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#SecurityConfidential #DarkRhiinoSecurityJohn Carse is the Field CISO at SquareX and a seasoned cybersecurity leader with over 20 years of experience spanning the U.S. Navy, JPMorgan, Expedia, Dyson, and Rakuten. With a background in securing critical naval systems during his 14 years in the Navy, John has since built and led global security programs across finance, tech, and e-commerce. He holds multiple cloud security patents and is currently helping develop the industry's first Browser Detection and Response (BDR) solution. With hands-on expertise and a global perspective from roles in the U.S., Japan, Singapore, Bahrain, and Europe, John is passionate about tackling emerging threats and sharing real-world insights that blend innovation with practical defense. 00:00 Introduction03:00 Protecting Intellectual Property 10:37 Understand the business, then look at the controls14:18 How different is cybersecurity across the country22:16 Browser Detection Response32:19 Does BDR replace other tools?36:10 What about virtual environments?39:30 More from John---------------------------------------------------------------To learn more about Dark Rhiino Security visit https://www.darkrhiinosecurity.com---------------------------------------------------------------

Faithful Witness  Revelation 1:1-5 Acts 22:19-21 19 “But I said, ‘Lord, they know that in synagogue after synagogue I had those who believed in you imprisoned and beaten. 20 And when the blood of your witness Stephen was being shed, I stood there giving approval and guarding the clothes of those who killed him.' 21 “He said to me, ‘Go, because I will send you far away to the Gentiles.'” μάρτυς, martys 1. a judicial witness 2. a witness to a circumstance 3. a martyr martyr- A witness to the truth of the gospel who gave his/her life for the gospel Revelation 1:1-6 1 The revelation of Jesus Christ that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2 who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, whatever he saw. 3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near. 4 John: To the seven churches in Asia. Grace and peace to you from the one who is, who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and has set us free from our sins by his blood, 6 and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father—to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. To be a faithful witness: • To bear witness to the TRUTH • Jesus is the standard we look to • We are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14) • Scripture is the faithful witness to the interactions of God with the whole creation (Isaiah 43:10-12). • Jesus is the beginning of new life and the Amen (Revelation 3:14). Isaiah 43:10-12 10 “You are my witnesses”—this is the Lord's declaration—“and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.No god was formed before me, and there will be none after me. 11 I—I am the Lord. Besides me, there is no Savior. 12 I alone declared, saved, and proclaimed—and not some foreign god among you. So you are my witnesses”—this is the Lord's declaration—“and I am God. Revelation 3:14 “Write to the angel of the church in Laodicea: Thus says the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the originator of God's creation: Amen- "So be it." To be trusted, to be reliable, sure

Frisco Roughriders Josh Hatcher joins the minor league show with Jeff & John To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join us as Pastor Tommy finishes out our study on the Book of John To connect with us visit our website: https://www.midtownvineyardchurch.com/ You can find our church on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MidtownVineyard You can find our church on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/midtownvineyard/ Download the ChurchCenter app to keep update with our events : https://churchcenter.com/setup

Join Micah Herbster for a 12 week study through the New Testament book of 1 John. In this episode, Micah will share three purposes of the study as well as four ways to get the most out of the study. Follow along and invite a friend to join you! /// Three goals in studying 1 John this summer: To stimulate love for God and His Word To grasp the linear development of 1 John To be encouraged in obeying the Truth Four steps to accomplish these goals: Be Present - plan to tune in as often as you possibly can through the summer Be Praying - plan to pray that God would use this study in your life; that God would open your heart to the Truth and that this study would shape you as a Christian Be Participating - plan to read, study, learn, and memorize the text Be Practicing - plan to apply what you learn from 1 John to your daily living as a christian /// Reach out to Micah and the Walk Talks team by emailing mdherbster@southlandcamp.org!

Rookie sensation Wyatt Langford joins Jeff & John To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

#SecurityConfidential #DarkRhinoSecurity John Shegerian (pronounced "SHUH-GARE-EE-UHN") is the co-founder and Chairman/CEO of ERI, the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States. He is also the co-author of the #1 best-selling book "The Insecurity of Everything: How Hardware Data Security is Becoming the Most Important Topic in the World” and the host of the IMPACT podcast. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 Our Guest 01:34 Johns Origin Story 05:34 The secret to success: Doing good for others 07:56 Advice for Future Entrepreneurs 11:00 ERI: SOC2 Compliance 12:05 What are the steps for recycling electronics? 15:33 Gold, Copper, Precious Metals 18:30 Is there a recycling issue forming with EV cars? How JB Straubel is involved 25:21 Hardware Hacking 30:55 What to do before throwing electronics away 38:07 Anything you can't recycle? 42:03 A FREE COPY OF JOHNS BOOK 44:33 Johns Book 47:11 Rental Car Agencies 48:20 Anything new for John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To learn more about John visit https://johnshegerian.com To learn more about Dark Rhino Security visit https://www.darkrhinosecurity.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SOCIAL MEDIA: Stay connected with us on our social media pages where we'll give you snippets, alerts for new podcasts, and even behind the scenes of our studio! Instagram: @securityconfidential and @OfficialDarkRhinoSecurity Facebook: @Dark-Rhino-Security-Inc Twitter: @darkrhinosec LinkedIn: @dark-rhino-security Youtube: @Dark Rhino Security ​ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Articles Mentioned United Nations Article: https://ewastemonitor.info/gem-2020/ https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170914006135/en/Fortune-Magazine-Calls-Electronic-Waste-%E2%80%98Dead-but-Not-Forgotten%E2%80%99----ERI-Featured-in-Report-About-Cybersecurity https://fortune.com/2017/09/06/electronic-waste-recycling-cybersecurity/ Information and photos about John: https://impactpodcast.com/ https://eridirect.com/category/news/ https://johnshegerian.com/gallery/ https://eridirect.com/ 1992 LA Rodney King Riots: https://www.britannica.com/event/Los-Angeles-Riots-of-1992 https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/timeline-rodney-king-beating-lapd-verdict-1992-la-riots/2880027/

Istrouma Baptist Church (BR) Oct 2, 2022 ========== October 2 l Revelation Welcome! We're glad you've joined us today for our Sunday morning worship service! For more information about Istrouma, go to istrouma.org or contact us at info@istrouma.org. We glorify God by making disciples of all nations. ========== Connection Card https://istrouma.org/myinfo October 2, 2022 | Tim Keith Revelation 1:1-11 ‭‭Revelation‬ ‭1:1-11‬‬ The revelation of Jesus Christ that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, whatever he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near. John: To the seven churches in Asia. Grace and peace to you from the one who is, who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and has set us free from our sins by his blood, and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father — to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn over him. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “the one who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” I, John, your brother and partner in the affliction, kingdom, and endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard a loud voice behind me like a trumpet saying, “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.” Want to receive weekly announcements in your inbox each week? https://istrouma.org/email Give Online Text ISTROUMA IBC to 73256 or go to: https://istrouma.org/give Our Website https://istrouma.org

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.

Paula Williams: Hey, Paula Williams. John Williams: And John Williams. Paula: And we are ABCI. And ABCI's mission is... John: To help all you ladies and gents out there sell more of your products and services in the aviation world. Paula: Absolutely. John: I [...]

Dr. John Eshleman has dedicated his life to making our science successful for all. Standing in Ogden Lindsley's wish for the use of plain English in Precision Teaching, he has the ability to express complex scientific phenomena in understandable language. John joins us in this episode to discuss a variety of topics from the richness of SAFMEDS to his explanation of Ogden's “Common Language for Analyzing Behavior”. He shares his views on how our rich underpinnings have been watered down in a rush to train behavior technicians in order to make the demands for frontline staff for the autism field. He also questions the reason behind the initiative to limit the BACB certifications to North America.   HIGHLIGHTS   04:41 Who were John's early influences that led him to pursue a career in Psychology and Precision Teaching? 13:42 John on his career after graduate school, including his projects with Aubrey Daniels & Associates 23:34 On the benefits of using manual flashcards  26:18 What were some of the applications that John has used SAFMEDS for? 31:18 John describes Steve Graf's dissertation topic on word responses 41:01 On the use of plain English in Precision Teaching 58:06 On the current state of ABA 1:17:07 On the current state and future hope for Precision Teaching 1:29:18 Helpful resources for students pursuing Precision Teaching and charting   RESOURCES   Learn more about the Standard Celeration Society on their Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/celeration.org/   Learn more about the Standard Celeration Society on their website: https://celeration.org/  Check out Carl Binder's The Fluency Channel on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/189260084444139/  Visit the Fluency Project's website: https://fluency.org/  Check out Richard McManus' Fluency Factory videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/richardinhingham/playlists  Learn more about Steve Graf on this website: https://www.stevegraf.org/  Read the book, Precision Teaching--A Practical Science of Education by Norris G. Haring (Author), Margaret (Peggy) S. White (Author), Malcolm D. Neely (Author): https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Teaching-Practical-Sciene-Education/dp/1597380342  Get a copy of the book, Handbook of the Standard Celeration Chart from the Cambridge Center Website: https://behavior.org/product/handbook-of-the-standard-celeration-chart-deluxe-edition-color-2/ Join our The ABA and PT Podcast Facebook Group to get access to the following resources: Facebook group link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/397478901376425    QUOTES   30:09 John: "Here's one of the things about instructional design— that's part of my philosophy at least— is that why make personal learning on something if they already know it? I'm always an advocate of 'if somebody knows something, can they test it out?' That way they don't have to waste their time or your time going through a learning program about something they already know." 45:48 John: "Lindsley's whole idea with COLAB was to use as much plain English as possible, presented accelerating consequence. There's nothing technical about that, right? It's presented, it's not taken away. It's accelerated, not decelerated because you have presented decelerating consequence too, as opposed to a punisher." 52:04 John: "Precision Teaching itself, as a term, is a euphemism. Euphemism is a better-sounding word that has less baggage or less controversy." 1:13:58 John: "To the extent that Precision Teaching can maintain some independence, it always was somewhat independent of ABA because they both come from different lineages and they only partially overlap. Precision Teaching is about a lot of positive things. I mean, we're teaching. So we call our client 'learners'." 1:19:09 John: "As long as we respect what the background is of Precision Teaching, what its main purpose was, using the actual chart and not being dogmatic about any of this. Being willing to graph things other ways too— that's the least dogmatic it can be."

AFTERBURN:Some of the topics covered are:• Opener• Thoughts from Shamesh Steve Waffle• Your brother in need…• A personal testimony of emotional healing• Elohim called you because…?• Loving and hating your brother• His seed stays in him (1 John 3:9)• Did Messiah become sin for us?• Love, hate, and the World (1 John 3:13)• The key to 1 John• To be vulnerable• Loving yourself to love others… and much more!Afterburn: also known in the world of fitness as the “afterburn effect”, simply put; The more intense the exercise, the more oxygen your body consumes afterward. The same could be true as you build up your spiritual self. After an intense teaching session, you need answers as more thoughts and questions consume you in your spiritual growth.Rabbi Steve Berkson, director of MTOI, provides an opportunity for the Afterburn to take place by additional thoughts and insight about what he just taught as well as answering questions from the local congregation and those watching the live stream.Don't miss out on new teachings every week. Please click on the "LIKE" button if this video has been a blessing to you.For more information about MTOI (Messianic Torah Observant Israel), visit our website, https://mtoi.org.Join us on Social media!  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mtoiworldwideFollow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mtoiworldwide/Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mtoiworldwideWe are located in Cleveland TN. If you would like to know more about us, we would love to hear from you! Feel free to visit us on our website, https://mtoi.org, email us at admin@mtoi.org or call us at 423-250-3020. Join us for Shabbat Services & Torah Study LIVE Streamed on our Main YouTube Channel every Saturday at 1:15 pm (EST) and every Tuesday for Torah Study Live Stream at 6:30 pm (EST).

Welcome to Episode 71.5 of the RetroWDW Podcast: 50th Anniversary Memories - We appreciate your support and hope you have been enjoying each and every episode. Be sure to check out some of our previous shows from over the years. We have visited multiple parks, resorts, and just about everything else in between. We hope you stick with us through 2021 as we bring you some great content that will take you back to WDW each month. For this episode, we are focusing on you the listener, and all the feedback you sent us from Episode 71. The outpouring of memories was overwhelming and we felt we needed to showcase this on an episode. While we do not have time to get through everyone, this episode features many of you and also what you had to say. If you enjoy memories, you won't want to skip this one. We get into lots of great stories that were shared with us and we hope you enjoy them as much as we did. Main Topic / Listener Mail For this main topic, the plan is to give you a short synopsis of each letter we discuss. This should help guide you through this episode and also give you a letter or two to look forward to if the topic matches your interest.  Jim: Discusses visiting the parks with his children, which changed his magical experience, including the Crystal Palace character meal. The WDW sign was a huge hit for his children and they even moved to Florida. Jim is also a fan of just sitting on a bench too! John: To start, reminds us that the shells from the Polynesian are Puka Shells. John also brings up 'South of the Border' signs which appear on the highway. He remembers staying at Fort Wilderness, staying on the Jack Rabbit Run Loop, and of course the boat/train whistle. Craig: Gives us some great examples of the legendary WDW customer service, including freebies and meeting Mickey. Craig also praises Lego Land for its customer service. We all get into our stories about freebies and how it's the little things that make a big difference. Claudia: Starts with some phases of the trip/visit. Also, Claudia gets into the past visits with people who have passed on. She also gets into closed-down attractions and also spoilers before visiting an attraction. Finally, she discusses WDW customer service. Matt: Sent us a story about customer service at Fort Wilderness. The bed was too soft and at 8pm, cast members drove over to fix the situation in an unimaginable way. Great story Matt! Ramon: Really enjoyed Episode 71 and he felt it was so nice to be unscripted. He will be traveling to Fort Wilderness soon and puts Episode 71 in his top three. Michael: Felt the last episode was somewhat therapeutic and also made him think a bit at the end. When getting into where things are heading for the parks, maybe we are not the target audience anymore... Michael also gave us a call! Thanks, Michael! Scott: Sent this through Instagram, Scott really enjoyed Episode 71. Thanks for your kind words about our show and past episodes. We discuss our different visits, history, and trip experiences. @JLBNerdy: Episode 71 brought her to tears and she is going in November, taking her niece for the first time. We hope you have a fabulous trip! Josh: Joined the show around the time of our Horizons episodes, playing catchup ever since. Happy 50th to you Josh! Andrew: This is another voicemail and Andrew tells us about ordering a cake on Main Street, taking that cake to the Contemporary, then enjoying the Electrical Water Pageant. This is amazing and we all would love to spend our birthday like this. Bob: Discusses major news events that occur when you are in the parks. Bob also defends Todd and the Gold Key Package, which of course is for high rollers only. Todd vows to cover this on a future episode or movie night. @JustEllenIGuess: Would like to hear more stories and loved the format of our last episode. We work to keep it real, research the memories to verify them and also keep it respectful. Brian still thinks 20k is a boring ride! @ServoIsNaked: Discusses Tiny Mic and plans to sit on the lip-shaped couch interviewing anybody and everybody once we set that up. This refers to Mariah Carey and her couch requests for the castle stay. Scott: We get another voicemail and Scott loved everything WDW. His first visit wasn't until 1994, but it was like a dream come true. 24 trips later and he still loves every aspect of his WDW vacations. Justin: We heard from Justin on the Retro Line, he shares a sad memory. His mom took him to WDW when she was battling cancer and he has many fond memories from his trips to WDW. Special people connect us to the parks. Nathan: Wrote to us about How and his disgust for Champion's Gate Traffic. This is great! We even get Walt talking directly to How, which is hilarious. We also get a live look at the traffic near Champion's Gate. Michele: A WDW College Program student, we hear about a special walkway between Universe of Energy & Mission Space. This was a favorite place for Michele to sit, enjoy a coffee or donut and just relax. We all discuss our favorites around the property. Joe: Another voicemail and this one is about his memory from 1985 at Fort Wilderness. They drove from NJ and went for a walk at night, stumbling upon Chip & Dale roasting marshmallows. Joe also leaves another message, this time all about a celebrity encounter. We would like to wrap up by letting everyone know that our little podcast, run by four random guys that randomly met, has passed one million downloads. This is awesome and we are so thankful that so many of you have decided to download our show and join us as we share memories each month. The news of a million is still tough to comprehend, but we love doing this for our listeners and also sharing memories with you. RetroMagic Fifty Tickets are on sale now! We announced our RetroMagic 50 VIP List and we cannot wait to see you on April 24, 2022. Should you have any questions regarding this upcoming event, please send us a message so we can help you out. Click Here To Purchase Tickets Tickets are going quickly and you will not want to miss out on our next big event. 2021: Year Two of Film To make sure you are the first to know when items are released, subscribe to us on YouTube. Be sure to click the notification bell too, that way you are alerted when we post.  Finally, be sure to check out Vimeo if that is your thing, as we will post there as well. Post-Show Fun Join us next time for Episode 72, as we get things back to normal for a full-on attraction-based episode. We have another movie night coming soon too...  Subscribe on YouTube so you are ready.  Click Here to donate to the Lake Buena Vista Historical Society Follow along for updates on RetroMagic 50

