Podcast appearances and mentions of jon what

This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 197. Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberley Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go. Welcome back, you guys. So grateful to have this precious time with you. Thank you so much for coming and spending your very, very precious time with me. As we do this together, it's exciting, we're almost at 200 episodes. You guys, I cannot believe it. I am pretty, pretty proud of that, I'm not going to lie. Today's episode is with the amazing Jon Hershfield. He's been on the show multiple times and I have been really reflecting and thinking about how important it is for us to practice response prevention and how that is so, so important for everybody who has any type of anxiety, whether that be an anxiety disorder like OCD, social anxiety, specific phobia, generalized anxiety. Even for myself, I've been reflecting on any time I'm responding to fear and responding to discomfort. It's just a topic that I want to continue to address because I think from you guys, I just continue to see how much it's a struggle for you. As I thought about continuing education on tools you can use, I thought, who else can I have none other, but Jon Hershfield to talk about using mindfulness to manage compulsions. Now we talk about compulsions like mental compulsions and rumination. We talk about reassurance-seeking, avoidance, any kind of physical compulsion. We also talk about how to practice mindfulness so that it doesn't become a compulsion. And so I'm just so grateful to have John give us his very valuable time and to talk with you guys about these amazing concepts. I'm not going to spend too much more time doing the introduction. You guys know how amazing Jon Hershfield is. He has some amazing books. He has The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD, and he has Everyday Mindfulness that he co-authored with Shala Nicely, and The Teen OCD Workbook, and Harm OCD book. He's just written amazing books. So please do go out and support him. He does share all that information at the end of the show, and I can't wait for you guys to listen. In the meantime, please do go and leave a review. It helps us to reach more people. I'm going to be quiet now and let you listen to Jon's wisdom. Have a wonderful day. ----- Kimberley: All right, welcome. I am so happy to have the amazing Jon Hershfield with us again today. Jon: Thanks for having me. You make me sound like Spiderman of the OCD world. Kimberley: You are the Spiderman of the OCD world. I love it. Jon: What does that mean? Kimberley: Yeah, it's true. Well, that's a good thing. I know my son is probably jumping up and down at the idea of me meeting the Spiderman of something. Thank you for coming on. I really wanted to invite you on, of course, because I love the work that you're doing regarding mindfulness in OCD. I really wanted to talk about how we can use mindfulness, particularly to address compulsion, because a big part of Exposure and Response Prevention is the response prevention piece. I would really love to pick your mind on how you implement mindfulness as a part of that and also address some of the misunderstandings that happen regarding mindfulness. So, let me first ask you, just for those who don't know or new to the show, how would you give a definition? How would you explain mindfulness, particularly in the respect of treatment? Jon: It's interesting because we all make this same grammatical error. I do it too. We say we use mindfulness as if mindfulness was an act or an action or a thing that you use as opposed to a perspective that you take. So I'm thinking about what mindfulness means. Usually, the definition we hear is “Paying attention to the present moment as it is without judgment and without the desire to change it.” And that's a great definition. It's escaping me at the moment who actually coined that exact language, but I think it applies to most mindfulness concepts. But I don't like that it starts with the word “paying” because it still implies that you're doing something. I think mindfulness is actually the perspective that you have when you're paying attention to the present moment. If you want to play around with the words, it's really noticing the fullness of the mind – mindfulness, right? It's a position that you take as opposed to a thing that you do. Right now, I'm sitting here in my desk chair. I'm aware of the sensation of my body in the chair, hearing my voice in the headphones and I have coffee and tasting that coffee. These are all things that I'm noticing and I'm being mindful of. The other part of mindfulness that I think is important to understand is that, in a state of mindfulness, you're best able to observe the difference between an experience – I just listed for you a bunch of experiences – and a story. A story is a narrative. It's the meaning and the webs that we weave around those experiences. So it's me thinking I'd had too much coffee today, right? That's a story about the taste of coffee in my mouth right now and its significance, but they're two separate things. When we're treating something like OCD, which is very much about being pulled away by your mind into these narratives, these fear-based narratives – to be able to drop out of the narrative and into the experience would be to take a mindful perspective, or in colloquial terms “to use mindfulness.” But I think a lot of times when we say “using mindfulness,” we associate that with stopping what we're doing and focusing on the breath, or pulling out an app and doing a meditation, or trying to execute change in our environment by being mindful. When in fact, mindfulness is very much the opposite of that. It's not about executing change. It's actually about stepping back and seeing the way things really are. Kimberley: Right. I love this. So would you say in this perspective that mindfulness is not adding something on, it's just dropping down into what was already there? Jon: Yes. I would agree with that. Kimberley: I like that. So how might we use this, particularly in terms of managing anxiety or uncertainty or any other discomfort? Can you give me a walk-through of what that might sound like or look like for somebody who is practicing mindfulness? Jon: Well, one of the things you might think about, when somebody feels triggered, something happens. You've touched something you think is contaminated or you've become aware of an unwanted, intrusive thought, a harming thought, or something like that. Then you have an experience in the brain and in the body that alerts you to the fact that you're under attack, that you're distressed, something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. What most people do is they immediately go into the story of, “This is bad. I'm triggered. I need to get away from this trigger. How do I make this feeling go away? Because it's unpleasant.” Of course, it's unpleasant because it's your brain's way of trying to help you jump into action to get away from the things that could harm you. So it's natural that we want to get rid of this feeling. And then we do these things called compulsions that reliably, in the short term, get rid of these feelings. If you know anything about OCD as you do, it's like you get stuck in that loop. The more you compulse, the more you really feel the responsibility towards your obsessions as they arise. In that space, between the trigger and the compulsion, there's an experience you're having. A person who has been practicing mindfulness or who is mindfully aware can show up to that experience in the same way they might show up to other experiences, again, without having to make it go away. So you render the compulsion less important because you're willing to be in the presence of that triggering experience. If you were to take this to the mat and think about, “Well, what happens when you're meditating and you get an itch?” what is the instruction? It's not, “Well, just scratch it so you can be more comfortable.” It's usually, “Okay, well, notice what itching is like. Notice what it's like to be sitting, which is what you're doing, and then have your attention pulled away from the sitting to the sensation of itching, to be able to say, ‘Oh, that's itching.'” Now at some point, we all break and we start scratching ourselves all over it because it's too much, but that's fine. But that's not the first instruction. The first instruction is simply notice itching. And then if you're capable of letting go of that and going back to what you were doing before you got distracted by the itch, you'd go back to your breath or whatever the anchor of your meditation might've been. It's the same thing in real life. You're minding your own business. You're trying to read a book and then you have an intrusive thought that something terrible is going to happen. And then you notice that experience of this mental itching and you're, “Okay, that's happening.” And then you have a choice. You can drop down out of that back into your book, or you can dwell on it, ruminate on it, try to figure it out, try to figure out a way to make it go away, and then give yourself permission to go back to your book. Kimberley: So, we call it in my practice, my staff have called it “itch surfing.” Jon: Itch surfing. Yeah. Kimberley: I always laugh when I say “itch surfing.” So, let's say you have the presence of a thought that's really concerning, right? It's triggering. And you're trying to be mindful, but you're also not trying to step across the line to where you are ruminating or being compulsive related to that. How might someone differentiate between the two? Jon: So there's a couple of things to consider here. One is that a lot of people will say, mindfulness is about watching your thoughts come and go. There's a good reason why we use that metaphor, that idea of sitting at the bank of the stream and watching the leaves go by. But it's not really accurate in the sense that it's more about just noticing thoughts coming and going. Watching thoughts coming and going implies that you're supposed to sit there and stare at them and give them special attention. You're supposed to remember, right? It's a perspective. It's not an act. You're supposed to remember like, “Oh yeah, it was a thought coming and going. Okay, that's cool.” And then let go of it. Ruminating is when you're digging up that thought for the purpose of trying to figure it out to digest it. You're trying to act on the thought and get certainty about it. It's a very active thing you're doing when you're ruminating. To be mindful would really be the opposite of that. It would be to notice that you're ruminating and stop. Because the whole point, if you're being mindful, it's not that you're executing change on your environment, but you're simply noticing what's coming up. So it was really impossible to be mindful and ruminate at the same time because that would be like being mindful while trying to figure out some problem. So the instruction would be to notice that urge to ruminate, to notice what's coming up for you in your body, that experience of, “I really want to figure this out,” and then to allow that experience to be there, and again, drop back down into your anchor. In real life, it's whatever you were doing before you got distracted. In meditation, it's whatever your anchor is – the breath, the feeling of your body in the seat. Kimberley: So it'd be like using the metaphor of, if you're sitting at the edge of the stream and you're just watching the leaves come and go, that would be mindfulness. But ruminating or being hyper-aware would be like watching the leaf after it's way, way, way, way down the river, but you're still giving that attention and missing what's right in front of you? Jon: Yeah. It's easy to make that mistake because you could feel like you're being mindful. You could say like, “Well, I'm just watching this leaf and seeing how far it goes.” But in fact, when you're doing that, you're missing everything that's happening in the present moment, all those other leaves that are going by. A lot of times, people think of themselves as being very negative because they get distracted by negative thoughts, and the thought comes down the stream and they follow it. And while they're falling, those negative thoughts, all sorts of other nice things are happening – the smell of their breakfast or the warmth of the sun or whatever it might be. But they're not noticing that stuff because they're immersed in tracking that negative experience that they had. They think of their lives as being negative instead of thinking of their lives as just being whatever it happens to be in any given moment. Kimberley: Right. Talk about, if you will, hyper-awareness, because I think sometimes people think they're being mindful, and I think it's going to be very similar maybe in your answer, but I just want to be really clear for people who I've heard struggle with. They're trying to be mindful, but it becomes hyper-awareness. Do you have any thoughts on that? Jon: A lot of this, I think, comes down again to language. Most of us are trained to say things like “Sit with uncertainty,” which sounds like a good idea, but the implication for some is that you're literally sitting and there's literally uncertainty in front of you. It's like sitting on your head and you're immersed in it and you're dwelling on it. So it gets translated as “Dwell on uncertainty,” and feel bad as long as you can feel bad. Actually, I interviewed Jon Abramowitz who some of you may know in a lecture series here at Sheppard Pratt not too long ago. He said he likes to say, “Act with uncertainty instead.” I really like that because to me, that is still mindfulness. You're doing something, you notice you became distracted, cool. That's what that's like. Now I'm going to go back to what I was doing