Podcasts about kyle it

Show Notes Today's Guests: Kerry Lammers PT, DPT, CCS Kerry.Lammers@osumc.edu Twitter: @kerry_lammers Josh Johnson PT, DPT, PhD joshua.johnson@duke.edu Twitter: @joshkj_dpt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-johnson-21262a41/ Kyle Ridgeway PT, DPT, CCS kyle.ridgeway@uchealth.org Twitter: @Dr_Ridge_DPT IG: @kylejridge LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylejridgeway/ https://ptthinktank.com/author/kridgeway/ https://www.youtube.com/@kyleridgeway8484 Richard Severin PT, DPT, PhD, CCS rsever5@uic.edu Twitter: @ptreviewer IG: @pt_reviewer Daniel Young PT, DPT, PhD daniel.young@unlv.edu Links: CSM Acute Care Programming: https://www.aptaacutecare.org/page/CSMmain CSM Shark Tank Session: https://apta.confex.com/apta/csm2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/18385 Shark Tank Application: https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9ZF2GDgjg6vxXfw Research Connections Event: https://apta.confex.com/apta/csm2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/19126 Bridge the Gap: https://www.aptaacutecare.org/page/bridgethegap From December Critical Edge (More information): Seeking Academy Members to “Swim in the Shark Tank” at CSM 2024 In this open call, we are seeking budding investigators to submit their idea, for the chance to pitch it live… to a panel of six expert “sharks” at CSM 2024! Have you ever had a clinical question you thought could turn into a project? Or a project that just can't seem to get off the ground? Are you unsure how to take a great idea all the way to CSM? Those selected will give a 3-5 minute “pitch” of their idea at the conference. Our panel of “sharks” will talk through the challenges and triumphs of conducting clinical research and offer specific feedback and guidance. Contact Research Committee Chairs or submit your idea directly. Everyone is encouraged to join us in the very first Academy of Acute Care Shark Tank at CSM 2024, for a great dialogue about bringing science into practice! Guest Quotes: 3:21 Kerry “The goal of the Shark Tank is basically to create a mentorship type relationship, create connections around the country. You know, connect like minded individuals who have experience doing these types of projects ranging from really sophisticated research projects all the way down to how do I just operationalize a systematic change here at my med center…” 5:53 Rich “But I think there's so many stories from clinical practice that don't get told just because people don't have the means to do it, right?...And this is a great opportunity for clinicians who are trying to test the water.” 6:57 Josh “I don't have to be the one that asks the questions, I get to partner with clinicians who have much more relevant questions than I could possibly ask. And we get to bring those to the forefront…” 26:44 Daniel “I think that the end goal is that we provide better care. Like that's the end goal for any of the things that are coming. So if you're a person who's thinking, I wish we could do this better, or I wish we knew how to do this better or what to do better.  Those are the people and the ideas that we need here.” 27:28 Kyle “We want our time and investment of this individual to help them grow to be better to able contribute in their local environment, whether that's a 40 bed critical access community hospital or 1000 bed academic center and improve the care of their patient populations, given the challenges and the people that they serve.” Rapid Responses: What's your favorite scrub color? Kyle: “It's got to be Caribbean blue. Cause that's what I'm mandated to wear. So that went down in the brand. Let's do it.” You know you work in acute care when: “You value your relationship with the CNAs and the environmental service employees.” Kerry: “The smells. You just know” Danny: “You have to change into scrubs because you got poop on the original ones.” Kyle: “When you end your day and you're not sure if you've done any therapy. “ Josh “the fact that patients and families get really excited ...

Joining Carol Pankow in the VRTAC-QM studio is Delora Newton, Division Administrator for the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, and Kyle Schemenauer, Director of Services, Eligibility and Order of Selection Unit at the Stout Vocational Rehabilitation Institute (SRVI). Delora and Kyle talk about the partnership that reduces the time for eligibility determination while freeing up counselors' work time by outsourcing and streamlining the pre-eligibility work to SRVI.  This partnership has brought an objective and consistent process utilizing a per-customer rate fee. It has been working for Wisconsin VR as applicant rates are soaring, keeping SVRI busier than ever.     Listen Here   Full Transcript:   VRTAC-QM Manager Minute - Maximizing VR Services: Leveraging Resources so Counselors Can Get Back to Counseling - Wisconsin VR- STOUT Partnership   {Music} Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: So welcome to the Manager Minute. Joining me in the studio today is Delora Newton, Division Administrator for the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, and Kyle Schemenauer, Director of Services, Eligibility and Order of Selection Unit at the Stout Vocational Rehabilitation Institute. Holy cow. That was a mouthful. So how are things going, Delora?   Delora: Going great. I agree. I thought mine was a mouthful. But Kyle is even more than mine.   Carol: It is. It's kind of funny. How are you doing, Kyle?   Kyle: Doing good. Doing good. Easy. We could abbreviate to Director of services. How about that?   Carol: I like giving you the full shebang. The full glorious title. So I want to give our listeners a little bit of context. Wisconsin had embarked on a project to free up counselor time. It was way back in 2015, and the premise was to have SVRI program at Stout handle the applications and gather that pre eligibility information that is packaged up, passed to the Wisconsin VR counselors for making the eligibility determination. And Delora's staff have discussed this at previous conferences, but we are all well aware of the seismic shift in leadership across the country over this past decade. And I mean, I know I thought, Delora, I think you did too. We thought, oh, everybody already knows this, but there actually is a whole new group of leaders who have never heard of this idea. And I actually think people are really at a different place in being open to new ideas and ways of operating post pandemic. I feel like folks thought and I know I did when I was sitting in the audience, Oh, that's a cool idea. But I really didn't know how I would pursue that or how it would apply when I was working at Minnesota Blind. And so given that State of VR today, I think it's timely to bring up all the options that could be available for states to pursue when it comes to leveraging resources to make VR services happen. The other thing that's really cool about your project is that it's kind of withstood the test of time. So let's dig in. So Delora, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how long you've been with the agency and how many staff and consumers that you serve?   Delora: Yeah. Thanks. I have maybe a unique story for being a VR director. I came to VR in a roundabout way. I am not or have I ever been a licensed counselor in Wisconsin. Division administrators were political appointees, and so before coming to VR, I had served elected officials in the state capital for almost ten years. I also have several years of experience working for various businesses and business related nonprofits. So I actually started working for the Department of Workforce Development. That's who VR is aligned with in Wisconsin. So I started working for the Department of Workforce Development in July of 2014, and then I was actually hired as the administrator for the Division of Workers Compensation in August of 2015. So the Secretary's office in the Department of Workforce Development was very pleased with what I was doing there in workers comp, and there was an opening for a director in VR. And so they asked me if I would make the move. So I did. And since that time I've used my knowledge of the state's law making and budgeting processes, my management skills, my understanding of small business needs to lead Wisconsin VR along very several very talented managers. I am so blessed to have them. They have the counseling degrees and the historical knowledge of the federal regulations that I lack. So I've learned a lot along the way and I feel blessed to work with such a great team who positively change lives every day. And you asked about how many people we have. We have about 335 staff if we are full up. So we're located in 42 offices around the state so that we're close by where our consumers are. And counselors can also travel to where the consumers are. They don't have to come to the office. And a lot of things are being done virtually these days as well. And we were serving with open cases, about 16,500 consumers each year..   Carol: Wow! You know, I didn't know that background about you, Delora. That explains a lot because I always think you've had this super practical approach. You're very, you know, even keel and the way you've talked about kind of things you've implemented in Wisconsin, I think that serves you well. You bringing that background and having some of that other expertise in the regs and the different things, and then pairing it with your Meredith and all your other, you know, great folks there. Gosh, that's a great team. Good to know. So, Kyle, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the SVRI Stout group?   Kyle: Yeah. So I come in, I'd be just shy of seven years now that I've been in my role here at. SVRI. And prior to that a couple of years in higher ed and disability services and then about six years or so in the VR world, in a local agency here that provided VR services. So as a service provider to Wisconsin. So all in all, I've been working with Wisconsin VR for almost 15 years and the service provider end of things. Yeah. And you know, kind of like Delora mentioned, I have a different path that kind of took a long path and have never been a VR counselor or anything like that, but have been in supervisory and director roles basically my whole professional career. Yeah. And that's got me here today, I guess.   Carol: Very cool. Well, and a little fact about me. I was not a VR counselor either, so I think a lot of us came into VR from a variety of different ways, but it's all good. So Delora let's go back to 2015. You came on board with Wisconsin VR and when you arrived, I know there was this confluence of things that had happened. Set the stage for us a little bit on what was going on that caused your staff to create this idea, and then you came into the picture and you helped them to implement it.   Delora: Yeah, well, again, it goes back to being a talented team. They're very innovative and creative and trying to come up with, you know, different ways to address issues. So they started this work before me. So when the law was when WIOA was signed into law in July of 2014 and, you know, they were looking at all the new things that VR was going to have to do. They were like, Wow, we need to try to find a way to address the additional administrative workload requirement for staff so that they can be able to prioritize their time to actually serving active consumers. So at that time, it was estimated that the VR counselors were spending up to 20% of their time processing applications. I mean, that's a lot, a lot that included getting consent forms signed and gathering the records that were needed to be determine eligibility. You know, things like the medical educational records. Et cetera. And then going back and forth with the consumers in communication or the applicants, actually, they would be applicants at that time. Also, at the same time, Wisconsin's Legislative audit bureau had done a report, and that report showed that eligibility outcomes were lower than anyone would like and that they were taking longer than people wanted them to. And then in addition, those eligibility determinations across the state were inconsistent. And what that means is, you know, we have 11 different workforce development areas. I told you we have 42 offices. And so depending on where you were in the state, you might have been using a little bit different of a process. So we thought or my staff at the time thought that development of a more objective and streamlined eligibility review process could really help address those issues. So DVR managers reviewed the law and they were like, Huh, Could we outsource the administrative elements of the eligibility process? So they talked to RSA. We're very good about talking to RSA up front before we do a big new initiative that saved us quite a bit. So they talked to RSA to make sure that outsourcing was allowable and RSA confirmed it was possible as long as the rehab counselors that were employed by the state agency reviewed the eligibility recommendation provided by the contracted entity or and that those counselors remained responsible for making the official eligibility determination. So knew that UW Stout and would be a perfect partner for the project. We have had a long standing history of collaboration with them and both UW Stout and SVRI are public entities operating in different roles, but with a common goal of increasing quality employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities. SVRI operates as a nonprofit within the university and can serve as an innovation incubator to pilot new ideas and approaches that can then be expanded or replicated.   Carol: I love that, you know your team, they're smart. I always look to Wisconsin like you guys are the one state agency that didn't have any monitoring findings. Like, you guys are always the people. You're on the edge and you aren't always out there chit-chatting about it. You know, you'll talk at a conference, but you aren't out, you know, widely promoting what you're doing. You all just are head down doing the work, but you're doing really creative things. And I love that you talked about engaging RSA because sometimes folks are thinking about these really great ideas and you don't talk to the federal partner and you might have a little element of this wrong. So that was really good advice that our listeners can take into anything that they're doing. Like it's really good to engage your federal partner just to make sure you don't go down the wrong path. Now, clearly you can't roll out something like this without taking some sort of staged approach. So what was the implementation process like in the beginning?   Delora: Yeah, you are right, a staged approach was really key. And so we launched the initiative as a pilot project in the fall of 2014, and then DVR and SVRI leadership started meeting weekly to design the pilot. So they talked about several different funding models and DVR opted to design it as a new service and then use case service dollars to fund the process per applicant. So we recognize that SVRI they were going to have high startup costs, you know, and we recognize that. And so we wanted to pay a higher rate initially to help them offset those higher start up costs. And then once those were covered, we started paying a lower set rate per case. And that model has worked really well because it provided SVRI with a boost to help with those initial costs. And then we could account for each expenditure because it was connected to a case. So then in May of 2014, SVRI initially hired ten staff for that pilot phase, and their leadership team provided close supervision and support as that new service was implemented and also DVR provided a multi-day, in-depth training to that new team in May of 2015. And then ongoing training was provided as needed. After that, we also provided extensive training to our staff, including directors, supervisors, counselors and support staff, so that no matter who you were on the team, you understood what the new process was going to be. And then we started piloting that new service in our southeast part of the state, which is the largest population center. For people who aren't really familiar with Wisconsin. That includes Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, you know, a very large population area of the state. And we started that in May of 2015. And then a phased model was used to expand the service statewide by the summer of 2016. And as more of our areas were added then SVRI hired more staff. So by the end of the first full year of implementation, SVRI was processing more than 10,000 applicants annually on behalf of DVR. So it ramped up very quickly. I think if we had to do it over again, we would probably have phased it in a little bit slower. But, you know, those are some of the takeaways and the lessons that you learn. But overall, it worked really, really well.   Carol: That's a lot when you talk about that 10,000 applicants. I know I keep that number. When you said in the beginning, really that your staff were spending 20% of their time, you know, processing applications. Holy cow. I mean, this leveraging, you know, of these other services definitely helped you out. So now I know you also Delora did in the beginning kind of had this little bit of a situation or kind of the pushback from the counselors where maybe they were challenging some of the work done by SVRI. Can you talk a little bit about that?   Delora: Yeah, we knew going into it that we had inconsistent eligibility determinations across the state, which meant that all of our counselors weren't doing it the same. At the time we had almost 200 counselors reviewing those applications and then making the eligibility determinations based on their training and interpretation of the regs. And we all know that our regs are not black and white. They are gray. So people interpreted them a little bit differently. And of course, everybody believed that their way was the correct way to do it. So when SVRI had a dedicated team that was reviewing those applications and recommending the eligibility determinations, remember, recommendation is a key word here. The recommendations became a lot more consistent across the state because you had a set group of people who was doing it no matter where they were. So counselors have to make that final determination to stay compliant with the regs. Some of the counselors disagreed with the SVRI recommendations, so we had our managers review those disputed recommendations. And funny or not funny, however you want to look at it, they determined that most of what SVRI was recommending was actually correct mean some of our counselors weren't doing it correctly. So our managers, you know, also regularly conferred with SVR leadership about the feedback and the questions that we got from counselors so we could update processes as soon as possible if they needed updating. Sometimes more training was required for SVRI staff and sometimes more training was required for our counselors. But it was a joint effort of, okay, here's what we're seeing. You know, talking to Kyle, here's what we're seeing, here's what they're seeing. What do we need to adjust? So it was a very collaborative process.   Carol: Yeah, I really like that. And I'm sure any time you go into a new venture, you know, and staff are like they're kind of suspicious of what's happening and are you taking my work away? Even though people are like, it took 20% of my time, I don't want that work, yet, I don't want somebody else to do it either. So that sounds like that was handled really well. Now, Kyle, kind of switching to you a little bit, you came on board at the end of 2016 when the project was fully staffed. What challenges did you face as you were fully rolling all of this out?   Kyle: Yeah. As anything new in growing a new kind of business is getting the buy-in of one.. your staff, but then of your partners. So it was one continuously growing. So things, systematically things are changing, processes. We're trying to be as efficient and effective as we possibly can. So training, all of that, making sure we have the right staff, developing that communication and trust with Wisconsin VR, trusting in the process of what we're doing. So with anything new that was, you know, our biggest challenge is, is establishing the lines of communication and doing it the right way and getting the buy-in from both our staff, but then the VR staff as well, that we're in it for one thing, and that's the consumers. And we're here to do it together and make it the way it's supposed to be and provide that consistency across the board. It was a lot of training and education on both ends. It was our staff needing some time to kind of stand their ground of, well, this is our process and this is how we do that. And really just continuously to work together. In my role, it was continuously still hiring, even coming in at my spot at that point, we had that turnover, we had that that transition of anything new where you got your certain staff that were certainly bought in, maybe some staff that wasn't for you. So it was the growing pains of anything new. So facing that, plus then facing the referrals coming in and really just gearing up and making sure that we're providing the service that we say that we're going to provide and doing that. So yeah, it brought its own challenges, but working with VR in the past, having local VR connections and things like that on my perspective really helped kind of me and I guess maybe building that trust with VR and just being completely transparent in who we are and what we're trying to do.   Carol: I think it's cool. It's really evident you guys have a very good working relationship. I just wondered too, Kyle, kind of a little follow up. Did you ever think like, I keep thinking about 10,000, you know, like you had to do 10,000 applicants. Was that at all in your brain that it was going to be that many to handle?   Kyle: You know, maybe not, but we can do it. When you look at what's coming at you week to week, obviously that's accumulating. And over the time at the end of the year, yeah, we've served that many individuals and that's just amazing. And we have a great team of staff that, you know, we still have staff, the original kind of 10 or 8 staff. We have some of those staff that are still with us yet today from the beginning. And we do have a lot of longevity now since really myself coming in and some staff even before me coming in. So it's been great to see. It's been  great to see us continue to evolve together and working on little mini pilots within this to be more efficient and more rapid engaging with the consumer and stuff. So it's come a long ways and it's been a great partnership.   Carol: That's very cool music to my ears. That rapid engaging of those consumers. I like it. So Delora, as with any new initiative or initiatives that you go on, you've got staff that love it, you got people that hate it. How do you deal with those perspectives of staff? I'm sure you probably still maybe have a little rumblings of that as you go along.   Delora: Yeah, there has been rumblings a little bit, but as time goes on and we have more new counselors come in, they don't even know any different. So what we just continue to stress when we hear grumbling is that having SVRI handle the administrative side of collecting those applications and the related documents gives counselors more time to do what they want to do, which is actually offer rehabilitation counseling. It also has given counselors more time to work with transition students. We have met our federal 15% Pre-ets funding requirement every year since we've been required. I think we've heard we were the first state to do it. I can't verify that, but that's kind of what we had heard. And that equates to about $10 million annually for us. So counselors have really had more time to meet with those students throughout the year. And we do a lot of summer youth activities and trainings. And so it gives people time to actually plan those. And those summer youth activities give skills training and temporary work experiences to hundreds of students. So most counselors are now really happy to have SVRI do the task. And any new counselors who kind of want the experience of better understanding what is involved in making an eligibility determination, we will allow them to do those eligibilities on their own for a couple of months I mean, you know, with support of their supervisors and stuff, but we discourage them doing that very long term. So that's how we've addressed it.   Carol: Excellent.. Well, good for you too. I'm like, I'm giving you a big clap that you met your 15% and you're not one of the agencies that just received their 107 monitoring letter on the Pre-ets expenditures. And I would only expect the best of Wisconsin because you are the people we all always look up to because you guys are always doing it the right way. Now, I know you talked a little bit before about how you fund this, and so I just wanted to make sure that I had captured that in my brain the correct way. So you're doing kind of a fee per case, is that correct?   Delora: Yes, a fee for case. And we know the volume can fluctuate a little bit. So that also helps too. So like just having a flat rate, it helps us be able to budget more, I think, because it's something that they at least they know what the rate is per case.   Carol: Yeah, that's really good. That's interesting because I'm sure some of our folks that are listening in are going to sit there and go, Well, how are they making this happen? Okay, So Kyle, you had some really interesting data on your website. Can you talk to us a little bit about that, what the numbers look like?   Kyle: Yeah, really kind of, you know, feeding into what Delora mentioned is, you know, it's our goal is to provide that consistency, give back that time to the VR counselors to provide that guidance and counseling and let us do that busy work of the eligibility process. So really what we looked at is like a five year snapshot of kind of an internal study that we did on our end of what is our service providing to our agencies. And it is that sense of consistent eligibility across the board. More time back for the counselor to provide the guidance and counseling that they want to be doing. Allow us to do the busy work of the records collection, the information gathering and provide you this written report back to you that you can just take and run with and go. Now again, stamp of approval VR counselors providing their approval of that. We're just providing that recommendation. So really just looking at creating efficiencies and cost savings for our agencies and reflecting that. So we have some numbers on there over that five year window of how we're able to decrease eligibility determinations. You know, at one point we were down to like 23 days of being able to submit eligibility back to Wisconsin. All of this is a little bit you know, this is prior to the Covid timeframe that changes everything a little bit, too, but just the cost savings. So really what we're trying to reflect is what can we provide or, you know, even not just us having to do this for other entities, but showing what we've done for Wisconsin VR in that snapshot of time.   Carol: Yeah, I love that. I thought that was good stuff. So since you brought up the dreaded topic of the pandemic, let's look at that a little bit. So how did that impact what was happening with this project? And Delora, I'm going to go to you first and then I'll get your thoughts Kyle.   Delora: Yeah. So, you know, we're like other VR agencies around the country. Our numbers really went down during the pandemic. Even people who were on the caseload at that time who opted, can we just put my case on hold because I'm not comfortable going out in the world and very vulnerable medically. And it would be really, really especially difficult if I got Covid. So we respected that. So since we pay per case, SVRI saw a big decrease in their funding level and so they had to make staffing adjustments on their end. We understood that. And Kyle can speak more about that in a minute, but I do want to just add that SVRI remained a really strong partner throughout the pandemic and continued to provide sufficient staffing levels to meet our needs. So kudos and props to them for continuing to be a strong partner through a difficult time for everybody.   Carol: So since Delora said that, Kyle, what did that look like for your staffing numbers and how that all impact you?   Kyle: Yeah, overall, we've always kind of floated around a fully kind of staffed unit of about 25 to 30 staff, just really kind of depending on where things are at, at that point when referrals are starting to dry up. We didn't have any work anymore. We ended up going down to only five case facilitators, like a few office support staff to handle that during that time frame and then even campus implementing furloughs and all of that stuff. So there was furloughs that went across to quite a bit of our staff at that point, which nobody knew where things were going to go or how things were going to ever get back. You know, everything shifted completely remote. That was something where we would have day in and day out. You would have case facilitators in their cubicles here at work, and it was a buzz that went completely silent. Then everybody started shifting to working from home. That's been really the biggest, I think, shift to, I think for everybody is the world of work realized that there are some possibilities where you can be doing this from really anywhere. So we really started practicing that too. Even as we started to staff back up, we did weather the storm. It wasn't delightful by any means, but we made it. And realistically, now we're seeing record numbers on our end. And thankfully we were able to bring back almost everybody that we had to furlough at the point of our lowest point. And really, as things kind of changed and the world started shifting a little bit back to quote unquote, normal, we were able to then staff back up and pull everybody back in and just really adjust to the referrals as they were coming back to us.   Carol: Holy cow. Going down to five, my heart sunk. I'm like, that's a lot. That's pretty drastic. So since you said that, you know, where are the numbers today? So are you back at it, Kyle? Are you back up to your 25 or what are you looking at?   Kyle: We are crazy busy. We have seen weekly numbers that we have never seen before in terms of weekly referrals. We look at our numbers on a calendar year. Our actual years, July 1st, June 30th, we track our stuff within our case management systems calendar year. So January 1st through the year. And right now we're on pace for a record breaking year. We started tracking our data through Salesforce, our CRM that we use. We started tracking that in 2017, and right now we're on pace to shatter anything that we've tracked since then.   Carol: So what does shatter mean? What's that mean?   Kyle: Right now, at this pace, right now, we'll be over 12,000 cases. And in 2017, when we first started tracking, we were at just shy of 11,000. So we're going to at least be close to that, if not more. And that's great. That struggles with that is just the unknown that that was happening and really staffing back up. So that's kind of where we're at right now. You know, talking about pandemic and things changing the world of hiring employees is ever so challenging right now. And we've been in the hiring phase really since early this year and continue to hire because we can't keep up, which is great for business and we'll get there. We're confident in that. That's really where we're at is we're seeing such an influx in cases and the expansion of what we're doing, which is awesome to see that. And that's what we keep plugging along, is getting people in here as quickly as we possibly can and get them trained into our process and getting them doing eligibility.   Carol: Well, that's exciting news. So, Delora, I'm wondering, are you seeing numbers now of just consumers overall? Are you getting back to kind of pre-pandemic levels for the consumers you're serving?   Delora: Yeah, absolutely. I think our numbers went down through the pandemic. And then like I already said, we had people who just kind of like dropped out and said, this isn't a good time for me. But then even our new numbers coming in was really, really low. But we are ramping back up quite rapidly. So we started to ramp up last year, but to just give you an idea, so we had in June of 2022, we had 873 applicants and this June we had 1264.   Carol: Wow.   Delora: Since October of last year, we've consistently seen higher monthly numbers. It's anywhere from like 100 to 400 more than that month the previous year. So it's really going. We think part of it is because we want to make sure that we spend those federal dollars and we don't have to give money back. We've increased our outreach across the state, you know, making sure that we're connecting more in the schools with the local ILCs, with the ADRCs, and just really trying to get our message out that we're here to help. So we think that that's been helping. So we hope that that higher trend continues. And as Kyle said, we appreciate him watching those numbers, too. He's got a little bit harder job on his end because he's so dependent just on what we're paying, where we can absorb through higher budgets. But they're doing a good job of, you know, hiring as quickly as they can to respond to the need.   Carol: Well, that is super exciting news, though, because I know nationally, like the numbers have been just down in the program. So it's exciting to hear that that spurt, you know, coming back in, and I'm sorry, Kyle, I cut you off.   Kyle: No, that's fine. I just second what Dolores saying those numbers per month from last year to this year. That's exactly what we're seeing, too. They're seeing trends that we've never seen before. And really, you know, as the summer months, school's out, things, you know, kind of that roller coaster, you're kind of maybe going down a little bit. That never happened. This year, we're seeing over a thousand cases referred in the summer months, which were 700 in years prior, all years prior. We're seeing trends in data that of the years that we've been tracking it. This has never happened. So that's great. And the outreach must be working because they're seeing it and we're seeing it as well.   Carol: Yeah, that's super cool to hear. So I know that many states are looking for ways to leverage those other resources to help them carry out this type of work. And I know that, you know, Kyle, you and SVRI you can't do the work for the whole country. In fact, Delora won't let you because Wisconsin has you. But can you tell us some of the ways you've helped other states get started on this journey in their own state?   Kyle: Really, with our national networking of SVRI and who we are and the partnership with Wisconsin VR, we have drawn interest from other states from just having a conversation like we're having right now about kind of who we are. Two other states that are very interested in wanting to model something like this. Actually, we are doing a small pilot with the state of New Hampshire that we've been doing since actually just about a year now that we've been kind of fully engaged. Three offices, I believe, out of the state of New Hampshire on a very small scale doing that and also will be looking in the near future to be also piloting for the state of Vermont on a small scale again. And we've had other conversations. We've had a lot of conversations with the state of Texas and looking to collaborate with the Dallas Fort Worth area, University of North Texas, to really model who we are in that area. And then we've talked with Maryland on a couple of different occasions as well. And again, it's just really being as transparent as who we are, providing the information. And we're here to help guide or train or any type of technical assistance or anything that we could be doing in our end to talk about what we've done over the years and the growing pains and the ways to approach it. And if you did it differently, what would you do and things like that. So we've engaged in a lot of different conversations, most recently within the last probably couple years of who we are, you know, getting at the intrigue of those other states.   Carol: Yeah, I think that's cool that you guys are willing to do that and kind of share your knowledge out because definitely I feel like coming out of the pandemic, people are in a way different space with looking for different ideas and options and how to do something. And obviously you can't serve the whole country. So it is nice if you can help another state, maybe replicate this with their university or some entity, you know, to be able to take that on. I think that's really cool. So what lessons have you learned from this whole deal that are important to others as they might be looking at this option? And Delora, I'm going to go to you first.   Delora: Thank you. First of all, don't be afraid to think outside the box to find workable solutions. And when you're doing that, be sure that you're talking to your frontline staff to learn what are their pain points and then help. Let them help you identify some creative answers. That being said, people are naturally resistant to change, so create a solid change management plan and implement it early. Communicate that plan to staff in multiple ways. Use things like email trainings and staff meetings. The staff are going to need to hear the messages about why, how and when more than once, because they need that to fully absorb the big picture as well as all of the details. Make sure that that planning and implementation timelines are realistic. I mentioned earlier, if we had it to do over again, we would have phased that pilot project out a little bit longer than just a year. So be sure you don't rush it. And the benefits to doing pilots and launching segment by segment of your team is so that you can learn what's working, what's not, and what additional training needs that you have. And then also, as we've talked about, don't forget to consult with RSA during the process to make sure your innovative project is allowed under the regs. We have a positive working relationship with them and think it's a lot because we consult with them in advance and can make any needed adjustments prior to implementation and think that's probably also why we didn't have findings, as you mentioned earlier, because we do regularly consult is this allowed or not allowed? And then we might kind of come back at them a couple different times. Are you sure we can't do this? Or how could we do it a little bit differently so that it meets the regs? But that communication is key.   Carol: Yeah, love that. Really good advice. And Kyle, how about any lessons learned that you might be able to share?   Kyle: It works. We have a track record here now that just show that it does work. And if you can build a good team both as the service provider and the agency and you have strong communication and trust in the process, it works. And if you can get those buy-ins, , it's great to see the growth and I'm glad that we've had the opportunity to collaborate with other states because it's been something on my end. When we first kind of got started and got rolling out like, Oh my goodness, this needs to happen in other places because this is something that I truly believe in that can be replicated and can do the right thing. The biggest is your communication and trust in each other to do it and entertain anything new. And from our perspective, we're always looking to try to be more efficient, more effective. What is out there? Technologies are always changing. Processes are always changing to make us faster and to entertain those ideas and to share those with others to do it the right way.   Carol: Love it. You two have been fabulous this morning. I really appreciate it. And I'm sure as our listeners may want to reach out, that you're both open if someone's going to email you or some such with any questions. Is that all right?   Kyle: Absolutely.   Delora: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we have had other states reach out to us and we're more than happy to meet with them. And New Hampshire did as well as the state of Texas. There might have been another state, too, that I just can't remember. So, yeah, we're always happy to help.   Carol: Well, good stuff and wish continued great success in your collaboration going forward. And thanks for being with me today. Appreciate it.   Delora: Thanks for having us.   Kyle: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.   {Music} Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!  

