in a vegetative state, not much over a vegetative state at least. Hardly any higher function, no speech, no move, be able to move anything. Dr John: That’s a book there. That's a book or a movie. Lisa: It's the book. Dr John: That's a book and a movie for sure. Lisa: Exactly. And this is very powerful. Because I saw this and when you're in the darkness, everybody is telling you there is no hope, there is no chance. And these are medical professionals who have been to medical school, who have a hell of a lot more authority than you. You just go, ‘No, I am not accepting it because that alternative means death, basically, decline and death in being in an institution. And that is not what I'm going to answer. I'm going to find somebody who can help me’ and I did. I found hundreds of people, actually, and this is what tipped me into doing what I'm doing now, is finding world leading experts to give me the next piece of the puzzle for her and for the people now that are following me so that I can help empower people, not to be limited by the people who tell us we can't do something. It's because that means basically they don't have the answer. Not that there is no answer, is my understanding. And they were right. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I did it and my mum is alive and she's well, and that book. I really want to empower people with a story. I see that same like they're obviously your passion. What you went through with your learning problems when you were young and your mum standing beside you has actually propelled you into this lifelong journey that I find absolutely fascinating because that passion, and I can see that passion in you, is still very much alive 48 years later because you're doing what your priority is. Dr John: I'm definitely doing what I love doing. It's interesting that your story reminded me of something that happened to me when I was 27. If you don't mind, I'd like to share this. So I graduated from my professional school. I had a bit of a reputation there of being kind of the taking the cream of the crop clients, patients that were turned down everywhere else. I just tackled it, see what we can do with it. And I got a family from Mexico, with a son that fell three stories off an apartment complex onto the ground on his head. He went into a coma, been in a coma for three and a half years. And the mother, they assumed he was dead a few times, but there was still a breath. There were still something. It wasn't a strong breath. You couldn't see it but you could put a mirror in front of you and get a little bit of breath out there. So he wasn't dead. And he had decerebrate rigidity. So his whole body was so rigid that when I saw him, you could lift up his feet and his whole body would rock. It was so stiff. His hands are like this. A classical decerebrate rigidity. And he had gone to, throughout different hospitals in Mexico, where he was from, and nobody checked them. They came to America, they went to the Medical Center in Houston, which is the largest Medical Center America. And they got rejected. No one would accept it. There's nothing we can do. They went out to the professional school that I'd gone to. And they said, ‘We can't do anything.’ But we know this interesting character. West Houston, if there's anybody that would try something this guy might try, who knows? And they sent him to my office. I remember when they came in, they carried him wrapped up in a white sheet, and laid him on the armrest of the chairs on my office. I looked out there and I saw this Mexican man and woman and seven or eight other kids in a family. I'm in this. At first, I didn't know what this was, this thing wrapped up in this sheet. They came down my hallway and I saw him going down the hallway. And like, ‘What on earth is this?’ Then they unveiled him in my exam room. And there was this 58 pound tube in his nose, coma case that was so stiff. It was ridiculous. I mean, he had gauze on his chin and his hand was rubbing on it and to protect the chin from having an ulcer. It had an odor to him in the head. It was just nothing. Just stare. He just sat there. But the mother and father said, ‘No, he's still alive. Please help.’ So I didn't really have much to do an exam with. So I got him, we took him in and did a film of his spine and his skull from the history. We found his foramen magnum, his skull was jammed down on a spinal cord and his spinal cord is up in his foramen magnum. This opening in the bottom of the skull. And I thought that night, when I was developing those films, and I looked at that I thought, 'I wonder what happened if I lifted that skull? If I've got that off? It could? Could something happen?' And I was scared because you just don't do that. He could die just instantly. I sent them over to this health food store to get him some liquid vitamins and minerals and amino acids to try to get nutrients in him because they're feeding him beans and rice with liquid. It was just crazy. So the next day came in. We had four doctors on a preceptorship visiting my office, one doctor that was working for me, one assistant, the seven or eight kids plus him and the mother and father in this little room. It was packed. And I said to him that I saw that on the film something that might have make him, help. I don't know, I can't guarantee it. But if we, if I did a particular manoeuvre, it might open up the brain function. And the little woman held on to her husband and she said, 'If he dies, he dies. If he lives, we rejoice. But please help us. We have nowhere else to go.' Lisa: Yeah. Wow. Dr John: She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling, like I had a power of a Mack truck in me. I don't know how to describe it. And I had this manoeuvre that we could do this, what they call the Chrane Condyle Lift, that can actually lift the skull up the spine. And I said to myself, if I'm not willing to have him die in my hands, I can't raise the dead with my hands as a little quote that I learned from an ancient healing philosopher. And I thought, 'Okay, we're, I'm going to take the risk, and just see what happens.' Because, I mean, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna do it. Because I mean, they've got no place to go and I only took a rip. As I lifted that skull with this powerful movement. He came out of his coma. He came right out of the coma. He screamed, and this whining noise you couldn't. It was not coherent. It was just this whining sound. The whole family went on their knees, they were Catholic. They just went to their knees and prayed. I was blown away. I saw the four doctors one of them ran down the hallway and vomited, couldn't handle it. The other just stared. And here's this boy squirming on the table. I walked out to let the family be with the child for a minute and just sat with one of my doctors. We sat there and just cried. Because we knew that the spinal cord expressed life in the body. But we didn't know what would happen if we took the spinal cord, it just scanned off. Theoretically, it could kill you. But there was some still life in the spinal cord. Anyway, this boy went on to gain 20 pounds up to 78 pounds. We took him off the tube, we got him to move, we had everybody in the family take a joint in his body and move his joints to remobilise him. Sometimes I think we probably tore some ligaments doing it. But we got mobility. And this boy came out of it. And I have a picture here with me of the boy actually graduating from high school. Lisa: You’re kidding me? Why is this not an? What is not? Why have I never heard the story?  Dr John: I don’t get to share it too often. I didn't many years ago. I haven't practised in a long time. But all I know is that that was a moment that you just, it's probably like you had with your mum when you saw incremental progress. Lisa: Yeah. Just grind. Dr John: And I think that that's a metaphor. That's a metaphor. It doesn't matter where you've come from, doesn't matter what you're going through, doesn't matter what you've been through. What matters is you have something that you're striving for. And are you willing to do some incremental movement towards that? What else just said is, he's got a diagnosis. Diagnosis means through knowledge, supposedly, but it could also mean die to an agnosis. You don't know. Even the doctors don't know. But the reality is,  he came out of the coma. And I had over the next few months, I had some amazing cases of a boy that was blind and couldn't walk, and all of a sudden see and walked again. I had a boy that was paralysed quadriplegic, was able to walk. I mean, I had some amazing stuff happen. When you're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do, you're willing to experience when other people don't get to experience. Lisa: Yep, it is just so powerful. And I'm just absolutely blown away from that story. Because, I mean, I know with my mum who was only in a coma for three weeks, and had stroke and so on, and in the specificity and the things that I've had to deal with. The whole vestibular system being completely offline, she has like a rag doll, having to read, programming her from being a baby, basically, to being an adult, within that three year period with a body that is now like 79 years old. And the doctors going like, your brain can't change that much. And in just going, I'm going to keep going. I'm only listening to people who tell me I can do something, I'm not listening to anybody who tells me I can't do something. And this is something that I've really integrated into my entire life like as an athlete, doing stupidly long ultramarathon distances. I was always told you can't do this, and you can't do that. It's impossible. And I was like, 'We'll see.' I'm going to throw everything in it. And that was my passion at the time have now retired from doing the stupid distances because I've got other missions on in life. But whatever it is, is always the big mission. And then everybody comes up against people who tell you, you can't do it. This is one of the biggest limiting things that I see. Dr John: That's what Einstein said, greatness is automatically pounded by mediocre minds.  Lisa: Wow. Dr John: I had a boy, a boy attend my breakthrough experience, who had a surfing accident and became arms and legs not working, He could move his neck. He got a little bit of function slowly into the hand that was about it, just a tiny bit. And I remember a man wheeling him in and having them kind of strapped to a wheelchair. I knew the father and I knew his brother. There were doctors who were colleagues of mine. And they brought him, they flew him literally from Los Angeles over to Texas to come to the breakthrough experience. I remember him looking straight down really depressed, suicidal, because he was a surfer and he was on his way to being a great surfer. If he couldn't surf, he didn't want to live kind of. I remember getting on my knees and looking up at him at this chair, and I said, 'It all determines inside you what you decide. I don't know what the limit you have in your body. I don't know what you can repair. I don't know what you can do. I don't want to say you can't. But all I know is that if you're going to, you're going to have to put everything into it. You're gonna have to have no turning back kind of attitude. There's got to be a relentless pursuit of your master plan to serve.' His name is Jesse Billauer. He made a decision at the Breakthrough Experience that nothing was going to stop him from surfing again, nothing. He is really, in the room was absolutely applauding him. The before and after in that weekend was so astonishing that it was tear jerking. Well, about 17 years ago, 16 half years ago, I had the opportunity to get, I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia. I had many homes in New York and different places. But I had one in the Gold Coast of Australia in Aria, lived in the penthouse of Aria. And all of a sudden, I found in my entrance of my penthouse, which you only can get into with my key somebody from downstairs, put it in there like mail, a DVD video of a surfing movie, called Stepping Into Liquid. And when I pulled that up and put that in there, there was Jesse Billauer, surfing. He found a way of using his head muscles, and designing a special vehicle, a transport system, a surfboard. He had to have somebody take them out into the water and push him. But once he got on a wave his head movements were able to ride and he was riding like 12 foot waves, which is 20 foot face waves. He was doing that. And he was an inspiration. He became friends with Superman who had quadriplegia and they became friends and he created a foundation to do something but he taught people how to go surfing as a quadriplegic. So when the wise big enough to house take care of themselves, you've proven that in your book. What little I've done in my life compared to some of these kind of stories is just astonishing what I see sometimes people do. I mean, mind blowing stuff that people, that determination to overcome that are absolute inspirations. Inspiration is a byproduct of pursuing something that's deeply inspiring and deeply meaningful, through a challenge that people believe is not possible. That's inspiration. Lisa: That's how we grow as a human race. We have these amazing people that do incredible things. And these stories, I mean, these are stories that aren't even out there in the world, in a huge way. There are hundreds of these stories and thousands of these stories and miraculous stories. These are the things that we should be talking about. Because why are we not studying the outliers? Why are we not? When I look at my book, or my story, which I share publicly and not a single doctor that had anything to do with my mum ever asked me, 'Well, how did you do it?' Nobody is interested in why she has not taken the normal path as long gone. Nobody has asked me what did you do? People do. My audience want to know why. The people that follow me, etc. But nobody that was involved in that case. And I see that over and over again.  Dr John: It's forcing him to face their own, you might say, belief systems about what they've been taught. There's an educated awareness by the herd and then there's an innate yearning by the master. The master transcends the herd, if you will. You can be a sheep or a shepherd. The shepherd is the one that goes out and does things that the sheep are not willing to do. But then once they do it, they'll rally around it. They are there watching you to be the hero instead of becoming the hero. Lisa: Wow. And why is it in the medical fraternity that there seems to be a very big herd mentality, like no one is scared to step outside of their norms, and they get slammed. I see this in academia and in science as well, where people who have brilliant ideas and hypotheses and studies and so on, they just get slammed because it's outside of the current paradigm.  Dr John: William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said 'To be great…' And Emerson followed in suit, 'To be greatest, to be misunderstood.’ William James basically said that the majority of people fear rejection from the multitudes because that was survival. People that are into survival follow the multitude. People that are in thrival create a new paradigm. At first they're going to be ridiculed. They're going to be violently opposed to Schopenhauer and Gandhi said, but eventually becomes self-evident. And you're either following a culture or building one. The people that do that build a new culture. They build a new culture of idea. Emerson said in his essays on circles, 'We rise up and we create a new circle of possibility. And then that becomes the new norm until somebody comes up and breaks through that concentric sphere with another circle.' It's like the four minute mile. I had a gentleman on my program the other day who is striving to be the fastest runner in the world. He's got bronze and silver medals, but he hadn't got the fastest running. And he's not stopping. He's working sometimes eight to 13 hours a day on this project. I believe that the way he's so determined to do it, and how he works on it, and he doesn't need a coach telling him what to do. He just does it. He's inspired to do it. He'll be the fastest runner, he won't stop till he's the fastest runner in the world. And that’s determination, that to be great at that one thing, find that one thing that you really target like a magnifying glass, on that you become the greatest at that thing.  Mine was human development, human behaviour. I want to have the broadest and greatest width of information about that. That's my one thing. But each individual has something that they can excel in, if they just define it, and give themselves permission at it, and say, thank you but no thank you to the opinions. The opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth that would circulate the most as a use value. There’s ton of those. But those opinions aren’t what matter. It's not you comparing yourself to other people, it's you comparing your daily actions to what's deeply meaningful to you, and the highest priority actions daily, that’s what it is. Lisa: How do you, this is a problem that I face, get to a certain level of success and achievement, and then you start getting lots of offers and opportunities and so on, and you start to lose the focus. You get distracted from the things that are happening in this day and age where the internet and everything that ends up like I get the shiny object syndrome. And say, 'Oh, this is an extremely interesting area of study, and I should go down that path. And then I go down that path, and then I go down that path.' It is adding to the whole picture of a general education. as someone who studied as much as you have, you've obviously encompassed all of these areas. But I think what I'm asking is, how do you find out what your highest priority is? And how do you get a team around you, so that you're not limited? I think there's a lot of business people that are listening to this, me included in this, who has struggling to get past a certain ceiling because the area of genius is one thing that they love and excelling at, and you'd like to spend all of your time doing that. But you're stuck in the groundhog day of admin and technology in the stuff that you hate. And not busting through because financially, you can't delegate to people. You also got to find people that are a good fit for you who can do the jobs, and then also have the finances to be able to break through to that near next level. Can you talk to that about? Dr John: Yes, absolutely. When I was 27 years old, I was just starting my practice. I was doing a little of everything, anything and everything, just to get the thing cranking. I had one assistant that I hired. But I realised I was doing way too many trivial things. And that'll burn you out after a while if you're doing stuff that's not really what your specialty is. I went to the bookstore and I got a book by Alec McKinsey called The Time Trap. I read this book. As I read it, I underlined it and extracted notes like I do. I decided to put together a little sheet for it. I'll share that because it was a goldmine. I made a list of every single thing that I do in a day, over a three month period, because each day I had sometimes different things to do. But I wrote down everything I might be doing in those three months in a day. I just wrote them all down. And I don't mean broad generalities like marketing or this type of thing or radiographs or whatever. I mean, the actual actions. The actual moment by moment actions I do in those categories. I made a list of those and it was a big list. And I looked at it. Then right next that list, every single thing I did from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, everything —  home, personal, professional. I wanted to know what my day looked. I want to be an honest, objective view of what am I actually doing with my day. Because if I want to create my life the way I want, I've got to take a look at what I'm actually doing because if I'm not doing things that give me the results, no wonder I'm not getting there.  I made that list, and right next to it, in column number two of six columns is how much does it produce per hour. Which is a measure of actually meeting somebody's need as a service and people willing to pay. How much is that produced per hour? And that was humbling because there are whole lot of stuff that I will do without pay. I was minoring in majors and majoring in minors. I was doing all kinds of stuff that was just cost, no return. I stopped and I looked at that, and that was humbling, and frustrating, and a bunch of stuff went through my mind. I mean, I just, but I had to be honest to myself, what does it actually produce? I extrapolate. If I spent two hours on it, what is it per hour? Cut it in half. If I spent 30 minutes, I’d double the number to get an idea what it is per hour. There's a lot of stuff that was not making anything and there was a few things that were making a lot.  The third column I wrote down, how much meaning does it have? How much is it that makes me inspired to get up and do it? I can't wait to do what people can't wait to get. Those are the things I want to target. So I looked at it on a one to ten scale, how much meaning it was. I made a list on a one to ten scale of every one of those items, how inspired am I to do that? And there's a lot of stuff on there that was not inspiring, that I didn't want to do. I thought, 'Hell. I went to ten years of college for this?' I made this list and I put this one to ten thing. And then I prioritised the tens down to the ones. I prioritise productivity down from the ones that made thousands of dollars an hour to nothing an hour. I just prioritise them. And then I looked. There were some that were overlapped, where the thing that was most meaningful and inspiring match where it’s most productive. I prioritise that based on the two together. And that was really eye opening. Then I went to the next one because I realised that if I don't delegate, I'm trapped. Then I put what does it cost? Every cost. Not just salary, but training costs, no hiring costs, parking costs, insurance costs, everything. What is the cost of somebody excelling at doing what it is I'm doing at a greater job than me? What would it cost? On every one of those items? The best I could do? I had to just guess on something, but I definitely did the best I could.  And then I prioritise that based on spread, how much it produced versus how much it cost. Then I put another column. How much time am I actually spending on average? The final column, I wrote down, what are my final priorities with all these variables? I did a very thorough prioritisation system there. I sliced those into ten layers. I put a job description, I put a job description on that bottom layer, and hired somebody to do that but bottom layer. It took me three people to get the right person because I had to learn about hiring. I didn't know how about, hiring. I finally got the first person there, and that was free. That allowed me to go up a notch. And then I hired the next layer. What I did is it allowed me to go and put more time into the thing to produce the most, which was actually sharing a message of what I was doing publicly, with speaking. Public speaking was my door opener. I just kept knocking out layers.In the next 18 months, my business tenfold in increase in income and business. I had 12 staff members and five doctors working for me in a 5000 square foot office from under 1000 square foot original office in 18 months. Because I said goodbye to anything that weighed me down. Anytime you do something that's lower on your values, and anytime something hone your value value yourself and the world values you when you value. It's waiting for you just to get authentic and live by the highest values, which is your ideological identity. The thing you really revolve around you. Mine was teaching, so I call myself a teacher, right? So whatever that highest value is, if you prioritise your day and fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn't fill up with low party distractions that don't, because it's now you're allowing yourself to be authentic. And it doesn't cost to properly delegate if you get the right people, and you go on and do what produces more per hour, it doesn't cost it makes sense. Lisa: That's the hard part, isn't it? As is growing. Dr John: You do your responsibilities. Go do the thing that knocks down the doors and goes and does the deals and then go and let them do all the crazy work. Like when I was 27, that's the last time I ever wrote a check or did payroll or looked at bills. I never looked at that again. Because that's a $20 an hour job and I could make way more speaking and doing my doctrine. So I thought, 'I'm not doing anything that's going to devalue me ever again in my life.' I've never gone back. 38 years, I've never gone back. Lisa: So systematise. This is a thing here, where I have a bit of a problem, a bit of a chaos, right? Dr John: I'm an ignoramus when it comes to anything other than research, write, travel, and teach. I'm useless. I'm not. I do jokes and say when I'm having I want to make love with my girlfriend. I tell her. I put my arms around I said, 'If I was to organise and have Hugh Jackman or Brad Pitt take care of lovemaking for you on my behalf and things like that, would you still love me?' One time if she said, 'No, I will still love you more.' I'm joking. That’s a joke. But the point is that if you're not delegating lower priority things, you're trapped. Lisa: And this is the dilemma, I think, of small businesses is giving that mix right and not taking on people before you can go to that next level. Dr John: But you go. You go to the next level by taking them on if it's done properly. Lisa: If it's done properly, because I've- Dr John: You want to make sure. That's why I have a value determination process on my website to determine the values of people I hire because if they're not inspired to do what I need to delegate, that's not the right person.You gotta have the right people on the bus, this column says. I have to be clear about what I can produce if I go and do these other things. And me speaking it, and doing the doctoring on the highest priority patients was way more productive financially than me doing those other things. So once I got on to that, I put somebody in place just to book speeches, and just to make sure that I was scheduled and filled my day with schedules with patients, it was a updated day and night. I've never gone back to that. I only research, write, travel, teach. That's it. Lisa: That's my dream. I'm gonna get there. Dr John: I don't do it. What's interesting is I became financially independent doing that because of that. I learned that if I don't value myself, and I don't pay myself, other people aren't going to pay me. If they're waiting for you to value you add when you value you, the world values you. You pay yourself first, other people pay you first. It's a reflection, economically, there. And that's what allowed me to do it. Because financial independence isn't for debauchery and for the fun life, in my opinion. It's for making sure that you get to do what you love because you love it not because you have to do it. Lisa: And having an impact on the world. But if you're stuck doing the admin and the technical, logical stuff, and the crap that goes along with the business. You're not impacting the world like you want to be impacting. Dr John: Weel, the individual that does the administration is impacting the world through the ripple effect by giving you the freedom to do it. Lisa: Exactly. Dr John: If that's what they love doing. That’s not what I love doing. But there are people that love administration, they love that stuff and love behind the scenes, I love doing that. Finding those people. That's the key. Lisa: Finding those people. I's given me a bit of encouragement because I've been in that sort of groundhog days I had to get through the ceiling and get to the next level of reach. Dr John: I finally realised that the cost of hiring somebody is insignificant compared to the freedom that it provides if you do your priority. Lisa: If you get your stuff right, and know what you… Dr John: Because the energy, your energy goes up the second you're doing what you love doing. And that draws business to you. Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, like doing what we're doing. Now, this is my happy place.  Dr John: We’re both in our element. This is why we're probably going to slow down. The point is, when you're doing something you love to do, when you're on fire, with kind of an enthusiasm, people come around to watch you burn. They want to see you on fire.  Lisa: I mean, they do, they do. And I've seen that in times in my life where I've been preparing for a big race or something, and I need sponsors. I just go out there.  At the start, I didn't know how to do a sponsored proposal, I didn't know how to do any of that fancy stuff. I just went out there and told the story. And by sharing the story, people were like, 'I want to get on board with this. That's exciting.' People would come on in and and when you don't know, one of the things that I've found in life is the less you know, sometimes the more audacious you are. When you actually h

John Vuong started his Toronto-based agency, Local SEO Search, in 2013 with the goal of helping small- to medium-sized businesses in North America, UK, and Australia improve digital presence in their local communities.   John had ten years in advertising and sales for print media directories with their online performance-based networks and then worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. Through this experience, he honed his understanding of how to dig out a business's gaps, opportunities and challenges, its potential customers, where those customers were located, what those customers wanted . . . and what businesses themselves were looking for in an agency. John explains that product characteristics, physical proximity, convenience, and/or services are only the beginning of the variables to consider in “positioning” a company. Whatever it is that a company's customers want needs to be prominent on its website. John says, “Make it easy for people to realize what you offer.” John believes “Google My Business” is “the biggest asset piece for the local space” – it is what sets local apart from traditional organic traffic. This link between Google search and maps is critical. Small business owners need to understand how people “shop, navigate, and search for information.” Websites at the local level need to be simple for Google to easily crawl and index user-relevant information.  Typical clients for this agency are professional service businesses (dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, and anything medical spa-ish), trades (e.g.; plumbers or roofers) and B2B businesses (e.g.; manufacturing, distribution, and e-com) – businesses that more competitive in nature, have higher revenue expectations, and have a higher lifetime customer value. John says the process of building a business takes time and work – that there are no shortcuts for things that are worthwhile. Local SEO Search has specialists that develop SEO strategy, build links, create content, and manage social media. The agency employs web developers and graphic designers. But even with that variety of services, the agency's focus is totally and simply on the attributes and signals Google uses to rank websites. John' strength is sales. Yellow Pages taught him a lot about business. He met business owners where the businesses had been in existence, not just for years, but for lifetimes. How? “They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it.” John sees the internet as the “new Yellow Pages.” When he started his agency, John had to learn how to deliver, how to hire and manage people, how to provide customer service. “There's so much more to running a business than just sales,” he admits. John values honesty and hard work and admits that he “went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked.” Today, he says, he's “just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people” who “have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means.” Those are the people he feels he can best help. John can be reached on his agency's website at: www.localseosearch.ca.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by John Vuong, owner of Local SEO Search based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Thanks a lot for having me, Rob. I'm excited to be on your show today. ROB: Super exciting to have you here. Why don't you start off and tell us about Local SEO Search? I think we might know what your superpower is, but why don't you tell us about it?  JOHN: Yeah, definitely. I started this agency 8 years ago, back in 2013. My sole purpose is really to help the small to medium size businesses service their local community and really help them for their digital presence, so make them appear more visibly on search, in particular Google. ROB: Interesting. We've talked to some different SEO firms, but a lot of times they're more on that “trying to rank for a keyword,” that B2B software client. How does that work differently with local? How do the tactics and mindsets differ when you're trying to be the pizza place somebody finds when they look locally? JOHN: There's a lot of different nuances. In my background – and maybe I'll take a step back before I even start with starting the agency. I actually worked 10 years prior in advertising/sales, and I dabbled in traditional advertising/sales and print media directories, some online affiliate performance-based networks, and then I resided and worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. For me, I really learned a lot about local businesses, understood what gaps, opportunities, and challenges they had, and what they wanted to look for or to in an agency, or someone that they wanted to build their trust and relationship with. When I started this company, it was all about understanding them, asking the right questions, and understanding what they really, really cared about in terms of staying connected and harvesting a good relationship long term. For me, that's all I needed to get into this agency world without knowing how to run an agency. Working at Yellow Pages is not your traditional digital agency. It was more traditional channel print media, telephone book. But I learned a lot from a big company, how to run a real company. In terms of local, the big thing for me was understanding who their customers were, understanding their challenges/problems, and ultimately the customers that were consuming their product or service. Fast forward to now Google and how local sets themselves apart from the traditional organic traffic, Google My Business is the biggest asset piece for the local space. How you understand and claim and verify and rank for a lot of terms to be on that prominent proximity or relevant map is so critical for a lot of these small business owners because that's how people shop, navigate, search for information. For you as a business owner, I feel you have to understand what your customers are looking for. The keyword gap analysis, great, but positioning so that you actually know exactly that pizza shop, what people are looking for, seeking out – is it the weekly specials? Is it the different toppings? The convenience factor, proximity, free pick-up, Uber, whatever? There's so many different variables. Understand that. Make it prominent on your website, and then make sure that Google recognizes that it's inside your schema markup, your sitemap. Make it easy for people to realize what you offer that's accessible and simple for your customers. ROB: Dig in a little bit just for a moment on schema markup. That's something I think some of the amateur SEOs like me out in the world might know less about. JOHN: Schema markup is just the way you sort your information on your website so that Google can index things. It's another way to add attributes within your website. The key about everything you do in terms of not just digital, but in your business, is to make it as efficient as possible for your customers. The more simplistic it is, easy it is – just like your sitemap on your website, making it so simple that Google can go in there and crawl it without trying to navigate five layers deep on the content piece that's relevant for the user. If you mark it up so it's simple, so that Google doesn't have a problem indexing your site, it allows you to then make it a clean transfer of information/content to the actual users and make it easy for Google to then crawl and index your site. ROB: Thank you for digging into that. It's an interesting through-line going back to your work with Yellow Pages. You've been helping businesses be found by people for longer than you've had a business. That's pretty fascinating. I wonder what a typical customer looks like for you. I might've pulled you down a path with that pizza restaurant example, but who are we talking about for your customers, usually? Are we talking about doctors or lawyers, home professionals, retail businesses? What's the meat and potatoes of who wants to be found locally and wants some help with that? JOHN: Our typical persona/avatar type of client is the professional service-based type of business, whether it be dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, anything medical spa-ish, as well as trades, which are the plumbers, roofers, etc. And of course, the B2B kind of businesses – manufacturing, distribution, e-com, etc. The reason for that is typically it's more competitive in nature, and in a local marketplace – I live in Toronto, Canada, and it's one of the larger metropolitan areas in all of Canada. There's more competition in dentists than there are barbershops. Therefore, if you are in business for a higher ticket service type sale of your client – and the lifetime value of a dentist is 7 years – so the value of acquiring a customer, you want the good type of avatar, a good ideal lead nurture of a client. Understanding that whole process, understanding who you want to cultivate, understanding how you want to portray your brand or yourself as a business cultivates the best lead source if you do SEO properly with the right company, yourself, or freelancer contractor. It doesn't matter. If you do it properly, you should have an inbound lead flow of quality clients begging for you, for your service. Those are typically my type of clients because of the price point, the value that they're looking for, and how difficult it is to get new customers in any other form of media channels, from social to paid ads to traditional, tradeshows, print media, radio, television. There are so many different media sources, but I feel SEO still cultivates the best lead source of your ideal type client. ROB: That makes sense. You started walking down a path I was interested to get into. Obviously, SEO is the name you hang on the front door of the business, but you mentioned other marketing channels. Have you engaged more deeply into paid and content and some other things? Or have you kept it pretty tight around SEO? JOHN: My agency focuses on SEO only, but there's pillars within SEO. We take care of the strategy; we have specialists. We also have link builders. We have content creators. We have web developers, graphic designers, social media management. But that is all attributes and signals of what Google is looking for to rank a website. Anything that is required to rank a website, that's what we touch. Anything outside that, which is usually paid – like if you're doing paid ads on social or Google Ads or behavioral networks, performance networks, email, that's different. We only focus on being a full-service SEO agency that's more of a boutique agency. ROB: You must've had clients, though, ask you to manage their paid budget. How have you looked at that temptation, potentially, and said no to it? JOHN: We have that daily, actually. A lot of clients know they need SEO, and I tell them there's a ton of agencies that offer full-service from paid ads to SEO to content, and they break it up, and that's fine, a la carte. I just want to be really good at one thing and do it right and be known for it. There's different strategies, different agencies out there. I just feel there's a big enough marketplace for being the best at one thing. If you're known for doing it really well, that's what people know you by, and that's enough business to be had. I could dabble into digital, like paid ads, and hire someone in-house and take it over, but I'm not a true believer in that. [laughs] I have to believe in it at a very high level to really be a big, strong proponent of selling it. ROB: Right. Super-duper interesting to keep that sort of focus. You mentioned your journey, you mentioned coming through that Yellow Pages background. It almost seems like there might've been a journey for you within that previous role before starting the company where you started to see something shift. What was your journey from “Hey, I'm working at Yellow Pages, I'm working with these businesses” to “I'm going to go start my own business”? Because it's a big difference between having someone who pays your bills and figuring out how to pay your own bills. JOHN: The journey definitely is something that I feel is a mindset journey for a lot of people. When I was at Yellow Pages, I was there for 5 years. I learned a ton about sales. I had the privilege to meet with thousands of business owners, and I was being mentored by them on what it takes to a business owner. And that's something that was invaluable at that time, for me to then pick their brain on what really mattered in not just business ownership, but in life. These people were so grateful to be ultra-curious about how they ran their business, what really made them happy, and what ultimately they wanted to do for their community, for their family, to have a good lifestyle. That's what resonated with me, along with, of course, selling ad space in a more dated format like the print directory, which allowed me to know that there was a gap in opportunity in the marketplace. People wanted to go with someone they trusted, or a company, but they didn't know how to do it and what was involved. So I wanted to be that transition piece. As you know, paid ads in the Yellow Pages was a diminishing return on investment. People were spending more than ever, getting fewer people transacting. The return on investment was lower, and people like myself were spending more time on Google to do search results. I knew there was an opportunity digitally. I didn't know anything about SEO at that time. I just knew there was a gap in the marketplace to add an idea, and I knew there were people willing to pay for someone or something to help them. That's all I really needed to get my foot in the door. But it was all timing as well. I did extremely well at Yellow Pages and ads, so I was doing well in sales. My wife gave me the go-ahead, because she had a stable job opportunity. For me, it was more, look, I can go get another job, maybe work at Google, work at another ad agency or whatever – or I can try something. Basically, she said, “Go for it.” The first couple years it was a struggle to learn how to run a business. [laughs] More so than the SEO thing at all. My strength was sales, so I was out there selling from Day 1. The first two months, I already had 10 clients. So, the sales aspect wasn't the challenge; it was more about now I had to figure out how to deliver and hire people and manage, customer service. I realized there's so much more to running a business than just sales. ROB: For sure, that is an interesting part of the journey. I wonder a little bit – I don't know if Yellow Pages ever tried this, but I know a lot of the TV and radio stations and the conglomerates around them that used to sell to local businesses tried to make this transition. They've been selling TV ads, radio ads, billboards to these local businesses for forever. A lot of them tried to make the jump into selling digital advertising and selling SEO, but it just doesn't seem like that transition worked for them. What is it that made it hard for those organizations to turn the corner where they already had the client relationship and build up that new line of business? JOHN: I think the biggest barrier for them was they were so comfortable with the margins they had. With a big company like Yellow Pages, they were so comfortable with a directory that they billed monthly for ads where they printed an ad, and the cost was less than one-quarter of a month. I knew the cost and the margin of retaining a customer and getting them to buy ads in their asset, which was the printed book. Now you go digital and the margins are a lot less; to get into that and then not know what expectations and profitability is, it's going to be bad on their shareholders because ultimately it's all about big business. For me, that's where this was a huge gap. I'm realizing, now that I've been doing this for 8 years, why do these business owners gravitate towards smaller boutique companies? Because the big guys will try to cut corners for cost – not deliver on the actual results. They're trying to do as little as possible and earn as much money as possible. ROB: And they're not used to doing the execution at all. You put something in a book and you're done versus managing a relationship, actually having to do execution, having to apologize. I'm sure something goes wrong sometimes in the Yellow Pages, but not the same way – I know of an ecommerce site that stood up their ecommerce site and WordPress had a setting that said “Don't Index Me.” That was kind of a problem for their SEO on a site migration. It doesn't usually happen that way in print. JOHN: Exactly. Again, digital is so multi-touchpoint and so many people need to be involved. With traditional media, like newspaper, flyer, tradeshow, radio, television, they already own their asset piece. It's a sunk cost. So, for them, it's all about ad spend and people. When you look at what is required for digital to perform, you invest a ton of money. For these companies that were so reluctant to spend and invest, and so comfortable with that profit margin, very difficult to get that mindset. Especially when they're older in terms of the older generation. They're okay with the status quo. They don't really forward-think like what we see today. As digital agencies, we have to look ahead. We have to stay ahead of the curve. ROB: You mentioned those first couple of years where you were learning a lot about running a business. You mentioned that you had some customers pretty early. Was there a point where it felt like you had turned a corner and you said, “Okay, we're not just trying this, we're doing this” and hit escape velocity where you'd built up a team now where you saw that ahead of you? JOHN: My goal to do this was either commit, do it properly, or not do it at all. For me, my intention was spend less time in the business eventually and learn as much as I can, early days. Because I did have a family but I didn't have children yet, I had time. I didn't have a lot of money because I bootstrapped everything. It was like, I've got to figure this out. I've got to make this happen. I've got to make this work. I didn't really have a digital background. No technical skills, no SEO skills. I had to learn it. I had to figure it out. My background was always just sales, but then I had to learn how to manage and operations and bookkeeping and all that other stuff that I needed to run a business. But that's the challenge of business ownership and entrepreneurship. You should always try to grow. You should always try to learn. And there are going to be tons of mistakes along the way. You have to acknowledge it, move ahead, and get better every single day, every hour. Challenge yourself. Figure out, what are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? Talk to people and get out there and learn. There's so much to it, and we only have a 30-minute podcast, so I don't even know where to start because there's so much I've learned over the last 8 years. ROB: It's such a big journey. I think you came into SEO at a pretty interesting time. SEO has an early baggage of being a gimmick business rather than a discipline business, or at least some people were very much in the gimmick business for a while. Were there any gimmicks or tactical short-term wins that you had to look at early on and either steer away from or get bit by once or twice to learn – I feel like what I would say is the best way to be found is to be worth finding, but it took us a while to get there in the SEO industry. JOHN: Yeah. There's so many hacks, fast ways. This is life in general, I feel. I was very fortunate working at Yellow Pages, where I met these business owners that were generationally in business – not just 5, 10, 20 years, but think about different lifetimes – 50, 100, 150 years. How did they survive without the internet? Internet's only been around for 15-20 years, right? Google has only really taken off in 10-15 years. It's transitioned and transformed the way we shop and our behaviors. Imagine these businesses. What did they do so well to keep them sustained? They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it. If you take that foundation and you put it now digitally, people don't put that much effort in the foundation of a business online. They're looking for shortcuts. And in life, typically there's no shortcuts. Just like any profession – not just in business and entrepreneurship, but profession as in if you're a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber, is there a shortcut to become one of them? Probably not. You probably have to go to school. You probably have to apprentice. You probably have to work as an associate. You've got to put your years in, training in, learning in. By the time you put in your 10, 15, 20 years, then maybe you have enough savings to start your own business. But now, with internet and with a lot of social media and videos and podcasts and everything, people find that it's easier for knowledge and information to be transferred. You can access information at your fingertips. There's so much information and intel at your disposal. However, there's not a lot of experience at your disposal. A lot of people think there's easier ways, faster ways to earn a living, and they get bitten by these videos or ways to do it. Just like a sports athlete, I'm all about mindset. I'm all about habits. If you look at one of the top basketball players – Michael Jordan, LeBron James – or Tiger Woods – how many years of training did they have to harvest? How many hours, how many years of dedication from help, practice, failures, to actually become that? People forget that in terms of business, and that's why in the first couple years of business ownership, a lot of people fail. They watch a video, they read a book, they listen to a podcast, and they purchase something on Wix or Squarespace or Shopify and build a site thinking, “Now I have a business.” But they don't have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means. That's the gap that I'm saying. In terms of what I've seen over the years, I'm more a mature business now because I've learned from the type of clients I want to work with versus the type of clients that are not even real business owners yet because they're not profitable or they don't know how to run a business. I don't want to train someone how to run a business to be working with them, if that makes sense. People that are starting off or have an idea aren't my clients. ROB: Right. Those clients tend to go away. It's a great point about the athletes and about the experience. I think I heard you mention before “I didn't have kids yet,” which makes me suspect you may have them now?  JOHN: Yeah. ROB: So I think because you have experience, you don't have the time you used to have. Tiger Woods isn't as young as he used to be, and at one point he had to retool his entire swing to stay competitive, and there are still things he changes in his game now. Because he's not as young as he used to be, now he has to heal two broken legs, I think. That's what I think I saw, I don't know. But he's going to figure out and adapt, and experience is going to be the thing that gives him what maybe having raw energy and pure physical prowess gave him early on. We still have to work all those muscles. But it's a great point, a great analogy. JOHN: Yeah, ultimately it's mindset, right? What you feel will be what you want to do for a very long time. A lot of business owners are in it for the wrong reasons. They're chasing money or chasing fame and glory or trying to be the best, but they don't put in the work to become it. Business ownership is the same way. SEO is the same way. Digital ad agencies are the same way. I'm not selling a fake promise. I'm being authentic in terms of the journey. I want people to realize how long it takes, what's involved, and let them make an informed decision. The more you're up front with any transaction or interaction you have with your customers, the more likelihood they're going to stay with you for the long term. ROB: You're still doing it. You have more people, you have in some ways more opportunities, but also more problems. So, what is it at this point that makes it worth it to you? JOHN: I'm really just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people. The challenge with digital agencies – and again, I'm not your traditional agency coming from the ad world. I come from Yellow Pages, and that's all I built my business around. Long-term trust in clients that have a problem, fixing the problem and answering it. It's not rocket science, but it's very simple. People overcomplicate things with funnels and landing pages and different ways to try to cultivate new clients. I'm the type of guy that just went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked. These things that really foundationally set these business owners apart when they first started still apply. People are always looking for shortcuts; there's no shortcuts. ROB: And it turns into – generically, not speaking specifically to the business – saying you're in the business of helping good people achieve what they want in their business in a way that you're skilled and enjoy. Isn't that what I think most people want from their work? JOHN: Not only will I give it all my best effort and my team will do what we possibly can for all clients, I'm trying to cultivate good, ideal customers that you want coming to you and positioning yourself as a thought leader. So, for me, I think a lot of business owners need to realize why they're in business, who they want to go after as their ideal type of client, and then focus heavily on that versus trying to take anything they can. Yes, maybe when they're first starting, you're doing that because it's like survival mode. But then you realize as you mature in your business what you really want to be known as. Who do you want to cultivate as an ideal customer? Just have fun. A lot of people forget about why they started the business in the first place. ROB: That's great advice, John. You've shared a lot of good lessons along your journey. Is there anything else you can think of – a key moment, a key decision you want a do-over on if you could? Obviously, we can only move forward, but if you could change something on the journey? JOHN: For me, I wouldn't, actually. Even though I made a ton of mistakes – I mean, I still make mistakes every day. I'm learning. I'm constantly eager and I'm hungry to want to be better. I don't have to be the best, and that's okay too. I'm always trying to get better. I know there's gaps in the agency. I know there's gaps in client expectations, and we can do more. I'm all about generating more value for my customers, taking care of my clients, taking care of my staff, and being a better human and living a better life of joy and happiness. If I'm enjoying that entire journey and process, that's what being a business owner should be about. ROB: That's fantastic, John. When people want to find you and Local SEO Search, where should they go to find you? JOHN: They can check out my website. It's www.localseosearch.ca. We're located in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients all across North America, UK, and Australia. For us, it's all about helping good people and informing them with decisions and letting them decide. I equip people with insight and knowledge, and they make their own decisions of who they want to work with and what they want to do. But just be informed. I think that's the biggest thing about SEO. Know what you want and go out there and be realistic, because there's experts or a lot of information out there; you just don't know who to trust and what that really means. ROB: When one goes to Google and types in “local SEO search,” I can affirm that you're proving your craft. You are the number one organic result for “local SEO search.” Not only that, there's like four or five ads above you, which means people really want that spot. It seems like there's some evidence here that you can do your job, John. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: It's pretty cool. And you're above people like BrightLocal and folks who would really like that slot. That's pretty impressive. JOHN: Yeah, Whitespark, BrightLocal. All of them have their own business. I feel just stay the course. It's a long game. Have fun, enjoy it. ROB: Sounds good, and we shall. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great to hear your own journey and wisdom from it. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms. In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 “shopping” platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.  John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) “accessible” for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website “attributes,” and these and other security measures need to be maintained. Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible. Although John currently sees Webflow as ”the future,” an organization's decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations. Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically. One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to “web-hook” different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a “thank you for your interest, here's another form.” Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free. John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site. 5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John's SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed. John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree.  John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency's website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here, man. Thank you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize. JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I'm the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas. ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp? JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code. I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who's a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That's when I was hooked. As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify. Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It's easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we've been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope. ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they'll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone's starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow? JOHN: That's a great question. If they're an existing business – let's say they've been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn't recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn't get a ton of traffic. If they're doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we'd probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design. If the business doesn't get a ton of traffic and they're not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want. You don't necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you're open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular. The good point about that is there's a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It's an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it. With Webflow, it's a little bit newer, so it's smaller. But the level to entry isn't as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn't need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you're pretty much good to go. ROB: Wow, it sounds like you're deep on the Zapier stuff. That's a whole other unlock there. JOHN: Oh man, it's like a cheat code, dude. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren't as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit. JOHN: I'll give you a precursor. The first thing is I'm a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I'm a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture. With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I'll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone's filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date. Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, “Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?” Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, “Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here,” and then we've connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps. ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren't going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future? JOHN: It really depends on the client because they're both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It's easy to add blogs. It's easy to update pages once either you're using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It's pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy. What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it's a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you're a web design agency, there's one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, “Hey, here's a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this.” Because sometimes you'll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, “Yeah, we don't really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us,” you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them. ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What's the origin story here? JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset. Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That's when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital. I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn't need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn't really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn't have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely. When other agency owners were like, “You need an office, you need this, you need that,” I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location. ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through? JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It's just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn't really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that's what we work by. This is when something's due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park. For me, ultimately you work when you're comfortable because I feel like that's when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system. ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they're involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you're involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing? JOHN: For me it's about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we're just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle. For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn't see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn't a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I've seen some beautiful illustrations, and we've leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn't see that and I saw that opportunity. When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, “Hey, this is what we're going to start building out,” and then it's essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It's almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity. BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we've already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I'm really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle. ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there's some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects? JOHN: Essentially, for me it's really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I'm not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold. I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn't get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%. At first, I was like, man, I'm a failure. I didn't do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience. So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I'm able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project. ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn't succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It's an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it. JOHN: Exactly. ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you've learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero? JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I'm working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it's just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot. I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would've helped me really streamline my process and be like, “This is the process we go through every time we take on a client” as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services. Secondly, I wish I would've started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, “These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer.” But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process. Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it. ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that's going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work? JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you'll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they're fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they're able to balance that and know that it's an open work environment where they'll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity. So, for me, it's really finding someone that's a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset. ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn't initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you've discovered in some way as you've built the agency? JOHN: It's definitely something I've discovered while building the agency. There's a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I'm pretty much the project manager. I'm the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey. I love being in that role because I'm able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I'm able to convey my ideas to the team, and we're able to implement together on what works best.  ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there's probably some future date where you're thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That's probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don't know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you're not doing much of that anymore. One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four? JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec. ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four? JOHN: Oh man, there's a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there's so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it's already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry. But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there's new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don't have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, “Hey, this is how it works,” do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It's a totally different dynamic. ROB: I've also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I've heard often there's a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer. JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there's been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it's almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there's been a dynamic shift.  Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don't necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don't want to go through that long process. They're trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy. ROB: I understand that. It's nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that's coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally? JOHN: Man, I'm a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It's an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you're able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That's something I've been hearing a lot of buzz about. In regards to the education side of digital, I'm really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor's, but there's just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we're doing. So, I'm really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it's super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I'm ultimately excited for that. ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space? JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily. We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills. ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training. JOHN: Oh yeah, that's what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it's called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don't do anything with the business. It's automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it's just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive. ROB: Wow, that's excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they're not quite Zoom, but they're pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable “get an ecommerce store online” platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn't quite gotten around to it yet? JOHN: I'm glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I'm Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that's easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product. And that's what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner's Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it's made for commerce. People that are starting out like, “I want to sell some t-shirts” can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It's really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks. ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work? JOHN: Yes, it's a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It's ridiculous. [laughs] ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want. JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don't even have to touch the inventory. ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up? JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That's where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I'm on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that's pretty much where I'm at. ROB: Excellent. What's the “D” for in John D. Saunders? JOHN: David. ROB: Excellent. Perfect. JOHN: I have that because there's a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that “D” in there to add a little difference. ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.  JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I'm happy to be here. ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye. JOHN: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