before I got distracted. I'm going to act with the uncertainty instead of sitting, letting the uncertainty sit on my head. I think it's such an important distinction because to be mindful of your thought process is to be aware of it. But it's not the same thing as to be trying to figure it out or be certain about it. That would be the opposite of mindfulness. And so the whole instruction, if you've had a lot of experience meditating, it might sound something like you wander away from your anchor and you start trying to figure out what's wrong with your life. And then you go, “Oh yeah, thinking.” And then you go back to your anchor. No meditation teacher is going to tell you like, “Well, just notice that you're trying to figure it out and keep trying to figure it out and try to get to some sort of outcome.” That really would go against the larger project. Kimberley: Yeah. I mean, for me, if I were to explain it, if I were out and about, and let's say another emotion showed up, like shame or guilt or something, my practice is just to go, “Oh, hi, Shame.” I think actually in the last episode, you were here talking about teens and you were like, “That's cool, bruh,” or whatever it was, but that's observing it and allowing it to be there. But then there's a redirect to the present. Would you agree that's a method that you use? I mean, again, we're saying it's not a doing, but talk to me about whether that's something that you would apply to. Jon: I would absolutely apply that. I mean, at the end of the day, we're coming up with fancier and fancier ways of politely and compassionately saying, “Let it go.” We might have all the different ways of saying “It's okay to let it go,” where we understand that it's very painful to have these experiences and that makes it difficult to let it go. We don't mean let it go, like, “Oh, you're being silly.” I mean literally, it arrived and you allowed that, and now it's leaving and you can allow that to let it go. To become aware that you have an urge to ruminate or an urge to do some other compulsion and to let that urge be a thing, don't sit there and stare at the urge and wait for it to go away. just be like, “Oh, that's happening.” Just like shame arises or guilt arises. And then just gently note it and allow it to be, and you don't have to do anything. It's really a beautiful thing. The shame and the guilt and the urge to ruminate and the urge to wash, it'll go away in its own time. You don't have to be actively involved in it. Kimberley: Right. It's like mindfulness underneath there. A major component is non-attachment, to not be attached to it or the story we tell about it or what it means and all the things. Jon: I mean, if you look at that and the concept of diffusion, they have specific skills for trying to make that happen. I think people can argue over like, “Well, what are the mechanics of building those skills? And could there be some compulsivity involved in that?” I mean, I think there's some people that certainly could. If you're going around saying, “It's just the thought, it's just the thought, it's just the thought,” that's not exactly what we're getting at when we talk about diffusion. But the end game is diffusion, it's being able to say, “I'm having a thought that...” What we want is to be able to do that without having to say it, without having to remind ourselves. But instead, simply have the experience that the thought arises much the same way the credits in a movie arise on a screen. Okay, yeah, that is the thought. And then you get to decide, “Do I want to engage with this or let it go?” If it's an obsessive thought that you've been grappling with, that you've decided is your OCD because you keep trying to get certainty about it, well then the instruction is going to be to drop it, not to play with it. Kimberley: Right. Yeah. I think that this was a lesson for me early in my mindfulness game. Mindfulness is not just that heady, heady meaning like only a cognitive skill. It's like you talk about dropping down, and it's a behavioral skill as well. It's not just sitting still and thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking your way out of discomfort. It's also a doing. It's a body thing as well, instead of it just being heady. I think that's where we get into trouble, right? We start to try to think our way out of problems or our way out of discomfort. Jon: Look at checking OCD, for example, like OCD where there's a lot of checking compulsions. What happens is there's this experience of not being complete, something missing or something being lost. And rather than own that experience and be able to say, “That's something that just came up for me and I'm willing to allow that,” the instinct is to get rid of that experience by engaging in the checking compulsion. So, mindfulness plays an important role in being able to say, “I'm aware of this urge to check, and that's fine. I have all kinds of urges throughout the day. I don't have to give in to this urge.” You don't have to do anything about it. Like you were saying, that's an experience you have in the body, like a sense that the body is craving a change and your willingness to allow that craving. Again, not to sit there and stare at it and wait for it to go away, but just simply just know that it is there and then go onto the next thing. Kimberley: Right. I think that this is true in so many compulsions. Would you use the same skill? Would you use the same concepts regarding reassurance-seeking compulsions? Jon: Yeah. Well, reassurance-seeking is really just another form of checking, isn't it? It's like you have a sense that you know something, just like you have a sense that your door is locked when you go back to make sure. In the case of reassurance-seeking, you're going to a person or the internet to try to make sure. But again, it's that experience of dis-ease, right? Not feeling ease with your experience and wanting to change. Instead of resisting that by doing compulsions, you're saying, “I'll allow it.” I've been using this coping skill with the client. I might have mentioned that they prefer “allow” rather than “accept” because accept felt, I don't know, it felt different to them. We can use whatever language you want, but I liked it. I've noticed that as a coping statement. If something comes up, like, “I want to change it,” and they're like, “Nope, I'll allow it.” And then now you're free. Kimberley: Open the gates to it. Jon: Yeah. Kimberley: Right. I like that a lot. The same goes for avoidance, right? Do you want to share how you might drop into mindfulness when it comes to avoiding, whether you're about to avoid or you're already in avoidance? What would your thoughts be there? Jon: Well, it's like observing your inner magnet, right? Something is pulling you in a direction. It might be pulling you away from something or pulling you towards it. And again, what does that feel like for you? What does that experience in the body? And rather than telling yourself “Accept it, accept it, I got to accept it, and push, push, push, push, push,” can you just notice where the resistance is? Can you let go of that, that part of you that's resisting? you want to go to this party, but it's overstimulating and you might say something embarrassing and there's something there that might be triggering for you or something like that. But you want to go. As you're approaching it, do you notice that resistance? Do you notice that push-pull in your body? And again, can you allow it? Can you say, “Worth it, investment return, worth it.” Very quickly, not spending a lot of time on it. Again, I think cognitive therapy gets a bad rap a little bit in the OCD world because it can so easily turn into mental rituals, trying to assess the probabilities and things like that. But just a pinch, like a pinch of salt, a pinch of cognitive therapy where you're able to say, “Come on now, this is a black and white thinking. I can handle this.” If you're allowed to do that. Kimberley: It's funny that you say that because I was actually just about to ask you, like, go back to your story. Remember at the beginning, you were talking about the stories we tell ourselves. And I think in avoidance, there are so many stories that take us away from mindfulness. So I was actually going to ask you. Do you want to share how you would maybe implement a cognitive skill there? Jon: So, if you're being mindful, it means that you're aware that you're thinking. And if you can be aware that you're thinking, you can also be aware of the tone of thinking. This is especially useful if you're trying to quickly assess. Are you ruminating? Are you engaged in mental rehearsal? Are you thought-neutralizing? What is the mental behavior? If you're noticing the way that you're thinking and that tone, you might be able to pick up historically if that tone has been helpful or not, or if it usually ends in you feeling like you have to do compulsions. Take catastrophizing, for example. You're saying, “Something in the future is definitely going to go badly and I'm not going to be able to handle it.” Now, if you're aware and you're mindful, you know you're thinking, and then you know that that's what you're thinking, and you know that that's catastrophizing, you can simply say, “Yeah, that's catastrophizing. I don't need to do that right now.” Very simple. “I can't predict the future.” You don't have to go into “Everything will be fine,” or “The probability is that this is going to go my way.” Again, we want to spend as little time there as possible because we don't want to get wrapped up in arguing with the OCD, but to just call it out and say like, “I can't predict the future. I'm going to just go with this and see what happens.” And then when you make that choice, notice what that feels like. Can you allow that or not? And if you can't, that's okay. You can go find something else that you can allow. Kimberley: Right. I will always remember many, many years ago, probably even when we worked together, a client of mine, and they gave me permission to tell this story, but I won't, of course, disclose any information. But they always said they can feel the shift in their body. And that was them being mindful. They said as if they were holding onto the sides of their chair. So even though they weren't sitting in a chair, they could feel this shift in their body of clenching. You can't see me on the video. You can see me on the video, but listeners can't. But just this wringing of the hands or clinging of the hands, and that her being able to just identify that slight shift in her body was enough to be able to shift out of that avoidance or resistance. I think just being aware and mindful of that, I think, is a big piece of the pie. Jon: So, it's knowing the quality and the tone and the texture of your internal experience. That's essential for being able to pick out and resist mental compulsions. Ruminating is not just thinking about something because you like to think about it. Ruminating is very much like, there's a puzzle and you've put all the pieces together but one, and now you can't find that one piece that it's somewhere. Maybe it's on the floor, it's under your desk. You know what that feeling is like. It's so intense. And that mental quality is what's going on with the person who's ruminating. And that's what they have to let go of, or be able to experience to let go of the ruminating. If you can't truly appreciate the tone and texture of your mind that “Sometimes when I'm thinking this way, it feels like this, sometimes when I'm thinking this way, it feels like that,” it's just very difficult to trust yourself enough to call out the mental compulsion as they happen. Kimberley: Yeah. I love this so much. I think it's so important that we do address it. So, in all, I know there has-- we have addressed this, but I want to make sure we're really clear. Do you believe that someone can mindfully ruminate? Jon: I think it's an oxymoron because to be mindful is to remember that everything going on inside is an object of attention, and to ruminate is to really engage in a changed behavior. So it's really the opposite of mindfulness. There are types of meditations like traditional meditation. You have an anchor. You notice when you're not paying attention to the anchor, you return your attention. Then there's other types of meditations that might involve free-floating, like free-associating. Notice that this thought then connected to that thought, then connected to that thought. That is a kind of meditation. And you could argue that there's a kind of mindful awareness of where things are going when you're doing that. I still wouldn't call that ruminating though, because ruminating is done with purpose. It's done with a specific intention. It's not just watching where your thoughts land. Now, if you have OCD and you're learning to meditate, I certainly wouldn't recommend you do the type of meditation where you just watch your thoughts bounce around each other. But if you're a more experienced meditator and you want to do that free-associating of watching each thought arise and fall and rise and fall and connect to other thoughts and feelings, that can be fun. But it's not ruminating. To ruminate would be to intentionally try to figure out or try to get certain about your obsessive content. And I don't think that there's any mindful way to do that because it is literally the antithesis of mindfulness, in my opinion. Kimberley: Right. No, and that's how I was trained on it as well. I think the thing that I often will say to clients is, anything can become compulsive. Treatment can become compulsive. If you were to technically look at the term, engaging in compulsive treatment isn't actual treatment because it's going in the direction of doing compulsions, which is not the technical term for treatment. Jon: It's tricky with exposures. For example, I