Podcasts about jon who

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SUMMARY: Covered in This Episode: What is a Mental Compulsion?  What is the difference between Mental Rumination and Mental Compulsions?  How to use Mindfulness for Mental Compulsions How to “Label and Abandon” intrusive thoughts and mental compulsions  How to use Awareness logs to help reduce mental rituals and mental rumination  Links To Things I Talk About: Links to Jon's Books https://www.amazon.com/ Work with Jon https://www.sheppardpratt.org/care-finder/ocd-anxiety-center/ Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more.  To learn about our Online Course for OCD, visit https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free, and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION I want you to go back and listen to that. That is where I walk you through Mental Compulsions 101. What is a mental compulsion, the types of mental compulsions, things to be looking out for. The reason I stress that you start there is there may be things you're doing that are mental compulsions and you didn't realize. So, you want to know those things before you go in and listen to the skills that you're about to receive. Oh my goodness. This is just so, so exciting. I'm mind-blown with how exciting this is all for me. First of all, let's introduce the guest for today. Today, we have the amazing Jon Hershfield. Jon has been on the episode before, even talking about mental compulsions. However, I wanted him to status off. He was so brave. He jumped in, and I wanted him to give his ideas around what is a mental compulsion, how he uses mental compulsion treatment with his clients, what skills he uses. Little thing to know here, he taught me something I myself didn't know and have now since implemented with our patients over at my clinic of people who struggle with mental compulsions. I've also uploaded that and added a little bit of that concept into ERP School, which is our course for OCD, called ERP School. You can get it at CBTSchool.com.  Jon is amazing. So, you're going to really feel solid moving into this. He gives some solid advice. Of course, he's always so lovely and wise. And so, I am just so excited to share this with you. Let's just get to the show because I know you're here to learn. This is episode two of the series. Next week we will be talking with Shala Nicely and she will be dropping major truth bombs and major skills as well, as will all of the people on the series. So, I am so, so excited.  One thing to know as you move into it is there will be some things that really work for you and some that won't. So, I'm going to say this in every episode intro. So, all of these skills are top-notch science-based skills. Each person is going to give their own specific nuanced way of managing it. So, I want you to go in knowing that you can take what you need. Some things will really be like, yes, that's exactly what I needed to hear. Some may not. So, I want you to go in with an open mind knowing that the whole purpose of this six-part series is to give you many different approaches so that you can try on what works for you. That's my main agenda here, is that you can feel like you've gotten all the ideas and then you can start to put together a plan for yourself. Let's go over to the show. I'm so happy you're here. ----- Kimberley: Welcome, Jon. I'm so happy to have you back. Jon: Hi, Kimberley. Thanks for having me back. Difference Between Mental Compulsions and Mental Rumination  Kimberley: Okay. So, you're first in line and I purposely had you first in line. I know we've had episodes similar to this in the past, but I just wanted to really get your view on how you're dealing with mental compulsions. First, I want to check in, do you call them “mental compulsions” or do you call it “mental rumination”? Do you want to clarify your own idea? Jon: Yeah. I say mental compulsions or mental rituals. I use the terms pretty interchangeably. It comes up at the first, usually in the assessment, if not then in the first post-assessment session, when I'm explaining how OCD works and I get to the part we say, and then there's this thing called compulsions. And what I do is I describe compulsions as anything that you do physically or mentally to reduce distress, and this is the important part, specifically by trying to increase certainty about the content of the obsession.  Why that's important is I think we need to get rid of this myth that sometimes shows up in the OCD community that when you do exposures or when you're triggered, you're just supposed to freak out and deal with it, and hopefully, it'll go away on its own. Actually, there are many things you can do to reduce distress that aren't compulsive, because what makes it compulsive is that it's acting on the content of the obsession. I mean, there might be some rare exceptions where your specific obsession has to do with an unwillingness to be anxious or something like that. But for the most part, meditation, breathing exercises, grounding exercises, DBT, certain forms of distraction, exercise – these can all reduce your physical experience of distress without saying anything in particular about whether or not the thought that triggered you is true or going to come. So, once I've described that, then hopefully, it opens people up to realize, well, it could really be anything and most of those things are going to be mental. So then, we go through, “Well, what are the different mental ways?” We know the physical ways through washing hands and checking locks and things like that. But what are all the things you're doing in your mind to convince yourself out of the distress, as opposed to actually working your way through the distress using a variety of distress tolerance skills, including acceptance? Kimberley: Right. Do you do the same for people with generalized anxiety or social anxiety or other anxiety disorders? Would you conceptualize it the same way? Mental Compulsions for General Anxiety Disorder vs OCD  Jon: Yeah. I think for the most part, I mean, I do meet people. Some people who I think are better understood as having generalized anxiety disorder than OCD, and identifying with that concept actually helps them approach this problem that they have of dealing with uncertainty and dealing with worry and dealing with anxiety on close to home, regular everyday issues like finance and work and health and relationships and things like that. And there's a subsection of that people who, if you treat it like OCD, it's really helpful. And there's a subsection if you treat it like OCD, they think, “Oh no, I have some other psychiatric problem I have to worry about right now.” I'm a fan of treating the individual that the diagnostic terms are there to help us. Fundamentally, the treatment will be the same. What are you doing that's sending the signal to your brain, that these ideas are threats as opposed to ideas, and how can we change that signal? Exposure & Response Prevention for Mental Compulsions  Kimberley: Right. I thank you for clarifying on that. So, after you've given that degree of psychoeducation, what do you personally do next? Do you want to share? Do you go more into an exposure option? Do you do more response prevention? Tell me a little bit about it, walk me through how you would do this with a client. Jon: The first thing I would usually do is ask them to educate me on what it's really like to be them. And so, that involves some thought tracking. So, we'll use a trigger and response log. So, I keep it very simple. What's setting you off and what are you doing? And I'll tell them in the beginning, don't try too hard to get better because I want to know what your life is really like, and I'll start to see the patterns. It seems every time you're triggered by this, you seem to do that. And that's where they'll start to reveal to me things like, “Well, I just thought about it for an hour and then it went away.” And that's how I know that they're engaging in mental review and rumination, other things like that. Or I was triggered by the thought that I could be sick and I repeated the word “healthy” 10 times. Okay. So, they're doing thought neutralization. Sometimes we'll expand on that. One of the clinicians in my practice took our thought records and repurposed them as a mental behavior log. So, it's what set you off. What did you do? What was the mental behavior that was happening at that time? And in some cases, what would've been more helpful? Again, I rely more on my patients to tell me what's going on than on me to tell them “Here's what's going on,” so you get the best information. Logging Mental Rituals  Kimberley: Right. I love that. I love the idea of having a log. You're really checking in for what's going on before dropping everything down. Does that increase their distress? How do they experience that? Jon: I think a lot of people find it very helpful because first of all, it's an act of mindfulness to write this stuff down because it's requiring you to put it in front of you and see it, which is different than having it hit you from inside your head. And so, that's helpful. They're seeing it as a thought process. And I think it also helps people come to terms with a certain reality about rumination that it's not a hundred percent compulsion in the sense that there's an element of rumination that's habitual. Your mind, like a puppy, is conditioned to respond automatically to certain things that it's been reinforced to do. And so, sometimes people just ruminate because they're alone or sitting in a particular chair. It's the same reason why people sometimes struggle with hair-pulling disorder, trichotillomania or skin picking. It's these environmental cues. And then the brain says, “Oh, we should do this now because this is what we do in this situation.” People give themselves a really hard time for ruminating because they've been told to stop, but they can't stop because they find themselves doing it.  