What You'll Hear: Raised Southern Baptist, profession of faith at age 9, committed to Christ in late 20's Worked for the Federal Government in IT. Was the Federal Manager for the first  Unix systems and the founding webmaster for EPA.gov I was the token conservative in the group, they certainly knew where I stood with regards to my faith and social issues I looked for opportunities to put a pebble in their shoe.  We would have good conversations at lunch.  Don't know that anybody's lives were changed. I treated everyone with dignity and respect, including a woman who was openly Lesbian who was mistreated by other co-workers It's important to ask not just how we're spending time but what we're spending time on. We can't really manage time, but we can manage ourselves and what we do We make time for the things that are important to us It's important to think not just about what to do but what NOT to do Break 1 - 10:57 - next dig into the meat of his presentation on Time Management, starting with the Rule of 13 which made a big difference in my life when I first heard about it from John To say "I'm too busy" is really a mark of pride The rule of 13 divides the week into 21 time periods and says if you're committed to more than 13 of those time periods you're too busy.  That's bondage, captivity.  You have no time for spontaneity, to relax, time with your family.  If you don't have that bondage, you have more freedom to be creative and to respond to opportunities. Stephen Covey's book "First Things First" talked about everything we do is in 1 of 4 quadrants, either urgent or not urgent and important or not important.  Quadrant 1, important and urgent needs to be managed. Quadrant 2, important and not urgent, is where we should spend most of our time. Quadrant 3, urgent and not important you want to avoid and learn to say no.  Quadrant, not urgent and not important should be minimized. You need to set goals. This will help you realize when you're doing something unimportant.  Train yourself so that you can be set free. Saw a meme recently.  Fit is hard, fat is hard. You choose.  Self-imposed captivity can free you. The ultimate goal is to glorify God in the things we do. Break 2 - 30:14 - next some specific tips very helpful Tips - it's like gardening and weeding, do a little bit often rather than putting it off Each evening plan 2 or 3 things you want to accomplish the next day To be set free you need to limit the distractions.  Don't let your phone create any sounds. When at home don't have it with you every second. A 5 second interruption can cost you a minute Consider only handling emails once or twice a day. Be more time focused rather than task focused.  Carve out times to do certain things. Make an appointment with yourself and block that time out on your calendar Get things out of your head so your mind can be creative, this is called psychic bandwidth.  Make lists and carry a pencil and pen to jot down an idea.  Empty your inboxes regularly Imagine you're leaving tomorrow for a month long trip to raft the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon.  Today you're only going to do the things that absolutely need to get done Kiss the Toad is about doing something you don't want to do but needs to be done, just do it first thing and the rest of your day will be great. Contact jksapex@gmail.com

Key TakeawaysYour team doesn't have the time or patience to hunt for the resources they need to do their work. CTOs and CIOs have tremendous power to build more robust, essential knowledge hubs to help their teams find the information they're looking for, or document a newly minted process.Prioritizing projects is an art. CIOs have to learn how to weigh one project's impact against another's while juggling the work they have in-flight. Agile workflows help teams prioritize and move swiftly, as opposed to burning time and money on a years-long project.Teams might be working outside of the office, but their expectations haven't changed. Someone working remotely still expects the speed of the office WiFi, the VPN capacity, and more. CIOs have to fine tune their infrastructure to help teams work together from afar.Key Quotes"Surprising and delighting people is just making technology more transparent in their lives. I focus a lot on those types of things as well as removing friction." - John"To be a good CIO,  I think you have to have genuine passion and interest in understanding the business and what it's trying to accomplish. The technology comes later. It's really about understanding the business." - Anisha"Innovation comes from really listening to what people need and hearing what they're actually saying." - John"Gone are the days of the five year IT project and boiling the ocean. It's about building flexible, iterative, agile delivery models and having the ability to respond to shifting demand as it appears. " - AnishaLinksAnisha Vaswani LinkedInJohn Stecher LinkedInBlackstoneToastThanks to our friendsLearn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.comThis podcast is brought to you by Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom. Modern employees demand the best tools at work. If your company wants to embrace the modern work environment, you need best of breed tools like Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom. 

An audio recording of Morning Prayer from St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church (Fleming Island, FL). Psalms 15-17 2 Samuel 17:1-23 2 John To support our mission, visit: https://www.saintmichaelsanglican.org/support-our-mission

We cover the basics on the traditional IRA. John and Nick will break down what this investment vehicle is for and how it may be able to benefit you.Helpful Information:PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/Contact: 813-286-7776Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.comFor a transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/Transcript of Today's Show:----more----Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome into this edition of Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick here with me, talking about investing finance and retirement. From their office, their PFG Private Wealth in Tampa Bay guys, what's going on? How are you this week, John?John: I'm good. How are you doing?Speaker 1: I'm hanging in there. Amidst the goofiness of the world, I'm doing all right. How about you, Nick? You doing okay?Nick: Yep, yep. Pretty good. We finished up the retirement classes that we teach recently, so just meeting with a lot of people after that class.Speaker 1: Okay. Those went pretty well?Nick: Yeah. Yeah, always good. Always fun.Speaker 1: Okay, well, very good. Listen, I got a little bit of a kind of a class idea for us to run through here. I wanted to talk this week about IRAs, really just an IRA 101, if you will, and then we'll follow it up with our next podcast coming up after this one. We'll follow up with the Roth side of the coin. Let's jump into here just a little bit and talk about this and get rocking and rolling. Just do us a favor. Just assume that we don't all have the same knowledge base. What is an IRA? Give us just a quick 101 on that.John: So yeah, good question. Especially with a tax season coming up, because I know a lot of people when they're doing their taxes, and whether it's TurboTax or working with an accountant, at the end of it it says you might want contribute to an IRA and maybe save some taxes this year. Or maybe get [inaudible 00:01:22] taxable income down the road. But you brought this topic up. So when I raise an individual retirement account on the personal side, a lot of people have their employer sponsored plans, but the IRA is for the individual. Really, there's a lot of tax benefits to it to provide for saving for retirement. One of the biggest questions that Nick and I get, or I guess assumptions, is that most people think an IRA is an actual investment, and it's really not. I explain it as imagine a tax shell, a tax shell you can invest in a lot of different things, and you have some tax benefits within the shell.Speaker 1: Okay. So it's like a turtle shell, if you want to look out that way. It's a wrapper really, right? So it's what your Snicker bar comes in. It's the wrapper. Then inside there you can put all sorts of different stuff. So who can contribute to IRAs?John: Well, there's two main types, and Nick will jump into that. But there's your traditional IRA and then a Roth IRA.Speaker 1: Okay.Nick: From the standpoint of how those break down, how those work, we're going to focus on traditional IRAs today. The number one determination on whether or not you can contribute to an IRA is if there is earned income in the household. So if it's a single person household, they have to have earned income. That does not include pension income, social security income, rental income. It's earned income. You receive some sort of wage for doing a job. So that's the first rule. You can contribute for 2019 and for 2020 essentially, if you're under 50, you can contribute $6,000. If you're over 50, you can take part in what's called a catch-up, which is an additional $1,000 for a total of $7,000.Nick: So as an example, let say that it's a two-person household. One person is working, one person is not, and the person that's working has a least $14,000 of income. Then as long as they satisfy a couple other rules that we'll talk about, they can make a contribution for themself for the $7,000 and for the spouse for the $7,000. So earned income doesn't have to be for both people. It has to be for one, and then the amount ties in the amount of earned income.Speaker 1: Oh, okay.John: One thing to jump into that, and I've seen some people, not our clients, but others, make some mistakes where they think that, we talked about the two different kinds, traditional and Roth, where they think they can make, let's say, $7,000 into one and $7,000 in the other. It's actually $7,000 total between the two of them.Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. So, okay, so those are good to know. Whenever you're talking about just the contribution, the base set up of them. So let's stick with the traditional IRA and talk about it. What are some key things to think about like as an investment vehicle, as a machine here? These are pre-taxed, right?Nick: Yeah. When we talk about, and this is where the confusion really sets in for many people, when we talk about traditional IRAs, we really like to have conversations with people to make sure that they understand that there can be both a tax deductible or pretax traditional IRA, and there can be non-deductible traditional IRAs. So the logistics are dependent upon, really, a couple of different things whether or not they're active in an employer's plan. Then there are income limits that will determine whether or not somebody can participate in the tax deductible side of a traditional IRA. So that can be a little confusing. We usually have people consult with their tax prepare or and/or their software so that they can fully understand.Nick: But part of the reason that we bring that up is a real-world scenario is, what [inaudible 00:05:17] this client, worked at a company for 10 years, and she contributed to the 401k on a pretax basis. She left the company, rolled her 401k into a rollover IRA, and she's no longer working, but her spouse is working and wants to make IRA contributions for them. But he has a plan at work and makes too much money. They might have to do a non-deductible IRA. So usually what we will tell them to do is to open a second IRA, and when they make the contribution, they're going to account for it on their taxes as they made it. They're not going to deduct it. So we try not to commingle those dollars together. So a nondeductible IRA, we would like you to be separate from a rollover IRA. Otherwise, they have to keep track of the cost basis and their tax basis on nondeductible proportion commingled, and we're really just [inaudible 00:06:16] nightmare.John: Yeah, that's never fun to try and keep track of and never easy. One thing with with the pretax, just give an example of what that means is, let's say someone's taxable income in a given year is $100,000, and doing their taxes, it says, you might want to make a deductible contribution to an IRA. If they were to put $5,000 into the IRA, their taxable income for that given year would be $95,000. So that's where people look at the pretax as a benefit versus a nondeductible. That same example, $100,000 of income, you put $5,000 into a nondeductible IRA, your taxable income stays at that $100,000.Speaker 1: Okay. So what are the factors that determine if it's deductible or not?Nick: The answer is that it's fairly complicated. The first factor is, if we talk about an individual, they're going to look at do you have a plan at work that you're able to contribute to? So that's the first test. The second test is an income test. The tricky part with the income test is that there is a test for your income, and then there's also tests for household income. So usually we revert to the charts and advisors. We work together with the tax preparers to help make sure that we're in compliance with all of the rules. It should be much less complicated than it actually is. But it's really, honestly, a pain. I will say that if you do not have a plan at work that you can contribute to, your ability to contribute in [inaudible 00:07:56] to an IRA, a traditional IRA is much easier.Speaker 1: Okay. Gotcha. All right. So if that's some of the determining factors in there, what are some other important things for us to take away from a traditional IRA standpoint?John: Yeah, one of the biggest benefits to investing in an IRA versus, let's say, outside of it, is and if the account grows tax-deferred. So let's say you had money outside of an IRA and you get some growth on it, I say typically, because nothing's ever absolute. But you can really get it [inaudible 00:08:28] every single year and the gains and the dividends and things like that. Within the IRA shell, going back to that, it just continues to grow tax-deferred. So really help the compounding growth of it.Speaker 1: Okay. So when we're talking about some of these important pieces and the different things with the traditional, what are some other, I know a lot of times we know that it's the 59 and a half, right? All that kind of stuff. Give us some other things to think about just so that we're aware of the gist of it. Now, there was some changes to the Secure Act, which also makes them some of these numbers a little bit different now. The 59 and a half is still there, but now it's gone from 70 and a half to 72, right?John: Yeah. With good things like tax deferral and pre-tax, we do have some nice rules that the IRS/government basically hands down to us. One of them is as far as access to the account, you cannot fully access the account without any penalties until 59 and a half. After you're 59 and a half, you do get access to your account. If you access it before that, there is a 10% penalty on top of a whatever you draw. So that's basically deter to pull out early. There are some special circumstances as far as pulling out before 59 and a half, which could be any type of hardships financially, health wise, and also first time home purchases. We get that quite a bit sometimes where people say, I'm looking to buy a house and I want to go ahead and pull out of my IRA. Can I do so and avoid the penalty? The answer is yes, up to $10,000.John: Some of the changes with the Secure Act where they used to be after 70 and a half, you can no longer contribute to an IRA, even if you have earned income. That's actually gone, which is a nice feature when we're doing planning for clients above 70 and a half, where we can now make a deductible contribution to an IRA, where before we couldn't. Nick's the expert in RMD, so he can jump in and take that.Nick: One of the biggest things to keep in mind from the standpoint of traditional IRAs are that they do have required minimum distributions. The good thing is that those required minimum distributions are now required at age 72 versus 70 and a half. So that makes things a little bit easier for people. And again, that's kind of a big differentiator from the standpoint of a Roth IRA does not have an RMD, a traditional IRA does have an RMD.Speaker 1: Right, and with the RMDs, it's money that basically the government says, we're tired of waiting. Where's our tax revenue? Is there any basic things there just to think about when we're thinking about having to pull this out? Is there a figure attached to it?Nick: I would say we try to give people an idea, because sometimes there's uncertainty on any sort of concept of how much they have to take out. But on average it's about 3.6% in the first year. I would say though, that probably one of the biggest, or I should say one of the most misunderstood portions about it are that the RMD amount that has to come out, it's based on the prior years and balance of all of the pretax accounts. So you may have multiple accounts, you don't have to take an RMD out of each account. You just need to make sure that you take out the amount that is due, and you have the ability to be able to pick which account you want to take that out of, which really, at first thought that can seem more complicated. But if you're working with somebody it helps increase the ability to strategize and ladder your investments and use a bucket strategy where you can use short-term, mid-term, long-term strategies on your money, and have a little bit more flexibility on which account you're going to take money out of when.John: To jump on that, we went through that paycheck series when we talked about having a long-term bucket, and in some strategies that's where by being able to choose what IRA you draw from, you can just let that long-term bucket just continue to build up and not worrying about pulling out of it.Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay. All right. So that gives us a good rundown, I think, through the traditional side of it, and gives us some basic class, if you will, on what these are. Of course, as the guys mentioned, they teach classes all the time. So if there's things you want to learn more about the IRA, the traditional IRA, and how you might be able to be using it or better using it as part of an investment vehicle, then always reach out to the team and have a conversation about that specifically. Because again, we just covered some basics and general things that apply to just about everybody here. But when you want to see how it works for your situation specifically, you always have to have those conversations one-on-one. So reach out to them, let them know if you want to chat about the traditional IRA, or how you can better use the vehicle, or change, or whatever it is that you're looking to do.Speaker 1: (813) 286-7776 is the number you call to have a conversation with them. You simply let them know that you want to come in. They'll get you scheduled and set up for a time that works well for you. That's (813) 286-7776. They are financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth in the Tampa Bay area. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, whatever platform of choice you like to use. You can simply download the app onto your smartphone and search Retirement Planning Redefined on the app for the podcast. Or you could just simply go to their website at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com. Guys, thanks for spending a few minutes with me this week talking about IRAs. So let's, next podcast, talk about the Roth side. We'll flip over to the cousins, okay?John: One more thing I want to mention before we go is withdrawing from the accounts of, let's say someone goes to retire above 59 and a half, and it's time to really start using this money as income. So it's just important to understand that whatever amount that you withdraw out of the IRA, assuming everything was pre-tax that went into it, it adds to your taxable income. So for example, if someone's pulling $50,000 out of their IRA, their taxable income goes up by $50,000 in a given year. So we just want to point that out, because as people are putting money into it, we sometimes do get questions of, when I take it out am I actually taxed on this, the answer is yes, if it was pretax put into it.Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, great point. Thanks for bringing that up as well. So I appreciate that. And again, folks, the nice thing about a podcast is you can always pause it, and you can always rewind it, replay it. If you're learning, trying to learn something useful, or get a new nugget of information here, that's a great thing about it. That's also why subscribing is fantastic. You can hear new episodes that come out, as well as go back and check on something that you were thinking about, and that way when you come to have that conversation, you can say, listen, I want to understand more about how withdrawals with my traditional IRA is going to affect me, or whatever your question might be. So again, guys, thanks for your time this week. I'll let you get back to work and we'll talk again soon.John: Thanks.Nick: Thanks.Speaker 1: We'll catch you next time here, folks, on the podcast. Again, go subscribe. We'd appreciate it on Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth.