encounter people all the time who are doing checking compulsions but calling them exposures. “I have a fear of something. So I'm going to go over and pretend to do that thing and expose myself to that fear by being in this scary situation. And then it's going to go away and then I'll know that I'm not going to do that thing.” Well, that wasn't an exposure. It might've been hard, but it really wasn't ERP. I usually tell people not to do ERP when they want to. That's usually suspicious of that. And also to consider what the point of it is. Like, if your OCD is getting between you and some valued behavior, that's a good reason to go do that ERP. But if it's not, and it just exists in your head, you don't have to go ahead and be ready to go find any ERP to do. You're allowed to just live your life. That's allowed. Kimberley: Right. Jon: Yeah. I think that the other thing that happens with rumination that I think is very confusing and hard for people to appreciate is that, though, I wouldn't say you can mindfully ruminate. You can certainly be lost in thought and you can certainly ruminate without full awareness of what you're doing, because a lot of it is habit, right? Rumination, some compulsions, they can become habitual, but most of them are pretty easy to tease apart from habits. But mental behavior is a little bit trickier, I think. In the same way that a person who's-- let's say they have difficulty with biting their nails, and they always bite their nails when in front of the computer. The computer becomes the cue to bite their nails. The hands go up to their face. They start chewing on their nails. They're not necessarily thinking, “Oh, I'm going to bite my nails now.” It's just happening. And then they might become aware of it. And if they're working on it, then they might use a habit blocker or some other strategy that they might remember to be mindful of the urge to bite it and come up with another strategy. The same thing happens in the mind where if you're someone who's used to engaging in compulsive rumination in different contexts of your life, there are going to be things that actually cue you to do it without you paying attention. You might not notice that, but it's like, “Oh, every time I'm in this chair, I start to ruminate.” The goal here in terms of improving your mental health situation would be to take ownership of the moment that you become aware of what you're doing. Not to beat yourself up for ruminating, because again, your mind was like, “Oh, are we sitting in that chair? Okay, sure. Let's bring up that topic and start reviewing it.” And you can't take responsibility for something you can't control. You might argue, “Okay, well, that's not really rumination because you're not the one trying to control it,” but it has all the same words. You're just lost in this thought of like, “Well, I know this thought must not be true because of this and that, plus my therapist said this and I read in a book, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You don't know that you've left the building. You still think you're sitting in the chair. But then, boom, you become aware. You suddenly remember, “Wait a minute, I'm a guy sitting in a chair, having a thought, and wait, I'm trying to figure out if my obsessions are true. Nope. Not going to do that. That's rumination. Okay, good. Where was I?” Let it go. But I think people can get very self-critical, really hard on themselves, and say, “I can't stop thinking, I can't stop ruminating.” In part, some of that is then taking responsibility for something that's-- it's just habit. It's just the brain has been trained to just start revving up the engine. That's all right. You'll catch it earlier and earlier and earlier if you practice. Kimberley: Right. Okay. Is there anything else that you feel we haven't covered in this area? I mean, of course, we haven't covered everything, but is there anything that you really want to drive home here in this conversation? Jon: Well, I guess one thing that's been on my mind is, we talk a lot about how thoughts aren't the problem, right? If you're being mindful, thought as a thought is a thought. And if you have mastery over your OCD, whatever, a thought about what day it is or a thought about hurting your baby, they're just thoughts. It's no big deal. And to some extent, that's true. We don't treat OCD by treating what thoughts people have. We address how they're relating to those thoughts and what behaviors they're choosing in response to that experience. But in the interest of remembering self-compassion too, I think it's important to recognize that it may also be the case that people with OCD are more predisposed to the average person to receive certain types of thoughts in a certain way. So even though those thoughts are normal events, it is normal for you to have thoughts about all of the potentials in human existence, all of the different things. We can kill and have sex with all of these things. It's totally normal to have thoughts about them. But it might also be that when you have that thought, it hits you in a way that immediately generates an urge or a moral responsibility to address it. And yes, mindfulness can help because it can help. You both recognize the arising of the thought as an object of consciousness and the arising of that desire to do something about it as an object of consciousness. But it's also worth noting that it's just hard to have OCD sometimes. And every once in a while, you're just going to get sucker-punched by it. And that's not because you've done something wrong, it's because your brain is conditioned or wired to receive some thoughts in that way. And that can be something that you develop mastery over. But I think when we take all of the emphasis on behavior and none of the emphasis on perspective or predisposition, some people feel like they're not being heard. Kimberley: Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I think that that's been largely the feedback I have gotten as well. If people are struggling and they don't want to struggle, and they're trying to navigate this thing, that feels like an absolutely crazy puzzle that, like you said, they don't even have all the pieces. They don't even have half the pieces yet. So I totally really loved that you said that. I love the idea of compassionate responsibility, which is, we can take responsibility for our experience with the absence of self-criticism. I think we sometimes think that owning this and experiencing this has to mean you have to beat yourself up and that it has to be like “You should've done better” kind of thing. But I do not like that. Jon: Well, you've recently written a book on the subject, and I could go on and on about self-compassion. We could do a whole other episode on it. But I do want to end on this note, which is, a lot of what mindfulness means is simply being honest, and we often lie to ourselves about our experiences. We say, “I should have known better,” but when you look at it, there's no way to have known better, that everything you've done is preceded by a thought or an urge or an emotion and we can track this back very, very far. I'm not making the case for no free will or not taking responsibility for anything. I'm just saying self-criticism is inherently dishonest. I say, “I'm a bad person.” That's a story. That's not an objective fact. I say, “I feel terrible.” That's an experience. That's honest and that's also mindful. Kimberley: Right. I love it. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful. I wanted to navigate all this, but I didn't want to do it on my own. So, thank you for coming on and helping me because you're just so good at explaining this stuff, and I really appreciate the way that you conceptualize this. So thank you. Jon: Well, I appreciate you inviting me. I always love hanging out. Kimberley: Yeah. Are there any projects or things you've got going on that you want to share with us? Jon: Well, right now, we're working really hard at The Center for OCD and Anxiety at Sheppard Pratt. We have some new team members and so we're helping a lot of people that way. Not too long ago, we launched the residential program, the OCD program at the retreat here at Sheppard. We've had a few people come in and out of that program. It's really exciting because it's just a different way of working, working as a team on one or two cases at a time and seeing them every day. That dynamic is new and exciting for us. And then book-wise, the OCD Workbook for Teens is out there. The second edition of Mindfulness Workbook for OCD is out there. I just started working on a new one that I'm co-writing with a friend on how to combine ERP and DBT. Kimberley: That's fantastic. Jon: Yeah. So, dealing with relentless thoughts and painful emotions. Kimberley: Nice. That would be so important. Jon: Yeah, I hope so. Kimberley: Oh, without a doubt, DBT is such an important piece of the work, particularly when those emotions are really strong. So that's super exciting. We'll make sure all of those links to that are in the podcast notes so people can check that. Thank you again. Jon: Thank you. ----- Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbtschool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.

Larger companies get most of the press and excitement with their 6 and 7 figure marketing budgets, but the majority of clients we work with are smaller. And smaller companies have to do things a little differently than the big guys. What impact does a small budget have on driving traffic? How should small budget brands compete online? https://www.logicalposition.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Jon: Hey Ryan. So we get companies contacting us all the time, that don't have large, six or seven figure marketing budgets, and many times, those large clients get most of the press and excitement, but the majority of companies that end up investing in marketing are going to be smaller, and smaller companies have to do things a little bit differently. I want to ask you today, what impact does a small budget have on driving traffic and how do those small budget brands compete online? They obviously want to compete, they have to compete in order to grow, and I want to know what's the magic, how do they make that happen? I'm excited to talk to you about this today, and I guess I'll start pretty broad, in e-commerce, is there such a thing as too small of a budget? Ryan: Across the board as a broad general rule, no, but if you're really going to do something with your budget, then yes. I mean, you have to have enough budget to start moving things around and collecting data. And I think that initial starting budget, if you're a smaller business, is going to be important to determine how quick you can grow, how aggressive you can be, where are you going to find that opportunity to take the next step in the digital marketing evolution of your business? And I challenged a lot of business owners in this space, as I'm talking to smaller ones all the time. Like for example, yes, you can start with $100 a month budget, it's your money, and you can market it however you want, invest it however you want. But if you're e-commerce, you're e-commerce so that you can sell everywhere and have your online store open all the time, even when you're sleeping. And so if that's the case, $100 is not going to get you very far in marketing across the internet. And so if you're going to do something that small, you really need to be hyper, hyper, hyper-focused, which does limit your potential and opportunities to find little pockets where you can really dominate or win. And so I would generally say less than $1,000, there may be better places for your money than trying to drive traffic with it online. Jon: Interesting. I was going to ask, and maybe you've just answered, but I'd love your take on this too, if I only have $1,000 a month to spend, is it worth doing it or am I just throwing my money away, when we're talking about driving traffic through traditional paid media sense? Ryan: That's a difficult one because most business owners that are coming up with this $1,000 and you're smaller, that's a meaningful number to them probably, but they probably don't have the expertise to really make that $1,000 do as much as it can. And so you probably have to bring an expert in, and that costs money as well, because most people in the digital marketing world are not working for free. And so you have to figure in an expert generally, and I'll probably come back to that point, but for most businesses, I would say that you have to look at it through a lens of time and money. Jon: Okay. Ryan: Anybody can learn how to do digital marketing. You have to be able to study, you have to be able to go in and make some mistakes and learn it, but anybody can figure it out. It's definitely not the most complex thing you could be learning. But if you have more time, then you should be doing some of that work yourself and learning it and getting it to it like, "Can I get some basic things done?" If you have more money, than you need to hire people and your budget should probably be a little bit higher to be able to invest and push traffic. Jon: So we should be saying, when we say budget for today's conversation, should I be thinking about it as budget including the expert or budget just in what you would spend to drive traffic in these channels? Ryan: I think businesses should be looking at it together, but I think most business owners are thinking about, "Okay, I can spend $1,000 to drive traffic. Let's go put that on Google and make it work." I do believe though, the Googles in particular and I'll focus on Google for right now, but Google in particular has done some pretty cool things helping small e-commerce businesses get going. If you've got a feed and you're on a smaller platform, like if you're on Shopify, it's very, very