“We need to be able to connect with people emotionally. Because if we can't do that, then everything, all of the brilliant things that you have to say, are going in one ear and out the other,” explains Kyle Gray, world-class presentation coach, story strategist and author.    Healthcare experts tend to struggle with relaying information in a way that is relatable and understandable to their audience. It's one thing to know how to solve a problem, but it's another to actually be able to connect emotionally with people and influence them to want to work with you.    So how do you persuade people that you can actually help them, so that they will say yes to working with you?   In this episode, Kyle discusses how to utilize the ancient technology of storytelling to get your messages across to really empathize with your chosen audience. There are certain key elements to effective storytelling and once you learn these elements, you can draw from your own life experiences to share stories that convey your message in a way that can be universally understood.    Quotes “This is an ancient technology, maybe the most ancient technology, is storytelling. And it's a very specific formula that allows us to resonate and understand and remember things.” (7:01-7:15 | Kyle) “The trick here is to get to these moments and use your client's words to tell your story. And even though the story is about you, your clients are going to experience it as if they're experiencing their own life, and they get to walk through your experience to see how you came to the solution.” (10:27-10:46 | Kyle) “We need to be able to connect with them emotionally, because if we can't do that, then everything, all of the brilliant things that you have to say, are going in one ear and out the other.” (11:33-11:42 | Kyle) “Instead of trying to teach us how to solve a problem, really focus your teaching on overcoming those beliefs and objections to get them open to it.” (15:38-15:49 | Kyle) “It's your responsibility to learn how to communicate in this way, and it's not good enough to just be able to solve the problem.” (28:05-28:15 | Kyle) “One story could really change your life and change so many other people's lives.” (28:32-28:37 | Kyle)    Links Connect with Kyle Gray: Website: https://www.thestoryengine.co/ Podcast: https://www.thestoryengine.co/podcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heykylegray Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heykylegray/   ====    Thank You For Listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review! Your positive review helps others find this podcast and increase its visibility.   Getting to YES boils down to two things: Saying the right things and saying those things consistently… so if you want to go deeper, check out Uli's one-page “Getting to YES” blueprint and training with the essential 9 persuasion prompts you need to leverage: https://uliiserloh.com/blueprint     Connect With Uli Website: https://uliiserloh.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/uliiserloh   Instagram: https://instagram.com/uliiserloh Youtube: https://youtube.com/uliiserloh  Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/@uliiserloh  Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/uliiserloh/ If you'd like to learn more about Uli's marketing agency and available services, visit https://bigboost.marketing

Secrets of Overcoming Romantic Rejection Part 1 of 2 In today's podcast we are proud to interview Dr. Kyle Jones from the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California. Kyle Jones, PhD is a clinical psychology postdoctoral fellow affiliated with Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California where he provides individual psychotherapy in a private practice. He co-leads a monthly consultation group with Maggie Holtam, PhD where therapists can get help with exposure methods for anxiety. He has recently become an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Palo Alto University - teaching Clinical Interviewing in the clinical psychology PhD program. Kyle wrote: “Here are some questions from patients of mine for our podcast today - we don't have to go through all of these bust just some talking points!" We will publish part of the questions in today's podcast, and several more next week. There are even more questions, so let us know if you would want a Part 3 on this topic at some time in the future. Below you will find the list of questions with some responses by David and Rhonda BEFORE the podcast. To get the true scoop, listen to the podcast, as most of the comments below were simply ideas that popped into our heads prior to the podcast. Although we focus on romantic rejection in these two podcasts, the idea really pertain to rejection in all segments of our lives. 1. Why do you think it's so hard for us humans to handle rejection/why do you think we are so afraid of it? David THE LOVE ADDICTION SDB. LOOKING TO EXTERNAL SOURCES FOR FEELINGS OF SELF-WORTH AND HAPPINESS. THE CBA IS CRUCIAL, SINCE PEOPLE MAY NOT WANT TO STOP LINKING SELF WORTH WITH LOVE. Rhonda Plus, it hurts.  And our brain is wired to experience pain when rejected.  We are wired that way. Evolutionary psychologists believe it all started when we were hunter gatherers who lived in clans. Since we could not survive alone, being ostracized from our clan was basically a death sentence. As a result, we developed an early warning system to alert us when we were at risk of being rejected by our tribemates. People who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behavior, remain in the clan, and pass along their genes. Kyle Getting dumped sucks! We aren't really taught how to handle rejection very well in our culture. 2. Are we capable of overcoming the fear of rejection and how do we accomplish that?  David You can face your fear with REJECTION PRACTICE. The FIRST SECTION OF INTIMATE CONNECTIONS IS ON OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF BEING ALONE. Rhonda Is part of the fear of rejection also a fear of being alone?  You can use the “What If” technique to uncover more about those fears.  Then put the thoughts in a Daily Mood Log, and challenge them with a variety of techniques you can select for a Recovery Circle. You can also face your fears with Rejection Practice and/or Exposure. 3. When it comes to getting dumped do you guys believe there is a good way to approach it communicating wise? David YOU CAN USE FIVE SECRETS TO FIND OUT WHY THE OTHER PERSON IS REJECTING YOU. OR, PERHAPS BETTER, YOU CAN TURN THE TABLES ON THE REJECTOR, SINCE IT IS PART OF A CHASE GAME. Rhonda If you want to know more about why you were “dumped,” will you trust the other person to be honest with you?  Will you believe them when they respond?  You might want to do a Cost Benefit Analysis to decide whether or not you even want to ask them to explain why you were “dumped.” Kyle It depends on the situation. If you have gone through a divorce and have children, you may still need to talk with you ex-partner. Generally, I don't think it's a good idea to stay in touch and keep chatting with an ex who dumped you! 4. If we are caught off guard with the breakup and don't see it coming and all of a sudden one day our partner decides to end the relationship, how do we not let our emotions get the best of us in that moment in that very moment? David WHEN YOU SAY, “GET THE BEST OF US” IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE NOT ACCEPTING YOUR FEELINGS. IS IT OKAY TO FEEL FEELINGS? THIS QUESTION SOUNDS LIKE EMOTOPHOBIA. Rhonda It's perfectly reasonable to be sad, to cry, to be shocked and angry.  Why not have those feelings?  You also don't have to expect to respond with a “perfect 5-Secrets.”  Maybe you need to take a break from each other, breathe, walk, calm down, and then meet again to talk talk, if that is what you want to do. Kyle If you get blindsided by a breakup it can really be shocking and overwhelming. It's okay to feel how you feel in that moment I would think. 5. When it comes to recovery after being broken up with, how do you fight the urge to go back to your ex? David THIS URGE IS DUE TO THE BURNS RULE: WE ONLY WHAT WE CAN'T GET, AND NEVER WANT WHAT WE CAN GET. ALSO, CAN DO A CBA ON CHASING. Rhonda Also, look at the thoughts that are leading you to want to get back together.  What do they say about you that is awesome?  Then examine them for Cognitive Distortions, and talk back to them with Dbl Standard or Ext of Voices. Do a “Time Projection,” see yourself in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years.  Have a conversation with your future selves to talk about what you want, what kind of person you want to be with, how you want to be treated in the future. Practice “Distraction,” when you start thinking about your “ex” distract yourself by concentrating intensely on something else, music, work, friends, cooking, another hobby. Kyle Come back to reality and remember all the crummy ways an ex may have been treating you, instead of letting your mind ruminate on how great things were during the first few weeks of dating. Come up with all the good reasons to continue wishing/hoping you and your ex will get back together and talk back to those. My book, Intimate Connections, will help you with dating and rejection issues! Stay tuned for Part 2 next week.

Intro- Chino cappin- Disrespectful Outro- NLE Choppa- Push it *We do not own the rights to this music   Question: What is One Small thing you are OCD about? -Music (underground mostly) News Flash (drops from pop artist)Both: NLE choppa- me vs me; Pink sweats- Pink Moon; Amber Mark- Three Dimensions Deep; BlocBoy Jb- Bacc 2 da Blocc; Kyle- It's not so bad, PNB Rock - Sound Cloud Daze, Wake up mfers: Babyface Ray- Face; Doe Boy- Oh Really; Chino Cappin- Permanently scarred New artist of the week (Lemme put you on)Kweisi: Bluestaeb- That's Ok Chef: Anoyd - Falling In Love Outstanding song (weekly) (New and Popular artist)Young ArtistKwe: Ben Beal- Coraline;  Chino Cappin- Disrespectful Chef: Doe Boy - Respectfully, Cheque - Dangerous Popular ArtistsChef : BlocBoy JB - Addiction, PARTYNEXTDOOR - No Fuss Kwe: NLE Choppa- Push it; amber mark- One

Welcome Passive Traders to another special edition of the Option Genius Podcast. Today I have something a little bit different for you. I was interviewed on another show called "2 Bulls in A China Shop" by a company called Financial Ineptitude. That's actually their name,Financial Ineptitud. Basically, it's two guys. You know, there are really cool guys named Kyle and Dan, and they've been talking about trading for a little bit. They've been trying to learn how to trade and so they made this podcast to basically help them get their thoughts out, and to record all of their lessons. Their website is really cool. Their podcast is two bulls in a china shop and I'm going to include the interview that they had here as an episode because I thought it was really good. It was a lot of fun. And hopefully you guys will get something out of it and learn from it as well. So again, that's "2 Bulls in A China Shop" by Kyle and Dan. Enjoy the episode. We're so glad you've joined us today, folks, today is a very special day, we've got a fantastic guest with us. We're gonna be joined here by Allen Sama, Head Trader and owner of Option Genius. He is an Amazon bestseller author of the book Passive Trading: How to Generate Consistent Monthly Income from the Stock Market in Just Minutes a Day. And we're going to let you know more about that. But first, Allen, how are you doing today? Allen: I'm doing very well. Thank you very much. Kyle: Thanks for coming on. I know we had to work a little bit to get this. This recordin going. Allen: Yeah, better make it good. Allen: I'll do my best. Kyle: The more you work for it the sweeter to be right? Yeah, Dan: Yeah. No pain, no gain, Allen: The more you value it, right. Dan: Oh, right. So so tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming the Option Genius.  Allen: So I was born as a trust fund baby and I started with $20 million. Kyle: End of story. Allen: Exactly, then I made a course. And then I made a course and I started selling it. Dan: Make more money selling. Allen: Yeah. So I have a similar story to you guys. You know, I got laid off from basically the only job I ever had. And it was really about, hey, do I go back to finding another job than job market? Or do I try my hand at trading, which I had been starting to learn while I was working because I was working remotely. So it was a great job learned a lot. But it just came to an end. The business went under in the financial crisis. And so, you know, we were actually teaching mortgage brokers how to be mortgage brokers, mortgage brokers, they owe it away. So it's like they didn't need me anymore. And so I said, Alright, cool. Let me you know, try my hand at trading. And I took some of my wife's money, and I lost most of it roughly, for like 40- 43,000. Plus, very quickly. Dan: Oh you're kidding. Allen: And, you know, like you guys said, you know, you learn very quickly, what doesn't work and most of it doesn't work. Yeah, at least for me. Dan: I get to strangled to work one day. Allen: Yeah. And so really, the, the best thing for me was that, you know, she had, she had faith in me, and she, she's like, you know, you need to make this work. And so I went back, and that kind of really put a fire under my ass. And then I looked at all my records, because I keep paper records of all my trades, write down everything. And so I found that, you know, I was doing day trading, and I was doing this and I was doing that buying and selling and value and I was trying everything, you know, there was one time where I was long, the inverse ETFs you know, SDS and SSO. So SSO is the two 2X S&P Going up, and SDS is 2X going down. So I was long on both of them. I was like, I can't lose. Right? Yeah, it's like the only trade that I can't lose on but guess what I did, I ended up losing money on that trade. Dan: You're telling my story, Allen. You're telling my story. Kyle: This all sounds so familiar. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel that it sounds like you.. Allen: Because the only thing that worked for me was selling options. And I had done at least one trade where, you know, I put it on, didn't really know what I was doing. But I followed it. And I put it on and I forgot about it. And then it it was in my paper records, but it wasn't in my account. And I'm like, where to go. My broker scamming me, you know, that should be here, you know, I put the trade on, where's my trick, and I kept researching, and then I realized that that trade had expired, worthless, and it just had gone away. So it doesn't show up on the screen anymore. And there's no exit record. And so I was like, Well, this is cool. You know, this is something that I didn't pay any attention to. And I made, you know, a good decent amount on it. And I didn't like it was easy. So I'm like, What is this thing? So I learned more and I dug deep into it. And we went into covered calls and naked puts and spreads and iron condors and, and all these different ones. And eventually I found that, um, you know, these type of trades are a lot more forgiving. So if you're not the most savvy, technical analysis like me, and if you're always buying at the wrong time and selling at the wrong time, getting all emotional like me, then this really was something that was much easier to do and, you know, you probably hear it If you talk about it, but it's like you put the odds in your favor. So it's a little bit, I think it's more conservative. But it's a lot more passive in the sense where I don't have to be in front of the screen all the time, I'll put a trade on, and then just check it and make sure it's okay. And that Theta decay just works in my favor. So the time decay, meaning the options go down in value, you know, every day as they should. And then eventually they expire. And when they expire, then the trade is over. Kyle: So what kind of time frame are usually looking at when you're selling your contracts? Allen: Well, I'm in different strategies now. But usually, I'm going around 45 days to about 25 days. Kyle: You basically just rolling monthly, the monthly. Allen: Yep. So I'll stay in two months. And then if I get out, then I'll be like, okay, good down. Let me look at next month, sometimes I get out early, and I'll take, you know, take a week or two off, I'm not doing anything. And then, but most of the time, yeah, it's you know, you're getting out of one and then you're getting into the next one. Kyle: Are you just doing these cover calls? Are you doing spreads? Or what are you doing to cap your, your, your losses, because we selling options? Contracts can be really dangerous.. Allen: Mm hmm. So we do a little bit of all of them. You know, I've been doing it now for 15 years. So I started with the iron condor, because that that, Oh, my God, this is awesome. You know, you can make money on both sides, and the stock doesn't move too much. And it's a trade that can't lose. Obviously, I found out that yeah, you can lose. But I mean, it's probably the most complicated trade you can start with. And that's the one I did and then I got, you know, I got good at it. And then I did look at covered calls, we did that for a while still do them now in my. So let me break it down, in my retirement accounts, I do covered calls, naked puts, and some spreads. And the spreads are really there to just goose the returns. Because in those I'm looking for about 10% a month, the covered calls naked puts, I'm looking for one to 3% in the retirement accounts. And then in my trading account, I do spreads iron condors. And then I also do a little bit of futures options. So those are a bit more, they got a lot more oomph to them, because there's more leverage involved. And so they're faster. They're very, they're much faster trade. So I'm in and out, usually around two weeks, about 14 trading days. Kyle: Before we get too deep into here, maybe we should kind of talk, can you explain, let's start with an iron condor. And maybe just real quick recap of what a spread is. Allen: Sure. So a spread and the way I trade them is I want to be selling the spread. And so it is something that where you take an option that is far out of the money, you sell that one, and then you buy another one a little bit further out of the money to hedge yourself. So it's a risk defined trade, meaning you know, exactly "Okay, I'm gonna put in, you know, $500 into this trade, or 1000, or 5000", or whatever you put, that's the most you can lose. And then you get a credit for doing it, meaning you get paid when you put the trade on. That credit is the most you can make. So now on the spreads that I do. So for example, let's say we have a stock that just going up and up and up and up. Right now, I like to play the trend, I like to play momentum. And so if it's going up and up and up, I'm going to sell calls. So I'll sell a call spread, I'll get paid for that. As long as the stock doesn't go below my calls, my trade makes money. And on those types of trades, I'm looking for about 10%, like I said, on a monthly basis. My iron condor would be doing that trade with puts and calls on the same stock at the same time. So you want, in that situation, you kind of want something that's going sideways, you want a stock or an index or something that's, you know, it's not moving too much. It's kind of lazy moving sideways, and so you sell some puts below it, and some calls above it. And so that way, you get paid for both you get paid for the calls, and you get paid for the puts. But you don't have to, you're not risking both sides, because you can only lose on one side. You know, so you have the same amount of risk as if you just did a one sided spread, but you get double the credit so you make twice as much money. Kyle: Right. Oh, I was found that the more complicated things get the worse I do at them. We'll have some links in the episode description explaining those a little bit better to anybody.  Dan: Yeah, I'll need to follow those. Yeah. Kyle: So you're looking to generate about 10%. 10% A month or return on your investment then? Allen: Yep, that's it. Yep, that's it go. I mean, you don't always get there, right? You're going to have months where you make less, there's going to be months when you lose money. So if I aim for 10, you know, I can think hey, you know, if I get five for the month, I'm happy. You know, that's 60% a year. That's that's pretty good. Yeah. So I cannot complain. There have been there have been years when I've done over 100% And then there'll be two years when I've lost money. So, but overall for the past 15 years. It's been working really, really well for me, so you know. Kyle: Yeah, it sounds like you're Your path kind of took the same path that mine actually took, like, that was what led me to quit my job is thinking like, I could sell contracts because you know, 80% of them or whatever, expire worthless, rather be on the side that has the math with it. And I'll just, I'll just basically trade the wheel and sell puts, you know, until I get the stock and then calls against it until they get taken away. Success has been mixed so far, but still not working. So. Oh, really? Well, we could talk about that. Well, it sounds like I need to read your book is what it really sounds like. Allen: Yeah, I mean, you know, right now, we're in a bull market. And so the puts that we've been doing the selling the puts, I mean, it's been, it's been working phenomenally, um, covered calls are doing well, as well, because we go pretty far out of the money. So like, you know, it's not always 80%, sometimes I'll go 85, 90 95%, depending on what I want to do. So in my retirement accounts, I don't want to lose my stock. And so I'll sell pretty far out of the money. So I'm not making as much on those. But I don't want to lose my stock. And I'm just looking for a little bit, you know, I'm looking for, you know, 1%, one and a half percent, maybe a month, and I'm happy with that. And so the naked eye, you know, it's also stock selection. And I think that's one of the issues that a lot of people get mistaken. People say that, "Oh, when you're selling options, you should be looking at the ones that are the most volatile names, because they have the most premium, and you get paid the most". To me, I think that's like a suicide mission. And, and I just want to be the, I just want to save ones that are boring, that are you know, everybody ignores them. You know, I like the small, the large, very large companies, they pay dividends, they don't move very much. Those are the ones I just want to cash flow, you know, I just want to be selling naked puts on them, they're not gonna drop 10%. If they do, it's like, it's like the, oh, my God, this thing dropped 10%. You know, that's good news. So I want to sell those, and I want to keep them and collect the dividends and then just get my cost basis down as far as I can get. Dan: Do you have a favorite company then that you find yourself going back to more than others? Allen: I like stuff like McDonald's, Walmart, Starbucks, you know, big names. Everybody's known them there around the world, they have dividends so you know, that they're if they're paying the dividend, they're still profitable. They're making money. You know, Apple is kind of joining that list, although Apple is still a little bit more volatile than the others. But yeah, stuff like that, you know, basic big name, dao components, most of them, one of them that I really liked, that hasn't has been doing really well over the past few years is Intuitive Surgical. It's is ISRG so it doesn't pay dividends. And it's not good. It doesn't have a lot of option volume, but for credit for covered calls, and naked puts it's good enough. And that stock has been doing really, really well for me for the last few years. So that's a particular name. Kyle: So yeah, some of these are pretty expensive, though. I mean, yeah, you gotta be real careful, you don't get stuck with a couple 100 shares, if you don't have the account to cover that. Allen: Yeah. So in that case, you know, what we can also do is you can always roll them. So if I get into a position where I'm sold a naked put and it goes into the money like I've done this with right now, my kid loves Roblox. I don't know if you have kids, but my kids are always on that game. And I was when it came out. I was like, Oh, this is cool, you know. So I sold some naked puts on it. And now they're in the money, and they've been in the money for like three months. So what I do is I just roll them to the next month. So about maybe a week or so before expiration, I will buy back the put the naked put and then sell it again for the next month, collect a little bit more premium, and then the trade just continues. Kyle: Hmm, that's interesting. Yeah. Wow, I didn't even think about doing that. That's awesome. Okay, so roll it over. I'm making notes for myself.  Allen: Now, these are on stocks that you actually think are eventually going to go back up, you know, if it's still going down, down, down, then you're like, No, you need to bail out and be like, yeah. But if it's a decent company with decent, you know, fundamentals, and you know, they're making money and all that stuff, then yeah, Kyle: I've always gravitated towards the cheaper stocks when trying to sell contracts, just because at least if I'm selling, and they could put on something that's only valued at like, $15, then I know I can't lose more than $15 a share. Allen: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, like, my thinking is that I want to be in a company that I know is not going to zero, so I don't have to worry about it. Kyle: I mean, Ford for a while is trading around 15. It's at 18. Now, but yeah, I know for some solid companies that are in that range, right? There's a lot of other ones that aren't though. Allen: Like if it was a $200 stock, and now it's at 15 There's another issue going on there. Dan: Hertz is coming back. Good PR story. Damn it. Kyle: I'm gonna go back to losing $40,000 of your wife's money. So what were you doing that got you like we tried to day trade options were you.. Allen: I was doing a little bit everything I was day trading stocks, I was buying options. I was buying and selling like I was doing some value investing for a little bit. I'll be watching Kramer every night and looking at what's Kramer telling me to do. Okay, I'm gonna do this and that I would watch fast money every day and look for any anything that sold this is going up okay, hey, copper is going up. Let me buy some you know, SPX. Let me buy some of this. So trying to play the trend is trying to play all that stuff. I looked at futures, you know, trading futures a little bit, but that's,  that takes a lot of money. Kyle: There's no it actually takes less than you think. Really? $4,000 you can fund and account. Allen: Yeah, but then I mean, like you got Japanese. Japanese yen that takes that's a lot of money for a contracts. Dan: Okay, Yen is in micros now. Allen: Yeah, at that time, they didn't. They didn't I don't think they had those. Kyle: Probably. Yeah, I think minis were kind of new thing. Yeah. Allen: But yes, I was trying a little bit everything, whatever I could, whatever book I could find whatever video I could find. Just trying a little bit everything in nothing, nothing really worked for me. Kyle: So what was it that actually got you out of that? That, I guess Funk You can call it. Allen: So until for several months, my wife did not know that I was losing all the money. You know, she'd come home. And she actually, I mean bless her heart, she took a second job. So she's working two jobs while I'm at home trading. And, and we didn't have any kids at the time. So that was good. But you know, she she'd come home tired, and she wouldn't really want to talk about it. Because sometimes I'd be happy sometimes I'd be sad. She really couldn't tell what was going on. And then one day, she checked the mail and the account statement had come in the mail. And she's like, where's all the money?    