In this episode of Small Business Snippets, I chat to John Tusa, author, journalist and one of the founding presenters of BBC’s Newsnight.  He shares his experiences of the boardroom and how risk analysis and cumbersome objectives can overshadow your organisation's core purpose.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on leadership and creativity in business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Here's the transcript of John Tusa's podcast interview Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have John Tusa, author, journalist and one of the founding presenters of BBC’s Newsnight. He’s served on several boards including The British Museum, the Clore Leadership Programme and, since 2014, the European Union Youth Orchestra. On top of that, John was the managing director of the BBC World Service and London’s Barbican Centre. Today we’re going to be talking about the secrets of the boardroom, as outlined in his latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom. Anna: Hi John. John: Hi Anna. Anna: How are you doing? John: Pretty well, thank you. Looking forward to this, looking forward to talking to you. Great. So as mentioned in the intro, I’m going to start with your latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom. In the book, you talk about the importance of having a plurality of expertise, but at the same time make clear that artistic institutions and not-for-profits are very different from businesses. Are there any transferrable lessons from these types of boardroom to the business boardroom?   John: Well actually, my guru around governance, who was a major American businessman called Kenneth Dayton from Minneapolis, and he said that there is no difference between arts boards and cultural boards and corporate boards and, if anything, my British contacts said that cultural boards are much more complicated than business boards because they have so many different layers of accountability. There aren’t two worlds, there’s only one world and that is governance and the relationship between the supervisory board and the executive board. And, if anything, arts and culture boards are more complicated than the others. That’s not me saying it; that’s businesspeople saying it.   Ahh, that is interesting. I understand that, at times, the CEO of a company can also be the chairman [of the company board], but they can be very different roles. How do they differ, exactly? John: The CEO, managing director – call them what you want – are responsible for management, for actually running the place. And they are also responsible for devising the strategic direction of the organisation. The supervisory board are there to advise, help, encourage, monitor, warn and, if necessary, get rid of the chief executive. Again, my great American guru, Kenneth Dayton, said that governance is governance, that is, you look after the overall organisation, and management is management – and you mustn’t confuse them. And that is why anyone who thinks they can be a chairman and managing director, is riding readily, and speedily, for trouble. They’re separate functions. Somebody defined the role between the chairman and the chief executive as partnership, but separation. That is close partnership until the time that you have to sack them. That is an absolutely essential relationship – and a tension – but a constructive tension, at the heart of the governance management business. Right – so this is typically one of the most turbulent relationships you’d find in the boardroom? John: They can be. But on the other hand, I had at least two, maybe three, very good relationships with either the chairman when I was chief executive or the chief executive when I was chairman. And when you get it right, it is extremely productive, it’s very enjoyable and it’s very good for the organisation concerned. Let’s be quite clear – any organisation which has a bad relationship between the chair and the chief executive is in real trouble – and I saw several of those. You can’t take too much trouble over getting that relationship right and making sure the relationship is right. One of the key things about it is absolute openness and transparency. I said to my chief executive at the University of the Arts London, ‘You will always hear it from me first. You will never hear rumours and you will never hear gossip. If there’s anything to deal with, you and I will deal with it first – alone and properly.’ If you do it that way, you have trust, you have openness, you have transparency – and you can have a terrific and successful relationship. For a business owner or director who is fairly new, who isn’t used to the boardroom environment, perhaps is intimidated by it, what advice do you have for them in terms of survival? John: It shouldn’t be survival, in the sense that it is a key part of the relationship. If you are whatever size of enterprise and you have a supervisory board, the assumption is that it is a constructive partnership. But, as I mentioned before, the supervisory board mustn’t interfere in management. And also, a chief executive must make sure that the supervisory board doesn’t interfere in governance. It may be necessary sometimes to say ‘look, this is an executive decision’ or ‘this is part of management’ but it ought not to be a relationship of fear and, in any case, the chief executive should always have some idea of who the chair will be bringing on to the supervisory board. The really important thing is that the chair has to make sure that members of the trustee board are there to provide their individual skills, yes, but also to give good overall advice, but not to interfere. On that basis, it should be positive, harmonious, constructive and lead to the success of the organisation. How about managing tensions that come up between member of the board – what’s the best way to go about resolving those? John: It all depends what they are, but if there are tensions between individual members, you might have to decide that one of them is in due course invited to step down. Or it’s very important for the chair to make it clear if a member is overstepping their mark, being too intrusive, taking up too much time or being too unnecessarily dominant. The chair is responsible for the way the board works and they have to make it clear. I had one case at the University of the Arts London where I was chairman of the court of governors and one of the members of the court was the trade union representative and he refused to understand that he was there to look after the interests of the university as a whole and not just the trade union members. He would stand up and he would harangue the court as if we were a trade union meeting. I put up with this for two meetings and then I had a huge row with him and told him that this was not an acceptable way of behaving. It was a big public row, I didn’t enjoy it and in a way I regretted it but it made it clear to him and to everybody that that was not how the court was going to run and it worked very much better afterwards.    Anna: In the book you talk about managing egos. I suppose it’s just a case of reading the situation and on balance knowing how to deal with different types of personality in the boardroom. John: Yes, in general and overwhelmingly, the people I sat on boards with, who are people with real authority and substance and responsibility in the areas they came from, overwhelmingly understood that they were there to support the organisation. You are holding in trust for others. It’s not something where you play individual games with it. And overwhelmingly, the people I sat on boards with understood that very well and left their egos at the door. Absolutely. In the past I knew you’ve spoken about having ‘the wrong ambition’. Tell me a little more about what you mean by that and how it can affect your standing as a leader. John: I think that sometimes in life, and this is nothing to do directly with governance, that you may misjudge what your abilities are or what you might be doing. If you want this example, the worst one was when I decided to accept the offer to be head of a Cambridge college and I did that for all the wrong reasons. I did that because it seemed a posh thing to do, which it was. It seemed a good address, which it was. It was absolutely the wrong job for me. I shouldn’t have touched it and I lasted around six or seven months. There’s a sense of what can I do, what can I do well and when am I being prodded by a false ambition and false vanity? That’s an important part of self-preservation. There may also be some times when you shouldn’t accept a chairmanship. For a very short time, I had the post of chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum and chairman of the University of the Arts London. That was, in retrospect, very unwise. Fortunately, the people at the University of the Arts London thought, ‘well, if he’s going to be chairman of the V&A as well, it’s obvious that that will be his first priority’ and at a very early stage said, ‘look, we’re worried about this, and we don’t think it will work. Would you like to think about it?’ And when I thought about it, I realised that they were absolutely right. It won’t work and once again, I’ve gone into that for the wrong kind of ambition. There will be a clash, and because I’d said yes to the University of the Arts London first, I stood down from the chair of the V&A. So that was the wrong kind of ambition and thank goodness, I was saved from getting into, what could have been, a very confused situation. Talking more about the board as a whole, in terms of chaos and crises, there’s possibly no bigger than what we’ve been experiencing over the past months. How do you manage difficulties in the boardroom when you’re going through something like a global pandemic?       John: With difficulty, and I think I’d try to go back to the basic principles of management and governance. Say, if I were chair of some organisation, I would expect the board of management to come up with a strategy – six months, one year, eighteen months, two years – first a strategy for survival, then a strategy for development then a longer term strategy. That would be put to the supervisory board, we would look at what the financial implications were, decide whether it was doable or not doable and then there would be a process of the supervisory board reviewing what management suggested, sometimes suggesting less, sometimes suggesting more, sometimes suggesting that they should be more ambitious in these times. You can’t, for example, because there’s a pandemic, just say ‘we’ll stop doing anything’ because actually, the implications are too great. So the times are tough but the way that people behave in them makes it even more important that they behave as a good board and executive together should behave. The behaviour shouldn’t change.    I’d like to go a little bit off-piste here. You’ve said that the BBC increasingly exercises ‘business dogma over creative values.’ What do you mean by that and how do you maintain creative values in a growing business? John: I come back without apology to ‘why are we here? Why are you here? Why is the organisation here? Why is the new organisation starting up?’ Because somebody wants to do something.   Business tools are just that: they’re a set of tools. If you are observing them and that’s all you’re doing, I don’t think that you’ll ever succeed. There are toolkits to help you succeed. What worries me about the BBC is to, too often, they go into forms of business behaviour which lose sight of the nature and the purposes of broadcasting and programmes and the needs of the audience. I’ll give you one example which I think may help. That is the whole business of risk analysis. Everyone says you need risk analysis and you’ve got to be very serious, you’ve got to know what’s coming over the hill. On one occasion we were looking at risk analysis for the university at the University of the Arts London. By the time the centre had listed its risks, every one of the six colleges had listed their risks and different faculties had listed their risks, it was about six or seven pages and, as I recall, about 130 risks. It’s ludicrous. And it was the chair of the audit committee, who’s an accountant, who said ‘I can’t deal with this, nobody can deal with this’. He said ‘let’s have eight, ten, a dozen, maybe – a dozen main strategic risks. He said let’s get rid of the rest. This becomes a separate activity in its own right, dreaming up risks. It’s ludicrous. And he also said, ‘if you’re going to have a risk register, why not have an opportunity register?’ He said that risk and opportunity are different sides of the same coin. Anna: Yeah, I understand. And I think it’s a good exercise for business owners to have this opportunity register. John: Can I also say about objectives? A good colleague of mine, actually he was the chair of the British Museum and he used to run Unilever. On one occasion, he was at the gathering of chairs of the major cultural institutions, had a meeting organised by the department of culture, media and sport. They were discussing – the chairs and the department, ministers and so on, the whole business of objectives. This man who used to chair Unilever said, ‘ you know, in my years of chairing Unilever, we would set about seven or eight objectives, and if I got most of the people, most of the time, to work to half a dozen of them, I thought we were doing very well.’ And he noticed that the secretary of state looked a little pale. Afterwards a senior civil servant came up to him and said, ‘you know when you said you could work to eight objectives and if six were observed, you were doing very well? He said that we in the department set 48 objectives this morning.’ That again is an example of a management tool becoming something completely useless. And by the by, the man who invented objectives said, ‘if an objective isn’t being met, you may have the wrong one. Ditch it, think of another one.’ That’s not a great use of your resources. I guess my final question is what advice do you have about setting objectives in the boardroom? John: I’ve always had a, what some would regard as an over-light view of objectives. I was managing director of the Barbican Centre for 12 years. In general, I say this without false modesty, it was a much better organisation at the end of 12 years than it was at the beginning. It wasn’t just me, of course, that was my team. And from time to time, people would say to me ‘did the corporation of London set you strict objectives, what you had to do? And I said no, they never said anything, but I knew that I worked to four objectives: 1) run a good arts centre 2) run it within the financial limits that you have 3) bring credit to the corporation of London so that everyone can say ‘isn’t the corporation of London wonderful? They fund the Barbican and 4) don’t insult the Lord Mayor. In 12 years, we didn’t need any other objectives. I would say strip yourself of these things and say,‘are they helping me do the things that I want to do, what the organisation needs done or are they a substitute for making sure the organisation works properly?’ And if you can shed all that and keep things clear, then the governance will work better and the management will certainly work better. What about critics that would say that you need SMART goals that are measurable and based on precise numbers? John: The answer to that is measures measure what measures measure. Measures hardly ever get to the heart of what an organisation is about. You look at the finances the whole time, of course you do. In the case of the BBC World Service, you looked at the audiences. You’re aware of numbers, you use them, but you don’t say that such and such a number is a success, and if we don’t it must be a failure. It’s much more complicated than that. They may be a guide, but they are not the most important thing which determines the success or failure of an organisation. Anna: Absolutely. I think in business today we do have a way of getting caught up in it and it causes a lot of tension and anxiety. Where, as you say, remembering what you’re doing, what people need and what keeps it going should be at the heart of it. Well, that seems like an ideal place to finish. Thanks ever so much for coming on the podcast, John. John: Thank you very much, Anna. Nice to talk to you. John’s latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom, has been published by Bloomsbury and is available now from Amazon and all other major book retailers. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on leadership and creativity in business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening. 

On a bright spring day in May of 1974, on the side of a highway in the mountains of British Columbia, a small child of four tiredly walked several feet behind her mother and stepfather, barefoot, dirty and crying, dragging her teddy bear behind her on the gravel shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway.A passerby, Robert, would pull over and give the family a ride to Vancouver, set them up in a hotel, and get the child's stepfather a job, and take temporary custody of the girl. One morning her mother would come and fetch her and the next time he would hear of the little girl, she'd be dead. The people of the city were terrified and upset. Where was Tricia? What happened to her? Parents started walking their kids to school, and teachers began talking about stranger-danger in the classroom.Joyce gave permission to the Brantford Police Services to tap a phone call she would make to John Wildman from the police station. Here is the transcript of the call:"John: Well, uh, what I can't understand, Joyce, is why you would phone here on Thursday night before anyone knew about Trish and accuse me, and then your friends, Val and them, phone the people downstairs on Saturday Joyce and say the same thing. Joyce: Same thing about what?John: They told Bev and Ron that between them and myself that we killed Trish, and this was on Saturday, Joyce. Now, what in the hell is going on with you and your friends – before anybody even knew what happened."Episode Crime Article, Photos + Sources: https://truecrimerealtimepod.com/Music provided by Scoutyboy: Twitter: @ scoutlhurtHuge thanks to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. Explore sponsorship opportunities and start monetizing your podcast by signing up here: https://podcorn.com/podcasters/

SONGS The Ren Faire Song performed by The Musical Blades from the album Up the Ante https://www.musicalblades.com I'll Tell My Ma performed by Tullamore from the album The O'Malley's Sessions - One for the Road https://www.tullamore.band/home Lord of the PounceWhere's the Cat! performed by Marc Gunn from the album Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers www.marcgunn.com Beggars to God performed by Jesse Linder from the album Easy & Free http://www.JesseLinder.Bandcamp.com Cyrus In The Moonlight performed by Empty Hats from the album The Hat Came Back https://www.emptyhats.com When I Was A Young Maid performed by Tania Opland and Mike Freeman from the album Choice Fare Unknown Website The Voyage performed by Terry Griffith from the album Songs From the Pub https://www.facebook.com/terry.l.griffith.1 O'neill's March performed by Pictus from the album Fire https://pictusmusic.com Mingulay Boat Song performed by Bounding Main from the album Fish Out of Water http://www.boundingmain.com Skillywidden performed by Cantiga from the album Martha's Dragon http://www.cantigamusic.com/ Dark Lady performed by Far From Home from the album Of Course! https://www.facebook.com/WeRFarFromHome/ Exiles Of Erin performed by Compilations from the album Songs from the Village of Carlisle Unknown Website HOW TO LISTEN Apple (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/renaissance-festival-podcast/id74073024) Spotify (spotify.com/artist/0UcBe1IGWeIQ4y22y3bWgi) Pandora (www.pandora.com/) Podbay (www.podbay.fm/show/74073024) Listennotes (www.listennotes.com/podcasts/renaissance-festival-podcast-minions-1Xd3YjQ7fWx/) HOW TO CONTACT US Post it on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/renfestmusic) Email us at renfestpodcast@gmail.com Call or text the castle at 478- castles (227-8537) SONG LYRICS The Ren Faire Song performed by The Musical Blades from the album Up the Ante https://www.musicalblades.com Step right up and come inside,  To a world of make believe, Of shiny knights and maidens fair, You'll never want to leave,  Be sure to buy your wooden sword,  For fourteen ninety five,And grab a handful of the King's nuts,As soon as you arrive, Cause fantasy's just a step away, And nothing doth compare Cause you'll see your life in a different way, Through the lens of ye olde ren faire   HUZZAH! We've got all the kilted Shrek sounding men, And the fairies ya need, We've got all the elves and the gypsy boys, And we've got a sample of mead, Step up and test your balance and strength, And be sure to jump on all the rides,  It's amazing the things you can get on a stick,And all the things that you can get fried, Cause fantasy's just a step away, And nothing doth compare Cause you'll see your life in a different way, Through the lens of ye olde ren faire  HUZZAH! You'll find fire eaters and jugglers here,You'll find Kings and their Queens too,You'll see wizards and warriors and Star Wars dweebsAnd a singing pirate crew, We've got clothes, we've got armor, We've got turkey legsJust waiting here for you, And you can use your Master Card, Or Lady Visa too... Cause fantasy's just a step away, And nothing doth compare Cause you'll see your life in a different way, Through the lens of ye olde ren faire  HUZZAH!  I'll Tell My Ma performed by Tullamore from the album The O'Malley's Sessions - One for the Road https://www.tullamore.band/home I'll Tell My Ma I'll tell my ma when I get home, The boys won't leave the girls alone They pull my hair and stole my comb But that's all right till I go home She is handsome, she is pretty, She is the Belle of Belfast city She is a courtin' one, two, three, Please won't you tell me who is she Albert Mooney says he loves her, All the boys are fightin' for her Knock at the door and ring at the bell, Saying oh my true love, are you well Out she comes as white as snow, Rrings on her fingers, bells on her toes Ould Johnny Morrissey says she'll die If she doesn't get the fella with the roving eye Let the wind and the rain and the hail blow high And the snow come travellin' through the sky She's as sweet as apple pie, She'll get her own lad by and by When she gets a lad of her own She won't tell her ma when she gets home Let them all come as they will For it's Albert Mooney she loves still" Lord of the PounceWhere's the Cat! performed by Marc Gunn from the album Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers www.marcgunn.com I pounced in the morning when the world was begun. I pounced on the moon and the stars all for fun. I leaped down from heaven, and I pounced on the earth. When I pounced my first mouse, I had my birth. Pounce, pounce, wherever you may be I am lord of the pounce, said he. I'll run under feet, wherever you may be. And I'll leap on you in the pounce, said he. I pounced on the papyrus of the Egyptians They wouldn't play so I stole their feather pens I pounced on the fish caught by James and John They fed me fish then the pounce went on. I pounced on the Sabbath, rubbed my head against the lame. Many people shook their head, said this feline was insane. I may rest from pouncing, do not think I am gone. For I just saw a rat, so the pounce goes on. I and my lady meowed a song across the plain The birds came down, and we pounced on each of them. On the bedchamber floor, I laid my carrion. Then I raced out the door and I pounced again. I dog jumped down, so I leapt up high. I have nine lives that will never, never die. I'll pounce on you though you bark at me I am the Lord of the Pounce, said he. Beggars to God performed by Jesse Linder from the album Easy & Free http://www.JesseLinder.Bandcamp.com The song of gypsy Davy rang delighted through the night, A wise and foolish virgin kept her candles burning bright, Rise up, my young and foolish one, and follow if you can, There'll be no need for hot candles in the arms of such a man. Make love to each other; be free with each other, Be prisoners of love 'til you lie in the sod, Be friends to each other, forgive one another, See God in each other, be beggars to God. The night was cold and dark and wet as they wandered on alone, The sky became their canopy, the earth became their throne, And as their raiment ran to rags, they thought it nothing wrong, For earth and sky are robe enough, when you sing the gypsy song. Make love to each other; be free with each other, Be prisoners of love 'til you lie in the sod, Be friends to each other, forgive one another, See God in each other, be beggars to God. They sang and played the gypsy song wherever they were sent, To some, it seemed a dancing tune; to some, a sad lament, But in every heart that heard it true, a tear became a smile, And a pauper or a prince became a gypsy for a while. Make love to each other; be free with each other, Be prisoners of love 'til you lie in the sod, Be friends to each other, forgive one another, See God in each other, be beggars to God.   Cyrus In The Moonlight performed by Empty Hats from the album The Hat Came Back https://www.emptyhats.com Oh the hills are full of spirits And they walk when night comes round And they speak to who they choose to When the moon is shining down And ramona loves the orchard And liza loves the pine And cyrus in the moonlight Loves the flowing of the wineOh cyrus trusts the spirits And they fill his life with grace Yeah the father of his fathers Passed him down the gift of faith And one night you might hear it Like a wailing from above It's just cyrus in the moonlight Singing to the one he loves...And the two girls start to dancing When they hear that drunken voice That's when cyrus asks the moonlight Do I have to make a choice 'tween liza with her red hair And ramona with her blues And with all these gifts they bring me Tell me how can I refuse Related When I Was A Young Maid performed by Tania Opland and Mike Freeman from the album Choice Fare When I was a young maid, about seventeen I enlisted in the Navy for to serve the Queen. I enlisted in the Navy, a sailor lad to stand, For to hear the cannons rattlin' and the music so grand. The music so grand, the music so grand. For to hear the cannons rattlin' and the music so grand. Well the officer who enlisted me was a fine and handsome man. He said, ""You'll make a sailor, so come along me lad."" Well, me waist being tall and slender and my fingers long and thin, Oh the very soon they learned me I soon exceeded them. I soon exceeded them, I soon exceeded them. Oh the very soon they learned me I soon exceeded them. They sent me to bunk and they sent me to bed For to lie with the sailor lads I never was afraid But in buttoning up me blue coat, it often made me smile For to think I was a sailor and a maiden all the while. A maiden all the while, a maiden all the while. For to think I was a sailor and a maiden all the while. They sent me to London to guard the tower And I swore that I would be there until my dying hour But a lady fell in love with me and I told her I was a maid. She went up to my captain and my secret she betrayed. My secret she betrayed, my secret she betrayed. She went up to my captain and my secret she betrayed. Well the captain, he came up to me and he asked if it were so. I dared not, I dared not, I dared not say no. "It's a pity we should lose you, such a sailor lad you made, It's a pity we should lose you, such a handsome young maid." A handsome young maid, a handsome young maid. It's a pity we should lose you, such a handsome young maid. So fare you well my captain, you've been so kind to me. "And likewise, my sailor lads, I'm sorry to part with thee." But if ever the Navy needs a lad, a sailor I'll remain. I'll put off my cap and feathers and I'll run the riggin' again! I'll run the riggin' again, I'll run the riggin' again. I'll put off my cap and feathers and I'll run the riggin' again!"   The Voyage performed by Terry Griffith from the album Songs From the Pub https://www.facebook.com/terry.l.griffith.1 I am a sailor, you're my first mate We signed on together, we coupled our fate Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail For the hearts treasure, together we set sail With no maps to guide us we steered our own course Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope Working together we learned how to cope Life is an ocean and love is a boat In troubled water that keeps us afloat When we started the voyage, there was just me and you Now gathered round us, we have our own crew Together we're in this relationship We built it with care to last the whole trip Our true destination's not marked on any charts We're navigating to the shores of the heart Life is an ocean and love is a boat In troubled water that keeps us afloat When we started the voyage, there was just me and you Now gathered round us, we have our own crew Life is an ocean and love is a boat In troubled water that keeps us afloat When we started the voyage, there was just me and you Now gathered round us, we have our own crew   O'neill's March performed by Pictus from the album Fire https://pictusmusic.com (instrumental)" Mingulay Boat Song performed by Bounding Main from the album Fish Out of Water http://www.boundingmain.com Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Heave her head round to the weather Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Sailing homeward to Mingulay What care we though white the Minch is What care we boys the wind and weather When we know that, every inch is Closer homeward to Mingulay Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Heave her head round to the weather Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Sailing homeward to Mingulay Wives are waiting by the pierhead Gazing seaward from the heather Heave ahead round and we'll anchor Ere the sun sets on Mingulay Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Heave her head round to the weather Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys Sailing homeward to Mingulay Sailing homeward to Mingulay Skillywidden performed by Cantiga from the album Martha's Dragon http://www.cantigamusic.com/ Unknown Dark Lady performed by Far From Home from the album Of Course! https://www.facebook.com/WeRFarFromHome/ A fierce one-eyed man named Baron LaBonne A meaner pirate had never been known And he sailed on the Dark Lady A ship strong and sound with a perilous crew And high on the mast the skull and bones flew Fleet and swift was the Dark Lady And every night the Baron would drink a toast He'd say, ""Here's to our lovely lady host! My one true love"" ""Hear, hear!"" the crew replied And the Dark Lady sighed A rich Spanish galleon was spotted one night The Dark Lady's crew prepared for the fight Clash of swords.... No Spaniards survived it Except for the maiden with dark eyes so bold Found in the hull with the jewels and the gold LaBonne laughed and took her for ranson And every night the Baron would drink a toast He'd say, ""Here's to our lovely lady host! My one true love"" ""Hear, hear!"" the crew replied And the Dark Lady sighed The girl Carlotta was a beauty quite rare With each passing night LaBonne couldn't bear His empty bed... He brought her to it The Baron soon found he felt more than desire His love for her grew and his heart filled with fire He proclaimed that they would marry The night the Baron drank with jubilee He said, ""Here's to my lovely bride-to-be! My one true love"" ""Hear, hear !"" the crew replied And the Dark Lady cried The following night and storm brewed at sea The Dark Lady saw her chance to be free Of her rival, the beauty Carlotta The ship steered her south to the heart of the gale Where a wave swept the maiden out over the rail Sweet revenge on an unfaithful lover That night the Lady drank a toast She said, ""Here's to your lovely lady host! Your one true love""... No voices replied And the Dark Lady smiled And now every night when a storm fills the sky They say that a ghost ship sails in its eye Fleet and swift is the Dark Lady A ship strong and sound with a perilous crew And high on the mast the skull and bones flew While the Captain gazes out to sea And every night the Baron must drink a toast And say, ""Here's to our lovely lady host My one true love"" ""Hear, hear!"" the ghost crew replies And the Dark Lady smiles Exiles Of Erin performed by Compilations from the album Songs from the Village of Carlisle Unknown Website There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin, The dew on his robe was heavy and chilly; For his country he sighed when, at twilight, repairing To wander alone by the wind-beaten kill. But the day-star attracted his eye's sad devotion, For it rose on its own native isle of the ocean. Where once, in the flow of his youthful emotion, he sang the bold anthem of Erin-go-bragh. Oh! sad is my fate, said the heart-broken stranger, The wild deer and wolf to a covert can flee; But I have no refuge from famine or danger, A home and a country remains not for me. Ah! never again in the green shady bower, Where my forefathers lived, shall I spend the sweet hours, Or cover my harp with the wild-woven flowers, And strike the sweet numbers of Erin-go-bragh. Oh! Erin, my country, though sad and forsaken, In dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore; But, alas! in a far foreign land I awaken, And sigh for the friends that can meet me no more. And thou, cruel fate, wilt thou never replace me In a mansion of peace, where no perils can chase me? Ah! never again shall my brothers embrace me- They died to defend me, or live to deplore. Where now is my cabin-door, so fast by the wildwood? Sisters and sire did weep for its fall; Where is the mother that looked on my childhood? And where is my bosom friend -dearer than all? Ah! my sad soul, long abandoned by pleasure, Why did it dote on a fast-fading treasure? Tears, like the rain, may fall without measure, But rapture and beauty they cannot recall. But yet all its fond recollections suppressing, One dying wish my fond bosom shall draw; Erin, an exile, bequeaths thee his blessings, Land of my fathers, Erin-go-bragh. Buried and cold, when my heart stills its motion. Green be thy fields, sweetest isle in the ocean, ? And the harp-striking bards sing aloud with devotion, Erin Mavourneen, sweet Erin-go-bragh.