Jayson and Blue are joined by John To talk about Gender Identity and how to be a better person. Jayson Also gets a burger and we discuss movies --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/KC_caffeine/support

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with the roundtable format asking the question is there change in the WordPress ecosystem?  John Turner and Phil Derksen are the special guests that share what significant changes they have made in their careers and what they see in the  WordPress ecosystem. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Why exiting solopreneurship is the right move Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:47:53 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:47:53 John Turner joined Awesome Motive through their customer accelerator portal to help his company grow. Syed Balkhi, Awesome Motive's owner,  suggested that John join the company as a partner since his product and strategy aligned with Awesome Motive. (3:10) Phil Derksen recently joined Sandhills Development LLC after running a one-man shop company called WP Simple Pay, which is a stripe payment and subscription program.  Sandhills Development, LLC  has a whole suite of products that was founded by Pippin Williamson. (4:20) What you will learn in this Episode: Startups in the WordPress economy were easy to start as a fully bootstrapped business. It can be a roller coaster ride of going solo and joining a company, then trying to go solo again. (6:48) John – Worked for 6 or 7 years and did not feel like he was continually growing. When the opportunity became available with Syed and Awesome Motive John decided to give it a try and take the growth to the next level. It was difficult where the uncertainty and change is concerned, but he is excited to be a part of the company.  (7:48) Phil – Phil had many happy customers with his product and support. Although he had a level of comfort with his company, he did not feel like he could release the features that customers were requesting. For example, EDD could offer many things that his product couldn't do. Phil had one product to focus on, but it was distracting to jump from being a developer, then marketing and support. It is exciting to work with a team and see the growth of the products. (11:11) Product Growth – Marketing or the Product Alone? Phil – Product features and planning for the future is critical. Then the focus needs to change to marketing to get the word out to the customers. (11:59) John– Marketing is the most important focus and the lesson to learn. You can have an awesome product, but you need to have the time and focus on marketing. (12:23) Matt – For people to scale their business they need to market their product successfully and make more money. It takes a lot of time and money to do marketing correctly.  (13:41) Marketing John – There is no magic bullet when it comes to marketing. When you find out what is working you need to concentrate on it. When your business is small, you don't have a lot of money to spend on marketing. You need to focus on one or two channels (like Facebook and Content Marketing) and focus on what is working for you. It could take awhile. (15:19) Phil – Phil has recently spent money and time on content marketing. Finding what works and knowing that changes over time are important. It is tough to get noticed with new plugins or themes on WordPress.org. Sandhills Development has a marketing team that reaches out and promotes products. (17:19) Matt – Some businesses try a blanket approach with marketing and cover too much. The person in the WordPress Community that is doing marketing well seems to be Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. His company does a great job with their brand and content marketing. Pagely is another company that does a great job with their quality and material. Phil: Chris Badgett at LifterLMS does a great job with content marketing and his podcast concentrating around learning systems. John: LifterLMS has very focused content with their brand and audience. The material has intent. Content Marketing Focus: Matt – Content Marketing is very expensive and very hard to do as a business owner. If you are preparing webinars and podcasts, it takes a lot of time when launching a podcast. It can be hard to produce quality content consistently. (19:54) John – To test the market in the WordPress space getting on WordPress.org is the best place to start and get some eyes on your product. It is essential to focus on the product name and reviews. You need to start somewhere and then figure out how to rank it. (21:03) Phil  – Some people go to the content route first without a free version of their product. Phil likes the podcast/YouTube style. Joe Howard has started the WPMRR Podcast and focuses on monthly revenue. When you find something that is working, you can double down on it.  While you are adjusting your approach, you should be concentrating on your email list. (22:09) John – Many niches are very competitive in the WordPress space. You need to build up the business and take baby steps slowly. It is not easy. (22:53) Matt – There are two sides to this. You can try to rank in WordPress. org. But as competition starts to grow, some new business owners find they start too late with the ideas for marketing. One great idea is to leverage customer stories with a podcast and repurpose the content.  (24:21) Forecasting the Future of WordPress: Matt – WordPress is becoming more competitive, and pricing in the marketing is still a challenge.  How is pricing changing in the WordPress space? (26:07) John – Many themes and plugins have gone to automatic subscription. Many customers are renewing without a discount in subsequent years (especially with hosting or SaaS products) (26:46) Phil – Larger companies can adapt to charge more because they have a reputation and support behind the product. The customer can count on them with staying power. (28:04) Matt – Prices in the space are tiered for support for products. Customers seem to value the product and as an end user, they see the value. (28:50) John  – Customers are buying the products and making money. There was a positive response from his customers with his joining a larger company. Phil – There were no complaints coming from customers when features were released and annual subscriptions were occurring. SaaS products seem to do this annually. Phil got a great response from his customers when he joined Sandhills Development. They were excited with the partnership and the solutions that can be offered. (30:32) Balancing User Requests and Feedback: John:  He would produce a yearly survey to stay on pace with his customers including the feedback that he received over the year. Every feature that you include will be a support burden down the line. (33:16) Phil – Sent out a survey as well as tracking support requests that looked like new features. Phil collected responses all year and weighed those requests with what it would take to develop and support. Phil was very cautious about adding features while trying to not take any feature away. (33:59) Monetization with Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 John – Waiting to see what happens after the release. There seems to be a lot of opinions about what will happen with the newest release. (35:47) Phil – Is expecting support to be overwhelmed after the release. Documents and videos will help people with the release. WP Simple Pay will not be that impacted. The page builder and themes could be impacted but uncertain by how much and in what way. (36:36) Matt – There are a lot of folks jumping into the opportunity around Gutenberg with an opportunity to sell to customers. The release seems to be a way to create a SaaS around WordPress.org. With Jetpack enabled you will be able to remind the customer about what is coming and create upsells. (38:45) To Keep in Touch: John Turner: Hooked on Products Podcast Twitter – @johnturner seedprod.com Phil Derksen: Twitter – @philderksen Phil Derksen   Episode Resources: Awesome Motive MemberPress Formidable Forms Syed Balkhi Sandhills Development, LLC EDD Affiliate WP Restrict Content Pro Sugar Calendar Delicious Brains Pagely LifterLMS LMSCast WPMRR Jetpack To Stay in Touch: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

Panel: Charles Max Wood John Papa Special Guest: Adrian Faciu In this episode, Chuck talks with Adrian Faciu who is a developer for Visma and is a blogger. The panel talks to Adrian about his blog titled, “NgRx Tips & Tricks.” They ask Adrian in-depth questions about NgRx, among many other topics. Listen to today’s episode for more details! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:55 – Chuck: Hi! Our guest is Adrian Faciu. 1:10 – Guest: Hello! I am Adrian and I am a developer who works for a Norwegian company, but I live in Romania! 1:35 – Chuck. 1:36 – Guest. 1:47 – Chuck: The market is so global. I have talked with many different guests from different parts of the world – it’s really neat! It’s this global phenomenon. 2:12 – Guest: It’s a great thing! 2:23 – Chuck: They have an office where you live? 2:31 – Yes. 2:37 – Chuck: How are you guys using Angular over there? 2:47 – Guest: We have several different products. We customize using them with internalized tools. 3:04 – Chuck: Real quick let’s talk about your blog post. I will admit I am not that familiar with NgRx, so I will ask newbie questions. Now do you want to explain what this is? 3:41 – Guest: Sure! The short story of the article is I saw people doing things the hard way. And after I figured out some things, people encouraged me to write about my experience. 4:37 – Chuck: John Papa just signed-in! 4:53 – Guest: Yes NgRx is... 5:02 – Chuck: You used classes for all actions what do you mean by that? 5:05 – Guest answers the question into detail. 6:31 – Chuck: Let’s say we have a class that uses a log error... 6:42 – Guest: For example you have actions that... 7:02 – Chuck: When you use the reducer... 7:10 – Guest: There are other tricks we can use like keeping all of them in the same file... 8:00 – Guest talks about the union type. 8:24 – Chuck: You learned this by doing things wrong – what happens when you do these things wrong? 8:30 – Guest: If you don’t put all of your classes in the right file then you end up with a lot of files. If you don’t create hero types then you’d have to... 10:02 – Chuck: If you import user actions then does it import all of the other types? 10:08 – Guest: Import everything from that file. 10:17 – Chuck: If you have any questions, John, feel free to chime-in! 10:29 – John: Yeah I am scanning through this. The negative I hear a lot of through actions, it’s cause we create constants – the action class creators, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress. How much actual code do you actually have to write – how do you feel about that? 11:12 – Guest: I didn’t want to write all of this code! That’s what I wanted to avoid. 11:44 – John: I wrote them, didn’t like them, I went back to them... It wasn’t just that I created a new action I had to create the constant and other things – also the place you do the union type, I’d forget to do the union type at the end! If you don’t have all of those things then it won’t work. Even on a simple project I’d have 120 lines of code for a simple task. 12:49 – Guest: Yes. Sometimes I would forget this or that. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong. I went back and created classes for a lot of things. I like the benefits. 13:19 – John: I like your ideas and your tips in your blog. How do you feel about the NAMES of those actions? 13:55 – Guest. 14:51 – John: Important part is the naming of the string inside of it – that’s the value... So you can see the actions that are being displayed. 15:25 – Guest: If you didn’t do it right that’s where the problem would be. 15:38 – John: To me it’s a love/hate relationship b/c there is so much code to it. I usually copy and paste which means that I usually forget to change something. I agree, but I don’t’ like creating it. 16:05 – Guest: I’ve been trying to figure out a solution for it eventually I gave up. 16:23 – John: Moving onto effects – inside that happens inside of the Redux cycle – if you want to do something outside of it that’s when you do effects right? 16:40 – Guest. 16:49 – John: Using the effects is good or do it a different way? 17: 20 – Guest: It makes my components cleaner. I have seen projects that DON’T use it and it’s not the best. 17:36 – John: Like getting a list of customers... (I am using my hands and nobody can see me!) It’s weird to me to NOT use the effects! 18:52 – Guest: If you implement some type of caching then it’s everything to put everything in the state. 19:07 – Chuck: I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but I haven’t do much with it. 19:23 – John: I am curious from somebody hasn’t dove into it – does effects make sense to you, Chuck? 19:39 – Chuck: It seems like effects is a side effect? Like calling out an external API... 20:10 – John: Yeah even multiple effects. John asks a question. 20:23 – Guest answers the question. 20:29 – Chuck: I like that you can make constrained assumptions and all of the complicated... 21:10 – Guest: I am using my effects like functions. 21:26 – John’s question. 21:31 – Chuck: Doing everything! You said implement the 2-payload method – that doesn’t make sense? 21:43 – Guest: Not 100% convinced you need it. What people are doing on these actions... 22:43 – Chuck: How much magic you want? 22:50 – Guest. 22:59 – John: I am confused about ERROR HANDLING. What do you advise for people to do? 23:21 – Guest: Basically, when you deal with that effect you deal with the actions, and the actions... If you get an error on it it’s done. I was trying to explain there that...do it on another stream. Try it on another stream and handle it. What happened to me – I did it on the action state and I got an error and then everything will stop. 24:27 – John: That’s not good! 24:32 – Chuck. 24:35 – John: Good tip! 24:40 – Chuck: Angular has gotten better at that. I still find, though... 25:06 – John. 25:16 – John: Hey I appreciate these blog posts that don’t always show the happy path. To show the unhappy path is a good idea. 25:32 – Chuck. 26:00 – Going down your list, Adrian, let’s talk about effects are services. I agree, but not that we have... 26:24 – Guest: I have seen cases where people forget that. They say I want to call a service, how do I do that? They forget... 26:50 – John: You have to provide your services somewhere. The old way was you could go into the... What do you do? 27:28 – Guest: Most of the applications... 28:17 – John. 28:25 – Chuck: I love deleting code! 28:32 – John: You end up in a spaghetti pool, though, if you needed that deleted code. Nooooo!!! 29:00 – Chuck. 29:01 – Guest. 29:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 29:49 – John: Let’s talk about reducers – the smallest part of your tip sections. You say, “keep them simple” – how do you keep them simple? 30:07 – Guest: I have received this observation from several people. This is the biggest problem I had. How to keep them simple... 31:08 – John: When someone makes that type of code – where would you want them to put it? 31:23 – Guest: It depends on different types of actions. Maybe I have some sort of matter that I added to the data – an action from my application we can catch it into an effect and... Not all of the actions have to go to the reducer. 32:04 – John: I say, “Hmm...” when I see reducers like this...they are running a synchronized code inside of a reducer. And I see that a lot. 32:24 – Chuck. 32:28 – John: You go call a reaction, and...sometimes they are doing HTP there, but it’s hard to explain. 33:11 – John: What are some of the things that they can do to step-into, when they are using these? 33:16 – Guest: That’s why I only have these things about the reducers. 33:48 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the life cycle look like? What do you call a reducer from an effect from an action or vice versa? 34:09 – Guest answers the question. 34:37 – John: It can be confusing with all of these different terms. Where does it end? Your component you have to say: call this action. Perform this action and then the action says get customers – the NgRx library listens for that and helps connect to the reducer for you. Look into the action and then return that to a stream to whatever... 35:29 – Guest: Yes, it sends it to reducers. Guest goes into more detail. 36:09 – John: You never talk to the reducer directly? 36:17 – Chuck: ...is that something I should have done before – or does it call effects and the effects load the information into the state and the reducer pulls it out for the action? 36:46 – Guest. 36:58 – Chuck. 37:03 – Guest. 37:53 – John: It really depends on what you want to do, Chuck. John will give a hypothetical scenario. 38:58 – Chuck: In your scenario, let’s say... 39:14 – John: Everything is right up until the end there. It’s a little magical, honestly. I just know here is my selector and here is my data! 40:17 – Chuck: Selector is essentially I am interested in THIS state or THIS state change. 40:40 – Guest. 40:50 – Chuck: So when that changes... 40:56 – Guest. 40:59 – John. 41:05 – Chuck: A little piece of the overall store. 41:18 – Guest: My tip there was a bout the selectors... 42:30 – Chuck: So I can hand off my selector to multiple places? 42:36 – Guest: Yep. You don’t need to know anything else. 42:44 – Guest: Combine it as needed. Another benefit here is memorization. It says that each time you select pure functions it wont call the function again. 43:42 – I am seeing a trend in your tips, too. I am seeing easier way to code. You are always saying selector technique. There are a lot of terms in NgRx module. Dispatchers and states and stores...it’s nice to have a way to create the code easier. 44:21 – Guest: It does take a lot of time for someone to grasp. 44:30 – Chuck. 44:35 – John: Don’t use the store all over the place – that’s what Adrian says! 44:54 – Guest: I think it’s more like dumb components. I have a container of all of these dumb components. The container is the one that KNOWS. 46:22 – Chuck: It’s just a button. 46:28 – Guest: You click the button and it triggers. Whenever you want to use that component then you... 46:48 – Chuck: Any types of data that you wouldn’t want to use in your NgRx store? 47:07 – Guest: It depends – I am not holding any logging information there, though. 47:51 – John: I like to ask WHY. Property initialization. You are saying... 48:11 – Guest: It’s less code and it’s reasonable. If I can have less code then I’d love to have it. I think it’s cleaner b/c it’s not that much code. Most people might think blah, blah, blah, but I think it looks okay. 48:46 – John: I can see why it would be less code. 48:57 – Guest. 49:07 – John: I haven’t seen this: looking at your property initializer... Looking at your code here, Adrian... The store object itself is a reference to the NgRx store. That means you have to... To me I don’t want my app to know that NgRx is involved. I started to do this...I was creating an Angular service, which... Have you done this before? 50:33 – Guest:  I have seen this function but I haven’t played with it. It makes sense. This takes it a step further. Like you say it’s perfect b/c nobody knows anything about that store, but it’s a new level. I think you have some benefits with that way of doing it, too. 51:23 – John: The one thing that sticks out is company name is your observable, then your... 52:10 – Guest: Yeah that’s good b/c it might be better! They might not even know what NgRx is, and you have a service so just use them. Yeah it’s just an observable. 52:33 – Chuck: You don’t want to see my garage. 52:44 – Guest: Some services are underrated. Like you suggested we could use them for much more. 53:01 – Guest: It was nice writing these tips. 53:19 – Chuck: What are working on now? 53:23 – Guest: Writing a new blog. 53:41 – Chuck: We will keep an eye out for it. Where do you post? 53:55 – Guest: Usually Medium, and Twitter. Search for my name and you will find me, b/c I have the same handler on all the places. 54:15 – Chuck & John: Let’s go to picks! 54:30 – Chuck is talking about future episodes and potential topics. You can vote stuff up on Trello on NgRx so we can go deeper on this topic. 55:40 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:02:00 – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular C# Chuck’s Twitter John Papa’s Twitter Adrian’s Medium Adrian’s Twitter Adrian’s GitHub Adrian’s Blog Post Adrian’s Article: Testing NgRx Effects Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: John NgRx Data Conferences  - Don’t feel mofo Charles Discord App Adrain Angular In-depth Doc Wallaby