Dan: Oh, no.    Allen: And I was like, Yeah, we need to talk about that. And then I feel, you know, I could tell that, you know, the marriage was on the ropes because we were newly married, and she had saved up for years working to save up this money. And so it was really a matter of, you know, I promise you that I will give me three months. That's what it boiled down to. So give me three months, I promise you, I will at least get back to breakeven or like, you know, not lose money every month, and then I'll start making it back. And if I don't, I'll get a job. So that was it. That was my ultimatum, I had three months to turn it around, or go back to, you know, the 9 to 5 grind.   Kyle: So I gotta ask you, one of the things that took us a while to learn was basically the number one job of being a trader is risk management. So what point during that journey did that finally kick it in your head? Risk is the most important thing. So you don't end up blowing up an account like that. Allen: It didn't really hit me for a long time, even after I started getting a little bit consistent. Really? Yeah. Kyle: That's interesting. Allen: You know, I kept going gung ho blazes forward until maybe like a year, year and a half. of really, you know, trading full time. The one thing the benefits of the selling options is that they're not that many losses, you know, you don't lose on too many trades, because it's set up to to help you win. And so that kind of helped me, but I would, I would have these huge losses, like if I'm making 10% on a trade, the idea was not to lose more than 25 to 30%. But I would be losing, you know, 40% 50% 60%. And I just couldn't get out of that hole. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you the secret. What turned it around. It was my wife, yeah. So she's like, cuz I was talking to her at this point. I'm like, Hey, this is working. This is not working. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. She goes, You know, it seems like you have everything you need. You're just not sticking to your own trading plan. Right? Yeah. Cuz I get emotional. You know, I think he's gonna turn around. I think he's gonna do this. But then, you know, CNBC said this, and then fox said this, and so she's like, oh, let's do this. She goes, I'm gonna come and check on you every day at a certain time and we're gonna go through each trade. And I'm gonna ask you questions, and then you have to answer. I'm like, Okay, let's do it. So she would come up, you know, she'd come upstairs to the office. And she'd be like, Alright, show me your trade. Alright, what's the goal? How much are you trying to make? Alright, where's it now? What's the trading plan? What happens if it goes down? You know, when are you going to adjust it? Or when are you going to get out? And then if I haven't gotten out yet, or if I haven't adjusted, then I have to answer why. Why? Yeah. And if I don't have a good answer, get out now. Allen: That's, that's really awesome, actually. So you just delegated your risk manager hat to your wife. Allen: Pretty much. And then, you know, there were times where I didn't want to have her breathing down my neck anymore. And so that's when I got better at it myself. And then, you know, after a while, she was like, Hey, I think you got it. You don't need me anymore.   Kyle: I know you say that you think that you're blessed to be to be able to do a dream job of earning money in the stock market and working in your PJs, but I think you I think you hit the lottery twice. It sounds like you really married a great woman. Allen: Oh, yes, I did. I did. And she hates me. He's telling this story about how I lost her money, she hates. She's like, you sound like such an idiot like a dumbass.  Allen: Yep. I think we all go through it. We all do it. Dan: Nobody just started out and just like, oh, every trade I've made. It's been great. What's your problem? Kyle: No, most people will blow up an account too. And that's why the things that we've been learning is, Dan and I are both trying to learn futures. So we're going through some courses with the trade pro Academy. I think we're I think Dan just flipped the live today, in week four now. But one of the main things with that is like, Okay, we fund the minimum amount we need in that account in case something goes wrong. You know, the most we can lose is whatever's in that account. Yeah, we're not going to fund it with you know, the life savings and then give ourselves you know a hundred thousand dollars  a full wrap with,   Allen: Yeah but the cool thing is, you know, you guys have each other to bounce ideas off to talk to, you know, a lot of people try to do it on their own. And they're just like, I did you know, I was lonely. I was doing, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. It didn't have anybody to talk to. Because I mean, you tried to talk to your neighbor, or your friends or your family like, oh, yeah, hey, I sold a, you know, a call spread. And they're like, "What? What the hell are you talking about?" I couldn't talk to anybody, so it's awesome that you guys have somebody. Kyle: Well, actually, I think the podcast for us is actually but what's taking the role of the wife explaining the moves? I mean, at the end of every episode, we do a good, bad and ugly segment where we talk about something that worked something that didn't work and something that was really bad. Allen: Yeah that's accountability. Right there. You got to tell the world. Kyle: So now, yeah, when you're getting ready to do something stupid, you're like, how do I really want to talk about this on Saturday? Okay, I'm looking at their your, your, your sheet here that you said this. And one of the things that I see on here that's really interesting is that you made a small investment for your four year old. Yep. What's the deal with that? Allen: Alright, so the biggest thing that I've been learning by talking to people and everything is that people are not people don't have enough saved for retirement. You know, that's like the one biggest thing and people come to us, and they're like, Hey, I, you know, I'm in my 50s, I just got laid off, you know, what am I gonna do? I don't know what to do. I got to figure out how to trade. I'm like, well, you're under a lot of pressure. I don't know if this is the right time, right. And so I didn't want my kids stuff to go through that. So currently, my wife has another business. Mm hmm. And so what we did was, we have three kids, we got a 10 year old nine year old and now she's five. So the little one is five. At that time, she was four, when we started this actually know when she was born is when we started this. So we took the kids, and we found a way for them to earn some money. And basically, we did it as we were their models. So they model and we take pictures of them for advertising, for our website, the brochures for my wife's business. And so the kids get paid for it. And that money then goes into their Roth IRA. Okay, so that they have no, there's no taxes, there's no income taxes on that money that they that they make, right? Because they're minors, and there's a certain limit, so I'm not an accountant. So don't, you know, none of us are, I don't think but when we started, you know, the rule was you can make up to 12,000 As a child, and it would not be taxed. And then you know, who knows what if that's going to change anytime soon, but we could pay them take that money, put 6000 into the Roth IRA. Now, you know, She's five years old. So we've been doing that for a few years. And currently, she has about $50,000 in her account. Now, you, you can look at, you know, you can do the math on any investment calculator. She's five years old, she's gonna retire in 60 years. So you take that 50,000 invested in let's say, an index fund, and you make 8% a year. Right? Compounded for 60 years. How much is she going to have at the end of that? 60 years? It's going to be well over $2 million. Right? That's if I don't put any more money into it. Yep. If she never touches it, she doesn't put anything else. You know, she's gonna have a $2 million retirements on when she when she's done. And, and that's without me doing any of my options stuff or, you know, doing anything.  Dan: There I say better than a college account fund. Allen: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I mean, part of it is, you know, the money, she's gonna when she takes it out, she, when she retires, she won't have to pay any taxes on it. So we made the money, we didn't pay any taxes on it, she's gonna grow the money and not have to pay any taxes on and then she takes it out and there's so there's like no tax at all. It's like the only loophole I've seen like this.   Kyle: We might need to bleep some of that out just in case. That's interesting. We saw a story not too long ago about a senator proposing a bill to like, and I don't think there's any traction on the actual bill. But what was interesting was the math behind it. He said that I think it was about $2,200 for every newborn, put into an account for him, like that will basically make them retire as millionaires.  Allen: Yeah. I mean, if you start early enough, and you put it away, and you don't touch it, it just compounds and it works. And hopefully, it'll be at the same, you know, average at least 7 - 8% a year that the stock markets been doing historically. So you know, of course, things change in the future. We don't know. But I'm trying to just set these kids up in a way that can help them succeed, you know, and if you if you think about it, like if she doesn't have to worry about saving for retirement, then whatever she makes, she could like, enjoy it. She could give back to our community. She can you know, spend it do it everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Dan: Take care of you hopefully.. Kyle: That's smart. Allen: Yeah, that's the plan. Yes, that's my retirement. Kyle: Tell us a little bit about your company Option Genius. What do you guys do over there? Allen: So it started off as so when you sell options, you know, it's kind of boring. It's very, like I said, it's passive. It takes just a few minutes to put on a few trades, and then just watch him watch and watch. And so when I started doing it, I got bored. And so I would go and I would bother my wife. Hey, what you doing? What do you do? Oh, you're cooking that again? Oh, no. She's like, can you just get out of my hair? And I'm like, Well, no, cuz I don't have anything else to do. She goes, Why don't you like, teach other people how to do what you're doing? Oh, that's a good idea. So I started a website. And the idea was, you know, I'm gonna have one website, and I'll just do my trades, and I'll share them with other people. It'll be a membership site, they'll pay me for it. If they want to do the trades, great. If they want to learn, that's great, whatever. And, you know, hands off kind of thing that started doing really well it started growing and people start asking questions. How do you do this? How do you do? What about this strategy? What about this strategy, and it just grew from one website to many of them three. Now we have three different memberships, we got like three different courses and coaching programs, we got a couple of books out there to spread the word. And eventually, I got to the point where you know what, the emails that we would get from people would be so heartbreaking, that it's like, there's this better way that I think are found, and people don't know about it. Let me, let me expose let me share the message. And so that's really behind what Option Genius is. I mean, you know, not to brag, but you know, I'm trading a seven figure account. And so if I can make, you know, two or 3% on that in a month, I'm living a really, really nice lifestyle. You know, I don't, I don't have a private plane, I don't have a Lambo. I don't need any of that stuff. So we're really doing well. And so this is like, if it works great. If we can help other people great. If not, I can walk away. I don't need it. But we've we've been doing it for a while. And we've really, it's heart warming. When somebody comes in, oh, man, I just did my first trade. And I made 10% Oh, man. And we have we have our own podcast. And I've started to interview our students. And so they come on board. And they're like, you know, I had a small account, but we got one guy. He, we gave him a scholarship. Like every year, we have a scholarship to one of our courses. So he actually won the scholarship. And he's like, you know, I have a small account. It's like $4,000. And he's a teacher. And he does now what you were talking about the wheel. So he learned that from us, and he's doing it. And he's like, hey, you know, I made 30% this year from my wheel. So that goes awesome. Yeah. There's other guys. They're making, like 7, 8% 10%. We had one guy who came in, he lost his job. And then he's like, Hey, I'm in your program. What do I do? I'm like, do the follow up program. You paid for it. He started doing it, you know? And seven months later, he's like, Yeah, dude, I'm making 10 grand a month. I'm like, That's freaking awesome. And he goes, You know what he told me? He goes, I'm going back to work. I'm like, what? He goes, because it doesn't take any time. And I want to go back to work. Whatever floats your boat. Kyle: Learn a different skill. I mean, I guess that's what you want to do. I guess. It's funny though. The more people that we talk to, especially the ones that are really successful, that seems like they all want to give back somehow to the community. Allen: Mm hmm. Kyle: That seems to be a common theme and I don't really think see that in a lot of other industries. Allen: No. I mean, there's only so much money you can make, and it doesn't really make you that much happier anymore. But when you can like to have, you know, the Maslow's hierarchy with a triangle going up to be like self actualized you gotta have significance you got to give back. Mm, Dan: Yeah that's awesome. Oh, boy. Awesome. Okay. Allen: But I mean, you guys are doing that, you know, the podcast, and you guys are helping  Dan: We hope Kyle: Mostly they're learning what not to do. Allen: There's value in that as well. Kyle: Yeah, I think that was our tagline once "Let us lose the money for you". Dan: Oh, yeah, yeah, I've proven myself capable of that time and time again. Mm Kyle: hmm. All right, what else we got on here? And Dan got any other questions here? Dan: Yeah, so when you're starting out some people I mean, I know you mentioned you get somebody started as low as four grand Do you do you give people like a target, like try and get this much money together to start the ball rolling, or you just.. Allen: Um, you know, we say, we say, if you're going to do what we call passive trading, they can start with anything. But if you're going to go into something like just spreads or like futures options, and we say, start with about 10,000. But even then, you want to start off with paper trading, especially if you've never traded options before, because you need to, you need to know what buttons to push and you know, you don't want to hit the wrong button. Instead of the sale, you hit the buy. And it goes backwards. And you got to know what you're doing on the platform, the software, the broker software, before you start putting real money at risk. Dan: Yeah. Kyle: Is there a specific broker that you prefer? Allen: I have most of my money at Thinkorswim and tasty, but it doesn't really matter. Kyle: We've been getting more into Thinkorswim too. Yeah like their their bracket order than other options bracket. It took us a year to figure out the Active Trader even know it existed. But man that made a huge difference. Huge. Oh, you can just drag your stops. Dan: But that's more day trading options. Well, yeah. Well, we talked a little bit real quick, do you ever use the the ThinkOrSwim probabilities when you're looking at selling your options? Allen: Um, so we have a couple of different ways. I use the the desktop Thinkorswim Yeah. And so like, uh, you know, if you're looking at an option, right, you look at the option chain, and it tells you what the delta is, you can pretty quickly find out what is the probability of that option. So if it's delta 20, that means okay, this still this option has an 80% chance of probability of expiring worthless. If it's delta 10. It's got a 90% probability of expiring worthless. So that's kind of like rule of thumb, really quick table math, you know, where you could be like, Okay, I want to do this, or I'll look at the Analyze tab. You know, if it's a more complicated trade, then I'll look at the Analyze tab, and I'll use the numbers that they give me there. Dan: Okay. Okay. I remember that for a little bit with straddles and strangles. But I didn't have much success. Kyle: I think I heard that before with the Delta, but I never I pay attention to it more, because that's tell you how much the underlying will move, right? Like for every dollar that the  underlying moves, then you should see a 30 cent change if it's a 30 Delta, or 20 cent if it's 20. Allen: Yep. But I mean, I don't know how accurate that is, because it always changes all the time. So.. Kyle: Yes, that's true. Allen: It's like I thought it was gonna move 30 cents. Well, your Vega did this and the gamma did that. So. Okay, great. Thanks. Kyle: Plus, now the delta is different. Yeah. We started talking a little bit about crypto. Dan, should we move into move into that? Dan: I would love to talk about it, especially coming from somebody who educated their way into Options success. Do you have anything going with crypto? Allen: So I have been taking advantage of a couple times. We could talk about that. So I'm learning about currently a friend of mine introduced me to I guess they're called alt coins. You know, so I do have some of the big ones, you know, the Bitcoin, the Etherium whatnot. And those I've just holding on to so and then I just started because I have a lot of it. I have it at Coinbase. And so I've put up my Etherium for it was called staking or stocking. Kyle: Staking Allen: Oh, yes. Staking. Yeah, so they hold it on, they hold it for you and they pay you four and a half percent a year. So I'm like, Okay, I'm not gonna sell anyway, I might as well make some most of it. And I think, you know, it's been going up and up. So hopefully by the time I actually want to take it out, it's appreciated. And I will It'll made that four and a half percent, which is pretty good. And so I'm doing that. And then I'm starting to get into these alt coins and trying to figure out which ones are actually going to make it big. And which ones are scams and about, I guess 99% of them are scams. And like so my friends been showing me like, hey, you know, you can tell how much money was used to create this coin, and then are they allowed, are you allowed to sell coins? Or you're not allowed to sell coins? Or you know, what are the different little red flags that go hey, this coin is a scam this coin is a scam this coin maybe not be a scam. You know? And so you know, you put your money in and then if it goes up a little bit, you take your money out, and then you'll play with the house money and then you let it right kind of thing. Kyle: Yeah. So which coins have you found that piqued your interest then? Allen: So the one that I'm getting into right now, I haven't got like I'm pretty new at this. So I'm still learning and looking around. The one that I have found that has a good chance of success right now is called Floki. Kyle: Floki. Like the Norse god. Allen: Uh huh. Yeah Kyle: The trickster god. Allen: Yeah. Floki dot INU Floki.INU. And so his symbol is a dog with the viking helmet.  Okay. So it's it's one of the meme coins, but they're doing a ton of advertising. They're coming out with some actual use for the coin soon. You know, so that one has already gone up in value a lot. And there's probably a lot more to go in my opinion. So that's one that I'm going into. Kyle: What's one that you're that you found some red flags on them? Allen: There's been a bunch. The names I don't know off the top my head but there was one. Oh, it's like world peace earth or something like that. You know, there's like, so there's so many of them. There's like, they call them weird names. Whatever's trending at the moment like just endgame coin and Avengers coin. Dan: Oh, I just read a story that the squid game coin is apparently the creators fleeced everybody. What? Kyle: What, what's your thoughts on hamster coins? Jack Dorsey's favorite. He thinks that's gonna overtake Etherium. Allen: Oh, really? I haven't heard of that one. Dan: Nobody has. Kyle: Nobody has, I know. Dan: Don't listen to Jack Dorsey. That's all I have to say. Allen: I mean, you know, it's so it's, it's like the Wild West is full of gambling. And you know, the guy that teached me about it. He's like, Yeah, you know, we probably have maybe another year or two years before this all this stuff gets regulated. And all these alt coins are just gone.  Kyle: It's kind of started already to Yeah, Mm hmm. I think didn't I see something about the SEC getting authority over was stable coins, stable coins just issued today. Allen: Oh, that's today. Okay. Dan: Biden said if you don't do it, we'll issue an executive order to make it happen? So it's on the way? Yeah, it's happening. They're there. They're the beginnings of regulation. Or I should say not like, we won't get there for a bit.  Allen: So because I mean, we think that, you know, the people behind these coins are like, really sophisticated and smart developers, and they spent all this time and effort, you know, creating a coin. It costs like $1 to make a coin. Kyle: Yeah. Dan and I were actually looking at making our own. Yeah, the two bowls going. Allen: You know, so it's like, yeah, it doesn't take a lot. And it's pretty simple. And people, they're, like, new coins come out every like five minutes. There's a new board. And so it's like, geez, yeah, you're Kyle: Constantly fighting that delusion.  Allen: Mm hmm. So it's interesting. It's something that is, you know, I'm playing with it. But it's money that I can afford to lose. And the bread and butter is still, you know, stock market options trading. Kyle: That's why I was gonna ask you what I mean, because now that you have a real risk manager side to you, like, what's your, how do you limit your risk then onto that? I'm assuming you do it based on like, a small percentage of your portfolio or like this is probably just play around money, right, especially when you're learning? Allen: Yeah. Yeah. So um, you know, I bought 30 grand of Ethereum. And that's is what I'm about to put at risk and all this stuff. So, but some of these coins like they're brand new, right? So they're little, and they can go up 500, 800, 10000% and then they will back down. Yeah. You can have a really big move. And some of the people that I know, they've this year, this past year, and this is why I got into it, because they took like really small amounts, and they've made you know, they have a million dollars or $5 million, or $3 million worth of cryptocurrencies. And I was like, why aren't you selling, you know, yeah. And then they go off and they're like, Well, you know, it's gonna go up more and you know, I gotta pay taxes. I don't want to pay 50 2% taxes or more moved to Puerto Rico and so they have all their reasons for.. Dan: Transfer for a more stable one. Allen: Mm hmm. Kyle: Dan just had this same conversation with a couple of his friends. Dan: Yeah, yeah, mate. Yeah. Kyle: 50% on the latest dip on Bitcoin and then refuses to sell any Kyle: It's 10% Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's like like you're saying like, take your money out. Let let it be house money. Yeah, exactly. Not getting risk on anything come on.  Kyle: And then you got money to reload because it drops again. Yes, I want to have some ammo laying around the to jump into something when the opportunity strikes Allen: Yep. Now I think you guys are you guys are traders you know you guys are watching the markets, you guys are there in the front of the screen, I'm not that much into it, you know, I'll keep my screen open but I'm not checking all the time. And so for me that's a little bit harder. And so, you know, I for my bitcoin and Etherium or whatever I'm not, I'm not selling, you know, even if it dips or goes up, I'm not selling I know I'm gonna hold it for another maybe 10-15 years. So hopefully it keeps going up, but we'll see how it goes. But for now the idea was, hey, just buy it, hold it. And if it keeps going up maybe you add a little bit here and there. So I've been doing that.  Dan: No,but yeah, that's your plan. It's a long term plan. You're not trying to strike it rich the people that are buying into these things trying to strike it rich and then refusing to ever sell. Allen: Oh, that's silly. Yeah Dan: Yes. Like you gotta get paid some point Allen: There was one guy on the had an article where he became a Dodge coin millionaire and he's like, I'm not selling like.. Dan: Oh, no, not a millionaire anymore. Allen: What's the point? Dan: You never were a millionaire, coz you never sold. Kyle: Exactly. Have you come across anything? I guess staking is kind of similar to derivatives. But like, If there comes a time where you can sell calls on your Bitcoin you can do something like that.  Allen: So yeah, so they just came out with, is it bati? I forget the name of it.  Dang it. The the first ETF Bitcoin ETF just came out. Dan: That's Yes, that's right. Um, that was a futures based one too, though, isn't it? Allen: Bitl. There we go. So, that's tradable. And that that has options. So, you know, right now it's at $39. I don't know if that's cheap enough for your wheel. But.. Dan: I think what cuz that's if that's based around a futures contract, it's going to be constantly losing money too overtime, right? Allen: Probably. Dan: Won't you get like double decay if you. So decay of the futures contract. And every time, Allen: Yeah every time they roll it forward a month they lose, right? Because I have all the fees and stuff to pay. So that is something.. Dan: That might be a really good one to sell Options. Allen: Yep. So I mean, I, you know, I've sold some calls on it, because I was like, Okay, if bitcoin goes up, and they're saying, you know, bitcoins gonna be 100,000 by the end of the year, I was like, Okay, I'll sell some calls on it. And or no, sorry, I'll buy some calls. I bought some calls. This is one of the few ones where I'm actually buying calls. Now that trade is still negative. But you know, it's a bet, you know, it's a bet. If it goes up, great. Dan: Yeah, just manage that risk. Allen: Mm hmm. Dan: So let's wrap things up with I want to ask you some questions about just some of the most common mistakes that you see from your students, or just the biggest struggles that they have and how they had to overcome those. Okay, yeah. So if you're going to give us like, just the top couple pitches, see? Allen: Okay, so first off, I would say is that they try to do too much too soon. And so one of the things that I always stress is, Hey, pick one strategy that fits who you are. And just focus on that one strategy, get really good at it, hammer it, do back testing, or get some back testing software, pay for it if you have to, and just do trade after trade after trade after trade until you understand it, until it's like, you know, second nature to you and you're consistently profitable. Only at that time, should you then venture off and say okay, let me add another strategy. Right. So that's the that's the first thing that I tell everybody a second thing is not all strategies are for every person. Mm hmm. Like for me if you told me Hey, you know, I'm gonna put a gun to your head and you have to be be profitable at futures trading, or be like well, you know, goodbye Allen: You know, tell my wife I love here. you know, telling her that life insurance is very well Allen: So it's not for me, you know, my temperament my style, the way I I am the risk temper the the risk appetite that I have is different than everybody else. And so you got to figure out what strategy and there's 1000 strategies and there's every every strategy out there you can make money there are people out there making money with futures day trading and, and Options on futures and, you know, pairs trading and whatever you can think of people are doing it, some of them making money, most are not, but if you find the thing that fits you and you're like, you know what, this this really, really makes sense to me, I really get this, then that's the one that you should focus on. Most people are just like, Oh, hey, you know, I found my friend is doing this or I can make a lot of money doing this or I saw an advertisement, I saw an email, and then they run into it, and then they get blown out of the water. Dan: We actually just had a discussion on that not too long ago, Dan, about, you know, when you try to copy somebody else's strategy, it's not your own, you don't have time and effort that you've got put into learning it, you're not passionate about it. So what you're saying makes a whole lot of sense. Like, yeah, you need to find the thing that speaks to you.  