It's a narrative that often gets repeated to parents of young children with disabilities: the more services the better. But John and Connie found a different way early on with their son Mark. Their family's dream was bigger. The vision they have for an ordinary life really gets to the heart of why this podcast started - to offer out ideas for families and people with disabilities to go after more in life than the expected route of disability services and segregated activities.As founders of the Plan Institute in Rhode Island 15 years ago, the Susa family connected with Starfire to learn how to launch community projects. They said that this way of bringing people together, over a shared goal like a community garden, generates a certain magic - almost instantly.If you are someone who wants to think seriously about how you and your loved ones spend your time, how to connect more deeply in community, and ways to make longterm relationships a reality, this episode is for you. GET THE PODCAST FULL TRANSCRIPT:CONNIE: - I have heard speakers talk about this concept as a way of healing the world and as we're in the midst of the COVID19 virus outbreak right now, I think the world could use a lot of healing, not only physically but also in terms of relationships. We have a new neighbor who shares that passion with us, and it has been such a joy to get to know one another, to have a real give and take. I can see how if this were multiplied throughout communities, and states and nations, the world would be a beautiful place. KATIE: Beautiful. JOHN - I'm John Susa. I think what moves me for a lot of this work is almost a therapeutic plan for me. I grew up very very isolated and I had very few interactions with anybody besides my family. And most people would have described me as being very introverted. When people asked me when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? My answer was always the same. I wanted to be a long distance truck driver. So I could sit in that cab and not have any human interaction for days. And if left to myself that's probably what would have happened. But instead I learned that if I pushed myself a little bit and started interacting with people and meeting people then I could change that desire to be a loner. And so I think the reason I'm so involved in all of this stuff is still mostly for myself to avoid falling back into be a loner. So I made pretty much a conscious decision that I was just going to change my behavior first. And of course after I changed my behavior for a while my attitude started to change.Fast forwarding then to when you and Connie met, and you had children and you were - down the road, you know, deciding how to engage as a family in the community, what were some of the things that you had to consider first to be connected?JOHN - I think for me the recognition that Mark developmentally was experiencing life differently than others made me realize it was going to be very helpful if I became more engaged in the disability advocacy world. I was kind of driven by two different quotes that were in my head that I learned while I was in the military. And they're very a-typical but they're very powerful. One is from Johann Goethe a German philosopher and he said, “Dream no small dreams for they have power insufficient to change the hearts of men.” That's been something that I've always come to recognize as a very powerful piece of instruction and advice. And I saw that there were people who were encouraging us in many ways to dream small, to be satisfied with what Mark is able to do, focus in on his disabilities, spend your time searching out services. In many ways that was dreaming small. There were occasionally people who would say, “No, no, no don't do that. Dream big. Dream like Mark's future is limitless. Dream like if you just provide him with all the opportunities that life has to offer, you will be amazed at how much he is going to accomplish.” And that is what I took from Goethe, dream big. And we have ever since. And that really has kind of put us into contact with a lot of other big dreamers. It's those big dreamers that really have changed the world works for people with disabilities.KATIE - Beautiful. MARK - Excellent.CONNIE: - For me in terms of community building, I think one of the greatest advances has been our church. Mark turned three at the end of December.MARK - Right. CONNIE: And three-year-olds were supposed to begin in what most people would call “Junior Sunday School.” When Mark was three, we were still carrying him - cradling him in our arms. Did you know when you were three years old you couldn't sit up by yourself? MARK - No way, really?CONNIE: Truly. Mark just kept attending our Sunday school classes with us and about two, three weeks into that sequence one of our friend's who taught the three year old class, the Sunbeam class, came to us in the hallway and said, “Why hasn't Mark been in my class?” And I said, “Edith - look.” As if seeing where Mark was at that moment meant everything. And she said, “Yes, but look at my role.” And Mark's name was there, without x's in the attendance boxes.And she said, “We really need him in our class.” And I said, “Edith he can't even sit up independently.” She said, “Well we could get a highchair and we could put pillows all around it so that he can sit up.” And I said, “We're not even sure that he can understand what you're teaching the other kids.” And she said, “That doesn't matter.” She said, “The reason I need Mark in my class is because all the other kids have so much to learn from him.” MARK - Really.CONNIE: And while we had been working seriously on stimulations and Mark had gone through early intervention and we learned about you know sensory stuff and what have you. We were doing that once a week, in a group and the rest of the time at home. But what Edith had said really started Mark and us on the path to community. Mark now…well, tell Katie what you do at church.MARK - A lot. CONNIE: - Some things that you're responsible for?MARK - I'm secretary. CONNIE: - Secretary for what?MARK - For attendance. CONNIE: - Yup, and you set up appointments for interviews.MARK - Set up appointments for interviews. CONNIE: - We were amazed, Mark was enfolded in the arms of these people who understood all about community because that fits the teachings that we have as Christians. Going back to what Edith had said to you that you know, diversity and having different types of learning in a classroom is really really really important and once you accepted that invitation, what unfolded in that first year? JOHN - What I remember is that it reinforced something that I came to realize, everybody became comfortable and it was now normal and accepted that Mark would be part of that congregation. Once people got to the point where they were comfortable because of exposure and experience they relaxed and they accepted Mark for who he was. And they didn't feel the need to treat him any differently than they would any other child. It reminds me of another one of my kind of guiding principles and this comes from a guy, Rudolf Steiner, talking about early childhood. Rudolf Steiner is the founder of the Waldorf educational system. Are you familiar with that?KATIE - Yes. JOHN - He said that, “There is nothing more therapeutic than normalcy.” That was a piece of advice that was given to us by a good friend, developmental pediatrician, when Mark was finally identified as having all these developmental challenges. The meeting at the end of the two-day evaluation process was nothing but a group of people who were very pessimistic about Mark. “He's not going to walk. He's not going to talk. He's probably not going to be aware of you. He's certainly not going to hear.” A whole bunch of things, they all at the end say “Well, good luck, take him home and love him.” That was their advice, which is good advice but inadequate. When they all left, their boss who was sitting at the back of the room observing asked us to go into his office because Connie was bawling. Sig closes the door and the first thing he says is, “Don't believe a word of what those people said to you.” And I said, “Sig if you say that, why didn't you stop them before they started?” And he said, “You know all those people in that room were doing or could do is describe Mark now, as they see him. They could not possibly describe Mark in the future. I believe if you believe them, that future will happen. If you don't believe and you adopt the approach that the best thing to do is to have Mark experience as much normalcy as possible he will become a different person. He will become more like the ‘normal kids' whatever that may be. Every person will develop depending on how much they're exposed to.” So he said, “I'm not going to let them label him because that will result in other people reading the report and it will only help them treat him in a stereotypical way based on his label. I'm just going to say he's developmentally delayed.” And his advice was, “Take him home and love him but then help him have every normal experience as other children.” And that kind of guided our thinking really from then on. KATIE - And you know, dreaming big in this instance is to dream ordinary, to dream normal. JOHN - Exactly. Yeah. KATIE - And sometimes ordinary is the biggest gift anyone can have.JOHN - Right, right. It's kind of counterintuitive because in the world of disabilities a lot of times people think that dreaming big means getting more services, the more the better, the more services the better. Steiner said think seriously about substituting every hour of normalcy with an hour of service because that hour of service is removing that person from normalcy. So it's almost in the disability world it's almost a flipping of thinking that that has to happen. CONNIE: - Be concerned if you were just going to services. JOHN - Be big in your thinking by vying for normalcy. KATIE - Yes, so even in services are... they're not normal. It's interesting. JOHN - They're not normal. CONNIE: - What's more important is that Mark participated not only in that class but every subsequent class. And when Mark was eleven years old we took our school district to a due process hearing because they had adamantly fought us for two years in bringing Mark back into district from a segregated day placement that was anything but normal, because they were sure that Mark would not act appropriately in a classroom setting. They were sure that Mark would be a disruption to other students, they were sure that he might even be self injurious or injury other people, because they were thinking in terms of stereotypes not in terms of who Mark is as an individual. And do you remember Jennifer Coats, Mark?MARK – Yeah. The one with the power.CONNIE: - She came to your hearing. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And she told everybody just how you act in a classroom setting. That you raised your hand just like that, that you participated appropriately in singing time, that you sat with your class and no additional extra support. That you sang the songs that you answered questions, you gave talks. MARK - Right. Yes I did. KATIE - So it sounds like Jennifer had another piece of Mark and your family's story along this journey to dream big, to live an ordinary life? She made an impact during that hearing.I want to see if we can dip our toes briefly in the water of the day placement that you mentioned, that Mark was in, and how that was anything but normal. Can you explain how abnormal it was or what about it made it not ordinary?CONNIE: - Sure, the very fact that there were multiple kids with multiple disabilities just ate up so much of the instruction time. What else do you remember about it? JOHN - Everybody in Mark's class was just like Mark. Six little kids, wheelchairs. So the biggest thing I believe happened when he left there and went into a regular classroom is that for the first time he started culturally and socially experiencing life as every other eleven, or twelve or fifteen year old does. KATIE - You agree with that, Mark?MARK - Yes, excellent. KATIE - Yeah and I think that's a good segway to the phrase ‘a good life' that is something you hear a lot from Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack. It's a big part of the PLAN institute model and you all have been involved with PLAN at Rhode Island for quite some time. So what ways has it helped? CONNIE: - John first heard Al speak, he recognized the wisdom in their model that we always acknowledge how deeply we depend on the work. When we brought PLAN (Personal Lifetime Advocacy Network) to Rhode Island 15 years ago we knew that we were standing on the shoulders of giants. The two things that we have focused on in trying to replicate their model is we help parents put all their ducks in a row, plan for the time that they are no longer going to be there or able to enrich the lives of their sons and daughters out of the love and the family history, the precious relationships. The much more important part of what they did in Canada and what we did in Rhode Island is to build a personal support network around the member. The family joins on behalf of their son, daughter, brother, sister and they engage with a facilitator to build and maintain that support network so that it's not just every individual having a relationship with a person at the center of the circle but it is all those people getting to know one another, to recognize one another's strengths, to trust one another. Between all those group gatherings individuals will do things with the members at the center, with our loved ones. And as parents we try to do that early enough so that we can fill in the important parts of the history. So the support network is really there to build a circle of support around a person, and yet also it's not just about the person in the center it's about everyone in the network joining together, being in relationships together, and in that way being in a community. Where are you now with the support network?CONNIE: - Right. Mark has had a personal support network for the entire time that PLAN has been in existence in Rhode Island. It really does take some time for relationships to mature that if we had to step off the Earth the next week, this would go on. MARK - Right.CONNIE: - And that it would provide Mark with people that he could depend on, people who were real friends, who had proved that over time. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - People who enjoy spending time with him. And we feel secure. In one of the questions that PLAN Institute seems to start with is what would happen to my loved one after I pass on, if I'm not around, if we're not there to help what will happen? And so starting from a young age it sounds like you guys have done a lot of work to build that support network so that in a time of disaster or otherwise that there is somebody there for Mark?JOHN - Right. When PLAN in Canada was first put together it was even before Al Etmanski, it was just a group of parents and they hired Al. They originally thought that they were preparing for their demise, the focus was on what's going to happen? What they quickly discovered was that yes they were doing that but they were also starting to develop a stronger sense of security and the feeling that their son or daughter was safe. There were some very positive benefits to the parents while they were still alive. And they figured it out that it was the existence of this network that provided that sense of security. And not only the sense of it but the actual security. KATIE - I love how you put that, that's very clearly stated for me and I think it's actually it starts as soon as you begin to community build: the benefits, the magic, the parts of it that are really just supportive feeling begin right away. And every parent needs that and we need to raise our children as a village. You all as a family have taken the brave step being able to say well even though some experts are telling us otherwise we're going to not believe that and in doing that we are going start this support network early and we're going to build and the more people who have joined in along the way it sounds like the more momentum has build towards this? Tell me about your family's leadership in the community as it relates to your street, and how your support network, Mark, how they were involved in that process? JOHN - So as we kind of navigate our life with Mark, I'm always looking for things that are in the way of him achieving greater independence. So this little project about looking at Warwick Avenue, Mark and his brother live about two and a half, three miles apart, they both require a wheelchair in Mark's case or a scooter in Frank's case. And so when Frank moved back here to Rhode Island we thought, “Wow wouldn't it be nice if these two guys could get together once in a while without Mom and Dad having to be the go between.” We started looking at this road and we recognized very quickly that this road was a problem. I've known that this road was a problem probably for at least fifteen years now, but I've not had a real strong reason for us to say, “Let's do something about it.” So we naturally thought that this is going to be something that is much more powerful if we have a group involved. We had a group, we had Mark's network, they all know him, they're comfortable with him. So we posed the idea, the project, people thought this is great. And the fact is that there is appropriated money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development every year for infrastructure maintenance. But the fact is also is that many states use that money for something else besides not worrying about wheelchair accessibility. So our complaint kind of brought this into the public eye and I'm pretty confident that we will be able to see some change and some action as we kind of work through the process. But it is also what ever you want to call it, karma, good luck whatever, that here we have our network and one of the powerful things about a network is the fact every member of that network has other connections with other people and within our little group we were able to identify somebody else who is not part of Mark's network but is only peripherally connected, kind of, who is going to be very helpful in resolving. And you never know who you may know until you start talking and working and interacting in community. Every network is a little community and every little community has a lot more resources than we certainly had by ourselves. Absolutely and maybe you can share how some of the other families you know in Rhode Island who have similar networks of support like you all do around Mark, how they've utilized their networks of support to do other projects in their communities with Starfire's facilitation support. What are a few of those other projects that have happened or sprung out of this collaboration?JOHN - So in about a month or so another network is going to do a project that is to create a mosaic welcome sign to this little town's community garden. It's prompted by a family who have a son who has very significant disabilities but who is a very very talented artist who is really good at sketching and painting vegetables. So they're going to take his work and they're going to create a mosaic welcome sign. This is a family I've known for quite a while, also been part of PLAN for a while, and they have dramatically really been able to bring their son like we did out of a special school into the real world and Sid has really blossomed as a result of that real world life experience. Why do you think it's important for families to lead efforts toward building community? And how do you think families are helping other people in the neighborhoods see the light of community building, the magic of community building?CONNIE: - We've been told for years on end that certain federal programs are underfunded and that there may come a time that those things are no longer available or that their support and services get shrunken and Mark loves people, he's a very social person. MARK - I do. CONNIE: - You do and you contribute in a lot of ways. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And we're very proud of that. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - So just in terms of politics alone it's important that we give our sons and daughters opportunities to show that they can contribute to society. JOHN - From our own experience and from the experience of a lot of people we know that the amount of community, acceptance and inclusion that people with disabilities experience is really very much influenced by how much their family is integrated and included in their community. Our experience was that after Mark started going to special private school we spent more and more and more time at that school helping them with fundraising, helping them with all kinds of stuff and we spent less and less time in our community. We often meet family with children with disabilities and very quickly they'll say, “Oh, but we don't know anybody. We're not engaged in our community.” And without spending a lot of time we recently were able to recognize that that was because they were spending their time in a different world than their community. So we really really strongly encourage people to become more engaged and more involved. One of the ways is get engaged in a community project and all of a sudden you know a bunch of people, not all of those people are going to become part of their son's or daughter's network but some will. And that's because all of a sudden they know people who have common interests, there are all kinds of things that happen when you start doing things together. These projects are just ways people becoming engaged in their community, as a family, and then as time goes on for that family to be unique and having people have a relationship with that son or daughter who has a disability.Absolutely. And maybe we'll end with a quote here I think that is related to everything you just said. It's by Al Etmanski he says, “People are naturally ingenious when faced with adversity.” What ways do you think you all have managed to be ingenious?CONNIE: - With the COVID19 crisis, Mark's facilitator of Mark's support network is putting out requests with two things. One to ensure them that Mark is no more susceptible to this virus than anyone else in the community is. More importantly, because Mark has benefited so much from his contact with all the members of his network, she is going to ask them to engage with him regularly remotely as long as they cannot engage with him personally. He reads and he can enjoy texts and answer emails and appreciates post cards and greeting cards and phone calls.MARK - Right. CONNIE: - That's an adaptation that we're making right now. JOHN - We've learned that we really have to remain flexible. We have to depend on other people's creativity and let them interact with Mark in their way. In the beginning when he was younger people would always ask us, “What does Mark like to do?” And a long time ago we basically came up with the same answer, “Well I don't know, ask him.” Not only ask him but invite him. Mark surprises everybody with his ability to express his enthusiasm for things. KATIE - I love how you turned a question into a way to mobilize community to be more involved and be more inclusive. It's wonderful to meet and hear your story. JOHN: As parents we've benefited from such wonderful and powerful messaged from guys like Tim (Vogt) and Al Etmanski and David Wehterow and John O'Brien. There's a million of these messages that we've been lucky enough to try and hear and try and incorporate into what we're trying to do for Mark. That's what it's all about we're doing it for our family first - and hope that other families will see what we've done and will say, “Hey if those guys can do it so can we.” That's the power of this movement. KATIE: It's actually moving, it's doing something. That's the exciting part of it. Thanks for being movers, so great to meet you. MARK: Good-bye.

Wisdom from the Wizard of UCLA (Part 1) - John WoodenWisdom from the Wizard of UCLA (Part 2) - John WoodenWisdom from the Wizard of UCLA (Part 3) - John WoodenFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Growing Up With WoodenDay 1 of 3 Guest:                    John Wooden From the series:   True Success:  A Personal Visit with John Wooden  Bob:                It was the 1920s in rural Indiana.  The Depression had not yet rocked America.  John Wooden was a young boy growing up on a farm, a high school student who loved basketball but who was about to meet the real love of his life. John:              I noticed this one little gal, and I didn't know, but she had noticed me, too, but I didn't know that.  Somehow, on the first day of classes my freshman year, we happened to be in the same class, and I knew right then, and we knew we were going to be married by the time I got out of high school, and August 8th it would have been 70 years since last August 8th, we would have been married. Bob:                Today you'll hear the first part of a conversation with a man who grew up to be one of the greatest coaches of all time as we talk about his faith, his family, and basketball.  Stay tuned as we talk with Coach John Wooden on FamilyLife Today.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Wednesday edition.  I can't help but smile as I listen to that excerpt from our interview with Coach John Wooden.  Of course, a lot of people are smiling right about now because this is the time of the year when March madness really takes over.  There is a lot of basketball ahead for us. Dennis:          Semis are this weekend, Final Four on Monday. Bob:                It's got to bring back lots of memories for you from your college days, doesn't it? Dennis:          Well, high school.  You know, going back to high school, Bob, those were my glory days.  My college days, I had several splinters. Bob:                Sitting on the bench, huh? Dennis:          I got the 15th uniform out of 15 in college.  I learned what it was like to be a substitute. Bob:                But your team almost went to the Final Four, didn't it? Dennis:          Well, not THE Final Four.  We almost went to the Junior College National Championships in Kansas, and I'm trying to remember where in Kansas. Bob:                But that's like the Final Four for Junior Colleges, right? Dennis:          Oh, yeah, absolutely.  In fact, I started that game – the last game of my college career, I started. Bob:                You poured in what – 15, 20 points? Dennis:          Now, wait a second – hold it, just one second, because they put me on an All American.  This is a true story.  The coach had watched me.  It was the only game I started in my college career, but my coach was so impressed with me never quitting and just staying out there and being tenacious – he started me.  And he put me on the quickest guy I've ever played against. Bob:                Man-to-man defense. Dennis:          Man-to-man defense, and did you know, when I left the game in the first half – I played about six or seven minutes – I had scored more points … Bob:                … than the All American, and the reason was this:  He was so fast and I was so slow, he would fake three or four times, and by the time I had taken his first fake, I was back to where he was really going.  And so I would post up underneath the bucket, and the guy didn't like to play defense, and I'd post up on him and score.  And so when I left the game, I had actually scored more points than him. Bob:                Now, some of our listeners are wondering what are you talking about Dennis' glory days of basketball on FamilyLife Today? Dennis:          Because we really don't have anything else to talk about.  No, that's not true.  We have a guest today – well, Bob, a dream of mine, and I sent you a note one day.  I said, "Bob, you know, one of the people I would really like in all the world to interview for FamilyLife Today and for our listeners and give them a glimpse of what a great human being he is, what many have described as the greatest coach of any sport of all time – Coach John Wooden."  Now, there are a number of our listeners who have no idea who John Wooden is, but a ton do.  Bob:                Coach Wooden coached the UCLA Bruins back in the '60s and the '70s. Dennis:          Well, actually, he started coaching in 1948.  That's what most people don't realize is.  He didn't build that national championship dominant team in the '60s and '70s.  He built it in obscurity beginning in 1948 throughout all the '50s and early '60s before he won his first national championship in 1964. Bob:                And after he won his first one, then he won his second and his third and his fourth and his fifth and his sixth.  Over a 12-year period he won 10 national championships. Dennis:          That's right, including winning 88 games in a row before they were knocked off at the Houston Astrodome, and I remember watching this game as a young man, where Lew Alcindor was playing against Elvin Hayes, and Houston beat them 71-69, and the Astrodome had, like, 49,000 people in it.  It was nationally televised.  It was an event, and there are few coaches that could claim the accomplishments that – in any sport – what he has accomplished.  But in basketball, he is the ultimate. Bob:                Well, we're going to hear a little bit about that game and about a lot of other games as we talk with Coach Wooden over the next few days.  A while back, you and I sat down with him in a studio in Los Angeles and just had a great opportunity to find out about the man who grew up to be "The Coach."  Here is part 1 of our conversation with Coach John Wooden: Dennis:          Tell us about life in the Wooden household when you were growing up as a young lad. John:              We had a small farm, and I learned a lot, I think, of things that helped me later on.  You had to work hard.  Dad felt there was time for play but always after the chores and the studies were done.  Dad would read to us every night from the Scriptures and poetry, and I think that created a love of poetry, which I've always had, liked to dabble in it a little bit.  My dad was a wonderful person.  I never heard him speak an ill word of anybody; never blamed anybody for anything; I never heard him use a word of profanity.  I think that his reading to us of a night later caused all four sons to get through college, though he had no financial means to help and there were no athletic scholarships.  All four sons graduated from college and all majored or minored in English, and all got advanced degrees, and I think Dad had a lot to do with that. Dennis:          Your dad had, as you've already mentioned, a profound impact on your life.  In fact, I was so looking forward to this interview with you, because I've quoted you about something that you said you carried around in your pocket.  Or – it, first of all, was carried around in your father's pocket, is that right?  And then you started carrying it around – it was your dad's creed – and then a poem by a pastor by the name of Henry Van Dyke. John:              My father gave to me, when I graduated from high school – excuse me – from grade school, from the eighth grade, he gave me a $2 bill – one of those large $2 bills and said, "Son, as long as you keep this you'll never be broke."  Then he also gave me a card, and on one side was the verse by Reverend Van Dyke that said, "Four things a man must learn to do if he would make his life more true; to think without confusion clearly; to love his fellow man sincerely; to act from honest motives purely; to trust in God and heaven securely." And on the other side was a seven-point creed, and the seven-point creed insisted, first of all, I think it was, "Be true to yourself," and I think we know if we're true to ourselves, we'll be true to others; and the second was "Help others."  There is no greater joy than a person can have than do something for someone else, especially when you do it with no thought of something in return. Another one was "Make friendship a fine art."  Work at it, don't take it for granted, work at making friends and making friendships flourish.  And then was one, I think, stood out to me a great deal was, "Make me today your masterpiece," and I tried to teach from that, as time went by, to my players and my English students, to just try and do the best you can each day.  Just make each day a masterpiece.  It's the only thing over which you have control.  You have no control over yesterday.  That will never change.  The only way you can affect tomorrow is today.  And then another one was to "Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible;" and then was "Build a shelter against a rainy day," and he wasn't thinking about a physical shelter, he was thinking about a more lasting shelter.  When I think about that, I often think of when Socrates was unjustly imprisoned and was facing imminent death and the jailers who were mean people, they couldn't understand his serenity, and they said, "Why aren't you preparing for death?"  And his statement was, "I've been preparing for death all my life by the life I've led," and when I think of building a shelter against a rainy day, I think that's what Dad had in mind. Then the last was – the seventh was "Give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day," and I've carried that with me in one form or another since those days, yes. Bob:                Those core convictions are so bedrock with you, that's a part of how your mom and dad raised you.  I think some people – we hear those things in the 21st century and some people go, "That sounds kind of old-fashioned, kind of corny," but that's so ingrained into who you are and who you've been, and you would say that's been a part of what has made you successful as a coach, right? John:              Well, I would hope so, but I know, too, if someone said, "I'm not what I ought to be and not what I want to be and not what I'm going to be, but I think those things have made me better than I would have been. Dennis:          Your dad read the Bible every day. John:              Yes, he did. Dennis:          How did you see him live out his faith in Christ every day, as a father?  What are the most indelible memories that you have, as a boy, watching your dad?  Because, undoubtedly, for him to have the influence he had on you as a man, his character has to resonate even today in your life. John:              Perhaps I wasn't realizing it at the time, but as I look back on my dad and the fact that he never spoke an ill word of anyone and just was a good person.  You don't realize it so much of the time, and many of the things – one of the things he said was never try to be better than someone else.  You have no control over that, and if you get too involved and engrossed and concerned – maybe these weren't his exact words, but things over which you have no control will adversely affect the things over which you have control.                         Now, years later, I remember that.  So somewhere in the hidden recesses of the mind, they stuck there, but it was things like that.  Mr. Lincoln said there is nothing stronger than gentleness, and my father was gentle man – working with animals and things.  I remember reading to us nights over the Scriptures, and I can still close my eyes and hear him reading "Hiawatha."  I can still hear "By the shores of Gitchigoomie, by the Shining Big Sea Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis," and so on, and things of that sort. Bob:                You didn't have any TV, any radio, so in the evening reading was the primary form of entertainment, wasn't it? John:              You're correct – by a coal oil lamp or candles. Bob:                Was your dad – as you think back on his life, you've talked about this tender side of him, and yet he was still whipping you when you did the wrong thing.  Was he a strict disciplinarian? John:              Well, I would say yes but not in a physical point of way.  I know – oh, I didn't want to get an unkind word from my dad, you know, a strong word.  I don't know, you just hated to hurt him in any way.  You just had that feeling about him. Dennis:          As you followed your dad, you undoubtedly watched how he'd love your mother.  Tell us about what you observed there and his commitment to her, as a woman and to his wife, over their years together. John:              Well, I think Dad's first concern was always for Mother.  He was looking out for her the best he could in every way but in a gentle way, in a gentle way.  I can picture them together – not at all the romantic way that you might think, but there was just something between them that was very, very special.  I don't know how to describe it. Dennis:          You said of yourself in your book, "They Call Me Coach," that as you moved into your high school years, you were shy, you were reserved, especially with the opposite sex. John:              Yes, I suppose, not being exposed much – no sisters – and I'm on the farm, and I suppose that's the reason, I don't know, but I was a little shy. Bob:                But here you were, this star basketball player on the high school team.  I mean, the girls, the cheerleaders, had to notice Johnny Wooden, didn't they?  Did they call you Johnny back then or was it John? John:              They called me lots of things. (laughter)                          You'd be surprised, the more they think it was John Bob. Bob:                John Bob. Dennis:          John Bob. John:              And Nellie and I had been married for many years when her sister came out here to California one time, and she said, "Don't you think you and John have been married long enough that you should quit calling him John Bob?" Bob:                But didn't the girls start to notice you as you were draining those jump shots on the basketball teams? Dennis:          Yeah, he kind of skirted your answer there.  I was watching him about that. John:              Well, I'll tell you, my freshman year, I was still living on the farm.  We didn't lose the farm until after my freshman year, and then we commuted from this little town of Center, and we lived about a half a mile out of that to Martinsville, and I noticed this one little gal, and I didn't know that she had noticed me, too, but I didn't know that, and that summer she brought the brother of her closest friend, who became very dear to me, to drive up.  Her brother had a car, and they drove up, and I was working in the field plowing corn with a team, and they parked in the road and motioned for me to come over, and I wouldn't go over.  I just kept on. Bob:                Why wouldn't you go over?  Here's this cute girl on the side of the road … Dennis:          … and you even liked her, too. John:              Oh, yeah, but I was dirty and somehow on the first day of classes, we happened to be in the same class.  She said, "Why didn't you come over to see us?"  I said, "Well, I was dirty and perspiring, and you would have just made fun of me."  And Nellie said – I can still see her, she said, "I would never make fun of you," and I knew right then … Dennis:          … there was a spark in her eyes. John:              And this is the only girl I ever really went with. Bob:                So by your junior year in high school, did you think, "This is the girl I'll marry?" John:              I did. Bob:                And you all started going together? John:              We did. Bob:                So you waited to marry until you got to college? John:              Yes, until I graduated.  I was glad to be married and graduated and got my first job, yes. Bob:                Coach, that's a long courtship – from your junior year in high school until you've graduated from college and got your first job.  That must have been hard. Dennis:          But, Bob, the rest of the story is, if Nellie hadn't put her foot down … Bob:                … he might still be dragging it on today? Dennis:          Well, there is the rest of the story here, because he really had promised her that he was going to marry her upon graduation, but then the war came along. John:              Yes.  Well, I had an appointment to West Point, and she said it would be six more years, and "I'm not going to wait.  I'm going to a convent."  So I didn't go to West Point. Bob:                She said she wouldn't wait on you? John:              That's right. Dennis:          And so what did you do? John:              Well, I finished at Purdue.  Dennis:          So you were married then? John:              We were married on August 8th.  It would have been 70 years just last August 8th that we would have been married.  We were married on August 8, 1932. Dennis:          You were, in those days, All American three years in a row, you were named the College Player of the Year your senior year, and as I was doing this research, I was thinking – I was talking to Bob.  I said, "I don't remember Coach Wooden being that tall, to be College Player of the Year.  He must have been 6'3" or 6'4".  On the sidelines you looked a little small around those big guys at UCLA.  But you were only 5'10" in those days. John:              But, you know, the teams weren't as big then, either, as they are now, too.  Our center at Purdue, Stretch Murphy, was 6'8", and he was a giant.  I only had the pleasure of playing with him one year.  I had the displeasure of playing against him one year when I was a sophomore in high school for the Indiana State Championship, he was the center on the opposing team, and he was good. Bob:                Did you just have what it takes as an athlete?  Were you just a naturally gifted – something about the way God made you that you turned out to be a good basketball player?  Or did you work really hard to be a good ball player? John:              Well, I hope I did the latter, but He provided the former.  I had natural quickness, and I couldn't do much about my height, but I could do something about my condition, and I always wanted to be in the best possible condition and hoped that would be better than others, hoped others wouldn't work as hard at it as I did do that, and I think I carried that throughout, and I think that helped.  And I think it probably come from my earlier grade school days on the farm of working hard, and I like to feel that no one is going to be in better condition, then I have no control over it.  I should have control over myself. Bob:                Well, we've been listening to a conversation with Coach John Wooden – actually, part 1 of a conversation that we're going to hear the remainder of over the next couple of days. Dennis:          What a sweet time, huh? Bob:                It was a great time. Dennis:          Bob, you and I just had a great time.  I'd look over at you occasionally, and you'd be sitting there grinning, and I'd be grinning, and the reason is, is when we interviewed Coach, he was 91 years old.  He's now at his 92nd birthday, and I'm told that he knows where 180 of his players are – his past players.  He's kept in touch with them.  I heard about a coach the other day whose players never go back to visit him – none of them.  It's common knowledge that his players don't want to have anything to do with him, and I think about Coach Wooden and the wisdom that he passed on, and it reminds me, really, of Proverbs, chapter 4, where a father is imploring and exhorting a son to "Listen, my son, and acquire wisdom."   And I'll tell you, just hanging with the Coach for the interview we did over an hour and a half, we're not going to be able to air all of it here on the broadcast over the next couple of days, but just hanging with him, you thought, "What would it have been like to have played for a coach like that?"  And then it hit me, you know, that's what our children need to be expressing about us as parents.  You know, we learned, we sat under the greatest mom, the greatest dad, the greatest coach, the greatest teacher the world has ever known.  Yeah, they're going to be biased, but the idea is that we, as parents, we're impacting the next generation just like Coach Wooden did. Bob:                That's right.  You mentioned the entire interview going more than an hour and a half long.  We've actually taken the complete interview and put it on two CDs, and I got some early copies of these CDs, and I'll tell you what I found – you can pass these out to lots of folks.  You can pass them out to the high school coach at the high school where your kids go. Dennis:          Oh, let me tell you something, I've been doing this, and I've had friends doing this – any coach of any sport – Laura's volleyball coach – I gave her a copy of this, and she grabbed hold of it like it was gold, and the reason is it is gold.  Bob:                It's thoughts on life from a great coach but it's also thoughts on faith and character and what really matters.  You can use this as a way to begin a dialog and to open doors evangelistically with fans of the game, with coaches, with players, with friends.  We have the two-CD set that features the entire – I think it's about an hour-and-45-minute-long conversation with Coach John Wooden.                          It's available in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  You can call 1-800-FLTODAY to request as many copies as you want. Dennis:          It even looks like a basketball on one side and a net on the other. Bob:                1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.  You can also order online at FamilyLife.com.  Ask for the two-CD set of our conversation with Coach John Wooden when you contact us, and there's a second resource we want to mention to you as well – Coach Wooden has put together a course that is designed to teach his principles of success in business, in athletics, in school.  We have a videocassette where Coach lays out the Pyramid of Success that he put together, and we have the Pyramid on our website at FamilyLife.com, but we also have it on a mousepad that you can have by your computer just to review the character qualities that go into success in any endeavor.  Along with the video and the mousepad, we've got a wallet card. Dennis:          Not just any wallet card. Bob:                No, it's a laminated … Dennis:          … a laminated … Bob:                … that's right, and it has some of the Coach's philosophy on it – never lie, never cheat, never steal, don't whine, don't complain, don't make excuses – pretty simple stuff but profound nonetheless.                           Ask for these resources when you call 1-800-FLTODAY.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY or go online at FamilyLife.com, and you can see some of the resources there, and you can order online as well.  Again, our website is FamilyLife.com.                          When you do get in touch with us, someone is likely to ask if you'd like to help with a donation to FamilyLife Today, and we hope when they ask, if you are able, you'll say yes and be able to add a donation to the work of this ministry.  We're a nonprofit organization, and we depend on those contributions to keep doing what we're doing.  So if you can't help with a donation, you can donate online at FamilyLife.com.  You can call 1-800-FLTODAY or you can write a check and mail it to us at FamilyLife Today, Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas.  The zip code is 72221.  Once again, it's FamilyLife Today at Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas, and our zip code is 72221.                          Well, tomorrow we're going to find out how the UCLA dynasty almost never happened and how it might have been the Minnesota dynasty if it hadn't been for a snowstorm. Dennis:          Yeah, this is a great story about lost opportunity. Bob:                We'll hear that tomorrow as we continue our conversation with Coach John Wooden.  I hope you can be with us for that.                           I want to thank our engineer today, Robbie Neal [sp], and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.    We are so happy to provide these transcripts for you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs? Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights 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Don't Waste Your Life (Part 1) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 2) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John PiperFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Don't Waste Your LifeDay 2 of 3 Guest:                          John Piper From the Series:         Glorifying God From Your Wealth ________________________________________________________________Bob:                If you really understand and embrace the realities of the Christian faith, it will change your life.  Here is Dr. John Piper. John:              It seems to me that in this global village of ours, those who have any sense of reality at all know if Christianity is real, it's worth dying for.  If it's not real, then let's not even talk about it.  So, absolutely, I think we need to be straight up with young people and say, "Look, are you going to give your life and lay it down for Jesus or are you just going to play games?"  And nobody is out there saying, "What I really want to do with my life is play games." Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, July 27th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Is your Christian faith worth dying for?  Is it worth living for?  Stay with us.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.  A couple of songs I remember from the 1960s.  You know, I always kind of – we talk about a program, and I always think of a song – you remember the song, "Alfie?"  Do you know that song? Dennis:          Well, I couldn't sing it, but I remember it. Bob:                "What's it all about, Alfie, is it just for the moment we live?  What's it all about?  Wouldn't you sort it out, Alfie?  Are we meant to take more than we give or are we meant to be kind and if only fools are kind, Alfie" – it keeps going on and on.  That was kind of an existential, philosophical – Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote that.  They were – and then there was this other one – remember Peggy Lee?  She had this song about life, and she'd experienced the house burnt down one time, and she looked at the ashes, and she looked up, and she said, "Is that all there is?"  If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.  Let's break out the booze and a have a ball, if that's all.                          You know, they were talking about some pretty heavy themes back there in the '60s.  They needed John Piper who could have told them what's it all about and that this is not all there is. Dennis:          Well, you know, you're going to like John Piper, Bob, because in his book he quotes a Bob Dylan song called "Blowin' in the Wind."  "How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?  Yes, and how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?  Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows" … Bob:                [mimicking Bob Dylan] "that too many people have died?  The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind."                         I thought I'd throw in a little Bob Dylan. Dennis:          And those who know him can make their own judgments about that. John:              It was pretty good. Dennis:          Was it good, John?   Bob:                [as Bob Dylan] Thank you. Dennis:          But as John points out, you know, think about that – the answer is blowing in the wind?  I mean, what a great place to look for a solution to life, huh? Bob:                In the wind. John:              Well, there are two ways to take that.  I took it both despairingly and hopefully because he said "the answer."  I mean, today, nobody believes there is such a thing in this post-modern age, there is no "the answer" blowing anywhere – wind or Bible.  And the fact that he would say "the answer is blowin' in the wind," held up to me, as a young person in those days, I'm hungry for the answer.  I'm hungry for the answer.  And so there was at least an echo of confidence, of objectivity there, and in those existentialist days, and our days are not any different, even moreso, anybody that believes in there is "the answer" is in a minority.  He's in a minority, and I want to get around him and say, "I believe that, too."  That's my only hope.  If there is no "the answer" then life really is empty. Bob:                You don't think he'd been reading John, chapter 3, where Jesus says, "the wind blows wherever it will, and the answer is here, and the spirit moves" … John:              I would like to think that. Dennis:          He would love to believe that.  Well, the author of this book, don't waste your life, is John Piper.  He is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and, John, increasingly you are writing for a generation of college students and young professionals, I believe, who drink deeply from your writings because I think they're fed up with the culture of tolerance and political correctness and the lack of absolutes, and you're talking about absolutes here that rock their world in your book, "Don't Waste Your Life."                           In fact, in your book, you actually call these young men and women and all of us to be ready to give our lives for our faith.  I mean, that's a radical absolute that we would be willing to give our lives for our faith in Jesus Christ. John:              You know, it's hard not to issue that call where you read, as I read an article about the Christians in Sudan.  Choose life or choose Christ; that is, you're going to be threatened and perhaps killed for just talking about mobs of people who circulate in Southern Sudan, take people and say, "Are you a Christian or are you not?"  If it's a woman, if she says, "I am," a gang rape happens.  If she says, "I'm not," fine, go on.                           And so you know that around the world today the persecuted church is dealing with these things at the cutting-edge level of life and death.  I can't see going around the country today or standing in my pulpit and talking another language and saying, "Well, we really have an easy life, and Christianity doesn't mean the same thing to us here, it's just a nice way to get healthy and wealthy and prosperous," blah-blah-blah.  If I can't call young people to be a Christian in Sudan, I can't call them to Christian anywhere. Bob:                Well, and here's the challenge, even as I hear you talk about this, because you're absolutely right – to call people even to modern, suburban, evangelical Christianity, that's not a radical call, and yet that's kind of what I'm living, you know?  I mean, that's where I am, and so I read your book and go, "Do I have sell my house and move to the inner city and do I have to do radical things like that?"  Or can I live in the suburbs and still not waste my life?   John:              My approach in dealing with wealthy Americans, which we all are, is not to dictate the particulars of a lifestyle but to hold up Christ who calls people to follow Him when he has no place to lay his head, who says it's hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom, who says, through John the Baptist, if you have two coats, sell and give to him who has one."  Who says, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven and not on earth."  Through His Apostle Paul, He says, "Those who desire to be rich pierce themselves with many pangs and ruin and destroy their soul."  I just hold up these challenges and say, "You decide whether your house is too exorbitant.  You decide whether you need as many cars as you have.  You decide whether you need a cabin by the lake.  You decide whether you need five suits and 18 ties.  You decide" – and what I want to do is just push us towards a wartime lifestyle.                         Now, here is the reason I use "wartime" instead of "simple."  Simple lifestyle might mean go live in a cabin in northern Minnesota, plant carrots, eat organic foods, and they are no good for anybody. Dennis:          Could we go to Montana instead of northern Minnesota? John:              Yeah, you can go to Montana if you want to do that. Dennis:          Okay. John:              But here's the reason I'm not into that – I'm into blessing the world with my life as much as I can with Jesus Christ flowing out from me.  You might need to buy a computer and have e-mail access to be maximally invested for Jesus with your calling.  That's not a simple lifestyle.  It will cost you a couple thousand dollars to get set up with that.  If you want to win a war, you might buy a B-52 or a rocket launcher, but the people back home might be on austerity lifestyle so that the army can have its B-52.  So when I say, "Well, what about the people who are at home in America and the cutting-edge people?"  Well, I'd say probably the people back home need to streamline their life for two reasons at least – one is to maximize their resources for kingdom purposes, and the other is because the world is watching.                           It says in 1 Peter 3:15 that they're going to ask you a reason for the hope that is in you.  When was the last time they did?  Not very often.  Why?  Because we look like we're hoping in the same stuff they do – same car, same insurance policy, same retirement plan.  So why would they ask us what are you hoping in?                           But if you do something radical with your life, if you take a chance, if you do some risking, if you let your children go, you know, or you go yourself, or you're around someplace where you might get malaria or AIDS from the orphans, then they might say, "Isn't a little bit risky for you and your kids?"  We say, "Yeah."                         I want to breed a kind of Christian so that the world will look at this life and say what is your hope in?  My hope is in money and good retirement and 911 and health insurance.  What's your hope in?  And I hope the answer can be "Christ." Dennis:          You know, you can tell how close you are to the battle lines on the basis of what you're complaining about.  The guys who are complaining about the lack of ammo and artillery and air support and fuel and additional troops – those are the guys who are on the front lines.  The guys who are taking the R&R are complaining about how hard the cot is or the bed that they're sleeping in; that their accommodations generally are less than satisfactory.  Those are a long ways from the front line of battle.                         And what we've sought to be about here on FamilyLife Today is to call the listener to say, "You know what?  I'm not going to live an R&R lifestyle."  Where it's rest and relaxation.  Instead, I'm going to press in to the battle and the cause and the war that is taking place right now, whether you're a part of it or not.  And it is a kingdom war, and the reality is the results, the result of this war are lasting. John:              They're eternal. Dennis:          They're eternal, and for most of us I think that war and that battle begins in our marriage and in our family.  That's where it starts, but it wasn't meant to end there.  It was meant to spill over and impact our neighborhoods, our schools, our communities, our states and our nation. John:              Yes, it is so clearly a family issue, this issue of wartime lifestyle and kingdom orientation and eternal perspective, because your kids are watching big-time what your values are, and if you buy from the finest restaurant and the finest department store and drive the finest car and insist on having the finest cabin, that's exactly what they're going to live for.  But if you buy your clothes at Saver's down the street for 50 cents a bag, and you have a one-car family, and you don't have to have a new car, and if you live in a neighborhood where you choose it for ministry and not for safety, they're going to pick it up.                         So, for example – I'll give you a concrete example.  We haven't had a television in our house in America for 30 years, and I used to think, "Oh, dear, I'm going to raise these boys, and they're going to be out of it," and yet I was choosing to take that risk because mainly time and banality.  I wasn't worried about sex and violence.  I mean, who cares about sex and violence, the Bible is full of it.  I care about the silliness of it all and dragging the soul down into such small, empty, insignificant junk that fills that screen every day – how can anybody have a capacity for glory and greatness and magnificence and chivalry and beauty?                         And so we've done this for 30 years.  My boys have never once – they're grown now – and they've never once complained in my hearing that we didn't have a TV because their lives were full.  Instead of saying, "Oh, they've got to see reality, they've got to see suffering, they've got to see life as it really is."  I say, "Look, why don't you just take them and live where life really is."  So we live in the poorest neighborhood in Minneapolis, Phillips Neighborhood.  They've seen people do drugs, they've seen prostitutes, they've seen me pull a guy off of a woman trying to rape her in my front yard, they've heard the gunshots.  They don't need a TV, just go there.  Really, come on, parent, if you're serious about wanting your kids to see life as it really is, do you really think TV is the answer?  It's not the answer, it's an escape hatch when you're tired at night, and you're most vulnerable, and you're letting the world infect your brain.                         So I've got an orientation on family for wartime lifestyle that I hope embraces and says "Amen" to everything you stand for, because if we don't get it at the home, we won't get it anywhere. Bob:                John, if the idol of Mammon is the dominant idol in American culture, why has not God stepped in and destroyed it?  Why haven't we had the next great Depression where God says, "I will not allow you to worship lesser things?" John:              God is always doing more than one thing, and we must be very careful to judge ahead of time what any given season of life in America is.  If things are going really well, it would be a mistake to say, "This is all blessing from the Lord," because it may be judgment.  I mean, the worst judgment America could get would be for all people to become prosperous and forget God.                           And when things are going really bad in the culture, we better not jump to the conclusion, "This is all judgment," because what could be better than for a father to discipline his children, including the church?  And so the short answer to your question is grace, sheer, undeserved grace that has been poured out on America.  Not because we have the right governmental system or have the right forefathers or have the right anything, but because God is merciful.                         I would say, though, that probably the presence of many, many God-exalting, Bible-saturated, Christ-centered Christians, according to that principle in Genesis where Abraham says, "Won't you spare if there are 50, 40, 30?"  And God seems to say, "Yeah, I will."  And so I think there is an element of that as well – that God does spare America because there are such remarkable ministries and churches and Christians of faithfulness here.  But I wouldn't make that absolute, because God could wipe us off the scene in a minute and do us no wrong. Bob:                Do you think we're seeing a generation emerge that is less materially centered than our own? John:              It's a mixed bag.  I couldn't say that for sure.  When I watch, say, kids who don't seem to be as bent on dressing up as I was with my bleeding madras shirt and my penny loafers and yellow socks … Bob:                You were a prepster, weren't you? John:              Yeah.  I look at them today, I see nothing better because I think they put as much time and thought and effort into their kooky, kinky, twisted, messed up, half-blond hair as I did in my "Kooky, Kooky, lend me your comb hair" back in the '60s.  I don't really see any basic difference.  You can spend as much time and as much money on looking down as you can looking up, and so maybe, maybe not, I'm just not a sharp enough assessor of culture to know what the majority is like right now.                         What I'm interested in is harnessing the good that I do see and transforming the bad that I see, because I think there are tens of thousands of young people on the edge of their chair saying, "Tell me how to die for Jesus." Dennis:          Yeah, and, frankly, that's where I'd like to go right now.  Let's harness some of the good who are listening to this broadcast – that person who has listened to you and to us, and they've resonated with what you're saying.  So you know what?  I've had enough of the toys.  I've had enough of the games.  I'm tired of the R&R.  I want a life characterized by being near the front lines of battle, by being in the war about what God's about, which is displaying His glory, changing people's lives, transforming them through the Gospel.  There's a person listening right now, what would you say to them – how can they engage in that battle? John:              The number-one issue is treasuring Christ above all things.  Before you do anything you must be a lover of Jesus, which means you must see – I've got this book called "Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ."  We must see Him.  So I would say to the person, labor to see Jesus for the glorious person that He is.  Which probably will boil down to some pretty basic and simple things.  Get your Bible, get a pad of paper, get alone with God, open it up, and pray that He would open your eyes to see wonderful things.  In other words, mull the Bible, meditate over the Bible, read the Gospels over and over until you see Christ as inimitably and self-authenticatingly glorious, worth dying for, because until you see Him, your lifestyle is not going to change except legalistically.  But once you see Him, and He is your treasure, then things will start peeling away, and there will be a straight-arrow kind of living for Him.                         So I think the real battle is fought in what do we see and what do we savor? Dennis:          But after we've seen him, there needs to be that fruit in our lives, where there is that peeling away, as you described.  John:              Right, and I think it helps tremendously at that point to get alongside other believers and help each other in churches, small groups, recognize the challenges before us, the sins remaining in our lives, so that we can renounce the sins and embrace the challenges, and I think reading some good missions literature would be great, because most young people are so insular in America, we don't even know what's going on in the rest of the world, especially we don't know what's going on at the kingdom level. Dennis:          And I think today, as Jesus said, "The fields are white into harvest."  These are days to engage in the battle, and if what John has been saying here resonates with you, I want to give you a challenge.  Either right after this broadcast is over, or tonight before you lay your head down to go to sleep, I want you to pull out a sheet of paper, and I want you to sign over the very title deed of your life to Jesus Christ.  Barbara and I did this our first Christmas together in 1972.                           Now, I'm not saying there hasn't been struggles since then, because there has.  But you know what?  It's one thing to operate from a commitment where you have said, "I will pursue you and your agenda for my life."  It's one thing to operate from that, it's another thing to have never done that. Bob:                And here is what's happening – you are essentially trading in your cubic zirconia for diamonds.  You may look at your cubic zirconia and go, "But it's so pretty.  I don't want to let lose of this cut glass, it's so beautiful."  And that's only because you haven't seen the diamonds.  That's the essence of what John is saying in the book, "Don't Waste Your Life," and not only do we need the message, but we know people who need this message.  I'm going to ask John to sign a copy of this book for my kids, because they need this message but so do their parents, you know? Dennis:          I agree. Bob:                In fact, when the book first came out, my son, Jimmy, went through this book with a group of his fellow classmates, and we were thrilled that he was reading John's strong exhortation to make your life count.                         We've got copies of the book in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  If you'd like to get a copy for yourself or for someone you know who could profit from reading this book, go to our website, FamilyLife.com, and in the center of the home page you'll see a red button that says "Go."  You click that button, it will take you right to a page where you can get information about this book.  You can order online, if you'd like.  Again, our website is FamilyLife.com or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY, that's 1-800-358-6329, and someone on our team can let you know how you can have a copy of John's book sent out to you.                         You can also order a copy of the CD of our conversation with John Piper, or if you're interested in it as an MP3 file, that's available on our website as well.  Once again, our website is FamilyLife.com, and the toll-free number is 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.                         My daughter, Amy, has had the opportunity to hear you speak on this subject, John.  She attended the Passion Conference back – I think it was in 1999 and maybe again in 2000, and both times Beth Moore was speaking at that conference with you, and I think both of you were really pouring out your hearts to students on the same issue, and that is making Christ central to everything you do, having Him be the consuming center of your life.                         Not long ago, Dennis and I had the opportunity to sit down with Beth and to talk with her about her 25-year marriage to her husband, Keith; about some of the challenges they've experienced.  She was very open, and she spoke with us during that interview, and many of our listeners contacted us asking for a copy of that CD.  In fact, many of our listeners who have gone through Beth's studies were very interested to hear what she had to share about her marriage and her family.                          This month and next month, we are making that CD of the interview with Beth Moore available as our way of saying thank you to any of our listeners who can make a donation of any amount for the ministry of FamilyLife Today.  We're listener-supported, and those donations are what keep this ministry on the air, and if you can help with a donation this month, we want you to feel free to request a copy of the CD from Beth Moore.                          You can donate online, if you'd like, and if you do that, as you're filling out the donation form, you'll come to a keycode box – just type the word "free" in the keycode box, and we'll know that you'd like the CD from Beth Moore sent to you.  Or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY and make a donation over the phone.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and just mention that you're interested in the CD with Beth Moore, and we'll be happy to send that out to you as well.  Again, it's our way of saying thank you for your financial support of this ministry, which we not only need, but we very much appreciate your partnership.                         Well, tomorrow Dr. John Piper is going to be back with us, and we're going to focus our hearts and our minds where they ought to be focused – on the cross of Christ.  I hope you can be with us for that conversation.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.    We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com      

