Podcasts about kyle you

If they ain't talking shop, they are definitely talking shieet! The boys talk about new gear acquisitions, getting jammed up on stage and cheap but good back up guitars. -Kyle     You can help support the show on our PATREON for as little as $1 a month! Double down to bump it to $2 a month and you'll get an extra episode every week!   Join the fun on our Facebook group!   Follow us on the fuckin' Gram!   Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for the video version of the show, demos, vlogs, and more!   We have shirts available at The Jerk Store!   Check out our band Plane Without a Pilot   Hosted by Brian Gower and Kyle McIntyre

I don't even know what this episode is about. I'm just uploading it because Brian's computer is dumb and cant even perform basic tasks like opening a browser. Remember when we all used to pirate music and absolutely destroy our family computers? I do. Just wreck them and pretend we didn't know what happened to the hard drive.  Anyways, this is why I'm not allowed to do anything important for the podcast.   -Kyle   You can help support the show on our PATREON for as little as $1 a month! Double down to bump it to $2 a month and you'll get an extra episode every week!   Join the fun on our Facebook group!   Follow us on the fuckin' Gram!   Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for the video version of the show, demos, vlogs, and more!   We have shirts available at The Jerk Store!   Check out our band Plane Without a Pilot   Hosted by Brian Gower and Kyle McIntyre

Are traditional retirement plans holding you back? In this eye-opening episode, I dive into a conversation with Kyle Christensen, where he disrupts conventional financial strategies queued up for dentists. Rather than funneling earnings into several miscellaneous traditional retirement savings like 401ks and IRAs, Kyle introduces the novel concept of "fake assets" that might not serve you as you imagined. He advises dentists to channel their investments into their sphere of expertise—into themselves and their practice—in order to craft paths towards abundant wealth genuinely.Kyle breaks apart the paradigm of diversification and advocates for other arenas like real estate, intellectual property, and personal development ventures such as coaching. Discover the lengths to which specialization can forge wealth without waiting decades!What You'll Learn in This Episode:Why 401ks and IRAs might be considered "fake assets" for dentists.The importance of investing in one's expertise and practice for optimal wealth creation.Strategies for maintaining high liquidity to seize strategic opportunities.Understanding the value in real estate, IP investment, and self-improvement coaching.Kyle's take on why diversification strategies might be outdated.How specialization, rather than diversification, leads to increased wealth.Ready to reshape your financial future and mastering the art of specialization? Dive into this episode now!‍‍Sponsors:Studio 8E8: Dentistry's story-driven marketing agency. Traditional marketing repels. Story-first dental marketing attracts.We bring your story to life in a way that captivates and connects: https://s8e8.com/affiliates/tdm?utm_source=tdm&utm_medium=affiliate&wc_clear=true‍You can reach out to Kyle Christensen here:Website: https://uniqueadvantage.biz/Kyle's Book "Principals Based Planning": https://a.co/d/8576RD3Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unique_advantage/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558072766116LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uniqueadvantage-planning/‍Mentions and Links: ‍Terms:Fica Taxes‍People:Bill GatesElon Musk‍Books:FAKE: Fake Money, Fake Teachers, Fake Assets: How Lies Are Making the Poor and Middle Class PoorerThe Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and the Gospel of Wealth‍Videos:Why diversification is for suckers: Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban‍Businesses/Brands:MicrosoftAppleBerkshire HathawayWalmart‍Places:Wall Street‍If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)‍Michael: Hey, Kyle. So talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning? Kyle: My advice is to don't gamble with your financial future. And there's a reason I'm saying that. Michael: What's the reason behind it? Kyle: I think most of your listeners are probably being pressured, by the conventional wisdom out there to start quote, saving for retirement.And basically the way I look at that is they're divesting money from their control and their use and their expertise, and they're putting it in things that they have no control, expertise or use. And that's generally encouraged by the financial planning industry. Okay. Michael: So would you say, Don't start putting funds into that. Kyle: I know. Sounds crazy. Doesn't it? Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. The financial institutions that are promoting the philosophy of retirement and retirement planning, they only have one objective, and it's actually a huge conflict of interest.Their objective is to get asset center management. Their objective is to get your audience to send them money on a regular and ongoing basis and not touch it for decades and not receive any income for decades from those supposed assets, Robert Kiyosaki in his most recent book called fakecalls 401ks and IRAs mutual funds.He calls them fake assets. And the reason is he says a real asset is something that puts money in your pocket. And a liability is something that takes money out of your pocket for years. And that's why he calls those kinds of things, fake assets. Michael: So then from your expertise, where should we be putting our money then?Kyle: They should be putting it in what they're experts in. I've been to plenty of dental industry events, conferences. throughout the country. And I can tell you by looking at all the exhibitors of these events, there's plenty of opportunity for, dentists to invest in themselves and to grow and to expand.They're being convinced, however, to, move their money and invest in things that are not in their expertise, which I just finished reading Andrew Carnegie'sautobiography earlier this year. And in his book, he talks about that exactly. He says, I've never seen a man be embarrassed by investing in anything other than things outside of his expertise.his recommendation, which he's the richest American thatthat's ever lived. You know, we think, Bill Gates is super rich and Elon and they are, but comparatively Andrew Carnegie would be worth 300 billion in today's dollars. So he knows what he's talking about.And I think there's some wisdom in what he's saying. He's saying that, look, you should be investing in thethings you can control, and influence. Michael: Interesting. So then what are some strategic investments specifically for dentists that they should be investing in?Kyle: Yeah. So number one, I would say, don't be afraid of having cash. Don't be afraid of accumulating cash because cash means opportunity, think everybody's heard the phrase cash is King and there's truth to that. The people who have cash have opportunity. I'm sure most of your audience has dealt with loans, practice loans, or equipment loans, or things like that, right?What if you could get to a point in time when, you're only using loans strategically. You're not using them because you have to, but you're using them strategically. Maybe when the interest rates are really great and you're making more interest in where your cash is at, right?So at that point in time, it might make a lot more sense to just maintain the cash, take the loan, right? But in most people's cases, they're taking loans because they don't have the cash. So I would say, don't be afraid to build and maintain high levels of cash because cash equals opportunity. I'm thinking about one of my dental clients that's in Oklahoma.I started working with him whenhe bought into his first practice and he was making about 250, 000 a year. so that was in about 2014 when I started working with him this year.in fact, a conversation that I had with him last week, he's buying in three more practices.So he'll have a total of six practices. He has over 10 doctors working for him, his annual income just from what he does managing the practices, he makes over 2 million per year. That's where people should be investing right in their own ideas, in their own business, in their own property. Investment, for a dentist could be, investing in coaching.That's a great investment. In fact, this particular client, that was one of the first big investments that they did is they invested into coaching for their practice. And the amount of increase in efficiency in their practice went through the roof. So those are the kinds of investments that I think that your audience should be considering and, should weigh heavier than things that they have no expertise in.Michael: Yeah. Interesting. was that revenue profit or cash? Kyle: That was net profit per year for him. Michael: Oh, interesting. I like that, man. So then how would you plan for long term, I guess, like financial security and wealth building Kyle: So one of the things that you can do is you can start to invest into real estate, right?For example, maybe the property that your practice is in, that's an opportunity, right? And that's actually a way to, change the character of your income. Let's say that you're paying 20, 000 a month in lease, for your office lease if you were to own the building And now you're practice is paying that to you that twenty thousand bucks a year.You're Recharacterizing two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year now. It's not going to be subject to fikaSo you're saving fifteen point three percent of that money in taxes And now you're going to pay ordinary income tax, which you would have anyway, but you save a huge chunk of money over time if you sell that practice in the future, you could still Keep the building, it's a cash flowing asset to you.You can look at investing in other, what I would call real assets. Real assets are basically things that financial institutions can't sell you. So real assets might be owning a franchise. It might be owning, other real estate property, intellectual property. I think about the inventions that have taken place in the dental industry in just the last 10 years.And it's incredible. If you've been to the dentist regularly, you've seen it, the way they take x rays, the way they do imaging, everything. It's amazing how much technology, how much improvement has been made. What's the genesis of most of that improvement? Is it somebody who's not in the dental world or is it somebody that's in the dental world that came up with those things?And I would say it's mostly things that were brought up or invented Or at least thought of by people in the dental industry. Your audience might be, as they go along, be coming up with ideas that are multi million dollar cash flowing ideas.And what I'm saying is, that's the sort of thing they should be investing in. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So then how do you balance reinvesting in the business with diversifying your portfolio for long term wealth here? Kyle: So diversification, just submit is a marketing idea. Really? Michael: Okay. Yes. Kyle: in fact, I would encourage everybody to look up what Warren Buffett says and Mark Cuban says about diversification on YouTube.Diversification is an excuse for lack of knowledge. So specialization is what creates well, it's having an inch wide. Knowledge, but it's a mile deep, versus the Jack of all trades that has a mile wide basis of knowledge. And it's only an inch deep the whole way.People get paid for what they know. this idea of diversification, it's wall street. Wall Street is encouraging diversification because an excuse for their inability to pick winners and losers, which all the research actually says that they cannot do. And so we pay all these mutual fund managers and these money managers a lot of money right, every year, so that they can pick winners and losers, and yet all the research says that they can't, and what do they tell us we have to do?Diversify. We have to diversify. We have to asset allocate, We have to change that so that if something goes down, which is out of our control, which is a key point, I think then not all of our money will go down. So my question is. Should Bill Gates have diversified out of Microsoft should Steve Jobs have diversified out of Apple should Warren Buffett diversify outside of Berkshire Hathaway, I would say no, I think that those guys know exactly what they're doing.And they're investing in the things that they know that they're experts in. Michael: Interesting. Okay. So then if we do have a portfolio and our consultants are, are, you know, financial advisors are telling us like, yeah, you need to diversify. We did it already.How can we start scaling back? Or do we just take everything out of our mutual fund 401k RAs and stuff like that? Or, Or what are your thoughts? Kyle: Here's my question. How much controller influence do you have over how that performs?Michael: None. Like If I bought Walmart stock, how much influence do I have over that? buy something at Walmart, but nothing happens. Kyle: But it's not going to move the needle, right? It's not going to change the stock price, right? So I have no influence over that. So in reality, if you look up the definition of the word invest or the word gamble, What is that more like, Is it really investing or is it really gambling? I think that's the first thing we need to do. Let's call it what it is. And some people like to gamble and that's fine. for some people it's exciting. It's a fun game, but I don't think that people want to rely, put their entire financial future on gambling, right?But they're being told that that's what they should do. So what should you do if you already have, most of your investment in that kind of situation? Well, number one, does it make it better to put good money after bad? in the business world, don't put good money after bad, right?So if we're already doing something and we realize maybe this isn't the direction I want to go, then don't keep putting money in that direction. Does that make sense? So that's the first thing I would stop contributing If you realize that, hey, you know what? I really do have more confidence in what I'm doing than I do in putting it into something I have no clue and I have no control, no influence over the outcome, right?I'm actually penalized if I touch my money, Here's the other thing. Don't let the tax tail wag the dog. So what I mean by that is, taxes, yes, are an important factor to keep in mind, But they shouldn't be the sole deciding factor, if my entire goal is to avoid taxes, you know what the easiest way for me to avoid taxes is?Don't make money. And I don't know of anybody who has that as a goal. That's not a goal for anybody. It's not a good goal. I don't think to not make money. So avoidance of taxes isn't really the goal. Financial freedom is your goal. It should be your goal. And I think that's what most people have in mind when they think about retirement, even though that's not what the word retirement means.I think that they think about financial freedom, you know, I want to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Well, The problem with retirement accounts is that they don't provide you with any. income. They don't provide you with any velocity. That's the principle. It's called velocity of money.So you put money into a retirement account and you can't touch it for a long time. Michael, you seem like you're in your thirties, maybe. Are you in your thirties? So if you're in your thirties, when can you touch that money without paying a penalty? 30 more years. Yeah, it's 30 more years. And who benefits from that?Is it you or is it the financial institutions? Michael: I don't know if I'll be here in 30 more years, even like so. Kyle: that's true. It's absolutely true. There's no guarantee that you'll live that long. Here's the thing. Those products, those accounts are not designed for financial freedom. They're designed for retirement, which is an age.Retirement doesn't mean capability. And so here's the question. Would you rather pay the tax? And maybe even the penalty. Right now we're at, the market's still at, near it's all time high. It might make sense actually, to cash out. And pay the tax and the penalty. Which seems totally crazy. I'm the only financial planner that you'll ever hear that suggests that that might be a good idea.And here's why. Because I believe in you. I believe in you more than I do Wall Street. They have a conflict of interest actually. Their conflict of interest is this. If you take out your money, they make less. That's the reality. that's an actual financial conflict of interest. So when do they want you to take your money out?Never. Michael: Yeah. Kyle: Yeah. It's never. that's the game. They're just pushing it down the road for 30 years. And if you've put money into the retirement accounts, you've agreed to that condition that you won't touch your money for 30 years. Which only benefits them. It doesn't benefit you in any way, but they're trying to convince you that that's true And then when you get to 30 years from now because we just said what's their conflict of interest?They don't ever want you to touch your money. They get financially injured if you take the money out when you hit 30 years from now, do you think they're going to still want you to take your money out at that point? Nope. They're going to give you every reason why you shouldn't because you might outlive it.It's not enough. it didn't grow as much as we thought it would and so on. I would rather you have half of that money in your full control and your full use. Michael: Love it, man. Awesome. I appreciate your time. And if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group, or where can they reach out to you directly?Kyle: You can go to my website, uniqueadvantage. biz. And the last letters are B I Z, Boy Island Zoo. Our email addresses are on there. You can, reach out. I'd love to answer any question.Michael: couple other ways you can find out more, right? You can go to amazon. com and you can buy my book, principles based planning, a better approach to financial planning. The other ways you can find us we're on Instagram.Kyle: Facebook and LinkedIn. So we'd love to have you follow connect. We'd love to see on there. Michael: Awesome. Yeah. So that's going to be in the show notes below Kyle's book. I saw social media handles. Please reach out to him if you have any questions and Kyle, thank you for being with me on this Monday morning episode.Thank you.