simple to get up and running on Shopify and get your products going to Google. And then there's what Google is calling smart shopping campaigns that allow a business really to say, "Google, here's how much I'm willing to spend per day, and here's the goal I need to get out of it." It does not take an expert to get that up and running. And in fact, I tell companies, do not pay an agency to manage smart shopping campaigns because there's nothing to do. It can be a small piece of an overall structure, in fact, we at Logical Position do use smart campaigns in a small piece of a campaign occasionally, but we have to do a lot more work in the reporting and strategy on that type of client, to be able to justify charging management fees on smart campaigns. Jon: Okay. That makes sense. Ryan: Small budgets use more automation, I think, is the name of the game. Use things that are set up to make sure you don't just waste a bunch of money, and I think that's where a lot of small businesses, what keeps them from starting often is that fear of, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to go waste money trying to drive traffic because I don't know how to do it right." Doing some research, I think, can help keep that option to a minimum, that is just going to go out there and be a big waste. Jon: Let's say a company hasn't driven traffic on Google. How do they decide what that starting budget should be? Ryan: This generally comes down to, what's the business doing as a whole? If you're doing $100,000 a month on your website and you haven't been spending money, you probably have a larger amount you could start with then if I'm only doing $1,000 a month in sales. It's a threshold there of starting to look at it, but I generally say, in e-commerce, at least $1,000 to start with on Google. And then start thinking about it through a lens of, "I know I'm not going to be starting out at the gate if I'm doing it myself in a perfect world scenario." So there's going to be some learnings. I look at it through the lens of what's my light money on fire threshold, to let me get things going, and I've done this with new platforms on some of my brands. Nobody knew what they were doing yet, across the entire platform. Pinterest is being one of them. A couple years ago, it was just wide open. Nobody knew what it was going to do. I think they're getting some more structure in place and it's driving better traffic, but I went onto it saying, "Look, I don't know what it's going to do." My light money threshold at that point was, I think about 2,500 bucks, so I talked to Pinterest like, "Look, we can go a thousand a day for two and a half days if you want, or we can go $100 a day for about a month. I'm okay with either, whichever one you think is going to work better for me." And that was my light money on fire threshold, that I wasn't going to be mad, I was just like, "Yeah, that did suck, but I got some learnings." Pinterest didn't work for us at that point in time on that business, we'll continue to be revisiting it. But all that to come back around to it can't be a budget that if it doesn't work, it's going to tank your business, because there's a lot of unknowns if you haven't been on Google before, to how is your website going to convert, what traffic is going to work best for you. Because you'll take the same product with the same price for the same search query, going to two different sites and it's going to convert and there's going to be a different return on ad spend. And so with all of that unknown, anybody that tells you they know exactly what you're going to get by putting $1,000 out there, they're lying to you because there's no data to tell you one way or another. There's no way to know. Jon: Okay. So don't bet the farm. Ryan: Don't bet the farm, but it should probably make you a little uncomfortable. Jon: Okay. Ryan: When I'm looking at business decisions and I want to grow, and you know me, I tend to be on the aggressive side of things, I want what I'm risking to make me a little uncomfortable. I don't want it to be an easy decision or an easy thing to be like, "Okay." Could I have wasted $100 to test Pinterest? Yeah, but that was not an uncomfortable thing. 2,500 from me was a little bit uncomfortable. Partners and I talked through it and we're like, "Okay, if it returns nothing, that's not going to be great. But again, we're not going to lose the business because of a mistake if it doesn't work." So a little bit of uncomfort, I think, is good. Jon: Okay. So then let's say I have a thousand bucks, where do I start, Facebook, Google, something else? Ryan: I think generally it's going to come down to those two for most businesses to start off with. I think other platforms generally are younger and they are less proven and therefore generally higher up in the funnel. Like if you're going to jump right on TikTok or Snapchat for marketing and you haven't done Google or Facebook, I think it's going to be difficult to know if that platform is actually working for you, if you haven't gone to more advanced ones yet. And so when I talk to a business owner or a marketing team that's looking at deciding between both of those two to start, the easy way of looking at it as if there is existing market for your product, I generally say go to Google because you're going to capture people towards the bottom of the funnel as they're looking for your product. If you're creating a brand new category, there's not a lot of people searching for it on Google and so you're going to have to figure out how to create that and find the right audiences on Facebook and convince people to start trying you to build that search volume. So for example, last week I talked to a guy, his company makes edible bubbles and I'm like, "I have never heard of this before.'. Jon: Isn't that bubblegum? Ryan: Yeah. This is for kids going out and playing and blowing bubbles, he makes edible bubbles. And I had no idea my kids would want that until he sent me some samples and they're actually pretty cool. Jon: That's awesome. Ryan: But they actually make them for bars. Someday when we get to go back to a bar, they make these bubbles you can blow on top of a drink, and a lot of times they infuse them with smoke for presentations. Jon: That's cool. That's a great idea. Ryan: So really cool stuff, but there's not a target market yet that they know to search for that. So I, before last week, never would have even considered searching for the term edible bubble or edible bubble for a drink or bar drink presentation bubbles, that's just not even there. And so for that type of business, you've got to go on Facebook, you've got to target bartenders, you've got to target moms with kids, with the kid bubble one. And there's some really cool targeting on Facebook, and if you've got a good visual and some good offers, I think Facebook can work really well. For other businesses, Facebook generally will hit top of funnel like that, and so the return, again, generalizations, is going to be a little bit lower than if you had run some bottom funnel, Google stuff to figure out where people are searching for your product and what are your advantages and all of that. Jon: So we're talking the difference between perhaps intent versus awareness? Ryan: Yes. Like if there's already people searching with intent for your products or services, I would go capture them first. It's going to be a little more expensive per click, possibly, there's generally going to be more competition, but it's an existing demand that you're tapping into. You've just got to figure out how you're going to compete there. If you're creating a brand new product that nobody's ever searched before, you probably can't even spend your money on Google on search terms, you're going to be on broad match keywords on Google wasting money. Jon: Right. No, that definitely makes sense, then Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. Ryan Garrow, of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services, to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon: What other things tactics do the smaller budgets need to be aware of? What else would you consider? Ryan: Some of the tactics I talked about when looking at smaller budgets on advertising and driving traffic, don't even have to do with the tactics to drive the traffic. A lot of small businesses, even over the last year with COVID and a lot of brick and mortar moving into online, a lot of them haven't thought about what is my advantage online? If you are selling the exact same product at the exact same price, and you have no discernible advantage over a competitor, what are you doing? Try to figure out, before you go spend money, why somebody is going to buy from you. And you can't really tell me that your advantage online is going to be because you have really smart salespeople inside, or you have a lot of knowledge in your industry, because that's not going to come across in Google shopping. Nobody cares how much you know, they don't know how much people know when they're just going to a website and transacting. And so you've got to figure out what that advantage looks like first. Why should somebody buy from you versus a competitor, if they've never met either one of you and all they're doing is seeing your website because the internet is the great equalizer and small companies can't compete with big companies, if they're better at certain things. Better at converting, if all of your competitors are stuck on really ancient Yahoo stores that are 20 years old, and you're going to come in there with a Shopify or a big commerce site, that's really easy to convert on. That can be a significant advantage, even if everything else is the same. Jon: It's funny, you say that, a friend and I were just talking about that and we were laughing, saying a great business model would be to just go to find a index of all the remaining Yahoo stores making over a million dollars a year and just replicate that on a better platform, with better usability and you would print money. Ryan: Why are we doing a podcast? Let's go get a list and start making business. But it's true. I think we still have 50 clients on Yahoo and some of them are, I think, are on the RTML, that really old coding platform, that if you're not 50, you've never even heard of that. And I only heard about it because we have clients on it. Jon: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think a lot of these stores take the approach of, if it's not broke, don't fix it. And they're still printing money, so why change it? I think they're going to ride that till the end. So somebody will come along and end them by doing something better, but you got to find it first. Talking about that is one of the things that the platform could be, one thing that these smaller companies are doing wrong. But thinking about smaller budgets, if they're sending traffic to their site, what do most of these smaller budgets do wrong? What mistakes are they making with their small budgets? Ryan: I think a lot of them, if they do have some advantages and they do have a reason to market, a lot of them make the mistake of not being aggressive enough. I think I've mentioned this probably multiple times, but a lot of small business owners really watch their P and L and all line items going in and out of the business, which is good. But when they come to Google ads, it can quickly become a very large line item and they want to focus on, hey, I need to increase profits, so we need to start cutting this budget and controlling Google, because if I control something in the middle of my P and L, the bottom gets bigger. And unfortunately, something like a Google ads or Facebook ad, is generally driving top line number that does translate into bottom line number, but if you eliminate what's driving that top line, it can really have an opposite effect of what you're intending. And so it's really a paradigm shift. If you're looking at your budget like a line item, you start looking at it as you're investing in getting new customers and then what are you going to do with it? Don't see Google ads or Facebook ads as a cost necessarily, unless you're purposely losing money and you have to control that piece, but that's a whole different story and most small businesses are not doing that, so I won't dive into that necessarily now. But then trying to figure out, okay, once you've got a customer, what are you going to do with them? Because Google and Facebook, they're a marketing channel and you're going to have to give some or all of that initial order margin to the platform to get the customer. And that allows you to compete and capture more market share, but if that margin is going to the platform, it's not going to you, the business owner or marketing teams future budgets. So you've got to do lifetime value, figure out what you're going to be doing to bring them back. So many times small businesses are thinking about, I've got to get customers, I've got to get customers, so I've got a market. Okay, good, you do have to do that, but you can't keep trying to do that without focusing on the customers you do have. What happened to the customers from last month, what are you doing with them? If you're not emailing them, if you don't have a loyalty program, you're essentially wasting all of this effort that you're doing to successfully bring new customers into the brand. And so that's where I see most struggles, because then they'll just be like, "Oh, Google was terrible. It took all my profit and then I had nothing." Jon: Well, we've talked about this several times on the show, of understanding that it's okay on that first sale to break even, and your customer acquisition costs might be high on that first sale, but you have to have a longer term game plan in place. Is it a subscription type product that you're going to use, if you have a consumable, is