Allen: Mm hmm. And I guess, if I give you one more, it'll be that time goes by a lot faster than we realize, hmm. And so if there are people out there that have already paved the way, and you know, for a fact that they're doing well, then just do what they're doing, you know, or at least learn from them. Yeah, learn from, you know, if you can hire them, hire them, and just see what they're doing, learn, watch their strategies, and just do what they're doing. And hopefully it should work, right. And then you can tweak it once you do what they're doing. And once you're getting good results, then you can start tweaking it and be like, okay, you know, I'm gonna make it a little bit more conservative, a little more aggressive, a little bit this little bit that, but follow the plan first, you know, make it work, and then you add your own twist to it. We have so many people that come in, they're like, you know, I've been following you or I've been listening to you for two years. Okay, how many trades have you done? Well, not really. You know, I've been trying to do it on my own and watching free YouTube videos, like, Okay, well, you only get so far watching free Youtube videos, because you don't number one, you don't know how legit they're right? That's one thing. Anybody can like I say that, you know, any idiot can make a YouTube video. Allen: It used to be hard to write a book, you know, you have to go to a publisher get published and have references and all that stuff nowadays. Man, you put up a PDF on Amazon, it takes like a weekend. So don't be like, Oh, I'm an author. Okay, great. You know, everybody's an author. No. So it's really you got to be really careful of what you listen to. Kyle: Speaking of which, where can they find your book? PassiveTrading.com. Yeah, that's PassiveTrading.com. It's a free book, you know, just pay for the shipping, and we'll ship you out a printed copy of it. Dan: So PassiveTrading.com, we'll link in the description for that. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners before we sign off here? Allen: No. I mean, it's been a lot of fun. You know, you guys, you guys are awesome. And I love it that you guys are honest. And you share the wins and the losses. Most of the time, you only see oh, I made 1,000,000% Oh, I made 20%. You don't see the losses, you don't see the the nitty gritty behind the scenes stuff. And you guys are showing that. So that's I love that part.  Dan: Well it's the same thing with gamblers too, right? You talk to a guy who goes to the casino and says, Oh, I won $300 last night. Oh, how much did you lose the night before? Yeah. Allen: Um, but yeah, I mean, if people are interested in Options, it's a great, it's a great way to add some passive money, you know? And if that's, if that fits, you know, it doesn't fit for everybody. Like some people, they come in and, and they're like, Yeah, I'm trying to do this, but I'm, I'm doing this and do that. I'm like, Dude, you're too aggressive. You know, if you want to be trading every day or every other day, then this is not for you. You know, find something you can do this part time, and then do with the rest of your time. Play something that fits your style more, but that's really important. You know, find your style, and then it'll just it just a whole lot easier. It's just which is way easier. Dan: What else can they, so we find your OptionGenius.com. You've also got your podcast. Allen: Yep. It's called the Option Genius Podcast. Kyle: Oh, hey. Allen: Yeah, we got really creative with our very own brains. Dan: All right, perfect. Yeah, we'll make sure we link all that stuff. Right. So if anybody wants to find out more they can check it out the description. Kyle: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us Allen, this has been a great conversation all of your your knowledge and experience has been a good time to listen to. We really appreciate you coming by the shop and talking with us today. Dan: Yeah, the hardships too, because I feel like you learn more from those sometimes.  Allen: Mm, yeah. They hit on the head. You know, sometimes you got to do it over and over again. Eventually, they eventually they sink in. Kyle: Alright, well there you have it, folks. We'll have all of that fun stuff in the episode description all those links for you. Any parting word, Allen? Allen: Just you know, I I tell everybody you know, trade with the odds in your favor.  Dan: The odds be ever in your favor. Kyle: It's like in the movie? Kyle: All right. Well, I guess it's time to kick everybody out. You don't got to go home but you can't stay here. Until next time. Happy trades. Allen: Bye, guys.   LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe have a discussion about spirituality and spiritual development.  Joe was rubbed the wrong way by a podcast he recently listened to where a previously very psychedelic-oriented Qabalist said that psychedelics didn't really help with spiritual growth. This leads to a discussion built on many questions: what is spiritual development? What is enlightenment? Does drug-taking always need a set intention based on growth? Do "I need a break from bullshit" or "I want to have fun with my friends" count as intentions? And who are we worried will discredit or judge us for having those be our intentions or keys to spiritual development?  They also touch on religion and their embedded spiritual goals, the importance and power of the communal aspect of some of these experiences, the community that church brings to people and what's changing as more people move away from religion, hypnosis and the dangers of inaccurate or entirely fabricated "memories," the importance of diversifying your tools for growth, the trouble in trying to define shamanism, the problems with therapists and facilitators bringing their own frameworks into sessions rather than letting clients define their own experience, and the unfortunate passing of the Fungi Academy's Oliver Merivee (fundraiser link below).  Lastly, they remind us that there are only a few spots left for the upcoming Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists class, which begins on January 8th. If you've been considering taking the class, what better time than the new year to take that step? Time to leave 2020 behind and step into 2021 with purpose! Happy New Year! Notable Quotes “The thing that had me keep coming back to breathwork is that sense of community. And I think a lot of people start to find their community in these medicine spaces and ayahuasca circles and whatnot, because you’re having an experience together and being able to explore and share that, and sometimes these are so vulnerable and so deep experiences- you’re together with a bunch of strangers and you feel like you just shared things or experienced things that you never really experienced with the closest people in your life. And somehow, that creates a sense of meaning or connection that is hard to find elsewhere. It’s interesting to really kind of view the community or community aspect as part of spirituality, in a sense.” -Kyle “It’s interesting to hear people have these experiences and then have a facilitator say, ‘Yes, that’s what happened to you.’ How do you know? I don’t know. I’ve had plenty of these past life experiences and I have no idea if that was actually real.” -Kyle“Of course this is a complicated topic, and really messy. We wouldn’t have this many episodes of the podcast if it wasn’t.” -Joe Links DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, by Rick Strassman Shamanic Qabalah: A Mystical Path to Uniting the Tree of Life & the Great Work, by Daniel Moler Tantric Physics I & II (Vol.1: Cave of the Numinous, Vol.2: Sacred Body, Sacred Space), by Craig Williams Thevenusproject.com Psychologyconcepts.com: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness Oliver Merivee (founder of the Fungi Academy)’s Memorial Fundraiser Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, after a short and much-needed break, Kyle and Joe return, but don't really touch on any news. This time, they have a very open conversation largely focused on philosophy and capitalism. They dive into a lot of philosophical questions: are we reducing the mystical to the medical? Do we understand enough about spirit and somatic energies to measure them? How much are therapists and sitters interpreting mystical experience and assigning meaning to it for others vs. teaching people how to interpret it themselves? What makes a God? Is commodifying the sacred bad? And what makes something sacred other than it being significant? And the classic: What is good?  They also touch on Harvard School of World Religions' year-long series on psychedelics and the future of religion, the Divine Command Theory, James Kent's DoseNation podcast series, Charles Eisenstein and the concept of deflationary money, the billionaire pledge, triple bottom line thinking and other ways to incentivize employees to make businesses closer to co-ops, and why not all capitalism is bad. Lastly, Joe highly recommends Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring's book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, which touches on MKUltra, the Phoenix Program, how the government used Charles Manson, and how the drug war was a logical consequence of the paranoia of the U.S.S.R. and communism toppling the USA and capitalism. Notable Quotes “Coming from the somatic world, our bodies- I think, sometimes we dismiss that and maybe might call that a little ‘woo woo,’ but how is your body an actual instrument that can help you understand maybe what’s going on? It’s firing a bunch of signals all the time, right? Information is just coming in and we have to try to make sense of it. Is it an appropriate instrument to try to learn how to discern the information that’s coming in? Could we finely tune that?” -Kyle “It’s helpful to have diagnostic categories, but I think we’re taking the diagnostic categories a little too seriously and making them a little too real. A diagnostic category is not as real as a glass of water in your hand. One’s real concrete, one’s real abstract. Both are helpful at times. Both could be harmful, depending on what you do with the glass.” -Joe“A lot of folks want to just use psychedelics and escape the world, like the ‘drop out’ thing. Like, ‘I’m just going to be with the spirit world.’ But it’s like, what good is you being with the spirit world if you’re not having any impact on the world world?” -Joe “Being hubristic enough to say that ‘I have an answer’- that’s where I see the problem. Being willing to engage in conversation with people with a lot more experience with this kind of thing is probably where it’s at. Like, ok, let’s talk to 4-5 economists and see what their opinion is. Maybe talk to some professional ethicists to see what their opinion is. I don’t think anybody is going to have the answer, but by hearing all of those perspectives, we can learn more.” -Joe Links Center for the Study of World Religions: Medicalizing Mysticism: Religion in Contemporary Psychedelic Trials (youtube) Divine Command Theory Psymposia.com: “Lucy In The Sky With Nazis: Psychedelics and the Right Wing” by Brian Pace, PhD Sage Journals: Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression James Kent’s DoseNation podcast The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, by Thomas S. Szasz The Giving Pledge turns 10: These billionaires pledged to give away half their wealth, but they soon ran into a problem CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss some very scientific (read: hard to understand) articles. First, they talk about one on Salvinorin A and its interactions with a different receptor than other psychedelics (kappa opioid receptors) and what that could mean, and a related article from Wired- a first-hand account of taking salvia as part of a brain-imaging study at Johns Hopkins University. The biggest takeaway from these can be summed up in researcher Manoj Doss's closing quote: "Not only does this tell me how little we understand psychedelics, it also tells me how little we understand how to study them.” They then review a recent double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study on LSD, which showed results we expect to see, but the full details haven't been released yet. This leads to a discussion about intergenerational trauma and researchers finding that children of Holocaust survivors often display more trauma-related behavior than their parents, commonality between people of Irish and German decent (due to shared traumatic histories), the idea of "group soul," how the lymphatic system works within the brain to remove toxins and how this and the blood-brain barrier can be affected by a concussion, and the effects caesarian sections have both on an individual person as well as in higher concentrations of people per country. Do countries with more C-sections produce more traumatized people? Lastly, they talk about how psychedelics opening up people's brains and thought processes could possibly lead toward more conspiratorial thinking, which leads to discussion about QAnon, Alan Moore, a crazy story about 9/11 from Kyle, and the very idea of truth: what is your personal criteria for something being true? What do any of us really know? And one last reminder- October 28th is the premiere of the new 15-week online course offering called An Introduction to Philosophy and Psychedelics with Lenny Gibson, so if you're considering taking it, now is the time to sign up! Notable Quotes “Do we always need to seek ego death to have profound healing in psychedelic experiences? Could it be more gentle at times?” -Kyle “There seems to be this trend in the scientific world to say, ‘ok cool, our data suggests that this model of the world and how things are working is true, therefore this model is true’ and kind of sticking to your guns on that, and I think because we finally have our tools back where we can examine the psyche after decades of prohibition, that maybe let’s not rush- like, let’s keep them hypotheses, and perhaps we can be more fluid when new hypotheses come out about the world and the mind and the brain and these things. Perhaps that’ll help us not necessarily have to live in a certain paradigm for a super long time and we can be a little bit more paradigm-fluid maybe, or model-agnostic, and just kind of shift around as new data comes to light.” -Joe “What’s truth and how do you know what is true? ….How can you validate that that is true? And what do you know to be true in your world? It’s a hard thing to really understand. When I think about it, I think the only true thing that I know is this present moment.” -Kyle “It’s interesting. How do we know more? How does knowledge work? Epistemology, metaphysics-  these are massive questions, and as much as I appreciate science, I feel like science could benefit a lot from being philosophy-aware. Like, what are we really doing? What kind of metaphysics and epistemology underlies our go-forward here? Is there data to suggest that mind and brain aren’t the same thing? Yes, there is, including [from] top neurologists like Karl Pribram and others. Mind does not equal brain. And how do we transcend that and go forward? I know this is not what the establishment wants us to be saying, if we want to talk about conspiracies. Just look at scientism vs. philosophy and the humanist traditions- really, quite a battle that’s been going on for a long time, probably since the time of Newton or before.” -Joe  Links The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time, by Jimena Canales Wired.com: This Is My Brain on Salvia Nature.com: The Acute Effects of the Atypical Dissociative Hallucinogen Salvinorin A on Functional Connectivity in the Human Brain Psychedelics Today: Does Salvia Divinorum Have Therapeutic Potential? By Michelle Janikian Nature.com: Acute dose-dependent effects of lysergic acid diethylamide in a double-blind placebo-controlled study in healthy subjects Psychedelicreview.com: Ketanserin info Statista.com: Cesarean sections - Statistics & Facts Different Doorway: Adventures of a Caesarean Born, by Jane B. English The Concussion Repair Manual : A Practical Guide to Recovering from Traumatic Brain Injuries, by Dan Engle Nih.gov: Brain cleaning system uses lymphatic vessels Resonancescience.org (Resonance Science Foundation) Nytimes.com: Cleve Backster: He talked to plants. And they talked back. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss recent items in the news and dive into cannabis-assisted psychotherapy after Joe recently helped with his first session. They discuss Compass Pathways' projection that their upcoming stock price could be $14-$16 a share, giving them a possible valuation of as much as $544 million and the problem of having Peter Thiel as one of their leading investors, as it has recently come to surface that he met with white nationalists in 2016 and had good things to say about them. This, in addition to his concerning data-mining company, Palantir Technologies, soon going public puts a lot of the wrong attention and bad press on Compass Pathways. They talk about UC Berkeley launching a new center for psychedelic science and education with Michael Pollan as one of the co-founders, Decriminalize Nature Ann Arbor putting forth to the city council a resolution to decriminalize entheogenic substances on September 21st, and progress in Washington D.C. and Chicago's decriminalization efforts. They also talk about Dr. Bronner's new "Heal soul!" campaign, which includes new labeling about psychedelic-assisted therapy and a 10% donation of net October sales towards several familiar organizations including: MAPS, Heroic Hearts Project, The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI), and Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, Inc. (VETS). Lastly, they talk about cannabis-assisted psychotherapy sessions and how similar they are to both psychedelic and breathwork sessions, how Kyle uses cannabis and somatic work together, and how established worldviews and paradigms can shift through narratives and critical analysis from both sober and psychedelic-assisted thinking. And finally, the next round of Navigating Psychedelics (beginning September 17th) is now officially sold out, but dates for the next round will be announced soon if you missed your chance. Additionally, there is a new class offering which explores Jungian psychology called Imagination as Revelation, developed by Kyle and Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, and a new class with Lenny Gibson coming in October about the history of western philosophy (info/sign up here).  Notable Quotes On cannabis use: “It’s always been very psychedelic to me. The way I work with it is somatically, being able to lie down, incorporate some of the breathing techniques, do movement, do yoga, do some bodywork, and to really work with whatever is coming up in my body that way, maybe play some music... I kind of started developing this naturally over 10+ years just from-- it was like listening to the plant saying ‘this is how I should be used’ in a sense. Like, ‘every time you go do something stupid with me, X might happen.’ So I started getting the message of: use this more consciously. This is a tool for inner exploration.” -Kyle “It’s this cultural baggage around cannabis. We think ‘oh you smoke it at a Grateful Dead show’ or ‘you watch Cartoon Network late at night while you’re smoking pot.’ You don’t think: ‘Let me close my eyes with intention and journey with it.’ That’s not part of our cultural vision of the plant and our relationship to it. Though, why not? There’s no reason not to. If we can cure or help manage or treat a lot of these things happening in our psyche with cannabis, what kind of miracle is that?” -Joe “Similar to Robert Anton Wilson’s kind of reality tunnels, you can flip on the Marxist lens, you can flip on the existentialist lens, or modern capitalist lenses just to allow you to get a better picture of what’s happening in front of you. You’re never going to see objective reality but you can get closer and closer and closer. And the more lenses you use, the better you’re going to get. Does a single telescope give you a great idea about a planet? No, but when you have 400, you’re going to have a lot better [idea]. What happens when you throw a satellite out there and you’re able to see from outside the atmosphere?” -Joe “I guess I come back to narrative a lot. If you’re telling somebody that they are sick and broken, what are they going to think about that, that they’re never going to be able to heal? Is there power in narrative? If you have a more hopeful narrative, can people heal? I’m just thinking about even in breathwork experiences, where I’ve visited narratives that are so embedded in me and then going through a breathwork session, being like ‘holy shit, maybe I don’t actually need to subscribe to that narrative anymore. Maybe that’s something I’ve been holding onto for so long, and maybe I do have the internal power to change.' But most people just say, ‘no, that’s what it is. That’s going to be your lifelong sentence.’ Maybe not. How do we encourage people that they can change?” -Kyle Links Investors.com: The First Psychedelic Drug IPO Could Be Worth More Than Half A Billion Dollars Buzzfeednews.com: Peter Thiel Met With The Racist Fringe As He Went All In On Drumpf Vox.com: Everything you need to know about Palantir, the secretive company coming for all your data News.berkeley.edu: UC Berkeley launches new center for psychedelic science and education Metrotimes.com: Ann Arbor to consider decriminalizing psychoactive mushrooms, plants Washingtonpost.com: D.C. residents to vote on decriminalization of ‘magic mushrooms’ on November ballot Psychedelicreview.com: Chicago Follows Oakland, Introduces Resolution to Decriminalize Psychedelic Plants Dr. Bronner: Support Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies to Heal the Soul! Dr. Bronner's new "Heal Soul" label Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

Clockwise from Left to Right: Matthew, Katrina and Kyle It’s here! We made it to 20 episodes! Kyle Buchman joined Matthew and Katrina to talk about birding and cooking in cast iron skillets.

In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss topics in the media including the usefulness of brain activity scans and the idea that “brain does not equal mind,” how language can shift the social narrative to or away from stigma when describing substance use, and psilocybin testing in mice and when we might see psilocybin start being prescribed. They spend a lot of time on the questions everyone is asking right now- what changes can we make that will help the most people and give the oppressed what they need? What tangible changes do the oppressed actually want? What should the role of police look like, either compared to or in conjunction with social work or therapy? They look at these questions with hope, but through a realistic lens- disasters, illness and even global warming always affects the poor and oppressed more than those in power. And historically, people have always shown a natural tendency to want to hold others down. What is the real purpose behind what those in power do (for example, outlawing encrypted texting or arresting someone for doing drugs)? Are they trying to encourage only specific conversations they’re comfortable with?  Quotes So what really can we do, and what specifically can those with white privilege do? The answer there is to find where your voice is most effective, and to have those tough conversations. “Find those inarguable points. Don’t let the media steer your narrative. Major media outlets want you to talk about certain things. Don’t do that. Find out what you think is most important and most helpful to discuss with the people you’re around. Where do you have the most influence?” -Joe  “How can we... shift the narrative there to help people heal instead of… putting them in this lifelong box of ‘you’ll never heal from this because you have this disorder and this disease’? I’m always on the side of healing [rather] than trying to completely pathologize experiences.” -Kyle “It sounds nice to say that we want to eliminate violence, we want to eliminate racism, we want to eliminate rape- all these really bad things. But how long have those things been with us? At least 14,000 years, I think. What’s it going to really take to totally reprogram the human genome- the human mind- to transition to this ideal? Is it possible? I don’t know... I want to see these police held accountable, I want to see… criminals in the government go to jail. But it’s kind of the nature of these institutions. They have this monopoly on violence that was granted to them a long time ago, and there’s no real recourse. They’ve got way bigger budgets than any of us as individuals or gangs have, much more training, much better gear… I don’t totally see a great path out.” -Joe Links Studies of Brain Activity Aren't as Useful as Scientists Thought Language Matters in the Recovery Movement Interview: Adam Halberstadt, UC San Diego Protests Drive DC Psychedelics Decriminalization Signatures As Activists Launch Major Mailer Campaign Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

It doesn't come as any real surprise, but Bernie Sanders' campaign coordinator for Iowa, Kyle Jurek (whose nose looks suspicious), was caught on camera by a Project Veritas whistleblower doing some IRL Siege-posting. Needless to say, it's pretty bad optics. One has to wonder, though... Will his open threats to start an Antifa riot and re-educate Trump supporters earn him a visit from our esteemed friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation?  Probably not, because Kyle is a communist. Which brings up an interesting question: are these the people you want in charge of threat detection and criminal justice? If Kyle felt confident enough to openly brag about his radical communist leanings, how many other people in the Bernie campaign are the same way? How many radical communist extremists are being ignored by intelligence for the sake of political witch hunts against so-called "white supremacists"? How do you know you won't be dragged from your bed in the middle of the night if Bernie becomes president and hires a bunch of people like Kyle? It's a scary thought, and one we'll be exploring. We'll also be talking a bit about Iran and immigration. This is EPISODE 346 of So to Speak w/ Jared Howe!