In this episode, John and Kyle dive into the critical question: "Why not do it myself?"when it comes to managing rental properties. They explore the challenges and pitfallsthat individuals often face when attempting to manage properties on their own andhighlight the immense benefits of hiring professional property managers.Throughout the discussion, Kyle and John emphasize the importance of buildingwealth through real estate while maintaining a balance between financial success andpersonal happiness. They underscore that while managing properties oneself mightseem cost-effective initially, it often results in higher long-term expenses due toinefficiencies, emotional decisions, and missed growth opportunities.Quotes:• ”Why do you want to create a job? Did you buy a rental property so that you can havea job?" - John• ”Even if you do hate your job, at least you have more time with your family if you buildwealth through real estate or give you more freedom." - Kyle• ”You need to focus on things that you should be doing yourself—like growing yourrental portfolio." - JohnListen to We Are TPM on any major podcast platform including Apple Podcasts,Google Play, Spotify, and many more.Tune in today!We Are TPMTeixeira Property ManagementMansfield, Texaswww.WeAreTPM.comShowMeTheMoney@WeAreTPM.com———————————————————————————There are a vast amount of ways in today's world to build wealth using real estate andinvesting, not just in property, but in yourself!Located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, John Teixeira and Kyle Teixeira ofTeixeira Property Management bring you all of the knowledge and experience they canprovide for the confidence to achieve your investment goals, or how and why to createthem. Now, while John and Kyle have a ton to share, they will also be bringing youinterviews with some of their clients, industry partners, experienced investors, andmuch more every week!John and Kyle look forward to sharing the knowledge you need about arguably thegreatest investment vehicle that is available to the masses — Real Estate. Knowledgeis power, and John and Kyle intend to give you as much power as possible. It's notalways about the HOW, but also the WHY, and they will be digging into it right hereevery week!

In this episode of the Stronger Marriage Connection Podcast, hosts Dr. Dave Schramm and Dr. Liz Hale sit down with licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Kyle Barth. They discuss the foundation of healthy relationships, focusing on trust, boundaries, and overcoming obstacles. Kyle Barth shares his professional journey and personal insights into creating safe, connected, and value-based relationships. Listeners will gain valuable tools and perspectives for improving their relationships and understanding the complexities of trauma and trust. #marriage #buildingtrust #relationshipgoals #couplestherapy About Kyle Barth: I'm not your typical relationship therapist. Yes, I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist with over a decade of experience, but here's the twist: I've been through divorce myself. Unexpected, right? Life has a funny way of steering us in unexpected directions. However, this experience further ignited my passion to help others build safe, secure, and connected relationships.  My mission is to empower individuals to cultivate confidence and foster healthy,empowering, and connected relationships. By incorporating trauma-informed andevidenced based therapy practices, I create a safe haven for healing, honesty, andgrowth. I'll walk alongside you as you rewrite the script of your story. But beyond my role as a therapist, my proudest title is "dad." Nothing brings me more joy than spending quality time with my kids. When I'm not immersed in the world of therapy, I indulge my love for the great outdoors, cheer on the Utah Jazz, and love reading. Let's embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation, unlocking your potential for meaningful connections and personal growth. You matter! Insights: Kyle: You're capable of having the relationship of your dreams, no matter your current situation or past experiences. Whether you're 60 years old and have never been married, have never had a long-term relationship, or have been divorced three times, you can still achieve that dream relationship. It may not look like what you envisioned earlier in life or even right now, but it can become a reality for you. It might require letting go of past relationships or changing how you've been doing things, but you're capable of making it happen. Dave: One thing that might stand out about ways of thinking is the concept of the marriage of your dreams. Initially, you might think of a fairy tale, like a Disney ending with music, dancing, and everyone focusing on the couple. However, that's not reality. The marriage of your dreams can mean feeling safe, happy, and connected, with your partner as your best friend, by your side through all the ups and downs. That's what many truly want and long for. Liz: We are always changing, and I think that's really great. To try something new, we often talk about marriage 2.0, but I've even had a couple say this is marriage 10.0 because of constant change. We need to be willing to let go of old patterns. Just as our internal bodies and organs are changing, we are part of that process, and we need to embrace it intentionally in our marriages. Kyle Barth Links: https://impactfulcounseling.com/   Visit our site for FREE relationship resources and regular giveaways: Strongermarriage.org Podcast.stongermarriage.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/strongermarriage/Facebook Marriage Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/770019130329579Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strongermarriagelife/ Dr. Dave Schramm:http://drdaveschramm.comhttp://drdavespeaks.com Dr. Liz Hale:http://www.drlizhale.com  

This episode features an interview with Kyle Coleman, CMO at Clari & Devin Reed, Head of Content at Clari. Clari's Revenue Platform improves efficiency, predictability, and growth across the entire revenue process. In this episode, Kyle and Devin give us the inside scoop on how to reduce revenue leak with purpose-driven Marketing, share their thoughts on operational thought leadership, and how revenue is not just an event it's an outcome.Key Takeaways:Revenue is not just an event, it's a business process. And a process can be planned, modified, and provide more predictability.Map out your buying personas across the entire buying group. This has to be done so marketers can have more of a seat at the table for deal acceleration. The buyer's journey has changed so much and we need to be aware of those changes and make strategic decisions through a more updated, effective playbook.Sell and evangelize the problem you solve. You should always be talking about the value you bring to the marketplace and make sure you put the hero cape on your customer so they feel empowered to leverage what you offer and solve their problems.Quote(s):Kyle:“ You need to be selling and evangelizing the problem that you solve, and you need to be putting the hero cape on the buyer so that they feel empowered to go solve that problem, leveraging your technology. And that's the move that we're trying to make. So a lot of what we do in the RunRevenue campaign, and the way that we're showing up, and certainly, hopefully, the vibe that you get when you engage with any Clary properties, whether that's RunRevenue pro or Clary. com or us on social. Hopefully, you get more of a B2C feel from us. We want you leaving any Clari experience and feeling like, that was, that felt like Nike. That felt like Apple. Not, that felt like IBM. Like, that's not the way we want to go. So that's what we're trying to invest more in.”Devin:“You need to win mind share before you can win market share. So all that like people like, oh, it's brand content, like that's not converting. It's like, but most people aren't buying anyway. So you need to start to get, uh, get them to know, like, and trust you, like you're doing with your ad. And then later, when the meeting comes, when it comes up that I need your services, you'll be the first one. And you'll get more inbound.”Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Kyle on LinkedInConnect with Devin on LinkedInLearn more about ClariLearn more about Caspian Studios

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!  

This episode of the Live Better Seller Better Podcast features Kyle Norton, SVP of Sales at Owner.com. Today, Kyle talks not about career trajectory, but company choice. He invites salespeople to become proactive instead of reactive, to pursue companies that they've vetted and bet their efforts on.He gives advice on how to measure a company's capacity to grow and shares insights on when it's best to fold on an opportunity. He also shares some actionable tips on personalizing messages and not being afraid to reach out to decision-makers. HIGHLIGHT QUOTESFor the asymmetric risks of a startup, there have to be asymmetric upsides too - Kyle: "You need to look for an asymmetric upside. You're getting asymmetric risk, as we've all seen in this market. Lay-offs, a lot of companies are zombies at this point like there's a lot of not great stuff happening, and so there is more risk than being at a big established company... if you're going to take that risk and take that chaos and all that comes with startup land, you need to bet big."Be proactive and reach out to decision-makers for an interview - Kyle: "If you want a great job at a good company where you definitely can't get an interview just applying online, which is most of the time... but all of securing the interview is in the personalized outreach, the research, and having a really tight value prop." You can find out more about Kyle and cold call him to find out about available jobs in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylecnorton/Website: https://www.owner.com/Live Better. Sell Better. is sponsored by our proud partner:Vidyard | vidyard.com

The world of investing can be intimidating and scary to jump into but having tips and tools of the trade can make it easier to jump in and start building legacy wealth for you and your family! This episode is the follow-up to my season ending episode "Trade Secrets-Real Talk on Investing & Wealth Building" I was joined for this enlightening discussion by 2 giants in their respective fields: Mr. Asa Patterson, Entrepreneur, Real estate investor, Business and Real estate mentor and coach  Mr. Kyle Stephenson, Real estate investor & Founder of the property management firm, KRS Holdings, Inc. Asa & Kyle gave us some invaluable tips and advice on real estate investing and creative ways to build wealth. Key Takeaways: Know your goal for the investment (Asa) Have a good foundation and understanding of what you want to do and know the goal of why you're doing it.(Asa) Make sure in your first deal, that what you pay for and what the rent truly is will take care of all of the expenses. (Kyle) You shouldn't get into anything speculative! (Kyle) Land is not a cashflow type of product (Asa) If you are a new investor with little money and a lot of time wholesaling is a good way to start in real estate investing. (Asa) If you have a little time, if you have a little credit and a little money you would look into a bread and butter. A bread and butter neighborhood is, where working class, median income neighborhood, where the crime is lower, the better schools, then you can buy something using your cash and your credit to rent (out) (Asa) Build a relationship with your local credit union! (Asa) There's good debt and there's bad debt. (Kyle) An investment property that generates cash that can pay that debt is good debt! (Kyle) Bad debt is debt that you can't pay back and it's at 18%! (Kyle) Financial literacy will set you free! (Kyle & Asa)   Guest Contact Info: Asa Patterson- https://www.premier72.com https://twitter.com/asapmentor4u https://www.instagram.com/mrasapatterson/ https://www.facebook.com/asa.e.patterson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/asa-e-patterson-m-ed-897a4b4/   Kyle Stephenson- https://www.krsholdings.com/ https://www.facebook.com/krsholdings.property/ https://twitter.com/krsholdings https://www.linkedin.com/company/krs-holdings-inc-   Intro: "Welcome To The Kandid Shop by: Buss_TE (Anthony Nelson) Outro: "Union" by Walz   Join me on Wednesday March 30th @ 7:30pm for a very special "live video " kandid chat with Cecil "DC Brain Supreme" Glenn from the 90's hip-hop duo "Tag Team!"        

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.