it something where you're able to continue to market to them afterwards, but you're doing it in a way that is going to continue to drive down the customer acquisition, but up the lifetime value over time? That definitely makes a lot of sense. So, okay, we've heard a lot of disadvantages to being small here today, but there's still a fact that most brands are going to be in that small budget. What are the advantages, what's the positive side, the glass half full here, what's the advantages to being smaller advertisers? Ryan: Yep. There's no secret that having more money can have more advantages in advertising, I mean, that's just basic marketing 101. But what I've seen through a lot of small businesses and having my own that compete against much larger brands, is you inherently have more flexibility. In fact, we were just laughing before we got on and started recording, about politics in larger companies, having all these things that you have to wade through to get things approved, or to do things, where you can't move quickly into new markets, because there's all these layers of approval. Small businesses, hopefully don't have that problem. And it's like, if you see an opportunity, you can just go do it and there's not a lot of people that have to sign off on. It's like, no, I'm going to go capitalize on that change in the market or that area that hasn't been attacked by larger brands. And so that can be a huge advantage, but I still think a lot of small businesses don't think of it that way and look at it, hey, I can afford to make mistakes and learn from them very, very quickly and pivot and adjust. And I can test new products on my site, I can test things on my site as a small business that I don't have to go to a web dev team. I can make quick little changes on my Shopify site to say, "Hey, let's see if this works or not. Let's run it for a week and if it doesn't work, flip it back." So much opportunity to test and so few small businesses actually taking advantage of that. I mean, I can't say the number of times that we've tested small things, even on Joyful Dirt, as we're moving very quickly and say, "Hey, let's test this or test this." That many of them work. I mean, we've got a really smart team that can come up with really cool ideas to test. For example, this month we did a black history month label, so we just, "Hey, let's just do a small run of a few hundred labels and see what happens." And larger brands can't in mid January, decide to do a label run for a specific event and try to get it to work. We're like, "Yeah, let's just see if it works. And so based on the success, we're going to do this multiple times throughout the year for different events and just have custom labels. Jon: That's a great idea. Ryan: Because we can. Jon: I believe this is called the innovator's dilemma. So when you're at a large corporation, you as an individual can come to the table and say, "I want to do custom labels for this month, starting in two weeks." But you have so much red tape to get through that you can actually affect the change that you want to affect. So that's a definite competitive advantage for a small brand, I can completely understand how that would work in their advantage. So that's great. Is there any other advantages that we should be thinking about? Ryan: I think being smaller also forces you to pay attention to details, that larger brands don't have to. We have a lot of large clients that focus on such macro level numbers, 35,000 foot layer of saying, "Hey, what's our data? How much should we spend? What is this?" And there's not the deep dive on, "Okay, how can I squeeze this little bit more out of this product?" It exists on a few large brands, but generally it doesn't matter to them on the small little minutia. And I think smaller brands, really have an opportunity because there is less data to sift through, they can quickly see where markets may be changing or evolving, that larger brands aren't going to catch till later. So you have to be willing to be aggressive and move quick when you see them, but you might see, even on Amazon, this is a massive thing with one of our clients where there's a couple really big players in vital wheat gluten, for example, on Amazon and the volume of sales on baking products on Amazon, is astronomical, I had zero clue until we started working with this company. Jon: Yeah, would not have suggested or thought that. Ryan: No, I'm like, "Vital wheat gluten," that's a very specific product for a very specific niche of people. Jon: Baking in general on Amazon, you would think there's no way. Ryan: It blew me away. But because the volume is so high, everybody selling FBA can only send in, because vital wheat gluten comes in, it's heavy and it comes in five pound bags or two pound bags, so it takes up enough shelf volume that you can't get 50,000 units in there at a time. And because you're usually co-packing, you're getting pallets delivered, and once it's down, you can't all of a sudden like, I'm just going to send 10 units today to take care of the sales. It's massive in and out of stocks all over the place. And so smaller advertisers could leverage that by saying, "All right, if I have my own fulfillment house, I can always keep a seller central product in stock on Amazon. Even if my FBA stock goes out," and you can play a lot of games and figure out what part of the country is or is not working. But that type of flexibility as a small brand, can pay huge dividends just by being aware of some of the struggles of your larger competitors. If your larger competitor has a disgusting amount of aging inventory, they've got problems probably floating the next purchase. Whereas you may not have that problem as a small advertiser, and you can even use drop shipping through one of the partners that could help you. So I think small companies have some significant advantages and I enjoy that part because it is more exciting to grow a smaller brand to take on a larger one. I do it myself, I add to this one. Jon: You'd love to take down the big guy. Ryan: IT do. Jon: Who doesn't? I mean, if you're in business, you're a competitor, just the way it is. Ryan: Oh yeah. And I love competing. And so it's fun as smaller business, but it does take a mentality that you are going to scrap and do everything you can to make it work. And when you come in with that mentality, I think it's very difficult to fail on Google ads or Facebook ads, because you're not accepting that it's not going to work. You see the data, you know people are spending money in your industry and they may not all be making money, but there's consistent effort there. And you just have to get to the point where you can wade through it and make it work because it will. Jon: Well on that note, any parting thoughts on this? I feel like I'm sufficiently equipped if I were a small brand advertising. You're giving me some renewed hope, that's for sure, that my $1,000 per day or per month, excuse me, would actually go someplace. Ryan: Yeah. The only thing I will say is that I do believe quality help will go a long way. You can be a small advertiser as a business owner and spend $1,000 if you learn and you're quick enough at adjusting and pivoting and looking at data, you're going to learn how to do it, but it might take you six, seven, eight months to get the point where you could have started at that point with an expert. And so it's at least worth interviewing a couple of agencies to see what it is they could do to help you if you bring experts on to manage that $1,000 spend. Yes, you're going to have to pay an agency extra cost, but can they get you moving towards your target at a quicker rate? I think often they can, but even if you're going to do it yourself, at least talk to somebody else that really knows what they're doing to see what the advantages could be. Jon: Well, and it could be huge too, if you get a higher return on that ad spend, that margin difference, they pay for themselves. It's like working with a great CPA, they're going to get you a bigger refund than if you did it yourself. So that covers their fees and hopefully more. Ryan: For sure. Jon: All right Ryan, well, thank you for your expertise on this. I know you guys work with thousands. Every time I talk to you, it's another thousand. So I'll just say thousands and thousands of clients at Logical Position, and a lot of those are smaller ones and you guys have learned a lot from that. So thank you for sharing all of the expertise you've learned. Ryan: Oh yeah. Thank you, Jon. I appreciate the time. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

Welcome to first episode of this podcast! In this show, we are joined by two amazing guests: - Jon Levesque, Senior Platform Evangelist at Microsoft linktr.ee/jonjlevesque - Geetha Sivasailam, Consultant at Artis Consulting svaghub.wordpress.com Questions discussed in the show: What is one of the new features of Power Platform that you are excited about? (Vivek) Power Virtual Agents? First Impressions? Useful? Easy to build? (Jon) What’s the next productivity feature for Flow makers on your wish list? (Geetha) 2020 as we all know has been a tough year. Tell me one thing that you liked about it or something good that happened to you this year. (Vivek) When the pandemic is over what is one place you will travel and one thing you will do there? (Jon) What tip would you give your 20 year old self? (Geetha) Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would love to hear your feedback at vivekbavishi@thatapiguy.tech --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rapidpower/message

Hey, it's Jon Cook with Keynote Content. Thanks so much for connecting with me today. I want to connect with you about the four main chemicals inside our brain. We have dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Not just the main chemicals but the main happy chemicals... The chemicals that your audience wants to experience through your products, your services, your coaching, your talks, your webinar, or whatever might be. When you give a message with your audience, those are the four chemicals that your brain, that your audience brains are craving that they want to experience. And so we were going through the series talking about D for dopamine, O for oxytocin, S or serotonin, E for endorphins. Those are the four kind of happy chemicals. And I've already done a couple of videos about dopamine and oxytocin. Today I want to talk with you about serotonin, but before I really jump into this, you might be saying like, "Who is this guy? Who is Jon? What's your credible ability that you can talk to me about brain chemistry and how our brains are wired for influence and impact?" I spent over 11,000 hours and over $50,000 researching these four chemicals, testing them with sales copy, Facebook ad copy, Google ad words copy, website pages, creating contents for speakers from stages, working with over 1100 different business coaches and consultants, and more than 800 different speakers over the last four years. And what I've learned is here, our brains are wired for these chemicals and how our audience can respond to those inside our messaging, that we can then activate with our wording, with our phrasing, our messaging. And then we can deliver on that with our products and services. So we can know how to activate these chemicals and then deliver on that in a way that we say we feel good about activating that chemical because anybody can activate a brain chemical with manipulation and that's icky. We don't want that, but say, if I know how to activate that with certain words and the phrasing that I use inside my messaging, that I know can lead them to a product or service or solution that ethically delivers on that desire, then I've truly served my audience. So serotonin is what we're going to focus on today and serotonin what I call kind of a happy chemical, that sunshine chemical. And I live in Denver, Colorado, here in the United States. And we have over 300 days of abundant sunshine. I know if you live, maybe in the Midwest of the United States, it might be a little dreary, a little cold, whatnot, overcast. We have sunshine. And now you probably have had these moments where you say, "I kind of feel like in a funk." Like it's just a funky day where it's overcast, cloudy, kind of a blah type of day. I've been there too. I've been there a lot of times, where it says, it just kind of feels like there's just not a lot of sunshine, but then the sun comes out and you take a five-minute walk and come back and you say, "Wow. I just feel like this is a great day." (Transcript continues) ------------ Being an expert doesn't mean you automatically have an audience, especially with so much noise in the digital marketing space. You need to break through the noise and establish your message as a rising thought leader in your industry. Jon Cook has worked with over 1,100 coaches and consultants and 800 speakers to make their messages remarkably clear and compelling to the right audience, and today he wants to help you. If you want greater clarity and even better results with your message, visit workwithjoncook.com.

In this episode, Sam is joined by Jon Krawczynski and Danny Leroux to break down NBA defensive standouts. On Wednesday, Krawczynski and Josh Robbins published their anonymous coaches poll of who should make the All-NBA defensive team. What did the coaches look for in their conversations with Jon? What were the trends? Did anything surprise them about how the coaches voted?  Then, I chat with Danny Leroux, and we chat about what we look for when evaluating defenders as public facing analysts. How do we contextualize scheme? How do we look at effort defensively throughout the regular season? Who are some of the best defenders, and what are some of the differences we'd have with the coaches from taking a league-wide view? 