So, what I try to help people understand is like, “Look, you can only control what you can control. And the more that you are aware of, the more you can control. So, this is where you can bring mindfulness into it.” So, maybe for this person, there's such a ruminator. They're constantly analyzing, figuring things out. It's part of their identity. They're very philosophical. They're not thinking of it as a compulsion, and many times they're not thinking of it at all. It's just happening. And then we increased their awareness, like, “Oh, okay. I got triggered. I left the building for a while. And then suddenly, I realized I was way down the rabbit hole, convinced myself that's something terrible. So, in that moment I realized I'm supposed to stop, but so much damage has been done because I just spent a really long time analyzing and compulsing and trying to figure it out.”  So, strategies that increase our awareness of what the mind is doing are extraordinarily helpful because imagine catching it five seconds into the process and being able to say, “Oh, I'm ruminating. Okay, I don't need to do that right now. I'm going to return my attention to what I was doing before I got distracted.” Kimberley: Right. I love the idea of this, the log for awareness, because a lot of people say, “Oh, maybe for half an hour a day.” Once they've logged it, they're like, “Wow, it's four hours a day.” I think it's helpful to actually recognize this, like how impactful it is on their life. So, I love that you're doing that piece. You can only control what you can control. What do you do with the stuff you can't control? Jon: Oh, you apply heavy doses of self-criticism until you hate yourself enough to never do it again. That's the other mental ritual that usually happens and people realize, “Oh, I've been ruminating,” and they're angry at themselves. “I should know better.” So, they're angry at themselves for something they didn't know they were doing, which is unfair. So, I use the term, I say, “label and abandon.” That's what you do with all mental rituals. The moment you see it, you give it a name and you drop it. You just drop it on the floor where you were, you don't finish it up real quick. You don't analyze too much about it and then drop it. You're just like, “Oh, I'm holding this thing I must not hold,” and you drop it. Label and abandon. What people tend to do is criticize then label, then criticize some more and then abandon. And the real problem with that is that the self-criticism is in and of itself another mental ritual. It's a strategy for reducing distress that's focused on increasing certainty about the content of the obsession. The obsession, in this case, is “I'm never going to get better.” Now I know I'm going to get better because I've told myself that I'm being fooled and that I'll never do that again. It's not true. But then you wash your hands. They aren't really clean either. So, none of our compulsions really work. Self-Compassion for Mental Compulsions  Kimberley: Doesn't have to make sense.  Jon: Yeah. So, I think bringing self-compassion in the moment to be able to recognize it and recognize the urge to self-criticize and really just say like, “Oh, I'm not going to do that. I caught myself ruminating. Well done.” Same thing we do when we meditate. Some people think that meditation has something to do with relaxation or something to do with controlling your mind. It's actually just a noticing exercise. Your mind wanders, you notice it. “Oh, look at that, I'm thinking.” Back to the breath. That's a good thing that you noticed that you wandered. Not, “Oh, I wandered, I can't focus. I'm bad at meditating.” So, it's really just changing the frame for how people are relating to what's going on inside.  One, eliminating self-criticism just makes life a lot easier. Two, eliminating the self-criticism and including that willingness to just label the thought pattern or the thought process and drop it right where it is. You can start to catch that earlier and earlier and earlier. So, you're reducing compulsions. And you'll see that the activity, the neutralizing, the figuring it out, the using your mental strength against yourself instead of in support of yourself, you could see how that's sending the signal to the brain. “Wait, this is very important. I need to keep pushing it to the forefront.” There's something to figure out here. This isn't a cold case in a box, on a shelf somewhere. This is an ongoing investigation and we have to figure it out. How do we know? Because they're still trying to figure it out. Kimberley: Right. How much do you think insight has to play here or how much of a role does it play? Jon: Insight plays a role in all forms of OCD. I mean, it plays a role in everything – insight into our relationships, insight into our career aspirations. I think one of the things I've noticed, and this is just anecdotal, is that the higher the distress and the poorer the distress regulation skills, often the lower the insight. Not necessarily the other way around. Some people have low insight and aren't particularly distressed by what's going on, but if the anxiety and the distress and the discomfort and disgust are so high that the brain goes into a brownout, I noticed that people switch from trying to get me to reassure them that their fears are untrue to trying to convince me that their fears are true. And to me, that represents an insight drop and I want to help them boost up their insight. And again, I think becoming more aware of your mental activity that is voluntary – I'm choosing to put my mind on this, I'm choosing to figure it out, it didn't just happen. But in this moment, I'm actually trying to complete the problem, the puzzle – becoming more aware that that's what you're doing, that's how you develop insight. And that actually helps with distress regulation. Kimberley: Right. Tell me, I love you're using this word. So, for someone who struggles with distress regulation, what kind of skills would you give a client or use for yourself? Jon: So, there are many different skills a person could use. And I hesitate to say, “Look, use this skill,” because sometimes if you're always relying on one skill and it's not working for you, you might be resistant to using a different skill. In DBT, they have something called tip skills. So, changing in-- drastic changes in temperature, intense exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, pace breathing. These are all ways of shifting your perspective. In a more global sense, I think the most important thing is dropping out of the intellectualization of what's happening and into the body. So, let's say the problem, the way you know that you're anxious is that your muscles are tense and there's heat in your body and your heart rate is elevated. But there are lots of circumstances in your life where your muscles would be tense and your heart rate will be up and you'll feel hot, and you might be exercising, for example.  So, that experience alone isn't threatening. It's that experience press plus the narrative that something bad is going to happen and it's because I'm triggered and it's because I can't handle the uncertainty and all this stuff. So, it's doing two things at once. It's dropping out of the thought process, which is fundamentally the same thing as labeling and abandoning the mental ritual, and then dropping into the body and saying, “What's happening now is my hands are sweaty,” and just paying attention to it. Okay, alright, sweaty hands. I can be with sweaty hands. Slowing things down and looking at things the way they are, which is not intellectual, as opposed to looking at things the way they could be, or should be, or might have been, which again is a mental ruminative process. Kimberley: Right. Do you find-- I have found recently actually with several clients that they have an obsession. They start to ruminate and then somewhere through there, it's hard to determine what's in control and what's not. So, we want to preface it with that. But things get really out of control once they start to catastrophize even more. So, would you call the catastrophization a mental rumination, or would you call it an intrusive thought? How would you conceptualize that with a client? They have the obsession, they start ruminating, and then they start going to the worst-case scenario and just staying there. Jon: Yeah. There's different ways to look at it. So, catastrophizing is predicting a negative future and assuming you can't cope with it, and it's a way of thinking about a situation. So, it's investing in a false project. The real project is there's something unknown about the future and it makes you uncomfortable and you don't like it. How do you deal with that? That's worth taking a look at. The false project is, my plane is going to crash and I need to figure out how to keep the plane from crashing. But that's how the OCD mind tends to work. So, one way of thinking about catastrophizing is it's a tone it's a way-- if you can step back far enough and be mindful of the fact that you're thinking, you can also be mindful of the fact that there is a way that you're thinking. And if the way that you're thinking is catastrophizing, you could say, “Yeah, that's catastrophizing. I don't need to do that right now.”  But I think to your point, it is also an act. It's something somebody is doing. It's like, I'm going to see this through to the end and the hopes that it doesn't end in catastrophe, but I'm also going to steer it into catastrophe because I just can't help myself. It's like a hot stove in your head that you just want to touch and you're like, “Ouch.” And in that case, I would say, yeah, that's a mental ritual. It's something that you're doing.  I like the concept of non-engagement responses. So, things that you can do to respond to the thought process that aren't engaging it directly, that are helping you launch off. Because like I said, before you label and abandon. But between the label and abandon, a lot of people feel like they need a little help. They need something to drive a wedge between them and the thought process. Simply dropping it just doesn't feel enough, or it's met with such distress because whenever you don't do a compulsion, it feels irresponsible, and they can't handle that distress. So, they need just a little boost.  