Today is the start of a multiple part series on social security. We'll be discussing topics such as the state of the fund and reforms that are aimed to help the program and more, so tune in and catch up on social security.Helpful Information:PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/Contact: 813-286-7776Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com----more----Transcript of today's show:Mark: Hey gang, welcome into another edition of retirement planning redefined with the boys from PFG Private Wealth Financial Advisors, John and Nick, once again here on the program with me as we talk about investing, finance and retirement. Always go to the website and check them out at pfgprivatewealth.com that is pfgprivatewealth.com. While you're there, subscribe to the podcast. Give us a like and check us out and all that good stuff. Subscribe to it for past episodes as well as future episodes. And of course anytime you hear anything, you've got a question or concern, give them a call before you take any action. 813-286-7776 is the number to call. If you hear a useful nugget of information and you want to learn more, again, reach out to them at (813)-286-7776. Guys, I hope you're doing well this week. Nick, what's going on man?Nick: Yeah, we're doing well. Staying busy for sure. Today what we wanted to do is kick off a multi session on social security.Mark: Okay. Cool.Nick: And we just want to let everybody know. We know that some of the people that'll be listening to this will have become familiar with us through either the more comprehensive classes that we put on around town or via a financial wellness workshop. And social security has been one of the hot topics for a long time and it continues to be as it is more in the news with the different pressures and some of the funding issues and those sorts of things. And then obviously with everybody, so many people and so many baby boomers getting closer to retirement, although we will be getting into it fairly comprehensively in this session, we just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that if they were interested in having us come in, whether it's some sort of association or an employer based kind of program, we like to do the lunch and learns or some sort of financial wellness workshop.Nick: And we've got about a 50 minute session that we'll do on social security. And from the feedback that we've gotten, it's been one of the most positively embraced sessions that we've done. So we just want to let people know that if they wanted a more comprehensive overview on this or they thought it might be beneficial for their employer or fellow employees or coworkers, that that's something that's available.Mark: Awesome. Yeah. When we get into that we'll have this multi-part series on the podcast regarding social security. And again, as Nick mentioned, if you want to talk with them, (813)-286-7776, (813)-286-7776.Mark: John, how are you man? You doing all right?John: I'm doing great. How are you doing?Mark: I'm doing very well. Thank you for asking. And you know, Nick got us all set up there for the conversation. So what do you say we dive into it? How does it work? I mean, what's the crux of the whole social security situation here we're looking at?Nick: Most people are obviously familiar with the fact that they are eligible for social security and they pay into the system, but not a lot of people are familiar with how it all works and ties together. We always like to start off in explaining people how the program is funded. A lot of people have seen on their pay stub where it might say FICA and they're not really quite sure what that is. But out of that 7.62 that comes out of your paycheck for those FICA tax is 6.2% of that is for social security. And one of the things that we have found over the years is that many people are not familiar with the fact that the employer also pays in 6.2%. Some people have this idea that the program is fully funded by the government and really it's fully funded by them and their employer.Nick: Letting them know that about 12.5% of their income each year is going into the program towards them is something that is important for them to understand. And for some of the higher income earners, they may have noticed at a certain point of the year that their paycheck gets a little bit bigger. And usually that's because payroll tax is capped, so people no longer pay in on earnings over ... In 2019 on earnings over $132,900. And as we talk a little bit about some of the things that'll change over time with the program, one of the things that's in the news the most is that cap and removing that cap so that it's similar to Medicare where people will pay on, no matter what their earnings are, they will continue to pay into the system.John: That cap's actually been going up aggressively. You know, I think a few years ago it was $112 Nick, and I think now they've jumped it up to one $132.Nick: Yeah, yeah. They've definitely been indexing it up faster than inflation, that's for sure.Mark: Yeah. And depending on what happens in the elections coming up next year, you know, depending on who gets in, there's conversations that that 6.2 could be raised as well. So if you're still working, so that could go up substantially as well.Mark: How much can somebody expect guys? I imagine that's a big question that always comes up is, what are we looking at? I know you can get your estimates, obviously, from the website. They don't even send those little papers out anymore I don't think. They used to send them out every year, then it went to every five years. I'm not sure if they even still do that.John: They do occasionally, and I'm not sure the exact how often, but I know that from our classes we're starting to have guests say, yeah they're getting the statements. But it's based off of your earnings record. And one thing that's important to understand, it's actually your highest 35 years. So a lot of people when I first started working, I think the first year I was 18 I made like $12,000.Mark: That's pretty good for 18.John: You're [crosstalk 00:05:20]. Yeah, exactly. Your highest earning years are really later in life, once you hit your 50s and 60s. So that's important to understand if someone's thinking about retiring early to make sure that they look on the statement and see, Hey, what years do I have that are significant in here? Because if I stop working my last seven years, you know the benefit that I'm seeing on my statement's actually going to be less.John: Because when you get your statement, what it shows if you continue to work up until that age, not if you stopped. So that's important. Another thing we tell our clients and anyone that comes to our classes is to make sure that you look at it, see if there's any zeros in there. Because if you do have zeros in your highest 35 that will actually bring down your benefit and that's something you may want to consider maybe working a couple of extra years to make sure that you maximize your social security retirement benefit as best you can.John: And you're right, you can go on social security.gov and pull up your statement. They'll ask you a lot of funny questions. What was the color of your first car? Most likely most people get locked out unfortunately, but it's good to go check it out if you haven't done that in awhile.Nick: Yeah. Another thing to just make sure that people know from the standpoint of those highest 35 years is that's in relation to the cap. And so you know that cap that we mentioned earlier, that $132,900, it's in relation to that. Just because there may have been a period of time, we've seen it in some circumstances, where maybe somebody took some time off to stay home with the kids and then they're returning to work and before they took time off they were making a higher income. And although, from a pure dollar standpoint they may be making more dollars now as in relation to the cap, that may not necessarily be the case.Nick: That highest 35 earning years is in relation to that cap. And with how social security date change the mailing out of the [inaudible 00:07:04] and that sort of thing, we absolutely recommend that people, although it can be a little bit of a pain from the process, to really get logged into the site, make sure they understand how to access that statement, make sure they understand how to read that statement. Especially from the standpoint of people that we have that are self employed. We have them double check their statements to make sure that their income is being correctly recorded because they may be paying in their self employment tax, which is essentially payroll tax. Making sure that that's recorded properly so they're going to get the benefits that they're entitled to down the road.Mark: Yeah. Now guys, I've heard through the years that if you see those zeros on there like John mentioned that that's not really on the social security to fix that. That falls back on you in trying to follow up possibly with past and employers. Like if you know you earned something in a given year and you're seeing a zero, is that still how it is? Is that the way that it goes? Do you need to talk with the social security office about that or do you need to track down that past employer?John: You do need to reach out to them and Nick's, I believe, grandfather did that and Nick can share that story.Mark: Oh, all right.Nick: And this was years ago, so I don't know any details on it, but my grandfather was from Cuba and so he had a natural distrust for the government. And when he was a professor at the University of Rochester and when he went to retire and file for social security, he did not agree with the amount. And due to his non-trusting nature, he happened to have every pay stub that he ever had in the basement. And so he was able to figure that out. Luckily now we have things that are more electronic and we do have people try to keep some sort of record and haven't had anybody recently deal with that in any sort of deeper way.Mark: That's good.Nick: But usually a tax return will help. And tax returns are one of the things that we have people ... We've got a portal for clients and we have them upload those tax returns so that they can be a really good resource down the road in case there's any issues.Mark: Well that's cool. Yeah. I mean I'm 48 and I think about myself and I think God, if I had to go back and figure out who I worked for when I was 20 and what they owed me or whatever, or what I paid in, I don't know where I'd start. So that was awesome that your grandfather actually kept all that stuff. Because I know that for a lot of people that would be definitely a challenge. But that's just something I thought about and I wanted to bring that up and get your guys' opinion on that.Mark: So if you're talking about things that are really important to people, obviously a big question for boomers, and I'm sure you get this at the wellness events that you do and just in general is the constant question of the health of the fund. Is it going to be around?John: Yeah, that is a 100% the main question we get at the workshops and also when we're doing planning for clients. But as it states today there's actually a surplus and the fund is actually growing. There's roughly $2.9 trillion in it and when you say trillion it doesn't really in reality mean much, we have no idea what that actually equates to.Mark: It sounds like a lot.John: [crosstalk 00:09:56] Surplus, it is a lot. But the surplus is about $3 billion a year between money that's coming into it through the payroll taxes and also the interest earned on the balance. Just to kind of give some people some numbers because they're always asking. In 2023, 2024 that surplus actually will stop. So it's actually going to be going into a deficit and then in 2034 the fund's basically exhausted and then it's just going to be paid through basically money coming in through payroll taxes and then the money's going to come out. An then in 2034 when that happens, based on the numbers, the estimates, is looking like there's going to be a 21% reduction of benefits. So you're going to get 79% of the benefit owed to you. And again, that's if no changes happen, which we'll we're going to go into shortly. Nick will start it up where we're talking about some of the reforms that already have been happening and that will continue to happen.Nick: And we do tend to ... Some of these will probably be repeated throughout the series about social security. And earlier I mentioned the increase in max earnings, removing that cap. That's probably one of the lowest hanging fruit from the standpoint of people getting on board with making higher income earners continue to pay into the system. Right now, the earliest retirement age that somebody can collect benefits from is 62. So that's an age, especially with the longevity of people's lives and people just living longer overall, that 62 will probably start to increase. I'm sure people will be grandfathered in at a certain age or certain, your worth and before it will be grandfathered in, but-Mark: It seems like that's a really-Nick: John and I suspect that our-Mark: Yeah, that seems like the easiest one too for a lot of things. Right? Just push it back for people under a certain age, like 50 and under or something, just push it back.Nick: Yeah. And social security ... The trickiest thing and probably one of the biggest reasons that not much has been done with it is because, frankly politicians are worried about not getting voted back into office, so-Mark: Yeah, it's a political poker chip for sure.Nick: They [inaudible 00:11:53] can down the road and try not to tick people off at least to a certain extent. So raising that initial retirement age from 62 probably upwards of ... They'll probably ease it in, but I wouldn't be surprised if John and I, our initial retirement age is closer to 65 or higher.Nick: They've talked about doing means testing from the standpoint of if people have a certain amount of income on that they wouldn't collect their social security. I think that one will probably be a little bit more difficult because usually that's income focused and honestly there's a lot of ways around that.Nick: But another thing would be that cost of living adjustment, and that's been tinkered with a little bit really over the last decade as inflation stayed low for a little while and interest rates were really low. But that could be something that they adjust. But realistically what we think will be the easiest things to do will be to take up on the payroll tax, potentially have employers put in a slightly larger percentage than the actual employee. It's something that they can do. Increasing that cap or the earning cap or removing the cap in general, and bumping back that initial retirement age, are all things that we think will be a big deal.Nick: The other thing could be the, really the increases, the percentage increases that social security provides for people that defer taking their benefits. So if they wait, any year after full retirement age, there's an 8% increase. And so that's something that'll probably drop as well.Nick: The good news is that this is pretty actuarial and really all you have to do is math to figure it out. It's just going to take people being willing, people being the government, being willing to make the changes.John: Yeah. And they've already, in 2015 they actually closed some of the loopholes which we've been seeing a lot of in planning some strategies that people were using are going away, which helped the program out. They're already doing some things. And the big thing that ... One of the things Nick talked about was the cost of living adjustments. To me that's one of the ones we need to keep an eye on because when we're doing planning, it really helps out the plan when you have some type of guaranteed income that actually goes up with inflation.John: Historically, social security has gone up about 2.6%. It's been low over the last five or six years due to inflation, but that's actually a pretty nice benefit when you look at what you start with at let's say 66 and what you end up with that age 85. It's a big amount. When you look over that 20 year period.Nick: Probably the one people want to fight for the most to maintain from the standpoint of anybody that's likes to be active or have a vested interest in the topic, that cost of living adjustment's really, really important for them.Mark: Absolutely. Well, let's take that point and segue into an offer for you guys. If you're listening and you want a free maximization strategy and the social security guide to anyone who emails in, just email john@pfgprivatewealth.com that's john@pfgprivatewealth.com. Again to get that free maximization strategy and social security guide here on the program.Mark: And I that's going to do it for us this week on the podcast guys. Really good information to start this week, talking about social security here on the show. We're going to continue on, as Nick mentioned earlier on, and do a multi-part series on this next time here on the program. We're going to talk about integrating social security into your retirement plan, making that part of the plan and some things to look for and think about in regards to that.Mark: You've been listening to retirement planning redefined with John and Nick financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth. Again, that's PFG Private Wealth and that you can find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com and subscribe to the podcast while you're there. Don't forget to email John if you'd like to get that social security maximization or give him a call at (813)-286-7776. If you've got some questions about your own social security, get on the horn with them. Come in for a consultation and a conversation. (813)-286-7776. This has been retirement planning redefined for John and Nick. I'm Mark and we'll see you next time.