James: Hi listeners, welcome to Achieve Wealth Podcast. This is James Kandasamy and Achieve Wealth Podcast focuses on Commercial Real Estate Operators who are killing it in all kind of commercial real estate asset classes. Today, I have Kyle Mitchell. Kyle is from California who has bought his first deal of 42 units in the market of Tucson, Arizona and he's going to be sharing his experience on coming to that first deal. Kyle is also a co-host of his weekly real estate podcast, which is Passive Income True Multifamily Real Estate.  Hey, Kyle, welcome to the show. Kyle: Hey James, how you doing? I'm happy to be on and thanks for inviting me.  James: Oh, it's an honor to see someone, you know starting to buy in this market, in this red hot market right now where it's so competitive; even though it's still the best time to buy just because of the climate of buying the deals. The interest rate is really good and there's a lot of capital looking for a place to park their money and make money as well but the biggest problem is finding the right deal. So tell me about your journey. I mean, when did you start looking for deals? I mean, when did you start even thinking about investing in real estate? Kyle: Yeah. So I've been investing in real estate since 2013 and how I got started was even in high school, I invested a little bit of money in the stock market. I had a couple of thousand dollars invested in the stock market and I lost it in six months and it was nothing that I could do about it. And I just learned quickly that I wanted more control over my investments and I just started looking online and listening to some podcasts, reading some books. Like most people, Rich Dad Poor Dad was one of the books that changed my life and I just knew I want to get into real estate. So I bought my first single-family home in Long Beach, California, southern California and started building up a small portfolio of single-family homes across the United States. And from there, I learned quickly that I couldn't scale as fast as I wanted to single-family homes, and I wanted real estate to be my vehicle to provide myself and my family with financial freedom. And so I started looking at some other asset classes and that's when I found multifamily. James: I got it. Got it. Got it. You just reminded me of something very interesting in my life when I went into real estate. I mean, the first time I read Robert Kiyosaki's book, maybe like 10 15 years ago when I was busy working and I never understood the book. I'm not sure, I know it changed a lot of people's lives when they read it. I mean, I recently read it again and now, it all makes sense. In the beginning, it didn't make sense. I say, what is this guy talking about? Because we are so busy on a W-2 job and especially me, I can never understand what is it he's trying to talk about? So what was the aha moment when you read that book, I mean, what is that?  Kyle: Yeah, to be honest. I did read that book and I reread it several times. The one that really changed my thinking was his Cash Flow Quadrant Book if I'm being honest but he really teaches you how to understand how your time works for you, basically. And so, being a business owner and an entrepreneur, you can have other people working for you while you make money. Otherwise, you're trading your time for money, being an independent contractor or a small business owner or W-2 employee. And so that was the biggest mindset shift to me is really purchasing assets not liabilities that cash flow while you sleep and having other people work on them for you. James: Got it. Got it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, there may be people who are in W-2 job who have read his book and never get it and I was one of them. Because I think when you're working 9 to 5, W-2 job you're busy and suddenly when you get this knowledge about, hey, you can do business, you can do investment, it's like completely out of your arena right. I read a few pages and I gave up on it because it just doesn't align to me.  So for the people who are in W-2 job just be aware, sometimes it may not align with you because you are busy working in your own job, but I think when you mingle with people in real estate or with the business people you get it but if you are just working in your table to job, you may not get it. Just to be aware, you have to change your network to really make a shift in your life.  So tell us about how did you choose to be an operator? Because you bought this 42 units recently and I remember talking to you like one year ago when I meet you in California or maybe six months ago when we met up there in Long Beach and you were like, I want to get into the game. I know multifamily is really good and you started your own meetup and everybody's excited. And you said, okay, I want to get started with the capital raising and we had that discussion about being an operator and what's your background.  Tell me about your background and how did you choose to become an operator?  Kyle: Yeah, so my background is being an operator and that's why I'm an operator now, but my background was in the golf business and I was a general manager and a regional manager for a golf management company for about 15 years. So what I did was manage people, manage the business, manage the P&Ls, drive revenues, control expenses, hire/fire, manage people. So my whole entire background is really in operations and Logistics in business. And so at the time when we were talking, I was really struggling because I knew when I first started our company that I wanted to be an operator. However, it's a hot market. It's very tough to find deals and I was kind of like that Facebook frenzy, the fear of missing out, you want to get in the game. And so I was struggling because I was presented with some deals to raise capital on and I knew these people and they were good operators and it was a really good opportunity for me to jump on board. I decided not to jump on board, not because I didn't believe in the operator or the deal but really because I wanted to stick to my values and who I believe I am and then also my strengths and my strengths are really as an operator. And so we passed on those and just kind of kept grinding and I knew we would eventually get to the point where we did get a property and we can operate it on our own and that's kind of where we are today. James: So were you able to see someone else whose an operator and you can align with it or how did you know that being an operator is what you want to do? Kyle: It's because of my background. It's just something that I'm naturally kind of transferring over from the golf business to here. I think a lot of people here, okay, you're in the golf business; that's completely different than real estate and that may be the case. But we're doing the same things in the golf business that we're doing in real estate. We are driving our revenues, we're controlling our expenses, we're making sure that our employees or our third-party property management company are doing the job that they need to do to operate the property. So it was an easy transition really for me and it's just something I've been doing for so long that I really enjoy it. I'm not a big sales guy. I mean, we do find our own deals and do all that kind of stuff too but as far as raising capital, it wasn't something that I was really in love with doing. And really with an operator, it's the stuff that I love doing; diving into the P&Ls, working out the business plan, working together with the third-party property management company to make sure that we are doing the right things to get to the numbers so our investors make their returns.  James: Yeah, I mean, with so much Capital nowadays looking for a place to park their money and make money. So sometimes it easier to start with being a capital raiser or being a partner who's bringing a chunk of capital. But for me, it's always the operator whose at the top of the food chain. They make the most money, they control the whole deal, they are the backbone of the business. This person who's the operator is so important because they know the detail of the business. They know how did they come up with the per forma of rent increase? How did they underwrite the deal? Which comps did they go and shop? And when some things don't go right, the operator has to bring back the plane to the flight path again and they are the one who can control all that.  Whereas if you're in any other role it's very hard for you to do that. And I think it's important that the investors need to know who are the operators because the operators are the backbone of the deal. I think that's a very key fact. So coming back to the deal that you did, how did you choose to do 42 units and not 10 units or 100 units?  Kyle: Yeah. So I think in a perfect world, we would have probably started with something a little bit larger, but I think you also have to know your limits as an operator and as a money raiser. And so, let's just say we were going to go after a 10 million-dollar deal, that's 120 units, you can back into the number that you're going to need to be able to close on. So you need 3 million dollars for the down payment, another let's just say million for the capex so you're at 4 million. So does your net worth and liquidity get to what you need to close on the loan? Can you raise 4 million?  And so all those things we had tracked and we felt that this 42 unit at the price point that it was that we could raise enough money, we have the net worth to put in to take it down and it's a good size property to have our first deal. James:  So how did you align your team to be ready to take on that 42 units? I'm trying to figure out how did you come up with that 3 million-dollar limit. So you must have either your net worth or someone who acted as a key principle as a KP.  Kyle: Yeah, so this is an interesting story, actually. Originally, we were going with the Freddie Mac loan and the team was my fiance and I, who is my business partner, and then our parents were going to sign on the loan as KPs to bring on the net worth piece and liquidity. And halfway through we were, I wouldn't say we're struggling with the capital raised but we were not feeling as comfortable as we should have. We had to raise about a million dollars on this deal and about three weeks in, we're about halfway there. And so the plan was to bring in another partner to help with asset management and raise Capital if we were not able to get there and use our extension. Well at that point, our mortgage broker said, hey, Kyle, it's too late to bring on a GP. We've already submitted your loan application to Freddie Mac. We're not adding any more GPS. So then, we were stuck between a rock and a hard place, to be honest, because it was either continue to raise what we're doing the 506B, so it's not like we can meet new people; our network is our network at that time. And so we would really have to grind it out and convince some of the people that weren't on board to come onboard or come up with our own capital or switch over and try to find another lender. And the reason why we were in that position is I fully believe that you need to raise a hundred percent of your capital or else you just can't execute on your business plan.  If your business plan is to raise a million dollars and you only raise 700,000, you're $300,000 short on executing on your business plan. And that's very crucial and we are not the type of investors that utilize the cash flow from our properties to put back into the capex. We feel like that could really hurt you. If the revenues go down or for some reason you have a big expense, you don't have cash flow that month, now all of a sudden you can't put money back into the property and your business plan suffers. So we always raise the capital upfront for the capital improvements so that we can execute them, whether our incomes are up or down. So we decide to switch; 29 days left to close after our extension, we switch from Freddy to Fanny and a new lender and it was a pretty stressful time. But so we brought on a KP to sign on it and that KP we had known for about 10 months. We've been building a relationship with them and wanted to do other deals. We looked at several other deals together and we met through our meet up. And there was one other partner that came on board that helped with asset management and we raised about 900,000 ourselves and this other person came in and raised 100,000 to close. And we literally record about an hour before we were supposed to close. James: Got it. Got it. That's very interesting. So how did you align passive investors before your first deal?  Kyle: Yeah, so we had been building our investor list for over a year before we got this deal. And so it was something that we had planned all along. And the reason why we really hadn't done a deal up until that point, we wanted to make sure that we felt comfortable with the amount of money that we could raise so we did several things. We obviously went to networking events. We started our own meetup and we also told all our friends and family what we were doing and through that, through our monthly newsletter, we had an email drip campaign setup or it's 20 months of emails just educating them on who we are, what we do, why we do it and it's really about adding value to other people and educating them about what you do and making them comfortable with what you do. So after about a year, we built up that list and it's several hundred people up at this point and we felt comfortable to where we could raise the money.  James: So which channel was the most effective? I think you did some kind of drip campaign through your emails and you did a meet-up and you also tell everybody and is there anything that I missed out of and can you explain which one was the most effective in getting the passive investors because you are new. I mean you're completely new.  Kyle: Yeah, I would say it was 50/50 between friends and family who have known us for a while. And then the meetup. I would definitely say the meetup group was the strongest one. Because at the meetup, on a monthly basis, we had been doing it for 12 months at that time, you're seeing people face-to-face for 12 months and you're becoming friends with these people and very close to them and getting to know them on a personal level. I mean really building that strong relationship with them. So I think that was the strongest for sure.  We do have a podcast as well, but that didn't start until March of this year so that was not something where it was kind of on board quite yet.  James: Okay. So today, let's say, you found the deal you underwrite it, it works well; so how did you communicate that to the people in your list? And so how did you convince them to invest with you?  Kyle: Yeah, so it started with an email but it also took a ton of phone calls. I mean, I think it's all on the follow-up when you're raising money and you can't just call someone, after seeing him, six months later and say hey, I've got a deal, do you want to put in 50,000 on this deal? It's really about building that relationship. So, every month I try and reach out to our investors and whether it's through email or text or phone call, I try and touch them in some way on top of our monthly communication with them, through our drip campaign and database emails. But it was really about talking to them, meeting them in person for coffee one by one and telling about the opportunity that we have. James: So apart from the 50% of investors, which came from your friends and family. I mean, they're friends and family and they don't mind giving you some money. So the people who are complete strangers and you have build up that relationship, so what do you think is the biggest factor that they trust you with their money? Kyle: The value that we've added to them. If they want to hop on a phone call with me and just ask me for advice on where they're going with their real estate career, we would do free calls. I think also the meetup, the podcast, monthly emails; it's just everything that we provide for them. We also have a free online passive Investors Guide that they can read that's about 30 40 pages that help to educate them. And I think the other thing was they just saw the passion in us.  I mean, Lita - who's my wife now, fiance back then - we would drive to Tucson at 2:00 in the morning because we both had full-time jobs at that time and I've since left but she still had one and she only gets one day off a week. So on her day off, we would leave at 2 in the morning, 2:30 in the morning, get to Tucson around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m, tour properties, meet with investors, brokers for about 8 hours and then drive back and get back the next day at like 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. So just telling the story about what we're doing and how hard we're working, I think people saw it in us that this was something we were very serious about, we didn't take lightly and we operate our company as a business, you know, this is a serious business and we're an investment firm and we take it seriously. We don't do this part-time and we don't do this kind of on the side, which you can certainly do and I know several successful investors who do that, but they also take it very seriously like a business and I think that's a very important thing. Kyle: Yeah, certainly but I would say that I don't think you can learn everything from a mentor until you actually go through it. I think mentorship is needed and you definitely should have one so you can limit your mistakes, but you just don't know what you don't know and really until you go through that process, kind of like what I went through with the lending experience. It's really difficult to get that through a mentorship program, sometimes, at a certain point, you just gotta jump in there and do it.  James: Yeah. Yeah. I know some people go for boot camp after boot camp, mentor after mentor and never get started. So sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and take a chance on a deal that at least makes sense. So other than the financing issues that you mentioned in the beginning, throughout the closing process, was there any big aha moment that you see throughout the process with the first deal?  Kyle: Yeah, I think we would have just lined up our partners beforehand instead of trying to do it all on our own. We could have gotten it done on our own but it was just a very stressful thing and it could have really put our investors' money at risk, which is something that you just don't want to do. So I think lining up your team upfront. But I think from like an operations standpoint, I think where my experience helped is that - and during the close, you still need to make sure the property is operating on a positive note. If it starts to go back, your proceeds from the lenders are going to get cut and a lot of other things; your returns are not going to look as good.  So you need to stay on the property management company that's currently managing it, whether you're going to switch over or not. You're going to have to manage the broker to make sure they're doing everything they can to make sure that they're renting up, they're still putting renovations in there and they're managing it at the level that you want it to be managed when you take over. James: Yeah, absolutely. So that's what you want to make sure that everybody does that. And what about any issues in the money race, were there any surprises at the end?  Kyle: No, actually there wasn't. I mean, we raised all the funds prior to close, which was fantastic. I would say that raising money, you really get a peek behind the curtains of people's lives; whether they're closing on a house and need to show liquidity and can invest or they're out of town for a while or they're having a baby so they can invest. So all I would say is that if you plan on raising a million dollars, you should probably have 2 million dollars of commitments. Just because someone says, "Yes, I'll invest" doesn't mean they will. And something can be going on in their life where, yeah, they want to commit and invest but it's just not the right timing. So raising money, it's a huge timing thing.  You're raising money for 30 to 45 days and so, it's not a big window and there are things going on in other people's lives that may stop them from being able to commit to that one deal.  James: Got it. Got it. So Kyle, I mean you are a new person, bought your first deal. What was your strategy to find that first deal? Brokers, off-market or what did you do? Kyle: Yeah, it was really networking and leveraging the brokers as much as I can but it was driving out to the markets and it's something that we still do to this day. We're in the market every single week because we believe in those strong relationships and meeting people face-to-face and showing them that we're serious. I think a lot of out-of-state investors call brokers on a regular basis, but hardly ever see them face to face. I found it very beneficial to have lunches and dinners and coffees and touring the properties with the brokers and having face-to-face because you get to learn who they are and even outside of the business aspect, you get to know them as a person, as an individual, so that's been really beneficial to us. So the way we found the 42 unit; we were in town, in Tucson and one of the brokers called me and said, hey Kyle, we just got the keys to this property. Would you like to walk it with us? I haven't seen in any of the units and so we walked it and so we were the first ones to see it and it was three weeks before it was on market. And by the time they brought it to market, we had done all of our due diligence. We had a head start on everyone and we were able to take it down.  James: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean usually brokers, especially on a much larger deal, they are very, very skeptical or they do not want to deal with a lot of new people. Because there's a lot of people looking at the much larger deal and you went to 40 something unit, which a lot of big guys don't look at it, which I think is absolutely a good strategy for a person to start. I know a lot of people out there telling just go and buy above 100 units because there's so much capital you can syndicate but it's also harder to get started because there are a lot of people looking at above 100 units. So I started with 45 units and I really learned a lot. So do you think you are learning a lot and how many months already right now? Kyle: It's been two months since we've closed and yeah, absolutely, I am learning a lot on the whole process from A to Z. Now we're in my comfort zone, where I'm operating the property, managing the property manager. So I'm still learning on how the property management company kind of does things but I really do feel like I'm in my comfort zone right now. James: Awesome. Yeah, I mean you really learn a lot when you buy deals on your own and you buy smaller properties because you're going to be learning everything. But the thing is, the knowledge that I got from 45 units and the knowledge that you're getting in the 42 units is going to take you to above 1000 units pretty easily because you are doing it yourself. So sometimes when you buy a too big of a deal, there are too many GPs in the GP shape and you give it to a third party, you're not there, you're not being an active asset manager you may skip a lot of knowledge.           So do you have a property manager right now for 42 units or how is that being worked out? Kyle: We do and I think we got lucky on this. We have a property management company that is the biggest Property Management Company in Phoenix, and they also have a lot of properties in Tucson. It just so happens that most of their owners have sold their properties in Tucson so now they're trying to build back their portfolio, so I caught them on a really good time. They know I want to scale in those two markets and so they typically do not manage properties under 100 units and we were able to convince them to manage this property. So we don't have full-time staff, but we have a part-time leasing agent and a part-time maintenance person, but we're able to piggyback off of another property so that they're both full-time employees.  And so that's worked out really good and having a third party property management company that's as large as they are were able to leverage. They have an in-house GC team. We can leverage all their relationships. They have an in-house marketing team. So there's not a lot of 42 units that have their own Facebook page, their own website and all that kind of stuff and this third party property management company does that for us. James: Awesome. That's very interesting because I know 42 units are going to be hard to have. I think you probably can have like one person but you are managing with the leasing agent and part-time maintenance so that's awesome. And they are sharing it with other properties, which is really good. And so why did you choose Tucson?   Kyle: You know, first we were looking into Phoenix and Phoenix is a really hot market right now and we love everything about it. It's just very competitive. So a lot of the brokers that we were talking to said Kyle what you're looking for value-add, B to C class assets take a look at Tucson. And at that point, this was a year and a half ago or just over a year ago, we weren't really sold on it because we didn't know much about it. So what we did is we started going out there every week and start learning the market; the rent growth, the population growth. All those metrics are very good in Tucson and they follow the Phoenix market. So the more time we spend out there, the more we started to like it.           Now, I would say about Tucson is you have to be careful where you buy. It's definitely a pocketed area, but it's got job diversity just like Phoenix does and that's why we like both of those markets. The proximity of them is another good point for us. I'm out in the markets every week and so I can either drive or fly but be there pretty quickly. Whereas if I was investing in Florida, it would be difficult for me to make it out there on a weekly basis and dealing with the time changes and things like that.  James: Got it. And what is the value-add that you see in this deal? Kyle: Well, there's a lot of value-adds on it. The previous owner was a very hands-off owner. And the first time we saw the property, it was pretty evident there's just not a lot of money being put back into the property. The sign on the front on the corner had a phone number that was disconnected. They did not have any online presence so I'm actually not even sure how they were leasing up the units so that was an opportunity right there. And we've already been able to get the performer rents prior to any renovation starting just by having a phone number that works, having someone that responds. You know, the property management company that they had in there was a single-family home provider so any type of service call, they're getting charged 35 40 dollars an hour, even if it's to open the door for someone and so there's a lot of repair and maintenance money in there that is being wasted. But overall, it's just being mismanaged from an income standpoint and an expense standpoint.  James: Got it. Got it. So, I want to go back for people who are newbies who want to get started in this business, is there any advice that you want to give to newbies that you want to emphasize right now? Kyle: Yeah, I've said this a lot lately and it's, just get out of your comfort zone. It's something that is very difficult at times but once you start doing it, you really start to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and that's been the biggest thing for us. I would say 15 months ago, I would not be able to speak on this podcast. I could not speak in front of a group of people at a meetup, I was just terrified. And I just decided to jump right in. So we've got two meetups now. I've got a podcast and I quit my job to pursue this full time. We've just closed on our first property and now I'm on other people's podcast so I would just say get out of your comfort zone. I try and do something three or four times a year now that gets me out of my comfort zone because as you get out of your comfort zone, you grow as a person, you grow as a business owner and you will elevate your game that much faster. James: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So why do you want to do this for the rest of your life, why? Kyle:  It's building generational wealth. Multifamily is not 'get rich quick' by any means but it's definitely getting rich over a long period of time and you can build generational wealth, which is what I'm focused on and really want to provide my family with that opportunity. But at the same time, we're helping other people build generational wealth and that's what I love the most. We can add value into other people's lives and we can help create passive income for other people. A lot of people who we talked to don't know about multifamily or passive investing. They only know the stock market and so we really want to help educate people and say, hey, look, there's another way, there's a better way and there's a better way to diversify your portfolio as well. So we love helping other people build generational wealth while we do the same thing. James: Awesome. Awesome. I know you have been on a few other podcasts, is there anything that you think that you have not shared in any of the podcast that you want to share to our listeners? Kyle: Yeah. Actually, aligning your interest with your business partners. So my business partner is my fiance and I think that a lot of people ask us how do you work with your significant other and I don't think it's for everybody but the one thing that has worked really well for us is making sure that we wrote down our goals and aligned our interest before we started anything to make sure that we're on the same page. So even through ups and downs, we always remember and look back to that and say okay, these are our goals. So even if it's not your fiance or significant other, if it's your business partner, you've got to make sure that your goals are aligned before. Otherwise, once you're doing deals, it's just too late to start having those kinds of conversations. So definitely have the conversations upfront.  And while you're building your team, make sure that you take the time to get on the same page because a lot of people just want to get going now and if you want to get going now and you get the wrong business partner, it's going to come crumbling down in the future. And so, take more time upfront to set up your teams and align yourself with the right people so that you can streamline your business and really be off and going on the right foot. James: Awesome. Awesome. Where and how our listeners can find you?  Kyle: Yeah, sure. We've got our podcast that you mention, which is Passive Income Through Multifamily Real Estate. Our website is www.limitless-estates.com, and you can shoot me an email at Kmitchell@limitless - estates.com.  James: Awesome, Kyle. So thanks for coming over to this podcast. And for the audience, just to announce our launch of our own mentoring program. It's called multifamily A to Z Mentoring Program: Learn how to be an Operator.  I'm not sure, is there any program out there that teaches any newbies or anybody who want to get started in this business and how to be an operator and we want to cover A to Z because we do A to Z. So Property Management, Asset Management, raising money and how to build a business by itself. So we have launched that, if you are interested, let me know. Send me a mail James@achieveinvestmentgroup.com. I think we are done. Thank you very much, Kyle, for coming on board and you add tons of value to our listeners. Thank you.  Kyle: Thanks, James. I had a blast.  