What do we know about OCD? We know that the one thing you can't do effectively is defend yourself because then you're getting into an argument and you can't win an argument against somebody who doesn't care what the outcome of the argument is. The OCD just wants to argue. So, any argument, no matter how good it is, the OCD is like, “Great, now we're arguing again.” How to Manage Mental Compulsions  Kimberley: Yeah. “I got you.” Jon: Yeah. So, what are our options? What are our non-engagement response options? One, which I think is completely undersold, is ignoring it. Just ignoring it. Again, none of these you want to only focus on because they could all become compulsive. And then you're walking around going, “I'm ignoring it, I'm ignoring it.” And then you're just actually avoiding it. But it's completely okay to just choose not to take yourself seriously. You look at your email and it's things that you want. And then in there is a junk mail that just accidentally got filtered into the inbox instead of the spam box, and mostly what you do is ignore it. You don't even read the subject of it. You recognize that in the moment, it's spam and you move on as if it wasn't even there. Then there's being mindful of it. Mindful noting. Just acknowledging it. You take that extra beat to be like, “Oh yeah, there's that thought.” In act, they would call this diffusion. I'm having a thought that something terrible is going to happen. And then you're dropping it. So, you're just stepping back and be like, “Oh, I see what's going on here. Okay, cool. But I'm not going to respond to it.” And then as we get into more ERP territory, we also have the option of agreeing with the uncertainty that maybe, maybe not. “What do I know? Okay. Maybe the plane is going to crash. I can't be bothered with this.” But you have to do it with attitude because if you get too involved in the linguistics of it, then it's like, well, what's the potential that it'll happen? And you can't play that game, the probability game.  But it is objectively true that any statement that begins with the word “maybe” has something to it. Maybe in the middle of this call, this computer is going to explode or something like that. It would be very silly for me to worry about that, but you can't deny that the statement is true because it's possible. It's maybe. So, just acknowledging that, be like, “Okay, fine. Maybe.” And then dropping it the way you would if you had some thought that you didn't find triggering and yet was still objectively true.  And then the last one, which can be a lot of fun, can also be overdone, can also become compulsive, but if done well can make life a little bit more fun, is agreeing with the thought in an exaggerated humorous, sarcastic way. Just blowing it up. So, you're out doing the OCD. The OCD is very creative, but you're more creative than the OCD. Kimberley: Can you give me examples? Jon: Well, the OCD says your plane is going to crash. He said, your plane is going to crash into a school. Just be done with it, right? And that kind of shock where the bully is expecting you to defend yourself and instead, you just punched yourself in the face. He's like, “Yeah, you're weird. I'm not going to bother you anymore.” That's the relationship one wants with their OCD. Kimberley: That's true. I remember in a previous episode we had with, I think it was when you had brought out your team book about saying “Good one bro,” or “brah.” Jon: “Cool story, brah.” Yeah.  Kimberley: Cool story brah. And I've had many of my patients say that that was also really helpful, is there's a degree of attitude that goes with that, right? Jon: Yeah. And because again, it's just a glitch in the system that, of course, you're conditioned to respond to it like it's serious. But once you realize it is, once you get the hint that it's OCD, you have to shift out of that, “Oh, this is very important, very serious,” and into this like, “This is junk mail.” And if you actually look at your junk mail, none of it is serious. It sounds serious. It sounds like I just inherited a billion dollars from some prince in Nigeria. That sounds very important. I Kimberley: I get that email every day pretty much.  Jon: Yeah. But I look at it and immediately I know that it's not serious, even though the words in it sound very important.  Kimberley: Yeah. So, for somebody, I'm sitting in the mind of someone who has OCD and is listening right now, and I'm guessing, to those who are listening, you're nodding and “Yes, this is so helpful. This is so helpful.” And then we may finish the episode and then the realization that “This is really hard” comes. How much coaching, how much encouragement? How do you walk someone through treatment who is finding this incredibly difficult? Jon: I want to live in your mind. In my mind, let that same audience member is like, “This guy sucks.” Kimberley: My mind isn't so funny after we start the recording. So, you're cool. Jon: Who is this clown? Again, it's back to self-compassion. I'm sure people are tired of hearing about it, but it's simply more objective. It is hard. And if you're acting like it shouldn't be hard or you're doing something wrong as a function, it's hard because you're doing something wrong, you're really confused. How could that be? You could not have known better than to end up here. Everything that brought you here was some other thought or some other feeling, and you're just responding to your environment. The question is right now where you have some control, what are you going to do with your attention? Right now, you're noticing, “Oh man, it's really hard to resist mental rituals. It's hard to catch them. It's hard to let go of them. It's hard to deal with the anxiety of thinking because I didn't finish the mental ritual. Maybe I missed something and somebody's going to get hurt or something like that because I didn't figure it out.”  It is really hard. I don't think we should pretend that it's easy. We should acknowledge that it's hard. And then we should ask, “Okay, well, I made a decision that I'm going to do this. I'm going to treat my OCD and it looks like the treatment for OCD is I'm going to confront this uncertainty and not do compulsions. So, I have to figure out what to do with the fact that it's hard.” And then it's back to the body. How do you know that it's hard? “Well, I could feel the tension here and I could feel my heart rate and my breath.” So, let's work with that. How can I relate to that experience that's coming up in a way that's actually helpful? The thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is this idea that the brain is quick to learn that something is dangerous. Something happens and it hurts, and your brain is like, “Yeah, let's not do that again.” And you might conclude later that that thing really wasn't as dangerous as you thought. And so, you want to re-engage with it. And you might find that's really hard to do, which is why exposure therapy is really hard because it's not like a one-and-done thing. You have to practice it because the brain is very slow to learn that something is safe, especially after it's been taught that it's dangerous.  But that's not a bad thing. You want a brain that does that. You don't want a brain that's like, “Yeah, well, I got bit by one dog, but who cares? Let's go back in the kennel.” You want a brain that's like, “Hold on. Are you sure about this?” That whole process of overcoming your fears, I think people, again, they're way too hard on themselves. It should take some time and it should be slow and sluggish. You look like you're getting better, and then you slip back a little bit, because it's really just your brain saying, “Listen, I'm here to keep you safe, and I learned that you weren't, and you are not following rules. So, I'm pulling you back.” That's where that is coming from. So, that's the hard feeling. That's the hard feeling right there. It's your brain really trying to get you to say, “No, go back to doing compulsions. Compulsions are keeping you safe.” You have to override that circuit and say, “I appreciate your help. But I think I know something that you don't. So, I'm going to keep doing this.” And then you can relate to that hard feeling with like, “Good, my brain works. My brain is slow and sluggish to change, but not totally resistant. Over time, I'm going to bend it to my will and it will eventually let go, and either say this isn't scary anymore or say like, ‘Well, it's still scary, but I'm not going to keep you from doing it.'” Kimberley: Right. I had a client at the beginning of COVID I think, and the biggest struggle-- and this was true for a lot of people, I think, is they would notice the thought, notice they're engaging in compulsions and drop it, to use your language, and then go, “Yay, I did that.” And then they would notice another thought in the next 12 seconds or half a second, and then they would go, “Okay, notice it and drop it.” And then they'd do it again. And by number 14, they're like, “No, this is--” or it would either be like, “This is too hard,” or “This isn't working.” So, I'm wondering if you could speak to-- we've talked about it being “too hard.” Can you speak to your ideas around “this isn't working”? Jon: Yeah. That's a painful thought. I think that a lot of times, people, when they say it isn't working, I ask them to be more specific because their definition of working often involves things like, “I was expecting not to have more intrusive thoughts,” or “I was expecting for those thoughts to not make me anxious.” And when you let go of those expectations, which isn't lowering them at all, it's just shifting them, asking, well, what is it that you really want to do in your limited time on this earth? You're offline for billions of years. Now you're online for, I don't know, 70 to 100 if you're lucky, and then you're offline again. So, this is the time you have. So, what do you want to do with your attention? And if it's going to be completely focused on your mental health, well, that's a bummer. You need to be able to yes, notice the thought, yes, notice the ritual, yes, drop them both, and then return to something.  