Saffron in the SouksVibrant Recipes from the Heart of LebanonBy John Gregory-Smith Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors. John: I'm John Gregory-Smith, and my new cookery book is called Saffron in the Souks. It's packed with vibrant recipes from Lebanon. Suzy Chase: The first line in this cookbook says, “When I was writing my first cookbook in 2010, I went to work as a chef in Beirut.” Let's go back for a minute, and tell me how you got to that point in 2010, in Beirut? John: So, the landscape was very different then. Social media was a completely different beast back in 2010, I think. I don't even think Instagram was really a thing back then. I was more like Facebook and Twitter. I'd read an article on a restaurant, very old school, like in the newspaper, that was like a community kitchen. The guys set up this place called Tawlet in Beirut, where they had a really good front of house, really good chefs, and they would invite people from local regions of Lebanon to come and cook their local cuisine. The landscape there was a bit, let's say, challenging outside of the city. It was still a bit dangerous. A lot of the people with the money who were living in Beirut weren't traveling anywhere. What you wanted to do was encourage people to come and cook, they could take home a bit of cash. Just do good things via food. I thought it sounded incredible, and I also thought it sounded like a very smart way to go to one place and learn about all the regional cuisine of the country. Lebanon is not a huge country anyway, but it wasn't a great place to be traveling around. You could just go to the city and stay there. I emailed them and they got back to me and said, “Yeah, come out. That would be great, we'd love to have you.” I basically was there for a couple of weeks. I'd go in every morning and do the morning shifts, and help the guys prep for lunch service. The way they eat in this restaurant is just beautiful. You go and you pay a set price, I think it's about $30 or whatever. You have this ginormous banquet laid out for you of hot and cold [mezzes 00:02:21], and then amazing stews and meats, and amazing vegetarian food from the different regions. The ladies who would come in from the regions would spearhead what they wanted to cook, and then the chefs would help them prepare it. It was really quality food, really interesting menus, and it was changing all the time. The desserts, oh my God, they were so delicious! They'd have this huge counter laid out, with opulent desserts. It was just incredible. I learned so much. Really, really enjoyed the city as well. It was a very vibrant place to be, there was a lot happening, it felt like it was really exciting. I was very much advised to just stay in the city, for my own safety. I don't speak Arabic, and that was ... When the locals tell you to do something, you tend to do it, do you know what I mean? Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: So, I had this incredible time, kept in touch with everybody in the restaurant. They were saying, "Oh, you know, the country is changing, it's really opening up, it's a lot safer now. You should think about coming back." I did, I just decided that's what I wanted to do. I went back, hired a car, and drove around for a few months on my own. Tapped into these lovely ladies who'd helped me originally. It was so nice, going to revisit them, and going to stay in their homes. Spend time with them properly, and cook with them on their own terms. It was just phenomenal. Suzy Chase: Now, years later when you went back, did you go thinking about writing a cookbook, or did you just go back, just to revisit it? John: Absolutely writing a cookbook. I got the green light that I could ... Basically, I said to the guys I'd stayed in touch with in the restaurant, if I come back, the way I write books is I need to drive around, I need to be on my own, I need to soak things up. I need to feel that I can go anywhere, do everything, meet everyone. Is that doable? They were like, “Absolutely.” So, I spoke to my publisher. I felt if I could do it, go for it. They were quite supportive. Suzy Chase: Did you have a translator? John: Yes. My Arabic is dreadful. It's a really hard language. Suzy Chase: Yes. John: I'm very bad at languages, anyway. I can speak three words of French. Arabic is a very different beast. I can say hello, and thank you. Most of the times when I say that, people don't really understand what I'm saying. I would very much have a translator. Actually, what I found when I was there is that most of the guys would speak a bit of English. I could get around it quite easy. It was nice when I did have a translator, because I could get the beautiful stories, and the nuances of the food quite a lot better. Suzy Chase: Tell me about the title, Saffron in the Souks? It just rolls off the tongue. John: So, what I like to do is, when I go to these countries, I get incredibly overexcited. I'm quite an excitable person. I charge around, full of energy. I see everything, do everything, and I tend to just love it all. What I want to do is communicate that to everybody, really. It has to be through the recipes, through the writing, and the title. What I was trying to come up with was something really evocative, and beautiful, and that would inspire how the country had inspired me, really. Saffron in the Souks just felt like it had that lovely hint of something exotic. It felt perfect for it. Suzy Chase: It's nice. You could even name a restaurant Saffron in the Souks. John: Yeah, it's gorgeous. I love it. Suzy Chase: It's really pretty. John: Trademarked, by the way, so you can't. Suzy Chase: Oh, darn. I was going to do my new Twitter handle, Saffron in the Souks. John: Funny. Suzy Chase: What is typical Lebanese street food? John: So, the really good stuff would be kebabs. Amazing kebabs, they eat them meat over fire. You wouldn't cook it at home because you don't have a huge fire pit. That is served everywhere. Any town you go to will have a really good kebab shop. They make everything from chicken sheesh, which is the very basic marinated cubes of chicken, to more elaborate lamb kebabs, and ground meats. The other thing is, again, because they don't have ovens, you use communal bakers. Even in the tiny villages, they'll have a local baker. The baker will obviously cook the bread, but they also do these really wicked things called manouche, which is a flatbread that's cooked fresh with zaatar. Zaatar is a spice blend of different dried herbs. Sumac, which is a red berry that grows in dry areas. It's ground and it's got a very tart flavor. Then, finally, sesame seeds. It's quite a sucker punch of flavor. They drizzle oil and put the spice mix over the raw dough and bake it. You eat that as breakfast on the go, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Tell me about picking fresh zaatar in Nabatieh? How do you pronounce it? John: Nabatieh. Suzy Chase: Nabatieh. John: Yeah, that was really interesting. Actually, that was right in the south of Lebanon, by the Israeli border. I was advised not to go there. I think people just felt it could be a bit risky, basically. Anyway, I was with the guys who I'd been working with the whole time, who ran this kitchen. I was say I really want to go down there, but I've been told not to. They went, “Listen, we know this brilliant farmer there. He's really lovely. Let's call him and see what he says.” We called this guy, he's called Abu. Abu was so lovely. He went, “Look, it's completely fine at the moment, it's really safe. It feels like it's been safe for quite a while. Why don't you come down to the farm?” I went with a friend of mine, she actually drove me. Now, I did drive everywhere in Lebanon, and it was only out of laziness she decided to drive. It also meant that the journey, which probably would have taken me maybe four hours, because I drive so slowly, took about an hour because they drive ... She drove so fast. We went there, and it was exquisite. It was a really vibrant, green part of Lebanon. Beautiful, it was springtime. Wild flowers everywhere, and this herb called zaatar grows there. If you buy this blend called zaatar, say in America, it will probably have thyme or oregano in it as the herb. In Lebanon, they actually have a herb called zaatar. It's native to their country, and it's got this incredible perfume. Abu was this wonderful man. Really just so much energy and life, he was gorgeous, grew this herb commercially. When he first started growing it, everyone was like, you're insane. This just grows wild everywhere, we can just pick it. He basically knew that he had found the best zaatar plants. He had the last laugh, because now is zaatar is very coveted all over Lebanon and beyond. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: I think he even stocks some restaurants in London now with it. He was just so lovely. We strolled around his farm, and he took me down to this incredible river that was in this gorge. It was just so beautiful. I was thinking I was so lost in the whimsical beauty of this place. I was like, my God, we're actually in a really dangerous part of the world. Who would have thought this kicks off here? It's just too beautiful. He developed ... He was such a canny old man. He developed this technology, this machine that could spin the herbs. He would dry it and spin it, and it would remove all the little bits of grit, and separate the lovely top bit of herb from the grit. I'm like ... the journalist in me was like, I want more information. Tell me about this? How does it work, what does it do? He was really funny, because it was all through a translator. I could just see his face, he was very serious while she was talking. Then, he'd just roared laughing. I even understood what he was saying. He was like, “There's absolutely no way that I'm telling you how this works. This is my trade secret. Back on your horse.” It was just so wonderful, it was such a lovely experience. I'm really glad that I went down there. I felt completely safe, and it's great for me to be able to report back on it. I'm not saying everyone should run down there immediately, but if you choose to and it's right for you, it's pretty fabulous. Suzy Chase: I love the photo of him on page 139. John: Yeah, it's amazing. Suzy Chase: There's just so many stories in that face of his. John: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. Suzy Chase: Describe the Lebanese seven spice? John: Lebanese, they do use a lot of spices, but actually it tends to be, in general, quite herb heavy and fresh. It's more the old, Arabic dishes that they use spices in. One of the blends is called seven spice. It's typically more than seven spices, that's what I came to realize when I was there. I was like, that's not seven, that's about 12. People would just look at me, very blankly. It tends to be quite heavy, woody spices. Cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, those sorts of things. They add in this incredible spice called mahleb. Mahleb is actually cherry stones, so the pits or the seeds from a cherry, and they're ground, which sounds disgusting. You'd just be thinking, why would you want to grind a gross old stone after you've eaten it? But it has the most incredible sweet perfume. Actually, in Syrian cuisine, they use it a lot in desserts. Lots of pastries and baklava, they'll add it too. It goes into some seven spice mixes, and you can smell the ones that have it. It can be quite hard to find. I think America is very similar to the UK, in if you order it, you get it, but that can be a bit of a faff. I think you can get a mix called [baharat 00:12:17]. I know, for example, in Whole Foods, you can buy baharat. That's a sort of similar style blend. I've tried to put that in. Everywhere I've said seven spice, I've put that in, just so you can stay on top of the cooking. Suzy Chase: How do you spell that, if we want to look for it at Whole Foods? John: Oh, let's try. I'm quite dyslexic, but I'll give it a go. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I think it's B-A-H-A-R-A-T.Suzy Chase: Okay.John: That's it. Suzy Chase: So, it's spelled like it sounds? John: Yes. I think so. Maybe check on Google just in case-Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: -I've got it completely wrong. Suzy Chase: Well, just look in the Bs. John: Yeah, exactly. Suzy Chase: I found it interesting that Beirut used to be called The Paris of the East. John: Yes. Suzy Chase: Talk a bit about that? John: So, Beirut was originally a very Liberal city, a coastal city. Beautiful beaches, beautiful people, beautiful drinks, beautiful food. It was a French doctorate for quite a long time, Lebanon. It had a massive French hangover, almost. The architecture there was very Parisian, beautiful wide streets, very unlike typical Arabic. It would have wide balconies, beautiful French windows. Things were very open on the facade, whereas if you go to a very Arabic city, everything's very closed because they like to do things behind closed doors. So, it had this beautiful architecture, really good art scene, and it was known as being a quite decadent city. There's a city outside of Beirut called Baalbek, which is an extraordinary city near Syria. Baalbek used to have ... It's famous for Roman ruins, actually. It's got the most incredible Roman ruins. The temples look like the Acropolis. It's the Temple to Dionysus, which is the God of Booze. They used to do these incredible festivals there in the forties, where all the Hollywood greats would go. It was a real roaring place to be. Unfortunately, just because of politics, and religion, and strife, it took a massive turn for the worst. The people who live there remember that, and they hold onto that, and they treasure that. What's really lovely now is that people are like, “We want that back, and we're going to get it back.” You really feel that when you're there now. Beirut has so much energy when you're there. Really amazing, all along the coast, really rocking beach bars where you just hang out all day. Really creative artsy side of the city as well, so lots of poets, and musicians, and artists, and they're really injecting life back into it. Fingers crossed that they can do it, because it's certainly a cool place to be. Suzy Chase: Speaking of Dionysus, when you think about an Arabic country, you would assume no one drinks or parties. John: Exactly. Boy, do they drink and party there. Lebanon is a very small country. It's near, obviously, Jerusalem, so it has ... During the Crusades, it was always quite a hot spot. That coast was very dominant. That whole area has always been ... What's a nice way to put it? A slight tussle between the different religions, let's say. Suzy Chase: A tussle. John: Yeah, really top line way of saying it. When you're there, there's obviously a massive Christian community still there. In this small country, you've got big Christian community, there's a big Arabic community. They've got Drus, they've got Jews, they've got loads of different communities there. A lot of those communities are very happy. Arabs do party, but they just party in a very different way. There's a lot of them there who certainly like to party with a good drink in hand. The interesting thing about Lebanon is they have, to the east valley called Becker Valley. Becker Valley is the wine region, so it's filled with vineyards. They make some exquisite wines there. Suzy Chase: So, describe the sour tang that the Lebanese palette is so partial to? John: Yeah, right. It's extraordinary. They love sour. When you're cooking with Lebanese, there're certain ingredients that their eyes light up, and they love the taste of sour. Pomegranate molasses, which is essentially just pomegranate, which we know are full of those pits with that lovely bejeweled bit of fruit around each one. They just squeeze the juice out and simmer it down. The natural sweetness turns it into this very sticky molasses. They will shove that in salads, stews. They'll make vinegarette and sauces out of it. It gives this very sweet sour tang. The lemons there are incredible. They are tart, but they're not like really horrid, bitter lemons that make you wince. They're more like Amalfi lemons. They're huge, slightly sweet flavored. They're gorgeous, and they will really go for it with that. The other ingredient, I think I mentioned earlier, is the sumac, which is the ground red berry. Quite often, they'll use all three. For example, when they make fattoush, which is a classic Lebanese salad, which is essentially chopped ingredients with bits of crispy fried bread. Just deeply pleasing. They'll make the dressing with pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, and sumac, and then they put in their gorgeous olive oil. It's very, very sour. It's interesting when you're cooking with someone who's palette's a bit more developed in that direction than you. I'd be like, oh, just a little hint. They're like, "What are you doing? Keep going, keep going." Actually, it does work. When you're using really lovely fresh ingredients, they can quite often take a sour that's lovely. Suzy Chase: When I think about Lebanon, I don't think about exciting produce. Talk a bit about that? John: Yeah. It's a funny old place. Again, for such a small country, it's got the most incredible different terrain. You've obviously got the Mediterranean Sea to one side, so you get all the coastal food. Then, you've got the mountains in the North and the South. Really, you've got a band of band mountains in the middle, and then a valley on the other side. It's very fertile, it's incredibly fertile country. They grow everything from fruit and vegetables to amazing herbs. Really, really amazing herbs. Rice grains, everything grows there. They get really good seasons. You get really long, hot summers. You get good autumn, good spring, where it's a lot cooler. Then, cold winters so things can regenerate. You do get this incredible, incredible turnaround of produce there. What's lovely is they don't have a culture like, say, mine or yours, where we're so used to going into the supermarket and you get whatever you want, whenever you want. There, they do have supermarkets in the cities, but everything is just seasonal. You just get what you get, and it is really lovely. They'll be certain things at certain times of the year. For example, strawberries. Well, they'll just go bad for it. Or, in the spring, when the green beans come, farva beans. They just love it. You see little stalls popping up everywhere, selling just one ingredient. The farmers will come, we've got a glut of them. Everybody gets really excited about it, it's so sweet. They may only be around for a couple of months. I don't have that. I've just grown up in London where you go to the supermarket and get what you want. I just love being around that excitement over something so simple. It's really gorgeous. Suzy Chase: One recipe that was surprising in this cookbook is the Garlicky Douma Dumplings. Is it Douma? John: Oh! Yes! They're so good. Suzy Chase: Tell me about those. John: Douma is this beautiful little Christian village. It looks like you're in Tuscany, it's in the hills before you get to the mountains. It is so beautiful. Really, it's extraordinary. I took my parents there, and they couldn't believe it. You've got these little villages with huge churches in. Everything is dome, tiled roofs. It really looks like Italy, it's really weird. All the olive trees going around. In the villages there, they make these dumplings. They almost make a pasta dough, and they fill them with meat. They actually look even like little tortellini. They serve them in a yogurt sauce. When I first got given this bowl of joy, I was so overexcited. Because I'm such a geek, the first thing I wanted to do was take a photo. The light was really bad. I was in this beautiful old house, with this amazing kitchen, and these lovely women cooking and chatting. I got given this bowl of food and yelped, and made a run for what had been the door to go outside. I hadn't realized that someone had actually closed the glass door, so I just ran into it, into the glass door. Suzy Chase: No!John: Luckily, nothing bad happened, but the whole bowl of food just flew all over me. I was like, turned around covered in these dumplings dripping down my face. They were all just in utter hysterics. Suzy Chase: Oh, my. John: They thought I was weird enough anyway, and that was definitely the cherry on top. Suzy Chase: Just pushed you over the top. John: It was so funny. They are absolutely dreamy. They're quite easy to make, because the dough is ... There's actually no egg in it. Unlike pasta, there's no egg in that dough, so it's super easy to work with. They are delicious. Suzy Chase: Last weekend, I made your recipe for Beirut meatballs on page 111.John: I saw! Suzy Chase: Now, this is a traditional recipe named after an Ottoman name Daout BashaJohn: Yeah. Suzy Chase: How have you adapted this recipe, and how did this guy get a dish named after him? John: So, funnily enough, the woman who told me this story, it was really funny. She was this incredible woman, she was so glamorous and cool. I met her in the restaurant in Beirut. I didn't meet her 10 years ago, I met her this time around because I kept going to the restaurant for lunch. Whenever I was in the city, I'd always pop in to say hi to everyone. I met her. We got on like a house on fire, and actually went to her house. She showed me how to cook these. She was like ... You know how when you meet some people, you're just naturally drawn to them? Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. John: They've just got something about them. She'd been through really bad cancer. She was so full of life and energy. Her son was an opera singer. They were just really cool. I'm a bit obsessed with pasta and meatballs, and for some reason we were talking about that. She was like, “Oh my goodness. There's this dish that I've got to teach you.” She showed me how to make them. They're sort of like sour meatballs in a ... There's a lot of onions, and pomegranate, and it's very perfumed. I was asking her, where is this recipe from? She gave me that story, that this Turkish guy had come. This was named after him. I said, why? She just went, “Well, it just is.” That was the end of the story. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I was like, oh. Can you give me any more detail than that? She's like, “No, they're just named after him.” I've Googled it, and spoken to other people, and they all said the same thing. Whoever he was, came over, and left this dish. That's it. Regardless of the slightly stunted story, they are delicious. They're really, really nice. Suzy Chase: I even made my own pomegranate molasses, which was so easy. John: Wow. That's really top marks. You win. That's amazing. I would never do that. Suzy Chase: It was really easy.John: Really? How long did it take to cook down? Suzy Chase: About eight minutes. Not that long. John: That's so good, that's amazing. Suzy Chase: I didn't need that much. John: Is that because you couldn't find a bottle? Suzy Chase: Yeah, I couldn't find-John: Oh. Suzy Chase: I used pomegranate juice. John: Oh, that's great. How intuitive of you. Suzy Chase: Yeah, look at that.John: Look at you. Suzy Chase: Look at me cooking. I also made the recipe for roasted carrots with tahini and black sesame seeds on page 51. John: Yeah, that's nice. Suzy Chase: Describe this dish. John: Obviously I said earlier about the way the produce works, and the way things are just eaten in season. They have an innate love of vegetable. They just love veggies. They do them really, really well. Most meals you go to, actually, will have ... Actually, quite a lot of people will eat vegetarian food quite a lot of the time, certainly in the more rural areas where they've not got so much cash. Even if you eat a big meal, it will tend to be a little meat or fish, then loads of veg. This was just one of those dishes that was very simple, and it makes the vegetables sing. What you want is ... Do you have the word ... You do have the word heritage for vegetables in America, don't you? Suzy Chase: Yes. We call them heirloom. John: Okay, so heirloom carrots. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: You want the nicest carrots that you can get. All different colors, all different flavors. You just roast them up with a bit of cumin. The lovely bit is the tahini. Carrots have that deep sweetness that you get from a root veg. Tahini is almost like a peanut butter, but it's made with sesame seeds. It's a ground sesame seed paste, and it has a wonderful, rich sweetness that just compliments the carrots. It's just two ingredients that work so well together, and I just love it. Suzy Chase: I also made the Akra smashed Lemon Chickpeas on page 16. John: Whoa. Suzy Chase: How is this different from hummus? John: Okay, hummus is chickpeas, tahini, garlic, and lemon. That's how you make classic hummus. This recipe, it's called Akra Smashed. Akra is the name of the restaurant in Tripoli. Tripoli is this fabulous, old Venetian city on the coast, north of Beirut. It really is buzzing, it's brilliant. I think, actually the best street food in Lebanon is in Tripoli. There's this ginormous restaurant called Akra. It opens really early in the morning, like six o'clock, maybe even earlier, and it stays open until about two. All they serve is hummus. It's got about 350 covers, it's packed the whole time. The point being, you basically get a whole bowl of hummus for yourself, with a little bowl of pickles, veg, and some pitas. That's a snack or a light meal. Actually, it's not that light because you eat so much of it. They serve the classic hummus. They serve a thing called hummus ful, spelled F-U-L. That's made with fava beans. It's quite an acquired taste, actually. Then they make this other style of hummus that I copied in this book. It's basically the same ingredients. You've got your chickpeas, your lemon, your garlic, and your tahini, but it's blended so that it has a bit more texture. It's more lemon juice than you would normally serve, so it tastes a bit fresher, a bit lighter. It's got a lovely texture to it. It's not that silky smooth complexion of hummus, it's a bit more chunky. Like a guacamole or something. What was so nice about it is you get that sort of texture, and almost dryness from the chickpeas. It feels like it's gagging for something. What they did is they drizzle it with a chile butter, a very rich chile butter, and then loads of roasted nuts. You get all the things in it missing, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Now to my segment this season called my favorite cookbook. John: Right.Suzy Chase: Aside from this cookbook and your others, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? John: Oh, all-time favorite book, that's really hard. Can it only be one? Suzy Chase: Yes. John: Yes, because that was the question, wasn't it? Oh my God, that's really hard. What would be the one book that I would hang onto? I would be Delia Smith, How To Cook. Delia Smith is a stalwart British cookery writer and TV chef from the ... She was really massive ... She's still huge here now, but she was really big in the seventies and eighties. It was before cookery was cool, so on telly. It was a bit like a school teach telling you how to cook. Her recipes really worked. It was everything from how to make an omelet to how to make a roast chicken. I taught myself how to cook with that book. My mom had a copy. The cover, Delia has the most extraordinary, coiffed 1970s haircut you've ever seen. It looks like someone's put a weird bowl over her hair, tilted it backwards, and cut around it. Suzy Chase: I love it. John: It's extraordinary. If you Google it, it will just make you roar with laughter. That book, I learned how to cook from it. I think that would probably be the one book I feel so nostalgic about and hang onto. Suzy Chase: In interviewed James Rich, who wrote the cookbook Apple yesterday. John: Oh, yeah, right. Suzy Chase: He said the same thing! John: Did he? Suzy Chase: Yes! John: That's so funny. That is so funny. Suzy Chase: Okay, so you've done Turkey, Morocco, and Lebanon. What's next? John: I'm entirely sure, actually. I came up with a brilliant, very hair brained idea. I like really weird and wonderful, I love weird and wonderful a lot, and I my publisher thought my idea was way too weird, and perhaps not so wonderful. They've asked me to rethink. Yeah, I definitely want to continue with the Middle Eastern thing. I feel that I want to dip into another country there, because I just love it around there. I've got a trip coming up, actually. I'm going to Gaza in a couple of weeks, which is going to be very, very interesting. Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. John: Yeah, I'm going with a charity to look at child nutrition out there. It's all quite intense. I think it will be incredible, I think it's going to be really extraordinary going to pretty much a war zone to see how people eat. Yeah, it's going to be quite an intense trip. I would love to go somewhere ... I love the Eastern Mediterranean, it's beautiful. I'd love to do a book in Iranian food, but I don't think now is the time to be going to Iran. Suzy Chase: What does your mom say? Is your mom freaking out?John: Yeah, completely. When I said the G word, they made that teeth wincing noise. She went, “Oh, my baby. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” I said, I want to go because it's this amazing charity and we're going to help children. It means this tiny thing I can do to contribute could be a really good thing. She was just like, “But why there? Why don't you pick somewhere nicer?” I'm dead excited. I think it'll be great. Suzy Chase: So, where can you find you on the web, and social media? John: So, I use Instagram an awful lot, much to the annoyance of my family. My Instagram handle is @JohnGS. I've got a lot of content on there, I do a lot of free content. I'm trying to stick a couple recipes out every week for people to copy. Then, everything on my website, which is just JohnGregorySmith.com.Suzy Chase: As the Lebanese people say, Sahtain, which means double health. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. John: Loved it, and love you. Outro: Subscribe over on CookeryByTheBook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Are you a property manager or owner who wants to recoup financial losses when stuck with a bad tenant who stops paying rent or needs to be evicted? Lower your risk? Trust somebody else to manage your properties? Protect all parties involved?  Today, I am talking to John Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Steady Marketplace, a leading technology platform for property owners and managers. Steady’s subsidiaries offer financial products, including rent default insurance.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Background of Big Financial Numbers: Starting with event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with billions in assets.  [06:37] Steady’s products protect property owners/managers from bad tenant outcomes.  [07:40] Rent Default Insurance: Protection against rental income loss due to tenant’s failure to pay.  [10:15] Rent Default Insurance is widely available and adopted around the world. About 70% are renters and 30% are owners. [12:38] Collaboration Over Competition: Don’t simply copy-and-paste products and policies; leads to lack of innovation. [13:55] Automate It All: Learn from online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and pricing. [15:05] Perfect Businesses are Out of Business: Entrepreneurs think they've got something perfect, only to realize they need to make it better.  [16:15] By the Book: Take regulatory issues seriously, and make sure to do it right. [17:00] Adoption is #1 challenge with any solution, software, or service.  [17:55] Competitive Advantage: Education, awareness, and understanding of product.  [20:53] FAQs: How does it work? Why does this exist? What’s the catch?  [21:55] Renter’s Insurance vs. Rent Default Insurance: What’s the difference? Tweetables Every entrepreneur should make a difference. Otherwise, they're just causing problems. When there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. Automate everything: Go slow to go fast. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Resources John Higgins’ Email Steady Marketplace Steady Marketplace FAQ John Higgins on LinkedIn SureVestor Rent Rescue National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners, we want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today, I am hanging out with John Higgins of Steady Marketplace. John, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. John: It's great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: John, you've got a really big bio and you're really impressive. Do you want me to read all of it? John: You can read whatever you want to read. I'm not that impressive. I'll say you're more impressive hosting this show and with your following in the space. I'm just a guy trying to make a difference. Jason: I appreciate it. That's what every good entrepreneur is trying to do is make a difference, at least I hope. Otherwise, they're just causing problems.  I'll read a little bit here. It says you are the co-founder and CEO of Steady Technologies Inc., a leading technology platform for property owners and property managers. Steady, through subsidiaries, offers financial products that benefit property owners and managers. Their first product is rent default insurance, offered in partnership with the top US insurance carrier that is a Fortune 100 company, rated A+ by AM Best, and S&P.  Prior to co-founding Steady, Mr. Higgins founded Nobadeer Advisors which provided business development and capital market expertise to technology-enabled lending platforms across the variety of consumers and business, lending verticals, and backed by top venture capital firms globally.  Prior to Nobadeer, Mr. Higgins spent 2.5 years at Prosper Marketplace, Inc. where he helped build the institutional loan program growing it from $0 to over $5 billion over his tenure and help scale Prosper's monthly origination volumes over 4000% during his time at the firm.  Mr. Higgins also previously served as a director at Topwater Capital, now owned by Leucadia, where he made investments between $5-$100 million to hedge fund managers across a variety of strategies via structured managed accounts.  Prior to Topwater, Mr. Higgins spent five years working for event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with assets as large as $1.85 billion. There's a lot of big financial numbers here, John. A lot of big financial numbers. John: Want me to dive a bit deeper on it and summarize for you? Jason: Yeah. Let's dive into that and then tell us how you got into all of these. John: Sure. I can start from how I got into the hedge funds space which led me through here. I started and talk my way into an internship my junior college, totally unqualified, at the University of New Hampshire versus people that are top of their class from top business schools. Got a shot to join big hedge fund on my way up. I worked my tail off that summer and got a full time offer. I joined that firm full time after I graduated college. I was really lucky. I worked for the really brilliant entrepreneur there who would start this business with $500,000. Four years later, he grew it to almost $2 billion.  Then, left that company and went to Topwater where I was invested in hedge fund strategies via structured managed accounts, kind of cross the bench of the long, short, and distressed credit. That company was acquired by Leucadia which is now Jefferies Investment Bank; the two merged. Leucadia was at a big stake and Jefferies a long story anyway. As that transaction was transpiring, I was approached by the former management team across the marketplace who've I known from the hedge fund industry. They had great entrepreneurs that built and sold the company that served hedge funds called Merlin Securities. They're backed by Sequoia. Sold that business to Wells Fargo and decided they were going to take over Prosper.  They reached out and said, "We're looking for someone to help us build out this business as we take it over and turn it around." Really fortunate to work with tremendous entrepreneurs and the tremendous team there. During my time there, we went from about 50 employees up to about 600+ when I left. That was my first foray into more pure play technology.  We're a financial technology platform. We're offering unsecured personal loans online to end consumers. If you're thinking about going online, applying for a personal loan, no human interaction, [...] pricing, I can get you a loan in a matter of days as opposed to having to leave your house, go to a bank, et cetera, and fill up paper forms. After leaving Prosper, I was consulting for various lending platforms as you touched on in the intro. I got to work again with tremendous entrepreneurs across a bunch of different verticals. One of the people I've got to work with was doing some lending into the small landlord space. It's fix and flip lending and also rental lending. I started looking at the opportunities. I said, "This is really interesting. I know all of these products that helped multifamily owners protect them against bad tenant outcomes."  There's a lot of companies that pop up doing that, but no one's really going after single family. I started looking at the space and opportunity. As you and everyone else in the space realizes, it's actually bigger than the multifamily space. When you live in New York, everyone thinks rental properties are the big highrise. In fact, there's roughly more than 16 million single family rental units in the US, then another 8 million duplexes, triplex quads. All in all, you have about 20 million rental units in the US owned by individual investors that owned less than 10 units. These owners actually can't solve for this risk which is if the tenant goes bad. The smart owners are getting professional property managers or actually better at picking tenants at the established processes and procedures. They're getting bad tenants out. It can help manage those properties and have better outcomes. But still, when there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. In fact, my business partner and co-founder, Viken, had a property in New York City that he was renting. Person just skips town in the middle of the night. He was left with close to $20,000. It actually might have been north of $20,000 loss because the tenant just left the unit and didn't say anything. It took awhile to get it rerented. He had no coverage. If he had, it had no protection against that. If you had Steady or some of these other providers that are popping up, they could've indemnify themselves from that loss, and could've been made whole for a modest premium.  Long story short, there's a big need in the market to this type of product. What we're really excited about is working with all the property managers across the country to help ensure this is product underlying landlords and finding ways for everyone to win. Jason: Cool. Let's talk about the product specifically. Explain this to somebody that's never heard of this. They might even be an unseasoned property manager. Describe the problem that exists, that this solves for. John: Sure. When you look at it, if the tenant goes bad whether it's professionally managed or not—let’s suppose it’s some professionally managed properties; that's really who we're serving here in this podcast, and who we speak to—if their tenants goes bad, the owner's mad at them. They might've lose that door because guess what? They probably picked the tenant. They were entrusted by the landlord or the owner to find the tenant, to select the right tenant, and now the tenant's bad. So, the owner's mad, they might lose every relationship. The owner's also rental income. As a result, property managers also lost their property management fee income. Generally, they're charging based on the property management fee.  If you look globally, across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, this type of insurance product, rent default insurance, is widely available and widely adopted. The reason is that, if you look in other jurisdictions, primarily Europe, it's flipped from the US. It's about 70% renter 30% owner. As we know, post financial crisis, more and more US consumers are now choosing to rent instead of own. So, the property management space is going to be larger and the rental property market is getting larger.  As this is occuring, we think that more and more people will be in need of this insurance because we have a growing market. The insurance itself indemnifies and there's different flavors. We'll speak generally about rent default insurance and what's out there as opposed to Steady, specifically. What we want to do is educate the market on the availability of these types of products.  Rent default insurance, generally speaking, indemnifies the owner against losses as a result of the bad tenant outcome. It could be eviction, tenant skips, et cetera; different programs to different coverages. What this does is it allows the owner who can't self-insure due to the diversification to recoup losses if they are unfortunately stuck with the bad tenant that stops paying rent or needs to get evicted.  Different people had different approaches to it. Us at Steady, we've taken a lot of the learnings from the online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and try to deliver a great product that are at a reasonable price to the end market.  A lot of property managers are saying, "Hey, this is great. This is a huge concern that my underlying owners have. What happens if the tenant doesn't pay rent?" They see property management companies out there that have eviction protection plans or other plans. You've got the SureVestors, the Rent Rescues, and a bunch of other great companies out here, all serving for these types of risks and helping solve these pain points. The reason for that is this huge market is a huge concern. If you've got one property, say you own a home and you move for work across the country. You can't sell your home or whatever reason you have. You put it with the professional property manager. They're managing that, but you're relying on that cash flow for maintenance, upkeep, taxes, et cetera. In many cases, to pay the mortgage. If that tenant goes bad, all of a sudden, you're break even or your cash flowing property gone upside down and now you're coming out of pocket. You now have a liability that you have to come out of the pocket for every month. That's a big pain point, a big concern, and what these types of products do is solve for those types of risk, help landlords have peace of mind, and protect against bad tenant outcomes. Jason: You name dropped some of your own competitors, which is very generous of you. How does Steady standout or differ? How do you compare, standout, or differ in the space? John: We've taken a bit of a different approach on how we can structure our products and policy. A lot of other competitors, not just in space but in insurance generally, what they do is copy and paste what other products work on their markets or other products that other people have launched, and there's not a lot of innovation. As a result, we haven't seen a huge take rate for these types of product in the US.  What we found—you might feel differently—my business partner, Viken, grew up in Paris. What works in Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work for the US. What Viken and I did when we came together is we deconstructed how these programs work globally. We took a lot of the learning from online lending to build what we believe is a better program here in the US.  One differentiation is automation. Our entire process is fully automated. We just set an email prior to this event saying, "We are now in 20 states." We've got the ability to be in all 50 states. The reason we're not in all 50 states right now is because we want to automate everything. It is going slow to go fast. As we start to take it off here and ramp because the updates have been very strong, it's continuing to go stronger daily, everything will be automated. What that will result in is more efficient processes, procedures, and better pricing.  Jason: Explain what that means so everyone understands. You're saying that automation is a differentiator and that it's fully automated. What's automated? John: A property manager or a property owner can go online to the website, inquire about rent default insurance on their own, and complete the entire process in less than two minutes. There's no human interaction necessary and they could do everything themselves. Now, newer company, newer brand, we’re lucky to be aligned with the very strong brand in the insurance space, but nothing's perfect. As you know, as an entrepreneur, you think you've got something perfect and they realize you need to make it better. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Jason: The perfect businesses are out of business. John: Right. We continue to constantly push new development releases and streamlining things. What we believe is that, if you can make the process as easy as buying, say for instance, travel insurance when you're buying a flight and make it that easy, that will be a great outcome for us and for this market. The way which you can do that is through API integrations, the right product structures, the right creativity, the right business development strategies, et cetera.  If you look at our product, where our technology is our technology, our product is our product, the two weren't built separately. They're built together. They work very closely together and in tandem. Because of that, it allows us to deliver a great customer experience, a frictionless process, high scalability, and keep headcount well. Right now, our biggest expenses have been legal and engineering, as you can imagine. It's a technology company, but legal because we invest heavily in making sure that we do everything right and by the book. Also, that our partners do things right by the book. As you know, the property management space has some instances where people have more of a cavalier or cowboy type approach that works until it doesn't. For us, we have ambitions to be a very large company and we operate in a highly regulated space. It's non negotiable for us to run into issues on the regulatory front or have our partners run into those issues. We take that very seriously and focus on in making sure everything is done the right way. Jason: That makes sense. The number one challenge when it comes to any solution or software or third party service is adoption. It's how easy is it for them to adopt this and use. If adoption is a challenge, then it's not going to work. It's not going to grow. People are not going to use it or it's going to be confusing or frustrating.  I'm a big Apple fan. Apple made adoption very easy. My AirPods, I just hold them out, open them up, my phone just show them on the screen, and they connect. It was magic, it's easy, I didn’t have to fill around weird Bluetooth settings or hold down buttons. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.  You've mentioned that it's easy for the consumer or for the property manager. One challenge that I see a lot of firms run into is when you're servicing an audience that's servicing that same audience. You almost can become competitors with them. How do you negotiate that? How does the property manager still have a competitive advantage against them just working with you directly? John: I guess, education, awareness, and understanding. People [...] this in massive market. People don't even know about this product. One parallel I draw frequently is pet insurance. I’ve got a pet, I’ve got a dog who's five now. I have pet insurance that I pay $70 or $80 a month. They haven’t got a good plan because the vet at the time said, "Hey, you should consider pet insurance if there's ever an issue." To me, the asset there is the pet. A little bit different than a rental property, maybe not as emotional as a rental property would be. They said, "Maybe you should look at this." It's a similar thing as what you're seeing happening in the property management space. Property managers are the fiduciary, the trusted advisor to the asset and the asset owner, which is the landlord or the small rental property owner who's contracted the property manager for their services. If they can be introduced to this product, it's for their benefit.  We don't have a big direct push. We're not looking to go after single family rental landlords directly. Our entire business model is predicated on partnerships. Based on our analysis, there's roughly eight million rental units in the US managed professionally. We've love to see that grow larger. Those are also, for us, we believe the best risk. As I touched on earlier, we believe strongly that property managers are better at picking tenants, have an established processes and procedures in getting bad tenants out, and they can get units rented more quickly. Jason: Which lowers your risk as an insurance provider. John: Correct, which results in better outcomes from the underwriting perspective.  Jason: Okay, makes sense. Your interests are aligned directly with property managers. They're your focus.  John: Yes. They are our focus. We just did a giveaway today to property management conference for people that could enter. We view property managers as our partners. Again, the reason I mentioned some of our competitors earlier because the rising tide lifts all boats. We want to see everyone do well, we want to see landlords have access to the solution so they get better outcomes, and we want to see property managers to be able to benefit from this as well.  Jason: Yeah, I love it. I believe that too. I have said before, rising tide raises all ships, but sometimes the bar is so low in property management in some areas and in some markets, that I don't think every ship's going to rise. Some have too many holes and are going to sink, but that's okay. John: That's right. That's Darwinism. Jason: Right, survival of the fittest. What are some of the most frequently asked questions or concerns that property managers are asking you or have been asking in sales conversations? So that we can make sure we address them here on this show. John: A lot of things that a lot of property managers ask is simply how it work. We have an FAQ section on our website and we can share the link on it. "How does it work?" "Why does this exist?" "How can no one else is doing is?" As I catch on, this is the third time I'll mention SureVestor, Rent Rescue, and others. The awareness is growing and that's what the biggest challenge is for all of us in this space is awareness that these types of solutions are available. This isn't like rental insurance or pet insurance. Pet insurance, I guess, is now becoming widely adopted, but people don't know about it and don't understand it. Most of the reactions we got is, "Wow, this exists? This is great. How does it work?" "Wow, that's inexpensive. This makes a lot of sense." It all depends on the property address, the rent amount, and the pricing. Jason: For anyone that's confused, let's just explain the difference between renter's insurance and rent default insurance. John: Renter's insurance covers the renter's possessions and liability to the landlord, generally speaking. It's paid for by the renter and they're doing it, so if there's a fire in the unit, they're not covered from the landlord's policy. Their possessions are gone. The landlord gets the unit rebuild, the house rebuilt, but they don’t receive anything. Now with renter's insurance, then we get some coverage for that.  From the landlord's perspective, if the renter has renter's insurance, they have a guest over, they slip and fall, and break their leg, it protects the liability to the landlord for them getting sued from that slip and fall. That's renter's insurance. Rent default insurance, it depends on the program. Different people, different features. Generally speaking, it covers loss of rent due to tenant skips, eviction, and tenant nonpayment for whatever reason. Jason: Sometimes, we have to make sure things are at an 8 year old level so that everybody gets it.  John: I generally need things at an 8 year old level to understand.  Jason: Right. Most entrepreneurs do because we're just so damn impatient at paying attention to things sometimes.  All right. We talked about how it works, why is anyone doing this. Any other frequently asked questions that people are concerned about? John: "What's the catch?" generally. Insurance companies, for better or for worse, generally don't always have the best reputation for making it easy to make claims, et cetera. That's another thing. Some people want to see the policies and see things in that nature.  Again, the big thing is people just don't understand these types of products exists. That's why we're out there educating the market and letting people know that there are these types of coverages available and you can get the coverage to these types of risks.  Jason: Let's touch on the benefits for a property management business in having this in their repertoire of services and how this can help them sell and close more deals, give them the competitive advantage, maybe. John: What do you see is property managers are now looking at this and some are saying, "I'm just going to include it in all my plans," and say, "This makes a lot of sense.” Now, we've got a differentiator. All of my property management packages include three months of rent default insurance if the tenant goes bad. They're out there marketing and saying that it includes it. Others are saying, "This is interesting. How can we offer this and earn some B revenue?" The only way it works, as I touched on earlier with compliance, is you can't get paid for the sales, solicitation, negotiation of insurance, unless you're an insurance producer. You can do other things such as marketing fees, et cetera, but you can't make conditions on the sale, solicitation, negotiation, and insurance. That's why we spend so much to make sure that anything we do, anything our partners do in partnership with us, is fully vetted and above board. We make sure everyone stays on the right side of the rules. Jason: Do they become somewhat of an insurance agent? Or you're just laying that all together? John: No. They do not become insurance agents in any way, shape, or form unless they've got an insurance agent license. Then, they could be an insurance agent, obviously.  Jason: Okay. John, it's great to see an entrepreneur doing something that's impacting the industry. I believe these products are going to have massive ripple effect in the industry. They're going to create a lot more safety and certainty in the property management space. It's going to lower the risk. It's going to lower the pain threshold for landlords to trust somebody else to manage their properties. It's going to protect all the parties involved and that means it's going to help the industry grow. If Australians, somebody said their markets are any indicator, it seems like these types of products help these markets grow significantly in a relatively short period of time, over a decade. They've grown phenomenally. I heard stats like Australia's grown through 25% in a decade. Largely, they claimed that it was connected to that. I don't know if that's accurately or true, but if that were true and the industry—single family residential—were maybe about 30% are professionally managed, that almost be our industry doubling here in the US. I don't know that there's enough companies here in the US right now to handle that level of growth. That would mean we need to double the amount of companies or we need to double the size of every company that exists. Something in between that. John: Or let's double the size of every company that exists. That'll be a good outcome for everyone. Jason: Yeah. Regardless, I want to make sure that we've got the best. Let's raise the tide. I appreciate that you're seeking to raise the tide. I think collaboration over competition is what builds market, it's what builds the category. It's always important to build the category before you try to build the individual brand. That's Marketing 101, everybody.  Property management is in the same boat. Property management has very low awareness, in general, here in the US and right now, we've got a lot of people going around something in their chest, trying to fill their individual brand. We need to build the category first. There's a lesson for the industry to take away from what you've mentioned and what's going on in what you're doing, so I appreciate that. John: NARPM’s done a good job trying to get the industry moving in the right direction. People like you and a lot of others that are trying to educate and build awareness are very helpful as well. It's great to see everyone working together in some way, shape, or form. Jason: There's no scarcity in property management. There just really isn't. There's 70% in single family residential that are self-managing right now. That does not indicate scarcity. In certain channels of marketing, there is a lot of scarcity because everybody's doing the same stuff, there is scarcity. John, I appreciate you coming in the show. How can people get in touch with Steady and learn more about this? John: They can go to the website www.steadymarketplace.com or shoot me an email john@steadymarketplace.com. Jason: Perfect. John, I appreciate you coming on the show, I appreciate what you're doing, and I wish Steady success. John: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Check them out at steadymarketplace.com. If you are, for some reason, not getting the growth that you want, you're growth is good, but you want to pour a little gasoline on that fire, if you find that you're getting a lot of your business lately from word of mouth, and from the trust that you built in the marketplace, I would love to pour gasoline on that fire. That's what DoorGrow specializes in, optimizing your warmly funnel and optimizing your business for more organic growth, which is a lot less expensive than showing up tens of thousands of dollars a year towards pay per click, SEO, and everything that everybody is competing and already doing.  Like I said, I don't believe there's scarcity in the industry, but I believe there's false scarcity that's been created by marketers, and you can avoid that. For those who can't see, I'm wearing my "SEO won't save you" shirt. A lot of people are relying on SEO to save you. Don't get me wrong, SEO is great. If you have the top spot in Google, that's great to have search engine optimization. But there are things that are better than having the top spot in Google like being the most trusted company in your market. Our whole system is focused on building trust for your brand, for your business, and helping you to go after that blue ocean where there's all that business available; that 70%. I appreciate John being on the show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Bringing outside perspectives and experiences to our business and podcast episodes adds another perspective to our expertise. This episode brings in someone with a lot of experience in a particular niche, in this case, the exit strategy/buyout arena. Quiet Light's own Walker Diebel is here today talking to our guest all about exit planning. BEI Institute founder John Brown started working as a lawyer in estate planning in the late 70s. John walks us through his journey managing business owner's assets and becoming aware that no one was helping them plan successful exits from their companies when the time came. Without being educated, he asked himself how these business owners would plan a strategic exit from their businesses and move successfully into their post-business lives. John's company, BEI is now is the leader in the exit planning industry. Episode Highlights: John explains exit planning. The first thing that someone who potentially wants to sell their business should do. The value drivers that are important to pay attention when building your business. The role of the business owner in the process. Business risks that are not avoidable or hard to foresee. The biggest deal killers. John walks us through the four exit paths. The Karl case study – an exit strategy lesson. Transcription: Mark: Joe I don't know if you know this or not but one of the advisers here at Quiet Light Brokerage; Walker, he's kind of a big deal. Joe: He is kind of a big deal. Let's do this; let's make a pact. This is the last intro and the last time that we will say did you know Walker Deibel wrote a book and a best-selling book, Forbes and Amazon, all this other stuff because you know Chuck and I did talk about it the last episode as well. We need to stop making fun of Walker. The truth is he's brilliant and we're jealous. That's the bottom line. Mark: That is why we make fun of him, right? I mean we kind of wish that we had that book to our name and he is brilliant. And he's well for a reason. Joe: And he's being asked to be a featured speaker all over the country to entrepreneurial groups. And he just had somebody named John H. Brown, founder of BEI on the podcast. I'm looking down because I'm looking at the book here; a brilliant guy. The wisdom that John brought in terms of exit planning and what entrepreneurs should do in terms of goal setting and looking out to the future and how to adjust their business as necessary to achieve their financial goals and their personal goals; it was brilliant. A great deal of wisdom that John brought to this podcast that Walker hosted instead of you, right? Mark: That's right. You guys get a break from us this week which is fantastic for you. I love bringing in outside opinions. We've brought in some people in the past who are also in our industry that do things that are similar to what we do at Quiet Light Brokerage but they come with a different perspective than we do. I love doing this because I think sometimes with what we do we can kind of get set in our ways and our perspectives and bringing somebody else in who has a lot of experience in this space and seeing how they look at it, it tends to stretch you a little bit and structure your viewpoints a bit to maybe look at things that you haven't looked at before. So this is going to be a fascinating interview that Walker did with John to see what he has to say about exit planning. Joe: I agree. I've listened to it twice. Let's go to it for our studio audience. Walker: Hi everybody it's Walker Deibel with Quiet Light Brokerage. Today I have John Brown who is the CEO of Business Enterprise Institute; the oldest and largest provider of exit planning education in North America and the author of the best-selling exit planning book of all time. And most recently John wrote Exit Planning The Definitive Guide To Sell Your Business When You Want For The Money You Need To The Person You Choose. John, welcome to the podcast. John: Thank you, Walker. It's nice to be here. Walker: Now here at Quiet Light we have a tradition of having our guests introduce themselves because we believe that you're going to be able to do a better job than we ever could. And what I might do is throw a curveball at you and say… John: There was never a good curveball if you will know. Walker: Maybe if you can tell us about your journey of being an attorney and then how you evolved to ultimately start BEI and writing all these books on exit planning. John: Sure. So I was the son of two business owners in Michigan. So I've always had some I guess passion for business owners because they ended up selling their business and it didn't turn out well. It was an absolute bust. And this was when I was probably in law school at the University of Wisconsin. I wasn't in a position to do anything because I didn't know what to do. Walker: Well let me interject a question little fast, when you say an absolute bust selling a business what does that mean? John: Well they sold the business to the management team for a promissory note. They retired because they're from Michigan. They retired at Florida like all the people from Michigan and within a year the business had gone under. And they received very little of the proceeds from the sale of their business. So that was just a bust. It really affected their retirement dramatically. Walker: I got it. John: And at the time I was just a young and stupid law student. I really didn't know how I could have helped them. And it was long enough ago that the word; the term exit planning hadn't even been coined. I think we probably coined the term back in the 1980s. So that always stuck with me. So when I started to practice law in Denver I really had a desire to work with business owners. So the law firm developed along the lines of representing closely-held business owners. And we had about 20 attorneys and all we did was represent closely-held business owners. It was a different type of law firm back then at least. Walker: Were you a transaction attorney or no? John: Half the firm was transactional, an M&A firm buying and selling businesses. But the other half was a planning firm and I headed that side. It was then evolved into explaining; how to design and implement a plan to allow the owner to leave on his or her terms. And then often would end up being a third party sale and so the M&A firm was active in that. But even more frequently it ended up being transferred to family members or to management. And so we just developed an exit planning process about that in the law firm with hundreds of clients and then I'm never having a passion for being a lawyer. I transitioned out of that. I exited my law firm and started BEI. Walker: Are you still a recovering attorney or have you had a chance to move on from that? John: I think my former partners would say I had recovered from being an attorney while I was still at the law firm. Walker: John what is exit planning? I mean what is the goal of exit planning? What is it; I mean what is this thing? John: So every owner is going to leave the business at some point. I think we can agree on that. Walker: If they don't? John: They may die. They may go bankrupt. Or hopefully something in between where they develop value that's transferable to another owner and they create a plan as part of that to exit the business when they want; is it three years, five years to whenever for the money they want or need and to the person they choose; the person of their choice. That's, in essence, is exit planning and a raptor into that then is an exit planning process that owners can use and BEI does not represent business owners. We train lawyers and CPAs and financial planners and so on to actually do the exit planning for business owners. Walker: And brokers? John: And brokers; and the good brokers I should say, Walker. Only the good brokers. Walker: Only the good ones. John: Only the good ones. And so that's what BEI does today. We train and support other advisors throughout North America. Walker: So I have to ask you as coming from the buy-side of the deal hearing about something called exit planning it almost seems to me like the goal from a buyer perspective might be perceived as the goal being to maximize the value, potentially some end gaming going on, or for lack of better description is exit planning just kind of putting lipstick on a pig in preparation of taking it to market or it' more…? John: Putting lipstick on a pig is the broker's job. Walker: Packaging it up; I got it. John: We're trying to convert the pig into a beautiful stallion. Walker: Right. So in other words what you're trying to do is address the sort of levers that drive value and build a lot more muscle into a company for an exit. John: Exactly. A better term for us instead of exit planning would probably have been pre-exit planning because almost all the planning and implementation work must take place and be completed before you transfer the business to a third party, before you go to market, or before you substantially transfer ownership to the kids or to an insider. So that planning needs to be done now for most owners because 80% of all owners according to our last summer survey want to leave their business within 10 years. I was about to say 10 days and it's true for some but it's 10 years to be a little more accurate. Walker: Every month I have calls with both ends of that spectrum. John: Yeah. Walker: Okay, so how should a seller plan strategically about their exit? Like what are the things that they need? Or let's start at the beginning, what is the first thing that someone who potentially wants to sell their business should be doing or thinking about? John: The first thing that would be really the first phase of explaining which consists of understanding what they want growth both in money, when they want to leave the business, who they want to transfer to, do they want to maintain the culture or legacy of their company, do they want to benefit the employees, do they want to keep the business in the community. Those are all goals that owners need to think about and then they need to create with some specificity. A quick example is most owners would say if I ask them when do you want to leave, they would say oh I'd like to leave in five years. If I were to come back in a year and I'd say hey when do I leave, they'd say oh I want to leave in five years. Well, that lacks clarity and specificity. So we would say okay, you want to leave in five years; you want to leave on August 8, 2024. Now we can start to plan towards that. So that's the goal side and the other side is knowing what the resources are. So in third party sale in your world the potential clients you talk to have an idea of the value of their company and that value is always quite a bit higher. It's almost always quite a bit higher than reality. So they should be coming to the transaction advisors. And this is what BEI members do, they have transaction advisors they work with all the time and if a client says I'd like to leave my business in five years and I think it's worth 10 million dollars so I think we can get started. The first thing one of our trained advisors is going to do is to say okay let's go talk to an experienced M&A advisor; you, an investment banker, a cayenne business broker and let's have them tell or give us a range of likely sales value. Hey that comes back at four million dollars or maybe something in between. We don't know as exit planners what it's going to be worth but we can't do any planning that suggests owners can't do any planning if they don't know what the heck they have and what in the heck they want to do. And that's the first phase of exit planning. And then it determines; the final part of that is is there a gap between the resources they have today and the resources they're going to need? We've determined all that using financial planners, maybe business valuation people if it's going to be a transfer to management, or an M&A business broker, or an investment banker if it's a third-party sale. What we know is where the owner stands and so does the owner before they make decisions on what they're going to do. Usually that decision is going to be I've got to grow value in the company and it may take me years to do so but not always. Walker: So it sounds like number one is to set the goals; apply what is the number we're trying to hit and what is the timeline in which we're trying to hit it. John: Right. Walker: Number two seems to be working with someone like a broker to get a valuation on the business today so that you know where you are and where you're trying to build to. Is that accurate? John: Well yeah we would say the first step is goal setting, the second step is resource determination. But to do it accurately like you just said. And then the third step in our exit planning process is to grow value, grow cash flow, minimize; do some tax planning. There's not so much tax planning most owners can do that they don't; they're totally unaware of because their attorneys and their CPAs have never suggested tax planning to them. I mean there are ways where you can sell the stock of your corporation; a C Corporation and not pick up a gains tax if it's been structured properly from the inception. Walker: Amazing. John: And few owners know about that. Walker: When we talk to our potential sellers at Quiet Light I mean if we really were to boil it all down there's probably seven different things that I kind of look at. And this isn't about Quiet Light, it's about you and the process that you've built. My question to you is what are the levers that drive value in a business? John: So we have a whole part of explaining in this third step called value drivers. And so we look at what are the value drivers in most businesses. And how do we get this idea; the value driver concepts? It's not from being a lawyer. It's from talking to the M&A community. What do they look for especially private equity in acquiring businesses? And then those value drivers or levers work equally well in selling the business to insiders. So two things, one is we focus on creating what we call transferable value. For smaller businesses where the owner is in charge of almost everything, it may have a million dollars of EBIDTA a year but that's probably not transferable because the owner sells the business, the owner goes away, and maybe the customers go away, maybe the employees go away. So a buyer is not going to be interested in a company where the owner is too important in the operation of the business. So to us, transferable value means the owner could leave the business today with minimal interruption to the company's cash flow. So part one; does the company have that? If not we need to work on that. And the value drivers then are what we work on which is the second part. The three biggest value drivers we see today, and you can probably comment on this better than I can Walker, is one having a top-notch best in class management team. That's what most buyers like to look for because most buyers don't have that management team to put in place in the company they acquire. And it also means there can be transferable value because the management team can continue the business without the owner. The second thing is diversity of the customer base or maybe the vendor base to make sure that the company is not dependent on any small group of customers or clients because again those customers and clients might leave when the owner does because they're loyal to the owner. So that's a risk that buyers don't want to have. And the third thing I hear today that I didn't hear a few years ago is the quality of the operating systems within the company. I'm hearing from a lot of the PE firms hey we don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more to go; to rip out the old operating system that's eight years old and put in a new operating [inaudible 00:16:50.8] operating system. They want to see that in the companies they're requiring; at least those worth millions of dollars. I mean a smaller company maybe they wouldn't expect that; I really don't know but maybe you want to comment on that. Walker: Hey, it's a really great point. I think that a lot of the sellers at Quiet Light Brokerage are online businesses, right? And as you know I've bought over half a dozen companies in my life and I sold a couple. And I've done everything from manufacturing and distribution to online. As a broker, I really only work in online businesses. But part of the reason for that is a lot of the reasons you're talking about because a management team is almost eliminated. I mean we can sell a company for five million dollars say and that's just one person and they've got a bunch of virtual assistants. So the most important person in the company might just be the hired gun that's running paid ads or something like that. So making sure that that management team can transfer is key. I want to come back to something you said around transferable value and I want to kind of dive into that just a little bit; a little surgical here and the question is it seems to me like what you're saying is that the owner can't be the craftsman in the business whether that be I'm out hustling doing one on one sales or I've got some key relationships or an industry of like in math analogy I'm the one making the pots. Is that accurate? I mean does that sort of core business need to be transferred to a different person that is going to transfer with the business even if it means a reduction in earnings because you're paying for a new person on staff? John: Yeah I think that for most buyers that would be critical. Now in the world you're in, the owner may not be that important. It might be the technology itself that's important then the owner is not; the owner maybe developed it and created it. Well he may no longer be important in the whole process. Walker: It does depend. But yes, go ahead. John: Yeah. So that would be in your world more than my world. In my world which isn't; I mean all worlds now have developed technology involved that seems like. Even farmers have a lot of technology. But that would be more towards an operating system. They're not developing the technology they're just using it. So I'm not sure I can answer your question I just don't have enough experience in that. But I would say if I were buying a company for its technology and it was created by the owner I would sure as heck want the owner to stay with the company because he or she probably has other ideas in their brain and I may want to capture some more of that. That might just be a situational issue more than anything else. Walker: You know I think it's one of these things where I was recently talking to; it was about…well, I shouldn't date it for confidentiality reasons. Months ago I was talking with a potential seller who wanted to exit and he owned a SaaS business; a Software As A Service business. And it turned out through the sort of valuation call I was having with him that he was the actual developer on the whole system which to me was like this is an unsellable business which is kind of what I'm getting at. So sometimes you get the; where the owner is the craftsman and that doesn't transfer and what we talk to our sellers about is the person who's likely to buy your business is an entrepreneur. It's a business person it's not a software developer it's not even necessarily a paid ads expert. So I'm glad to see that you agree with that transferability is all. I mean trying to outsource that craftsmanship and skill set to other team members makes the business sellable, to begin with. It sounds like that's really one of your first steps. John: That would be one of the things but then tied into that that's clearly the case is the owner before the sale. Let's say there are two craftsmen in the business that are really key to the growth and the continuation or stability of the business. We would want to tie those two key people, incent them to stay with the business through cash; maybe stock bonuses or stock options, have them really have a reason to continue on with new ownership because they're going to benefit from it themselves if they stay. If you don't do that in advance of making efforts to sell the business then the owner can be held hostage in effect by the craftsman because they can say you know owner if I leave your business sale is going to go out of the window and I know you've been talking about 10 million dollars and I think I'm probably responsible for at least 20% of that value so I need two million dollars. I've seen that happen not in high tech but I've seen it happen in traditional businesses all the time. Walker: Right. John: And so you've got to protect the trade secrets which is the value of the business. You've got to prevent somebody from going out and taking something. You've got to prevent your key people from going out and just joining a competitive firm. All that can be done in almost all states; California is an exception to this unless they have ownership which is something to look at. But you still can do some things and certainly motivate; incent them with deferred compensation, stock, stock bonus points. Those are all things your listeners should be aware of. They should be talking to attorneys and M&A advisers about how to protect themselves against that risk that is right there next door to them. Walker: John, I want to ask you this question is every business risk addressable? I mean in other words it sounds like a lot of what you talk about and help people navigate through is essentially eliminating the sort of risks that are going to; that a buyer is going to see when they come to the table to buy it, right? But is there anything that is just not addressable? John: Well I would say the thing that's not addressable is general business risk. Now let's say you guys one of your would-be buyers has just this great software for the quick print industry 10 years ago. Well that industry goes away. Now where does that work? So there's that element of business risk. Again you can take measures to try to be aware of that but some of this is hard to foresee. But most other things within the business you can do something about; maybe not everything you'd like to do at maybe a pure loss to the company. Walker: Yeah. And I just; where my brain is kind of going is more like in an offline business probably the number one problem that I see is maybe customer concentration issues, right? In the online world that usually is not a problem. Sometimes in SaaS businesses, you get one customer that's a bit of a behemoth but it tends to look more like supplier power if you will. Like maybe you've got one supplier that supplies all of your product and you're kind of a reseller for that. I mean I think that it's probably easier to address if it's supplier power because you can diversify your suppliers. I guess I'm just… John: That doesn't mean your owners are going to do that, right? Inaudible[00:24:25.6] has a good point. And you just have to figure out how can you mitigate your risk by diversifying it could be vendors, it could be suppliers, it could be customers; direct customers, it can be all kinds of different things. And advisers are not necessarily the best person or the best route to figure that out. Usually, the owner alone can figure that out through some good questioning by advisors. They may know what those business risks better than let's say a lawyer in your case you probably know all that because you're in this space yourself. So I think you would be a very valuable asset. Walker: John what are the biggest deal killers? John: The biggest deal killers; the first one is the owners doesn't understand if they sell the business what they're going to get and how they're going to get it. They go into the marketplace, they hire a transaction intermediary like yourself, they don't really know how much money they're going to need as a result of that sale. One if they want to retire after that, how much do they need for the rest of lives? Or secondly, if they're just going to flip companies, how much money do they really need to go to the next level and make sure that they have a reasonable chance of doing that before they even start the sales process. So we have investment bankers who are members of BEI and one of the main reasons they're members is that they've gone through that. They go to market, they get some good offers; lots of money, but the owner then looks at what he or she is living on now and the proceeds from that will not support that lifestyle even though it's a lot of money and they drop out of the market. They tainted the marketplace. It's difficult to reenter down the road and the broker and investment banker spend a lot of time and effort with nothing. Walker: Can you unpack that for me if you wouldn't mind? Can you kind of give me an example of what that might actually look like? John: An example would be a dealing with one of our members who is an investment banker in Texas and he had a client who went to market and a cash offer for 16 million dollars for his company. So the broker and the investment bank was pretty hands-on with that. It was at the top percentile of what he thought he could get when he sold the business. And at that time for the first time with a firm offer on the table the owner looks at how much money he needed; money after taxes, transaction fees, paying off debt, etcetera in order to support his lifestyle and it wasn't enough money. Walker: It was a surprise. John: It was a surprise and so he dropped out. So that's a real risk of doing it. And then along with that is another closely related risk; probably new world as well, is the owners have an overinflated concept or idea of what their business will sell for. And so again they either don't take steps to grow value, they don't take steps to protect the value and they just decide they're going to go to market. They talk to you and they learn that business is worth a third of what it really is and they've wasted years that they could have been working to put in the value drivers and other factors that would lead to greater value. Walker: There's a couple of times where I try to buy companies by going directly to the seller before the company was on the market so to speak and every single time they wanted 20 times EBIDTA. I mean just some [inaudible[00:28:05.1] with what the value of a company was. So I learned pretty quickly to find the sellers that are already working with advisers because they've already gone through the hard learning process of what the market actually is, right? You can want what you want but the market tells the truth. John: That's right. Working with an adviser there's going to be better information available as well. They're going to have a deal book. They're going to have vetted some of the owner's beliefs. Walker: Tell us about the four different exit paths and kind of like a brief synopsis on sort of the pluses and minuses of each. John: Gosh Walker you have read part of my books if you'd known about that. Walker: I take it pretty well. John: Did you just look at the chapters and figured out from there in the introduction? I get that; I mean I'm going to rip those Table of Contents off from now on. The four types of; the four exit paths starting with the least used to the most used. The least used is an ESOP, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. It's a great concept. It's a great tool. About 1% of the exit plans or members do use that path. Walker: And this is where the buyer of the company is the employees of the business. John: Well the buyer of the company is a retirement plan; a trust in which all of the employees are beneficiaries. And there are some great tax advantages in doing that but they're relatively complicated. You need a business that has probably 5 million dollars of value or more in good cash flow and a strong management team to do that. That can be great especially for owners who might say well I really want to keep my business and my community or I want to benefit my employees; I want the legacy of my company continue. In ESOP it's good because it's going to be indirectly owned by the employees and so the legacy etcetera will continue. The next used is sort of a tie; it's between transferring the business to kids. About a quarter of all business; all exit plans are members prepared with an exit plan are transfers to family. About 29% are transfers to third parties. So those are the second and third least used. And then the exit path most commonly used is transfer to management; surprisingly transfer to management. And the reason for both the transfer to management and transfer with the kids is that with the planning they can do really through our BEI members they can start to transfer the business sooner rather than later. They keep control over the business however until they get all of the money and achieve all of the other objectives they want to achieve. So that might be a 3, 5, 8, 10-year process of transferring ownership, getting the excess cash flow, getting some money for the transfer of new ownership, and then having a liquidity event at the end in which the buyout occurs. So that's kind of the general design of both transfers to family members and transfers to management. A transfer to a third party is used about 30% of the time and that's your world. And for a lot of owners they would like to maximize the dollars they'd like to exit; if their business is prepared they'd like to exit sooner rather than later. They don't have family members involved. Their management doesn't want to buy the business. So a lot of reasons for an outside third party sale. And so from an exit planning standpoint; in our world, that's the owners choice. The owner tells us the path they want to go down and then we just talk about the pluses and minuses of everything. But then our goal is to make sure that that owner is able to use that exit path and achieve this financial time-driven goals. Walker: Well, just knowing that you have options and the fact that you can outline it so clearly is a great roadmap just to start with. So your parents selling their business and kind of getting it all screwed up is a perfect example of what happens when you don't do exit planning. John: Right. Walker: Do have a story from your past that you can share that kind of shows the benefit of exit planning for an entrepreneur wanting to exit their company? John: Yeah there's a story that we often use in our training; we call it the Carl story. So actually Karl was a real client of mine. I started working with Carl while I was still practicing law. He came to me. He wanted to sell his business sooner rather than later. He wanted roughly five million dollars for his business. He wanted the business to become a world-class company; that was a soft goal. So I looked to his business. His business was worth maybe a million dollars. Carl was the business. He didn't really have a management team. It was actually a manufacturing type of company; plastic injection molding type of company. So I said Carl that your biggest; if you want to grow the value you want to maybe leave five or six years and you realized you couldn't leave right away, you're going to have to develop a management team. That's the number one weakness in small businesses; they don't have a management team. And Carl said I get it. He's actually really a bright guy. I get it. I know just the person to hire. And I thought oh no this is going in the wrong direction now. It's probably his son who is a bicycle mechanic. He said there's this guy in the Netherlands who is the young executive of the world in my industry niche and I'm going to go and this; my client was like in the eastern plains of Colorado which was hundreds of miles away from civilization. He said that I'm going to go over to the Netherlands. He's in Amsterdam; a world-class company and I'm going to hire him. He's going to come over and grow my business. I said go for it but you're not going to be able to do that because you can't afford to give him enough money. So we talked about how the new guy coming in to buy part of the company from Carl. And so that's what happened. We designed an exit strategy to enable that to happen where the new guy coming in; call him Wilhelm, was able to buy a portion of the company every year if the company get performance standards which were tied into the cash flow. And we knew if we hit those standards in general over a six or seven-year period Carl could sell the balance of the business to a third party or to Wilhelm and he will have financial security. That's exactly what happened. Wilhelm came in; knocked the lights out. It's a fascinating story how we did that. We can talk about it another time but at the end of seven years the business sold for 38 million dollars cash. Walker: Oh my God. John: Yeah. So for a long time I thought well Carl was just lucky because he happened to hit upon this boom; this technology at a certain point but then I realized he was lucky, yes, but he never would have accomplished that if he hadn't gone out and sold 49% of the company over time to this person who did all of the growth and who by the way got half of the 38 million dollars. Walker: Amazing. That's amazing. John: So that can happen but it was in accordance with the plan that we developed. It just happened to work out extremely well. And I think it shows the value of world-class management even in a small company. Walker: John, I'm thrilled that you decided to spend time with us. Thank you so much. How can our listeners learn more about why they should be exit planning or how to do it? John: Well there's a number of ways; they can always go to our website ExitPlanning.com but we just released a new video podcast series called Why We Plan. It's on iTunes. It's on Spotify. Really we've just released it this week. It's that new. So I encourage people do that. The CEO of my company and myself have recorded 20 podcasts so far; mostly case studies like the Carl Case Study. What went right, what went wrong, what might you do as an advisor in that situation or as an owner in that situation. So I encourage them to listen to that. Walker: John, thanks so much. John: Thank you, Walker.   Links and Resources: John's Business Website John's Bestselling Book John's Latest Book Why We Plan Podcast