Welcome back to our weekend Cabral HouseCall shows! This is where we answer our community's wellness, weight loss, and anti-aging questions to help people get back on track! Check out today's questions: Kara: I started your candida and bacteria protocol about 6 weeks ago. All was going well until I stopped using the sacchamices bulardi. I started the second probiotic for about a week and got off because I didn’t feel right.my symptoms returned. So my question is where should I go from here? Can I go back to the first probiotic since it was working? Also, what does that say about what’s going on with me if the first probiotic worked and then my symptoms seemed to return. Thanks Luke: Hi, I’m wanting to get your opinion on your 7, 14 & 21 day detox plans. Im a 26 year old male who lifts weights at least 4 times a week so I’m not looking to lose much weight but I am looking for a deep detox as I suffer from gut issues so what would you recommend is the best cleanse for that and would it be beneficial for gut health issues? Kyrsten: Hey I would like to get certified as a nutritionist or a healthy couch. Is there a program that you would recommend? Rachel: What can I do if I’m always cold? My hand and feet turn purple a lot. Thank you for your work and podcast. I listen often but haven’t made my way through all so not sure if you’ve addressed my questions. Thank you very much!     John: To whom it may concern, I am interested having a test taken for my apoE genotype and beginning a regimen for heart health. Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon, -John   Lauren: I am emailing in regards for some much needed help and relief (sorry about the lengthy question). I am 22 years old and have been suffering with a few issues since I was young and no one can seem to help me. I have PCOS so I don’t get my period, my hormones are all out of whack, I am constantly bloated in my stomach, I am very heavy/ hold on to a lot of fluid in my arms ( to the point where I feel like a man), I have been diagnosed with IBS, SIBO and can go days without going to the bathroom (although surprisingly they have been good for a few weeks now). I eat very healthy, never eat take out, eat plenty of veggies, try to avoid gluten (never eat bread or pasta), eat wholegrain such as brown rice, quinoa, try to eat spouted nuts/ seeds when I can, make my own raw desserts/ treats so I barely eat packaged things, trying to avoid soy due to my hormones, recently cut down on red meat as I did not enjoy it and felt my body cant process sit but do eat fish. I am extremely active and have been most of my life and usually do at least 45min of exercise daily. I have seen various acupunctures, bowel specialists, gynaecologists, nutritionists, Chinese medicine doctors, reiki practitioners to name a few. I've taken herbal mixes, tablets, medicines, oils, ultrasounds (internal and external), colonoscopy, stool tests, laxatives (they don't do anything), upping my fibre, removing soy, dairy and gluten but nothing seems to work. I have a high tolerance for pain but lately I am just sick of feeling and looking bloated everyday. It doesn’t matter what I eat or what time of day I constantly feel like I have a baby and am super swollen. I feel that my body does not absorb anything and as a result I am always super tired due to my body trying to break down food/unbloat. As I do not get a period I feel my body holds on to a lot and it doesn’t matter how much exercise I do I cant seem to slim these arms or unbolt them. Sometimes I literally want to get a pin and use it as relief to de-bloat my stomach and remove the weight in my arms. I have gotten to the point where I almost want to give up but I was listening to a podcast and heard Doctor Stephen Cabral on it and thought I would give the last bit of hope in me to him and his team. I have no idea where to go from here. Sorry for the overload in information I thought it would be easier to give you a lot so you could see where I was at. Thank you for your time.   Leslie: Hello from London! I am a recently-qualified Nutritional Therapist and absolutely love your podcast. Your dedication and enthusiasm give me hope that our profession can truly help people heal. Thank you so much for sharing your vast knowledge, I learn something new every time I listen! I'm writing in regards to a 10 yr old boy suffering from what has been diagnosed as status migrainous - or side-locked headache. His symptoms are: - very bad headache on left side of head that comes and goes - extreme tenderness across the entire area of the trigeminal nerve - sometimes he can't even have his face touched - extreme fatigue - a very heavy feeling in his head - stuffed sinuses They have done various tests, including an MRI, and have ruled out many other conditions. They have tried him on many medications - including very strong anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, occipital nerve block, steroid injection, anticonvulsives, hyperhydrosis and oxygen therapy. Nothing has made any difference. He has been suffering now for almost 8 weeks. Doctors are beginning to offer psychological services as they say he may have to live with this pain indefinitely! The headache started after an extreme bout of stress due to high pressure training at a professional football club (soccer). He was pulled out of the program in November, and by the beginning of January came down with a very bad virus he just couldn't seem to shake. His mother still believes he is suffering from the virus as he still has extreme fatigue and runny / stuffy nose. My intuition is that his immune system was under enormous stress due to excessive athletic training, and that EBV or Herpes Zoster could have re-activated itself in the nerve. I asked them to run a check to see if he had EBV and it came back positive for a past infection but not active. It is my understanding that it will only show an active infection at the first exposure - and any re-activation of the virus would show up as IgG and not IgM. I would be so grateful for any input. His parents are beside themselves with worry and are in a lot of distress seeing him in so much pain. Up until 8 weeks ago he was a very healthy, happy active boy. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this very detailed question. As an aside, one reason you are my favourite podcast is that I am originally a Massachusetts native so listening to you in Boston is a real treat for me. As you may have guessed from my name, we have Portuguese heritage in common too. :-) Also, I'd be interested in working as a health coach for you here if you ever need UK support. Thanks again - keep up the great work! Thank you for tuning into today's Cabral HouseCall and be sure to check back tomorrow where we answer more of our community’s questions! - - - Show Notes & Resources: http://StephenCabral.com/862 - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com      

Chapter 4 - Pragmatic Paranoia Tip 30: You Can't Write Perfect Software perfect software doesn't exist "defensive driving" analogy for a programmer, you shouldn't trust YOURSELF either, haha “Pragmatic Programmers code in defenses against their own mistakes.” John: To me this means testing and never assuming the user is wrong. Tip 31: Design with Contracts (long section alert) https://github.com/egonSchiele/contracts.ruby "You can think of contracts as assert on steroids" This says that double expects a number and returns a number. Here's the full code: require 'contracts' class Example include Contracts::Core include Contracts::Builtin Contract Num => Num def double(x) x * 2 end end puts Example.new.double("oops") be strict in what you will accept before you begin, and promise as little as possible in return. Remember, if your contract indicates that you'll accept anything and promise the world in return, then you've got a lot of code to write! What is a "correct" program? “What is a correct program? One that does no more and no less than it claims to do. Documenting and verifying that claim is the heart of Design by Contract” idea of "designing by contract" - a program should do more and no less than promised this is kind of like testing. Ruby doesn't have a "contract" system built into its design obviously, we have a Ruby gem for it! hah the reason this is supposedly more powerful than plain ol assertions is that contracts can propagate down the inheritance hierarchy given some precondition that must be true (i.e. must be a positive integer) -> the postcondition will be satisifed Tip 32: Crash Early don't have, "it can't happen mentality" code defensively a pragmatic progammer tells themself that if there is an error, something very bad has happened err on the side of crashing earlier! - when you don't, your program may continue with corrupted data “It's much easier to find and diagnose the problem by crashing early, at the site of the problem.” John: In ruby using rescue to aggressively just pushes the problem up. Not crashing but not working properly. When your code discovers that something that was something to be impossible just happened, your program is no longer viable A dead program normally does a lot less damage than a crippled one this brings into discussion being able to handle errors gracefully - this is very much a UX question as well Tip 33: If it can't happen, use assertions to ensure that it won't "This application will never be used abroad, so why internationalize it?" Let's not practice this kind of self-deception, particularly when coding this cuts me deep when you're this confident, you should write tests to absolutely ensure that you're right John: Write tests prove it won't be used in a certain way. I assumed there would always be money in the stripe account. Think through how the world will screw things up. Write tests against it. Tip 34: Use exceptions for exceptional problems our good friend, the javascript try...catch - ask yourself: "will this code still run if I remove all of the exception handlers". if the answer is, "no" then maybe exceptions are being used in nonexceptional circumstances John: Error and an exception are two different things. Very loosely: one is based on incorrect inputs the other is an error in a process. Programs that use exceptions as part of their normal processing suffer from all the readability and maintainability problems of classic spaghetti code. These programs break encapsulation routines and their callers are more tighlting coupled via exception handling Tip 35: Finish what you start John: Garbage collection. We are lucky as most major frameworks do garbage collection for us. resources that devs manage: memory, transactions, threads, files, timers these resources need memory allocated, THEN deallocated the problem is that devs don't have a plan for dealing with allocation AND deallocation basically, don't forget to garbage collect not doing so may lead to memory leaks don't forget to do things like close files John: I currently have this problem with action-cable web-socket connections. I am opening them and not managing the closing of these connections well. So it's leading to performance issues. Email sending: make sure it delivered. Handle the exception, finish what you started! Picks John: Rails Conf Talks are live I will update with my blogpost of top picks here. Polymorphism