In this crazy world we're living in now where we're just constantly surrounded by things to stimulate us and trigger us and make us think, we have lots of things to turn to that aren't necessarily healthy, but they're not all unhealthy either. So, it's not hard to turn your attention away from something and into a YouTube video or something like that. It is more challenging to shift your attention away from something scary and then bring it to the flavor of your tea. That's a mindfulness issue. That's all that is. Why is one thing easier than the other? It's because you don't think the flavor of your tea is important. Why? Because you're just not stimulated by the firing off of neurons in your tongue and the fact that we're alive on earth and that we've evolved over a million years to be able to make and taste tea. That's not as interesting as somebody dancing to a rap song. I get that, but it could be if you're paying a different kind of attention. So, it's just something to consider when you're like, “Well, I can't return to the present because it doesn't engage me in there.” Something to consider, what would really engage you and what is it about the present that you find so uninteresting? Maybe you should take another look. Kimberley: Right. For me, I'm just still so shocked that gravity works. Whenever I'm really stuck, I will admit, my rumination isn't so anxiety-based. I think it's more when I'm angry, I get into a ruminative place. We can do that similar behavior. So, when I'm feeling that, I have to just be like, “Okay, drop away from, that's not helpful. Be aware and then drop it.” And then for me, it's just like, “Wow, the gravity is pulling me down. It just keeps blowing my mind.” Jon: Yeah. That's probably a better use of your thought process than continuing to ruminate. But you bring up another point. I think this speaks more closely to your question about when people say it's not working. I'm probably going to go to OCD jail for this, but I think to some extent, when you get knocked off track by an OCD trigger, because you made me think of it when you're talking about anger. Like, someone says something to you and makes you angry and you're ruminating about it. But it's the same thing in OCD. Something happens. Something triggers you to think like, “I'm going to lose my job. I'm a terrible parent,” or something like that. You're just triggered. This isn't just like a little thought, you're like, “Oh, that's my OCD.” You can feel it in your bones. It got you. It really got you.  Now, you can put off ruminating as best you can, but you're going to be carrying that pain in your bones for a while. It could be an hour, could be a day, could be a couple of days. Now, if it's more than a couple of days, you have to take ownership of the fact that you are playing a big role in keeping this thing going and you need to change if you want different results. But if it's less than a couple of days and you have OCD, sometimes all you can do is just own it. “All right, I'm just going to be ruminating a lot right now.” And I'm not saying like, hey, sit there and really try to ruminate. But it's back to that thing before, like your brain is conditioned to take this seriously, and no matter how much you tell yourself it's not serious, your brain is going to do what your brain is going to do. And so, can you get your work done? Try to show up for your family, try to laugh when something funny happens on TV, even while there's this elephant sitting on your chest. And every second that you're not distracted, your mind is like, “Why did they say that? Why did I do that? What's going to happen next?” And really just step back from it and say like, “You know what, it's just going to have to be like this for now.” What I see people do a lot is really undersell how much that is living with OCD. “I'm not getting better.” I had this happen actually just earlier today. Somebody was telling me, walking me through this story that was just full of OCD minds that they kept stepping on and they kept exploding and they were distressed and everything. And yet, throughout the whole process, the only problem was they were having OCD and they were upset. But they weren't avoiding the situation. They weren't asking for reassurance and they weren't harming themselves in any way. They were just having a rough time because they just had their buttons pushed. It was frustrating because they wouldn't acknowledge that that is a kind of progress that is living with this disorder, which necessarily involves having symptoms.  I don't want people to get confused here and say like, “This is as good as it gets,” or “You should give up hope for getting better.” It's not about that. Part of getting better is really owning that this is how you show up in the world. You have your assets and your liabilities, and sometimes the best thing to do is just accept what's going on and work through it in a more self-compassionate way. Kimberley: Right. I really resonate with that too. I've had to practice that a lot lately too of accepting my humanness. Because I think there are times where you catch yourself and you're like, “No, I should be performing way up higher.” And then you're like, “No, let's just accept these next few days are going to be rough.” I like that. I think that that's actually more realistic in terms of what recovery really might look like. This is going to be a rough couple of days or a rough couple of hours or whatever it may be. Jon: Yeah. If you get punched hard enough in the stomach and knock the wind out of you, that takes a certain period of time before you catch your breath. And if you get punched in the OCD brain, it takes a certain amount of time before you catch your breath. So, hang on. It will get better. And again, this isn't me saying, just do as many compulsions as you want. It's just, you're going to do some, especially rumination and taking ownership of that, “Oh man, it's really loud in there. I've been ruminating a lot today. I'll just do the best I can.” That's going to be a better approach than like, “I'm going to sit and track every single thought and I'm going to burn it to the ground. I'm going to do it every five seconds.” Really, you're just going to end up ruminating more that way. Kimberley: Right. And probably beating yourself up more. Jon: Exactly. Kimberley: Right. Okay. I feel like that is an amazing place for us to end. Before we do, is there anything you feel like we've missed that you just want people to know before we finish up? Jon: I guess what's really important to know since we're talking about mental compulsions is that it's not separate from the rest of OCD and it's not harder to treat. People have this idea that, well, if you're a compulsive hand-washer, you can just stop washing your hands or you can just remove the sink or something like that. But if you're a compulsive ruminator about whether or not you're going to harm someone or you're a good person or any of that stuff, somehow that's harder to treat. I've not found this to be the case. Anecdotally, I haven't seen any evidence that this is really the case in terms of research. You might be harder on yourself in some ways, and that might make your symptoms seem more severe, but that's got nothing to do with how hard you are to treat or the likelihood of you getting better. Most physical rituals are really just efforts to get done what your mental rituals are not doing for you. So, many people who are doing physical rituals are also doing mental rituals and those who aren't doing physical rituals. Again, some people wash their hands. Some people wash their minds. Many people do both. A lot of this stuff, it has to do with like, “I expect my mind to be one way, and it's another.” And that thing that's making it another is a contaminant, “I hate it and I want to go away and I'm going to try to get it to go away.” And that's how this disorder works. Kimberley: Right. It's really, really wonderful advice. I think that it's actually really great that you covered that because I think a lot of people ask that question of, does that mean that I'm going to only have half the recovery of someone who does physical compulsions or just Googles or just seeks reassurance? So, I think it's really important. Do you feel like someone can overcome OCD if their predominant compulsion is mental? Jon: Absolutely. They may even have assets that they are unaware of that makes them even more treatable. I mean, only one way to find out. Kimberley: Yeah. I'm so grateful to you. Thank you for coming on. This is just filling my heart so much. Thank you. Jon: Thank you. I always love speaking with you. Kimberley: Do you want to share where people can find you and all your amazing books and what you're doing? Jon: My hub is OCDBaltimore.com. That's the website for the Center for OCD and Anxiety at Sheppard Pratt, and also the OCD program at The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt. And I'm on Instagram at OCDBaltimore, Twitter at OCDBaltimore. I don't know what my Facebook page is, but it's out there somewhere. I'm not hard to find. Falling behind a little bit on my meme game, I haven't found anything quite funny or inspiring enough. I think I've toured through all of my favorite movies and TV shows. And so, I'm waiting for some show that I'm into to inspire me. But someone asked me the other day, “Wait, you stopped with the memes.” Kimberley: They're like, nothing's funny anymore. Jon: I try not to get into that headspace. Sometimes I do think that way, but yeah, the memes find me. I don't find them. Kimberley: I love it. And your books are all on Amazon or wherever you can buy books, I'm imagining. Jon: Yes. The OCD Workbook For Teens is my most recent one and the second edition of the Mindfulness Workbook for OCD is also a relatively recent one. Kimberley: Amazing. You're amazing. Thank you so much. Jon: Thank you.