This week was the most eventful, yet uneventful, week since the UFC returned. There were no fights, but the drama got thicker. Will Francis actually fight Jon? What do we think of Conor's top 5 fighters of all time? Find out on this episode of Talk 2 Much MMA. ### MMA #UFC #JonJones #FrancisNgannou #twitch #livestream #streaming #sportspodcast #sports #podcast -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/xtrasina

SEASON 2: EPISODE 6 Performer Jon Wan argues that kids are campy. ABOUT THE GUEST  Slipping in and out of drag skin Kiko Soirée, animagus Jon Wan serves an alluring feast of emotion - sensual, sincere, stupid. Kiko (@kikosoiree) is a queer comedian, host and drag queen, performing at venues like Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, The Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's, Union Hall, MoCA, Caveat, and UCB. They've been named by Time Out Magazine as one of the rising LGBT POC comedians to watch. Monthly, Kiko hosts 'A+, The Pan-Asian Drag and Burlesque Revue', in the Lower East Side, and seasonally, produces the original musical advice show, 'Dear Kiko'. Their Spanish is better than their Cantonese which hasn't made their mother proud but tracks for the American Born Chinese narrative. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund.  Producer: Devon Guinn  Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue  Mixer: Andrew Litton  Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver  Theme Song: Jeff Hiller  Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, Rachel Wang Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION JON WAN: I just took saxophone cause my friend was also gonna play saxophone, and I just played it through middle school. Then I just continued in high school, and then after freshman year I was like, I don't actually like this instrument. And I'm definitely not a jazz person. Cause I was having saxophone lessons with this person who was a very cool cat. And I was like, I am not understanding fundamentally why I'm here. This isn't clicking with me.  NEIL GOLDBERG: I'm going to really make a controversial generalization here. I don't think jazz is gay.  JON: Oh, no, I don't think so either. You have to be like kind of loose and like -  NEIL: Exactly, a type of casualness. JON: Yeah, and like comfortable with your body and expression, and I was not - like I was learning classical piano from an oppressive Russian teacher, growing up as a Chinese American, closeted, in a primarily white town. I did not know how to express myself in a healthy way.  NEIL: Right. JON: Right. NEIL: Hello. I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist, and I have a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been jotting down thoughts and observations for about two decades. In SHE'S A TALKER, I explore the cards through conversations with guests and responses from listeners. These days, the cards often start as voice memos I record throughout the day. Here are some recent ones: When a parent says to a kid, "Look at me," I'm suspicious and think the parent is probably a narcissist. Thick Sharpies are to thin Sharpies as water bugs are to roaches. Art project: drawing all the missing arms in selfies. Today, my guest is Jon Wan. Jon, who often appears on stage as their drag persona, Kiko Soiree, describes themself as a Swiss Army knife performer whose work weaves together musical comedy, storytelling, standup, and beyond. Jon's performed at Club Cumming, Joe's Pub, the Bell House, Ars Nova, Caroline's Mocha, and has been named by Timeout Magazine as one of the rising LGBT people of color comedians to watch out for. We spoke in February at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. I'm so happy to have with me Jon Wan.  JON: Hello.  NEIL: Hi Jon. Thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER.  JON: I'm enchanted to be here. Simply.  NEIL: Simply. What are the alternatives, in terms of enchantment, besides simple enchantment? JON: Oh, very complex. Yeah. Like arcane magic, you know? Not for pedestrian folk.  NEIL: Yes. Complex enchantment. What is your elevator pitch for what you do? JON: I am a drag queen, performer, comedian bopping around New York City. You might know me as my drag persona, Ms. Kiko Soiree, performing and doing shows here in this beautiful garbage city and really always aspiring to one day live within walking distance of a Trader Joe's. NEIL: I see it for you. I really see it for you. You know, a Trader Joe's just opened opposite where Jeff and I live.  JON: No, which one?  NEIL: Uh, it's on Grand Street. Grand and Clinton.  JON: Oh, wow.  NEIL: It's the biggest Trader Joe's on the Eastern Seaboard, I'm told.  JON: That's crazy. So you live near not only a Trader Joe's, but a historic one. NEIL: Yes, exactly. Uh, what does your mom, when she's talking to her friends, what does she say you do?  JON: Oh, (In his mother's accent) oh, Jon um, oh, Jon lives in New York City. (back to normal voice) And then she kinda just like shoos the conversation. I think, she knows I'm a drag queen. I don't think she publicly has the language to talk about it the way she might alternatively say, "My daughter works for a pharmaceutical company." Do you know what I mean?  NEIL: Right. Do you have a sister that works...?  JON: She does. Don't worry. It's a good pharmaceutical company.  NEIL: Oh yeah. Uh, what does your dad say?  JON: My dad, uh, is actually very vocally supportive of my creative life. He usually says, "He's a performer and a comedian, and..."  NEIL: What kind of performances does he do? JON: "Oh, (In his father's accent) Jonathan does his funny stand up in New York City." And just stuff like that and yeah, I don't think they're, they're like ashamed of anything I do, but my dad came here for college. My mom came here when she was 13. They're kind of this transition generation, you know, they, they were really straddling both cultures and had to deal with the more brutish parts of assimilation. They came from traditional Chinese parents, but they're, you know, they're open-minded. They both grew up. They were like hippies. You look at old photos of them. My mom had like hair down to her waist. But, you know, you know, I'm the first drag queen of my family.  NEIL: That you know of.  JON: Hopefully not the last. NEIL: Yes. What is something you find yourself thinking about today?  JON: Um. Today, I was thinking about how everyone is a walking advertisement. I was a sucker for the AirPods, the first ones that came out. They're just, I know when I put them in my ear, I'm going to feel very sexy, and I had this thought today as I was putting them in my ear. It's like everyone is a walking advertisement.  NEIL: So when you're wearing AirPods, you're an advertisement for...  JON: Yeah, for Apple. My AirPods now suck because I lost the original case and I bought a knock off one on Amazon for like 30 bucks and they do try to pair with everyone on the train.  NEIL: Oh really?  JON: I just kind of, but you can't do it successfully. NEIL: It's like your dog humping strangers' legs or something. JON: Truly. I can see on people's phones like something comes up and says, Not your AirPods. It goes all the time and I just keep my head down and I just. I didn't want to pay another $70 for the case. NEIL: I've curated some cards just for you. Um, first card, Jon.  JON: Okay.  NEIL: All kids' names are campy.  JON: Absolutely. Cause kids are camp.  NEIL: How so?  JON: I used to teach, um, preschool in undergraduate. so I worked with three, four, and five-year-olds. And when you talk to a kid, it's very serious. It, it's of the utmost importance. And it's also insane.  NEIL: Which is the essence of camp!  JON: Which is the essence of camp. Um, but you know, when they're just playing, they're just talking very seriously about something. Or they're telling you an opinion, something they saw today, like.  (imitates kid's voice) "Like, Mr. Jon? Today, I, I saw a dog and... Dog had a really long tongue."  (back to normal voice) And they like will drop whatever they're playing with me to let me know about this thing, which neurologically like they're doing that thing where like, they have seen a new category that they don't yet understand and they're trying to integrate it into what they do, right? So I have to be there and say, "Daphne, tell me about the dog." You know, like I want to know more. Well, what color was the dog? You know what I'm saying? "It was, it was brown." I'm like, okay. All right. It was brown. I love that. So, but then it's also insane cause you're like, this is so crazy.  NEIL: To me, it makes perfect intuitive sense how that connects to camp. But could you, could you... JON: I think it connects to, I mean, camp, I mean, treats itself seriously, but knows it's also ridiculous. You know. I mean, campy drag queens like divine, completely over-the-top makeup and personality, but acting and performing with a lot of conviction.   NEIL: The difference, though, may be being, and maybe it's a technical difference, do you think kids know that they are ridiculous? JON: No. Absolutely not. Did you - NEIL: Okay. So they're inadvertently campy?  JON: Unless they were like early stars and then they're like, Oh, okay, people are enjoying what I'm doing.  NEIL: Right, right, right, right.  (flip card) I love the smell of a drag queen.  JON: Absolutely not. If you really smelled, uh, maybe the perfume that we put on at the very end, but if you smelled any of our undergarments or any of our clothing, that's, some of that, I mean, the vintage pieces maybe haven't ever been washed. Maybe just sprayed down with some alcohol and water.  To get rid of the bacteria and the smell. Um. And I'm not washing pantyhose every single week. Are you thinking of the metaphorical smell?  NEIL: I have no idea what that is. And I'm all in.  JON: Every drag queen has a different energy and that can be very intoxicating. That's like half the fun, that someone's showing you something on the other side of the looking glass. NEIL: Aha. But the literal smell for me is always about just powdery perfume. But you're saying beneath that is just... filth.  JON: I've, I guess I've, I've done it so many times. I'm no longer piqued by just the smell of powder and, and lipsticks and things like that. Just, that's kind of smells like the entrance of a, of a Macy's, you know? You know what I'm talking about, right? You walk into a Macy's and it's always like the perfume entrance, right? NEIL: Yeah, yeah. That somehow seems like a euphemism. Smells like the entrance of Macy's.  JON: God, she smelled like the entrance of a Macy's. I'm not going back there, Charlotte.  NEIL: Um, I guess I have thought about like with padding and tucking, uh...  JON: Mhm. Machinery going on. NEIL: Yeah. Which does involve compressing the body, or, or depriving the body of air circulation, which I guess could generate smells, right?  JON: Yeah. It's tight. I mean, if you're, I mean, if you're just, even if you're putting on hips, right? Let's say you're padding, some people, some queens are wearing four or five layers of tights, right? Just to make a smooth silhouette. Um, you know, and you're hot, you're moving around, your head is hot cause you're wearing a wig. My hair lines are glued down, so everything's sleek. So when I go, you know, getting out of drag is the best feeling.  NEIL: I can imagine. Do you get out of drag at the venue or at home? JON: I am an at home queen. And I'm also a get ready at home queen, too. I just ride the train down.  NEIL: Really?  JON: Yes. I mean, I'm in drag, but have like a winter coat on, and a scarf, and I have sweatpants over my dress, so I look like just like a, a gymnast going to a meet or something.  NEIL: To a Wheaties commercial.  JON: I look like a suburban mom going to Costco. NEIL: That thing of posing people in nude photos, so their genitals are hidden by a raised knee or what have you.  JON: That's very Black Mirror to me.  NEIL: Oh really?  JON: Oh, just like it's on the cusp of this is, this is very sexy, and also, what are we doing, right? What the hell are we doing? This is insane. I think of Instagram immediately. NEIL: Oh yeah, sure.  JON: People just like, a sexy photo of themselves. It's like, "You're naked." You hid, you moved your body a little bit. We're one centimeter away from seeing whatever it is, you know? But it's like, if you cover a little bit, Instagram's like, Oh, you're not nude.  NEIL: Isn't that deep?  JON: It's crazy. It's true. It's true. It's truly wild.  NEIL: I wonder if there is a fetish around obscured - like if there are people who get off on the actual obscuring.  JON: Oh, 100% yeah. 100% think that's a fetish. I mean, in the same way that just wearing a leather chest strap, that's totally nonfunctional.  NEIL: Right, exactly.  JON: Like there's not even a function to it. NEIL: Yeah.  JON: But I'm just imagining you in a different way. I mean, you know, cause you're an artist. Marina Abramovic's, um, performance where she stood naked, right? And she had a table of instruments.  NEIL: Yeah.  JON: That was, I think like the exploration of like is, is this actually like. Well, it was exploring a lot of things. Like one of the questions I had was like, is this sexual? Like, she had a feather. She had a knife. She had a gun, right?  NEIL: Uh, may have had a gun, uh, I thought she had scissors too. Or maybe I'm confusing that with Yoko Ono's "Cut" piece. Um, yeah, there were things that could do violence for sure.  