About Tim Manion & Kyle Baldwin Tim Manion - Director of Business Development  With a team of Account Executives, Tim curates, develops and manages relationships with potential clients, influencers and stakeholders. In his tenure he has had the opportunity to strategize across a diverse scope of industry and business models, ranging from fortune 50 companies to crowdsourced startups. Prior to joining the Catalyst team, Tim worked in medical sales and operations management.     Kyle Baldwin - Director of Design As the Director of Design at Catalyst, Kyle is responsible for creating meaningful engagements between people, brands, and places. He employs multi-disciplinary design methods to focus on the intersection of communication design and the built environment. Since joining in 2012, he has led some of the agency’s most unique, engaging, and interactive experiences for national brands such as RSA, FN America, GungHo Entertainment, Intel, CDW, and the Chicago Department of Aviation.   What is Catalyst Exhibits and what do you do? Tim: “We work with various clients in every industry too, um, in its simplest form, bring them to a trade show.”   Trade shows are built around networking, what kind of thought goes into designing exhibits to foster the most comfortable environment to network within? Kyle: “So, it's obviously becoming a much younger generation. The millennials are kind of driving a lot of different, uh, ways of selling and engaging with brands. And they're much better, much more educated about their products they're interested in because of the Internet.”   How do networking and social media affect business development and design, and what platforms do you see as the most influential? Tim: “It's interesting to watch how people use LinkedIn in my day today. Um, I use it as an opportunity to figure out who I'm talking to. A lot of people use it for networking to get in touch with people, but when I step into a room to pitch any sort of deal, I'm looking at who's in the room…” Kyle:” It’s an opportunity to have a more natural conversation with a company, with a person, with a brand…” Trade shows are chaotic, what do you do to balance that stress? Tim: “We get the opportunity to work with a lot of cool clients and they pulled back the curtain. Um, so half of it is just enjoying what you do and the natural curiosity to just figure out…”   Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? Tim: “I mean, the benefit of a trade show is the entire room is networking. Um, and I think the best experiences I've had is when a plan goes right, um, we put together pre-post-show marketing for any given client, um, and a client that's willing to listen…”   How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? Tim: “It's one thing at its very core on our end, you have to get, uh, a lot of trust from people. We're selling a picture really. Um, so it's being honest, upfront and sincere. Um, and then the follow-through, I'm on the show floor, sleeves rolled up, making sure everything happens…” Kyle: “I'd say we, we kind of keep up with just what's happening in the organization through obviously the, you know, Internet and social media and things like that. So, we're always…”   What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? Tim: “You should value the people you bring into your fold. It shouldn't just be this person linked with me. You don't know what they do. You don't know who they like. If you're going to if I'm going to reach out to someone…” Kyle: “I would say really like define what you want and what you would like to do. Right. And like find people doing that and kind of echo that career path in some way.”   Digital networking or traditional networking? Tim: “I'll say that the folks I hire right out of college are the best-suited people in the world at getting a hold of people. Everything is done digitally. Every platform they know, LinkedIn, Instagram, I mean these things are taught in college now. And when I was there…”   If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? Tim: “Don't get bogged down in the details. Just possible. Yeah. Yeah. That's fun to watch. When you do hire people who do it, it's like managers notice that and they'll help you and they'll give you every nugget along the way. But if you're in there asking for handouts…”   We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? Kyle: “I'd say there's probably a few more up there like Polish share and you know, Stefan Sagmeister and things like that I would love the chance to meet...”   Any final words of advice for our listeners? Tim: “Just be honest.” Kyle: “I'd say be fearless then in it as well because you have nothing to lose and it's your career and your path and just own it and you know, don't tread lightly on it. Go and attack every opportunity…”   You can get in contact with Tim at: LinkedIn: Click Here Email: tmannion@catalystexhibit.com(link sends e-mail)(link sends e-mail)   You can get in contact with Kyle at: LinkedIn: Click Here

Do you struggle setting up efficient systems so you can get things done? Do you have a hard time establishing and building a culture in your office or within yourself? Are you uncertain on how you best function in the workforce? Then you probably want to listen to today's interview with Kyle Dobbs, who owns Compound Performance in Saint Louis, Missouri and this is his thing. Aside from being an awesome coach, he focuses with personal trainers, coaches, physical therapists, as well as gyms on building exactly what I just said: establishing the culture, making sure that leaders are in place in managing people effectively, making systems efficient so we can maximize revenue streams and results. And he talks a lot about personality archetyping as well in this very long but very awesome interview. I hope that you like it, I hope you get as much out of it as I did. And without further ado, let's give Kyle Dobbs a shot. For more information on Kyle, he can be found Instagram: @compoundperformance_ Facebook: kyledobbs4 and Compound Performance Website: compoundperformance.com Here are the links mentioned in the show: Inside Tracker Lucy Hendricks DISC Personality test Google Drive Bill Hartman Google Forms Evernote How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You Ben House Human Matrix Enjoy the video and modified transcript Modified Transcript Zac: You have an incredibly unique skill set that you are offering to folks like us in the industry in regards to setting up system building, organization, creating a healthy culture within companies and businesses, and I think that that's something that is vastly underappreciated within our field. You can have a wonderful idea, but if your execution is lackluster, whether its business in-person or online, you're likely going to fail. And I think a lot of people fail because they just don't have those systems in place. So that's why I wanted to bring you into this show. Tell me though, how the heck did you get into this? How does Kyle Dobbs, a yoked bro with a better beard and better hair than I, get into building systems, building culture, with people? What's your story? Kyle Dobbs: I started as a trainer, just like a lot of other people out there. And as I grew with that, I got really passionate into development. Mostly from the training and physiological side of things. That development and education did eventually lead me into leadership and management and with that I started building a lot of the organizational skills and general communication skills that I try to use now. As I got into upper management, and managing managers and directing departments and things of that nature, I got into a position in my last job where I was consulting with not only trainers and fitness facilities, but high-level executive teams within the finance community, which within large real estate companies and the New York market. I was working with a behavioral psychologist at the time on interoffice relationships and communication to decrease, essentially, autonomic stress. So locating environmental coherence within both the office space and their home lives and trying to also integrate an intelligence training into that. We took a ninety day blood work with people, looking at stress markers, looking at endogenous sex hormones, micronutrient deficiencies, whatever, all that good stuff. And then we were also measuring HRV on a daily basis, so looking at autonomic hyperactivity and HPA access hyperactivity, within the client base themselves. Those were  the diagnostics we were testing from a physiological standpoint. At the same time, we were running personality archetypes on them and seeing what their actual environmental and communication preferences were. And with that, developing the tools and awareness within the individuals themselves first; understanding how they prefer to be communicated with and how they perceive other archetypes. [caption id="attachment_9609" align="aligncenter" width="810"] I like to perceive my archetypes bold...and highlighted[/caption] A lot of this stuff is very subconsciously driven. It's very subcortical. You're not necessarily aware of what those preferences are. We find that people, instead of working within environments that they're more acclimated to. Instead, they acclimate and adapt to work environments and work demands that drive money. And finance, and all those things that we want from a social construct stand point. And that's fine, humans are the great improvisers. We adapt better than anything else, ever. Even though we have the ability to adapt and to do so very well, we were finding that those adaptations still drove high levels of autonomic stress and sympathetic tone. So, people are running around all day -- and night, if they're not regulating at home -- with higher blood pressure, higher heart rate, higher core body temperature. And then looking at higher cortisol levels, higher adrenaline levels, lower testosterone levels, especially in men, and also decreased cognitive function. There were overly sympathetic. From a work productivity standpoint, that was also suffering. So that's how we got the buy-in from the corporate institutions themselves. First, bringing out the self-awareness and then working with them in groups as teams on building out communication strategies with one another, peer to peer, and then with management to employee. Finding out how to actually speak to one another in a way that was both efficient and effective given their archetype and also setting an environment that is conducive to those archetypes working well together with one another. And then also leveraging people's unique skill sets based on those archetypes for the success of the whole, giving them more purpose within the team but doing so in a way that really leveraged their individual strengths rather than maybe what their job demands might have been. So  doing a little bit of reorganization from that standpoint as well. And for me that was incredibly intriguing and satisfying. When I left that company and did my journey back to the midwest, I essentially started a consulting company. I work now with the strength and conditioning facilities, personal training facilities, and then individuals within the mentorship program where I use a lot of the same tools to help them with their teams and their client basis on a smaller scale which is great for me because it blends fitness with the actual leadership and community building of what I was doing before. Zac: I like that you were very scientific about making the changes with your previous job. With your clients  now, are you still tracking some of those variables? Are you having them measure HRV? Kyle: If they want to, I make that an optional thing. What I work with the most, with the people I work with now, is just looking at work performance. Especially being in fitness, a lot of them are tracking autonomics somehow anyway. It's something that more so where they're actually doing the tracking because they're excited about it. I offer the blood work as a third party option, I work with Inside Tracker based out of Austin, so I offer that as a third party at cost for them. Just to look at beginning, middle, and end numbers and I look for improvements over time there. But it is a pretty hefty expense and not everybody takes advantage of it. The majority of them do measure their own HRV or at the very least measure morning heart rate and look for changes off of baseline. They know that if they're plus ten to fifteen beats per minute, for a week, that they're probably going under some  systemic stress. So we look for just trends going lower with that. Same thing with HRV, we don't look at it that acutely, it's always looking at trends and looking at maybe environmental changes we can make prior to changes in the way they're training because all these individuals are also knowingly and willingly, , proactively accruing stress on a daily basis as well. So you have to differentiate at that point the physical and mechanical stress of training to the psychological and cognitive stress of incoherence from a lifestyle standpoint. There's a lot of reading data and then asking a lot of questions, looking at what their lifestyle is going through at that point rather than looking at maybe increase training demands or things of that nature acute-ly. Zac: As long you track some type of key performance indicator (KPI), in this case, work performance, everything else is gravy. Kyle: That's what it all boils down to. , HRV and the physiological metrics with people that are in fitness are so multifactorial. That, one, I don't want to get a false positive, but I also don't want to get a false negative based on some of those other things. At the end of the day, they're coming to me for work performance, not for improved HRV. So that's what I'm going to be looking at and we do that through a series of objective key results (OKRs) and some other principles that we'll talk about in a little bit but that's really what I'm looking at. Why personality testing? Zac: In terms of you getting into change or establishing these archetypes within the people you worked with in the past and having that be the intervention that you did at work, what led you to thinking that that was the big change that needed to be made in order to positively impact both work performance and these variables? For example, did you notice a difference in terms of the HRV measures when they were at the office or at work days versus just days they had off if it was the weekends or vacation? And if so, how did that lead you to going with communication as your primary intervention? Kyle: It was a little bit of both.  we definitely saw that over weekends, systemic stress really wasn't going down. A lot of it was because these people also had terrible lifestyle habits and they also, especially being in New York, they didn't leave work at work. Their weekends were still stress filled, they're still answering emails, they're still thinking about work all the time. A lot of them actually dreaded weekends because of the work they might lose once we started actually talking about that process. But we did notice when people weren't on vacations we'd see a little change early on but the longer the vacation went on, the more it would go back to normal because they'd start getting stressed about missing work. Their lives were being determined and dictated by their work rather than the other way around. From a communication standpoint, a lot of that information came from the behavioral psychologist I was working with. She'd been doing a little bit of work on this prior to working with me, she was already consulting with a few other companies and really taught me a lot about that process. As I was learning it, it was also really becoming applicable to the training that I was seeing from managing trainers and managing managers and looking at what makes a trainer successful from a professional basis. A lot of it, that I notice throughout the years, had more to do with how they interacted with their clients, how they engaged with them, and how they set that environment, rather than the amount of technical expertise they actually possessed. This is something that's always frustrating to trainers that always value education, and we have a bias towards education because that's our interest. This is something that's always frustrated people and, to be truthful, frustrated me in the past as a trainer. , I'm a very introverted individual, and communication has been something that I always had to really work at as far as being able to speak to different people. Especially to different people of different personality types and interest than that of myself. A lot of trainers are so highly focused on the aspect of training and not the aspect of the other 165 hours a week that their clients go through that they speak to them as if they might be trainers themselves. Trainers that maybe were missing or lacking of education that maybe were extrovert in personality, I noticed were talking to these clients about their lives. , about their communities, about their relationships, things that we might think are trivial from a training perspective, but are actually really important in setting the tone for lifestyle coherence and recovery and just purposefulness. We're having all this success in setting the environment for training. They're making it an anticipatory event rather than an obligation for the clients. It was something they were looking for and coming to. And it was all based on the relationship they were forming. As I was learning more about the archetypes, more about environmental coherence, it really started a lightbulb that  went off in my head that these principles are the same thing. Whether you're in an office building or whether you're an executive or whether you're a trainer is really irrelevant when you start talking about relationships. It's still people to people. Social norms play a role. At the end of the day, people want to be communicated with in a language and on terms that they understand. If you can get people to do that, and make them aware of that process and educate them on strategies to do so, they're going to be more successful in any endeavor they're in. The process for myself has made me a better husband and father, has made me a better friend, which for me is way more tactful than being a better trainer or manager in a sense. But it all crosses over, its principle-based so it applies to everything. Zac: Yeah, and I think one thing that most everyone is lacking in some degree is connection and I think especially to with technology and how we're always glued to phones. No one's ever taught the soft skills of how to have a conversation or how to build connection or rapport or anything. I mean, you've trained countless people, Kyle, and it eventually comes to the point where you're doing the same shit but the reason why they're with you is because they think you're a good person and that is their one time they get to hang out with someone that they enjoy. [caption id="attachment_9610" align="alignnone" width="810"] Or as I prefer, a "bruh"[/caption] Kyle: Yeah, I mean, what's adherence? From a contextual standpoint, the vast majority of the clients I've trained over the years have no knowledge of program design, or periodization, or anatomy and physiology but they do know what a good experience looks like. They do know what engagement looks like, they do know what communication looks like, and they know if they're enjoying themselves or not. That's what gets people coming back and if the trainer can combine technical expertise with those soft skills, they're going to crush it. That's what it comes out to be and the downside of that is I've seen way more people become successful with soft skills and little to none technical expertise than I have the other way around. We really might be fooling ourselves with what's actually the most important for the client. We feed that bias of educational law and we justify a lot of our actions by it. I've invested a lot of money in education and I value education, I've been an educator, but you also have to think outside the box and how you approach a demographic that is not fitness based. If they were fitness based, they wouldn't need you. If they understood anatomy and physiology and training and periodization and the required ownership to get to their goals from a physical standpoint, they wouldn't be paying you to train them. And I think that's something that trainers have to understand, that training is a choice for their client base. And they have to enjoy the experience. You're not necessarily educating them on how to become a trainer, you're not teaching them Latin with all the anatomy and physiology that you may know, you're providing them a path to fitness that they actually enjoy so you can build habit change within their lives and they're no longer intimidated or scared by fitness or physical activity, but they actually look forward to it and start integrating it into the other parts of their lives as well. Zac: Yeah, I can't agree more, and hearing that as a trainer should excite you because I think we do spend so much time, effort, energy, learning the training side of things to the nth degree of depth. No one gives a shit about that if they don't like you, so that's why I think what you offer is so essential in that regard. I think that the personality tests that you utilize is probably an easy barrier to entry for someone who wants to expand on their communication skills with others. The DISC Personality Test So why don't you talk to us a little bit about the DISC. I know that's one of your initial intake things that you utilize. Tell me a little bit about what the letters are about, how you use that to inform your decision making in terms of what people need to speed up their systems and how that's useful to help someone from a communication standpoint. Kyle: Yeah, in a broad sense the DISC is definitely my weapon of choice and most people, once they get their report back, are extremely surprised at just how accurate it is. There are four archetypes: D: Dominance I: Influence S: Steadiness C: Conscientiousness The D and the I are more extroverted archetypes and the S and the C are more introverted. The D and the C are more analytical archetypes and the I and the S are more novelty-based. Based off of those two things, I actually don't dive super deep into it with trainers because a lot of them aren't going to be running the DISC itself on their client bases. It's more so, if we can get even a fairly superficial view of what the archetypes prefer from a communication and environmental standpoint, and how to identify them and the people just through how they interact with their own environments. They're going to have enough strategies at that point to have a more efficient and effective conversation. I don't think everyone who takes this needs to become a psychologist. I'm definitely not one but I do think it's very similar to a movement assessment. We go to a movement assessment and we start analyzing gait and then we're walking down the street and everybody in front of us, everybody we see, has a hip shift or internal rotation or their pronating, There's a winged scap here, an elevated shoulder blade here and we're just picking all these things out and we really can't turn it off. With that, there's going to be a lot of different interventions that we might be able to use. The DISC is very similar. You can go into a room and see where people are positioned within that room and how their interacting with the other people in that room and have a pretty good idea of what archetype they are. From there you can start building out communication strategies if that is somebody that you want to communicate with. [caption id="attachment_9611" align="alignnone" width="810"] Tell me again about that time you couldn't bench press the bar.[/caption] “D” archetypes are usually found in leadership positions because they're naturally drawn to leadership and not everybody is. They are very analytical, but they're also fairly dopaminergic in the fact that they want challenge and they want to win a lot of the time. They sometimes push and rush through things in order to get to the end of the project. You can find them in a room fairly easy because they're extroverted and they'll usually be in the middle of the room, dominating conversation. They like to challenge ideas but they are people that you really have to provide evidence to if you've got ideas or something to bring up. They are people that like to win more than be right a lot of the times, so arguing with them is typically not something that is going to yield return for any of the other archetypes. “I” archetypes are very novelty-based, they're very extroverted. They're usually the life of the party. They like to be the center of attention and they like to be entertained and they like to entertain, in that respect. And if you're training an I, a linear program where they're isolated in a corner of a room, using maybe one modality for an extended period of time, is not going to be something that works well for them. They're going to get bored very quickly so you can set up your programming and your periodization around that archetype and that personality type to keep them engaged with the program. They're a little harder to train because you have to look at their needs based on the assessment and look at their goals. You have to implement enough exercise selection variation while still trying to accommodate the same outcomes throughout their programming to keep them entertained and keep them happy, which is not always an easy task to do because we're trainers. , reps are everything. If you want to get good at something, you have to practice, you have to repeat it, you have to be able to scale it with progressions and regressions while you got somebody who gets really bored really easily, you might never get to all the reps needed to actually see the outcomes you want because they're off doing boutique fitness or spin class. The way you also approach the different archetypes with praise and feedback is very important because everybody likes feedback but not everybody likes public praise. Some people get very embarrassed by it so you also want to make sure that people are very comfortable with how you're communicating with them from that respect. An “I” wants you to throw a parade for them every time they accomplish a new metric or hit a new goal of some sort. They want everybody in the room to know it and that's great. An “S”, the next one down the line, they just want a fist bump and to move on. They're more novelty-based, but they're also more introverted so they want to be engaged, they want a little bit of structure, little bit of uniformity, but they also want room to work within that structure, a little bit of autonomy. Again, you're going to program an “S” different, you're going to manage them differently from a management leadership standpoint because they love feedback but they have a hard time asking for it. If they feel like they are appreciated within a company or within a client-trainer relationship, they're going to work as hard as they can to make everybody happy. They're very much pleasers, they're people that usually work in service. A lot of trainers are “S's” and if they didn't love fitness, they would probably be teachers or nurses or something of that nature because that's what their archetype is typically drawn to outside of fitness. If they're not getting the feedback and the appreciation, they really withdraw within a company. They're not going to cause conflict or friction within a company, they're just going to become disengaged and apathetic which is just as bad. I think we've all seen that happen in clients before, if they're not getting the feedback and they just become disengaged and apathetic to not only the program but maybe the trainer. They move on, they're either moving on to a new trainer or maybe they're just out of fitness. They had a bad experience and now they're intimidated by it and they're done with it. Then you've got your “C's”. “C's” are very analytical. They're the people that come to every conversation or every Facebook thread with five Pubmed articles ready to cut and paste into a conversation and link to. , they're the science-based. They want everything backed up, but the problem is sometimes they don't get anything done because they're too busy researching. There's never enough information, so they end up paralysis by analysis. They're also a very introverted and analytical archetype, and when you're talking about training them, that's where a linear program works really well. They have the patience to look at change over time and they don't want to skew the variables. They think novelty is distracting and chaotic and frustrating. So they're the people that, yeah, we're going to do barbell workouts for the next eight weeks and we're going to look at your percentage maxes, and we're going to look at bar speed. You can bring data and analytics anywhere into a session, they're the people that are actually going to be interested in it. There's definitely different communication strategies and different ways that you can implement environment and communication into training when you're working with those people as well. From a manager perspective it's all about utilizing their strengths and putting them in positions to succeed and then offering support in the way that they actually want support. Because what might feel like a nice structured environment for a “C” or an “S” is going to feel like micromanaging to an “I.” So  when to push the gas and pull the brakes a little bit for a lot of these people. And then how to get the feedback that's actually going to promote progress rather than maybe too much reflection and frustration. It's definitely something that I use a lot and that I think the people that I work with find very applicable to the demographics that they work either as a manager with their employees or a trainer with their client base. Using Personality Testing to Build Systems Zac: It sounds like the DISC allows you to stratify how you want to interact and manage specific people, and just the little bit that I have learned from yourself and just some of the stuff that Lucy has told me has been very informative about just why people are the way they are, and it is pretty crazy how accurate it is. Let's say that we have the fam. The fam is listening, they fill out the DISC, and they find out which archetype they are or the mix of these specific archetypes. If they're looking at maximizing communication with others, but also they want to make themselves more organized and efficient, where do you see common pitfalls in system building? Let's say you are the one who's guiding them into becoming organized AF, where would you start with each of these people in terms of designing a system for them? Kyle: From a system perspective and from an organizational standpoint, obviously they all approach that a little differently and they all have unique pitfalls. With your “D's”, they typically are so hard-charging that they don't weigh all their options ahead of time, they don't look at return, and they don't look at cost as much as maybe they should. They have a little bit of the shiny object syndrome that you also see with “I's”, but they will drive harder for it and they will be more focused on it. They'll leave everything else on the back burner, they're very prone to specificity and thought. A lot of that with them is making sure from an organizational standpoint that they dedicate enough times to the other things to keep them on track and don't just let those things fall behind. None of us live in a specific environment where, from a demand standpoint, we can chase one thing over all others without incurring a cost of some sort. [caption id="attachment_9612" align="alignnone" width="810"] Put that shit on front burner, fam[/caption] From a systems perspective, we do a lot of OKRs with everybody, but how they interpret those strategies are going to be different given calendar work, making things automated, which works well for “D's”. Automation is a good way to make sure that things get sent out, whether it's newsletters or whether it's reminders, calendar events, things of that nature. Those are going to be very effective for programs potentially for their clients from a trainer perspective. Those are going to be good ways to keep them on track without having to always lose their focus as well. The positive aspects of a “D” are that they are so hyper-focused. If something is important, they'll get it done and they'll work really hard towards that. You also don't want to take away that driver, you want to find ways to accommodate it and support it with other means so automation works really well for them. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Zac: Quick question, you mentioned OKR, I don't think we defined what that is. What is an OKR? Kyle: Objectives and key results. Simultaneously, we're learning about the DISC when we're working with people. They're also filling out OKRs, which I usually keep it to three objectives. I tend to find that if there's more than three, they're not necessarily big rocks anymore. So people will have two to three main primary objectives that they want to work on either from a professional or from an individual lifestyle standpoint. People I work with will put things that relate to obviously their business, and their finances, and their professional accomplishment but they'll also put how to free up more time for their families. They'll put fitness goals on there and that's fine. I'm not judging what your objectives are, I just want to make sure that we actually set up an intelligent strategy or system to get there. So we identify the objectives and then we identify three key results from each of those objectives. The key results are the outcomes and how I work with outcomes of people is identifying what their definition of success for those objectives actually is on an individual standpoint. So we look at it, if it's quantitative, we look at metrics. If it's qualitative, we look at it emotionally. How do you want to feel, ? What's this going to lead to? What's this going to free time up for? From a quantitative standpoint, it could be anything. It could be money, it could be weight, pounds lost, it could be whatever. Metrics are super easy to work with, qualitative aspects are a little harder. So we have to be really honest and dig deep into those. Within these, most people will fill them out and they'll inherently be very vague or very general about their key results so I always have the question that just get as detailed as possible. Like, we'll talk about them and people will break into more detail and conversation. One of my big cues for people is to literally talk it out and then write down what you say. Speak it because you're inherently going to tell a story rather than having to write something down, and you're going to have more detail in the way you explain it than how you write it typically. That's usually how I get people to dig deeper and actually define success in a way that we might be able to measure. Then we set up strategies for all of those key results. The strategies are going to match the archetypes in a way because there's probably going to be things that those people naturally tend to lack. From a system standpoint, it's great because I usually don't have to identify systems for people, they can really look at what they're doing and what they're not doing and they identify them themselves which tends to lead to much more adherence than me telling them what to do. From another standpoint, it's a lot of me helping them understand and come to that realization themselves. “Oh, maybe I should start automating things or putting more things into my calendar, setting up backend sales leads or formals or whatever, building up more spreadsheets for tracking and automating my payroll!” There's a lot of things that as we're going through this and they're looking at strategies, like, “Oh yeah, I'm not sure why I ever thought about that,” but it is. Think about it because, from a coherent standpoint, they're usually looking in the other direction. There's a lot of realization typically with that and then we try to map it out, we look at it what actions they can take from a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual standpoint to get these things done and how the best way to track them is. Whether it's through channels regarding organization or structuring within their company or business if they're trainers. Zac: If someone comes to the conclusion themselves, they're more likely to execute it as opposed to being told what to do. Can you just give me an example of a typical objective and then the key results you might get from someone, from one of your clients. And let's keep it from an organizational standpoint. Kyle: If I'm looking at trainers, it's increasing their client base, say getting two new clients. From a key results standpoint, that's going to lead to X amount more money. That's maybe even going to lead to upping your price and dropping a lower paying client in some cases. That's going to lead to some financial goal of moving —  for people, the key results will differ a lot — that might lead to being able to live in a different apartment if you're in New York city or living in a different neighborhood where you no longer have to commute thirty or forty-five minutes into the city. [caption id="attachment_9613" align="alignnone" width="810"] While cool to visit, these problems are another reason I'm thankful I didn't move to the city.