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.

We talk about Summer Camp (sorry Jon) Who we're rooting for in in the Yankess/Nationals match-up Sydney tells me I have bad taste in music Who has the most to gain from a 60 game season? --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Are your marketing goals lining up with the goals you've set to grow your business overall? Many business owners or executive teams set goals for their online marketing to drive profit to the company. Unfortunately, the current digital marketing landscape makes it difficult to reach digital marketing goals that have a focus on profit: * Generally speaking, digital marketing has increased in competition and the real estate available for paid ads has shrunk (mainly on Google which controls a vast majority of search volume). * This has forced companies to further emphasize customer lifetime value activities (such as email and loyalty programs) to drive business profit. * Instead of driving profit from the first order on paid search, companies now may only break-even on that initial order (some companies even lose money on the first order-on purpose). The solution is to focus less on marketing ROI and focus more on the overall business objectives, like increasing market share: * Revisit the goal every two months to see how email and loyalty channels are impacted by the increase of new customers. * In theory, both of those channels will be driving much higher volumes of sales at extremely profitable levels. Even if profit doesn’t match up exactly, the sales volume will be making a noticeable dent in competitors. * Customers that buy from your website through non-brand search and shopping are customers that were likely going to purchase from a competitor if you didn’t get them. * They didn’t have any brand or site loyalty when making the search. * Over time, investing in non-brand search/shopping more aggressively will also have what we call, The Halo Effect. * Don’t let any changed goal continue for more than two months into the new year without analyzing the data to make sure that it is driving the intended outcome. * Having goals that don’t drive the business in the right direction aren’t necessarily bad, but can have unintended consequences when left unreviewed. LINKS "I Have Bad Goals, You Have Bad Goals, We ALL Have Bad Goals" by Ryan Garrow (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-bad-goals-you-we-all-part-1-ryan-garrow/) TRANSCRIPT JON MACDONALD: Ryan, I know you've spent a lot of time communicating with business owners and marketing teams about their goals with online marketing. To put these goals in perspective, we have to discuss overall business goals, and that's to me where things get really interesting, because their current marketing goals are not driving the online business towards an overall business goal. The business or individual usually has set a bad goal and the best time to review those I would think is at the beginning of a new budget year, which is typically the start of a calendar year. Ryan, today let's talk about setting more appropriate goals to online marketing and align that with business objectives. How does that sound? RYAN GARROW: Sounds awesome. It's one of my favorite topics actually. I get into this all year actually. I'll be talking to business owners as they're thinking about becoming a client or working with us. Or even if I'm just out having a beer after a conference, I always love talking about goals. It's been a big part of my life, and how I operate so I'm constantly setting goals, revisiting them, and business strategy and goal setting go so hand in hand that it just becomes a topic I naturally get to probably in almost every conversation with business owners or marketing teams. So often, I find that there are well intentioned people throughout an organization that set what seems to be an appropriate goal for their team, and then they get down the road 6 months to 12 months, and maybe they hit their goal, but it drove the business in a completely different direction then it actually been anticipated. Without all the stops in place, you really revisit that goal and decide, "Is this actually working and are we actually accomplishing what we're trying to accomplish?" It can be very fascinating conversation in that process. I'm excited about this topic for sure. JON: I recognize and maybe our listeners don't know, but you run several online businesses yourself, right? RYAN: Yes, my wife and I have probably more than our fair share [laughs] that we run. JON: I would think one is a fair share so the fact that you have more than that is awesome. That speaks to the fact that you put a lot of what you preach into practice, right? RYAN: Yes, there's actually not a scenario in which I will advise a business owner or marketing team to do something that I'm probably not already doing or I haven't learned from and therefore advise them correctly based on my own misgivings or wasted money. JON: I imagine in your day, you've probably set a bad goal or two. RYAN: The list is ongoing and my wife likes to remind me of those [laughs]. One funny one recently, I was so mad at myself for this one. We were launching a brand and we decided to launch it on Amazon. Partially for the education, but also because I had been built up as a digital marketer to fear Amazon, and that just made me mad that I was scared of Amazon. That's why I go, "Forget it. We're going to launch a brand on Amazon and see what happens. We have to understand the landscape." Our team was deciding to start up an Amazon ads department. I said, "All right, we'll launch on Amazon, you can have my money. I'll set a wonderfully appropriate goal to make sure we hit our objectives." Initially is like, "All right, I'm going to share the upside with this team and we're going to have a profit share." They know my margins because they need to know that to run the digital marketing through Amazon and help create the pages and all that. We had this wonderful goal that every dollar of profit we got from ads, they were going to get, I think it's something around 20% of that dollar, whatever that looked like. I can't remember exactly the goal. My goal as a business owner in launching this business was to dominate the competition. I was not in the game for profit. I want to spend down to break even to get customers, I want to understand the Amazon ecosystem, but my goal really in this is it's an organic fertilizer. I want to take down Monsanto. A pretty lofty goal considering how many billions of dollars they have. JON: Yes, no kidding. RYAN: Profit was secondary to me, it was like, let's get the product in the hands of people. I want to know their feedback as well as saying, "Hey, the more people that get it, the better my opportunities for repeat business, et cetera, et cetera." We get three months down the road, and I'm just frustrated with growth, like, hey, we went up aggressively. When we started the marketing it was exciting. My partners and I were looking at numbers daily. It was actually when the Apple Watch which we all had had the Amazon ping every time you got a sale, which was great. We'd have a glass of wine at the end of the day and our watch would go off and we're like, "Yes, we just got a sale. This is awesome." We were excited, but it flat-line so quick, and three months in I was talking to the team and I was like, there is way more search volume here on Amazon than what we're capturing. I could see our search rank and where we are ranking the competitors and their sales volume based on reviews and all these other metrics we had to look at. We were not moving the needle forward according to my overall business goal of becoming one of the largest houseplant fertilizers in the marketplace. The teams like, "Oh, the numbers are great. Look at we spent $5,000, regenerated 10 $12,000 of profit. You cut us a cheque on the side for $1,000. Isn't this great?" That is not my goal. Profits, not bad. The partners weren't upset about the profit, but the flat-line growth had to do with the fact that our marketing team that was pushing the levers, and pulling levers on the Amazon ads weren't actually able to accomplish my overall goal of market share and getting sales and new users because they were being conservative to protect that margin, which was their goal. I had to go back to the team and like, "Okay, I like the fact that we're able to pay you because you generate a profit. You nailed the goal. Awesome job. High fives all around, but as a business owner, I have to now change the goal because I don't really care about profit. I care about sales." We adjusted the goal to get on to percent of overall revenue, as long as we're not losing money. I said, "If there's a dollar in profit, I'm still paying you and I'll technically lose money as a brand, but that's the goal I want is aggressive sales growth, regardless of dollar profit from marketing, because that initial orders when I'm getting on Amazon, and we had some brand campaigns set up so we can avoid brand non brand stuff. It turns out, we