Cast: Christian Humes, Dan Weine & Tom Caswell (and some special guests)Pokémon 298: AzurilOfftopic: Books, BabiesGames: Halo Infinite, Activision Blizzard, NintendoPodcast Game: I Will Lie To YouFollow our guests!Kyle: You can find me anywhere online at @kbdotfyiNoah: Atnoahreno and jjppgchamp69Schteef: twitch.tv/Schteefplays Schteefplays on insta and tiktokOh and on PS and Xbox it's SchteefplaysQuestions, Comments, Complaints, Corrections!?Call: 805-738-8692Twitter: @UnrankedPodcastEmail@UnrankedPodcast.comDiscordhttps://discord.gg/e2c5MzbPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/unrankedpodcastYouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/unrankedpodcastStreamshttps://twitch.tv/GreatBriTomhttps://twitch.tv/TheChoomsMerchhttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/unranked-podcastHarmony: Echos of Powergetharmonyeop.comHost ContactsTwitter@Christian_Humes, @TunaTargaryen, @BigDan815, @GreatBriTomGamertagsTheChooms, Tuna Targaryen, BigDanW815, GreatBriTomNintendo Friend CodesChristian: 4405-3172-5821Alex: 5443-2451-6915Dan: 2588-5184-0411Tom: 1369-5857-5388PSN:TunaTaygaryen, BigDan815, GreatBriTom See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Timeline: [01:55] I am excited today about our guest on Insider Secrets, Kyle Mitchell [03:34] In one word, tell us what describes you personally and professionally? [04:36] Kyle shares his backstory. [09:14] So tell us a little bit about your portfolio. Where's it at? What type of product and asset class? [10:05] Do you buy an older product or do you not? What's your thoughts on the age piece of this? [16:55] Do you use third party to manage your properties? [19:46] How difficult do you find it is or pushback do you get from your onsite staff or your property manager when you want to go in and make a change? [21:29] What types of things have you seen as a result of adding more value locally in neighborhoods? [24:09] When you talk about holding people accountable, you mean that property manager or your onsite staff? [24:49] How do you go about making high stake decisions when it comes time to do? [26:00] Kyle shares about the systems and techniques they use. [28:11] Kyle talks about the best amenity in their properties that helps generate some extra revenue. [31:42] One of those Insider Secrets that you feel best has helped scale your business? [32:24] Last thoughts by Kyle. [33:23] Favorite tourist attraction? [34:38] Best book you've ever read? “Cash Flow Quadrant” by Robert Kiyosaki [36:33] How to contact Kyle: You can always schedule a call at our Website (aptcapitalgroup.com)

The last BumbleKast of 2020 has a lot of A's for your Q's! Support the show on Patreon and Ko-Fi! Shop the BumbleStore! Show Information Your hosts: Ian "BumbleKing" Flynn - Head writer of Sonic the Hedgehog comics for IDW Publishing and Mega Man for Archie Comics, Narrative Director for Rivals of Aether, writing for Archie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and more Kyle "KyleJCrb" Crouse - Founder & Administrator of the KNGI Network, host of the Nitro Game Injection video game music podcast Subscribe and listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play RSS Feed for podcast apps and readers Check out BumbleKing Comics and the KNGI Network Like BumbleKing Comics & KNGI on Facebook Follow @BumbleKast, @IanFlynnBKC & @KyleJCrb on Twitter Get some BumbleGear at the BumbleStore Original music in this episode composed by Ken "coda" Snyder, used with permission – Check out his music on Bandcamp Special Thanks to our friends at Noise Channel! Pay what you want for the theme song and more great music as part of their charity compilation Noisechan & Nugget: Adventures in Chiptunes Want to have your product promoted on the show? Check out the Patreon site to find out how! Want to ask us a question? Ask at: Twitter at @BumbleKast Email bumblekast [at] yahoo [dot] com YouTube comments Patrons can post on Patreon – https://patreon.com/bumblekast Priority Q&A AwesomeCakester Ian; Looking back on how you had to introduce a new Sonic world in the IDW comic, having to basically make a spiritual follow up to Sonic Forces for a different media. I think a lot of us don't really think about how difficult that was. Dealing with people that were unhappy with Sonic Forces, the sudden end to the Archie run and losing tons of characters that fans loved for so long, the Freedom Fighters, couldn't have been a walk in the park. What were some of the challenges that you had to face when starting the run of the IDW comics? Digamma What's the lead time between when a story is written (as in the script, pre-planning obviously stretches back far longer) to when it's published on IDW Sonic? (to simplify things let's go by original intended release dates for delayed issues) I remember back in the Archie days you mentioned it was 6 months, but that was Archie and this is IDW, different publishers, plus I've heard that art wise IDW has different lead times/deadlines than Archie. Also, is the lead time different between main book issues vs miniseries issues vs Annual stories? AWF Question for Ian and Kyle: You are now a chatacter in a Fallout game. What kind of chatacter are you? What kind of skills do you have? Are you a team player, or do you go in solo? Would you join a faction like the Brotherhood of Steel, or are you all about that raider lyfe? Scruffymatt Hey there gents. I was wondering what your plans are for this holiday season? How will you be adapting this year in lieu of being unable to do a lot of your usual holiday traditions? N'Oni Lo there, got a question! Whenever we're able to do the whole Convention thing again, Will the Bumblekast ever have a fan table at one? Also, would you take any suggestions on conventions to go to? Scurvy Piratehog To Ian: Hey Ian! love what you have done on Bad guys, but after issue 2...it got me thinking. Couldn't Eggman put EM Shielding on all his robots to prevent the Zeti from controlling them? I feel that kind of tech gives him an actual real fighting chance against them since they can control tech. Also while we are at it, considering Neo was in the first arc, and teh Deadly Six hijacked the metal Virus, is it too much to ask to have a big story arc where Eggmen gets to keep being the main villain through it? He's Sonic's arch-enemy after all and I miss having some real Sonic VS Eggman stories where he gets to be the full on main villain. To Kyle: Out of curiosity...

The last BumbleKast of 2020 has a lot of A's for your Q's! Support the show on Patreon and Ko-Fi! Shop the BumbleStore! Show Information Your hosts: Ian "BumbleKing" Flynn - Head writer of Sonic the Hedgehog comics for IDW Publishing and Mega Man for Archie Comics, Narrative Director for Rivals of Aether, writing for Archie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and more Kyle "KyleJCrb" Crouse - Founder & Administrator of the KNGI Network, host of the Nitro Game Injection video game music podcast Subscribe and listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play RSS Feed for podcast apps and readers Check out BumbleKing Comics and the KNGI Network Like BumbleKing Comics & KNGI on Facebook Follow @BumbleKast, @IanFlynnBKC & @KyleJCrb on Twitter Get some BumbleGear at the BumbleStore Original music in this episode composed by Ken "coda" Snyder, used with permission – Check out his music on Bandcamp Special Thanks to our friends at Noise Channel! Pay what you want for the theme song and more great music as part of their charity compilation Noisechan & Nugget: Adventures in Chiptunes Want to have your product promoted on the show? Check out the Patreon site to find out how! Want to ask us a question? Ask at: Twitter at @BumbleKast Email bumblekast [at] yahoo [dot] com YouTube comments Patrons can post on Patreon – https://patreon.com/bumblekast Priority Q&A AwesomeCakester Ian; Looking back on how you had to introduce a new Sonic world in the IDW comic, having to basically make a spiritual follow up to Sonic Forces for a different media. I think a lot of us don't really think about how difficult that was. Dealing with people that were unhappy with Sonic Forces, the sudden end to the Archie run and losing tons of characters that fans loved for so long, the Freedom Fighters, couldn't have been a walk in the park. What were some of the challenges that you had to face when starting the run of the IDW comics? Digamma What's the lead time between when a story is written (as in the script, pre-planning obviously stretches back far longer) to when it's published on IDW Sonic? (to simplify things let's go by original intended release dates for delayed issues) I remember back in the Archie days you mentioned it was 6 months, but that was Archie and this is IDW, different publishers, plus I've heard that art wise IDW has different lead times/deadlines than Archie. Also, is the lead time different between main book issues vs miniseries issues vs Annual stories? AWF Question for Ian and Kyle: You are now a chatacter in a Fallout game. What kind of chatacter are you? What kind of skills do you have? Are you a team player, or do you go in solo? Would you join a faction like the Brotherhood of Steel, or are you all about that raider lyfe? Scruffymatt Hey there gents. I was wondering what your plans are for this holiday season? How will you be adapting this year in lieu of being unable to do a lot of your usual holiday traditions? N'Oni Lo there, got a question! Whenever we're able to do the whole Convention thing again, Will the Bumblekast ever have a fan table at one? Also, would you take any suggestions on conventions to go to? Scurvy Piratehog To Ian: Hey Ian! love what you have done on Bad guys, but after issue 2...it got me thinking. Couldn't Eggman put EM Shielding on all his robots to prevent the Zeti from controlling them? I feel that kind of tech gives him an actual real fighting chance against them since they can control tech. Also while we are at it, considering Neo was in the first arc, and teh Deadly Six hijacked the metal Virus, is it too much to ask to have a big story arc where Eggmen gets to keep being the main villain through it? He's Sonic's arch-enemy after all and I miss having some real Sonic VS Eggman stories where he gets to be the full on main villain. To Kyle: Out of curiosity...

Connect with SyTrue on the Azure Marketplace: https://bit.ly/2JqldQS Kyle Silvestro is the founder and CEO of SyTrue, a company that leverages Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to substantially reduce the time it takes for a healthcare expert to identify what is clinically or administratively relevant within a medical record. As part of this discussion, we shared how their partnership with Microsoft, their use of Azure, and the Azure Marketplace have empowered them to scale and grow their business. Connect with Kyle: Web: https://sytrue.com/ Twitter: @clinicalNLP @SyTrueInc Microsoft partnership opportunities for healthcare partners: HealthcareIndExp@microsoft.com Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [00:49] We’re currently in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic where health care providers and payers are experiencing an exponential increase in their workload. The ramifications of this increase would be a proportionate exponential increase in the amount of data that will be generated. How are insurance companies digitizing the billions of new health records in order to convert them into useful data? [01:16] The challenge we’re having is that data is being generated as images, which then needs to be converted to text, and from there to useful information. [01:41] How much data is created in healthcare today? [02:12] How has COVID-19 impacted the volume of healthcare data that’s generated? [02:25] How do you handle this incoming influx of information? [03:06] What is the challenge the World Health Organization is having regarding our medical data? [03:12] The major challenge with our medical data is that you can only read so much data, so fast. [03:43] How can Health Insurance companies leverage AI and analytics to help fight Covid-19 related insurance fraud? [04:59] SyTrue recently launched a new offering on the Microsoft Azure marketplace, called SyHealth. Tell us about it and how it addresses some of the challenges we just discussed. [04:59] How is SyTrue helping fight Covid-19? [06:15] How can the public use your solution to fight Covid-19? [09:46] How would a healthcare organization use your solution with Azure? [10:57] How can customers find out more about the SyHealth solution, and procure it through the Azure Marketplace? Kyle: You can access it via this link: https://bit.ly/2JqldQS [11:22] How has partnering with Microsoft helped SyTrue scale and grow your business? [11:49] How can people find out more about Microsoft partnership opportunities for healthcare partners? Kyle: For more information you can send an email to HealthcareIndExp@microsoft.com. [12:07] How do people connect with you? Kyle: You can visit our website at https://sytrue.com/. You can also follow us on Twitter at @clinicalNLP or @SyTrueInc. [12:34] Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you’d like to share with the audience? #AskTheCEO with Kyle Silvestro

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.  

We review ‘The Poison Sky' as Martha Jones, Donna Noble, and The Doctor face off against the Sontarans. In the news we discuss a two Doctor story from Big Finish Audio, Fathom Events bringing the End of Time to theaters this August, and Lee inadvertently creates Kyle next obsession! Find out what and more in this episode as the Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 158. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Sontaran Stratagem' as Martha Jones makes her return to Doctor Who. What happens when Donna and Martha come face-to-face?  What is the Rattigan Academy?? We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 157. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Planet of the Ood' as Donna Noble and the Doctor travel to Donna's first off-world adventure! We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 156. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Fires of Pompeii' as Donna Noble and the Doctor travel back to Pompeii on the day before Volcano Day! We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 155. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

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.