John Boyd: LinkedIn Show Notes: 01:27 - Knocki 03:20 - The Device 06:19 - Complexity 08:44 - Software Distribution 14:01 - Allocating Memory 18:27 - Finding Hardware Hacking Libraries 22:01 - Updating and Diffing 24:06 - Migrations 26:51 - Decentralization of IoT 35:39 - Managing the Knocki Ecosystem 40:17 - Communication Standardization Resources: Malloc Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #81. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer and your podcast host-in-training here at the Frontside. With me today is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, how are you doing Charles. Welcome back. CHARLES: Yeah, thank you. It's good to be back. Today we're going to be continuing the ongoing series that we've been doing intermittently on the Internet of Things. It's a really fascinating, almost to a person fascinated with here at the Frontside. Today, we have with us to talk about this, someone who's very, very knowledgeable on the subject, John Boyd, who I got an opportunity to talk with, I guess it was about a month ago and I wish that we had the podcast recording equipment there in the room because it was just a very, very well-versed engineer, exactly the person you want to be the CTO of your company, which is very lucky for Knocki, the company that he works for, because he is in fact the CTO there. Welcome to the show, John. Thanks for coming. JOHN: Yeah, thank you very much, Charles and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to join the conversation this week. CHARLES: Yeah, why don't you start by what it is that you do at Knocki? Most of our audience comes from software and design and product management backgrounds. You've got a very strong hardware background. How does that play in to what you do at Knock? JOHN: Yes, certainly. As you previously mentioned, I'm CTO at a startup called Knocki, which you can mount onto any surface and turn that surface into a user interface. We're recently funded on Kickstarter so we're in the process of actually trying to develop this hardware but the central concept is any surface that you mount this on will now listen for touches and vibrations so you can say, mount it on a desk and tap three times on your desk and control your smart home around you. If you have smart speakers or TV, you can tap three times out of four times and control those devices with a really natural interioractive interface made out of anything in your home already. CHARLES: Tabletops, mirrors, I assume you've tested this on a lot of different services. JOHN: Yes, I'm sure we'll talk about that more a little bit later but the goal is to be able to turn any surface into user interface. That means if you really wild and you want to use it on the window, I recommend it. But we're thinking desks, walls, doors. It has a lot of applications for disabled and handicapped individuals. Think of a child or someone in a wheelchair that can't quite reach a light switch, if they have a Knocki mounted on the wall, they can still knock on the wall to control the lights. We feel like it adds a new level of user interface to people's lives that can be helpful. CHARLES: Definitely. Seeing the product and hearing you talk about it, I definitely got that impression. Now, the device that you actually brought into the office because you did come in and talk to us, like I said it was about a month ago but it was extremely tiny. In our explorations into the Internet of Things, we do things like control our lights from within the office. At least, we're trying to control our lights within the office. For us, we're using the standard kit. We've got Raspberry Pis that we're using, that are have access to a plug and they've got a full Linux install, just a really powerful processor and by comparison to the things that you were talking about, that's energy hog by comparison. We think of it as being very lightweight but if you're talking about making some small device, it's actually really, really wasteful of resources, so to speak. What is that transition that spectrum which you moved from these one-off hobbyist things where you're using high-powered equipment to these really custom devices? How do you make that transition? And what is the difference between the two? JOHN: Our devices are about the size of a hockey puck, which is much smaller if you can think of a Raspberry Pi. Pretty difficult to fit that inside of a hockey puck, especially when you want to start adding some sensors to detect knocks and taps on a surface. I don't hate or dislike the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black or any of those really quick SBCs that can get you started with IoT. But they have -- CHARLES: Acronym alert. What is an SBC? JOHN: SBC, single board computer. It's any of those credit cards size computers. CHARLES: Okay, great. So nothing against the SBCs like BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi. JOHN: Exactly. It's a great way to prototype ideas and get in a proof of concept out there and there are some cases where actually, they're great choices for a full-fledged product. A lot of cases in IoT, people are more concerned with things that you carry around with you so they have to be battery powered and you need to be a little bit more conscious about energy economy. You need to be very cost-effective with your components and it doesn't make sense to buy an expensive Raspberry Pi for each unit. CHARLES: Did you actually start with a Raspberry Pi, when you were developing this product or something that's like an SBC? JOHN: I actually went straight to a microcontroller dev kit. I started with Texas Instruments' CC3200 LaunchPad. It's a little bit lower level than SBC like the Raspberry Pi. It doesn't run Linux. The firmware I started off writing as a proof of concept was still embedded C bare metal software. CHARLES: How much complexity does that add? There's just a lot of nice things about having an operating system and being able to have your compilers, I guess you have a compiler tool chain, but having being able to install big programs like interpreters so that you can run Ruby and JavaScript on there. There's just nice things like scheduling. If you've got a bunch of processes running on this device, you don't have to worry about them, saying who's going to get what processor time. I assume that you're having to deal with all of that if you're writing the firmware by hand using C, right? JOHN: That's 100% true. There's definitely some great advantages to using a little more powerful system that can run a full Linux stack or full OS. As you mentioned, the design complexity is reduced a lot because you can import other people's code and you have a full operating system to handle most of the drivers in the system. You're right. There's a lot more complexity. We have to write all of that ourselves in C. But that's the fun part about it to me. I love getting down there and writing drivers that can communicate with accelerometers and set them up. As far as scheduling goes, for getting concurrent software running on your embedded system. There are RTOS's -- real-time operating system that can provide basic scheduling. For the brave, you don't even have to use that. You can use a lot of the embedded timers inside the microcontroller itself. But to answer your question, it is a lot more complex but one of the tradeoffs to get a device that small, beautiful and also has a battery life that can last many months or a year. CHARLES: Yeah, it almost sounds like the complexity but you're not going to save yourself any time prototyping it in tools that have all those things because you're essentially going to have to be rewriting your system from scratch, because those things are just a nonstarter if you want low profile devices. JOHN: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of rework would have to be done but those SBC systems are still very useful for prototyping the cloud side. Internet of Things is hardware and internet when it comes to building out your cloud interface. CHARLES: Yeah, that's definitely true. You're running a bunch of software on this device. The software that you've written, how do you actually distribute the software because we're very used to in our world, software distribution is not a problem. That's what made the web so popular. While we were willing to deal with really crappy tools on the web for a really, really, really long time, the distribution model was just so nice. You're also having to deal without that too when you're operating in the device space. But the challenges are still there. If you've got a bug on one of these things, how do you even detect it and how do you get a fix out there? JOHN: Obviously, any software is prone to bugs. Nobody writes a perfect code the first time. If you do, I'd love to hear about it. Obviously, one of the big concepts in IoT is security and to have a secure product, we need to be able to patch bugs as they arrived. A big really important feature in any good IoT product is the ability to remotely upgrade the firmware or send the patches as part of the maintainability that prevents big software bugs from turning your IoT product network into a botnet. A lot of our time is actually spent trying to make sure that our remote update capabilities are reliable, always functioning and globally distributed. You'd think this is an easy problem to solve but when you're working on a microcontroller that's not running an operating system, running bare metal code, things get a little bit more complicated when you want to make sure that any device anywhere in the world can install the next version of firmware reliably. CHARLES: Right. At any time there's a software update, it's always, it bugs me and then do I want to do this and it's always optional. There's none of that, right? It's just what a new version of the firmware goes out, boom! It goes out there. JOHN: You can design it in different ways. There are some great products out there. Apply the firmware update through the user's phone so you may open up your products application and it says, "There's an update available. Go update." That's definitely one way to do it but that's the problem if the user is not home and maybe they've set this device up in a guest house and they won't be home for six more months, then you have a device that could be vulnerable for six months, which is a long time in the world of software. CHARLES: Yeah, that's true. JOHN: To get around that, obviously our preferred solution is to have the device checked into our cloud servers to see if the device itself has updates available and then go through the download and update process that way, just to make sure even if the user is not home or never opens their mobile app, it will still get those critical security updates. CHARLES: Sounds hard. You're running a risk of bricking someone's device if that update doesn't go very well or it loses internet in the middle or power. JOHN: Very true, especially when you go towards a bare metal microcontroller with limited memory and limited processing capabilities, unreliable internet connection, a lot of work has to be done on the device side to make sure if something goes wrong during the firmware download process or installing the image correctly that it has a backup image. If you're downloading a new firmware upgrade and the download gets corrupted halfway through, make sure you have an old image that you can boot into. That's one part of it. The other part is detecting that it went bad if it gets past downloads in your image and then it reboot itself and tries to boot into it, how do you know that that image actually isn't behaving the way you want it to and then go ahead and revert back into that original stable version. CHARLES: I assume there's some key so that you can verify, not only that the image is not corrupt but it's a certified Knocki image that's coming down the wire? JOHN: Exactly. We signature verification, again something that I think anybody on the internet should be using when you download new software but make sure that the new firmware update was actually written by Knocki and you're not installing someone else's code. Another important factor is just please use HTTPS secure SSL connections to your server, then that reduces the possibility of someone taking over and giving you their own firmware image. But there are a lot of low power devices out there that are being used to make IoT products. These low power devices are important for many reasons but they have restrictions and sometimes, their security capabilities are limited. Maybe doing encryption on the device and actually are doing certificate verification. That's a costly operation. CHARLES: It sounds like there's a lot of cycles that that consumes. JOHN: Definitely. Most people try to make sure they have the resources to solve these problems but at the same time, there are a lot of developers out there that are cutting corners and that's where you get these big news stories about IoT products getting taken over. CHARLES: Along that vein, it's your reality but it constantly blows my mind that things that you're living without when you're programming for these devices like Knocki is do you have to write your own network stack? When you're doing these downloads, that's kind of like got it all. You've got the encryption piece that you've got to do to make sure that you're connecting over SSL so you've got to do the whole handshake and you've got to do the key exchange and the certificate verification and then the packets come in asynchronously so your message is arriving asynchronously in bits so the header is being assembled, now I've got the HTTP headers, now I can go ahead and get the body. There's a lot that happens for us when we're making a simple Ruby request. We're basically like resource.get. Boom! And it just comes to us fully assembled in memory. How much do you have to hand roll all of that? Are there libraries for doing it? How do you put that process together of just even downloading the image? JOHN: Fortunately, there are tons of open source freely available libraries for embedded C software that can help us solve these problems -- CHARLES: Is this like a genre of software like if I want to go look for these libraries, how I look for them? JOHN: In my example, all of our firmware is written in C or C++. Since we're working on a microcontroller with limited resources, it's important to look for libraries that don't use dynamic memory allocation. That's why it's a really big [inaudible]. Some software relies really heavily on that but -- CHARLES: When you say dynamic memory allocation, you're talking about like Malloc? JOHN: Exactly. CHARLES: You are basically are allocating memory on the heap. When you're doing for this, you basically want to do everything on the stack. Now, is that just because the instruction set of the processor doesn't support it or is it because it's just there be dragons like here there be dragons? JOHN: That particular scenario is actually just due to resource limitations. There's just not a lot of memory on our device. We do use Malloc in some cases but we have to be very careful about when we use it and make sure that it's always going to have the memory required or if it doesn't have the memory required, there's some fail safes involved. If you just use someone else's open source library and they're allocating memory left and right, they could end up causing issues on your embedded system. CHARLES: Right. Now, just a little bit of background for people who might not be fully familiar with Malloc, it's just when you're executing a program, you have this heap memory, which is where you store random stuff and then you have your stuff on like the call stack. Your variables that are on the call stack are in one place and then your just generic data structures that could be accessed from anywhere are in this thing called the heap. Our dynamic languages that we use like Ruby and JavaScript, the heap is hot stuff. Like everything gets allocated on the heap, that's why they consume these huge amounts of memory and then the things that are on the stack, really are just pointers that are referencing these big bags of data that are on the heap. But it sounds like you've got the exact opposite situation where you don't want to have big bags of memory that are just floating around in a heap and you want to do everything inside that stack. JOHN: Exactly. I couldn't have said it better. CHARLES: Anyway, you're looking for libraries that don't do that because it sounds like any time you want to allocate memory on the heap, that's going to be shared for the whole program, that space is very limited so you want to be very, very, very strict. You want to control that process. You don't want any other library that's doing it for you. Is that fair? JOHN: That's correct. That's also one specific example, dynamic memory allocation of the things that you want to make sure your other software libraries aren't going to be abusing. But in general, you need to make sure that any code that you're putting is compatible with your system. It doesn't have some special hardware requirement that your embedded system doesn't have. CHARLES: Right. For people who want to get into hardware hacking, is there some golden seal of approval like the people say like, "This library is great for embedded devices." Like I said, a lot of times when you're coming into it, you don't know what to look for so what you're really looking for is some expert or authority on the subject who can say, "This is good. This is not good." It is like, "Don't even look at this library because you're going to find something else because this is not embedded-friendly." JOHN: That's a good point. I wish there was a golden seal of approval or I wish I knew one, at least. Normally, most of our code that we uses are hosted on GitHub. Usually, we try to find software that was optimized from embedded systems and the author of that code will usually mention -- CHARLES: That [inaudible] me. JOHN: Exactly. This was designed for microcontrollers. ELRICK: I was going to ask if there's a golden standard when you're building these type of devices. Is there a checklist of things that if someone's going to build something similar that these are good things on your checklist that you should attempt to check off, if you're building this sort of device or want to build something similar. CHARLES: Now, you mean things like update and whatnot? ELRICK: Like updating or like how you were mentioning avoiding dynamic memory allocation. Anything, you can just shoot from the hip, like these are things that you should watch out for a lot of your battery power, you should look out for this or anything. JOHN: Yes. I definitely think the number one consideration that the biggest check box and [inaudible] before it goes out the door is going to be your security suite. Make sure your internet connections are encrypted: SSL, TLSL, that good stuff. Then as we hit on earlier, making sure that you always have a way of updating the device but don't use back doors. A lot of people think to update your device, you should put a back door access and you can go in and download updates that way. That's not the answer. ELRICK: That's like the back door that they were looking for in Apple like, "Do you guys have a backdoor to get into your device?" No. JOHN: No. That can be a controversial conversation. CHARLES: Yeah, or they're like, "Come on, really. It's okay. You can show us the backdoor." No, there is no backdoor. "I know you have to say that. Blink-blink." ELRICK: That's an interesting problem that you guys are solving on how to update these devices. You guys are essentially hand rolling or developing custom software to do that. JOHN: Again fortunately, we're using a Texas Instruments SSC system on a chip. They provide some core functionality, some core drivers that really help us out. For example, they provide a special bootloader that can really assist with a lot of the firmware download back up framework image checking, that sort of functionality. We don't have to write it all by scratch but we do have to write the logic to make sure that the device does check for updates and it doesn't forget to check in and talk to us. ELRICK: On the cloud side, do you guys have to write any custom software to do diffing, to make sure like -- Oh, do you diffing? Or do you just update everything all complete, like once you're updating, you're going to get a brand new update or do you diff and say, "You only need this." JOHN: Since we're working on the system that we're using, it just requires a fully-compiled image that gets installed by the bootloader. We can't really send just a patch to one part of the firmware, if that's what you're asking. CHARLES: But I assume there must be some state that's on the Knocki itself. Just even the credentials for the local Wi-Fi network, what devices it's connected to, part of the system is updating and part of it is not, I assume but how do you make sure that that state is compatible with the new firmware? JOHN: Yeah, that's another great point to keep in mind. The way we keep most of, we call it nonvolatile memory, every time the device reboot, it's going to forget about everything that was stored in RAM so we need to have somewhere in nonvolatile to store these things. We have a file system on the device that we can create files with different device configurations, algorithm, settings, Wi-Fi credentials, that sort of stuff. CHARLES: That file system, is that anything that we would even be familiar with like ZFS or is it just a custom file system that you've written or that you found on GitHub. JOHN: No, fortunately this is just a standard FAT file system. We do have some creature comforts there but that's not necessarily the norm. CHARLES: You heard it here. Is that FAT16? JOHN: No, it's FAT32. CHARLES: FAT32, described as creature comfort. JOHN: Yeah, we have a different perspective of creature comfort. CHARLES: There's a couple of things because immediately, what this brings to mind is for people who are familiar with Ruby on Rails, they have this concept of migrations, where you're migrating the schema of your database and as you have to transform the data from one format to the other, you're running these migrations. One of the things that's nice about that is if, let's say I have some system that is at Version 1, but let's say, I have one of the devices that hasn't taken an update, it starts at Version 1 and it needs to go to like Version 100. But you could have 10 format changes in between there. Is there a way to handle that case where you're basically incrementally applying a bunch of transforms? JOHN: Yes. That's another great point. We take this on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, being a small relatively simple system, there's not a whole lot of state data to keep track of. But to handle that situation, we've written are own OTA server-side software that manages the devices sending updates -- CHARLES: Acronym alert, OTA? JOHN: I'm sorry, yeah. Another acronym, OTA -- over the air updates. That's our slang for remotely sending firmware updates. CHARLES: Sorry to interrupt. It's just we have to unpack acronyms. JOHN: No, I'm sorry. I use a lot of jargons here. CHARLES: You know what? The thing is, so do I and I just never even notice it. JOHN: To handle that scenario, the way we handle it, our cloud knows what devices are out there and what firmware updates we've sent out to it. Furthermore, when the device checks in with the cloud and ask, "Do I have an update available?" It also tells the cloud, "By the way, I'm running Version 1.0." The cloud knows, if it's on Version 1.0, there's going to be some incremental changes that need to be made before we get to that last update and we can apply those changes incrementally. CHARLES: I see. I feel like we've touched on so many of these concepts that are universal to development but only projected into the hardware space. We've talked about dynamic allocation of memory and data migrations and it sounds like what you're describing in a way with OTAs is continuous delivery, where you have some way of automatically pushing out an update and all the stuff that's involved in that. It's just really cool to hear to view through such a vastly different lens than what we're used to. ELRICK: We've been talking a lot about communication between devices and back to the cloud in things of that nature. Does that play into the conversation around decentralization of IoT infrastructure and what does decentralization of IoT even mean? JOHN: Decentralization as a new methodology or ideology that a lot of people are adopting, I shouldn't say new. It's been around forever but the idea is from a high level, looking at the internet, most of the internet is access through some central, server is hosted on you name it -- XYZ cloud hosting provider. The way you do your URL DNS resolution that goes through centralized DNS servers that say, "You want to look at Netflix?" Netflix is stored over here on this AWS server farm. Decentralization, the idea is we don't necessarily need to talk to this DNS server and talk to AWS just to get content from specific providers. If you look at IoT for example, a lot of times in our case, we want to tap three times on the table and then later on, it will do the cloud, send the message and then turn on your Philips Hue light bulb in the living room. It would be great if the message could just go directly from Knocki to the Philips Hue light bulb, rather than going to our cloud, on some centralized hosting provider, then to Philip Hue's cloud, on their provider then out to the Philips Hue light bulb. Those are some of the really popular technologies that's a lot of people are talking about that really take advantage of the concept of decentralization. But it does -- CHARLES: Let me understand because why these would be necessary. When I get why it's compelling, if I want to have my Knocki talking directly to my Philips Hue light bulb without getting your servers involved, without getting Hue's servers involved, it seems like it's going to be a lot faster and just a lot more robust. There's just less links in the chain but it presents its own problems, like on both ends of the conversation between the Knocki and the Philips Hue, how do they agree that this is sanctioned by a user? That's just leaps out. That's a hard problem to solve. ELRICK: That you use some sort of like public-private key type of encryption to say, "It's me. Am I allowed to do this?" CHARLES: How do you decentralize that? JOHN: Well, I'd like to preface this by saying I'm not an expert on that particular subject but the goal is, if you're familiar with the bit torrent protocol and how it keeps track of a lot of different peers on a network using distributed hash tables, the idea is if you know at least one other person on the network, that person can say, "There's some other people that you may be interested in talking to, that may actually want your message. I'm just a bystander on the network and I don't really need your message but this guy is interested in it." In our application, that would be our server. We have to ask our server, who's out there that wants to hear what I have to say. The server is going to say, "Knocki 123, this Phillips Hue is over here at this address, this unique resource identifier, he's going to be very interested when you have two taps or three taps on the desk so just go ahead and talk directly to him. You don't need to talk to me." There's a lot more of that goes into that about making sure that the network can heal itself if somebody goes offline. But as I said I'm not really an expert in that subject. CHARLES: Right, but it really is compelling. Would you then, maybe have some device that was just kind of your coordinator in your home or multiple devices that would act as these bit torrent trackers? JOHN: Yeah, I think -- CHARLES: Or would the devices themselves actually be able to do that, like the Knocki could actually participate in the conversation about what other devices there were in the home. JOHN: Exactly, yeah. I think in a true peer-to-peer network, any peer can talk to another peer and eventually learn where the other node that they want to talk to is. You don't have to talk to any one particular person but you can ask anybody and they can tell you how to talk to the person you're looking for. The really big advantage to decentralization in my opinion is security. A lot of times if everything is controlled through one central point, that's one central point of failure. If someone DDOS's your cloud service, then now your entire network of devices is offline, just because one location got attacked. If it's a decentralized network, there's no one central point of failure and it's very, very difficult for someone to attack your network. CHARLES: Right, that's true but the tradeoff then is complexity that your decentralize network has to agree, somehow come to some consensus. It's very easy to generate with consensus when you have one process or one point that's driving everything. JOHN: Exactly. Another big tradeoff is ownership of the data and enterprise today are really big revenue your point for a company is being able to have ownership of data and extract meaningful insights. But if your device doesn't talk to your central server every time I want to do something, how does your server know everything that your device is doing and you lose a lot of that data. There's a tradeoff there in how you're going to get the data you need to run your business but also let your device run autonomously on decentralized network. ELRICK: Do you think that this is going to be helpful or harmful to IoT? What's your views on decentralization? JOHN: I think it could be very powerful. Right now, I'm not aware of any products that are really using a decentralized architecture for IoT and the main reason for that is companies and developers are a little slow to adopt it because they want to have that ownership of every data packet that goes to the network. They own it. They can see it. But I think in the future, people will start to realize that they can still get the data that they need to run this business. They can still have visibility and control over the network the way they need to run their business without controlling every single packet. When that happens, I think it's going to be a revolution for the internet as a whole but it's really going to revolutionize IoT and devices will get lower power. They'll get faster and they'll get more secure. CHARLES: When you say being able to get the data that they need, is it just being able to asynchronously spool off the data later? I guess I'm trying to understand how they get the data if it's never talking to some central servers? Or is it just you will get the data at the time you want it or there will be some delay? I assume you can also have your server being part of... I don't know. I'm just curious how you see that playing out. JOHN: I think, every developer is going to have to tackle that on a case-by-case scenario but take for example a big brand smart thermostat company. They have a device that's going to control your AC heating and air and the house and it also collects a lot of the data from when you're home and when you're using it to be smart and adjust the temperature at certain times of day even when you're not home. Again, I don't work for any company that does that and I don't know how they're doing their devices under the hood but traditionally, they tap to a centralized server and they send a lot of this information whenever it's happening, always to the server. Every time the user adjust the temperature, it sends an update to the server and says, "The user just updated." In a decentralized network, these devices can just talk to themselves and say maybe periodically or every day and it'll just send one update and say, "The user adjusted it." You can still talk to a central server but it doesn't have to rely on the central server. CHARLES: Right. It's just what we call, an out of band process. JOHN: Exactly, not mission critical. CHARLES: Okay, I got it. Talking about the decentralization and interacting with other devices, how do you manage the ecosystem right now with Knocki? It's a general purpose interface to rise. It serves really the role of a keyboard or a mouse or some way of controlling other devices and other systems. I assume that in order to do that, you have to understand the capabilities of those systems or maybe you don't. How do you integrate these two devices? Let's go with the thermostat and the Knocki or maybe one that you're more familiar with that you've done. Do you all have to write the integration? Can a third party write the integration? Or is there some way to automatically discover and map the existing inputs of the device. I feel like we've got all these new devices are coming out day to day then and now, there's more and more permutations in which to confine these devices into a coherent system and I'm just curious to hear about that integration story from your perspective. JOHN: Certainly. If we want to configure our Knocki to tap three times and turn on our Philips Hue light bulbs -- I keep using Philips Hue just because that's what I've been actively working on lately. We currently rewrite the integrations in our own backend so the user pulls up the mobile app and says, "Knocki on my desk, every time I tap three times, listen to this Philips Hue," and then we have an integration where in the mobile app, they can essentially set a lot of the parameters that a Philips Hue light would use based on API that Philips Hue would provide us. That's the way most integrations are going to happen with third party products. They expose an API and we can write a little module and the user can configure that API. CHARLES: I see and as far as making affordances for third party people, if they want to change the behavior or add like intelligence, obviously they can configure it from the app but if I want to say add behaviors or something like that. JOHN: When you say add behaviors, you mean add new -- CHARLES: I mean like, rather than turning the lights on and off, say I want to strobe the lights or flash the lights, maybe I'm someone who's running a theater or something and during intermission, I want to knock three times to flash the overhead lights. I don't know if that's something that your integration with Hue could do but if I want to be able to add that. JOHN: Okay, I see your question. We try to enable as much of the products functionality as possible through our own integration on our mobile app but say, you're a hacker and you've come up with your own smart light that turns on any sort of party mode and flashes different colors whenever you want and your Philips Hue or any other smart light just can't quite do what you wanted to do. In the future, our goal is to have an open API that people can access and they can hopefully control their own homemade IoT devices. CHARLES: Now, what about for existing ones. You can definitely flash the lights with the Philip Hue but you're going have to have some custom software to do it, right? Do you see what I mean? You have to send a series of messages to it in sequence. JOHN: In that scenario, we currently don't support that and don't have a plan to support that. In our research, that's a really small use case of people that would be interested in that. Also, it's difficult now if we wanted to do some sort repeated command, you knock three times and then every 30 seconds, it's going to send a command in your light bulbs. We have to be careful about having processes that run away and you have a bunch of CPU power forever in the cloud. We may include features like that in the future. I think the most likely path for that sort of stuff is we'll have an open API that people can direct Knocki's inputs to their own server and then their own server can flash their Philips Hue lights as much as they want. ELRICK: Is there any standardization between the communication and what these API supposed to look, like the communication between devices? anyone can have an API, expecting one thing and someone that's writing software to communicate with that, wouldn't have to go look it up. Do you know of any standardization? JOHN: Yes. I know there have been a couple of companies out there trying to put a standard on the market and I think a standard would be a great idea. ELRICK: Yeah, I think so too. JOHN: It would be wonderful if we could just write generic control structures or information flow structures and anybody can hook their stuff up to it. As far as I know, I haven't seen any that really fit the bill. CHARLES: It feel like there's something that programming systems like software developers have been chasing for a long time is to have some distributed set of peers that they can look each other up. You can discover the capabilities of a thing without ever having to even know about in the first place. But I haven't really known that worked really well and hit that sweet spot. I'm thinking of DCOM and Java. There's like Java distributed beans or something like that. You have this idea of these objects in the cloud, which seems kind of analogous to what we're talking about now, except we're talking about actual devices, rather the software devices but who knows. Maybe it'll pan out where we'll have some standard for discovery and integration. JOHN: It's interesting that there hasn't been one already. You look at IoT and it's really ripe for standardization because a lot of the communication between devices takes the same format. You're generally just passing a small message saying, on or off or, "I read this temperature at 75 degrees. Who knows, maybe someone will solve it. CHARLES: Yeah, maybe so. Maybe the folks at Kasita. They're active integrators. They were on the podcast two episodes ago and one of their challenges was getting all these 30 things to talk together well. Maybe we can follow up with them and if they could have a standard, what they would like it to look like? JOHN: If they get on that, I would love to hear what they were working on. CHARLES: I think, maybe they mostly, have a wish list. It is like, "I wish it did this. I wish it did this. I wish it did this." ELRICK: Maybe we need to have like a 10-way podcast. It's like IoT companies and we can hash it out like the TC39 of IoT on the Frontside Podcast. CHARLES: Right, and then everybody punches each other. All right, well thank you so much, John for coming and talking with us. It's always fascinating. You can find Knocki at @Knocki on Twitter and Knocki.com. It's a great product and like I said, always a fascinating conversation so thank you so much for coming on the show. JOHN: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It was a great conversation. CHARLES: With that, we'll say goodbye. Thank you, Elrick. ELRICK: Thank you. CHARLES: We are, as always, the Frontside at @TheFrontside on Twitter, Frontside.io on the web or just drop us a line over email, Contact@Frontside.io. Thanks everybody.