started growing again, once we adjusted that goal and better aligned with my overall business vision, but that was frustrating for me, but it's also an example of how easy it is to get going on the wrong goal just because good intentions are not. I set a goal that just wasn't appropriate. JON: I think that aligns with the current digital marketing landscape, which has had a major shift over the last few years. Would you agree with that? RYAN: For sure. It's constantly changing. I think one of the reasons I still have a job in the digital marketing spaces is because it's constantly changing and the landscape is constantly in flux. Google, where the largest percentage of spend many times is for a company. In the last couple of years, we've gone from 11 text ads down to 7, and there's more companies competing. You can see you compressed the amount of available ad space, and then increased number of advertisers, logic dictates what's going to happen when that does, there's just an increase in cost per click and a real shift. Maybe five, six years ago, a lot of our e commerce clients would have said, "Set a goal around profit, and I need to get profit from ads because it's available." Now profit from that first ad isn't necessarily there for every company. In fact, many industries, it's you're losing money, no matter what happens on Google ads, or Microsoft ads, but you're moving the focus from that initial sale and what are you getting from that sale to, What's the lifetime value am I getting from that? And so it's extending out that return. We started doing this actually funny enough, probably about four or five years ago, with a company called Harry and David, where they did the math and actually understood how much money they should be losing on that first order to maximize their long term lifetime customer value, and how many companies they could get and how much market share could they capture. It was a real fascinating study, but we're finding that to be more than norm now than shooting for a 10X return on ads spend when your margin is 50%. JON: Yes, so they're basically looking to break even on that initial order. RYAN: A lot of companies should whether or not they are or not. My advice to a lot of companies is that first what we would considering a non brand acquisition, so somebody searching for your product or service and not your brand. That ordered in a perfect world right now should probably not have profit, it should be right about break-even and then having some lifetime value, being able to email them and bring them back into the brand through the same product again, another service, another product, having that future business coming in with your profit actually comes from. JON: Yes, because the cost of that second sale is so much cheaper. RYAN: Yes, and the more customers you can acquire on a non brand search, the less customers your competitors have, because that person is searching for product A unattached to a brand at this point. They're going to buy from somebody, it might as well be you because now you have that customer data, and that ends up becoming one of the most important things to a brand, regardless of whether you're a retailer or a brand. It's that customer data and knowing something about them that maybe your competitor doesn't know. JON: Is it safe to say that the number of levers that have impacted digital marketing return has just magnified tremendously over the past few years and maybe that's causing confusion with the goals? RYAN: I think so. I think you also have a lot of marketing teams and business owners that have goals that they have them and they don't necessarily know why. They've had them for years and it comes across to companies big and small that either their goal is, "We just take last year's numbers and add 10, 15% whatever we think the market's going to do and that's our goal." Or, "Hey, we have this profit goal from paid search and we look at it as a profit center and we always have, therefore why would we change that?" What I'm seeing from a broad stroke high level is most of those companies looking at profit goals from their marketing are shrinking as much for what their spend could be or what they actual new customers coming through that channel could be or it's causing them to focus more on just brand search in their paid channels, which has meaning they're capturing the same customers over and over and over again and are not actually growing their database. JON: Step one is to understand and acknowledge that we've had bad goals, right? Step two is to fix those goals and make sure that we've got marketing in alignment. I think we can all agree, at least in some part, we've all had bad goals. You had a great example of a bad goal earlier on and now that we've all agreed on that, let's talk about how we can fix those. Can you walk us through maybe an example conversation you've had with clients who have had bad goals and how you start to correct those? RYAN: One actually comes to mind. It's in the auto parts space. Generally speaking the margins are not extremely high. This particular brand though manufacturers and goes direct to consumer and so their margins are higher than most. In fact their margins I think are just below 50% but they're fairly large organization online. I think they are doing north of 50 million or so per year through their website. We took it over from another agency and magnified their sales phenomenally. I think they spent 1% last year over year, one of the months we looked at, before I was talking goals with them, spent 1% less and had 50% more revenue and their overall profit because they track profit outside of that for their marketing team, was that 57% on marketing even including agency fees because I think that was about a wash agency-to-agency. High level numbers looks phenomenal. They are really printing a lot of money on their paid search and they were beside themselves excited. The marketing team was in a great spot. They were super happy and one of our better references in the space. As we got into the numbers and started talking about overall business goals and what they could or should be doing, it became apparent that their marketing team had an incentive to create profit from paid search ads, which is one of the reasons they were so excited to be working with us at Logical Position because profit from paid search ads was up 57% and obviously their incentive was looking fairly solid. Diving into the numbers. They are a $50 million auto parts company that's part of a huge market. 50 million is one of the probably top five players in their specific segment, but it could be massive. They could probably be doing 100, 150 million a year online rather quickly, but they're being held back by some of their goals internally. Analyzing analytics and Google ads together uncovered some things where they only had about 20% of the impression share in shopping on some of their non-brand queries. Not that impression shares and end all be all because it can be manipulated within shopping to show almost whatever you want. This was fairly clean data that we knew that the market was fairly big for what they were doing and so despite their numbers being great, I had to talk to the CFO and talk to them about overall business goals and their goal is really become a big player and they do want to hit that 100, 150 million revenue number online and I had to talk to them about, "Okay, well, your marketing team is getting a 14X, spend a dollar, get $14 in revenue on non-brand terms," which is phenomenal in the auto space, especially in a place as competitive as theirs. There was a lot of room to run even with profit in the space and I put some numbers in front of them. I said, "Right now you're using a 15X as a barometer of success in non-brand search. What if you were able to say lower that goal to a 4X. You spend a dollar to get $4 in revenue, still technically profitable. What would that do to your spend to your overall sales to your new customers? Let's just play this out and see what happens?" It basically said, "If you tripled your budget on non-brand terms and we're talking about a six- figure budget so it's not inconsequential on a monthly basis, you are still able to get the same amount of end profit to the organization as you had before, but you were able to acquire a vast amount of new users. If you're manufacturing your fulfillment, all these things can keep pace with that. You should be pushing for a much lower return on ad spend on your non brand goals to take that market share," because they were covering such a small-- It was almost like the tip of the iceberg and they were being successful. There's no scenario in which they weren't happy, but the magnitude that they could move below that waterline and capture a massive amount of market share from competitors was for sure there and that's not the case with every company we look at or talk to. Some of them have really maximized their acquisition ability on non-brand terms, but most companies out there listening to this podcast, there for sure is the