In this episode, Zach and Latricia discuss effective salary negotiation strategies with experienced Walker Elliot senior recruiter Kyle Mosley. Length: 00:39:55Hosts: Latricia | ZachTRANSCRIPTLatricia: Federal Reserve research shows that Black workers earn less than their white counterparts in a worsening trend that holds even after accounting for differences in age, education, job type and geography.In 1979, the average black man in America earned 80 percent as much per hour as the average white man. By 2016, that shortfall had worsened to 70 percent, according to research from the San Francisco Federal Reserve, which found the divide had also widened for black women.The analysis from Institute for Women’s Policy Research says if the wage gap keeps narrowing at the pace it has been the last 50 years, Black women will not catch up to white men until the year 2124 (that's 106 years from now), Hispanics until 2248, and white women until 2056. The excerpts I read from Bloomberg and NBC respectively speak to historical inequity that people of color face when it comes to equal pay in the workplace. Considering the nation’s history, this itself should not be a surprise, however the question is what if anything can we do as non-white men do to tip the scales in our favor? This is Latricia. And you’re listening to Living Corporate.Latricia: So, today we’re talking about effective salary negotiation and career management strategies.Zach This is a great topic and I’m glad we’re discussing it. The data you shared at the top of the show was… I’ma be honest, it was like really depressing - BUT it points to the reality of where we are and we can’t move forward without being honest about where we’re starting.Latricia: Right. It is frustrating to see the data and it’s reminder that racial inequity goes beyond the typical talking points that aren’t often explored and understood.Zach: Right. Latricia: I mean, let me read this again-“The analysis from Institute for Women’s Policy Research says if the wage gap keeps narrowing at the pace it has been the last 50 years, Black women will not catch up to white men until the year 2124 (which is 106 years from now), Hispanics until 2248, and white women until 2056.”Zach: That. is. Crazy. And I know this show is about salary negotiation and career management, but that particular point from those articles reminds me of conversations you and I have had around how so many companies promote Diversity & Inclusion but don’t actually discuss anything beyond gender representation.Latricia: Right we just talked about that - so this is a great example of how that binary view is so problematic. From looking at the analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and again be reminded that all women aren’t treated equally, having that intersection of race and gender matters if we’re going to have completely authentic conversation around these issues.Zach: Man, I completely agree. So with that in mind, let’s talk about salary negotiation. I think this is a great topic because I’ll speak for my own experiences and what I’ve observed, I feel as if people of color don’t really advocate or encourage the idea of just negotiating. I’ll hear more stuff like “you just need to get in the door and work your way up, you don’t want them to look at you sideways or think that you’re all about the money or whatever, whatever, whatever”. I hear a lot of those talking points from other people of color.Latricia: Right, right. And I’ve heard the same thing. A little bit about me, my background is in public health and I’m in this facebook group with other women in public health, I won’t say the group specifically, but I’ve seen how black women with master’s degrees are working jobs out of their masters for almost minimum wage. And I can’t believe it. And even just the idea of a six figure salary is something that they don’t dream of until they’re at the top of their career, maybe close to retirement, we’re talking like 50. That’s when they’re thinking they’ll be able to get to that six figures. And then I’m sharing stories about kids I know coming out of undergrad within 3 years at some of these firms, and they’re making six figures in 3 years and you’re talking six figures 20 years into your career. And I’m really passionate about this episode and it’s important for us to talk about it. Like I said, in public health, for some reason people are too ashamed to talk about the money because we’re more focused on social justice and healthcare for all and I totally understand that viewpoint, but we can accomplish social justice and still secure the bag. So, I really think that this is going to be an important show.Zach: Right, and I guess I’m a little taken aback to be honest, because you’re talking about these women. And like I said, you and I have had this conversation in private, but you saying it again is just mind-boggling. You’re talking about women who have advanced degrees taking, like, pennies on the dollar. And that’s nuts to me. And it honestly makes me sad but I’m not surprised, like where do you think that comes from? The idea of not negotiating or not negotiating enough? And let me be clear guys, this is not just an issue for black women. The main people I’ve gotten this whole “chill, take it slow, get in the door and grind” talk are actually from male people of color. But where do you think that comes from, Latricia? What are your thoughts there?Latricia: It’s definitely not exclusive to women of color. These realities still create practical, micro level challenges for all of us day-to-day. And like we said from the start, the issues we’re pushing up against are systemic and institutional and we get that… but, I don’t think that means we just say “whelp, racism, woe is me” and don’t at least figure out ways to fight and be more strategic in how we push for that bag you know? Zach: I definitely do. That’s funny “whelp, racism” that should be a meme. “Nothing we can really do.” It’s not funny but it’s kinda funny at the same time. Anyway--Latricia: That’s gonna be the hashtag for the show, by the way.Zach: Anyway, to your point, I definitely do. And like you said, just talking about some of the larger data points, who’s to say that we’re not able to do some things and mobilize at an individual level that could impact the whole thing? There might be things that we can do, just as Latricia, as Zach, as the person listening to this podcast that could actually make a dent in some of these trends. Latricia: Absolutely. And really, it’d be great to have another, more seasoned perspective. Like someone with over 25 years of experience in career coaching, or corporate recruiting, salary negotiations, and strategic relationship building. Not to say this discussion hasn’t been great, but just to have that extra perspective, you know?Zach: Hmm… you mean like our guest for today’s show, Kyle Mosley?Latricia, Zach: Whaaaaa-?[air horns]Latricia: Alright, so next, we’re going to go into an interview with our guest, Kyle Mosely.Zach: So we have Kyle Mosley on the show - Kyle, welcome!Kyle: Hey, thank you for having me, Zach.Zach: Not a problem, we’re really excited to have you here. For those of us who don't know you, would you mind just sharing your story?Kyle: Oh definitely. Well, Zach, I’ve been a recruiter for about 25 years here in Houston, Texas. I started off in 1992, so really I’m going into my 26th year pretty soon. So I started as an engineering recruiter, as well as I delved into some executive recruiting. I owned my own recruiting firm for 8 years before getting back into connecting with an old buddy of mine in the recruiting network and I’m still recruiting until this day. It has been a very lucrative field, my wife is a recruiter as well. And it’s a great opportunity for me to be able to share and help other people.Zach: That’s awesome, and congratulations on coming up on 26 years, that’s amazing.Kyle: Yeah long time. Long, long time, man.Zach: So as you know today we're talking about effective salary negotiation. Can you explain from your point of view why salary negotiation matters?Kyle: That’s a good question. Salary negotiations are much like a relationship negotiation. It sets the tone for what relationship you will or will not have with the prospective employer, okay? So ideally everybody wants to have a win-win situation when it comes to salary negotiations. But, we know eventually one side will either concede or compromise or the other side will not. And somebody either will walk away or, if there is the compromise, there still may be some expectations there from one party that didn’t quite get what they want. So when you go into a salary negotiation, you must know that before you finalize the negotiation as well as come to terms with the other party, what are you prepared to be able live with? I think right now, Zach, in this day and age, it’s no different from when I started recruiting, to be honest with you. It’s that everybody expects to get something out of the deal, right? So if you go into the salary negotiation expecting your top ten list to be fulfilled by the employer? I think you’re delusional.Zach: [Laughs]Kyle: [Laughs] And the reason why I’m saying this is let’s be honest, and I always back to the relationship principle - when you and your wife first started dating, there was some give and take. And it’s the same with your employer, or prospective employer. There will be a give and take. Now, your employer may concede certain aspects of the job function or the salary that you’re going to get, but there are going to be some high expectations the higher that salary goes.Zach: Okay.Kyle: And are you willing and ready to be prepared to accept that responsibility, you see? So if you cannot accept that responsibility and take the ownership of what’s going to happen once you become gainfully employed with that prospective employer, you are going to really have a difficult track with that organization.Zach: So to your point though about, I guess, being more practical regarding companies’ expectations the higher the number goes, do you have any examples or stories of how that plays out?Kyle: Over 25 years I’ve been a part of hundreds of salary negotiations, right? The issue comes into play and it always comes back to “who’s going to be bitter about this situation or not?” [Laughs]Zach: [Laughs] ‘Kay.Kyle: and who’s going to have the higher expectation there. So let’s kind of do a reverse engineering type deal - Let’s start from - you’re on board with the employer, but that employer is going to be expecting certain things from you. So before you go into any salary negotiation, you’ve got to be able to do your homework, number one. And also, number two, you have to know your value. If you don’t know your value and you don’t know anything about the employer or where you’re going to work, you’re really going to put yourself at a disadvantage in this whole negotiation scenario. Now when I talk about knowing your value, is the fact that a lot of people believe that ‘okay. I came out of school, went for 4 years, got my bachelor’s’ and let’s say ‘I went to get a master’s degree or MBA or some sort of advanced college degree, right?Zach: Right.Kyle: So therefore when I go onto these career sites like glassdoor or salary.com or monster or careerbuilder, these guys are telling me I’m worth 80k dollars to start off with. And the employer wants to know ‘yeah, you have great credentials when it comes to your educational credentials, but what about when it comes to your real work experience credentials?’ Ok, and the value comes into - if I offer Zach an opportunity to come onto my company XYZ Executive Firm, right? I need to know that Zach from Day 1 is going to enhance my company. Versus Zach is going to be a person extracting from my company.Zach: okay, yeah.Kyle: So then, that’s when I’m saying if you know your value from day 1, you’ve got to be able to articulate this to your prospective employer. That’s a part of the negotiation cycle. Alright so, I have an entry-level kid coming out of one of these big name Texas schools, and he’s an engineer, and he has his PhD in engineering. So then I have a 5 year engineer who has worked in the oil and gas industry, he only has a bachelor’s degree and they’re vying for the same opportunity. So the firm is telling us ‘ Ilike the fact that this guy went to my alma mater. However, I need a guy that from Day 1 can hit the ground running.’ So who does he offer the job to? The one who has the practical, real-world experience. I’m not trying to alarm people who have done well in their educational pursuits, but you cannot say that I’m gonna walk in day 1 expecting x amount of salary if I don’t have practical experience. That’s when knowing your worth comes into play.Zach: ‘KayKyle: What are you willing to concede in order to get a start in the real world? That 1 if you’re entry-level. 2, let’s say you are the 5-year person or 10-year person or 20-year person - You have some achievements that you’ve done in previous jobs, but if you don’t have that information, if you’re just going off of your emotions-- see, you have to take the emotion out of the equation. You have to also articulate what you believe you’re worth.Zach: Okay. So when we’re sitting down and we’re having conversations with the employer, and you’re answering questions and things of that nature, how do you articulate your value?Kyle: Okay that’s where you do your homework. And a lot of doing your homework is what type of questions are you asking in the interview yourself. A lot of people go into an interview believing that they’re sitting down and the employer is going to ask them all of the questions and they’re going to answer questions and that’s it. No, you have to be prepared to be able to ask certain types of questions to the employer like How long has this job been open? How long have you been looking for the right person? What expectations do you have of that person when they walk in the door? 90 days, 120 days, 180 days, a year, whatever. What are those time tables? What are those things that we can quantify that you’re going to expect me to come in with through the door. If you’re a sales person, they’re going to want to see X amount of revenue that you bring into the organization, right?Zach: RightKyle: if you are an engineer or technical professional, they want to see how many projects you work on and complete in X amount of time. If you are an operations professional, how many projects have you brought to the table and how many projects have you been able to find the right people to work on those projects and be able to complete in this particular time frame as well. So those are the types of things that you have to be able to flesh out in the interview process. If you’re not able to flesh values from the employer, how can you negotiate effectively? Because a lot of people believe ‘It should be on my resume, and you should be able to give me what I’m worth’. So what is that? How does that look? How, as an employer, would I be able to know that Mr. Nunn is worth 60 or 80,000 dollars? 