[/caption] The key results are very individualistic. If you want to make more money, how much more money? We're going to identify what clients are going to bring in. Maybe, fifteen hundred dollars a month? That's how we're going to track it so if we're going to look at strategies, what's the timeline we're going to put on this? Two new clients by when? Two months, so we're looking at a client a month. What steps are we going to take from a marketing perspective, are we going to look at referrals? Are we going to look at communicating with other scopes of practice for referrals? You can look at client streams and you can look at, maybe  a physical therapy team in the city that you can go and talk to and look at as being their third-party outlet for training after someone is done rehabbing. Maybe you can talk to a massage therapist and look at them or a nutritionist, same thing, and build an actual team of practitioners that you might be able to be a part of where you can share clients and build referral networks and things of that nature. There's a lot of different avenues from a strategy perspective that we can start looking at. Maybe you're going to email all of your old clients that you've lost or call them. Depending on the trainer there's going to be different avenues there. Another thing that I get with a lot of people is building up additional streams of revenue. Not everybody wants to take on more clients because that's more time training, you want something that might be more passive, so we work on building up their remote business or we work on building semi-private training channels where they can train more people with one hour and work more efficiently. Then we set up the strategies to utilize that to lower price points. So who can we reach out to that maybe fell off one on one training because they either moved or the price point was no longer agreeable with their budget? Are there options for them? Can we start reaching out to those people? How do you market yourself? Are you looking through social media? Are you building up newsletters? There's a lot of different options from that perspective but we start looking at things that would actually fit their skill set and options they may have. Then we start setting timelines and scheduling out those things from an organizational standpoint. Zac: Essentially what you're doing is you use the objectives and key results as your skeleton, and then you are helping your clients build the rest of that out by having them figure out what type of systems need to be employed, and then taking into account their personality in terms of potential pitfalls they may have in building the system so they ultimately get the outcome that they want. Kyle: Yeah. If you look at OKRs, it's very conceptual and then the individual looks at it very contextual from a key result standpoint. Then strategies are going to be all your applications, so it really goes conceptually, contextually, and then applicably down the line. The objectives are usually pretty broad and then the key results we try to individualize as much as possible like I said, either qualitatively or quantitatively, depending on what that objective is. Then from a strategy standpoint, then it's all application based on their environment, their past, their unique circumstance, and their archetype, how can we build out strategies that are going to be beneficial for you and not have a high cost but a high return instead. Zac: Sounds very systematic, Kyle. Kyle: That's the idea. The pitfalls of personality types Zac: Let's go back to the four personality types and pitfalls. We went through “D,” which is dominant. The big thing they probably need to focus on is automation as well as looking at problems more in-depth so they don't do something with a huge cost. I got like a little hint of “D,” and the automation thing has been huge for me. I mean I automate just about everything from a blog perspective, emails, everything because it takes too much time if you don't do that. But what about, say, someone who's an “I” and then “S” and “C?” Let's go into the pitfalls of those three would have. Kyle: An “I” is usually the archetype that has the most trouble with any organization at all. They're sometimes described as chaotic in nature, where they thrive in environment with a lot of novelties. So because of that, familiarity becomes boring and organization is a way to increase familiarity with your environment. An “I” is typically are a little organizationally adverse. I work with them on minimal effective dose. How can we implement just enough organization within your life that you're able to get things done when you need to get them done but not overwhelm you into an adaptive quality. We don't want to turn you into a “C.” Automation also works really well with them, but it's also prioritizing what they actually need to organize. For them, developing hierarchies within their lives is very important. Like what are we going to prioritize based on your needs and wants from a lifestyle professional standpoint. A lot of it with them is laying out an awareness perspective: What is going to have the highest return? What is the most important? And what to focus on because focus is limited, it's a limited individual quality for them. Then we're going to automate the rest as much as possible. We're going to set alerts on everything that's important from a calendar standpoint, or a note standpoint, whatever. We're going to set deadlines for people, as they don't do well without a structured deadline. They won't create a deadline for themselves usually. They're people that need more ownership and accountability within their own personal frames. As I'm looking in OKRs and strategies, the way it works out on the form that I use is you essentially have three objectives and within each objective you have three key results potentially. Within each key result, you have three unique strategies that you might be able to employ. So you got an option of 27 different strategies at the end of this thing. I may be going to be doing one or two of those at any given time effectively. So it's looking at which strategies can we even implement that are going to have the biggest bang for buck. Can we find strategies that are going to positively affect any of the other outcomes that we're looking at? It's either, you're looking at low hanging fruit things that are easy depending on the person's lifestyle or you're looking at more of a bang for buck strategy that might positively impact additional strategies. The reason is especially we're looking at objectives and some of those key results for just a little bit of crossover within the process for people. Zac: Setting up a lot of the exact systems that you're talking about has been essential for myself as an “I”. So then, what about the “S” and the “C” in terms of their common pitfalls and where you work with those types of people? Kyle: “C's” need a lot of structure. They're pleasers by nature and they tend to put their own needs behind the needs of others, and they'll let a lot of their own personal growth go to the wayside a lot of the times and be over accommodating to the people they're working with or to the clients they're working with. It's, again, a lot of structure. They do well typically with full calendar setups with task lists, things of that nature, but you also want to give them a little bit autonomy, so there has to be some flexibility in there as well. So doing a very good job of balancing the needs and the wants works very well for them. [caption id="attachment_9614" align="alignnone" width="810"] Such a delicate balance indeed.[/caption] With them from an objective standpoint, I always try to have at least one lifestyle objective that  coheres with their professional objectives as well and making sure that those things both professionally and lifestyle wise, respectively, have a lot of coherence and alignment. If they're not aligned, neither one of them is going to get done and that's going to lead to a lot of frustration and withdrawal within the systems. From a communication standpoint as well, because they're so accommodating, try to also, again, prioritize their personal needs and make sure that they feel heard throughout the process and throughout whatever environment they're in relationship wise either with clients or their employers or employees or peers. , working on getting them a voice within that community as well in an outlet of sorts. Zac: It seems like the common trend is you're still getting all of them, and we haven't even talked about “S” yet so maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the trend with all these is you're still getting them to a similar point of having a goal in mind or an outcome they desire and then setting up systems whether its automated or whether it's a calendar of some sort to help them keep them on task essentially. Kyle: What you find is “D's” and “I's” have no problem outlining outcomes and key results but they typically try to go into action without setting strategies. And then you've got “C's” and “S's” will typically strategize quite a bit but it's hard to push them into actual action. So you prioritize those things differently depending on what side of the line they are from an archetype standpoint. Zac: Gotcha. So ”D's” and “I's” are great at figuring out what the outcome is, but take a terrible, inefficient path to get there. Kyle: Sometimes, yeah. Zac: Yeah, “S's” and “C's” take a beautiful path but to where? Who knows. Kyle: Yeah, they might just be spinning in circles. Zac: Tell me about the “S” then. What are some of the pitfalls that they have in terms of building out those systems? Kyle: ”C's” and “S's” are very similar in the fact that they have no problem building out strategies and building out systems. I'm the one who's the “CS” hybrid, so speaking about myself is a good example. I have excel sheets that I've created that I'll never use like it's a hobby of mine to build out systems that aren't really needed in any way. It's sometimes as a distraction of actually going to work and doing things, of being in action. From a strategy standpoint, a lot of “C's” and “S's” lump together, and “S's” especially must cut down on the strategies and figuring out which ones are going to be the most important for them because rather than getting distracted by all the potential outcomes, they're getting distracted by the strategies themselves. That's where that whole analysis by paralysis comes about with is. They're just going to keep doing research, keep building out models, and some of these things but they never actually take action. So they must set timelines. Once a system with an objective is built, let's put a timeline on it. How do we keep you accountable to a timeline? Because otherwise they will stall themselves by doing more research or building out more spreadsheets so it's when can we take action? It's then more of a time push than anything else. How to navigate going off task Zac: Then as you progress and work with these people, because it seems like you have to instill new habits with everyone and, as we all know, old habits die hard, sometimes we falter back into our own, I don't want to say bad habits but maybe, habits that aren't going to push you towards your goals. How do you instill coming back to these when someone does falter? So me for example, I'm pretty good at staying on task for most things but I definitely do find myself sometimes procrastinating or doing something that's going to be more ineffective towards me getting my stuff completed, so what things do you use to cue them back into getting back into the system when they do fall off the wagon? Kyle: Well the good thing is as we go through the DISC itself, is it's usually creates enough self-awareness that they know when they're fallen off the wagon. They're very aware of that fact. With both the consulting I do and the mentorship that I do, I'm on the phone or I'm on a Zoom video with them every week so we're always rehashing what their weaknesses would look like, what their OKR and development progress looks like. We also build out models, like actual business and training models, how that's going? I share everything through Google Drive so I can see live what's being worked on, when it's being worked on. If I see that their OKRs haven't been touched in two weeks or three weeks, we're going to go back and ask why. That's the good thing about some of those shared documents, is there's built in accountability within that. They know what I'm going to ask when we're on the phone. They know the structure of the conversation is going to be. We spend a lot of time talking about the DISC upfront then we eventually move into OKRs and auto-development and anything else that might've pop up within their lives or work environment that they want to talk about. I don't necessarily have to pull them back on track because within the first few weeks, they have enough self-awareness within their archetype, within their organizational needs and structural needs that they know if they fall off track and they'll usually actually bring that up before I get a chance to. Then we just talk about why. And the biggest thing that I work with all of the archetypes, regardless of who they are, is letting know that that's okay. At the end of the day, these are all tools that are going to be used to help them and we're all going to go about it in different ways. Whether we're talking about weekly progress or monthly progress, it's still progress. They're still doing things much differently than they would've done in the past and they're having good positive outcomes based on that. Some of the archetypes like a little more accountability from me. Particularly usually the “D's” and the “C's” prefer that I hold them a little more accountable. Whereas the “I's” and the “S's”, I need to handle a little differently with my communication and make sure that they understand that I'm empathic to what's going on within their lives and within their work environments. From a time perspective, they might not have gotten it done, so we decide to set up ways that we can work through the next week a little more efficiently. We look at what those pitfalls were in the prior week and we try to find out ways to work around them in the week upcoming. Were those pitfalls novel and acute? Was something where you got sick or you had to take your dog to the vet or your kid had multiple school events or sports events? Or was it something that's going to be more global that's going to be happening every single week that we really have to be adjusting for within our strategy? Identifying whether or not it was a one off thing or whether it's going to be continuous is also a big part of that conversation. Zac: Essentially what you're acting as when you're setting this up is some form of social support. Kyle:There's a lot of that. [caption id="attachment_9615" align="alignnone" width="810"] Team work makes the dream work.[/caption] Zac: You're lauded if you are someone who is considered self-made and really, no one is self-made. I mean, people think that I'm doing fairly good things, but we wouldn't even be having this conversation, Kyle, if it weren't for someone like Bill Hartman in my life or other people in my life who have pushed me into such a high esteem and high level and high drive. I think that even someone maybe on the “D” and “I” side of things, they tend to think of pushing others by the wayside because sometimes I do that. I think that having someone not necessarily to hold you accountable but just to be there with you as you're going through the process and keep you on track is just absolutely critical. And I think it's awesome that you're doing that. Kyle: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that, and the good thing about my career path with a lot of the people I work with is, I've been in a role that they're in or a very similar to for most of them as far as being a trainer, being a manager, being a multi-location manager to being a department head to being in a national level position. There's a lot of things that I've done in that respect where I can sympathize and empathize a lot with the needs that they're seeing and give them some usually pretty good real world advice with that as well, especially from a management leadership perspective if they're a gym owner. I haven't owned my own gym but I do know the things that go into running a space and managing a team and handling the daily operations. From a trainer, same thing, I've done two hundred sessions a month as a trainer. I've lived that seven-day-a-week life and the three thirty alarm going off in the morning and working till eight pm at night. I've lived a lot of the struggles that they're going through. And can look back on it  with a hindsight eye of understanding the things that might help them that I never had access to when I was in those roles and work with them from both from an archetype standpoint but also from an experiential standpoint. Organizational tools Zac: Now, we've discussed overarching principles on how you build out these systems, you have your OKRs, and building their systems in such a manner that you can get the outcomes that they want. Let's get into some specifics, what type of things and I mean we can get into software, we can talk if you're using paper, what type of things have you found most successful? It can be apps, it can be anything from organizational standpoint that you tried to employ with the people that you work with? Do you use google calendar, do you use iPhone calendar? What we got? Kyle: With a lot of my clients, I try not to task them with a lot of apps. I try to keep everything as a one stop shop, so I just use Google Drive for the majority of them. For one, it's a free service and that's something that I think is important for a lot of my clients. A lot of them don't actually understand all the functions that Drive has. Like, if you have the Gmail, you have a calendar, you have spreadsheets, you have Word Docs, you have Google Forms, you have things that you can set up and send to clients. You've got Keynote and some of those other aspects as far as setting presentations. You've got a lot of tools that you would need already at your fingertips, you just haven't started using them yet. What I usually work with them on is first making sure their calendar is always up to date, that they have as many things recurring as possible within that calendar. They have alerts set if needed. They're added the event participants respective to the event. From there they can identify what might be flexible and what might be inflexible from an event perspective. What can I move and how can I move it? Then we can also add all of the one-off things that go throughout the continuous events. If you've got new clients coming in, if you've got different meeting being set up you could start identifying where you can put those within your calendar as it stands on a weekly basis. Then from a Drive perspective, it's all about building out folders, it might be built around your objectives or it might be built around other things, but you're segmenting your business through revenue streams or departments, whatever it may be. And making sure that you have all the materials needed set up within those folders and you have the ability to share them with employees or with clients. If you're a trainer, it might be all your training templates. It might be all the data that you record from a biometric standpoint. Your folders might all just be your client names, you've got your templates, you've got your materials in there. I use the google forms a lot, my intake forms are all on them as well because I can send them via email so that's another thing from an intake perspective. You can build out PAR-Q's and intake forms on there to send to your clients ahead of time. You can build out feedback forms and daily questionnaires for clients. If I'm doing consulting within a staff, I can also look at analytics based on the questions that I'm asking. Within those forms, I use a lot of numbered rating systems so I can actually look at analytics based on a number scale or numerical scale as well over an entire staff. If we're talking about culture or leadership or things of that nature. A lot of what I use with people is Google. Instead of Survey Chimp, I use Google Forms. They'll have some app within their system that somehow matches the needs of whoever I'm working with and it does it for free. It does it all in one spot. If you have the Google Suite, it's even that much easier to utilize. From an app perspective, that's how I set up all my materials. I build out the majority of my own and it's all just shareable at that point so I can copy and share and create for all the people I'm working with. Zac: In terms of automation on Google, say you have client so and so, can you automate it in a manner that all your intakes and all of that will automatically go to a folder on Google? Specifically to that person or do they have to fill out the form and you're transposing it into that? Kyle: You can do it one of two ways, you can automate towards where the forms actually will go into that client's folder or you can keep all the forms together in one spot to look at analytics. So you can do it a couple different ways and that's different people are going to have different preferences and different purposes regarding that. When I look at my intake form, I will basically have just an original copy that I'll copy and create another one for the individual themselves that will live inside their folder once I send it and they fill it out. For a lot of my consulting and feedback forms, I'll keep them all together as one form where I can keep multiple responses at once and then look at analytics based on answers. So depending on the purpose, you can do either one of them. Zac: I'm transitioning over to Google because I've had too many steps with transmitting information from one place to the next. I'll give you an example of my current set up. Someone sends a Google Form to me and they want to work with me. They will go into the form and it's just the whole analytical side of things where you can compare answers and whatnot, I'll have my virtual assistant send that person an inquiry via email but it's the answer via email as opposed to a Google Form. Then what I have to do is take those answers, because I can't read it on Excel, because Excel is just atrocious for that. I have to put it in Evernote, read it on Evernote, and then I will summarize within the Excel. It's just too many steps but it sounds as though, if you keep things in one place, you can keep things automated as much as possible and under one platform, it just tends to make life that much simpler. Kyle: Yeah, it's just less tabs. It's less copy and pasting, it's less transfiguring and reconfiguring from a data standpoint. And you've got everything in one hand especially when you look at different archetypes. The more you can keep things together and the less different avenues they have to continuously click on, the better off they're going to be from a distraction standpoint. It also keeps everything on top aligned, to keep it all together in that manner. Zac: Yeah, that's really cool. I think you've officially sold me. I'm making the transition to the Google so thank you. Kyle: They're going to send me some money when they see this. It's going to be great. Zac: Yeah, they already put it into our brains somehow that we were going to transfer all things. Kyle: You're going to see a bunch of Facebook ads for Google and all kinds of things. [caption id="attachment_9616" align="alignnone" width="810"] Once Google changes their name to Skynet that's when you'll know.[/caption] Zac: Google and Compound Performance that's all it's going to be. Interesting side note, did you know on your phone there's an option that they will mark advertising for you automatically, and you can eliminate that. Yeah, I'll link this in the show notes too but I don't know if you went to check out that whole set up your phone for success thing. Kyle: No, I haven't read it yet. It is sitting in my inbox though. Zac: Man, life changing. Kyle: I'm on your newsletter, believe me. Zac: I know, I know you are, Kyle. But I'll link that. But there is an option somewhere in the settings in the iPhone where it says, “Yes, you can advertise to..” or “I can take your data and advertise it to whatever sites.” So you have to wonder, why is it that I look up leg lamps to buy someone for Christmas and all of a sudden I see leg lamps all over Facebook and Google and everything? And that's why. Kyle: Well, my wife and I will have conversations about something verbally. Like we might start talking about rugs, something like super boring in that regard, and I'll start looking on my Facebook and Instagram. I'll literally get rug adverts after advert for the next two weeks. It's like this is insane. Especially if you talk about that brand, that brand is going to be there. You don't even have to type it or look it up, you can just talk about it. That microphone is always on. You need a tin foil hat. Zac: A tin foil hat and move out into the wilderness. That's the only way you can circumvent Facebook and Google and all of them. Kyle: Live that Ben House lifestyle, except cut off the phone too. Build your model Zac: Are there any other systems or nitty gritty tech that you like to use before I go into another follow up question? Kyle: Yeah, the thing that I think I actually like a lot more and has been more meaningful for a lot of my clients is developing a model that's based more so on experience, both the client and the trainers rather than methodologies. Especially for a training perspective is identifying what you want that client to feel and experience through each part of your training or their training life, their training program rather than just identifying how you're going to train them. Methodologies are going to change. We're all doing X now, but we were all doing something differently two or three years ago. It's pretty naive to think that we're still going to be doing the same thing we're doing now in the next six months even. The industry and the information changes so quickly. When I'm working with trainers, a lot of them tend to be very biased to one methodology or ideology over another and they like to talk in those terms. They have a hard time relating things to terms that clients will understand but they also have a hard time understand what that client preference might be and what they want their experience to be during session. I look at everything from a consult intake to the actual training session itself, movement prep, neural prep, strength training, accessory training, to aerobics and cool down to the macro-cycling of anaerobic and aerobic training and then to their lifestyle coherence and communication. What do you want that client to feel from an emotional perspective? What's your outcome for each of those things and then what are the outcomes that you're looking for as a trainer? Can we get alignment between those two things? If we can get alignment between those two things, you're going to have a client that's pretty happy. Or a client base or demographic that's pretty happy. That's the other big thing, the other big rock, that starts people off once we start getting comfortable with the OKRs, we start talking about the actual model itself and it can be easily modified into a company thing. What is your business model? How do you want your entire demographic to look like from a training perspective? To a personal training model and looking at the individual experience for clients as well. That's also the big thing that I think has been eye opening to a lot of the people that I'm working with, is not deciding how you're going to train people but also identifying how you're going to treat people and how you want them to perceive what that training actually is. What's that outcome? Not just talking about increasing internal rotation to a femur, we're talking about their actual enjoyment of the process itself. Zac: Just me setting up Human Matrix has given me an idea in terms of setting up models. I think in some of that other areas that you've mentioned in terms of creating a good experience or just giving a business model. Those are areas that I haven't done but I think would be incredibly impactful. When you're having people set up these models, is there a preference? Or are you using this in organization in anyway of using the good old paper? Kyle: Well, I've got a template that I created that I help people set up. I've got, again, a base skeleton of the things I consider important but they have the option as well of adding additional columns or rows off of that template based on things that might apply to them individually and their businesses individually. I've got a base template that they all have their own copies, we share and we look at it. They can also modify it or I can modify it for them based on any changes or things that they want to prioritize within their own business. In addition, my columns are methodology kind experience and trainer outcomes. Different people are going to add an additional column or add additional rows based on how they communicate with people whether it's both in person and you're looking at actual like how are you communication, how are you greeting people, how are you greeting them at the door, how are you communicating with them, how are you cueing them, internal and external cues, hands-on and hands-off cuing, and then how are you communicating with them from a newsletter standpoint, from an educational standpoint, and then from an email, texting standpoint, calling standpoint, feedback forms, whatever. There're also ways that we can start including those within that process as well from an experiential standpoint. Zac: Essentially automating everything within the model just like you did with making processes. Kyle: Yeah, and identifying what that actually means. If you're sending feedback forms, what do you want that client to think? What's the reaction that you want them to have? Are they going to just discard it? Or are they going to feel like you're trusting them and valuing their opinion to improve the actual culture of the company? So what actual emotional outcome are you looking for and how can we generate that outcome through the process? Or through the environment itself as a whole? The To-do list Zac: To-do lists. Yay or nay? Kyle: It depends, as everything does. Zac: Always a default answer. Kyle: I think they can become very valuable but I think they can also become very encapsulating. In that sense, if you're a “C” that already lives on to-do lists, you probably don't need to make anymore. You probably just need to prioritize and act on the top two or three things on that list. If you're an “I” and there's really not a lot of rhyme or reason to what you're doing and then you're just chasing novelty all day long then the to do list is going to be very important for you. That might help you obtain a singular focus on the things that you actually need to be doing on a daily basis or weekly basis. Depending on who the person is, I think those are going to be great. If somebody is already super analytical, you're just getting one more thing to feed on that's going to delay the actual action and outcome that they're seeking. So it might be a deterrent at that point, depending on who they are. Zac: I think one thing I found for myself for the to do list is if you don't prioritize the right things and there's no temporal component, it's pretty much a useless piece of... [caption id="attachment_9617" align="alignnone" width="810"] I'm biased, but I loathe these things.[/caption] Kyle: You'll get this inception moment where you've got to-do lists on top of other to-do lists. That's like what a “C” would do and it's sometimes even a “D.” You've got a to-do list that lists out doing another to do list. It's like the guy looking at himself in the mi