ability to push more aggressively. John: Let's talk about the different levers then that are involved in that equation. I heard you say that they got a few of those wrong and had to go back and correct them or that it's limiting them. Can you tell us about a handful of these levers that everyone should be considering when they're setting goals? RYAN: First you have to separate out brand and non-brand. People searching for your brand and your brand plus product or brand plus service, those are your earned customers. You've already done the work either in digital marketing or branding offline or social media. Those people are actually searching for you. That group of people searching, you're not going to be able to necessarily set a goal that you can stick to around that because it's going to depend on what are your competitors doing? What does the landscape look like on Google based on your brand? If you're Kleenex, your brand searches a little nebulous space on are they looking for you or are they looking for just your product because you've been branded so well for that particular product separating that out. You have to have very clean data in your account to say, that's one piece of the account that's just going to-- we want to maximize our coverage and that's really your goal there. Acquisition goals in the page search realm or digital marketing realm are around new customers to your brand. We call them new to file customers. They're new to file a new in your CRM, new in your email database. That's really where you have a lever to push and pull for your acquisition of new customers. That's where you take into account what are your margins? What’s your lifetime value? Those are numbers the brand has to be able to at least have a good understanding of margins fairly easy to capture that but usually we'll start with just a broad stroke. What's your average margin? If it's going to range between 40 and 50 depending on the product line they're buying, but to meet in the middle right now at least to start with goal setting at 45, great let's figure out your break-even is and then what's your lifetime value? How often do they come back and rebuy or how often should they? And most companies don't know this piece. This is where they're guessing and revisiting goals comes into play because you might not have a successful email campaign currently and you're going to start it right away and you're going to make an estimate that our product has a life span of six months, so we expect to be able to get in front of these people again in six months. Great, let's figure that then. How many customers should we be acquiring to get this test going? Some companies and actually I would say most companies don't start with the goal of losing money to acquire customers. Just break-even and figure out how hard can we push? This makes people really nervous by the way [chuckles]. JON: I can only imagine, especially that CFO, you always have to talk to. RYAN: Oh yes, the CFO and in my world the CFO is my wife [laughs]. I like if I could spend a 100 grand tomorrow on digital marketing and get 100,000 profit, that'd be great. That makes some CFO, like my wife, very nervous to see, oh, the potential to spend $100,000 tomorrow is there. What if we only brought in $80,000 of revenue or profit? That would be concerning to have the family at a deficit of 20 grand in one day. The wonderful thing about digital marketing, specifically, we'll focus on Google right now, for the purposes of this conversation, money comes back into the brand almost as quick as you're putting it out and depending on how Google is billing you, whether it's net 30 or whether it's every $500 and how quickly your merchant processor is bringing your payments into your bank account. Generally speaking, it's a very quick wash on that. Money goes out, money comes back in and because you can see in Google ads and fairly close to real time what sales are coming in, there's very little risk to the cash flow of the business. That's where most CFOs start coming at me within the cash flow like "Oh, we've got a byproduct. We've got to do all these other things." Yes, you have to do that but if money's coming back in as quick, in theory, it's not causing any issues. There can be issues with having the product in stock. If you are a manufacturer, do you have the bandwidth to create that volume? Do you have the ability to fulfill that? There's a lot of other questions that come into that based on what we think the volume could be. As you're going into this, the threshold may not be how much can you spend, but it could be how much can we produce, sell, et cetera, et cetera. Data considerations within the space. JON: Ryan, one thing I've heard you talk a lot about between conversations with the clients that we jointly work with is something called the halo effect, right? Over time if these brands are investing in that non-branded search or shopping more aggressively, they'll have that halo effect. Can you talk to that a little bit? RYAN: Yes. You're going to set a goal and for most of you listening, start with a goal around breaking-even on non-brand. That needs to be on search and shopping but shopping is the fun one on Google. That's where if you control your search terms well enough and this one isn't necessarily easy to control because shopping is not set up with keywords. It does take some manipulation of the campaigns and structure and hierarchy and negative keywords, all of that. Let's assume you have that together pushing aggressively in non-brand shopping. I'm staring at my computer screens now. Let's just say you're selling computer screens down to break-even by marketing aggressively and shopping and pushing for extra units there. Most people that go to Google Shopping, actually two things. They buy something different. What you're pushing and shopping as far as the click, over 50% of the time they're going to buy something entirely different. That's where it does become important to monitor what they're buying because if your margins are different, it can be problematic, but they also convert often through other channels. I personally, when I shop on Google Shopping, when I click it, I buy it. I don't do a tremendous amount of research or I've done it beforehand by the time I'm looking on Google Shopping, I click, I buy, there's not a huge attribution funnel for my personal purchases. It's unique for me when I look in the data and actually see that Google Shopping actually opens more sales than it actually closes. If you're clicking on computer screens on Google Shopping, on average, you're going to come back and buy through a different channel. If you're looking at Google analytics, you can see a city conversions. You're going to see that the halo effect of investing in Google Shopping on non-brand terms, your organic traffic generally will increase. Your email, will generally increase, your direct traffic, your referrals, your social media. All of these channels will be impacted by Google Shopping. It's fascinating to see the impact that Google Shopping can have across channel and it generally doesn't get the credit that it's due. JON: Do you mean the organic and direct traffic and these other brand channels are all going to have noticeable revenue increases as well? RYAN: They should. Again, it's not in a vacuum where it's perfect for every brand across the world, but generally speaking do it for three months and look at the numbers and you should see an increase. Now if you're doing SEO as well, you would expect organic to continue to increase as well, but using the Google analytics assisted conversions, you should be able to see where Google Shopping is having an impact and you can actually get down into conversion paths and all that fun data to tell you what is being impacted the most by your extra investment in Google Shopping. In fact, just had a conversation with the CFO, one of our clients a few days ago and they've been investing in non-brand shopping at a lower return on ad spend than they normally would because they've been seeing this halo effect. They've measured it and said, "Hey, we actually aren't there." It's a very competitive space where there's not a lot of profit, if any to be had in the digital marketing space because of the competition but for them they realized, "Hey, we've got this extra data showing that organic traffic is having an uptick and so is email and direct traffic based on what analytics is telling us about our investment in shopping. Therefore we can go down a little bit below break-even because of that halo effect and allows them to get a little more aggressive because they do have a pretty strong lifetime value where people are coming back into the brand after their first acquisition. JON: I heard you say, Ryan, a little bit about how often you should be looking at this data. How often do you feel people should be reviewing that data and then perhaps even revisiting their goals? RYAN: I'm probably a little more odd in that I'm always looking at data constantly in there and you want to be aware of it. You