80 or 100,000 dollars to my organization? Because what’s going to be my return on my investment in Mr. Nunn?Zach: For those who don’t know, Kyle Mosley is a black man. And Kyle, I’m curious, as a black professional, I’m curious, have you seen any differences when you look at how white and non-white candidates pursue job opportunities?’Kyle: First of all, audience, let me just say this - I’m a Morehouse man. So when I came out of college, I believed I could conquer the world. I’ll be honest with you though, back in 1989, that’s when I graduated, and I believed I could walk into any room, boardroom and get an offer. That’s how i felt. As a matter of fact, when I first got to Houston, I interviewed at 5 companies in one day and got 4 offers. I had confidence, right? So the confidence I had was I did not go into the interviews with fear. When an African-American engineer, not all- this is what I have noticed.Zach: Okay.Kyle: When an AA engineer goes into an interview, they usually are not as well prepared on the company, who’s the interviewer, who’s going to be a part of the interviewing process, understanding what makes the people tick. If you ever have dealt with a recruiter or have a relationship, a recruiter can possibly give you some inside information on the company, what’s happening with the position, how long these people have been looking, if it’s a high turnover type of situation, or if it’s going to be a tough interview, and how you need to present yourself. We do the whole gamut of setting the person up for as much success during the interview versus if you’re winging it by yourself. And you can always use me, I’m just putting it out there, as someone - you’ve probably heard my voice and said ‘alright I need some help, I’m going into this, I don’t have a recruiter’ - call me. I’m open to help people out. What I would suggest is not only building a network with recruiters or with other talent professionals, being able to study who you’re going to speak with and the market. Also go on LinkedIn. Man, LinkedIn is a fabulous tool. I’m just going to use fictional ABC company.Zach: Sure.Kyle: So, sometimes Human Resources is going to say ‘Ok Sally, you have an interview at 8am tomorrow, be here, be early so you can be prepared to fill out paperwork...’ And you hang up the phone. ‘Wow, I got an interview!’ and you’re excited. Zach, who will you meet? Who will be a part of this process?Zach: Yeah.Kyle: Now I’ve seen other engineers say ‘ok that’s great, but when I walk in the door, who do I need to be expecting my arrival? And how long will I be with this person? Who else is going to be a part of this process?’ They ask more questions.Zach: Right.Kyle: They want to be educated. They want to go to the person’s linkind profile, look at let’s say, where the person went to school, how long they’ve been at the company themselves, what type of hobbies they may have, sometimes people have their hobbies on there. Let’s say it’s photography or hunting or whatever it is.Zach: Right.Kyle: Those are things that you could bring up in the interview, okay? Try to find some common ground with the person outside of just being about the interview or things of that nature, right?Zach: Right. Kyle: So those are things that help you build a successful way to get in the door, interview successfully with that person, and ask the right questions- typically I don’t want people to speak about money on the first interview.Zach: Okay.Kyle: You typically do not want to be the one to come out with the money first because you don’t want to look like it’s only about money to you. Most of the time, they’re going to ask you. So if they ask you, yes address it. And address it confidently. Now, you can also say this- let’s say I’m Mr. Interviewer. ‘Well, Zach, how much money do you want for this particular job?”Zach: Right. [laughs]Kyle: ‘How much are you expecting from us here?’‘Well, Mr. Employer that’s a great question. Can I answer this at the end of the interview so I can be able to get an assessment for what you guys are looking for, to make sure that I’m able to answer that correctly and address it properly.’Zach: Right. So I hear what you’re saying, but at the end of the interview, what would you suggest saying?Kyle: Well, you can give them the number you feel that would make you happy. [laughs]Zach: [laughs]Kyle: but you say it in such a way - ‘well, based upon what you guys are looking for, Joe, you’ve been looking for 5 months, you’ve been trying to find the right person who can execute this type of project. I have been able to execute this type of project in several occasions, I explained that in the interview. You’ve been looking for someone to come in and work well with the team, with different teams... so based upon what you’re looking for and my background and feeling like I can make a contribution immediately, I want 100,000 dollars.Zach: Straight like that.Kyle: If you already know that this is what the salary range is bearing, right? Zach: Right. Kyle: You need to have a good feeling, and you can ask that question with HR on the phone , say ‘Hey you know I’m just kind of curious. For this type of role, thank you for this interview first, but what’s the salary range for this?’Zach: you know, I think- Of course we live in a capitalistic society, right? Like you have to have money to survive. So I’m really trying, and I appreciate you clarifying, asking directly about the money piece because I’ve also been in situations where people reach out to me and they’ll be really excited and you know, their salary range is like 15-20% under what I’m making right now. And everybody wants to always make more. You know like ‘how much do you want to make?’ ‘I want to make more than I’m making right now whatchyou mean?’ So I think it’s really important if there’s a way that you can kinda get in front of that and in a way, to your point though, that isn’t so money hungry or just makes it seem as though all you care about is money but at the same time, being transparent about where are we with this thing financially.Kyle: Can I just adress one thing, Zach?Zach: You sure can, yes please.Kyle: Okay, notice when the person asked the question, I didn’t just immediately answer the question, but I asked another question. So there are a couple of techniques you can use. Person asks a question? You can answer the question with a question. Answering a question with a question - Kids are great at that, you know? They do the same thing. My son is about to be 13 next week and now he’s into - he’s not just going to give me a straight answer. And What I learned early on in my career in recruiting is that the person who answers the question first usually loses. Okay, so what do I mean by that? I’m glad you asked, Zach.Zach: [ laughs]Kyle: So what I mean by it is the fact that if a person says ‘we’re prepared to offer you 80,000 dollars.’. Now you can answer it ‘great! I accept! I’m ready to go to work!’ Because you must know in the back of your mind thats where you are and what you’re willing to accept. But if you want to negotiate, you may say ‘ hmm.......’ Notice that long, uncomfortable pause.Zach: Yes, I did.Kyle: right, it’s an uncomfortable pause so sometimes the HR professional who may be extending the offer verbally or the hiring manager may extend it verbally, sometimes they just send an email these days which is a horrible, horrible way of presenting an offer to a prospective employee. Yes I said that, Mr. and Mrs. Employer. You guys need to stop that.Zach: [laughs] Amen.Kyle: So you’ve got to be willing to answer the question, follow up and say ‘look, this seems like a great offer, let me study it, let me be able to review it. I may have some questions, will I be able to call you back? What time is good for me to do so? Let’s make an appointment, can we talk at 3 oclock on Monday to be able to go over the offer in detail, so I can be able to make sure I’m on the same page with you.Zach: Okay.Kyle: So you’re going to have them doing what? In the next day or two or the next hours that are coming - ‘did I really extend it the best offer I could’. Now I always ask my employers whenever they extend an offer to any of my candidate, I’ve been taught to ask this from day 1 - is this the best offer you can extend?Zach: I like that.Kyle: Why? Because I’ve got to be honest guys, 80-90% of the time, that’s not the best offer they can extend. Now, is that the best offer they’re going to extend to you? Maybe. But the bottom line is there are other variables. So you want them to be able to explain why they were eager to prepare this offer for you. And listen, don’t get emotional. Don’t get mad and feel you’re being lowballed. Or you’re being underappreciated or feeling discriminated against. You can’t do that. You have to listen first. Listen to what they have to say, say ‘Okay, I’m taking all of this into consideration. Can I get back to you’ Now here’s the fear part. And this is where many of my minority friends come into the fear part. ‘They’re going to rescind the offer. Because I asked to be able to think about it’.Zach: Right.Kyle: No. It’s how you prepare to ask about. If you have an attitude? Yeah, most likely they’re going to rescind the offer. But if you’re trying to make a well educated decision and let them know ‘I’m trying to make the best decision for me and my family’ or ‘for me and my professional career’. Even if you are fearful they’re going to rescind the offer, say something like this- ‘well, I need to see the benefits, can I speak with the human resources professional and go over the benefits first?’Zach: Oh that’s awesome, yeah.Kyle: Then they’re thinking ‘well yeah, it’s just the benefits, yeah sure. Sure sally why don’t you do that, I’ll set you up with Joe Best and you guys can go over that’ you know? How well you frame it is going to make sure you have your house being supported - your career is your house - what type of foundation you lay, what type of framework you put into your home, will it support the weight of everything else that’s going on? And I’m only saying this because I want the audience to be more in a power type of position versus being passive when it comes to this. Once you start your career, guys, you have to be able to say ‘This is what my goals are going to be’.. And every year you have to redefine your goals, you have to please please redefine your goals. Make sure you check on your goals, make sure you’re on point. You also need to have an outside coach or someone to help monitor you with your accountability as well.Alright, what I would say is this, to any professional, it doesn’t matter how young or old you are- make sure you learn as much as you can to platform yourself to your new situation. Build your career, have a solid foundation so that when people, they look at your track record, they see a progression. That’s it right there, a progression. OKay? Because I had a client of mine come to us and say ‘look, I don’t want to see anyone who’s unemployed’. It’s like ‘ok, this is oil and gas country, there may have been some people out of work’. And the guy says ‘yeah I understand that, but for this role, because this person will most likely become a manager within the next year or two and I need to train this person because I’m going to become the VP of the company, I need to see somebody with a career track record that they progressed from one job to the next. So the person wasn’t just engineer day 1, then he went to another company to be the same type of engineer. You know, I want to see the person go to the next step, supervisor, next step department manager, next step this that and the other, right? If the person’s going to be Analyst 1, don’t go to another job where you’re just going to be Analyst 1. If you can bear not to do so, just for the same type of functions, but more money.Zach: Kyle this is great. And I actually think that’s a good place to end it. You know I really appreciate your time, Thank you. Before we let you go - do you have any shoutouts?Kyle: First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has been in my career my 25+ years. Thank you very much for helping me to be highly successful. My wife, of course, and my family, and thank you for this opportunity as well. But most of all, audience, I would like to thank you for listening into what Zach is presenting because this is some good information. And you may say ‘Hey, Mr. Mosely, I think you made some nice points but I don’t quite agree with you’. That’s okay! It's a discussion for you to think about what you want to do with your career and how you’d like to progress with your career. So you can always follow me on twitter @ExecRecruitPro, I’m on twitter there. And if you want to connect with me, my firm that I represent is called Walker Elliott. So you can always email me at kmosley@walker-elliott.com.Zach: And there it is, Kyle Mosely thank you so much again.Kyle: Hey thank you Zach, anytime, let me know and remember - don’t be as good as, be better than.Zach: Amen. Peace, Man.Kyle: Take care, bye.Latricia: And we’re back! Zach that was a great interview. Kyle has a lot of knowledge and I just love his energy.Zach: Yeah for sure. Typically I feel like I’m the bombastic one but he was keeping up with me pretty good. What did you think about his feedback on clearly articulating the number you want and the reason why?Latricia: Yeah, I really enjoyed his practical perspective on things. For example, response methods. So not just blurting out concerns like ‘that’s not enough money!’, but pausing before you speak, and making it a little awkward. That was really funny, but it makes sense because it’s that psychological approach. There were some mind games there and I just really enjoyed that.Zach: Absolutely. I enjoyed it as well. I also appreciated that he said how this is his perspective and not Gospel. We definitely enjoyed having him on the show, and we definitely want to have him back.Latricia: Yeah he was great. We need to make sure we drop his contact information so everyone can reach out to him if they have any additional questions or concerns.Zach: For sure! Ok - Well look, let’s get into our next segment - favorite things, where we talk about our favorite things these days. Latricia I’ll let you start.Latricia: Yeah, so my favorite thing right now has to be biking. So, it’s very important that you stay fit. I recently participated in BikeMS in Dallas, it was a 160 mile bike route. Of course I did not do the 160 because I am a beginner. So I did the beginner route, but I love biking, it’s a great way to exercise without feeling like it’s punishment, and I’m hoping that next year I can actually complete the entire course.Zach: Man that’s really cool. And we definitely, definitely wanna stay fit, and I’m really excited actually because I know down the road we want to actually have a whole show about personal wellness. Right? And that’s a big part of it. Physical wellness is a huge part of it. Well, cool. My Favorite thing right now has to be, believe it or not, this Snoop Dogg Gospel album.Listen, y’all--Latricia: Ohh, that album is fire!Zach: It is Fire, it is really really good. I mean, welcome to 2018. Like, I can say that Snoop Dogg, at this point -- and again I didn’t want to be a prisoner of the moment, so I said welcome to 2018--where Snoop Dogg has dropped one of the coldest gospel albums I have ever heard. And it’s been some months now and this album is still heavy in my rotation, especially when folks trying me at work. To be honest.Latricia: [laughs] I actually listen to that song when I’m at work, too. Well, thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate Podcast. Make sure to follow us on instagram at @livingcorporate, twitter at @LivingCorp_Pod and subscribe to our newsletter through www.living-corporate.com. If you have a question you’d like us to answer and read on the show - Like The Read , make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. Aaaaaand that does it for us on this show. My name is Latricia.Zach: and I’m Zach.Latricia, Zach: peace!Mrs. Jackson: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post Production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on twitter, facebook, instagram and living dash corporate dot com. Thanks for listening! Stay tuned.