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

Episode 104 “Adult Category” 3:15John shares his recent trip with Josh to the Traffic and Conversion Summit. John talks about the potential growth that Simple Programmer could have in the future. John mention how valuable the conference was for him. John mentions seeing Gary Vaynerchuk and how he dropped the F-bomb at least 100 times in his talk. 10:00John talks about how Gary V. thinks that Snap Chat is the next ‘happening' app and platform. John talks about a canning website, and how one can make an offer on buying the domain, base on the revenue numbers. Making money without any risk… 17:00John talks about how Soft Skills could blowup with the marketing skills they have on their side. John mention their Trello board has 200 to dos in the list. 18:30Chuck talks about how iPheaks got invited to Microsoft Build conference, which might throw a wrench in the retreat plans. 21:00Derick talks about the new direction of Microsoft, and how it is not the same old Microsoft as it use to be. Derick is trying to find his flight confirmation tickets for the retreat and conference. 24:00Chuck mentions going through some ‘funk’ this past week, but is feeling much better. Chuck is trying to get it together for his Amsterdam visit. Chuck talks about reaching some milestones on some of his podcasts. 28:00Chuck asks for advice about rising the prices for some sponsorship slots in his podcasts. Derick asks what analytics do the sponsors look at to make prices fair. Chuck talks about giving a discount for long-time sponsors, Derick thinks its a good idea. 33:00Chuck mentions that he sort of announced he was writing a book on a recent podcast he was invited to. Now he has to write a book! Derick favors Fiverr for a cover art for the book. John thinks 99 Designs might be better. Chuck talks about putting up a blog post for the book. Derick makes of marketing suggestions for the landing page. 37:00Chuck asks about a long form sales page, and when he should create one. Chuck asks about what to do about interviews and payment. Derick mentions making it worth their time, instead of money. Possibly letting them pitch and plug their companies. 43:00Derick talks about how bad “Watch Me Code” is doing still. 7 sign-ups in 12 days. Derick is working at driving some traffic to the site. Derick talks about moving to Thrive and disabling SumoMe. Derick is happy with the varies configuration in Thrive. Derick talks about giving a month for things to pan out when trying a new tool. Derick shares some features of SumoMe with Chuck. 53:30Derick is planning for the Node JS projects coming up and is currently looking for people who are experts in the platform. Derick talks about the specialties and the kind of people he wants for the Node JS project. Derick mentions getting contacted by someone off of Twitter. 1:01:00Derick says he is “Done” speaking at conferences. Derick ask if that is a “sane thing” to do. Chuck says if the money is good then keep doing it. Derick shares his thoughts about the doing conferences and the time that is going into it. Chuck mentions that Derick should choose conferences that will payoff it time and the value of the network. 1:09:00 John shares this thoughts about speaking conferences. John mentions that in some situations. Getting on a podcast is more valuable then speaking at a conference. 1:15:00Chuck mentions planning to go to the podcast movement in July. Chuck asks if he and Josh made any major strategic plans. John explains where he and Josh are going with Simple Programmer. John mentions that he is going to fire is VA and hiring someone to answer emails for Simple Programmer, and handle customer service duties. 1:22:00John talks about the continually growth on his YouTube channel. John ask about setting up a Patreon account for his YouTube channel. Derick talks about try it and monitoring it, while using other types of resources to see if it is worth it. 1:29:00John mentions that Derick could do Webinars instead of conferences. Chuck talks about an easier way to conduct a webinar. John ask the team to look at Similar Web. Derick’s “Watch Me Code” site shows similarities to the those in the Adult Category. 1:37:00John talks about buying dead sites, to gain a bigger audience? John talks about associations with sites, instead of subscribing. Derick tells John to checkout the book The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow. Derick has is doubt about the certification idea. 1:48:00John mentions that he just sold his house in Tampa. Derick is refinancing his house… Thoughts of the Week Derick - Insanity is doing the same thing, expecting different results. John - To think bigger. Chuck - Take minute to ponder, pray, or meditate… Resources Mentioned in this Episode Patreon https://www.patreon.com SimilarWebhttp://www.similarweb.com The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFYXDNQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