 Learn the secret of getting your business and brand standout Know how to overcome price pressure or the scarcity of work through finding your super niche Learn more about creative niching and why you need to find your superniche Resources/Links: John William's 3- Part Mini Video Series: Creative Niching for Entrepreneurs: visit theideaslab.org/creativeniching Summary John Williams is the founder of The Ideas Lab and author of best-selling books Screw Work Let’s Play & Screw Work Break Free. He is formerly a creative technologies expert, and then senior managing consultant at Deloitte. John helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas and expertise into #1 businesses, books, and brands. In this episode, John shares a method of creative niching to help guide entrepreneur and experts overcome roadblocks so they can get on track with their business and to stand-out and be #1 in the crowded business world. Check out these episode highlights: 01:44 – John's ideal client: one is somebody who has some real scale in their subject but they want to turn their ideas and expertise into a number one business, book, or brand, as you mentioned. But also, people right in the beginning account in a corporate job. 02:10 – Problem he helps solve: Struggle to standout. 02:52 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to John: They're going to notice that there's a lot more competition around in pretty much every market. They're going to see that people are quibbling about their price. 03:40 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: I think when people first feel that kind of price pressure or the scarcity of work, they go more general. 04:25 – John’s Valuable Free Action(VFA): I would recommend thinking about your super niche. So, it’s not just enough to say I niche into this industry or into women between 30 and 50. That's what people describe to me as a niche. It's not a real niche. You need a super niche which is something really specific. 05:10 – John’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): http://theideaslab.org/creativeniching Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “People are finding themselves commoditized. Even if you got lots of skills, you're finding that people are just buying you on price instead of comparing you against the next person who does X or Y.” -@johnswClick To Tweet “You need a super niche which is something really specific...And then once you’ve got really successful in that area where you could do that have the most impact then you can expand from there.”-@johnswClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland: Hello everyone. A very warm welcome to another edition of Market The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland. Beaming out to as always from on the sand next to the waves a little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia. Joined today by John Williams. John a very warm welcome. Where are you...where are you hanging out? John Williams: Hi Tom. I'm in London. I'm in east London at the moment and this is quite early for me to get started. Tom Poland: Hope you had a strong espresso and enjoying the cricket. Cricket World Cup. John Williams: I pay no attention to sports, I'm afraid. That's dead and dry... TTom Poland: That's a very short conversation. Excellent. John Williams: I've had a very strong coffee just to...good to go. Tom Poland: Excellent. You're good to go. You got some caffeine in the veins; we are good to go. Folks for those of you who don't know John, he's a very interesting person. He's the founder of the Ideas Lab. Works with a lot of creative people. He's the author of "Screw Work, Let's Play" and "Screw Work, Break Free". John Williams: Yeah. Tom Poland: Great titles.

John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.

Air Force One draws attention everywhere it goes, even the retired version at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. And nearly a half-million visitors a year tour the world's most iconic aircraft.  Well, one of them anyway. Continue reading below or listen to the podcast during my private tour of Air Force One! ***Transcript*** Recorded February 12, 2018 John: It technically flew seven different presidents. President Reagan put the most mileage on it. I don't know what the exact number of that mileage is, but he definitely flew a great deal on this plane much more so than any other president. This was the aircraft that took him to Germany for the famous "tear down this wall" speech. Anything that was classified or I guess you'd call "secret" that was all removed prior to our obtaining the aircraft. There are no escape pods. Additionally, there are no hidden guns or bombs or anything else that can be released from the aircraft, so there's nothing like that and a lot of that are the fantasies in Hollywood that they portray in movies. The Home of Air Force One: The Ronald Reagan Library Tom Smith: Welcome to iDriveSoCal, the podcast all about mobility from the automotive capital of these fine United States - Southern California. I'm Tom Smith, and in honor of President's Day, we are sitting underneath Air Force One at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. John: Correct. Tom: Okay. And that is John Lehne who's the building facilities manager here for the Ronald Reagan Foundation, which runs the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. John: Correct. We are part of the library... the foundation actually supports the library. It is actually run by the government, National Archives Administration. The Air Force One pavilion, which we are sitting in right now with the Air Force One plane, is operated by the foundation. So this is a little unique part of the library. Tom: So there you have it for the specifics. But what the exciting part is, literally I'm looking up at the belly of Air Force One and it's a pretty cool thing. We got some really neat pictures. John was nice enough to walk me through the plane, little private tour, got a couple of pictures. I wasn't able to sit in President Ronald Reagan's office chair, but I did sit at the conference table and that was pretty darn neat. So, John, thank you so much for that. Tom Smith sits at Conference table aboard Air Force One. John: You're very welcome. How Did Air Force One Get to The Regan Library? Air Force One at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Tom: How did this plane get here? When you come to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Air Force One pavilion, you can see a cool pictorial story that's told on how actually the building was kind of built around the plane. “It was almost like the ultimate ship in a bottle type of construction.” John: They put the superstructure, the building up. The plane had flown in a little prior to that, and they disassembled the plane, towed up here in pieces, except for the fuselage was one solid piece. They did the superstructure of the building, pulled the plane and the pieces into the building and literally put the plane back together inside the building. Stripped the plane, repainted it, shrink-wrapped it, and then they finished the building around the plane. When they were done with the building, they unwrapped the plane, cleaned it up, polished it up, then put it on display. It was almost like the ultimate ship in a bottle type of construction. Tom: And the plane landed actually at San Bernardino International Airport. John: It flew out from Andrews Air Force Base and landed here in California and then it was trucked from that airport, from the San Bernardino Airport to Simi Valley and ultimately here to the Reagan Library. Tom: There's a cool picture where you see the fuselage of the plane next to the wings of the plane next to the dirt mounds that are ...

Recording date: 2018-11-13 John Papa https://twitter.com/john_papa Ward Bell https://twitter.com/wardbell Dan Wahlin https://twitter.com/danwahlin Jen Luker https://twitter.com/knitcodemonkey Resources: section 508 https://webaim.org/standards/508/checklist The a11y project https://a11yproject.com/ Jaws https://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS ARIA https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA The https://www.starbucks.com/careers/ Starbucks career site WCAG https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ Jen helped author https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y Husky https://www.npmjs.com/package/husky Google A11y https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/ Lighthouse https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/blipmdconlkpinefehnmjammfjpmpbjk?hl=en Azure text to speech https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/ amazon polly https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ Amazon Polly on Dan's blog: https://blog.codewithdan.com/8-tips-for-maximizing-your-productivity/ *Someone to follow * Gleb Bahmutov https://twitter.com/bahmutov Tejas Kumar https://twitter.com/TejasKumar_ Rick Strahl https://twitter.com/RickStrahl Transcript { credit to Jen Luker } (Intro Music) 0:00:06.6 Voiceover Welcome to Real Talk JavaScript, the weekly talk show with advice and insight into the technologies and practices currently being used to build web applications in the real world. Each week John Papa and Ward Bell talk to industry experts about their experiences writing, deploying and maintaining web applications in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And now, here are your hosts, John and Ward. 0:00:40.0 John Papa Welcome back to Real Talk JavaScript, this is Episode 11: Accessibility in JavaScript Apps and this week I’ve got my co-host, Dan Wahlin. How’s it going, Dan? 0:00:48.8 Dan Wahlin Going great, John. 0:00:49.9 John Papa And Dan, today we have a special guest of Jen Luker. How’re you doing, Jen? 0:00:54.6 Jen Luker Doing pretty well today. How are you? 0:00:56.0 John Papa We’re doing pretty good, thank you very much. Jen is a Senior Software Engineer at Formidable, BookBytes Podcast co-host, RxJS Learning Team member, and eslint-plugin-react-native-a11y core contributor. Jen has spent a majority of her career as a full stack developer but has a particular fondness for frontend technologies, thus why she’s here today. And she trains others in ReactJS and Accessibility, and enjoys removing obstacles that slow down productivity and loves optimizing webpack builds. When she’s not finding solutions or mentoring others, her spare time is spent spinning yarn from raw wool and knitting. She’s even better known to 3D print her own tools for the job. 0:01:33.3 Dan Wahlin Nice! 0:01:34.0 John Papa Welcome to the show, Jen. 0:01:35.2 Jen Luker Thank you! 0:01:36.0 John Papa There’s a lot in there. I mean, you’re not- 0:01:37.9 Jen Luker Yeah… 0:01:37.9 John Papa Just a JavaScript coder with ReactJS. It looks like you do a lot of teaching, and knitting! That’s pretty cool. 0:01:44.1 Jen Luker Haha, it’s… I like to say that I’m a knitter first and then a programmer second. So, it’s definitely a large part of my life. 0:01:53.3 John Papa You mean you do something besides coding all day? 0:01:56.1 Jen Luker It happens. 0:01:56.9 John Papa & Dan Wahlin (laughing) 0:01:58.9 Dan Wahlin You know, I have heard more and more people with knitting now. I, like, I hear that, I also do a lot of training, and I hear that all the time now, so it must be a big upcoming... trend I guess, I don’t know. 0:02:11.5 Jen Luker I think it has a little more to do with the fact that what we do as developers is often fleeting. It’s something that exists online, it’s not something tangible. Knitting is a programming language that sticks around long enough for you to wear it. So it’s- 0:02:28.9 John Papa I see. 0:02:30.4 Jen Luker Definitely caters to those that need that tangible aspect in their lives. But one of the coolest things I’ve seen knitting be used for, not just, you know, cryptography World War II, but also things like using it as a programming simulator for people that don’t have access to computers, such as people in Third World countries. So it’s definitely something that caters to the mind of programmers. 0:02:56.6 Dan Wahlin Interesting. Yeah, I’ve… Some of the people, too, have also mentioned it just helps them, it’s very relaxing they said. I don’t know how to knit, I haven’t tried it, but it looks fun. 0:03:04.3 John Papa So now, when we see Dan at his next conference, right before his talk, with a ball of yarn and some needles, we’ll know exactly why that happened. 0:03:10.7 Dan Wahlin Yeah. I’ll say, “Jen inspired me!” 0:03:13.0 John Papa & Dan Wahlin (laughing) 0:03:14.1 Jen Luker Well, you do know that at React Conf they actually had a fiberarts circle that I ran, so I ended up teaching quite a few people to knit, and crochet, and spin at that conference. So- 0:03:24.2 Dan Wahlin That’s so cool! 0:03:25.2 Jen Luker It is a possibility. 0:03:26.3 John Papa Huh! 0:03:26.8 Dan Wahlin There you go. 0:03:27.4 John Papa That is so cool. Yeah, I think we all have different ways of dealing with non programming mindsets. Like, what do you do when you’re not coding? And some people exercise, some people meditate, some people draw, some people play music, some people knit! So, I think it’s great to have something to kind of work different parts of your brain. 0:03:47.0 Jen Luker Definitely. 0:03:47.7 John Papa Hey, Dan! You had a question for us to kick things off about accessibility. 0:03:50.7 Dan Wahlin Yeah! So, I think we hear a lot… I used to work, one of my first jobs out of college was at a government agency and so there it was kind of required to learn about section 508 and things. But with corporations and with a lot of the developers I work with, I’ll have to admit I think we’re a little more in the dark on… 0:04:11.2 What are some of the ways, like, if I were to say, “Hey Jen, what are the key ways from a high level that I could add some accessibility things and like, who can I help with that?” Because I think a lot of us, we think, “Oh, well I just add a title to an image and call it a day.” 0:04:28.0 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:04:28.5 Dan Wahlin And I suspect there’s a lot more to it than that. 0:04:30.6 Jen Luker There is a lot more to it but there’s different ways of approaching accessibility on the web. One of the ways is technologically, which is oftentimes what developers deal with, but that’s only 30-50% of the problems you’re going to find in accessibility issues. The other half is going to be content and context and verbiage and language and ways that you say things that make it easier for people that have different disabilities, like neurological issues, or language barriers from interacting with the content on the site. 0:05:08.5 To deal with the technological side though, I tend to point people towards the aXe, Chrome, and Firefox extensions to begin with because it not only runs like, a technological audit on your site, but it also gives you more information. There’s always links that explain why there’s a problem, why the types of people that you’re focusing when you fix an issue, and different ways that you can fix an issue. So it’s a really great educational tool for just getting started. 0:05:43.6 John Papa Excellent. 0:05:44.2 Dan Wahlin Yeah, see, you already hit on a couple things like, you mentioned neurologically how maybe people interpret or have the context for different text. And I actually have a son with some disabilities so I’m very sensitive to this whole, you know, concept. It’s amazing how when you’re not around it, you just don’t think about it. But when you’re around it, it becomes, you know, your whole world. A big deal. So, you know, that’s when I hadn’t ever heard of- Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Is that related to the context you put into, like, the site, then, that helps them understand it better? Or how’s that work? 0:06:18.5 Jen Luker It is. Something that they recommend, or things that I’ve seen regarding recommendations for the level of content does vary depending on who your audience is. If you are a technical journal then chances are you’re going to be catering to a much more technical audience. However, if you’re a generic website you may want to keep your verbiage as low-level as possible, like anything between a third grade level to a high school level education, to allow for people to better understand the words that you’re actually putting on a page, and what the words are trying to tell you. 0:07:00.0 Like, you’ve got one side where you have people with ADHD that is not going to make it to the end of a 6-paragraph description of what it is you’re supposed to do. And then you have people on the other side of the spectrum that really need step-by-step instructions of what it is they need to do to get through your form. So trying to find that happy medium, or trying to find a way of giving a TLDR and then a longer context for different sides of that issue, is also something you may want to look at. 0:07:31.1 Dan Wahlin Interesting, yeah. I’ll have to admit that’s something that I haven’t really, you know, you mentioned third grade through, maybe, high school level and I think, as developers, we, especially if we’re in charge of putting some of the content, you know, out there ourselves, that’s something that I don’t think I’ve really thought through as to, you know, who’s my target that’s going to be reading this? As far as, you know, you think of, “I know these words and I’m sure everyone else will know these words.” But it sounds like you’re a lot better off if you can kind of reign that in a little bit, make it more focused. 0:08:02.3 Jen Luker Something that I’ve found that’s extremely different for even a dev when they’re onboarding into a new company is learning the names of things, and learning the acronyms for things. So if you’re using customized names for your products or your processes or you’re using acronyms, then you’re already losing part of your audience who just doesn’t understand what those things mean. 0:08:28.6 John Papa So, I think that’s a great point. This isn’t just for accessibility for, even for people like, let’s just say vision-impaired on one side. This is for anybody who doesn’t necessarily know your vernacular. 0:08:38.8 Jen Luker Exactly. 0:08:39.8 John Papa You go to a new company, what’s the first thing they do? “Hey, today we’re going to use the TLC with the EBY and then we’re going to talk with the XJ Bots.” And you’re like, “...What does any of that actually mean?” 0:08:49.4 Jen Luker I recently onboarded with a company and someone was very nice enough to put together a cheat sheet of acronyms for me and it was five pages long. 0:08:57.5 John Papa (laughs) 0:08:58.0 Dan Wahlin Wow! (laughs) 0:08:59.0 John Papa When I went to Disney one of my first things they did, like my first week there, was I got a book like that, too. 0:09:05.3 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:09:05.8 John Papa And the funny thing at Disney was the every TLA, which is a three-letter acronym which is kind of funny, the first letter of all of them begin with D for "Disney". Which really- 0:09:14.3 Jen Luker Yeah. 0:09:13.8 John Papa Only left two letters for all the rest. (laughs) 0:09:16.8 ALL (laughing) 0:09:17.9 John Papa I don't know if it's changed since then though. (laughs) But let's, let's start back. So on that same note, there's something I've seen a lot of over the years, and when I first encountered this, it's not an acronym but it's an abbreviation, I didn't know what the heck it meant. But, and maybe there's other people in the same boat so I wanted to talk about it with you. A-11-Y. 0:09:39.1 Jen Luker Yes. 0:09:40.0 John Papa Can you explain what that is and why people see that? 0:09:42.6 Jen Luker So back in the days of Twitter when there were only 140 characters, writing out a really long word like "accessibility" which is 13 letter long, took up a lot of space. So due to Twitter and their awesome audience, they shortened it to A11Y which is A-, the first letter in "accessibility", 11 letters, and then Y-, the last letter in "accessibility." You see the same thing with "Kubernetes" with K8S, or "internationalization" which is I18N. So any of those really long words end up getting shortened to first letter, number of characters in between first and last letter, and last letter. 0:10:26.0 John Papa Yeah, that's... that's kind of funny, you know? Once I realized that, I started going, "You know, I've been using I18N for years and I didn't know why it was called that." 0:10:33.1 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:10:33.2 John Papa Until I discovered it through A11Y, 'cause we, our nickname for it when we were talking about it was "ally". 0:10:39.0 Jen Luker Which I think is highly appropriate. 0:10:40.7 John Papa Yeah, yep. It kind of is a... 0:10:42.8 Dan Wahlin It fits it. 0:10:43.6 John Papa It kinda worked for us, too. 0:10:44.8 Dan Wahlin Yeah. 0:10:45.3 John Papa So, Dan, you're really D1N and Jen, you're J1n. It doesn't really work for our short first names, does it? 0:10:50.8 Dan Wahlin & Jen Luker (laughing) 0:10:52.0 Jen Luker Well, Jen is already shortened. 0:10:53.9 John Papa Yeah, yeah. It doesn't really help. What if your name is Al? What do you do? You only have two letters. 0:10:58.4 Dan Wahlin Yeah, there you're out of luck. 0:10:59.3 Jen Luker First and last. 0:11:01.0 John Papa A0L I guess? AOL! There you go! That's what AOL stood for. 0:11:05.4 Dan Wahlin Al. 0:11:06.4 John Papa The secret has been revealed, right here. 0:11:07.5 Dan Wahlin Who knew? 0:11:08.3 Jen Luker (laughs) 0:11:09.0 John Papa (laughs) So accessibility. One of the things I think that was really eye-opening to me was understanding how many people this actually affects. When I first started getting into it many years ago on some large projects the things that were introduced to me were,"Well, we're doing this because there are, you know, millions of people who are affected by this and we're really trying to make the web more accessible." You know, it sounds like a grandiose thing, but that was true. We were trying to make our websites more accessible to all these people who either couldn't use our websites, or they could but with much difficulty. 0:11:43.0 Jen Luker Right. 0:11:43.6 John Papa Now, what kind of scale is this really at? Is it just one guy down the street? Or is it, you know? How big is this? 0:11:48.8 Jen Luker Well the World Health Organization estimates that about 15% of the entire world has some sort of disability. This is a highly conservative number. Not everyone wants to identify with the fact that they have a disability. There's definitely a level of taboo that comes with the word "disability." So- 0:12:13.3 Dan Wahlin Yep, I can vouch for that. 0:12:15.6 Jen Luker Right? So there's a lot of people that will not identify with that label and therefore the 15% is, in fact, a very limited number. You know, if you're looking just in the U.S. they estimate, as of the 2012 census so it's been a while, 19% of people, so almost 1 in 5. If you're looking at other numbers we're looking at 8% of you men who are colorblind of some fashion, and it's not an on and off switch, there's a varying degree. There's also people with multiple versions of color blindness. There are people with very slight color blindness so it's almost unnoticeable. The range is quite large and about 1% of women also are colorblind. So you're looking at about 4.5% of the population as a whole just for one type of disability. 0:13:10.8 John Papa That's fascinating, and it hits, at part for me, that's at home, too. 'Cause I also identify as being partially colorblind, I guess you could say. I'm on that scale. 0:13:19.8 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:13:20.4 John Papa I don't have full blown color blindness because I can still determine some colors but others I have struggles with. 0:13:25.8 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:13:26.4 John Papa But I've also found that when I identify with this I get a lot of backlash from people of, "Well you're not really colorblind." Or, you know, there's a lot of disbelief. It's almost like it's become, "Oh, I'm sorry." So I can totally empathize with you on why people wouldn't want to identify with any of these things ‘cause it's almost like they put them in a category of, "Oh, well... the pity category." 0:13:48.0 Jen Luker Right? And there's differences in color blindness. It's not just grayscale in everything. There's the red/green, there's blue/green, there's you know, the trichotomy side, there's... there's a lot of different variations, and then there's some people that can see the differences between but the colors are all still muted. The more muted they are the less likely you're going to be able to tell the difference between them which really starts to rear its ugly head when you're looking at images or text color changes. So, it gets complicated fast. 0:14:25.8 John Papa Is this the real answer to what color that dress is on the internet streams? 0:14:29.6 ALL (laughing) 0:14:31.5 Dan Wahlin Oh my gosh. 0:14:32.5 Jen Luker That's a whole other fascinating concept- 0:14:34.6 John Papa (laughs) 0:14:34.9 Jen Luker When it comes to how each person perceives color- 0:14:39.2 Dan Wahlin Yeah. That was- 0:14:39.1 Jen Luker And how no one actually perceives them the same way. 0:14:41.5 Dan Wahlin That was pretty freaky, actually. 0:14:42.9 John Papa Yeah, I know. (laughs) Yeah, I get that a lot from folks on, themes for example. I like to create themes for VS Code or for other tools and when you create a theme people get very personal over what theme they choose. And the reason I created my own is because I like mine to look the way I look and it makes me feel good, it makes me more productive, but not everybody likes one theme. There's probably, you know, 100 great themes out there. It's because everybody looks at things differently and they have varying degrees of sensitivity to the colors, too. 0:15:14.0 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:15:14.4 John Papa So, you're building an app and you have to pull accessibility in. What kind of apps should use accessibility? 0:15:21.1 Jen Luker All of them. 0:15:22.0 John Papa Good answer. (laughs) 0:15:23.5 Dan Wahlin Yeah, it's a good one. I was gonna say, "Great answer." 0:15:24.3 Jen Luker (laughs) 0:15:25.0 John Papa What does it cost for money? I mean, I a business manager now. Does it cost more money? How much more time is it going to take? Do I need to teach my people how to build web apps for accessibility? What kind of things are affected by it? I don't have time for this, no, let's not do it. I bet you've heard all these things? 0:15:40.3 Jen Luker Oh yeah! Absolutely. 0:15:41.7 John Papa How do you answer those? 0:15:42.9 Jen Luker Well, there's a couple different ways. The not so passive-aggressive way is to find the person closest to them that's colorblind and then sit them down and say, "Can you explain to them why we're not going to write the website in a way that they can use it? This person in that company that works for you." That tends to drop, you know, that tends to pull up some people's shorts. 0:16:06.6 But the other ways is you can start talking about those financials. If you're looking at the return on investment take those 15% of the population. If you are, you know, a $10 million company, by making your website accessible it's an $11.5 million company, and that's just your slice of the 15%. Only 1 in 10 websites is accessible, which means you still have the opportunity to corner the market in your region, your demographic. That means that that 15% could very well be larger than the rest of the people that use your website. 0:16:53.4 Dan Wahlin That's an interesting concept from a, you know, purely financial standpoint. I’d never even thought about that, even cornering your own market. 0:17:00.1 John Papa And that's what a lot of people make decisions on, right? If you're gonna make more money, it's still making- Think like a business manager. You're telling me my $10 million app I can pull in $11.5 million instead; an extra 1.5 million a year, which is, pick some fake numbers for a minute. 0:17:13.9 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:17:14.5John Papa What's the cost though? Of building that app, what's the additional cost? 0:17:18.7 Jen Luker If you're designing it from the ground up it's very little additional cost. So a lot of the major issues have to do with color contrasts. Other ones have to do with making sure, you know, as you've said before, title tags on HTML or hrefs or ALT tags on images. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the platform, HTML, is inherently accessible and we, as JavaScript developers, go ahead and run through and override it and make it inaccessible. So, sticking closer to the platform is usually enough to cover the majority of accessibility issues. 0:18:03.4 John Papa Let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. 0:18:05.8 Voiceover Looking to learn more about the state of software security? Check out VeraCode’s recently released report, "State of Software Security Volume 9." This year's report highlights the more important open source vulnerabilities and the latest dev sec-ops trends. Dev sec-ops, by the way, is kind of like "devops" plus "security". This is VeraCode’s most developer-focused volume ever. So don't miss out. Get your copy today by visiting www.VeraCode.com/SOSS for State of Software Security. That's www. v-e-r-a- code.com slash S-O-S-S-. 0:18:47.0 John Papa And we're back. Jen, you were just talking about how you can stick to the platform and that might help you build accessible apps. Can you kind of explain what you mean by that? 0:18:55.4 Jen Luker I usually mean by using semantic HTML as much as possible for the reasons it's made. For instance there's a lot of... A lot of developers that still would rather use a div over a button, but the complexities inmaking a div accessible like a button go deeper than you'd expect. So it's not just adding a highlight, adding text or a keyboard interaction. It's also weird things like, in some versions of ios, if you don't add a cursor pointer in the CSS, ios won't detect that it's a link, even if you tell it that it is. 0:19:39.0 John Papa Hmm. That's interesting. 0:19:40.0 Dan Wahlin Yeah, I don't think I've run into that, myself. 0:19:42.5 John Papa Oh, we hear about semantic HTML a lot, right Dan? About, "Don't use divs everywhere!" But yet, I don't know about you, but a lot of apps I get called in to look at it's like, div craziness. 0:19:52.5 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:19:53.2 Dan Wahlin I call it div soup. 0:19:54.7 John Papa (laughs) Div soup! 0:19:55.0 Jen Luker (laughs) 0:19:56.4 Dan Wahlin Yeah. How much, so Jen, are there numbers out there, and I'm sure there are, for people- 'cause I know probably the only program I've heard of would be for people with vision, you know, various issues from they're completely blind to partially. How many different apps are out there? What, is there a number one app that you use to actually read these pages to them? Like, I've heard "JAWS", is that still a thing these days? 0:20:21.1 Jen Luker JAWS is definitely a huge things, particularly for windows systems. Other screen readers would be just the default screen reader that Mac uses. Chrome has its own that you can implement, too. There's a dozen major, major players. 0:20:44.0 Dan Wahlin Okay. 0:20:46.1 Jen Luker So, and not all of them, just like the browsers, read the text or the website in the same way. Even ios and android devices have different readers of their own. So, each one kind of reads things a little bit differently. It's important to be aware of those differences once you start really digging deep into accessibility, especially if you're trying to customize something away from semantic HTML. 0:21:13.5 Dan Wahlin Now does, you mentioned, I mean, the thing that I think most developers probably have heard of are title attributes, and like you mentioned, the ALT on images, things like that. One that probably most people have come across, and you're going to have to correct me if I say this wrong, I've already said "ARIA?" [pronounced are-ee-uh] 0:21:30.7 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:21:31.3 Dan Wahlin Is it ARIA [pronounced are-ee-uh] or ARIA [pronounced air-ee-uh?] Is it ARIA [pronounced are-ee-uh]? 0:21:32.6 Jen Luker I call it ARIA [pronounced are-ee-uh]. It's WAI-ARIA [pronounced why-are-ee-uh]. 0:21:34.2 Dan Wahlin Okay then. I'm going with you then. So, okay. See, I'm right, everyone! 0:21:38.6 John Papa & Jen Luker (laughing) 0:21:39.3 Dan Wahlin 'Cause Jen says! 0:21:40.8 Jen Luker Ha! 0:21:42.1 Dan Wahlin Now that's one I've only seen a few of the, I guess you could say core attributes that you can do with ARIA, but do those play a, I would assume, a pretty big role then? With some of the screen readers out there? 0:21:54.3 Jen Luker Yes and no. Going back to semantic HTML, if you're using just HTML then there's really no need for the ARIA roles. The roles themselves are built in to the platform-specific HTML; however, if you are deviating from that plan or you are using something a little closer to HTML5 then ARIA can play a role in making sure that exactly what you want read to a screen reader is defined. So, usually the first rule of ARIA is "Don't use ARIA." But there's definitely a place for it. 0:22:40.9 Dan Wahlin Okay, good to know. Yeah. I think that's one area that, you know, I'm comfortable with the semantic tags and it's good to hear that those are still the, kind of, I guess, goal. 0:22:51.3 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:22:52.1 Dan Wahlin But I'm not as familiar with the ARIA stuff. You know, you'll see it, for instance, even in some of the, if you use Bootstrap all, the CSS. 0:22:59.2 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:22:59.5 Dan Wahlin I've noticed they'll add it here and there. If you use Font Awesome I've noticed there'll even be some ARIA-type stuff. But kind of one of those where you copy and paste it and don't really know what it does, you know, without looking it up more. 0:23:10.5John Papa You bring up a great point there with Font Awesome, Dan. Font Awesome, if my memory serves me right, you take a icon tag, right? The i and then you almost always have to stick in an ARIA attribute into there because you're effectively making a button, sometimes, out of that. So you're making a button out of an icon, which isn't really a button, and maybe you don't want it to be inside of a button control. Which almost always leads to end up using the ARIA attributes on there. Is that a bad thing, Jen? Or is that, I mean, 'cause that's what I see a lot out there. I mean, just 'cause I see it doesn't mean that it's right. 0:23:45.7 Jen Luker For the most part what you want in a button is text; however, we often use icons for those buttons. If you can possibly wrap it in a button control that would be better than just trying to add ARIA items to the icon itself. However, that is a way to get around that. Ideally you'd add a button, you'd tell the button its title and its value and that's what ends up getting read instead of just an empty icon. 0:24:20.0 John Papa Yeah, I hear you. Ideally, I try to do that as well, and I'm actually trying to pull up some code of where I've done this before to kind of get sense for, you know, "Why did I do that as opposed to actually using a button, in that case?” And I think sometimes it's more about styling and maybe it's just about effort. Like, you could put it inside of a button. If you didn't really want it to look like a button you could then restyle the button so it didn't look that way. 0:24:44.7 Jen Luker It is so easy to restyle a button- 0:24:48.1 John Papa Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:24:47.8 Jen Luker So that it doesn't actually look like a button. 0:24:49.4 John Papa Yeah. 0:24:49.9 Jen Luker It is so easy. It's like three lines of CSS and suddenly it's just your icon. 0:24:55.9 John Papa I think you're right on that. I mean, and that's actually gets back to a thing of, Daniel you'll laugh at this, it makes me think of Silverlight. (laughs) The old Silverlight days. 0:25:04.2 Jen Luker (laughs) Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:25:05.3 John Papa Where everything was described as a lookless control. And I kind of wish, in some ways, HTML was like that. 0:25:11.8 Dan Wahlin Yeah. 0:25:12.4 John Papa Whereas, out of the box, a button has a certain look and a feel. I wish it didn't. Like, you had to add those things because I feel like because there already is a standard way these things are represented... Like, you stick a button on a page you get a certain look, and it's almost never exactly what you want it to look like anyway. So maybe if there was a lookless feel to these HTML elements- 0:25:32.6 Dan Wahlin Or at least an option for that, right? 0:25:34.7 John Papa Yeah! 0:25:35.0 Dan Wahlin Where if you want it out of the box, great. But if you don't, here's how you can start from scratch and just add your own CSS in. Which wouldn't be too bad because we typically use, especially for public facing, you know, reset-type CSS, stylesheets anyway. So you could just kind of say, "Nope. Start from scratch and here's what I'm using." 0:25:52.3 John Papa Yeah. 0:25:52.8 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:25:53.1 Dan Wahlin But on that topic, Jen. Is, you know, for your... You obviously specialize in this and I saw in some of the info John was sharing with me that you worked on a website that implemented some automated accessibility testing to meet, is it WCAG? Is that how you say the standard there? 0:26:10.5 Jen Luker Yeah. 0:26:11.1 Dan Wahlin WCAG 2.0? Okay. 0:26:12.5 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:26:13.4 Dan Wahlin Can you tell us more about, kind of that process? And what you need to do there? 0:26:17.6 Jen Luker I actually worked on the Starbucks Careers Site project that was recently released. The benefit of that project is that when they started with a rewrite they started from design up with the intention to comply with WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility. So it was literally baked in from the design up and everybody was on board with engineering it to be as accessible as possible. So it was very much a collaborative effort between the design team, the different developers that worked on it, and even the engineering managers and the product owners. It was a really great process. 0:27:05.2 As far as the testing goes, we actually went through a few different layers of testing. The very first one is we implemented the eslint-jsx... or the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y ... ESLint plugin. That (laughs)- 0:27:24.8 John Papa Oh, sorry, wait. Just let me make sure I got that one right. It's the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, right? 0:27:30.9 Jen Luker Yes! 0:27:31.8 John Papa Okay. Perfect. (laughs) 0:27:32.8 Dan Wahlin Say that 10 times fast. 0:27:33.7 Jen Luker I know. 0:27:34.0 John Papa Exactly. 0:27:34.9 Jen Luker It's really long. Especially when you start talking about the fact that I wrote another one for React Native. So... 0:27:39.4 John Papa (laughs) 0:27:40.0 Jen Luker It's even longer. That was kind of the first line of defense. It was utilized right there with Prettier, which was great. We used husky to run Prettier and the accessibility linter at the same time before someone could push code to the repo. In addition to that, we moved on to using axe-core as implemented into Jest for unit testing. And then we also use axe-core in Enzyme for end-to-end testing once the content was compiled down to static pages. 0:28:26.4 So this allowed us to hit the developers before they even pushed, hit the unit test of each one to make sure that they would comply if given the ideal data, and then made sure that it was still compliant once the data from the APIs was inserted into the page on a real time level. 0:28:52.2 That essentially meant that at every step of the process we made sure that everything was compliant before it made it to live. 0:29:02.1 Dan Wahlin Excellent. This would be public, I guess, right? Is this where people would go to look for a job? Or... is that what it was? It says the careers website, it looks like. 0:29:10.0 Jen Luker Yes, it was actually the... Yeah, it's just Starbucks.com/Careers. 0:29:14.8 John Papa Okay. 0:29:15.5 Jen Luker It was multiple pages, it had its own menu navigation. Once you actually go to look for a job by submitting your resume and stuff, you're transported out to the portal that they use, which we didn't get to go over, but the careers section of the Starbucks.com website is, in fact, accessible. And they're using those to expand that project. 0:29:43.4Dan Wahlin For people that want to learn more about it learn more about it, obviously I guess you could go right click view source on, you know, the careers site, but is there a recommended site that it out there that's considered a really good, almost like cheat sheet of how to get started adding stuff into your site? 0:29:59.5 Jen Luker There is. WCAG 2.0 website. 0:30:03.1Dan Wahlin Okay. 0:30:03.0 Jen Luker Which we will add to the show notes for this. It is on W3's website. That's usually a great place to go dig in and find out what's kind of covered in compliance. If you dig in deep enough you can find examples of how to implement code in an accessible way. They give different formats of how you could implement a menu, different ways of, you know, drop downs, so they do give you examples that would comply with accessibility compliance that I've found isn't always exactly going to suit your needs but gives you a very good idea of what's going to be necessary. 0:30:46.5 Dan Wahlin Okay. And is there, when it comes to, you know, if I'm vision-impaired, as a, from developer standpoint is there a way to really test that? Short of using like JAWS or maybe one of the built in readers you mentioned? Or is there an actual tool out there than can help you, you know, make sure that what you wanted them to hear is actually what gets heard? 0:31:08.0 Jen Luker It's literally manually testing at that point. 0:31:10.8 Dan Wahlin Okay, I kinda figured. But, yeah I'm wondering if there's anything out there. 0:31:14.4 Jen Luker Something I do want to mention about that is when you are dealing with testing screen readers, among other different types of ... you know, accessibility technologies, assistive technologies that help you. Being cold, not knowing them, and going in and trying to test them actually develops a huge amount of frustration. That can actually develop enough frustration that you decide that it's not even worth it for someone else to have to try to deal with this pain even with something is ideal. 0:31:52.0 What you should do is find someone who uses that technology day in and day out. You'll be amazed at how much faster and much easier they navigate through tools. And something that I have found extremely interesting is how they've learned to adapt their interactivity with your site based on how it's already broken. So it can be very fascinating to see how people that interact with it have their actual pain points, which things aren't, and those aren't things that you're going to be able to identify as just a casual user. 0:32:28.8 John Papa Let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. 0:32:32.0 Voiceover Are you building a web application? Need to deliver it soon and don’t have the people to do it? Maybe you’re not sure your company has the skillset or experience to do it. Then maybe we can help. 0:32:42.4 I’m your host, Ward Bell, and my day job is building applications for companies like yours. I don’t do it alone, I’m president of IdeaBlade, a consultancy that specializes in enterprise web application development. We’re particularly strong in Angular, RxJS, NgRx Redux on the frontend, and .Net Microsoft technologies on the server. 0:33:03.2 We’re a small tight knit group of people, hand picked by me, for their expertise, experience,integrity, and team spirit. Maybe we can help you with architectural guidance and hands-on development. And if there’s something we don’t know (and in our field, really, there’s too much to know), we can draw on our personal connections in the Microsoft RD, MVP, and Google GDE Networks as well as our international circle of really great developers, people we know and trust personally. 0:33:29.8 If you’ve got a project that’s keeping you up at night shoot us an email at info@ideablade.com. That’s info@IdeaBlade.com. And now back to the show! 0:33:42.0 John Papa And we’re back. Jen, Dan brought up a good question ‘cause I had this same thought, and I know it’s changed throughout the years, too; it’s how do you test for your site being accessible, and I realize, you know, the manual test is the best one. But there’s, and you do some automating as well for this. I noticed you mentioned the eslint plugin that you had. 0:34:01.5 Years ago there was, well it still exists, a Chrome plugin for screen reader which is now labeled as deprecated, and I notice they always link you over to the Lighthouse tools now, the Chrome plugin for that, which does an accessibility audit. I don’t know how you feel but I’m curious, like on, I see for example, the Starbucks Careers site has a, right now, 100 out of 100 score for accessibility. That doesn’t make me feel like it’s done, but it does make me feel like at least, like if there were something missing in that list of what wasn’t 100, I’d know I have some work to do. But when it’s 100 I’m then stuck with the, “What’s my next step?” Like, running Lighthouse step one: make sure those things aren’t barking at you. 0:34:44.9 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:34:45.6 John Papa But what do you do after that? 0:34:47.2 Jen Luker After that is when you starting bringing in actually user testers. So previously we were talking about return on investments of adding accessibility features from the viewpoint of someone who wants to add the accessibility demographic, right? The addition of adding those accessibility features actually expands far beyond those with accessibility issues, but also everybody. So, for instance, say that you’re sitting in a really noisy bar and you want to share a video with your friends. You can’t just sit there and play the video and expect them to get everything that’s being said. It’s too loud in the area that you’re in. With either a transcript or subtitles you can actually understand everything that’s going on in the video without having sound. 0:35:39.9 John Papa I’m so glad you brought that up ‘cause that’s something that is near and dear to me on videos. Not just for people who have issues, but it’s also… Just think about the financial side of this, too, and the marketing side. If you want somebody to watch your video and it’s scrolling past them on a screen in a Twitter feed, or Linkedin, or Instagram, or any kind of social media even, or even on the TV. If there’s no sound, if they can see the words sometimes that grabs their attention. 0:36:08.0 And I’ll, gonna share something about myself here, when I watch TV shows, and I love science fiction, things like Game of Thrones for example- 0:36:17.1 Jen Luker (laughs) 0:36:17.5 John Papa I actually put the closed captions on because I can’t tell what the heck name they’re saying. 0:36:21.7 Dan Wahlin I do the same thing. 0:36:23.0 John Papa You know? (laughs) 0:36:23.4 Dan Wahlin Not with Game of Thrones but with other stuff, yeah. 0:36:25.8 John Papa Yeah, I mean if their name was “Dan” I could get it. But when some of these names comes on I’m like, “...” So I love the fact that we… It’s not just for people who can’t understand names like me, but it’s a great thing for videos ‘cause now you’re reading an audience who maybe they don’t understand the slang you’re using, maybe English isn’t their first language. If you’re recording in English. 0:36:46.3 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:36:47.9 John Papa So when I talk with other countries they use the closed captions a lot for trying to figure out, “What did John say?” There’s just so many good ways and good reasons to do it and it’s not hard. 0:36:58.4 Jen Luker Unh-unh (negative). It’s not necessarily hard but it is time consuming. And it can be a little bit costly, depending on whether you do it yourself or whether you’re hiring someone to- 0:37:08.6 John Papa Yes. 0:37:09.2 Jen Luker Provide those transcriptions for you. 0:37:11.3 John Papa There are some free ones. Like if you go to YouTube and you upload it they give you one free translation, but then you run the risk of something like, my good buddy, Asim Hussain, his name is spelled A-S-I-M. 0:37:22.9 Jen Luker Mm-hmm (affirmative). 0:37:23.4 John Papa And when he recorded one of the videos it came out on the closed captioning as “Hello, everyone. My name is Awesome Hussein.” 0:37:29.3 Jen Luker (laughs) 0:37:30.2 ALL (laughing) 0:37:31.1 Dan Wahlin We should call him that now, when I see him. 0:37:32.6 John Papa Yes! So that’s now his nickname. (laughs) 0:37:34.6 Jen Luker That’s awesome. Ha ha! 0:37:35.9 John Papa Literally! 0:37:38.2 Jen Luker Oh, goodness. Yeah, YouTube is… I’m so proud of YouTube for at least trying to add like, automated transcriptions to all of the videos that are available. So there is a button you can click on that will show just a real time transcription as it’s developed. Unfortunately our ability to write machine learning that can fully understand different accents, different dialects, different contexts is still lagging behind how quickly communication and language evolves. So it’s not the best. It’s like trying to use Google Translate and it can be difficult. 0:38:23.3 Dan Wahlin Yeah, it’s- I started playing with, so Azure has it, and Amazon has had it though, for quite a while, has a few more voices at this point on AWS, but they have a service on some of my, I guess you could say wordier posts, meaning that there’s not as much code ‘cause it’s hard to convert. 0:38:43.0 This is kinda opposite of what we’re talking about, this is text-to-speech, and I said, you know, it doesn’t really cost me. I mean, it’s negligible, almost free it’s so minimally used by people and looking at the stats, but it’s you know, Amazon Polly and then Azure… I don’t remember what it’s called. what’s it called, John? They have their text-to-speech service. Do you know off the top of your head? I don’t think I remember the name. It’s probably part of the cognitive speech APIs I’m guessing. 0:39:12.9 But anyway it'll, you know, take your text and convert it into like, an mp3. So I’ve been doing that recently on just some of my more text based posts. ‘Case like I said, it’s hard to get context out of code, of course. But, you know, I like having it. I look at the stats. There’s not a ton of usage, per se. Although somebody could download it, almost like a podcast, but what I like about it is somebody that, you know, was vision impaired in some way, and I swear the older I get I’m starting to fall into that category anyway where I’d almost rather listen to it, you know, than read it. 0:39:49.4 But there’s a lot of different things out there like that that I think as technology progresses, you know, hopefully as you’ve mentioned, Jen, the YouTube closed captioning-type thing just keeps getting better and better. Text to speech is definitely getting pretty awesome. The voice I picked I’m just amazed with how high the quality is. So, a lot of cool stuff out there for this. 0:40:08.2 John Papa Yeah, that is called Azure’s text-to-speech cognitive services is the piece of it. You’re right it’s Amazon Polly. I put both those links in the show notes for everybody. 0:40:16.3 Jen Luker I think the biggest take away from all of this is that accessibility isn’t just for the people with disabilities. It literally is for everyone and it’s not just for old people or young people or people suffering from a specific disability. It’s also for people that have temporary or circumstantial disabilities. It’s for people that have you know, issues today, but no issues tomorrow. Or maybe they’re watching a TV show that has really loud explosions and really quiet text and your baby’s sleeping- 0:40:52.9 John Papa Yeah, what’s up with that anyway? 0:40:53.8 Jen Luker (laughs) Right? That’s why I use a screen… You know, that’s why I use subtitles. But, you know, it’s just the more you step back and look at it the more you realize that accessibility isn’t just keyboard tabbing and it’s not just a screen reader. It’s being able to allow people to interact with your content no matter who they are, or where they are, or what they are; and that has a real power. 0:41:22.9 That has the ability to take people that, I mean, arguably needs to be the ones that have the work flexibility in order to support themselves, and to be able to have the insurance to take care of their medical issues, and give them a job that gives them that freedom. I mean we, as devs, have a huge amount of freedom. We can work from anywhere as long as we’ve got an internet connection and a laptop. And as long as we’re working towards making the entire web accessible, whether that’s Game of Thrones, or that’s our technological documentation it really opens up the world to people that would not have otherwise had the opportunity to be able to make the best of it. 0:42:10.9 Dan Wahlin Absolutely. I think that’s, you know, that’s just a win all around for everyone. To kind of tag on that again, real quick… So I was at Dick’s Sporting Goods, which if you’re in the United States listening to this you’ll probably know who that is, they’re a pretty big sporting goods company. But I was out there doing some angular training and we were talking briefly- Jen, that’s why I asked more about the ARIA labels ‘cause that’s came up. And they actually have a full-time, at least one person maybe more but at least one I know full-time for accessibility. 0:42:41.0 So I think kind of challenge we might be able to issue all of us as devs is, if your company’s currently not doing that, there are companies that are. Now, you know, some of them I think are doing it purely out of what you just said, Jen. They just want to make it more accessible to everybody. Some of them probably it’s financial and okay, I think it’s a win either way, whatever they choose. 0:43:02.6 John Papa Sure. 0:43:03.1 Dan Wahlin But I think that’s a challenge we could all probably take on to try to be a little more educated on that and use it more. 0:43:09.6 John Papa there’s even little things you can do that may not fall under the exact category but how many times have you been to a website where there’s so much text jammed onto a screen you can’t actually discern what you’re supposed to be looking at? You know, so just making sites easier to read and having a better user experience. I find user experience and accessibility really flow together, personally. And when you’ve got one and the other together it’s like the beauty of the web. When you have neither of those that’s like when you go back to one of those 1996 websites where you can't figure out what’s going on. 0:43:42.2 Jen Luker (laughs) It’s absolutely true. It’s definitely a situation where making it fantastic for one group of people ends up helping everyone. So I mean, even if you do one thing today, if you add one more ALT tag, or you convert one more div to a button, or one button to a link, you know? That’s one more thing that’s going to be useable. You don’t have to flip the switch and have your entire website accessible tomorrow, but you can make one step today. 0:44:13.9 John Papa Awesome. Jen, we would like to wrap up this show with a section we call “Someone to Follow” where we talk about somebody who may be well known, or may not in the industry who we just want people to take a closer look at. And I’ll kick things off. Today, and I seem to be picking names that I can’t pronounce recently, so I apologize Gleb, but the person I want to point out is Gleb Bahmutov, and it’s… I’ll put his Twitter link up here on the page. He is one of the JavaScript ninjas behind the tool called cyprus.io which, Dan you did a show with us on that a couple of weeks or months ago. 0:44:47.6 Dan Wahlin I love it. Yeah. 0:44:49.1 John Papa Gleb is amazing. I’ve talked with him a few times on, he’s another Twitter friend, and the reason I wanted to call him out was I was working with cyprus.io, ‘cause I switched, Dan convinced me to switch. And I absolutely loved it and I was trying to solve some problems with it and I resent it to him on Twitter and he helped me get over those issues right away. And I just really love how open and friendly he was and he’s just done some amazing technology products that he’s had on the web over the years and cyprus io is just the recent one of those. Dan, do you have somebody to follow? 0:45:20.4 Dan Wahlin Yeah. So I had the chance to have dinner recently with one of my buddies, Rick Strahl. You know Rick, John. 0:45:27.6 John Papa Oh, yeah. 0:45:28.3 Dan Wahlin And for those that don’t know Rick he’s like, world champion I think. He windsurfs a lot (laughs). But Rick’s just a all-around very cool guy and very knowledgeable about frontend and backend type technologies, so he’s @Rick- We’ll put it in the show notes, but @RickStrahl on Twitter. 0:45:51.7 John Papa And Jen, do you have someone to follow? 0:45:53.1 Jen Luker I do. So there’s someone that I’ve been seeing a lot in the conference circuit this year. His name is Tejas Kumar. He is one of the nicest, most upbeat, most enthusiastic, and kindest, and most patient people you will ever meet in your entire life. He has more energy than my child and he’s basically the person who touts love and tolerance and kindness throughout Twitter. It’s a definite highlight in my feed. So I will definitely include his link in the show notes as well. But he’s my person to follow. 0:46:34.2 John Papa Actually I think I met Tejas last week at dotJS in Paris. Super nice guy. I hadn’t met him before but he was just a Twitter friend, so. It’s so nice when you actually meet people in person who you meet on the internet. (laughs) 0:46:46.0Jen Luker Absolutely. 0:46:47.1John Papa Well hey, Jen, it was great having you on here and thank you for coming on and talking to us about accessibility and for everybody who’s listening, thanks for listening to this show. We’re putting a bunch of links in the show notes so go check those out and please listen to us every Tuesday morning. 0:47:03.3 Jen Luker Thank you. (Exit Music) 0:47:08.4 Voiceover Thanks for listening to Real Talk JavaScript. This show and all of our shows are available at www.RealTalkJS.com with links and notes. John and Ward would love to hear what you think, especially about potential guests and topics for future shows. Follow and send them a message on Twitter @RealTalkJS.