Chunk rolls/ The power of the eye rolls/ Chuck W. Norris/ Tommy’s snake/ Porches and snakes/ Kyle/ You ever see a mummy in real life/ Starr and Sweet Tiff/ Why do we assume that soap is the cleanest thing/ Body Wash/ Offensive or not/ Apologize to all of the organizations/ Fury-ass/ A sarcasm vigilante/ “Shut up, Candyland”/ Tommy’s Anti-Trolling Movement/ LL Cool T/ An Axl Rose alarm clock/ “You’d just be a happy dream.”/ Tommy invites Randy to play kickball/ Slide tackles straight to hell/ Tommy’s kickball set-up/ The Summer of Kickball/ The Babe Ruth of Kick/ Getting critiqued about a previous date/ Randall Do-Wrong/ Tommy’s turning black and white/ Nary Cared/ “I’m very thinking a lot lately”/ Pretty Flustered/ Choose your joke/ The confidence of a fat man on a lawnmower/ Dress like a farmer/ Randy dresses like a 4 year old/ Fidget Spinner Hypnosis/ Getting tattoos and ride motorcycles/ Tommy’s au naturale/ Stupid tattoos/ What happened with Plan B?/ One Star/ Podcast War/ Hankering/ An Olive Branch/ Grunt/ Howard the Duck/ The Band, Bush/ Gavin Rossdale/ a new online dating app/ Creep/ Foolish names/ Missed Connections/ Butter Shucks/ Lifetime pee pants/ “You said that with some fierce” Visit the Patreon page at Patreon.com/MiserableRetailSlave and get access to exclusive content! Call The Miserable Hotline!!! (810) 328-3826 "LIKE" us on the Facebook, would ya? Even better, come join our closed Facebook crew and enjoy the insanity. Just search “Miserable Retail Slave” on the Facebook! Leave us a 5-star, positive iTunes review...that would be so kind of you! Follow us on Instagram: @miserableretailslavepodcast Follow Randy on Twitter: @mretailslave Intro: “Hard Times” by Dan “D-Boy” Amboy Check out his music: https://soundcloud.com/dan-amboy You should most definitely subscribe to the show if you dig what you hear: If you like that iTunes, point your Internet right here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/miserable-retail-slave/id527775275?mt=2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/miserable-retail-slave If you enjoy grabbing your pods using something else: http://miserableretailslave.libsyn.com/rss (Episode 168)