JON: I think there was a gun. NEIL: Yeah, that sounds right.  JON: Um, that sounds very Marina probably.  NEIL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.  JON: But, um, I think the reason why I thought Black Mirror at first, cause it's like we are so... We are surfing the simulacra of society.  NEIL: Oh my God.  JON: Who, Baudrillard? Is that the philosopher?  NEIL: Mhm. Society of spectacle. JON: I am really smart right now in this hour... NEIL: Oh my God. Um, it's funny you mention Marina Abramovic, cause one of the cards I have, or this is just an idea for an art project I would love to do, which is, you know, the artist is present where, you know, you would sit with and look into her eyes. But I'd like to do that with, butt warmth. You'd sit on chairs and then you would just switch. Like I could feel your butt warmth on the chair, and you could feel mine.  JON: And I'm going to, I'm going to build on this. The seats, to kind of give it some sort of like, um, sexy factor. The seats are thermo-visually dynamic. So when you sit, you can see the warmth, um, like a print? That the last person -  NEIL: The heat, the heat map.  JON: Mhm. The heat map of the last person.  NEIL: If that's what it's called. Our first collaboration.  JON: That's going to sell tickets at the MoMA. NEIL: This is a card I found tucked under my, uh, the, the sofa in my studio, and all it says is: Anus. JON: You know, synchronicity. Because we recently got a bidet. Um, which has quickly made my Top 2020 List of things to improve your life.  NEIL: Oh my God. Yeah.  JON: Um, bidet.  NEIL: Yeah.  JON: Pretty, uh very affordable. There are certain models that are just like, even under 50 bucks.  NEIL: Oh, wow. Okay.  JON: Will change your life.  NEIL: Huh? I, um, I would be, cause I feel like I've seen some like bidets that border on like the geriatric medical in terms of their appearance, you know, where they look like an add-on to the toilet seat. And, I feel like I would embrace a bidet deeply, but I need for the aesthetics to be on point.  JON: I hear you. I'm also someone who is an obsessed aesthete. And also I'm very practical and functional. And I really saw no point of a bidet cause I had a, was doing perfectly fine for God knows how many years, right? But we won it in a Santa Swap, like a, you know, the white elephant thing. Um, so we brought it home. I took it through the airport. My bag was fully paused cause they thought I was carrying home a bomb. Like what the fuck is in your bag, right? There's like piping and tubing, and this big shape of plastic and a knob. So, um, so this one's pretty sleek. And a bidet is, it's like a shower just for your ass. And. And that's it. It's, it's like, it's like taking a shower, but just for your anus. I, there's no other way to feel it. And I thought, and then I, I'm, and now I've, I've talked about it in my office because if I'm excited about something, I must to talk about it.  NEIL: Oh, yeah.  JON: And I'm going to put it out there - bidets are very sexual, and every straight man who's out there is understanding the queer experience. I, or like, this is like, you understand. It's like, Oh that's right, butt play isn't just like a gay thing. It's like a universal thing. And uh, you know, the anus is a sexual region, so you let it go for as long as you want. Some people have heated bidets, and that's nice cause then it's warm water. Mine is not, we have a cheap kind. So in the winter time it's frigid. But I like it because it makes me feel like I'm alive, and it's a test of character, which I get off on. And then you're done. And then it's, and then it's like you took a shower. NEIL: Ah. But you know, you should have front loaded the part that it's not heated. That might be a deal breaker for me. Although I also, like you, I'm energized by like, as a depressive. I love winter because it really brings out, um, a feeling of like, the will to live in me.  JON: And it's good for your skin.  NEIL: Cheers. But I don't want. I don't think I want, I don't know. I've never had that experience. I don't think I want a cold-water anal shower.   JON: Uh huh. Well, you know, and neither did I, I thought it would, it would never be on my radar. And that's why it's made my Top 2020 List.  NEIL: Wow.  JON: And I know we're just wrapping up the first month, but I think it's going to be on there. NEIL: Oh, I'm so confident in that, I'm so confident in that. I think if they called it a cold-water anal shower, it wouldn't sell as many units as a bidet.  JON: It would only sell in niche markets for sure.  NEIL: Uh, next card. The way you can tell certain people won't age well.  JON: Yeah. Um, you can just tell. Uh, for me it's just like an impression.  NEIL: Yes. It's not based on facts, for me.  JON: Truly not based on facts. A lot of it really just has to do with their energy.  NEIL: Exactly.  JON: Absolutely. Like their energy, the way they carry themselves, the way they think about themselves. Did you read that Roald Dahl book, The Twits?  NEIL: No. JON: The Twits. I can't recap the entire plot in entirety, but there's this one part of like, they think ugly thoughts and then they became ugly. And it was, you know, he is an amazing writer. But yeah, that never left me as a kid. And I think that continues to apply today. Even there are people who are old, but they just. They look and appear and they feel so young. And they're aging like, “Oh my gosh, you're aging beautifully.” NEIL: Right. I love that.  JON: Right?  NEIL: Yeah.  JON: It's not about having wrinkles or things like that. There really is a disposition, the way you carry yourself.  NEIL: Yeah. I find also, I think that card for me came from like, it, it can be a strategy or it used to be a strategy for managing, like desire. Like I would see someone who was hot to me, but then I would mentally age them and be like, No, as a way to... Yeah, manage my desire.  JON: Yeah. I mean, I'm not petty, but I recently went to a high school reunion and I said, I loved that I did not peak.  NEIL: Oh my God.  JON: I'm still ascending.  NEIL: Oh, you so are. You totally are.  JON: Oh, thank you. And you are too.  NEIL: Um, I think I, I don't know where I am.  JON: You're aging gracefully.  NEIL: Thank you. I'm trying.  JON: That's, and that's the goal. Yeah. No. Cause it's like some people that were like super hot in like, in high school and you're just like, Oh wow. I think we, I think our people had a different kind of strategy. We had a different strategy.  NEIL: Yeah. It's like, um. I just read this book called The Overstory, which is all about trees. I don't know if you heard of it. It's so good. I recommend it, but, uh, it talks about the different things different trees' seeds need to become activated. Like some seeds need extreme cold. Some need to be set on fire. Um, so I think the gay seed... That sounds bad. JON: No, no, no. Perfect.  NEIL: Um, benefits from not having peaked in high school. JON: Yes, absolutely.  NEIL: Can I ask how old you are?  JON: 29. 29, my numerological golden year.  NEIL: Oh, what does that mean?  JON: Everyone has a life path number.  Okay, so mine breaks down to 29 slash 11 slash 2. If you're a, ever all my die-hard numerologists out there. Um, and so 29 is the first reduction. And so I'm 29.  NEIL: I love it. Um 29 and 11 are both prime numbers, aren't they?   JON: Mm, I studied visual arts in undergraduate, so I'm going to pass on this one. But you know, you calculate your number by just adding your birthdate across like... So mine is zero plus eight plus zero plus two plus one plus nine plus nine zero equals 29. Two plus nine is 11. One plus one is two. NEIL: I love it.  JON: And then they all have meanings. You know, there's a whole book. You can Google it.  NEIL: Yeah, I can imagine. Wait, so you were born in August? Was that what I heard? Leo? JON: I'm a Leo. Are you a Leo?  NEIL: No, I'm a Virgo.  JON: Oh! I have a lot of Virgo friends.  NEIL: I have a lot of Leo friends. Well, Virgo teaches Leo. You're taught by the sign that follows you. So Virgo is taught by Libra. Leo is taught by Virgo.  JON: Yes, yes. And. The sign before you teaches a person after to remember that they didn't have to give up the qualities that they left behind. NEIL:  Cheers.  JON: Virgos are famously the perfectionists, right? Natural at managing their immediate environments and, you know, being very meticulous and they could run the whole system, but then they forget that they're also, you know, they can allow themselves to shine. They don't have to be so critical of themselves.  NEIL: That is such a beautiful, um, flipping of the teaching thing. I love it.  JON: You know who is a prime example of a Leo-Virgo cusp?  NEIL: Who? JON: Beyoncé. So you can tell she has the Virgo energy of like, everything must be perfect.  NEIL: Absolutely.  JON: Um, and I'll think of my idea and then I'll present it to you. But then she's also, you know, still carrying her Leo energy of like, I am a star.  NEIL: Right, exactly. That's deep. You have forever changed how I think about, um, the Zodiac.  JON: And that's my time today.  NEIL: Yes. (flips card) What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y?  JON: What's a bad X you'd take over a good Y? Oh gosh. I would take a bad massage over a good meal.  NEIL: I'm with you, totally with you.  JON: I had to really think.  NEIL: Yeah, you look a little spent right now.  JON: No, I mean that, that took the, the, the final juice of my brain. Yeah. We have, we have gone to the trenches of my brain and pulled everything out. That was it. I mean, like, that's it. That's my, that's my ethos.  NEIL: Have you had a bad massage?  JON: Absolutely. And would I take it over a good meal? 100%. I'm a little, I'm a little surprised that I haven't vocalized this earlier in my life, but that's how you know this is the genuine response. Bad massages? Oh, I don't care. Someone's touching me, oh, I melt. I like, I think I'm like in a constant state of low-grade ecstasy when someone's touching me. Right?  NEIL: Yeah.  JON: It could be terrible. And I have had my share of terrible massages. You know, Chinatown massages have a spectrum.  NEIL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  JON: No frills. You can't complain.  NEIL: Yeah.  JON: Good meal? Okay. But I know I'm gonna be hungry again. You know, like... Meal goodness to me is controllable cause you could let yourself go to the brink of like, I can't see, I'm so hungry and anything will taste good. Yes. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I let myself get so hungry if I'm, if there's a meal I'm not thrilled to eat. I'd be like, Oh, I'm more vegetarian now, but when I would, when I was less, I would hang out with some of my friends, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to go to their place. I'm going to let myself get famished cause then it won't matter what I eat.  NEIL: Cause they're not good cooks, potentially? JON: Cause like, Oh, I really wanted meat. But like who knows what the vegetarian meal will be. A crap-shoot. But I'll be so hungry. It's going to taste like milk and honey from the Bible.  NEIL: You found a way to turn - you've made it predictable. You've managed it.  JON: I mean the gamble is, you do become more irritable and you have to kind of like have a lot of self-control. NEIL: Right, right, right.  JON: People want to small talk with you. You'd be like, okay, when's dinner?  NEIL: When's the shitty dinner that I'm starving for?  JON: A shout out to all my vegetarian friends. I love coming over to your house and don't stop making food from me.  NEIL: On that note, Jon Wan, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER. JON: Oh, thank you for having me, Neil. NEIL: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of SHE'S A TALKER. Before we get to the credits, there were some listener responses to cards that I'd love to share. In my conversation with Buddhist teacher Kate Johnson, we talked about the card:  I can imagine thinking as I'm dying, "Here we go again."  In response to that card, David Coleman wrote, "The one time that I ever really thought I was about to die, all I could think was, 'Wow, so this is it. Nothing more than this.' It was a feeling of peaceful surprise. This story is from 9/ 11. My building was so close to the World Trade Center that when the first tower started to collapse, it appeared as though it was going to fall to the East, which would've completely flattened my building, and I felt so sure I was about to die. Actually, for the next several months, I had this little secret thought I'd never shared that maybe I really was dead. But then again, my neurologist also said I was the only person he'd ever heard of who enjoyed having a stroke. So don't go by me." Thank you, David. If anyone out there listening has something that you'd like to share about a card on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at shesatalker@gmail.com or message us on Instagram at shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend. This series is made possible with generous support from Still Point Fund. Devon Guinn produced this episode. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, and Rachel Wang. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver, and my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to all of them, and to my guest, Jon Wan, and to you for listening. JEFF HILLER: She's a talker with Neil Goldberg. She's a talker with fabulous guests. She's a talker, it's better than it sounds, yeah!