Increase Your Reach and Donations: Learn About How to Get $10K in Free Adwords [caption id="attachment_1523" align="alignleft" width="150"] Pip Patton[/caption] Pip Patton and John Zentmeyer will share secrets about how to get $10K in free Google AdWords monthly and how to drive more traffic to your website for more engagement and more publicity. Their company,  Search Intelligence LLC, based in Tampa Florida, is a digital marketing agency. 'We believe that marketing in today's digital age should not be confusing to utilize and benefit from.' We help you accomplish this by offering digital marketing services that are easy to understand and implement. Our services start with SEO and include optimized website design, social media management, video marketing and traffic analysis so you can make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. We also work with non-profits by helping them apply for and obtain a Google Grant. A Google Grant is a grant of $10,000 in AdWords advertising each month for your non-profit. You can use the grant to promote your non-profit and gain more exposure online; increase awareness, recruit volunteers, promote special events, etc. Notes from the Interview   Why do we care if people come to our websites? Need for visibility brings more of people you want to see, online is where people are looking. Not ranking on Google is like being 100 miles off the highway with no lights turned on. No one can find you! You can't get the word out on your work if no one can find you. How do you figure out who to attract to your website?   Extensive interview with client, create keywords and Adwords to drive traffic, find out what people are searching for through online research, very few people aware of what prospects are searching for and tax status is not a factor. Online is where more search for info takes place! 1. What is a Google Grant and How Do I Apply? Google's way to give back to the community; $10,000 month available to 501(c)3; keyword bids restricted to $2 or less; must find enough keywords to use all of the funds. Qualifications - verify status as charity; apply online; campaign (Adwords) must be ready to go when launching  2. What is SEO and why do I need it for my charity or church?  Paid v. Organic Search priority given to paid; Ranking based on most relevant to search according to Google who cater to their own customers; can use best keywords when they are paid for; Google rates the information you provide, you have to build authority; organic search provides 5 times amount of results as paid search; you have to build credibility through your results; good information adds to your authority! Facebook uses pixels attached to your website to build a “smart dat profile.” Google does not do this for you. LinkedIn relation to Google - optimized profiles are critical to building authority, it helps develop authority Organic Reach - Basics Clarity around what you do needs to be clear to Google tech; links back to high authority sites on subject helps (on page SEO) must be relevant and valuable; Google grades authority based on links from other sites, social media, or blog posts that are shared or other shared information. This all takes time using SEO. Only 18% to 20% of traffic comes from paid search. The rest is organic! The top 3 get the lion’s share! Analytics tell you what people type in to find you. Free tutorials available from Google. One-third of searches on monthly basis are different from anything they’ve ever seen before! QUUU.com Buffer and QUUU work together How do people learn how to do SEO in a way that helps them?  Creating a presence on the main social media sites use tools like Buffer (link posts to other sites); Quuu - (Aggregator of articles and information for curation); make sure you include some original content that increases engagement Basic Visibility Enhancers - get more than one account (the Big 5; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram); have accurate info on all sites; hire  someone who has expertise because everything changes frequently Algorithms for mobile and desktop differ, mobile friendly search is more important all the time; by 2018 it will dominate rankings; far more searches on mobile than desktop! Closing Thoughts - (John) Go through strategy form to provide the types of information they need to provide good service; stay in your wheelhouse and focus on what you know, let your SEO experts to help you get where you need to be; search terms most relevant to you Closing thoughts - (Pipp) - Take time to analyze your site and other information; video is a great tool for conversion, less than 2 minutes is best when it is engaging, speak like you are having a conversation with a single person; video drives up conversion considerably. Contact Information Search Intelligence, LLC 1520 W Cleveland St Tampa, FL 33606 (813) 321-3390 http://www.si-5.com   The Interview Transcript NPC Interview with Pipp Patton & John Zentmeyer Hugh Ballou: Welcome, everyone. We are talking nonprofit language. Our guests tonight are two distinguished-looking gentlemen, Pipp Patton and John Zentmeyer. They are in Florida on the Gulf Coast and in central Florida. They have a very defined expertise. I met Pipp on a couple trips in Orlando doing some interaction with CEOs. You must be a CEO if you are in that group. This company you have, tell me what the name of it is, what inspired you to launch this company, and a little bit about your history and expertise that you bring to this very specialized space. Pipp Patton: Thank you for having us on. My background: Over 20 years ago, I was actually in the yellow pages business. I used to work with small businesses, helping them promote themselves and growing through the vehicle of yellow pages back when the yellow page directory was the search engine of choice. Then that changed about 10 years ago. At that time, I was transitioning out of yellow pages. I enjoyed working with business owners, and the technology and the digital arena was of great interest to me. I studied it and tried to learn it. I have been now working about seven years or so in that arena with an agency model, where I help businesses be found in Google search primarily. Hugh: I used to buy yellow page ads when I had a camera shop. It was the go-to place to find out who to hire and who to solve your problems. That was a unique spot. You transitioned from that space? Was that a direct transition to the digital marketing that you do? Pipp: Yeah, pretty much. At that particular time, I left yellow pages because the company I worked for got bought out by someone else, and they didn't treat their new acquisition people real well. So it was a good opportunity for me to leave there. At that time, my mom needed some attention and care, so I decided to stay home and take care of her. Shortly thereafter, I had been studying digital marketing and had a couple of people that I met that really needed help in that arena. I helped them, and the business evolved from there. Hugh: Awesome. To fall into that. John, you are part of this team. Talk about that. What brought you to this place? John Zentmeyer: Directly, Pipp brought me to the place. Pipp and I have done business together off and on, many different ventures, always been good buddies, and always enjoyed bouncing business ideas off each other for over 30 years now. Last year, I was making a transition, and I have owned several businesses. At the time, I was working with a group that I thought I would be at for the rest of my career, but that doesn't always happen. But Pipp and I had always talked a lot about what he was doing and what was happening in the SEO world. All my career, I have looked for ways to bring large ROIs to companies or to my clients. SEO is a great way to do that. I have always been in the technology world, mostly automation, but this has been a lot of fun, and we have enjoyed working closer together. Hugh: Russell Dennis has been stalking you, so Russell, what did you find out about them online? Russell Dennis: John said wonderful things about Pipp online. It's a glowing testimony. There are a number of things. There is this track record of years where you have been getting premium results. Coming from the yellow page world, I saw yellow page ads in my sophomore year of college. I made a truckload of money that summer. This was back in 1995 of course. Pipp: That was a good time to be in yellow pages. John: It probably wouldn't work as well this summer. Russell: Probably not. I would probably go hungry over the summer. You see things like Yelp, but everything is a known directory. The only real power in that stuff is in the testimonials and getting credibility. Hugh: Awesome. That is back when a truckload really meant something. A truckload of money was worth something. Russell: That was before the exchange rates went to pot. Hugh: Oh gosh, yeah. Guys, we sent out an email today and one just a few minutes ago to tell people they could get $10,000 of free AdWords. We are going to talk about that. These are people who are in what we call social benefit work. They are running a membership organization. It has a tax-exempt status. They are running a church or synagogue, a community foundation, a cause-based charity. There are lots of people who are in education or government organizations, like down the road from me, we have an agency on aging, my peer group. We have a lot of people doing really good work. Why should we care that people come to our website? We want to direct traffic, but let's talk about why people come. Who do we want to attract? Let's take it sequentially. Why do we care, and then who do we want to bring to our website? Pipp: Whether it's a nonprofit or a regular for-profit business, you need more customers, more exposure, more people to know who you are and what you do. Whether they have an interest in perhaps volunteering or donating or being involved in special events that you have, taking advantage of what you may teach, all of those things are there, so having a higher profile online will bring more of those eyeballs and ears to you. If people want information about anything, they are online. John: Take it one step further. Having a website online and not being ranked in Google anywhere is like having your nonprofit or for-profit business ministry, whatever you're doing, out in the middle of a very dark desert with no lights. So you cannot be found. If you are providing a service for somebody in a nonprofit arena, then the idea is you want people who are looking for that service to be able to find you. That is the biggest reason that you want to expose yourself on that side. Doesn't matter what you're doing. If you're doing for-profit, you want people to be able to find you. Hugh: There are lots of really good organizations doing really fine work that nobody is aware of. It would occur to me that PR is one good reason. I know people will support the cause they believe in. If they can go to somebody's website and see the impact of the work of the charity—who are we serving, what problem are we solving—how do we figure out which people to attract to the website? That matters a lot, doesn't it? Pipp: It definitely does. In our world, what John and I do, generally when we work with an organization, they are telling us what people are searching for to find them, or at least the basic concept. We will build campaigns around that. If we are doing SEO, then we are going to work to make their site visible for certain keywords, as an example. In the AdWords arena, it's the same thing. You are bidding on keywords to become visible in a search. If somebody is new to an area and is looking for a specific type of denomination, they may go online to see what's around them. If you're not visible, you just missed out on a new member perhaps. Hugh: There are a lot of choices in life today, aren't there? Pipp: There sure are. Most businesses, or organizations if you will, today I find aren't really aware of how many searches there actually are online for their service or product. It's the single largest pool that exists of prospective new customers, clients. Those are interchangeable words, even in the nonprofit world. It equates to the same thing. If you have a business or an organization, and you are working in a certain arena, there is more search for that information about that online than there is anywhere else. Hugh: Awesome. John: Hugh, you can relate to this. What happened when you got a yellow page ad? Hugh: People would call me up and say, “I see you have this.” John: They found you. Hugh: That was the go-to place. We actually went to the yellow pages last week to look for some resources for moving. We put out a line that people get $10,000 in AdWords. Talk about that program. I have one of these grants, and I don't know how in the world I got it. Somebody helped me get it. I am still learning how to work it, but I am spending $10,000 a month. Talk about that program. How do people acquire that grant? Pipp: It's a terrific program by Google. This is their way of giving back to the community at large here in the United States .it may be available overseas, too; I'm not sure of that. It's a grant that they offer to any 501(c)3 for $10,000 a month to use any way the organization sees fit. The determination of the success of any advertising campaign is totally up to you. Google is providing that. The only restriction they put on it is that you can't bid on a keyword that is more than $2. Now depending on the area you live in, larger areas, certain keywords that might fit your organization might be highly competitive, and they would be well in excess of $2. But just as you found, Hugh, if you work with somebody who understands how to dig out the keywords that still fit the proper niche that you are going after, you can find enough keywords to bid on to utilize those dollars. Hugh: I think I have 24,000 keywords in all of the things that are related to us, and we have an average position of 2.5 on a search. Pipp: That is terrific. That is very good. And you are working on a national level, correct? Hugh: I'm working with anybody who speaks English. We got Philippines, Australia, New Zealand. Pipp: There are many organizations who would be able to take the same approach. If it was a local church or synagogue, an organization like that, they might be more defined by a geographic area. But still, the exposure that they can gain from that is just fabulous, and it is a really terrific program that Google has put out there and made available to all the 501(c)3s. Hugh: How do you get it? How do you qualify for it? Pipp: It's an application process. They just have to verify you are truly a legitimate 501(c)3. Doesn't matter what you are promoting or what you're about. We actually offer that service to nonprofits where we will do the application process for them. We don't charge for that. We are pretty successful. We haven't had anything not approved so far. Along with that application process, you have to have a campaign that is ready to go. Google sees there is a campaign in place that you are ready to turn on the minute they say yes. John: An AdWords campaign. Pipp: Yes, an AdWords campaign Hugh: You can register for that for free. If you do it on your own, you pay per click. Russell, they just slipped something in there. Did you hear what I hear? He said they do it for free. Pipp: Maybe we shouldn't have said that, John. What do you think? John: It's a little too late now, Pipp. You can't put that one back in the bag. Pipp: I will say this. We don't manage campaigns for free. I found a lot of people- The application process can be confusing to them. You can't even begin until you get approved. We have at least been able to figure that out and are willing to do that for anybody. They can manage their own campaigns. When you get into the nitty-gritty of it, as you found, Hugh, you need somebody to help you because it would be difficult for you on your own to find 24,000 keywords. Hugh: Oh my word. And to put them in the right ads in the right places to direct them to the right page to do what we call conversions. Pipp: You have to have landing pages and ad groups and campaigns and this stuff that needs to be done to optimize it. One of the reasons you have 24,000 keywords is you want to utilize all that money and are limited to $2 a click. You have to find a keyword that might only get five searches a month, but you want to make sure you are found when those five people are searching. Hugh: It's the misspelling of the words, too. People who spell leader wrong just as a typo. Laeder. John, you were going to say something? John: I just said the maximum is $2. It's not that they are all $2. Hugh: I adjust them down, and sometimes I get the mileage. There is also a quality score. I have some that are 7's and 8's, which I understand is pretty hard to do. They rate you on the quality of the word as to where you are driving it. There are some sophisticated tools out there to watch what you're doing. It's just amazing. Where do people contact you to let you help them do that and start that conversation? Pipp: They can call me. Our phone number is 813-321-3390. That is our main line here in Tampa. They can go to our website. On the website you can get contact information. The phone number is there of course, and there is an email link to send us an email if you want. They can reach me via email if they like at pipp@si-5.com. Hugh: Si-5.com is the website. That is a very generous offer. It's not a lot of work. I want to talk about the juxtaposition of SEO and the ads. Those two need to have some synergy. John, you were talking about that if you did the SEO, it would get you more mileage for less money with the AdWords. I'm surprised they didn't cancel me. I had the grant. It had five or six campaigns going. Now I have several thousand campaigns or ad groups going. Four campaigns. But I found that no matter what I tried, I could not spend more than $300 a month. That is the maximum you spend a day, $332 or $333. I spend that every day now. But I couldn't figure that out. So I had to get somebody to help me. That is a for-hire thing you can do. I got frustrated because I shouldn't have been doing this in the first place. I do leadership and culture and strategy really well. I suck at that. Suck is halfway to success. Talk about why you need this if you do SEO. Pipp: It's the difference between paid search and organic search. Whenever you do a Google search, you bring up a search result page. At the very top, the first three or four listings are going to be the paid ads. The next ten listings below that are what they call the organic or non-paid listings. Each of these listings, paid or unpaid, are the listings that Google believes are the most relevant to the search you have done. John: They are catering to their own customer. I as a Google searcher am a Google customer. They want to try to provide me the most relevant and best options possible so I am happy. Pipp: You are happy and continue to use Google. John: That's right. Pipp: Why don't you go ahead and talk about the percentages of where the clicks go, John? John: That is important. if I launch a campaign today, I can bid on an AdWord today, and I can get that AdWord and I can be found for that word today. Organic is a little bit different. That takes a little bit more time, authority, optimization. Google is not going to make that change quickly because again they want to make sure you actually do have good information to provide their customer when they search for a given keyword. That is why it takes time to build that authority for the organic search. What is very interesting is that the difference between the paid search and the organic search is there is about five times more volume for the organic search. That is a big deal. If you are buying AdWords and you are getting traffic, that is great because I can do it today. That is a way to get to the organic search. You can start to get traffic today but realize that over time you will have a lot more to choose from if you are getting the organic search. It just takes time. Hugh: Does Google learn, or does the effectiveness grow over time? I have listened to people talk about how they do Facebook ads. Over the weeks and months, the Facebook ads build a knowledge base and becomes more effective over time. That may or may not be the accurate description, but is there something like that with AdWords? John: The parallel would be- I guess it would be the authority that you gain by having good information and making it available so Google can read it, understand it. Your page is optimized. The information you are providing is relevant. Google will look at all of that. If I have a new page and someone finds me but my information is not very relevant, Google's customer, the searcher, will leave. Google doesn't like that. Pipp: I understand your question also relates to Facebook. Facebook has what they call a pixel. They want you to put that pixel on your website. Facebook learns. Facebook's algorithm learns who clicks on your ads and who your ideal customer is, and they get smarter and smarter at putting your ad in front of people that fit a profile that is more likely to click. AdWords, I don't believe does that. To be honest with you, my business partner is more knowledgeable than I am on the running of the AdWords campaigns. John: You should clarify that as your other business partner. Pipp: Yes, sorry. My other business partner, who is on vacation with her children right now and her husband. But I don't believe that the AdWords does that. It's pretty much up to us as the buyer of AdWords to optimize the campaigns and figure out what is working best. Hugh: My colleague Russell is very active on LinkedIn. I have heard you guys other times talk about authority. Russ does a lot of good stuff on LinkedIn. He has articles, and his description of who he is is very valuable. How does that play into the picture with the Google SEO and the AdWords and the whole package? Pipp: Having an optimized profile on LinkedIn, as well as other social media properties, is all important. Every one of those provides a description of you and your business, a link back to your website from a site that Google sees as high authority. When you can get a link back from a high authority site, some of that authority transfers back, and it helps you build the authority of your website. Those are all part of the mix. They don't really have much of an effect on your AdWords, but from an SEO standpoint, those are very important elements. Hugh: Russ, did that bring up any questions or comments on your side? Russell: Keywords are important. This program for grants is something I have seen because who couldn't use $10,000. When I read the language, there is a certain amount of traffic you have to drive. If you don't do that, they pass it on to people who can use it. The idea of them looking at keeping their own credibility high by giving their users what they need makes perfect sense. Unless somebody has a lot of expertise in that, and I don't think you have that on your typical nonprofit staff, is it's a wonderful opportunity, but you have to be able to drive the traffic to keep it going. Pipp: That is correct. Google AdWords is much more complicated to optimize, and it takes some time to optimize a campaign. Usually when you are working with AdWords, you will figure the first three or four months is what you will put in to tweak and figure it out. We are managing a campaign for a chiropractor client. It's not a big campaign or a huge amount of money, but we took it over because the people who were handling it for them were unhappy with the results they were getting. We have taken it over. We have had it about two months, and it will be another month or two before we get it fine-tuned. I was in my office just now building landing pages because they were sending all this paid traffic to their homepage. In their particular case, if you were looking for a chiropractic solution for back pain, the homepage mentions it, but it doesn't really talk about it in depth. So it's less likely to create a conversion or getting a phone call for an appointment than if they were landing on a page that spoke to that particular problem directly. I am in the process of building them landing pages that will help their conversion, and the better conversion you get helps your quality score. Hugh is obviously doing that well if he has some 7's and 8's in quality scores. Hugh: I'm not getting the conversions I want, but it has gone up dramatically in the past two months. I am starting to fine-tune it. I had some AdWords that weren't relevant, which were bringing in some people who weren't the right people. I wanted to come back to that piece. We want to bring the people that can find words, and we can trick them into coming, but if it's not what they want, they will leave within a second or two. So we just wasted the money. Pipp: Then Google dings you and realizes that ad is not working. Regardless of what you are bidding, they drop you down in position. With AdWords, even if there are three or four ads at the top of the page, even if they are all bidding the same thing, if they all have the same quality score, Google rotates those around. As time goes by and one or two gain more traction because they have a higher quality score—they are getting a better click rate, even though it's the same price or a little lower price—Google will show them ahead of the other ads. They want people to have a good experience so they keep using them. Like John said, the person doing the searching is the customer that Google is trying to please. Hugh: That's a really important area to understand. I'm a pretty smart guy, but it's taken me a while to wrap my head around this. I am learning it so I can bring on somebody and have them manage it. There are lots of charities doing social media, and they don't do themselves any favors. There are lots of charities who put up pretty websites. Propeller Head makes them something nice. They say you have all these hits. I think I shared this with you, but it's said that hits are how idiots attract success. It really doesn't matter who comes. Hits is every time you download an image or a page or something, so you can have a lot of hits with nothing. It's really coming back to this what do people do, the conversions, that matters. Let's go into some of the things you know people need to learn. When you put up a webpage or site, Google looks at everything. How does this organic SEO work? John: That's where it starts. The very first thing is that Google is a computer. It needs to make sense to Google. You can't infer things. It has to be written and optimized such that Google can read it and understand exactly what you do, what you're promoting, what information you're providing. We want to make sure you have optimized it so Google can understand it. Then you want to start to look for ways to continue to build that authority. We mentioned having links back from high authority sites so Google realizes, “Oh, okay. This site thinks that they are providing the right information about this given subject.” But the big thing is it does start on the page. We call it on-page SEO. It needs to have the right information in the right format and make sense for Google. Hugh: Go back to this authority site thing. Talk a little bit more about that. Pipp: The sites that you see in organic search on the results page—those are the sites that Google feels are the most relevant, which to them means they feel they have the highest authority on that subject. Authority is predominantly gained in a number of ways, but one of the biggest is links from other sites. It might be social media sites you have. It might be other people linking to your information. Maybe you wrote an article or a blog post, and other people pick up that blog post and repost it on their Facebook page or their own blog. Through that, there is a link back to your site from another site that has relevant information. It takes time. That is why John was talking about how SEO takes time. You can buy a paid ad and be at the top of the search for a given keyword tomorrow. But with SEO, it takes time to build that authority, and it takes time for Google to trust your site. A brand new site comes up, and no matter how good your information is, it can take months for those links to build and for Google to gain the confidence and trust that you are the right one to show for search results for that given keyword. Hugh: How do these two work together, the organic SEO and the AdWords? Is there a negative dynamic we can create that cancels each other out? Pipp: No, there is nothing negative about it. The numbers are interesting. Paid search gets about 18-20% of clicks on a page. Organic gets the rest. Hugh: Whoa. 18% is paid search? Pipp: 18-20. It can be different in different niches, but that is the average. Of all the ads out there, somebody searches for a new plumber. They say “My toilet is leaking and I need a plumber,” so they search for that. There will be ads at the top of the page. Those ads will get 18 out of 100 clicks. The organic listings will get the rest with the top three getting the lion's share. That is what SEO is. Our job is to build that authority and get an organization's site ranked into those top three to five positions. The reason I say three to five is in many niches, there are directory-type sites that will get into that top five, and they are not direct links. Customers will avoid those and go directly to a business because they want a solution to their problem. Hugh: Yeah. People are looking for things. You can go to Analytics and other tools like that to figure out what people are putting in, can't you? Pipp: Analytics will tell you what someone typed in in order to find you. That is certainly a great tool. Anyone who has a website should sign up and get Google Analytics. It's a free service from Google. They offer great tutorials on learning how to digest the data. Hugh: That would be a good way to research what people are looking for, is that true? Pipp: It would be, except you don't really have access. Google has a Keyword tool built into AdWords where you can type in a keyword and they will give you a range of how much search there is for those. Or they might come back and show no search even if there is some. It may be low, but there is some. I have a friend who often says, “It's great how much money I've made from search terms that Google shows there is no search for.” Anyway. But there are new searches all the time. Google says a third of the searches they see every month are searches done in a particular manner that they have never seen before. That is constantly changing. Hugh: Give me that statistic again. Pipp: A third of all the searches that Google sees every month are done a little differently than they have ever seen before. Hugh: I thought that's what you said. That's remarkable. Pipp: It is. I know. John: We can't use another term like that. I don't think Hugh can stand it. We can't bring him a new statistic that is blowing his mind. Hugh: That's amazing. Russell: At this rate, his hair will start turning gray. John: It will light on fire. Russell: You have to ease up on him. Hugh: At least I got hair. Ha! Russell: This is the secret to not having any gray. You cut it all off. Hugh: Last week, we had an interview with Les Brown, and Les talks about using the mascara on his gray. He said his gray hair doesn't last very long. He keeps looking fresh with that look. Guys, this is fascinating stuff. People put up websites, and they wonder why nobody comes. They really do stupid things on social media. It's really social. How do people learn about this? I think we should create an academy and have a membership for people who are in charitable work to learn how to do these things. Like Russ said, they have a small staff and not a lot of money. If they started getting traffic and people found them and they raised the donor base- and actually if donors know what you're doing, the impact you're having, they will continue to be donors and spread the word. There is no negative aspect to tooting your horn and letting people know about it. Come back to some of my crazy ideas here. Pipp: That's right. What you and I have talked about before is how do you create more of a presence in social media? You have the main social media sites, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe Pinterest, Google+. How do you put out information on a regular basis? There are a couple of tools that make it easier for you to do that. One is Buffer. Buffer has the ability to post and link articles to the various social media accounts you have. There is another company called Quuu. They are an aggregator of online articles. You will probably find articles in almost any niche or subject you can think of. You can get an account for free for both of these. On the free account, you are limited to how many posts you can do and how many social media accounts you can link to, but you can link Buffer with Quuu and pick like four or five different subjects and link two articles a day to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Every single day. Those are what they call curated content. Somebody else wrote it, it's in your niche, and you post it as interesting information for people who are interested in your niche and what you do. But I also recommend to people they need to be doing some original content of their own. If you have these other services, you don't have to write something every day or two to three times a week. You can do something original a couple times a month, but there is still a flow of information coming out. That creates engagement. You will build Twitter Followers, Facebook likes, and additional connections on LinkedIn all from having information that flows. John: You asked one other question, Hugh. Pipp and I spend a lot of time figuring this out. This is way full-time. There are some basic things that can be done to give your site more visibility, just some real basic things. The biggest thing Pipp said is make sure that you have a LinkedIn account, a Facebook business account or an account that is to your ministry or 501(c)3, a Twitter account, and an Instagram account, and have those connected to your website. That will sure help. You want to make sure that you have accurate information on all those places. You don't want to confuse Google because that's not good. You want to make sure information is accurate across platforms. Then when you want to get really serious on one of these areas, it's probably a good idea to hire somebody who spends a lot of time trying to figure it out. It changes all the time. We use the phrase that Google has all the gold and they make all the rules. We just have to live with those. Hugh: The golden rule. John: To have an academy would be a great thing. It wouldn't be a free academy, and it wouldn't be part-time. Hugh: No. I was throwing out an idea. If anybody is listening and interested, we could play with it. John: It's a great idea. Hugh: We could do the same thing with a group of people and make it a more level playing field and impact more people and have greater results. Talk about how Google changes things. They are sneaky about it. A logarithm, is that what it is? Pipp: Their algorithm, yeah. They have made a lot of changes just in the past couple of years. They have two search algorithms. One is for desktop search, and one is for mobile search. They are separate. They announced about a year and a half ago, or maybe two years ago, that they were going to put more priority on mobile search algorithm, meaning that if you were ranking on page one but your site wasn't mobile-friendly, because it wasn't, the mobile-friendly aspect was going to become much more important to the mobile-search algorithm, and you could lose ranking on a mobile search even if you are ranked highly on a desktop search. That was a couple years ago. Then a few months back, they announced that the mobile search algorithm in 2018 was going to be the predominant factor to ranking in the search engines period. John: And the reason for that? Pipp: Well more than half of all search is mobile. That is mostly Smartphones, but that also includes tablets. Hugh: Amazing. Russ, you have been taking this in. I think we should come up with a hard question for these guys. Let's stump our guests. Russell: How do you stop these guys from making all of these changes? John: No, it's a great question. But it goes back to that you have to look at it from their standpoint. They are trying to provide the best product for you and I, the guy who is searching. They are going to work really hard to get into our brains and to put that into their brain to give us the searcher the best result. What we have to be doing as SEO experts is understanding Google and where they are going and then making sure that our clients are providing relevant information for those search terms. It has to be. Otherwise, we are going to mistakenly send somebody to a client's site, and the Google customer is not going to be happy, which is going to drop them in ranking. Russell: This is how they made Yahoo and other people disappear in the first place. John: They worked really hard at it to provide the best quality product for their client. Pipp: And they make changes all the time. They make changes to their algorithm all the time. The nice part of it is we are actually members of a very large SEO mastermind group that is worldwide in scope. Some of our peers are really smart, and they- actually before Google makes changes, they file patents. They get copies of the new patents that are filed and waiting to be approved and read it. We generally have a pretty good idea of where things are headed. Google does their best to obfuscate that, but they have to have the information in there so the guys in the patent office can say okay. We have some smart colleagues that read that stuff, figure that out, and give us a good idea of where Google is going six months or a year from now. Hugh: Part of this change is necessary. People used to pack in the keywords. Then people used to go out and do these fictitious sites with all these backlinks. There were thousands of them, and Google got smart to that. Pipp: No matter what the rules that Google comes up with, there will always be somebody who figures out a way around it. Once they figure that out, Google will figure out that they did that, and they will change the rules again. But there are some basic things. We ourselves in our company follow industry-best practice. We don't do any blackhat. In the SEO world, blackhat is things you know you shouldn't do, but you do them anyway hoping for a good result and hoping not to get caught. That was standard practice, even five years ago. But the things that a lot of people did and we were doing five years ago, if we did them today, they would get us penalized. Still one of the biggest things I see for people who try to do SEO on their own is they over-optimize their websites in terms of keywords. Let's say they have 600 words of content on their homepage. They will put a keyword in there like 40 times. Google needs it there once or twice and they know what you're about. When you start putting it in 20-40 times, you get over-optimized. You may see yourself move up in the ranking. You may even get to the bottom or middle of page two, but you won't get further. Hugh: Wow. Pipp: it's almost like they give you hope. I'm movin' up, I'm movin' up, I'm movin' up, and boom, you hit the ceiling. You're on page two where nobody can find you. Hugh: When you get penalized, do you stay there, or is there any way to get out of that? Pipp: You can change it. I have had a client this last year who after I had done some SEO work and were moving up nicely, he went in on his own and decided to rewrite one of the pages he wanted to rank for, and he put the keyword in there like 42 times. Then we started dropping back. I was trying to figure out why, and he happened to mention to me that he went in and changed that page. I went in and copied all the information and highlighted all the places he had done that, saying, “This needs to get fixed.” I fixed it. And we shot right back up to page one. It took a little while. When I say “shot right up,” that might have taken two or three months, but that is something that still a lot of people do. I find particularly those who try to do SEO on their own, they are looking at old information and don't really have the resources to stay abreast of what is working today and what current best practices are. Hugh: Russ, did you have more to that question? Russell: It gets back to that notion of working within your wheelhouse and not trying to do things that you're not good at. I definitely don't know a lot about SEO, but I do write. What I have started doing is looking at the principles of copywriting and studying that because that is what I can do on my own. I definitely need to hire someone- I have a guy working on my website who knows a lot more of this stuff than I do. He is reoptimizing the site, but in order to help myself, I have started looking at copywriting. I put together a series on donors that talks about the information you have to have. You have to know your audience in order to get some traction. That is important. What your content contains is where the keywords are probably going to be found. Hugh: Absolutely. Good points. We are on the downside of our interview. We try to keep these under an hour because that's a lot of time and people want to get some good content. Think about some stuff we haven't talked about, guys. What is a thought or challenge or tip you want to leave with people? Let's go back to the electronic media. If all of this stuff, Russ and I work with organizations to build out their strategy. We are trying to hunt and peck in the dark rather than having a synergistic plan. I wouldn't dare get in front of an orchestra or a choir and try to direct without having a piece of music because people are all over the place. We have to have some glue to hold us together, and then people can become engaged. With that, we are very clear on what it is we offer, who it is we offer it to, the value of our service, and the impact. That gives you guys something to work around and to use your magic to bring that constituency to the site and actually do something. If I have heard you correctly, part of it is identifying the trends, finding what it is people are looking for, but also attracting the right people. On the other side, you slipped right by this, you are creating a landing page, and the landing page has to convert. It has something interesting so people don't leave in .2 seconds, so they engage with you and learn something and want to be part of your tribe, donate, or be a part of your volunteer pool. There is a whole synergy in this thing. Let me throw it to you. Like the last time we talked, my brain is firing on many cylinders that I'm not doing right. I can't handle much more of this, but I have a list of things to do. You will be getting a call from me about my new site. Let me throw it to John and then Pipp. As a departing thought and comment, sum up the things you wish people would do, and remind them of where they can go to find out. You have a survey or something on the site, so talk about that, too. John: We have a form that they can go through. What is the name of that form, Pipp? Pipp: Strategy form. John: We have a strategy form they can go through on the site. It leads them to give us information so we can get back to them with some knowledge of what they are trying to do. I am going to step back and go back to what Russell said. Stand in your wheelhouse. Companies that come to us, we are going to have to make the assumption that they are good at what they do. Pipp and I have a really wide range of backgrounds. Pipp has owned several businesses; I have owned several businesses. Sometimes we get more involved than we should in the whole process. But what we look to do is be the SEO expert. What we look for is our clients to bring to us “This is what I do, this is who searches for us, and this is how they search for us. Put me on page one for these three key search terms.” That is what we do. We go after those search terms. Sometimes we get deeper into the weeds than that. That is what we primarily do. Pipp: Once they have filled out our strategy form, we then produce an eight-minute video analysis where we look at their website, we look at the competition, the strength of the competition, and then tell them the opportunity that is there. If you rank for this, this is how many searches there are, this is a conservative estimate you could expect as far as visitors, and based upon a conservative conversion rate, how much that traffic would be worth to you. We like to show them how big the opportunity they are missing out on is. The other thing I was going to say in closing is something you and I have talked about before, Hugh. We touched a little bit on conversions, and we haven't talked about video on this call. Video can be a good way to help conversions on your site, on your landing pages. If you can do a short video that deals with your business, that topic of the landing page, usually less than two minutes on your page can be a tremendous help. People like to know who they are potentially going to get involved with. You do a video that is engaging, you look at the person who is watching, you talk to them directly. You want to talk to that single person. You can do that. As I told you once before, I have an attorney client that we had ranked, and he was getting clicks to this website but not getting the conversion. We put a short video on his site, and overnight, that video tripled or quadrupled his phone calls in a week for his business. It was unbelievable how much of a difference it made. Hugh: You guys aren't a one-trick pony. You have a whole lot of different programs and knowledge base and wisdom. That is quite remarkable. Pipp: I think that's one of our strengths. We have gray hair, too. At least I do. I'm not sure John does. We have done a lot of things. We generally have the ability to understand what they're doing fairly quickly and obviously work within our expertise, which is SEO and digital media. Oftentimes, we can make suggestions to other things you could be doing that could be helpful. Hugh: Thank you for jumping in at the last minute and being so gracious to share all of this information (we had a cancellation tonight). You do a lot of upfront service to people. That is a gift. Russell, thank you for being here again and asking really good questions. Russell has made some notes of the profound statements that came out of your mouth. Russell: There is one thing I'd like to sneak in before we leave. The service these guys provide is superior, premium. The thing I like about what I see in their website is when they go in there, they define some parameters. If your business or organization is at a certain point, we can help you. If you're not at that place, then we don't want to offer you something that will not benefit you. That is integrity on steroids, and I love it. Hugh: Russ listens and observes and comes up with some profound statements. John Zentmeyer and Pipp Patten, thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience tonight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Sekevitch, President of CyberSolutions.io, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss, conflict between direct and indirect sales, making your partners money, customer experience ownership and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Jen: Hi, everybody, welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer. And today I'm joined by John Sekevitch, who is President of CyberSolutions.io. Welcome, John.   John: Thanks, Jen. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody.   Jen: It's great to have you here. And before we dig into sales leadership and channel, tell me a little bit about Cyber Solutions and what that organization is.   John: Well, Cyber Solutions is a channel. Right now there's roughly a thousand companies representing about 5,000 different offerings in the cyber security space. And each one of them wants to have access to cheap information, like the security officers of major banks and financial services, organizations, large retailers, and other high tech companies with intellectual property to protect. And as a result of the challenges that these companies are having in going to market and getting access to their targeted executives, they work with channel partners such as I in terms of bringing their products to market.   So right now, I'm representing a couple of application security companies, a threat and vulnerability management company, risk management company, one involved with threat intelligence sharing, and finally, another associated with risk scoring and security scoring for cyber insurance purposes. I think what's going on is it's very difficult for new companies to get access to the market. So more and more companies are going right to channel partners rather than trying to field a direct organization first, and then expand into the channels. And I'm sure we'll probably get into some of that later.   For the most part right now what I'm doing is helping these companies and representing their offerings to roughly 100 of those types of companies. So I have established strong relationships over the past 20 years, and I can get them into places they wouldn't be able to get into themselves. And I think that's typically why companies are looking for their channel partners.   Jen: Well, this is a real treat for us. Typically on the podcast, I'm interviewing channel executives who represent a vendor and they're talking about their best practices, and their triumphs and challenges in engaging a channel of partners to help them achieve their revenue goals. And so, what's so great is you bring the perspective of the channel partner, which is a really powerful voice that many of our listeners need to hear. So I'm excited. This is going to be great.   John: Yeah, I've also been on both sides. So I've definitely been that head of sales and marketing who was looking to expand my direct team into places where they weren't able to get into, or to just scale to the market opportunity. So I have recruited and worked with channel partners, and not only in this situation of my own company, but prior to that being a channel partner of IBM and being a channel partner of Oracle, which are two of the biggest that work with channel partners and have a lot of the best practices in the space. So I'm happy to share my perspectives from both sides of the table.   Jen: That's exactly what I wanted to dig into next. Looking at your background, you've had these executive leadership positions that you've held over the last 20 years, companies like IBM, like Net SPI. You've worked directly in sales and marketing like you mentioned. So you have a vast amount of business experience, and so I imagine you understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to channel, but also really business in general. Channel is just one aspect of an entire business. I'd love to hear, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in channel sales and marketing?   John: Well, I think the biggest change I've seen is more and more companies starting with the channel, rather than starting with their own direct sales organization. I think that's just symptomatic of what's happening out in the marketplace, which is, it's very difficult to do direct sales these days without spending a lot of money on marketing. For the most part, in my experience everybody's kind of focused on a handful of executives, and those executives don't answer their phone and they don't respond to emails. They get their insights from their relationships, their trusted relationships.   And so more and more, hiring a sales guy just because they have the ability to sell isn't enough anymore. What you're looking for is potentially getting a channel partner who already has those trusted relationships. In the cyber security space for instance, there's a company called Opto, and Opto has relationships with most of the top banks and financial services, organizations and large retailers. So as a result, everybody wants to get their attention so that their products are being represented. What's interesting is that now the channel partner is in power, because of the fact that they have these relationships, and they can try to exact a pound of flesh out of the product or offering provider.   So what's interesting is you'll see things like big commission payouts for the direct side being in the 5% to 10% range, and on the channel side being in the 20% to 25% range, regardless of whether or not they're selling at this price or not. So I'm seeing starting with the channel rather than the direct, and also the power of the channel to be able to dictate economic terms, which hasn't been the situation in the past.   Jen: Well, working for Allbound, where we believe in the power of selling with partners, I'm definitely biased, but we started our own channel partner program very, very early on. It was one of the first things we did as an organization, and I love my partner leads. I talk frequently about how they're my favorite leads, because like you said, they're coming from a trusted adviser. So when I get a lead from one of my agency partners, that is not just a lead, that is somebody who is coming to us because someone that they trust and work with on a regular basis recommended me to them. So it's the warmest hand-off that you can possibly get in sales. I think that's part of why we're seeing these organizations starting those channel partner programs earlier and earlier on in their business.   John: Right. But there's also a lot of challenges in an effective channel program. For instance, you were just mentioning getting those channel leads. Well, one of the things that has to be managed is the channel conflict between the direct organization and the channel. Who has what responsibilities? What account responsibilities? What happens if the channel's not getting the traction that you were hoping to get out of a particular territory? How do you get a channel partner to support all of the sales reps rather than just one or two sales reps? And so these are all things that obviously you need to have executive leadership over. You always need to have somebody who wakes up in the morning caring about whether those deals are being done by the channel or being direct.   I've always had situations where I ran sales and marketing and had responsibility for the whole number. However, I always had somebody who was responsible for that channel. To think that that person who has responsibility for the total can also be the person who has responsibility for the channel number, is just not going to work because they can always get their number with the big number, rather than working through the channel. So you need to have deal headquarters, if you will, to make sure that everybody knows what's going on. And you've got to have trust in the partners to be able to share access to your salesforce.com or whatever CRM system that you're using, and also to have content that's relevant to the channel and not just for yourself.   So one of the things that companies are struggling with is the fact that they barely have enough content to support their own people, much less what's needed by the channel. At the end of the day, the channel still needs to have content. They might have relationships and that might get them access, but they need to have content to be able to share with their relationships to advance the value propositions that they're trying to represent out there.   Jen: Absolutely. They're your volunteer salespeople. They're out there selling on your behalf. They need to be empowered and enabled. So my next question I was going to ask you was, really, how do you determine if and when a company is ready to build a channel partner program? You mentioned a couple of things, you mentioned having a leader who is responsible for that revenue. You mentioned making sure they figured out some of those internal processes to avoid conflict. You mentioned content. So are those really hard and fast signs and if you don't have those three or four things, then you really can't launch a partner program? Is there anything else? What do you think is really the bare minimum for an organization to really start selling through and with channel partners?   John: Well, I mean, if you start with a channel partner program, then you don't have to worry about channel conflict. You're just going through the partner.   Jen: This is true, yeah.   John: So when you hire a person who has that experience, it'd be a different person than you would if you're going to hire the head of an internal sales organization, if you will. The other thing is what are you going to do about leads? Are you going to develop leads for your channel? A lot of companies are looking for both sides. So I remember working as a channel partner for Oracle, and we were a systems integrator for their e-commerce solution, and for a while, that company lived on business given to them by Oracle. But then came to the point where Oracle was expecting them to be bringing business to them. So there's got to be that give and take, if you will. So I would say that, if you're going to start with just a channel, be prepared to use your marketing and inbound resources, and perhaps even some of the inside sales resources to feed the channel, not just looking for the channel to feed you.   Jen: That's really great advice. I think about that, and I think about some of the mistakes that I've seen organizations make mostly around being under-resourced. So an organization, maybe that's been selling direct and then decides to build out a channel partner program, that group decides, "All right, we're going to hire this one person to really spearhead this and own it", except that person might be an operations type of individual, or a sales type of person...   John: Yeah, typically.   Jen: Right. Or maybe marketing but...   John: They're moving the paperwork, they're not moving the market. And that's a mistake. I'm glad you mentioned it.   Jen: Right.   John: I mean, naturally it is important to have somebody who moves the paper because of the fact that these people need to be paid. And if they're not being paid and if it's not worth their while, they won't put the work into it, and that's bad because sometimes you've given them exclusive territories, and they're not making any money on it, and they decide to walk away from the commitment so then nobody's pursuing these opportunities. So you got to be concerned about whether or not the channel's making money, because if they're not making money you're eventually going to lose them.   Jen: Are there any glaring mistakes that you've seen executives make in the channel? You don't you have to tell us who they are, or what companies they were. Just wondering if in your experience you've seen any like big failures that maybe, our listeners who are either building channel programs or nurturing them can learn from?   John: Well, there might be some people on the line that are familiar with this company, IBM for instance. So IBM pays 20% to 25% commission to their channel partners. The caveat is the fact that they pay 20% to 25% based on a deal that sold at list price. So the thing is that when it isn't sold at list price, and those of you on the podcast probably understand that there's never an IBM product that gets sold at list price. So consequently, these channel partners are making 5% to 10% instead of 20% to 25% because of the market realities that these IBM products need to be sold at a discount in order to be competitively priced.   So consequently, they lose a lot of the channel traction that they could be getting because even though the 20% to 25% seems like it's a reasonable commission to be paid, it's not actually being paid, and the result is the channel's not making any money, and they eventually lose some of that traction. So that's probably the most glaring example, other than just flat out, taking all the cherry accounts as in-house, and leaving the dogs and cats to the channel. That's again, not paying attention to whether or not the channel's making money. So you may be able to get somebody interested in it to begin with, but when the results don't stand up to their expectations, you eventually lose a channel, and I've seen that happen on a number of occasions.   Then the other thing is that you have to be continually diligent about whose account it is. On the one hand, it's the channel's account, but they're buying your product. And so consequently, you have to have a way of being able to stay involved so that they end up being a happy client. Because when they throw you out, you're going to get the black eye, not necessarily the channel partners. So something that needs to be coordinated is how do you maintain some degree of account ownership and ownership of the customer experience when there's a channel partner involved.   Jen: That's a really great point. That's something that we're seeing grow in importance, particularly in this as a service subscription economy that we're in, and where buyers have more choice than ever before to move from one product to one solution to another. Gosh, I mean, making sure that if you're a vendor you have the ability to easily collaborate with your channel partners or vice versa, so that you could ultimately take care of the customer, because that's what's most critical to your business. I think that's really, really great advice.   John: This is becoming a complication nowadays, because as customers move towards annual subscriptions versus perpetual licenses for many of these solutions, we're talking about paying commissions off of smaller numbers, or you're paying commissions off of just the first year rather than years two and three, type of thing. Again, this is all related to asking “Is my channel making money?” You can imagine if you got a $100,000 deal for a one year deal, and you're getting 25% of it, what do you get? You get a $25,000 doesn't go very far, but if you can pay them up front 25% of a $300,000 deal for instance, now you've got a bigger hit.   However, you don't get your money until years two and three. So you just have to figure out how to do that. So maybe instead of offering 25%, you offer 20%, but you pay the full three years upfront, that type of thing. These are all things that, again, focus on is my channel making money? If your channel's making money, you're going to be successful. If your channel's not making money, you won't be successful.   Jen: I couldn't agree more. It's perfect, perfect mic drop. Before I let you go, a lot of listeners of The Allbound Podcast are in their partner program infancy, and they're not the IBMs and the Oracles of the world. They are maybe some smaller mid-market SaaS companies that are really setting out to to build a partner program for the first time. Do you have some tips that you could share with folks like them, maybe the CEOs of those types of organizations? What do you recommend they do to really get started? Maybe it's even things they need to think about.   John: Well, I think what you're kind of describing is somebody who's already got a direct sales organization and now they're looking to expand into a channel, because otherwise, if you started with the channel you'd already have it there, so it's a little bit different. So let's assume that there is a direct sales organization, and now you're going to supplement that with the channel. So the first thing I would do is get somebody and invest in that person who is going to worry about the channel. Who's going to work with your inside teams to feed the channel? Who's going to set up the deal center to be able to manage channel conflict? Which accounts are the channel's? Which accounts are the inside team? Who's going to manage that? Who's going to put together the compensation plan that's going to be attractive to the channel, and still help the product company make money?   And then the other thing from a customer experience, is how are you going to share ownership of your mutual client? What are the expectations that you're going to have for your clients, for your channel's clients, and what are the expectations? How are you going to be participating in it? So I think if you take care of who's feeding the channel, who's compensating the channel, and how, and then also, how are you going to manage your mutual client? I think those are the three things that are most important to have a successful channel on your hands.   Jen: Excellent. Excellent advice. Well, this has been so great getting a chance to talk with you. Gosh, I could probably stay on the line even longer, and just pick your brain, but I won't. But before I really truly let you go, John, at the end of all of our podcasts, I have a little bit of a speed round of more personal questions, just four simple questions that I'd like to ask you. Are you open and ready for it?   John: Sure, sure.   Jen: All right. All right.   John: They're all related to channel, right?   Jen: No. They're actually not all related to channel. They're all related to you. So the first question is what is your favorite city?   John: My favorite city is Los Angeles. I like the ocean, and I like warm weather, and it's got a buzz to it. So I'm a Los Angeles type of guy, as compared to all my compatriots who seem to be Silicon Valley guys. So I'm a Los Angeles guy.   Jen: Southern California, awesome. Second question for you, are you an animal lover?   John: I am an animal lover. We have had cocker spaniels for years, and they live a long time, very painful to see them leave. We just had one that passed in the last few months. And so my wife is now in the process of getting a Saint Charles, I think is the type of cocker that she's expecting to get next, so we'll have one soon.   Jen: Aw! Those are so adorable. Will this be a puppy?   John: Oh, it will be a puppy, yeah. We always start from scratch and go through all that pain. But cockers are a lot of work, I'm telling you. So if you're looking for a puppy or a dog that is not a lot of work, I would not recommend cocker spaniels.   Jen: I don't think I've met a puppy that's not a lot of work. So if anyone out there on the internet knows of puppies that are easy, let me know. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?   John: Mac for sure.   Jen: And last question...   Jen: What's that?   John: The only way I made much affordable, however, is every time I bought one, I bought a share of Apple stock. And so it's been able to keep up.   Jen: There you go. All right, my last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?   John: All-expenses paid trip would have to be someplace in the US. I'm a US guy. Where have I not been? I've not been to Charleston, South Carolina. And I think I need to go there. My wife and I have thought about doing that and it's like, it never gets to be the right time to go to Charleston, South Carolina. But if you were going to pay for it, I'd go.   Jen: That's the first time that someone has picked Charleston, South Carolina as their destination of choice. So I need to ask you a fifth question which is, what is so amazing about Charleston, South Carolina that I am missing?   John: I think it's just the architecture. They've kind of kept their hands on the old, while still having all of the modern conveniences.   Jen: All right.   John: And it's warm.   Jen: And it's warm, and it's warm. Well, lovely. Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing your time with me today John, talking about channel, talking about South Carolina. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and just connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so?   John: Just my corporate email's fine. Its jsekevitch, S-E-K-E, V like Victor I-T-C-H@cybersolutions.io.   Jen: Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for your time. And thank you everybody else for tuning in. And I hope you'll join us next week for an all new episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.   Intro: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners.