Kyle Simpson: @getify | Blog | GitHub | getify@gmail.com Show Notes: 04:19 - Styles for Learning as a Newcomer 08:41 - The Structure of the Journey “If you're waiting until you're already an expert on a thing to share it with somebody else, you've waited far too long because we missed out on the most important part which was the journey.” 12:52 - Understanding a Problem vs Solving One "I want to inspire people to be uncommonly curious." 29:02 - How do you know when to stop? 35:02 - Knowing Math and Learning Programming 43:40 - The Importance of Mentorship Resources: LABjs The JavaScript Austin Meetup Pedagogy Saron Yitbarek (CodeNewbie): I don't belong in tech: Trying to find my place in the place I love, and constantly failing Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches (Star-Bellies Reference) Big O Notation You Don't Know JS: A Book Series Functional Light JavaScript Kyle's Frontend Masters Training Videos Transcript: CHARLES: Hey, everybody and welcome to the Frontside Podcast episode 50. I'm your host, Charles Lowell. With me, also from the Frontside, is Stephanie Riera. And with us today is a very special guest, Kyle Simpson, a fellow Austinite. We're going to talk about education and teaching JavaScript. You hear this name everywhere you go. I remember when I first moved to Austin, back in 2009, I moved back to Austin, I went to my very first JavaScript Meetup and there was this guy sitting there doing some live coding on this crazy thing called LABjs which was just like mind-blowing stuff that was going on that was doing crazy on-the-fly modules floating. And this was like back in 2008/2009, so awhile back. And that was my first experience. And then just moving inside tech circles, he just like popped again and again and that's just like the story. It seems like Kyle is like ubiquitous. I was at Clojure Conf last weekend and one of the speakers actually gave a shout-out to Kyle Simpson. So, I don't know Kyle if you do much Clojure, but you definitely have an impact, an outsized impact in the JavaScript community and outside the JavaScript community at large, all throughout tech. It's really a pleasure to get to have you on the show. So, welcome Kyle. KYLE: Thank you so much. It's a huge honor to be here. I'm glad to be doing this in our home city of Austin. It's fun to actually get a chance to pull again with the Austin community because a lot of my work takes me on the road. I sometimes joke that I know more about JavaScript communities in other cities than in my own since when I'm home, I'm usually with the family. And when I go to meetups, it's usually in other cities. But it's fun to be here. It's interesting you bring up that JavaScript Meetup, the original Austin JavaScript Meetup. It started in January of 2009. Actually Joe McCann, most people will know that name. He's kind of a rockstar in the Node community and one of the founders of NodeSource. I think he's up in New York City now. But he started the Austin JavaScript Meetup in January. February, I started kind of came on and we ended up kind of tag teaming running that meetup for the next couple of years. In the early days of that, you're talking about LABjs, I remember that was summer of 2009. The early days of starting up a meetup when you have 5 or 6 attendees on a really good night, mostly consists of about a week before the meetup, "Oh, we don't have a speaker. One of the two of us has to figure out something to speak about." So, I would often kind of take on that task and I would say, "Okay, what's something I'm interested in," or, "What's a library I could write that I could talk about something when I was coding?" CHARLES: So that actually born out of the need to actually present something at the Austin JavaScript Meetup? KYLE: Yes, actually LABjs, it was something at work at that time that I was trying to solve but I wasn't really making a library out of it. It was just some code that I was toodling around with. I was like, "Wow, crap! It's 3 days before the meetup. I better come up with something to talk about." So I wrote the very first version of LABjs to present at that meetup and I got a bunch of good feedback from people that were looking at it and saying, "Oh, that's cool." So I kind of ran with it. That's literally my first kind of major open source project. Most people probably originally heard of me if they've been around the tech world for a while, they originally heard of me because of that one. CHARLES: Wow! I had no idea I was there. KYLE: You were there for the origination. I was the unveiling to the world of LABjs. CHARLES: It's like the Woodstock of JavaScript. KYLE: Those were some early days of meetup stuff. You're like pick up a pizza and a couple of beers from the store on the way to the meetup and there wasn't a lot of organization but we had a lot of fun. Now, the Austin JavaScript Meetup 6 or 7 years later is, it rocks! There's 50 or 60 people every single month that attend. There's been several change-overs of leadership over that couple of years but it's still fun to think about kind of helping Joe get that off the ground way back in 2009. CHARLES: Yeah, that was fantastic. You've been in it a long time and that actually kind of brings me to one of the things that I'm curious about is you've been doing this for a long time. You've been writing JavaScript for a long time and yet you're very much connected to the Day 1 learners and the people who were coming in just kind of from at the very bottom floor. And one of the things that I find in my interactions with the people who are starting out or people who are beginning is that it can be very difficult to know what's appropriate to teach a style that's effective or teaching them because you don't have that empathy of you're so far removed from the experience, that struggle and that challenge of really clawing your way into programming. And yet that doesn't seem to be an issue for you or maybe it is. I'm just curious, one, do you perceive that as something that you have to deal with and how do you do it? KYLE: I would say that part of the way that I'm able to keep a pulse or a finger on what it's like to first start learning something comes from my own learning style which is that I, to learn a thing, I can't follow tutorials. As a matter of fact, every time somebody comes up with a new major awesome tool or framework and they put out this great tutorial and everybody raves about it, I secretly have that huge flare up of impostor syndrome because I know that I will feel really dumb if I try to go through a tutorial and learn it in that fashion. That's just not how I learn stuff. The way I learn stuff is very, very slow and methodical. It generally is taking a thing apart and trying to figure out what each of the different pieces is doing, understanding at that deeper level, and then reassembling the pieces. The reason I mentioned that is because I like to describe my process of teaching and I really think this generalizes to people beyond me that it's my process. I think that my process for teaching is just to have a narrative journey and that it's all about a process. It's not about a single event because I don't think that learning is transactional or I don't think it should be. I think learning should be a process. And so, for me, that process starts with an initial thing that I'm looking at. I get an idea of what it's about, the problem domain that it's in. I probably develop an instant sense of 'ooh, I don't really like that' or 'ooh, that's kind of interesting'. But if I'm going to learn a thing, it's not going to come through a tutorial. It's not going to come through reading a Read Me and being like, "Okay, I'm good to go," and I can sort of copy and pasting. For me, it's going to take, in some cases, reinventing parts of it as I put those pieces back together so I can really understand the choices that were made. I do a lot of reading of somebody else's source code. As an example of this ongoing journey that I'm learning, I was recently at a conference and I heard a discussion of Redux. And of course, Redux is something that tens of millions of people, I mean everybody seems to be an expert on this stuff and I don't know Redux. I don't know React. I don't spend a lot of time at that layer of the stack. But I was listening to a talk and I was thinking, "Well, that sounds interestingly similar to the stuff that I was playing around with back in 2010." It's kind of event oriented and single source of truth for the model and stuff like that. "That's cool. I should go and learn that more." So, that's on my pretty near future to-do list to kind of learn stuff. And there's a really good chance that that process, that journey that I go on to learn about Redux is going to spin off at least some sort of code that I play around with, whether that's using Redux or writing something kind of like Redux to show off how I've been thinking about the idea. And then I'll probably write about it. I know for sure that I'm going to be mentioning it in one of the chapters of my current book on functional programming. So, I'll be talking about it, at least a little blurb about how it fits into the overall scheme of things. And then probably eventually once my journey has gone a little bit further, eventually there'll be some kind of class that I spin up in a module or in one of my classes that I talk about Redux and where that comes from. And that's not because I've been on the high training. As a matter of fact, it's the opposite. I'm the latest adaptor for most of these things but that is a very long slow methodical process for me to learn something and then turn around and try to teach it to other people. CHARLES: Is the idea then that you want to kind of share that journey that you've taken or try to encourage the next learner to take a similar or different journey? How do you structure that learning once you do decide to package it up? KYLE: The structure of the journey -- I think that's an interesting way of articulating the question. What is the structure of the journey? And I would say that the structure of the journey generally, from my perspective, starts from understanding a concept, the why behind the concept, what is the problem I need to solve, and what is motivating solving the problem. And then it moves into the how are we going to do it, what are the possible ways to do that, and that really is the part of that process that you spend most of your time digging into and understanding the deeper level of the thing. So, not just using the library but understanding really how it does it and the choices that it made. And then it moves to the what. And that is inverted from the way most people's learning seems to go about because people learn most typically by, "I find the cool thing because it was in some newsletter that I read about. It seems like it would help on my job project, so I dropped the thing in, put in a couple of the snippets from the Read Me and it's working great, and maybe someday later, I'm going to go back and dig into it a little bit." I'm completely reversed. So, that's my structure for learning and I recommend that people, at least from time to time, take a similar path. It doesn't have to be exactly that way, but take a similar path to breaking down the learning. I'm sure as we go along in this discussion, I'll be able to elaborate on that more. I don't want to just churn on and on forever. But I really do think it's important for people to dig in deeper. So my process is that and the way that I teach is to take people on that journey with me. The way that I teach is to say, "This is the journey that I'm going through. This is the stuff that I understand." For the listeners that aren't teachers, there's some interesting -- I don't want to get too much into the weeds about teaching -- but there's something interesting about teaching. There's this fancy word called Pedagogy which is not the thing that you're teaching but the strategy that you want to use to teach it, the narrative that you want to take a person through. And I spend an awful lot, probably more of my time thinking about that than about the topic itself. So, my practice is to use a lot of silly metaphors. Like I'm teaching promises and I talk about future cheeseburgers and stuff for those that have read or heard from me before, they'll know the future cheeseburger. I use silly stuff like that because this stuff can be really dry and difficulty and I want it to stick in your head. I want the how to stick in your head. So, I invite other people. That doesn't mean that you have to take the entire journey that I did to learn a thing, but I really want to inspire people to learn at that level to be uncommonly curious. And I hope that when they see that I've done it and that I'm transparent about how my process works, I hope it inspires other people. CHARLES: Yeah, and I think wrapped-up in that is tied back to my usual question is because you yourself are in fact you're going through this process, it's very easy then to empathize people who are going through the same process. I really like that. KYLE: And I think everybody should look at the process of getting up to speed on the thing as an opportunity to go on that journey and to document and share that journey with others. You don't have to have the word 'teacher' in your job title to be a teacher. I think all engineers should be seeking to go outside of themselves and to explain things, if for no other reason than the purely selfish reason which is you learn it better by re-explaining it to somebody else, but all boats will rise with the tide. And so, I have taken, for years now, the perspective every time I learn a thing, I'm going to turn around and share it with somebody else. It's exactly the same thing that's interesting and almost ironic that we started our discussion today about that meetup and about LABjs. I was learning a thing and figuring out a thing and I turned around and shared it with other people and it turned out to make an impact. But the impact isn't the important part. The important part was the journey, it's not the end goals. I was always tell people, "If you're waiting until you're already an expert on a thing to share it with somebody else, you've waited far too long because we missed out on the most important part which was the journey." STEPHANIE: Kyle, you touched on something that I wanted to ask you about. You talked about the first phase being understanding a problem, and then the second one being how do we fix this. And last week, I believe, CodeNewbie has her own podcast. And she released a post on Medium and it's called 'I Don't Belong in Tech'. And she talks about how her instinct is to understand the problem versus solving it. It seemed like she feels she is an outcast in the tech community because most people are really excited about solving problems and she doesn't feel like she is solution-oriented. And I kind of wanted to ask you, is that the case? Do you think the people that excel in programming are people that are just naturally excited about solving problems? And if that's not the case, then what do you recommend for people that may not think in that fashion, they don't intuitively feel like solving problems and they feel like they approach it in a different manner? It seems like people have different learning styles. KYLE: I agree completely that people have different learning styles. And that question you just asked is so rich with so many things to mind. So, I'm excited to dig into that a little bit. I 100% agree that people have different learning styles and I think that it is why it is important for there to be people in the community who are spending their time and attention thinking about teaching and about improving educational processes. I do not think that curriculum teaches itself. And I'm somewhat suspect of the movement that we have as an industry towards almost praising or taking it as a badge of honor the label of self-taught. It's almost become its own cult that you're a self-taught person versus somebody who came through it from a more traditional path where a person was carefully thinking about how to present to you and how to teach you whether that was at a university or a tech school or mentorship or any of the others. People that are self-taught often wear that as a badge of honor. It's almost a rite of passage that you got to a level of understanding and experience and expertise because you boot strapped yourself up as opposed to the more top-down approach. And I am suspect of whether or not that's healthy for us to suggest to people that there are these two factions. It's kind of like the old Dr. Seuss book of the star bellies and the non-star bellies. I have the star belly because I got my Computer Science degree. And if you know that book and if you don't know the book, you should go look it up. But what happens in the book is at some point, there's a flip and now the people with stars are the excluded ones and the people without aren't. So I don't think it's healthy for us to promote the idea that we need two entirely different approaches that there's a person who can only be a self-taught and that's a thing, and then there's a person who gets more formal education. I really think it's important for people to spend time thinking about how stuff should be presented and not just throwing information out there for people to learn themselves. This is kind of a crazy metaphor. But if you had a one or two year old kid and you wanted them to learn to swim, the developer mindset often says, "Well, just throw them in the deep end and they'll figure it out." But that isn't how we actually would teach them to swim. We would be very, very patient, very, very cautious with them. We'll start with the shallow end, there being an adult there and they would guide them through that. And I think there's virtue in having some of your learning even if you're one of those listening that does value the whole self-taught thing or that has worked for you in the past. I think there's also value in people going through a more formalized process. Like I said, there's lots of different channels for that modality. But I think the formalized modality has value to it. And of course, that's what I spend my time thinking about. I put out a lot of information - my books and my training videos. There's a lot of that material available for people to self-teach but I really hope that what that does is not encourage people to stay disconnected but rather, to attract people to create relationships around learning because I think relationship-based learning is the most effective modality for leaning. And we've proven that for thousands of years in lots of other parts of society, but we haven't really taken that to heart in the developer world, and I think we need to more. You're right, going back to the original question that there are lots of different ways that people learn. I know CodeNewbie. What's interesting about that premise, I share a similar perspective on those that want to learn to solve a problem versus those that want to learn to figure out how to solve problems. I have a statement that I make which I will preface with I understand that sometimes it can be a little bit off but I hope that listeners will take this from the spirit that I'm trying to give it in. I think that one of the things we can do is begin to think a little bit more about what we're doing even though all of the other structure and process scaffolding around us incentivizes and encourages the opposite. I think what we see is that the developer-oriented mindset typically is more interested in first solving a problem and maybe later understanding it. Whereas I think the engineering mindset -- for lack of a better label, I'll call it the engineering mindset. That's my bias because I came up through a more traditional engineering CS degree. But I think the engineering mindset, the one that most people would say is heavily focused on problem solving and that kind of thing. I think the engineering mindset seeks first to understand the problem and maybe later solve it. If you have developer mindset that wants to solve a problem without really fully understanding it, I think one of the outcroppings of that is the churn that we see in the development community. We see people constantly every two or three years trying to go recreate a whole new stack of things because we're saying, "We need to do this thing differently." And I have seen that cycle four or five times in my career. And so, I can say with pretty strong certainty right now that somewhere in the world, there is a guy or a girl that is a 16 year old that is working on what is going to eventually replace React. I don't know what it is, I don't know who the person is, but I'm pretty sure that we're at some point going to say, "Wow!" And when that shift happens, we're going to come back and think to ourselves, "How could we have ever thought that React was the most amazing thing in the world," and we very quickly forget. So, one of the outcroppings is that continuing cycle because people are seeking to fix problems as quickly as possible and not everybody takes the time to really think about it. The authors of those tools, they think really deeply about these problems. They think so deeply about them. I am amazed the kinds of thought that goes into creating one of those frameworks or libraries. And I have a lot of deep respect to the Ember community, the React community, the Angular community. Those people spend a lot of time thinking about those problems. But the people that use them, use them as tools to get their job done honestly and earnestly so. But they very rightly focus on what can I get done with React rather than 'can I understand what React is really trying to do and use it to its best ability'. And we incentivize that. We incentivize that by saying that the people that advance at work, the people that become the senior developers at work are more likely the people that shipped more code. They're more likely the people that closed more bugs. And one path to getting there is you're just a really quick coder or you're one of those mythical unicorn 10x developers. But a lot of people aren't. I'm certainly not. I am not a fast developer. I'm one of the slower developers. I am very, very careful about what I write. So, I can't survive in that environment where I have to advance because I can write code quickly. Rather for me to survive in those environments, I advance or up my stature, if you will, because I understand the thing deeper than anybody else. And I think there's places in the workplace for both, so I'm not disparaging those that write a lot of code quickly. But one of the outcroppings of writing code quickly if jumping as quickly as you can to solving a problem, is that you often times find a local maximum. A mathematic theory about -- just visualize a curve kind of like the landscape of hills. If you're climbing a hill as quickly as possible and you get to the very top of the hill, it might not have been the tallest hill that you could have climbed. But you got to the top of the hill really quickly and you got the next promotion, you went on to the next thing. So, I think those value. Sometimes in your career and some people in the community who want to take a step back and understand a thing deeper, dig into a thing deeper, and I encourage people to have that as part of their toolset, that they would be that uncommon level of curiosity. Take a moment and by a moment I mean a couple of months, maybe a cycle at most of six months, take a step back from the just everyday churn of shipping a feature and fixing a bug and making the button blue, take a step back and say, "What are some of the things that I have been touching or I have been hearing people talk about," and dig into that thing and learn it. And learn it really deeply and really understand it, and maybe reinvent it if you need to. But really deeply get it. And then kind of resurface and look