Gary Myers: Hi, my name is Gary Myers. Joe Fontenot: I'm Joe Fontenot. This is the Answering The Call podcast. This is the podcast where we talk to people who are answering God's call. Today's guest is Kyle Beshears. Kyle talks about a new word, new word to me at least. Kyle was here at the Defend Conference, and the word he taught me was apatheism. Gary: Apatheism? Joe: Apatheism. Gary: That's a new one on me as well. Joe: It is, it's not fruit, it's something else, which he's going to tell us about now. Gary: Let's hear from Kyle. Joe: Okay, so Kyle you've said something that doesn't get said often and it's called apatheism. In some ways we can guess what it's about, but I think your explanation is much more helpful. What is apatheism? Kyle Beshears: Yeah, the word's a bit intuitive. You can parse two words out of there, apathy and theism, a clever way of trying to describe a feeling of indifference towards questions related to God's existence is how I would initially define apatheism. There's a ... I don't know how to describe it, the-ism we think has to do with the way we think, right? Kyle Beshears: It's a belief, it's cognitive, but I think apatheism affects our heart as well, and how we feel, our emotions. Apatheism is not just finding questions related to God's existence intellectually or being apathetic to them intellectually, it's also an affective reaction to questions about God. I might define apatheism as when a person believes questions about God are unimportant and they feel that way as well. It's both a belief and a feeling. Joe: Okay, so let's work that out. Like a role-play, right? Your apatheist, I am me, and I say, "Kyle, I would like to talk to you about God." What do you say? How do you act? Kyle: Well me personally I would be polite, but to have the conversation ... Joe: A kind apatheist. Kyle: Yeah, yeah, you seem like a nice guy Joe, but in reality I really don't want to have this conversation. I find it as uninteresting as arguing over whether or not Pepsi is to be preferred to Coca-Cola, right? It's just not an interesting conversation to me. Joe: It's sort of irrelevant. Kyle: Irrelevant, yeah, I don't find that God affects my life, my relationships, my future, and I don't think ... Maybe he affects you in a personal way, but that's that's you, that's idiosyncrasy, that's unique to each person. To me, I don't care. Joe: Do you think it's a generational thing? Kyle: Thinking through it, I think it's probably more prevalent in younger generations, so millennial's and younger. I've just been reclassified as zenial, so I guess we're in between generation Y and the millennial's. Joe: Okay. Kyle: I think probably you're starting to see it in Y, in zenial's, millennial's, and whoever comes next. I don't think it would be fair to assign apatheism to just younger generations. I think you see wherever there is a decrease in religious attendance and church services, wherever you see an increase in religious un-affiliation, I think you'll find apatheism there. Kyle: Apatheism may even be ... You might be able to find apatheism more geographically that generationally, right? Pockets in the Northeast in the United States, Western Europe, Canada, I think you'll find that apatheism is more prevalent with those people than in say southeastern United States or majority world contexts like South America and Africa where church is growing, you'll find a complete opposite. Joe: Where do you think apatheism comes from or what causes it? Is there an easy answer for that? Kyle: No, I don't think there's an easy answer for that. I think you can trace the beginnings of apatheism maybe as far back as pre-Socratic thinkers. You have this movement in ancient Greece where some philosophers are starting to move away from polytheism and they're moving towards this ... It's not monotheism, but it's God is everything and God is fate, right? Kyle: The problems you're having with your crops or your relationships or your wealth are not because of fickle gods, it's because of fate, so why should you care about the gods? You see an apathy towards the comings and goings of the gods, but it's not replaced with the apatheism we experience. Their apathy was a virtue like you come to just recognize that you can't control fate. Kyle: The moment you truly understand that, you'll find bliss, you'll find happiness. I think the kind of apatheism we experience today starts to rise in the Enlightenment period where people are rejecting Christian theism in exchange for agnosticism, which is we can't know if God exists. Deism, which means a God exists, but he or it doesn't really have any direct impact on our daily lives. Joe: Set it and forget it thing. Kyle: That's right, yeah, the popular phrase is the absentee landlord. Atheism, no, I'm unconvinced that God exists, right? There's this a line from one of those Enlightenment era atheists named Denise Diderot. I'm going to pull it up real quick. Sorry, you'll have to edit this part. Joe: No, it's okay, we don't edit, this will all be in there. Kyle: Oh, okay, great. Joe: They're listening to us right now. Kyle: Good, good, so Denise Diderot, famous Enlightenment atheist thinker, and he distills apatheism in his time in this one sentence. He says, "It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all," right? If you don't know much about hemlock, you should not put that on your tacos. Joe: That's the stuff that kills you. Kyle: It will kill you, yeah. Joe: Painfully. Kyle: Hemlock and parsley look similar, right? Diderot is saying it's more important that you discern between what can go on a salad and what will kill you than warrior fret about whether or not God exists. Joe: I feel like that betrays this huge idea already that God doesn't exist. If he exists, it's more of the idea of God exists. The same emotional attachment we might have like a small kid has to a blanket, do you know what I mean? This makes me feel good, I almost feel like in once sense what he's saying is forget about the blanket, it's just a toy thing. Joe: There's real issues, something could kill you and not kill you. The irony there is that what happens when you die? It really does matter if there is a God or not. Kyle: It is deeply ironic with this question, what happens when you do mistake the hemlock for parsley and you end up dying? Joe: Right. Kyle: Well, now the question of God's existence becomes of the ultimate importance. Joe: Right. Kyle: Yeah. Joe: Yeah. How do you put apatheism on the scale with atheism? I think a lot of people know atheism, whether it's the new atheists which are angry and want to pick the fight, or whether it's just the person who says look, "I'll be honest with you, I've thought through this, I don't think God exists. I'll talk to you about it, but it's not something I talk about a lot." Joe: Then you've got this new class or this newer category, newer to me, apatheism, which is just like this is completely irrelevant. Where do you put those on a line as far as the easiest people to talk to? Kyle: Yeah, intuitively you would think apatheism has a lot to do with atheism. If you don't think God's existence is important, well then you must not believe in him. That could very well be the case for a lot of people, but actually I think there is something that an atheist and a theist has more in common than does an apatheist, and that is interest in questions relating to God's existence. Kyle: If you were to ask a Christian theist, "Do you believe God exists?" They would say, "Yes, of course I do." Then you would be able to have a conversation, "Well, what is that God like? What are the implications of that belief?" If you were to ask an atheist, "Do you believe God exists?" They would say, "Well no, I don't," and then you'd be able have a conversation. "Well, what does God's nonexistence mean," right? Kyle: Now if you were to go to apatheist and ask them, "Do you believe God exists?" They're going to shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't care." That indifference drains any conversational power out of the whole dialogue, right? They won't have the conversation with you, because they don't care to have the conversation. In one sense atheists and theists should both share a deep concern about apatheism, because both the atheists and the theists find questions relating to God's existence important, because they understand the ramifications of answering the positive, theism, or negative, atheism. Joe: That's really interesting, I never thought about that before. An atheist should be concerned about the ramifications of an apatheist. Kyle: Absolutely. Joe: Clearly a theist of the Christian should be concerned, because we want everyone to be restored to God and love God and have a happy life. The atheist should be too, tell me why. Kyle: Yeah, I mean a simple scenario, who's going to buy Richard Dawkins books, right? Let's say Richard Dawkins publishes a new book, which is a very compelling, intellectual argument against the existence of God. The people that are going to buy those books are people interested in the question of God's existence. The atheist, the theist, and even the agnostic are sitting in a room having a conversation about God, because they're all interested in whether or not he exists, and what God is like if he does, and what it means if he doesn't, or even what it means if we can't know. Kyle: The apatheist is on the opposite side of the room looking over at those three having the conversation thinking they're wasting their time, it's completely useless. Yeah, I think that should be deeply concerning to atheists and agnostics as well as theists. That maybe rounds us back to the question that you asked earlier, which of those do I find most difficult to engage with the gospel, the atheist or the apatheist? Kyle: Unequivocally, I think it's the apatheist, because at least when you're approaching atheism, you have a mutually common interest in whether or not God exists. Joe: Yes, okay, so I have a very specific question about this. I'm going to come back to that in just a second. Before I get to there, what are we talking about? Are there a lot of people that are apatheistic? How do you count, find, survey apatheistic people? Would they even care? Then how do they compare to atheists or agnostics? What's the ratio? What's the population? What are we talking about? Kyle: Yeah, this is a frustrating thing looking into apatheism. It's impossible to tell how many apatheists there are in any given culture. The reason is because if you go to polling data, so things like American Religious Value surveys or Pew Forum or Gallup that ask questions about religious identification, those pollsters do not double-click into the reasons for why people don't believe. Kyle: Very quickly we might say, "Well I know where all the apatheists are, they're in the nones, the N-O-N-E-S," right? The religiously unaffiliated, those people who when asked if they have a religious affiliation, they say, "No, none." Apatheism is not restricted to the nones, and there may be nones that are not apatheistic, right? You may just not have a religious affiliation, but it doesn't mean you don't find the question of God's existence important. Kyle: Further, to complicate matters, you can find apatheism in people who identify as a religious tradition. You can say, "I'm Jewish, I'm Christian," but they don't really care what that means. Joe: For sure, I mean, there's so many, not so many, but I already at the top of my head think of so many secular Jews who are popular in the media or whatever. I feel like in a lot of ways they don't really care. They're Jewish by culture and heritage, but not religion in the spiritual sense. Kyle: Here we're in New Orleans, I'm in Mobile in Alabama. We're in the South, the primary religious affiliation is going to be some kind of Protestantism or Catholicism, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that they care about what that means, it just means that, that's the household they grew up in, that's the tribe to which they belong. Kyle: Apatheism permeates both religious affiliation and non-religious affiliation, so it makes it very tricky to try to gauge. Joe: Where does apatheism as a proper noun end, and where does all the category, whatever you would call this, and maybe this is apatheism, all the category of say the people that come and sit in the pew, but don't do anything, do you know what I mean? They don't tithe, they're not active, they're coming for some reason, maybe it's social, maybe it's guilt, maybe it's who knows? Joe: We all know this exact group of people and they're usually a large group of people, is that apatheism? If not, is apatheism something different or more extreme maybe? Kyle: Yeah, so I think what we're walking around now is the difference between apatheism and what's called practical atheism or pragmatic atheism. Practical atheism is as old as the Bible itself. We hear Scripture lament that the fool says in his heart, there is no God. Now that doesn't mean that they were actually atheist. The fool doesn't say, "There is no God." The fool says in his heart, so there's a dissonance between what this fool believes and how this fool acts, right? Kyle: This is the height of foolishness that you believe that there is a God or you acknowledge there's a God and you recognize that the implications of God's existence affects your ethical moral behavior, but you act as if he doesn't exist. I think for a lot of our experience in the church, what we're seeing is practical atheism. Kyle: It's a profession and even maybe a vague belief of God's existence, but a refusal to recognize and act upon the implications of that belief. How that's different from apatheism, is that the apatheist doesn't care about God's existence or nonexistence, he or she could care less. The practical atheism's apathy is sympathetic, it's not real. Kyle: An apatheists apathy towards God's existence is real. To me, from my experience and my readings, this is very new. This is a very new thing in the life of the church, not one that it's had to approach perhaps ever. Joe: Yeah, you had mentioned earlier that you and Tala Anderson have written or presented a paper on this. Kyle: Yeah, that's correct, so Tala Anderson is a professor of philosophy over at Oklahoma Baptist University. He and I and a couple of other folks presented papers on apatheism at the American Academy of Religion in Denver this past November. The goal of that presentation with those papers is to define apatheism from an evangelical, Christian perspective, and then to propose ways in which we might approach it as gospel believing evangelistic, Christians who are first concerned that you don't care about God's existence. Kyle: Second, that we would like to see you come to know the Lord Jesus the way we do. Yeah, we felt it was one of these conversations that the church ought to start having, right? Especially as the United States continues to secularize in an unique way from the rest of the West. A little slower than Canada and Western Europe and a little more diverse, right? Kyle: We're seeing an increase in interest in neopaganism and the occult, which is completely unexpected. Joe: Interesting, yeah, where did that come from? Kyle: Apathy, right? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: We are secularizing in a different way, but yeah, as a challenge to the gospel, we thought it would be a wise thing to begin, at least bringing it to the public mind. Joe: Yeah, getting the word out there. Kyle: Most people experience apatheism, they know it, but they don't know it. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: Right? The second you say even the word apatheism, people go, "Oh yeah." Joe: Right. Kyle: I know exactly what you're talking about. Then it makes that thing that was intangible, tangible. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: If it's tangible, well now we can talk about it, because we can identify it, we can see it, and we can prayerfully think through how we ought to approach it. Joe: This brings me to the question, one of the questions I wanted to ask specifically was how do you start a conversation with an apatheist? An atheist, right? That's easy, there's so many entry points. It might be intimidating, but it's clear there are a lot of ways in. An apatheist says, "I don't really want to talk about this." How do we talk about something someone doesn't want to talk about? Kyle: Yeah, this is the tricky part, right? The word that's probably floating around in people's minds with a conversation like this is well that's apologetics, right? I know what I need to do, I need to go bone up on apologetic methods, arguments for God's existence. If they don't find God important, well maybe if I argue that he exists, they'll find that he's important. Kyle: Unfortunately, that presupposes something that's not there, that they're interested in having that conversation, right? Joe: Right. Kyle: I certainly don't fault people, because as creatures created in the image and likeness of God designed to have a relationship with our creator, we are by default we have interest in God's existence, right? Thinking that everybody thinks the way or feels the way we do about God is intuitive, right? Certainly, that's the model we received from Scripture thinking about the context and the time in which it was written. Kyle: Everybody thought God or gods existence is in the little g, like multiple gods, is important. We've built our apologetic models off of that, and rightly so as a biblical foundation. For example, the most famous apologetic model that's cited from the New Testament is Paul's Areopagus sermon in Acts. When he goes into Athens and he's preaching the gospel and people find it interesting, so they invite him to the Areopagus or Mars Hill in the King James. Kyle: They want him to present this new philosophy they're so unfamiliar with. As he's walking there, he passes a pantheon, so he sees a bunch of statues of gods. He notices that there's one statue to the unknown God. They are so superstitious, that they wanted to make sure they didn't offend the one god that they might not have remembered in their little collection there. Kyle: This one God is really interesting, because there's something special about him, right? He seems to proceed the other gods, there's something more powerful, more mysterious about him. Paul notices that they're very religious and he leverages that religious interest. He starts, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious." Kyle: He presupposes that they both share a minimally common interest in theism, even though they are polytheists and he is a Christian. At least they both think that God's existence is important. From that story we've built our apologetic methods, have we not? I mean, I find it very rare to read a book on apologetics without that model coming up. Kyle: That's so important, because it's so good, but what if we live in an Athens without a statue to the unknown God? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: What if we live in a society now where there may have been a statue to an unknown God, but it's come under disrepair for being neglected, vines are growing on it, soot, it's been chiseled away, right? People don't care about the Pantheon anymore, how could Paul have started, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you're very religious." They would say, "What do you mean? No we're not, we don't care about what you have to say." Joe: It's like in the one hand you've got we're in a car and they're in a car. We have gas in our car and we're going north. They have gas in their car going south, and we're trying to get them to turn their wheel and come north, the right way. This new scenario that you're talking about here is like we're in a car and we're going north and they don't have any gas. Kyle: Right. Joe: It's like a totally, foundationally different issue. Kyle: That's correct, yeah, so that's why I argue that it's far more challenging to present the gospel to an apatheist than it is an atheist or an agnostic, because you are robbed of that minimally common belief. Not only are you robbed of that minimally common belief, but the question, do you believe in God, is zapped of its power because of indifference and apathy to it. Kyle: That question is meaningless to an apatheist, in fact, they may even feel negative towards it, because they're so tired of being asked it, right? Joe: Right, so you're starting at a deficit almost? Kyle: Exactly. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: You have to take a step backwards in just recognizing that we don't share that minimally common interest is crucial to approaching apatheism, yeah. Joe: Excuse me, what should I do if I've ... I have this friend and he's apatheist, I'm just going to say, and I have a few friends that I already know fit. Say they're not friends, say we don't have a relationship already, is that the key? Is it having a relationship? Even then, maybe they don't care to talk about this. I'm the kind of person, jumping into me for a minute, I'm the kind of person that I will get confused like sports. Joe: I'm like which one is the football and the basketball? I'm at that level, right? Extremely ignorant when it comes to sports, just a real idiot, and so somebody wants to come and talk to me at sports, I'm just like I will smile and be nice and can't wait for you to stop talking about this, right? How would a person come to me and talk about sports in a way that's interesting? Joe: How do I go to a person and talk about something spiritual when they just simply don't care? Kyle: Yeah, so in that scenario what I would say is you are interested in sports, you just don't know it yet. Joe: Oh, good one, I love this, please tell me more. Kyle: How do I get you to recognize that you actually are interested in sports? Well, I would begin by finding what are you interested in period, right? When I say that the classical methods that we've developed from apologetics, we've presupposed something that perhaps we don't have any more. What I'm not saying is well we'll just nuke apologetics altogether, right? Kyle: We're just going to start over again, that's absolutely foolish throwing the baby out and the bathwater, right? Joe: You've got nothing. Kyle: No, there are people in the history of Christianity thinking theologically, philosophically and approaching their cultures, that I think anticipated this type of thing. I think we look to, in their technical terms, individuals that have explored presuppositional or existential approaches to apologetics. Things like the moral argument can be very helpful here. Kyle: What we do is we start from the bottom up, rather than the top down, right? The to down approach is you believe in God, I believe in God, but you believe in God in a way that does not align with reality, so let me explain to you how. Let me argue that, let's go through your objections, and then boom, we get to the gospel. Joe: Which even works for an atheist, because you would say, "You believe in the value of this concept God, you just believe that it's false." Kyle: That's correct, yeah. Joe: Right. Kyle: Then you deal with objections and then get to a gospel presentation. With the apatheists though, I think you have to flip the script a bit, you have to start with the bottom up. We start with the individual, and I've found that most people are interested in themselves. Joe: Yeah, sure. Kyle: Via fallen nature that we are our favorite thing to think about. When I'm having conversations with apatheists, the place I start with is not God. He is the goal of course, but the place I start with is them. I ask them, "What do you find interesting? What drives you? What are your fears? What are your hopes? What are your desires? What do you think is virtuous? What do you think is unvirtuous? What do you think is good character? What do you think is a character flaw?" Kyle: Naturally most of those conversations go towards political things. What I try to do is I try to steer the conversation towards issues of morality. Then employ what Francis Schaeffer identified as pressure points and worldviews. Things that are held inconsistently or ideologically, and really push on them and ask, "Why? Why is that?" Kyle: Very quickly, for example, using the moral argument for why murder is wrong. You would ask a person like, "Why do you think murder is wrong?" The person would say, "Well, it's not good to kill somebody, because you're taking away that person from their family." "Well I agree with that, but what if a person, another person believes that taking away that person from their family is good, is a good thing, and they have one reason or another? Well who's to say that you shouldn't murder that person?" Kyle: Well the conversation then goes to there's governments let's say, right? You shouldn't murder, murder is illegal, so I guess that's why I think murder is wrong. Well what if there is a government that decides murdering is good, right? Joe: We've had that before. Kyle: We've had those before in history, right? Then what do we do, right? You argue this until you're in this theoretical land of a one universal government that determines whether or not murder is wrong. Then well you can imagine that universal government decides at one point no, genocide is good, so now what do we do? Well I don't know, what do we do? Kyle: That's a pressure point in their worldview, they can't explain why they believe murder is objectively wrong. Joe: Yeah, I think this is interesting, because a lot of the stuff we learned in apologetics, we've essentially shuffled the deck on. We're still using all those cards, we're using all those approaches. We're using all those ideas and concepts. We're using the reductio ad absurdum, the logic, like take this to its logical end and where does this take us based on what you said you, etc. Joe: We're doing it in a way, like you said, which I think is so critical, we're doing it in a way that starts with something they care about. Kyle: Right, that's exactly right, yeah, and notice the entire time I was having, we were having this very speedy, truncated vision of that conversation, I didn't bring up God once. Joe: Right. Kyle: I didn't need too, that wasn't the point in the conversation at the beginning stage. Then the question becomes well, why can you say murder is objectively wrong? I don't know. That moment, the, I don't know is called doubt, right? Doubt, when used sometimes, is quite advantageous. You've caused them now to think critically about their worldview. Kyle: Soren Kierkegaard has a great line about doubt, using it in this kind of a way. He says, "That doubt is a higher form than any objective thinking, because it presupposes the latter, but it has something more, a third, which is interest." Joe: Yes, because doubt is not simply, I don't know, like agnosticism in the little a, agnosticism. It's not just simply a vacuum, it's an out of balance vacuum. I feel uncomfortable, because something needs to be back in line. Kyle: That's right, so this is Kierkegaard's point. Doubt's a good thing in these kinds of situations, because if you're apathetic about your faith, if you're apathetic about a position, no amount of questioning or propositions is going to zap you out of that apathy until you're interested. Obviously you can't be apathetic toward something and interested toward something simultaneously, it's impossible, it defies both terms. Kyle: How do you get somebody from apathy to interest? Kierkegaard says, get them to doubt something about the thing that they're apathetic about, or that is related to the thing they're apathetic about. Then you have interest, and interest is important, because it zaps the apathy of its power, right? That one thing that they were completely disinterested in and indifferent towards just a moment ago, now becomes something that they have to seek out. Joe: Yes, doubt becomes like the fulcrum gets them back into the interest area. Kyle: That's right, that's right. Joe: That's very interesting. Kyle: At this point, in these moments of doubt, they start to think objectively. Now for the first time maybe in a long time they're interested. This is when you make a gospel presentation. This is when we can re-approach apologetics in the way that perhaps we're more familiar with, right? We've not assumed the presupposition that these men of Athens are very religious in every way. Kyle: We've gotten them interested and then now we can move forward. Joe: Really, unless a person is clinically depressed or something like this, unless a person is really just disconnected and not motivated to live, they are interested in something, in things. They have ambitions, they have motivations, and I feel like what you're saying is we just need to do the work of finding those. They are not being upfront in that kind of way in the way that an atheist is. Joe: An atheist says, "I'm very upfront about what I disbelieve." Somebody who is apathetic in this way says, "I'm not really gonna tell you in that way," right? Kyle: That's right. Joe: This conversation is boring to me, but it's not boring. It's just the framework of it's boring, and what you're saying is you come in with this back door, you find the doubt, find what they're interested in, expose the doubt, and then the new interest emerges, the relevance to the real conversation. Kyle: That's right, if you've struck a vein that truly causes them to doubt, interest inevitably comes. Nobody's ever doubted something and then not felt some kind of interest towards why they doubted that thing, right? It's a very, very powerful tool to use, it just needs to be used wisely and appropriately. Joe: Sure. Kyle: Perhaps even in moderation, you don't want to just throw somebody into an existential tail spin. Joe: Yeah, this is for your own good. Kyle: That's right. Yeah, I think it's a challenge, right? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: It's a challenge. Joe: It's a challenge, but it's also a way forward. I think you come across someone who is in apatheist, someone who's really just apathetic about spiritual things, you're like well I don't know what to do. I think a lot of people feel that, and having this approach first step I think is very helpful, it's very helpful for me. Kyle: Well that's good, that's good, yeah. Yeah, I would say I've had this kind of conversation quite a few times now, and one of the things that I've had told to me is that just seems like a lot. I can't even remember this conversation that we had, how am I supposed to draw up this framework the second I identify an apatheist? One, I think these types of things come with experience and practice. Kyle: Evangelism, of course, is a gifting that the Holy Spirit gives us, and it's one in which he guides us, and one that we become better with through experience. The challenge I would say is well don't worry about being able to draw on this and other things that you've thought about before, go do it in and see if the spirit is not good and willing and able to guide you through these things. Kyle: Then second, in these moments we're called to be stewards. If we're stewards of the message that we're given and we rely in faith that even in our stumblings we're trying to analyze somebody's worldview, find pressure points, push on them, get them to doubt, get them to interest, that first of all this is precious to the father. This is an act of worship and it's pleasing to him. Kyle: Second, he's good to use it, so you may not zap them out of their apathy the first time, the third time, the fifth time, the 10th time. That's okay, like you may be chapters one through three in a story that's 50 chapters long. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: Yeah, it's a challenging thing, but I still think that not only are we called to through the great commission to engage all peoples, which include the apatheists, even if they're more challenging than others, it's something that the spirit indwells you to do, right? He's there with you in these moments. Joe: I think the encouraging thing to me is having the right tools, knowing what to do, at least in some sense is a good thing, but ultimately, it's not my job to save anybody. Kyle: That's right. Joe: Right? It's just my job to say why I care. Kyle: Yeah, that's right. Joe: To me that's encouraging. This has been really great Kyle, I want to ask you one last question, how are you answering God's call? What does that mean and look like and so forth in your life? Kyle: Yeah, I mean personal day-to-day, the way I'm answering God's call is through finding the ways in which he's sanctifying me, and digging in and pushing into those. It may sound very basic, but I think it's very true. This comes through repentance and through prayer and through reading Scripture and acting on the things that God has told me to do and not just filing them away in a journal. Kyle: Very recently, just being candid, the Lord has pressed on, or just pushed on my heart in prayer that he would like to see me be more aware of what repentance means and to be bolder. Answering God's call for me in this season of life is being keenly aware of what is repentance, how often do we do it? Should I be doing it more often? What does it mean to be bold, to be bold for the gospel? Kyle: It means being a good husband, it means being a good teacher. It means being a good preacher when I'm given those opportunities. I think for me, the short answer of how I'm answering God's call is he's given me talents like from the parable, talents to steward and to multiply. Every day I ask how can I multiply the talents that you have given me? Kyle: Not just to receive an answer, but to act on that answer as well. Joe: It's a great question, how can I multiply the talents that you've given me. This has been quite a joy as always. Thanks for coming to the podcast Kyle. Kyle: Yeah, Joe, thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.

Convo with Kyle: It’s a special St. Nicholas episode featuring students from the St. Joseph campus of Mishawaka Catholic School! After talking a bit about who St. Nicholas was, Bishop answers questions from students - 5:28 - How old were you when you first thought about becoming a priest? - 6:18 - What’s your favorite prayer, and why did you decide to give your life to Christ? - 7:15 - What is the most difficult part about being a Bishop? And what is the best part about being a Bishop? - 8:37 - Why is being a Bishop so important? - 9:35 - If you weren’t a Bishop, what would you be? - 10:15 - What do you like doing when you’re not working? - 11:18 - Do you have any hidden talents? - 12:17 - Who is your favorite saint? - 13:22 - I wanted to know what is your favorite poem? - 14:36- What jobs you had before you joined the seminary? - 15:56 - How many pets did you have as a kid? If you did have any, what were their names and what were they? - 18:25 - What was your favorite book when you were in 4th grade? - 19:45 - How many siblings do you have? - 21:02- How often did you go to Church as a kid? -21:57 - When you were younger, did you want to be anything else besides a Bishop? If you did, why? - 25:05 - What’s your favorite church in the diocese? - 26:30 - What is your favorite color and why? - 27:13- What’s your favorite board game? - 29:23 - Did you played any sports when you were younger? - 32:14 - What is your favorite MLB baseball team? - 33:00 - What ’s your favorite part about Mass? - 33:53 - What’s your favorite food? - 36:11 - What is your favorite animal and why? - 37:40 - Where is your favorite place that you have been and why? - 39:05 - What your favorite ice cream flavor is? - 40:24 - What’s your favorite subject? - 41:05 - If you could visit any place in the world, where would it be? - 42:54 - I wanted to know how old you were? ------ Truth in Charity is brought to you in part by Notre Dame Federal Credit Union. ------ Live: www.redeemerradio.com Follow us on social media: www.Facebook.com/RedeemerRadio www.Twitter.com/RedeemerRadio www.Instagram.com/Instagram Submit your question(s): Call / Text (Holy Cross College text line) - 260-436-9598 Online - www.RedeemerRadio.com/AskBishop E-mail - AskBishop@RedeemerRadio.com Subscribe to the Podcast: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | RSS