Xiaohua: Toilet paper or toilet tissue is something we don’t really appreciate until we don’t have it. Did you know an average person uses 1.6 meters of toilet paper per visit to a public convenience? A recent study focuses on toilet usage patterns for the city of Shanghai. So, really? Is that how long every person wants in every toilet use?Heyang: Well, it sounds like an excessive amount of toilet paper that is used by people and, I think partially because it is free. And when you have the free toilet paper in the cubicle, I think sometimes people just use it for whatever reason. And it could be, well, kind of a big burden for the government as only for that 1.6 meters of toilet paper one uses , it costs 0.084 yuan. But when you do the math in this survey, there is more than 24,000 visitors in these 39 public toilets. It amounts to more than 700000 yuan a year, used just on supplying those toilet papers. It is a lot of money and it is not good for the environment. I think, yeah, having free toilet paper is great but it should be used in moderation.John: yeah, yeah, I agree, and in fact, someone is asking why don’t they just have the toilet paper outside the cubicle, as we see in many places here in Beijing? I think the issue there is that it’s easy to be misused as well. I mean look in study... in Shanghai, what they found was that people use it for everything to dry their hands, to clean their shoes, even to remove stains from their trousers. It really does not matter where the toilet paper is, people are so going to use in that way. However, if it is inside the cubicle, that means you are able to use the appropriate amount, if you wish to do so, right? My problem that I have is when I use the bathroom, and the toilet paper outside the cubicle, I have to take more than it is probably necessary because...Xiaohua: Because you can’t just come out again and take some.John: Yeah, I don’t know how much I am going to need, and I don’t want , you know, to run out before everything is clean. Right?Heyang: How could you not know how much you need to use? (John: Because, because, every...)in the ball park, you know, number one or number two, you just know...John:I mean I don’t sit down for number one, (Xiaohua: exactly), but it is difficult to say sometimes you think it’s gonna be a messy one and it’s clean and sometimes you think is gonna be clean it turns out to be messy. So in order to make sure...Heyang: Eew John Eew!John: I’m just talking about the reality....Xiaohua: Actually John has a point. (John: Of course I do) The thing I noticed is when using CRI’s toilets, sometimes I noticed that, well somewhere else too, that there is a hanger for you to hang bags and things. But usually(John: Toilet paper)...toilet paper are hung there...so it is probably clean, because you know, who would hang used toilet paper on the hanger?(John: It is probably clean, but...)But I’m not gonna use it because (John: You don’t know.) it is just...it is just weird. (John: It could have been hanging there for days, accumulate all sorts of particles...) What’s the mentality of someone who just hang up toilet paper there? If you cannot use it up, you just take it away for God’s sake.Heyang: Really? I hold exactly opposite view on this. I’ve always thought “oh great, someone is just conservation minded...John: They are, they are conservation minded, but Xiaohua is a bit too hygiene minded, perhaps.Xiaohua: But will you actually use it?Heyang: Yeah, I’ve used it.John: She just said that she used it. She uses it every time apparently...Heyang: OK, anyway, so I think it’s really important that people use the right amount. And...John: Exactly, which is why you need toilet paper inside the cubicle. Heyang: And then you get people who actually steal the rolls and, you know, to prevent that from happening, right?John: That’s the thing. So the question right now that Shanghai is asking, is free toilet paper or not free toilet paper? Perhaps a different question should be asking is free toilets or not free toilets? And when you go inside, you can get as much toilet paper as you want, but you are paying to get in and it is covering the costs of the toilet paper and is covering the costs for the maintenance. And the thing is that paid for toilets from what I’ve seen at least, they ended up being a lot more cleaner, and much more hygienic than free toilet.Xiaohua: They do, basic because there is someone managing in it and cleaning it, all the time...Heyang: And the last thing, so when next time you are using the toilet paper, don’t forget there are two and a half billion people on the planet who can’t even have this available for them. So keep that in mind. Don’ t be wasteful. Xiaohua: Something good to remember. Certainly don’t steal the roll.

Xiaohua: Recently, the ancient town of Fenghuang in Hunan province sparks some controversy again by holding a 偶遇节, or chance meeting festival. Is this a good way for single people to meet each other or just a tasteless commercial activity? Heyang: Actually, there has been a sort of tradition there, for young people to meet each other, in a setting and it is called “赶场”. So there is a history of that. But this time why this is controversial, it is because I think of the slogan that has been devised for this festival, in Chinese is “邂逅一个人·艳遇一个城”. So you have a chance meeting someone, then you have a romantic history with this city. That’s a nice way to put it. But in Chinese, it’s sort of implies a fling, a one night thing. So something I think that a lot of people would interpret towards that side. And that’s really not that…… You know it sort of rings alarm bells for some people. John: They need to get off their moral high horse and pay attention to their own lives, their own problems, because usually we find that people get all huff and puff about these kind of things. They are the type of people that look at every else and say: oh, you know, that person is a horrible person because of that, that person she is like this, that’s why I am better than her, and so on and so on. So really this is just the chance for everyone to take a deep breath and understand it really doesn’t matter what the slogan is. So actually I think it’s quite clever. So in English it can also be roughly translated as “run into someone, and have an affair with the city”. So there is a big difference between having affair in a city and having affair with a city. So even in the end, I think that “having affair with the city” is a great promotional slogan. I kinda wish I have thought, other city around the world, wish they have thought of it. But I think that in general, I don’t have much faith that this is going to be a very tasteful event. I don’t think it’s going to be all that successful, in terms of matchmaking. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But the way that I see it, take away all the moral crap that people are arguing about, and really what this comes down to is a city government trying to take advantage of and exploit a traditional ritual that has used to happen in the city. Heyang: This is actually gonna be a huge match-making event. In the festival, there will be a “friendship wall”, so to speak, but with the affair thing, friendship might behind, I don’t believe that whatsoever. Okay, don’t get too over heated here, okay? So let people fill in this card, those who are interested in the details, they get the card, then they get in contact with this person. So I don’t think there is anything particularly new, or captivating about how they are gonna facilitate the whole thing, but this slogan is really the key. It is creating so much attention to it. Xiaohua: Actually one of our listeners Elmar, I think she agree with John in a way by saying that wherever there is an official background to it, an official hosting or organization that people get such impressions, ulterior motives, commercialization, over commercialization and a misinterpretation of the original cultural ritual. John: Yeah, exactly. I think this is what we see all over the country where you have like the “农家乐”, all these other things you can go to these restaurants, “with ethnic flavor”, quote on quote, and you see a stage performance that supposed to be local culture, and it’s really not. It’s like going to the zoo, looking at the tigers and saying to yourself: oh, this is like their natural habitat. No, it is not, it is the zoo. Xiaohua: Yeah, I think the organization part of it and the official background of it really just keeps people off.

Xiaohua：Hello and welcome to roundtable’s word of the week. 在头一次约会的时候，人们经常会为吃饭时谁来付账而苦恼，这个时候“going Dutch”不失为一个好方法。So everyone knows what “going Dutch” means, but where exactly does the phrase come from? John: Yeah, actually sometimes it’s just called going Dutch, but it also can be called a Dutch date, a Dutch treat, which apparently is the oldest form, and also doing Dutch. So there are two possible ways this could be used: each person pays their own expenses or the entire bill is basically divided evenly between all participants. In strict terms, “going Dutch” refers to the former that everyone pays their own expenses, and the latter is usually referred to as just splitting the bill. Xiaohua: 所以“going Dutch”其实是指在一餐聚会中，每个人付自己点的那部分食物的账单。还有一种方法呢，则是把账单的总费用平均摊到个人头上，这个时候呢，就叫做splitting the bill? John: Splitting the bill, that’s right. So looking at the history of this phrase, one person has suggested that going Dutch might actually originate from the concept of a Dutch door. So this is usually farm houses. The door is actually consisted of two equal parts. Xiaohua: Interesting. 为什么一定跟Dutch有关呢？有一种解释是说，荷兰人家里的门经常是双开门，对开的那种门，所以that’s why it’s “going Dutch”. John: Whereas the Oxford English Dictionary connects “go Dutch” and “Dutch treat” and other phrases actually coming from the 17th century when there was a bit tension between the English and the Dutch. Another example is a “Dutch courage”, so in that sense it’s used to basically be derisive, or it’s actually a bit of negative term Xiaohua: 这个说法我也听说过，就是说英国人其实当时对荷兰人是有很多偏见的，导致在以前的英语中，存在很多这种歧视或者嘲笑荷兰人的词汇。 John：Yeah. Another term that’s actually used almost primarily in China is AA. Interestingly enough this term does not necessarily originate in the English speaking countries. In fact it actually originates in Hong Kong. Xiaohua: 英语母语国家的人好像很少说AA制，但是在香港，在大中华地区，很多人都说，我们来AA吧。 John: Yeah. There’re actually a few different theories there, as to what exactly that means. Some people suggest that it’s actually the algebraic average. And there are other theories suggesting that it means all apart. Xiaohua：So basically if I say AA to a friend from an English speaking country, they most probably wouldn’t know what I am talking about. John: They are probably thinking you are talking about alcoholic anonymous, which is very, very different. Xiaohua: I see. So “going Dutch”, that’s our word of the week.

Xiaohua: College and university students are going to graduate. And some schools in China decided to give graduation gifts or some sort of souvenirs to their future alumni. So do you think these are necessary? Heyang: Personally, I don’t think why this is a big deal. Well, are they free? If they are free, then great, you know. Otherwise…… Well, if it’s a voluntary thing that you can, if you want, you can pay extra to get a souvenir ring or a T-shirt or a mug, then fine. But I think most importantly, the biggest souvenir you get is that diploma. And I think, you know, that’s the most important thing of all. John: Yeah, but diplomas are boring. They are just pieces of paper that may be you can hang up on your wall. But like a ring or something like that, you can walk around with that, and people automatically know that you went to this that or the other school. Heyang: Oh, I guess I’m not so vain. John: But also I think that especially in the US, I’m not sure about the UK or Canada anything like that, but class rings are very very popular, especially in high school, and now more and more universities are adopting them as well. But they are certainly not free. In fact, they…… Xiaohua: Really? John: Yeah. Xiaohua: They are not free? John: Oh, no. Heyang: They are quite expensive. John: They can actually get quite expensive upwards of 200 dollars. I think I’ve seen some that are like 500 dollars in some cases. So I’m not surprised they are trying, they are giving out these rings. I’m surprised that they are giving them away for free. To be honest, I think that depending on the type and style and of course the material involved, they can actually get very expensive for school. But again in terms of a parting gift, in terms of a way to show people where you went to school, you know something a memento, you know, I mean having a ring, or even anything else, I think just kind of make sense. Xiaohua: Yeah, I do think it make sense. But I have to wonder how much they are going to commercialize it. Like Heyang says, if it’s free or maybe if it costs a little bit of money, then I’m totally OK with it. But if you are going to say, eh, make 30 different kinds of things with different price tag on everything and ask, you know, students whether you want to buy it, then it just reminds me of a university gift shop where you just pay to get something. John: Yeah. That’s the point, isn’t it? Heyang: But this is only for graduation, right? Xiaohua: Make money? John: Yeah. Heyang: Well, I think what Xiaohua was saying is probably already there, right, available in the university gift shop. But this is about graduation, you know, that big day and if it’s …… John: I don’t know. It’s same with the class rings in the US, you know. I can go back to my university and buy a T-shirt anytime that I want. And of course it’s going to be overpriced. I can buy a pendant, or I can buy a bumper-sticker. All of those are going to be overpriced. But the rings and other things are only available if you are a graduate, that only available for an exclusive set of people. And so I mean, I don’t see it as a problem, I never bought a ring. I thought they were a kind of stupid and expensive. Xiaohua: May be you are confident with yourself and your own decisions. John: Also my school wasn’t that great. Xioahua: Okay, that’s the main point. What about students who fear of peer pressure, who think everybody else has one so I must have one, but then I don’t have the money. And then they feel terrible? John: Sell a kidney. No, I’m just kidding, totally kidding. Xiaohua: Sure. Heyang: Okay, well, those people need to grow up, I think. And well if you have a culture of, you know, just you have to get a ring for graduation. I think that’s wrong. I don’t think that is…… The most important thing is your diploma and if anything else you want, then it’s sort of like put the cherry on top to have a little extra souvenir. John: Well. But the diploma is taking for granted. I mean everyone gets a diploma. But some people get to stand out. I mean, I think, in a more consumer, materialist-driving society and economy, these types of products, I think, are not surprising. You don’t have to buy one if you don’t want to. Certainly, there is going to be peer pressure. But there is always going to be people who want to stand out by not standing out, who want to go against the mainstream. Some they want to do that, that’s fine. If they want to buy a ring, that’s fine. That’s really up to them, isn’t it? Xiaohua: Yeah. Actually I kind of think that still it is a good idea, although I do have my concerns, but all in all, I think, you know, we don’t need to over worry for these kids, ’cos they are no longer kids any more, they are grown- ups.