can also get caught in making knee jerk reactions too quickly. I caution most marketing teams or business owners to go in there daily and look at the data and want to make changes. You have to let the experts in marketing do their thing. I like to revisit goals quarterly. For my businesses, I want to say, "All right, I was shooting for this goal quarterly. Let's look at what happened and do I need to pivot the goal, adjust the goal based on what my business is trying to accomplish?" Like I did with organic fertilizer. I did revisit the goal quarterly and thankfully a day because I was able to adjust and make it a better goal to help me drive the business where I want it to go. In marketing, we always have the best intentions and the best hypothesis is going in and saying, "If we do this, we believe this is going to happen." There's always something that's going to go wrong. Always. You may not completely miss the goal. We may go in with one hypothesis saying, "Oh, there's this much search volume on this term, let's go get it and then there's more or less than, so we have to pivot a goal", and that's really where some experts can be valuable on your marketing team and seeing that because knowing that it's going to be different than what you expect, being able to pivot and adjust on the fly is very important for the minutia of working on account in the paid search realm. The marketing teams in the account constantly look at the data and make adjustments to help the account get to the goal and then higher level, I would be looking at your goals quarterly to see those goals are appropriate and they're heading in the direction that you really wanted them to go. JON: Who do you recommend is involved in that conversation then? Because I've heard you mentioned the CFO a few times and I've heard you mention the marketing teams and of course the marketing experts that they might be working with to help them drive traffic. Who all do you think should be involved in those goal setting conversations on a quarterly basis? RYAN: To a degree I say less is more. I don't like meetings in general. More people generally cause meetings to go longer. I like to keep it small. Depending on the size of your organization, you may not have a large marketing team, you may not have a CFO. Its business owner and marketing team. If there is a CFO in the organization, I highly recommend they're involved in the goal because they're going to have a general overview of what's going on in the organization and maybe the sales volume is not sustainable based on inventory levels or manufacturing capabilities or the ability to ship and distribute. The CFO should have some insight on that. I for sure think a CFO should be involved also from just a cash perspective. You need somebody that understands the digital marketing deep enough to be able to talk strategically, but also not the person actually pushing all the buttons necessarily and then the person leading marketing overall should probably be involved. JON: Just like all goals, there's value in discussing those goals with experts though, right? Would you suggest that they have a third party reviewed these goals as well? RYAN: I would probably bring a third party in, maybe not necessarily quarterly, but at least annually to look at your goals. Maybe biannually, somebody that you trust just to have an unobstructed view of what you could or should be doing. Audit of Google's a place where you're spending a lot of your money, maybe have an audit at least once a year. If you're working with Logical Position, I don't dissuade somebody from having an audit done by somebody just to see-- to help keep them accountable. Accountability is not a bad thing. You want to make sure that you as a business owner or head of marketing are really getting what you're paying for or that your goals are appropriate and driving the business in the direction that you need it to be going. JON: You're not missing those potential pitfalls of that goal, right? RYAN: Yes, there are pitfalls of all kinds of goals that if you're expecting lifetime value, but your email program is not generating it, maybe you can't be shooting for break-even on the first order because you need some of that profit to cover a retail store that maybe isn't as profitable as it should be. There's a lot of variables to every business on the planet that one size doesn't fit all as far as a digital marketing goal, but you can use guidelines, regard rails in place to help formulate the most appropriate goal. JON: Ryan, this has been an amazing topic. I know I can't wait to start refining some of my own goals here at The Good. Anything else you wanted to add to this conversation? RYAN: I think just the most important thing is just make sure you're having fun. I see too many business owners and marketing teams getting into the minutia of goal setting or digital marketing and that just becomes not fun and that's really why a lot of people are in business in the first place. Yes, it's a job. It pays the bills, but if diving into the details is not fun, find a way to make it more enjoyable. Enjoy the process of setting goals, analyzing them and really find ways to win. It should be fun talking to your goals. It should be fun talking to business strategy of how is your brand going to win in 2020 and in this new decade? The potential right now for every brand is huge. You've got a new decade to look at, have fun with it, set some goals, be aggressive, conservative goals aren't nearly as fun to accomplish as aggressive, big pioneer sky goals. JON: I would say most people would think that looking at numbers can't be fun, but you know what? If those numbers are going up into the right and they're trending positive and you've set the right goals that are helping you achieve success and revenue and profit, then things get a lot more fun, right? RYAN: They do and I like setting goals to like, "Hey, there's a bottle of champagne in place when we hit this micro-goal on the way to our big goal." JON: I love it. Most people listening probably don't know that Ryan lives out in Sherwood, Oregon which is in the heart of Oregon Pinot, so I'm surprised you used champagne instead of a bottle of fine Pinot Noir but we'll pop it either way and enjoy. [chuckles] All right, Ryan. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can't wait to set my goals as I mentioned, and hopefully everyone else is going to do the same for a successful 2020 and decade. We'll chat soon. RYAN: Yes, and if anybody really out there wants to talk goals, reach out. I mean, it's fun. Jon and I do this constantly for brands all over the planet. For me-- I'm sure for you as well, Jon, it's just it's fun. Reach out because there's conversations-- Even if you're not working with us, I just enjoy the process and talking through and helping companies align their goals. JON: Great. Well, we'll look forward to hearing from everybody. Thanks, Ryan. RYAN: Thanks, Jon.

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!

Join Dustin P. & Jenius McGee as they recap HBO's Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 entitled "The Last of the Starks." Now that the threat from the dead is over, when will the war between the living begin? How will Dany handle the bombshell dropped on her by Jon? Who's going to sweep up all the ice cubes in Winterfell? SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!! Explicit Content

Join Dustin P. & Jenius McGee as they recap HBO's Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 entitled "The Last of the Starks." Now that the threat from the dead is over, when will the war between the living begin? How will Dany handle the bombshell dropped on her by Jon? Who's going to sweep up all the ice cubes in Winterfell? SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!! Explicit Content

What does the Night King actually want? What's in the cards for Dany and Jon? Who is the Prince That Was Promised? Should The Mountain and The Hound finally have their face-off, who is most likely to win? James and Darren look back at the highs and lows of Season 7, discuss what to expect in Season 8, and give their updated rankings on where all the seasons currently stand. Thank you to everyone who listened and supported this podcast this season! Tweet questions to @JamesHibberd and @DarrenFranich, or send us an email at GOTpodcast@ew.com. Please rate us on iTunes and leave us a review! We’d love to hear from you.  Credits:  Hosts: James Hibberd (@jameshibberd) and Darren Franich (@DarrenFranich)  Producer: Cristina Everett (@cristinaeverett)  Editor: DGital Media (@DGitalmedia_)  Contact Us: GOTpodcast@ew.com  For the latest in GOT news, go to: ew.com/gameofthrones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Season 7 just hours away, Franco, Raffy, and Nigel decided to do a predictions podcast for Game of Thrones. What will happen based of the titles of the first 3 episodes? What is the purpose of Dany and Jon? Who will survive? How will the season end? We answer these in this special hour-long episode of the After Credits Podcast