Today we talk with John McIntyre, a fellow email copywriter. First we begin discussing email marketing and take you deep into both of our processes for creating emails that sell on autopilot. Then we make a dramatic shift and get into a philosophical discussion about life, the addiction to money and why "constantly striving for higher revenue" is a unfulfilling way to live life for most people. In this episode we discuss... How to overcome objections using stories, case studies and more... Why "tips, tricks and hacks" do NOT work... Why templated systems don't work for most people... Why segmentation is the key to better email results... An epic discussion on why most entrepreneurs live un-fulfilled lives... Resources Mentioned  www.McMethod.com The Millionaire Next Door (book) Want To Work With Me? Visit http://www.JeremyReeves.com or email me at Jeremy@JeremyReeves.com Enjoy! Transcript Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of The Sales Funnel Mastery podcast. Today, I have a guest on the other line. His name is John McIntyre and he is a fellow marketer, he's an email copywriting specialist and basically, focuses on writing emails. I was actually on John's podcast a couple of weeks ago and when that goes live, I'll give you the link to my podcast. So I thought that I would get him on my podcast and expose you guys to him and how he thinks. So instead doing one of the boring introduction that everybody does, I'm just going to let John tell you who he is and how he came to be and what he does and we'll take it from there. Jeremy Reeves: So John, how are you? John McIntyre: I'm doing good, Jeremy. How are you? Jeremy: I apologize. I was just taking an extra (00:57). I'm good. So tell us a little about yourself. John: My name is John and I'm from Sydney, Australia. Though, I actually live in Thailand. A lot of people find that quite interesting. I grew up in Sydney, but I ended up in the Philippines, working. I did some marketing for a beach resort there. A nice, gorgeous resort on the beach which was a "tough life" as you can imagine. I still remember, this is when I just getting started with the agency that I have now, I'd still remember, every morning, I'd wake up and I'd get some coffee from the resort and they were right on the beach. So I'd grab a white plastic table and put that right next to the sand, right beneath two coconut trees and I'd get a big extension table from the restaurant and run it out to my table, out a seat there, and I'd set my laptop up and have breakfast, drink my coffee, and do some work, sitting under a coconut tree and just this bright beach (01:52). Jeremy: Sounds torturous. John: It was a tough period a lot. I worked really hard. Jeremy: Nice. John: So that was when I started around then I started learning copywriting, doing some email stuff, some sales letters, all the usual stuff. And around that, I started, I guess what you may call an 'agency'. What's becoming is we ended up moving to, after a year in the Philippines, I moved to Thailand. I had a conference that I went to in Bangkok. The big group went to Chiang Mai, which is an hour north of Bangkok on the plane. And I've been here ever since, which is two and a half years now. It just kind of whizzes by and this is what I do. I started as a copywriter, just doing bunch of different stuff and eventually realized that most people were coming to me for email stuff and basically thought that, you understand as a copywriter, you need a thing. So my thing was going to be email marketing and I decided to call myself the "Auto-responder Guy'. And that was a year ago, eighteen months, something like that. That was a really good decision. It worked out really well in terms of what it's done for the business but it's actually funny right now, I'm actually working with building out a process of bringing out bigger clients. And none of them having any idea what an auto-responder is, they don't think in terms of auto-responders and email marketing, they think in terms of leads and database and conversions. I'm slowly going through a slight transition. I'm trying to decide whether to drop the whole Auto-responder Guy things and go for more of that lead conversion angle. But time will tell. So that's what I do, man. I write emails, I set up similar stuff to you, I just come out form a slightly different angle. Jeremy: Okay. Nice. So tell us about The McMethod. What's your process? I know one of the things you do is write ten-part email sequences for clients and you have your McMethod that you sell as a product. So tell us about your methodology for the writing the emails and the process that you go through. John: Sure. So the first time I did this, I know this guy who's like a tropical MBA and it's about moving to the tropics and doing some business stuff, learning how to build a business. Anyway, so he was the first guy who hired me to write some emails for him. And what I came up with was where I will send an email every three days, ten emails a month and so what that morphed into was, you might call it a productized service (04:23) coming to me for a 10-email sequence. So we jump on the phone (04:27) their business and then I'd give him his ten emails and do it like that. It's fairly streamline, very easy to deliver. I've got guys that work for me to do (04:36) the bulk of the writing which is quite useful and (04:39) the way I do that is because it's productized like that, it makes it quite easy to do. And then we got a product which is called The McIntyre Method which is a four-week video training program on how to create your own ten-email sequence. But the idea, really is as I've grown, I've realized is that there's no ideal length, there's no ideal set of emails. If you really have a problem and you've got different solutions to solve that problem. So what I do now is there are sequences where I do ten emails since that's what a lot of people know me for, but also bringing in a lot more custom stuff. So depending on the problem, sometimes, someone really needs three or four emails, sometimes, it's going to be quite a lot more than that. So probably we're looking at today, we're looking at a proper sales funnel of something like fifty emails, I think. If you're really going to talk about emails. So you see (05:37) the process how it happens. Jeremy: Yeah. So that's one of the things that I've learned is everybody comes out and they need different things. In fact, I just had a client he just signed up maybe a week and a half ago or so and he came and he wanted A, B, C, D. I told him he needed less than that which you usually don't hear of that often. He was going like, "Oh, this guy had that so I need that." For this business, and where he's at, he didn't really need that exact thing. It's funny. People need different things and a lot of people start out like I'm going to provide this is in their service, and then it comes to being more like a custom job. So tell us when you're writing out those sequences, it doesn't really matter what the length, if it's ten or if it's fifty or anything like that. What's the big goal that you're trying to achieve when you're writing out these sequences (besides sales, obviously)? John: Right. I mean, ultimately, yeah. It does (07:08) but if people come to me and they think "Well, it's going to be the best subject line, all the best talk, all the best story." it's really (07:15) because at the end of the day, the only that really matters is are you solving a problem anyone actually cares about? And if the answer is 'Yes', well, great. Then you're in business. So now you need to understand as much as you can about the person you're trying to sell something to and as much as you can about the solution. This takes years and years to develop. This isn't something that you can sit down and do a brainstorming session and you've got it. I was reading an article about to go from 1 million to 10 million to 100 million with a software start-up. And often, it'll take them months or if not years just to get what they call 'Product Market Fit'. You might say it's a terminology from the start-up world but the idea if you've really got to a point where you can fit the product to the solution that you're offering to the exact needs that the person who's buying it. And sometimes that's going to mean changing the product, sometimes it's only going to mean changing the copy. And so the reason why you got to understand all that first is because that's what drives the copy. So when you sit down to figure out "Well, we got this prospect here, he's 37 years old, he manages a team of developers, and he works at a corporate company like Microsoft. And what he's trying to achieve is time management." And so there's our prospect. He really needs to leanr how to manage his own time and the time of his team. And then the other side, you got your product which is a software app for time management. It starts with understanding exactly what John Smith over here who works at Miscrosoft what his problems are, what his challenges are, what he really needs out of the product that you're offering him. Once you've got that, then you can go and build the product. Because ideally, the product's driven by John Smith's needs, otherwise it's not going to work for him and once you got that product, and assuming you got those two pieces worked out, because this is the thing, a lot of people come after that. It was kind of really interesting, I was at a marketing conference in the U.S. last September. And one thing I find, maybe this is just me being an Australian, coming from the outside direct response world but it seems a bit everyone always talks about hacks or how to optimize your sales copy, how to get a better funnel. Very rarely, does anyone ever say "Is this business worth having in the first place?" Jeremy: Yeah. John: It's funny how I always come back to this question of like that's the 99% of the battle is, are you selling sh*t that someone actually cares about? That's in a nutshell. But assuming you've got that, assuming you've nailed that or you're in the process of nailing that, how are we going to come up with the same auto-responder or any kind of marketing pieces you think about. I think about like you're on a bridge, you're on (10:01) and on one side of this (10:02), you've got his prospect and he's John Smith, he's got his problem that he needs to track the time to himself and his team and do it accurately and a bunch of different problems like that. And on the other side of the (10:13), you've got your product (10:17). And this could be an ebook on how to save time, it could be a software app, it could be a DVD series,. One thing I'm going to say is that the product doesn't really matter as long as it solves his problems. We've got this. Prospect on once of the (10:28), and the product on the other. The way I see it, the goal of any marketing piece is just to bridge that gap. So when I say bridge that gap, is that you're really going to sit down and list why wouldn't John Smith buy that in the first place? And step number one, he doesn't know what the hell it is, he doesn't even know it exists. So step number one, is making John aware that there is a solution to his product. Now let's say he went to John and say "Here's my solution. Do you want to buy it?" he's going to be like "Well, No. I got no idea who you are." Alright, so there's one objection. He doesn't know who you are. So your auto-responder needs to: Number one, get his attention. Because without his attention, he's not going to know who you are. So that's more of a traffic issue. But then you need to establish the authority otherwise he's going to be like "No, I don't trust you." then he's going to be like "I trust you but I know anyone else who's used this. Do you have any stores? Is there anyone else using this or am I the first person? And it's like therefore you need testimonials and case studies. And so what happens is once you understand what John's all about and what objections he might have, what's really stopping him from making that purchase in the first place? Then you have a list of five to ten main things. Main problems, main objections that you need to handle before he's going to buy that product. And the auto-responder just becomes a bunch of emails or a series of emails, could be a straight sequence, could be segmented in bunch of different ways, but the main thing is it's knocking out each of those objections in as many different angles as possible. Jeremy:Nice. That's a really good point. When I worked with clients, I actually have a 'she', it's like I call my copywriting researchee and it has twelve pages long of information that I fill out based on the avatar of the person and the demographics and the market and the competitors. One of the things on there is I write down a sheet of paper all the objections I could possibly think of and then as I'm writing the copy, whether it's a sales letter or an email sequence, I literally cross off each objection to make sure all of them are hit. The same thing with benefits, because you can create sentences and paragraphs that overcome the objection and then transition into giving them the benefit. I wish I had an example at the top of my head but I don't. So it's good to actually write it down rather than just having it in your head and hoping that you hit all of them. John: Absolutely! Part of the product that I've got to teach the people how to do this, is you make a list of these objections and then you just down. When you write your emails, you write an email for this objection, and then you write for this objection, and then you write for this objection. It's really that simple. Jeremy: Yeah. Let me ask you, what are some of your favorite ways of overcoming those objections. Do you use outside proof or anything like that to overcome those objections or do you just tackle them directly? What are your favorite ways to overcome the objections? John: To be honest, this goes back to understanding John Smith, your prospect. Like for example, my buddy calls me up and he says "Hey, we're all going out tonight for dinner. Do you want to come?" and I'm like "No, I can't." and then he just starts saying stuff "Oh, come on, man. you don't need to work tonight. It's The Friday night. We're going to go out." but low and behold, I wasn't even working in the first place. That wasn't the reason I couldn't go. So what he's done there is he's hit the wrong objection. This goes back to you doing sportsh as a 5 levels of awareness. You've really got to take the time to understand where someone's at in that awareness cycle. And this is from someone who's got no idea that you have any problem to someone who's aware that he has problem, aware that there's solutions out there and he's really just looking between solutions. And every layer in between that is five main layers, although five ways that he splits it up. as for how I do it, with email, storytelling is really the biggest thing you can do with emails. It fits perfectly. But ultimately, you really need to know if the trust is the issue, then you're going to need case studies and you're going to need proof. Maybe trust isn't the issue. Maybe the industry is so well-established, that he doesn't actually need trust. He believes you, he just wants a better price. So what you need to write is you need to have a special offer, where it's a time-sensitive offer for a lower price. It really depends on what angle you're going for. this is why sometimes it's hard. It's much fancier if I can get on a podcast and say "Well, Jeremy. I've got this three-step system..." Jeremy: Yeah. John: Gurus do this all the time. But it's total crap. There is no formula to do it. Jeremy: Like you're saying before, it's the same with little tricks and things like that and little hacks and all that kind of stuff. Most people are trying these weird, little hacks and tracks, but they don't have the basics in place. They're trying to do all of those but they're missing the stories, they're missing the case studies, they're missing the understanding who they're talking to. Like your example before. You're saying giving them the wrong objection. I can't tell you how many email sequences that I'm on and they're like "Do you suffer from this?" or "Is this your problem?" (16:20) notes actually not even close. One of the things you can do to overcome that is segmentation. What are your thoughts on segmentation and writing emails to more, say, you have a 10,000-person list segmenting based on their interests, maybe website behavior, like what pages they visited, so you know more about them. What's your experience on that? John: The reason I'm laughing right now is that I've been so bad at segmenting for so long. It's something that's changing right now. For example, the traffic that goes to my site is probably two main segments. I could split them up in a bunch of different ways but the two main ones are people who want to learn how to write emails themselves and become a copywriter and get their own clients. Maybe they just took off their own business and on the other side is people who had a business and they don't have time to write themselves, they need to hire someone. So it's taken me the longest, it's so easy to do and I did this recently, actually. But it was so easy to set up so now what happens is if someone signs up, the first thing that happens, is the next page is just like "Alright, you're almost done, before I could set you up your email sequence, your tips, answer this question - when it comes to converting more leads to business, would you rather write an email or convert the leads yourself or hire an expert to do it for you?" And so what happens after that now, based on what they say in response, I, then send them a custom sequence. So obviously, an example here would be like, the people who sign up, who want to do it themselves, they're really interested., they want to have a lifestyle, they want to have an automated business, they want to have passive income, email marketing, auto-responders. And on the other side that really want to hire an expert, they're mostly likely thinking about leads, leads, databases, conversions, revenues, then I'm really thinking about email marketing and auto-responders and quick my job and travel kind of thing. And already, I'm so glad that it's already been making a difference. I wish I got started doing this segmenting earlier because I've got a list of thousands of people and I only know the ones recently who are actually interested in hiring someone. Jeremy: And it really is good. There's a lot of ancillary benefits that go along with that. Like number one, you are able target them better and talk to them better and do all the things that we've been talking about the last twenty minutes. Another is your deliverability goes up because your open rates and your click-through rates, and all of your email stats increase so then that gives the email... I don't know the tech behind it. John: The email gotsky. Jeremy: Yeah, the email gotsky. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the higher your opening click-through rates, the higher, they say "Okay, well. You're sending relevant.." It's kind of like Google. You're sending relevant content to them, so I'm going to increase your reputation and that in turn gets better deliverability, so then more people see it, and it keeps that cycle continuous. Same thing with cleaning out your list. Everybody always wants a huge numbers list. This is something I am lacking in too so I can't really harp on anybody for doing this. But cleaning out your list, like looking at people who haven't opened your emails in the last three months or two months or six months and putting them into a re-engagement campaign and not sending to them. If you have a (20:16) to your list that hasn't been engaged in the last six months and then you put them on a separate list and start sending only to people who have been engaged, your open rates and click-through rates are going to go up by roughly 30% and then again, your deliverability goes up and the whole cycle continues. So one question, it's not exactly with auto-responders, but what is your opinion on a lot of people just want to grow their business but I feel like they don't really know why. It's like "Oh, I have to hit seven figures." And my question is why? Why do you want to hit seven figures, or eight figures or six figures? And a lot of people really don't know the answer. What's your opinion on people just growing businesses versus having an actual reason for hitting a specific number to be able to afford a certain lifestyle or anything like that. I know this has nothing to do with emails but it's... John: No, I love this question. This is something that's been on my mind a lot lately because I live in Thailand - Chiang Mai, Thailand. I lot of people live out here because the cost of living is quite low. And when I got here, I was probably a lot more budget-conscious when I first arrived. Now it's I don't have a budget, basically. And if I tried to live the same kind the way I tried to live here, I'd eat out all the time, I'd have great apartment in the best part of the town, taking regular trips to all sorts of places. This weekend, we're doing a dirt bike trip two days way up in the mountains. So one day up, one day back. Renting bikes, all the gear. And one day, I've been chatting to a couple of friends (22:14) today is this idea where when you get into business, especially this whole copywriting, just this whole entreprenuership thing, the whole hustle and grind and who's working the most hours and who had the best product launch, it's so glorified. I feel like it's a one upmanship game where everyone's trying to do better, very few people really stop and get a hang on - do you really want that? Is this really what life's about? Just hanging out? And who can put in the most hours and who can split test and who can build the biggest business because I don't think it is. But you never want to say that because it's kind of sacrilegious to say that like a business in marketing form, Facebook groups or some webinar. Like, no one would ever come out and say "No, I don't want to make seven figures." Jeremy: Yeah. Oh, I do. Like, I say that, I mean. John: Right. Interesting is I'd like to have a start-up that does a $100 million. Like, I'd love to have a copy like that but the more I think about it, I'm reading another book by Felix Denis it's called 'The Narrow Road'. Jeremy: Yeah. It's a good one. John: Yeah. It's (23:34) but I mean. I'm reading (23:37) in one of his essays he mentions that if you want to do a start-up and you want to build and make more of like a $100 million company. But the example was basically they were cramming thirty years of your working life into four years and so doing that means your life is work for that amount of time. And it's not as simple as that, it's not like you do it for four years and you bail, you go for four years and you go public, then there's a bunch of more mess, and the works gets even bigger and your health suffers, and it's going to be quite hard to manage any kind of social life, let alone a marriage or kids or anything like that. We're often sold the dream and we sell each other on this, this dream that you can have anything you want and it's just not true. It's kind of like you can have anything you want but you can't have everything. What I think about me for me personally, I enjoy living in Thailand. It would be easier if I was in the U.S Timezone, for example. But I prefer living out in Thailand. There's cost with that. Or it would be very hard to have a start-up out here. Or I like going to the gym and taking off to the gym for two hours, couple times a week. Or taking an afternoon off. Like today and yesterday, I took a nap in the park. Read a book, took a nap, you're just here, you don't feel like working, you're just like sweet! All I can chill, read a book, take a nap, listen to the birds, and if you're going to build a million dollar company or a ten million company, those moments, when you get to do a lot of that stuff, become a lot rarer. But no one's willing to talk about that. Jeremy: Yeah, I know. It's something that I'm really focusing a lot on in my life, like I've hot the point where I don't "need" more money. I'm taking care of everything. Like, my lifestyle, I do pretty much whatever I want to do which now I'm limited because I have a one and two-year-old. But I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And it's like, my kind of growth strategy is I want to continue growing just because I like the challenge of it, but I keep a criteria that I work up until 3:30. Usually 3:00. 3:30 is like my max end time in the afternoon so I'm growing as much as I can and focusing on net income, not gross. I don't care about gross, whatsoever. But focusing on net, what I actually bring home and can write checks with. But I won't work past 3:30. That's my criteria. I think it's good for people to have criteria. Maybe you work really hard during the week, you take the whole weekend off. I made a new webinar. It was a two to three weeks ago and people's excuse for the whole workaholic thing is "My business is my passion." So I work constantly for that and my response is always "Man, you must live a boring-ass life because if you have one passion, that must be awful." Like, why would you want to live life with one passion. Working is my passion. I love working, I live writing, I love coming up with strategy and all that kind of stuff. But I do that for the third of the day. And then I get spend time with my kids and spend time with my wife. I do the same thing, if I just don't feel like working in the afternoon, I'll take a nap, or I'll go out back and work out, play with the kids in the yard, go for a walk. You have to ask yourself why? I want to double my business this year - why? John: Eventually, like, one thing I've found and this has been fairly common of the guys I know in Thailand is no matter where you live, if you go to business, eventually you're going to get to the point where you make enough money to do all these you want and save some money, like you've covered all your bases. Then it's like "Well, I could keep working hard and there's wrong with that and it can be really fun to work hard but the bigger question, and this is the one I've been trying to work on lately, is (28:22 - 28:24) but for the most part, life is free and amazing. Like, I'm traveling around and I'm 25. So I'm like young, got this cool stuff going on, but then it's a bit like "Well, now, what now?" It's fun to have a mission and I enjoy the challenge of doing the business and growing your business, but I don't want to do it all the time. So the question becomes "What does it mean to have a good life, to build a good life?" And the answer's going to be different for everyone and I'm still figuring it out what that means to me but in many ways I love my job, I love working hard, I love the challenge, I love getting in the ring and having a go but I don't think grinding on the laptop all day, that I won't do. I agree, if someone's life is just working, I don't know how that fun that is. Jeremy: I know. I never got that. For me, I think I'm a little bit lucky in the sense that as my kids were growing up and as Katie was pregnant, that's when my business started taking off and I wasn't already a workaholic before kids, it kind of happened in lock step. I think I'm a little bit lucky in that sense that I was able to cement those values at the right time. Because let's just say you had kids at 35. And from 20 or 25 to 35, you were a workaholic, you were building a big business, it's hard to break out of that and I understand that. But I also think that a lot of people use it as a crutch, it's like "Oh, I have to..." Here's a good example, I have one client, she has a three and a half billion dollar business, the personal income is very high, more than anybody ever needs, she can have an awesome lifestyle, but I've been harping on her. I'll try not to say too much information so people won't know who is but I've been talking with her lately and she just e,ailed me last week and her husband booked a vacation for nine days away, they're taking free days because I introduced her to Strategic Coach, the free days and all that kind of stuff, where you take the day off where it's zero business. There's no email, there's no thinking about business, no talking about business, like no business whatsoever and she emailed me that she and her husband booked 9-day vacation away and there's no cellphone reception or anything like that. And she said that she hasn't had time away from her business since 2006... John: Wow... Jeremy: But it is possible, she went all those years and she was just stuck in that rut of just working and working and working and working and what broke her out of it was her daughter, she's really sick, she got like a tick (31:52) illness, I think (31:53) disease, I would imagine. And so she's in the hospital a lot, like one of her flares up, she has it really bad, apparently. So this client, she's like "I can't like I have anymore because I need to be there for my daughter." So she finally made the decision to make less money and scale back the business so she can have more free time. It's interesting. I think it's definitely worth thinking about for people. And on eof the things that helps with me, I know exactly how much money I need ti have my "perfect dream lifestyle" plus have enough savings for like long-term financial independence (32:46) real estate and all that. Plus, I always leave in a buffer, for like, kind of the just in case and then taxes and then everything. But I have a specific number that I'm trying to reach and I'm not quite there yet, I'm starting to get close but I'm not quite there yet but I have a specific number that when I hit it, it's like trying to hit that number without working longer and that's my thing that I came up with that works really, really well for me. So everybody should just think, map out your dream lifestyle, exactly how much money you need and then work to get that. You can probably do with a lot less, by the way. You really don't need that much. John: This is like a fascinating thing because like this is... This is the (33:40) I've noticed about businesses is a lot of people want to get into it to make more money, to have a better lifestyle, they're often one of like good financial sense, look at investors, anything to do with money and economics, is one of the best things you can do is just learn to spend less than you are. While earning more can help and you can have a better lifestyle and all that, like (33:59) today, actually. I was online, that was a lady's site, multi-level marketing something, the testimonial was like "We started making all this, we bought a new house and we bought a new car." that's one of the worst things you could've done. Jeremy: I know. John: Because that cements, that's enlisting yourself, because I'm assuming they probably would have up'd the house payments, up'd the car payments, because people have consumer mentality. At a certain point, you're going to realize this what's pretty much living in Thailand is getting this experience of having a huge amount of wealth without spending that much money for it. You kind of realize, well, there's not much difference. I stayed in $300 a night business hotels in Bangkok and afterwards, it's a nice hotel and it was cool and everything but it's really not much different from a $50 a night hotel. Jeremy: Yeah. John: I like motorcycles. I could buy a Ducati for $35,000 but then I'm like "I'd get another bike for $7,000" and it's going to do %99 of the same enjoyment for way less or even better I can just rent a motorcycle every week, whenever I feel like going, then I don't have to deal with licensing, the registration, I don't have to deal with insurance or any of the stuff and I can have a bike anytime I want I want to go and ride it. Jeremy: One of the things that helps with that is getting rid of your ego. John: Yeah. Jeremy: If you're buying stuff that's more high-end, it's almost always because you want other people to see that you're successful. And maybe that pisses some people off but that's the truth of it. John: Have you read 'The Millionaire Next Door'? Jeremy: Yeah. That was a good book. John: One of the lines that stuck with me (35:47), he basically said that "At a certain point, you've got to choose, with the money that we all have, you got to make a choice between how you're going to spend the money to acquire social status, which is basically buying high-status items like nice cars, houses, watches, clothes, anything that makes you look better as a person, or you're going to use that money that you make to prioritize wealth-building which means investing and saving and living in a worse neighborhood, buying second-hand cars, and not buying expensive shoes." There's a choice and people don't realize that they're making a choice when you go buy a new house or a new car or something nice, you're prioritizing ego and social status instead of wealth. I think if some people think about it, they might realize because this is what I think about like I like social status too. I'd love to have a Ferrari but what's more important to me in the long run where I'd rather have the wealth. I think I'd rather have the wealth and freedom than the Ferrari. Jeremy: Yeah, and with the wealth, like a view of $10 million sitting in the bank, it's peace of mind. Then you can go out and buy a Ducati or whatever. But get the wealth sitting in the bank first. And start (36:59). I was doing some Funnel Days in Florida. I went in and rented, for my car, because I've never been a car person, when I was a teenager I was into the Riser kind of car, the little like the Eclipses and the Hondas and all that, they're all loud, the Fast and Furious kind of stuff which I this is absolutely embarrassing now, but I sued to be into cars but not really that much, so when I was in Florida, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to see what it's like to drive a really fast car." So I got this high-end Mustang and I was like it's cool driving around in it, it makes you feel like a big hotshot and it's fast and it's fun and all that kind of stuff. But it's just not worth the extra you're going to spend. I have an expensive car, I have a Tahoe but because we have kids and we need the extra space. We always have strollers in the car our other car that we have is an Equinox which is not really expensive but it doe the trick. It gets you from A to B and it's not this big, fancy, high-end car. And the same, the Tahoe, it was more expensive but we needed the space. we needed the extra seat in the car, we needed the trunk room for the strollers and stuff so it's a pretty practical car but most people don't need big, giant cars like that. but it's interesting what people spend their money on and why they spend their money that stuff. John: Yeah, really interesting. Jeremy: Wait. I know the conversation kind of took a pretty wild turn from emails. I apologize. My voice, if it's starting to get hoarse, I've been battling a cold now for like ten days and it refuses to go away. But yeah, it was a pleasure talking to you. Before we head off, thanks again for everything. But before we head off, tell everybody about who can benefit from getting into your world and what do you have to offer people? John: Sure. So what I do I mean (39:38) the email marketing stuff, so if you want to learn emails better want to basically convert more leads into customers, that's what I do. So if you head over to my website that I operate from is www.TheMcMethod.com. There's a bunch of stuff there. I've got a podcast. I'm almost up to 100 episodes and every episode is an interview with a marketer, like Jeremy, which should be live in a couple weeks. I've got Perry Marshall, John Carlton, John Benson, Russell Brighton, some of the biggest guys in the industry and exactly what their marketing strategies are. Honestly, that'll be the best place to start but there's obviously, I sent that email tips which he heard a little about the funnel here. And there's a community and coaching and all that sort of stuff which you'll see in the back end but I'd say the place to start would be to check out the site and have a listen to the podcast, if you like that, join the list, and hit me up. Jeremy: Yeah. Sounds good. Alright, thanks everybody for listening. As always, if you got value out of this, share it, and write reviews on iTunes because that helps to get more people listening to the podcast, make sure to send it to your friends, and colleagues, anybody who would benefit, head over to JeremyReeves.com. If you have any questions or you would like to work with me or check out any of my products or go to www.TheMcMethod.com to check out John's stuff and we'll talk to you next time. John: Sounds great, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. Jeremy: Alright, thanks. Have a good one.  

1 - Part 1-The Miracles of Jesus Christ 14:52 2 - Part 2-Jesus Turns Water Into Wine 13:44 3 - Part 3-Healing the Nobleman's Son 14:06 4 - Part 4-The Pool of Bethesda 14:21 Series title: The Sign of the Prophet Jonah: A Study of the Miracles of Jesus Christ as recorded in The Gospel According to John (To hear all twelve parts in this series, select the series title from the Group search field on the home page at www.newchurchaudio.org)