Next Spoken Wheel episode is scheduled for January 31, 2019 @ 9pm eastern, contact us if you are interested in joining the round table conversation. TOPICS: Post Christmas ride to Greenwood, SC. Rich, Jon, Rico, and Steven Case (Riders of Loud Pipes member) for lunch at Mill House Pizza. (https://millhousepizza.com/) R6 is on the lift for another gasket change Jon rode to the Emerald Isle, NC (https://www.emeraldisle-nc.org/) Possible tail of the dragon trip again for Jon and the Dragon Krew 2019 Progressive International Motorcycle Show (http://www.motorcycleshows.com/cities) is starting this weekend: Easyriders show Charlotte 2019 (http://easyridersevents.com/bikeshow-2019-charlotte.php) - January 26-27 Park Expo Center (change in venue from last year) Congregation Show Charlotte 2019 (https://www.thecongregationshow.com/) April 13th, 1-8pm STATE OF THE STUDIO 2018 highlights Over 72 hours of produced content across 3 shows (Loud Pipes, MotoNobodies, Motorcycle Podcasters Challenge) Loud Pipes had almost as many downloads in 2018 than all prior years combined! MotoNobodies is finding their way and achieved an average show download number equal to Loud Pipes year year LP audience is 82.4% US followed in order by United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, all other countries listed in the last 2%. Apple podcast and related clients accounts for 63% of all downloads with 14% being the next largest category of other MotoNobodies is similar for countries, but has 58% Apple, 23% Android clients, and other is around 8% of the download total MPC 6 podcasts with 15 riders in total and 49 individual riders also signed up, with 29 riders earning points. 25,635 miles accumulated by all rider, which is enough to make a trip around the earth! Congrats again to Throttled podcast for winning the team challenge, and Zyon for the individual challenge Thank you to guests of the show for past year Irishman, KP Moto, Brother Bacon, Amp’d Moto, Colin (aka Broncoride), Aaron Smith, Liza Miller, Joey Mitchell, Dangerous Dave, Old Man Slacker, Sean Burch, Justin Webster, Roger Smith, Tom Churchill, Big events of 2018 New rider series Meetup in Gettysburg Barber trip 2019 plans LP without Rico for a while, interview heavy, more guests, perhaps other podcast hosts to join and fill that void. Patreon alternative, starting up direct links with Paypal (https://www.paypal.me/rdubstudios) and checks to our P.O. box Episodic level support and general support for the studio Some sort of split amongst the three shows Loud Pipes Racing (http://loudpipesracing.com) Support for racers for 2019 and beyond Individual bikes of Brian Hunnicutt The Peoples bike at Isle of Man TT for 2019 and 2020 Rich's R6 will run with the Loud Pipes! Racing graphics for track days Individual Thanks Rico: For his contributions to the show and behind the scenes efforts. Although he is currently taking a break, we started Loud Pipes over 4 years and 145 episodes ago, so a break to focus on family priorities is needed and well deserved Jon: What can I say, he does so much on the show and even more behind the scenes that people may not see directly, but without his efforts, your would for sure notice. Show notes, reminding me about things that need to get done, helping to plan and arrange topics/guests/content. Website updates, show notes, or just a place for me to vent out some frustration Natalie (and Jon again really) Work on MPC, graphics, swag, and also general advice and support as needed Brother Bacon for his efforts on the MotoNobodies podcast, his appearances on LP, and overall support again behind the scenes Thank you to Riders of Loud Pipes! Markus, Rickard, Edward, Jebie, and Zyon, Chuck, KnobbyTyre, Old Man Slacker, S.U.R Mike, the executive producer of chaos and mayhem, Steven, Jacob, Sean, Steve, Micah, Kenny, Dangerous Dave, James, Broncoride, Rich, Joe, Tony, Darren, the Motorcycles and Misfits podcast, Jared, Cale, and our newest member David Lineberger Thank you all for your support. It’s sincerely appreciated and we have some exciting plans for 2019, that are possible in part by the support from this group of great people. EVENTS: April 12th - 14th - MotoGP Austin, TX - Still in planning and only Jon confirmed so far June 1st 2019 East Coast Moto Amino Meetup - Salisbury NC Planning for 2019 Loud Pipes meetup - NC Summer. Looking for rough headcount for July 4th weekend. August 9th - 12th 2019 - Upstate NY Trip for Jon May 2020 - Isle of Man TT

Inhouse copywriter Jon Lamphier joins Kira and Rob for the 78th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’ve known Jon for a few years now and really admire his ability to get readers to care about his writing. And he’s a lot of fun to hang out with. We talked with Jon about: •  how socializing at a trivia game led to a job as a copywriter •  what it’s like to work as at an agency and his terrifying first days •  when he first realized that copywriting was what he wanted to do (and that he was good at it) •  the kinds of work he took on as an agency copywriter •  how he developed the ability to throw out funny one-liners •  how he breaks down the creative process to get to the right idea •  what the day-to-day work looks like at an agency •  the dark side of agency life (the knife someone on the first day analogy) •  how he balances freelance and a regular copywriting day job •  how he gets himself into the mindset for coming up with good ideas •  the big career mistake he made on the way to an important pitch •  how a mastermind made him a better writer and agency employee •  what Jon is doing today as an in-house copywriter •  what he learned from moving his family to a new city for a new job •  his two-word advice to writers going through the job search process We also talked about why he doesn’t limit himself to a single niche, where he sees himself working in sixty years (okay, maybe not sixty years), the books and other resources he loves as a copywriter, and the #1 mistake he sees copywriters making (and the opportunity it presents to those who are ready for it). To hear it all, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: McDonald’s George Clooney Joanna Wiebe Copyhackers David Ogilvy Aaron Sorkin JRR Tolkien Neil Gaiman Lianna Patch Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 78, as we talk with in-house copywriter Jon Lamphier about how he became a copywriter; the ends and outs of agency life; what he does to stay creative; and how he got so good at writing great headlines. Kira: Jon, welcome! Jon: Hey guys. Rob: Jon. Kira: I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to get you on the show. Rob: Yeah, seriously. Jon: What? Why? You guys have had so many famous copywriters on the show, I am the opposite of that! Kira: Laughs. Rob: Maybe not famous, but every bit as talented, and certainly a better friend than most of them are to us. Jon: All right, I’ll take....I’ll take that. I’ll take that; I appreciate it. Kira: Laughs. So why don’t we start with your story, Jon? How did you end up as a copywriter? Jon: All right. Well, I had a past life in another career, but, when I went to a trivia night one night after my wife and I had moved to Greensboro, North Carolina... Showed up at that trivia night, and made a friend who was actually the host. Told him I thought he did a great job, and we got to talking over a couple of adult beverages, and you know, he started talking about how he was overloaded at work. One thing led to another, and I picked up a freelance gig working for the agency that he was working for; I knocked it out of the park, and sort of fell in and realized that this is what I should’ve been doing all along, so... Rob: So you’re not the kind of guy that grew up wishing to be a copywriter? You weren’t watching Darren Stevens on Bewitched, or you know, any.... Jon: No.... Rob: ....Thinking “copy’s for me”? Jon: No, I wasn’t. I mean,

Eddard Stark was an honorable man. That we knew. But now that it seems that R+L=J, what does that mean for Jon? What were the whispers that Bran was conveniently too far away to hear? Is the Cersei we knew gone forever, and if so, what is she now? And why is it only the main characters who seem to find the express ships? Join Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me's Peter Sagal and Nerdette's Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen as they analyze the finale of Game of Thrones' sixth season, "The Winds of Winter."