around and say, "All right, let me find the next thing." And so, I think those cycles are healthy for people. And I think the engineering mindset should be something that each of us strives to adopt at least some in the workplace as opposed to being almost drunk on the idea that the best developers among us are the ones that ship code the quickest. CHARLES: I think also too there is like if you do take the time and you then make that investment upfront, it engenders a lasting speed. In the same way that if you look at a child taking its first steps which is kind of the initial solution of a problem, it takes intense concentration. And it takes all the muscles or trembling and stuff just to coordinate the balance to take those first steps. But then once the child kind of understands the process fully -- like none of us, at this point in our lives, think about walking. It's just something that we do naturally. But because the human brain is wired at that point to take whether it's walking or any other kind of motor skills to really understand the motion and rewire the brain optimized for that motion so that it becomes second nature, so that you benefit from that again and again and again. And I feel having spent a long time in the industry seeing the speedups that can actually be gained by doing it slow. In other words, you expand that understanding to fill the room and then the door is only a few millimeters away, if that makes any sense. KYLE: I think it does. And I think for those that are listening just to address what questions may be popping up in people's heads because as a teacher, you learn to anticipate questions ahead of time. So I can see, even from our discussion so far, that somebody may be asking, "Okay, you're talking about some really nice theory here, but what about the practicality of it? What are the benefits of the thing? I don't have time to go learn React but I can get my job done by applying React to my business process." So, I think there are some practical things that we can point to that that come from being that uncommon level of curious, that deeper and slower and more methodical learning. One of those, I'd like to say -- and people always kind of smirk at me when I say this -- I call them getify's laws. They're just statements that I make. They're statements of my opinion and really the only thing that I'm an expert on is my own opinions and I'm never at a lack for those. It's just an opinion but I believe that you can't hope to solve a problem if you don't first understand it. Or to put another way the getify's law - if you don't understand why a piece of code works, you have no hope of understanding why it broke and how to fix it. So we do a lot of code that works and we don't know why. I would say probably the majority of code that gets shipped were just sort of only kind of tenuously understand it. And sometimes it's really tenuous. Sometimes it's house of cards development where you build a thing and you're not really quite sure why it works but you put a comment there that says 'don't touch this' and 'don't break it' or whatever. And then we back away and hold our breath and hope that it stays in place. That is a way to ship code quickly. The agile mindset has permeated so deep down that on every line of code we're thinking [inaudible], we're thinking, "Just get the thing working and get the test passing and then we'll worry about whether it's the appropriate way to solve the problem. We'll worry about that later." Many times we don't get a chance to worry about it later until there's a fire, until something's broken. And that fire could be that bug or that brokenness could be it's not doing what it's supposed to do or more often, that fire is it's doing it but it's impossibly slow, it's impractically slow. And now, we have to go back and think, "We thought we only had five pieces of data to ever work with, but now we have 50,000 and the algorithm completely falls apart. We can't do an [inaudible] scan anymore," or whatever. So that very narrow myopic short term mentality can be effective for people to get stuff shipped and to advance in their jobs, but it falls apart when things start breaking. If you're talking about a car and you said, "I don't need to know how a car works, so I can just drive a car." And that's entirely true. But if we took that to its logical extreme, you could say, "I don't even need to know that my vehicle runs of gasoline or electricity," or whatever. "I don't even need to know anything about the liquids that go in that make my car work. I just sit down behind the driver wheel and drive and it works." And that will work until your gas tank runs empty. And then at that point, you have no idea how to fix your problem. So you're going to have do some reading and worse, you're going to be at the mercy of somebody else. Having an instinct, having a clue about something about what's going on into the hood is pretty important when we go off the happy path and start trying to fix problems, whether that is fixing bugs or improving performance. Those are, I think, some very important practical takeaways that come from some people some of the time being the uncommonly deep learner. Just for fun, for my son in his school, I've been working on building a game that he's doing as part of his school through this Mathematics competition, I've been building a computerized version of this game. And those that have been following my Twitter have seen some interesting tweets about that. But I've been building an AI, a strategy turn based AI so that you can play against the computer for this thing. Tackling that requires you to kind of really understand or at least be able to fiddle your way through some deeper "CSC" kind of topics. But I got it working and it was too slow. You have to wait for the computer for 20 or 30 seconds for it to figure out its next move and that's slow. So then I started thinking about how I'm going to optimize this. Do I need an object pulled to pull stuff in and be able to reuse arrays or something? I was at a loss as to how to do that efficiently. I was completely lost. And so, I had to learn that thing. I had to think very carefully methodically. If I had let some sort of artificial deadline and say, "No, you just got to ship the game," it would have worked but it would have been impractical. And so, taking that time to think about it -- actually, I finally did. It took me days but I finally arrived at a solution for managing, sharing references that actually works from a performance perspective. It is practical now. I think there are practical takeaways. It's not just all the theory behind being a deeper learner. CHARLES: I've been thinking like where do you know where the stopping point is? Because the world is just packed with knowledge. When I was starting out as a programmer, there were people who just code assembly for fun and assemble their own microprocessors and stuff because that's what they did when they were coming up. But all of that stuff exists like we're standing on it. We've kind of lived on the level of the city street but beneath that is the subway and beneath that is the power grid and the gas pipes and the hog water pipes and all that stuff. Who knows how much more layers of urban development lie beneath some of these cities that are certainly way more rich than Austin. None of that stuff is present here. KYLE: I was going to say I didn't know there was a subway. I wish there was. CHARLES: Once I realized what the analogy was, I was standing in the Austin streets, I kind of transitioned to New York without telling anybody. My point is that in the computer world -- let's just keep it there -- let's say you're working with JavaScript and you're running on top of the browser. Most of modern browsers are written in C that are also using C libraries that are written on native platform tool kits whether it's OSX or Linux or Windows which then are written on top of these operating systems which then are written on top of these compiled assembly language that run on these microprocessors. It's a deep, deep ocean, so to speak. And we spend most of our time skimming around on the surface in our boats. And so, I guess the question is how do you know when to stop and how do you know when enough is enough? Ultimately, there is a tension between a deadline and the amount of time that you're going to invest in learning. And I think that there are definitely -- I feel very strongly that it's skewed way towards the deadline and that we need to kind of pull that tug of war back in the other direction. So the question is then how far is far enough? Or is it just really until you feel comfortable? KYLE: I see the world of what we do in computers and in software development as layers of a cake if you want to mix in a whole bunch of different metaphors here. There's lots of layers of abstraction that we create to utilize technology more effectively in our lives. And in a sense, the technological revolution from the 1940's onward has really been a story of adding layer upon layer upon layer upon layer just like a big tall cake of different abstraction because lots of different people need to eat at different layers. They need to get their jobs done, if you will, at different layers. There are people who need to get their job done the assembly language, the deep guts of your computer talking to the 1's and 0's kind of thing. And then there are people that need to work in the C libraries. And then there are people that need to work in the operating system tool kits. And then there are people that need to work in the browser. And then there are people that need to work in JavaScript. And then there are people that need to work on frameworks. And then there are people that need to work on transpilers that build the frameworks that then get compiled down. So we just keep adding more and more layers because there's more and more people that were opening up the world to, to participate. And not everybody is going to play on the same level. If your choice is to be a JavaScript developer, if your choice is to be a React developer, if your choice is to be somebody who builds those almost meta tools like the transpilers that go from one language to another, if you're a ClojureScript developer or whatever, my recommendation is that whatever layer of cake you eat out, whatever layer you've chosen to make your primary focus, I think you should be striving to become an absolute expert at that layer. And that is not a transactional thing when you just go watch the right video or read the right book and then you check it off. That will be, in most respects, a lifelong process. But I think you should strive to be as much of an expert at that layer as you can. But to become an expert at that layer, one of the most important things is to begin to have an understanding, a level of competency at the layer below it. So if you're a React developer, having a layer of JavaScript below it means that you want to have some pretty good core competency in the JavaScript language. In a sense, that's what my job is dedicated to doing is assisting people at playing at these higher levels at the frameworks and tools levels by understanding JavaScript more deeply. But if you're a core JavaScript developer and that's all you do, you should have some competency at the layer below that which we might say would be the browser API level or maybe the C level and understanding something about how memory is going to get managed to let you have some intuition about that. And so, the further you go down in the stack, you start to see that diminish but it never gets to zero. I don't think there should be any engineer out there that aspires to have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of what a processor is or what 1's and 0's are or any of that. But that might not be your everyday task. If that's 4 layers removed and you have a lot less understanding of that layer, to be effective in your job, you should be an expert at your layer and be seeking to have a core competency level of understanding at the layer below that. I think that's how you start to answer, Charles, your question of how do you figure out where to stop is at this point in your career -- because many people will dance around and eat at different layers of the cake as they go. But whatever point you are at in your career now, be looking to understand how to eat all that layer of cake and then understand the one below it. I would say that would be the most effective strategy that I've come up with. CHARLES: I like that. I like that a lot. STEPHANIE: I want to become an expert in JavaScript. But sometimes I have doubts in my ability to "become a programmer" or think like a programmer. I feel like the people that excel in programming, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you've noticed this as well or haven't. But it seems like the people that excel at programming are the people that are naturally good at math. It's like they think in terms of math. I don't know if they're seeing algorithms in their brain or what it is. And I don't know if other people relate to this as well. But I'm a natural problem solver. I like problem solving but I don't think in terms of math. And I've taken a lot of math courses for my undergrad degree. I took Calculus for Biosciences like two and a half times, and so I beat my brain enough to understand those concepts. But I don't know if you have also seen that, if that is the case. And if it is the case, is there any advice for the hopeless programmers like myself that are not naturally good at math. But I am interested and I do want to be good at this. KYLE: There's hope, Stephanie. There's definitely hope. STEPHANIE: [Laughs] KYLE: Again, lots to unpack here and I thank you for asking that question because I actually do have a particular sensitivity to the mindset that seems to come around between people - again, the haves and have-nots. There are people that naturally gravitate to or understand math and there are people for whom math has always been an opaque topic that they keep running into over and over and they haven't been able to really fully engross themselves in or wrap themselves in. They haven't been able to get it, if you will. And as an educator, I don't teach math for a living. But as an educator, it deeply troubles me. As a parent, my son, Ethan, is about to turn six. He's in Kindergarten for the first time, so it is right on the front of my radar screen to think about how we teach these things. And I want for everybody to be able to grasp important concepts like obviously reading is important, but Math is one of those core concepts that I think is important for people to not be intimidated by. And I think we do ourselves a really big disservice and have for many, many years by approaching the teaching of that topic as there's one right way to know how to do math. In a sense, I think, we're seeing a shift to know there's lots of ways to learn and we should embrace that. Just like we said there's lots of different ways that people learn. There's lots of different ways to approach. There's lots of different pedagogy, if you will, around approaching math and I embrace that idea that we should be doing that. I think we should be starting that with our Kindergarteners and working all the way up. And I'm glad that there are educators that are thinking about that because my generation was taught that either you get it this way or you're just "not a math person". And I sat and sat alongside in my Science and English classes all the way through schooling even at University, I sat along people that were math people and on the other side of me were people that were "not math people". It's sad and it sucks that we would divide people that way or that people would choose to divide themselves that way because they struggle with math. My sphere of influence right now is my two kids - my son, Ethan, and my daughter, Emily. I really want for both of them, whether they become math nerds or nor, whether they have a minor in math like I do or it's just a thing that they learn, I want them to not be intimated by that. I want them to understand it. And I hope that I will be able to, in the sense, partner with the educational system. Our kids are in Austin IST Public Schools and they will be for their whole lives, as our plan, but I hope to, in a sense, be augmenting that by saying, "I understand that this is struggling for you, but let me help to at least not be intimidating, at least be a thing that you can grab on to and understand even if it's not interesting to you, it won't be scary to you," because I have family members and I see it personally that have self-labeled and self-[inaudible] themselves as "not math people" and they struggle their entire lives as a result. And I don't want that to happen. So, I'm glad I got at least a little chance to have some advocacy there to say I hope that people aren't being that way and aren't promoting patterns that treat people as either you know math or you don't. I was one of those people that gravitated towards math. But I can tell you for a fact that I do not use most of my math background on a regular basis as a programmer, and even if I try. As you're asking the question, I was doing some self-assessment here. What are the things that I know from math? Like I understand for example that a function is putting in an X value and getting out a Y value and when we plot that, we see a parabola on the graph. I get that concept. So, there's a tie in between the visual and the actual written out math for me. And I understand in calculus when we have the integral. I understand that's the area underneath the curve. So, I get those concepts. But does any of that stuff actually play into my day-to-day work? Not really. Maybe a little bit about functions since I'm starting to be a bit more attuned to the functional programming these days, but it really doesn't play into my job. But there is a part of math that really does play in almost daily, and that's what we call discrete math. That's more of the computer science-y take on math. And discrete math is things like understanding number systems, things like understanding the difference between representing something as a binary or representing it in base 10 or hexadecimal. There are certain concepts that we talk about like Big O Notation - that's one of those computer science-y concepts. When I was writing this game AI, I had an intuition about a loop inside of a loop is going to perform worse than just a single level of loop. But I didn't spend any time whatsoever actually calculating the Big O complexity of my algorithm. I just had some intuition about it. And the reason I have this intuition about it is because I took a discrete math class. So, if I could say anything to the people listening, for those that aren't math people or for some reason or another didn't really gravitate towards it, to be better at programming, I would encourage you to at least think about discrete math as an area to study to get some better understanding around, because I do think those things help. But I don't think that most of math, the stuff that most people struggle with, like algebra and matrices -- I was terrible at matrices. I hated them for some reason. I don't think most of that ever comes in. I learned what an icon vector was but I've never once coded it. So I don't think that you have to feel intimated coming at programming if you weren't one of those "math people" but there are some parts of math that do end up playing quite a bit into the programmers' everyday life. CHARLES: I think for me certainly whenever you have a particular problem, then that's an opportunity to actually explore the math behind it. I think a lot of times we put -- there's this kind of inverse relationship -- we put the cart before the horse. It's like you got to learn math and then you learn the programming. But it's almost like the equation ought to be reversed in the sense that it's like trying to -- let me just cast about for a random analogy here -- it's like learning the theory of fishing without actually living on the coast and going out on a boat every day. You can certainly study it and it can be interesting. Yes, we tie the line to the pole and we put it in the water but unless you actually have that problem of like, "Now, I'm trying to catch fish," you actually are connected to it in a way that's going to help you understand what solutions work and which ones don't. I often feel like we frontload way too much on the theory. I feel it has to be connected to practice, I guess is what I'm saying. Because certainly my experience, I come from a CS background, but I didn't switch to CS until my junior year of college. And that after I'd basically dropped out of school for two years to work at a startup. And I remember it made a lot more sense because I had this prior programming experience. It's like, "Oh…" Whereas, I think a lot of my classmates, they were kind of dumbfounded by, "What does this even mean? I don't understand. I don't understand how this connects to anything." But if you have that kind of experience, then the learning can come in hand with it but it has to be more of an organic process as opposed to one coming before the other. That's my experience. KYLE: I love what you're saying there and I want to build off of that to unpack some of my most recent passion and focus in the area of education and with developers because I really think what you're saying is the foundation is the same belief I have. So, I'm right there with you. If you look at humans and the way humans have passed along information and skill to the next generation, if you look at that over the course of history, we have mountains of precedent around the idea that skills are passed along through the mentorship model. Some like to call it the master apprentice model. It's the more classical way to think about it. But just the more modern way is to call it mentorship. For example, chefs. You would never suggest that the best chef at the best restaurant in town and the way that that chef got there, the way that that chef got to be the best chef in town and have the best restaurant was that they sat in a classroom and learned all the theory about how to bake a chicken. First, before going and baking the chicken, there's lots of ways that they could have gotten to be better but probably the least effective way would have been for them to learn all the theory upfront and then just go work in a kitchen for year after year after year after year and almost accidentally -- we call it the School of Hard Knocks -- accidentally learn all those experiences. That's how a lot of people define experience is experience these mistakes over time getting practice making perfect. That does work and lots of people have done that. And I certainly would say a lot of my story is that way, but I wish that I'd had a mentor. I wish that I'd had somebody like what happens with chefs to sit there and say, "I'm not just going to let you figure it out on your own and screw up a bunch of chickens. What I'm going to do is give you a little bit of information about cooking a chicken. Like for example, what the temperature of the oven needs to be, how to tell what the temperature of the chicken is to know that it's fully cooked, what materials you need and what utensils. But we're going to spend 10 minutes in the classroom talking about it and then we're going to go sit in a kitchen and you're going to watch me bake a chicken. And you're going to watch very carefully. And I want you to ask a lot of questions about what I'm doing and I'm going to talk to you about it every single step and the decisions that I'm making. And then I'm going to do that again and again and again and again. And over time, you're going to start to pick up on and glean some of my experience from observation. And then eventually, once you are starting to feel more confident about it, we're going to flip the tables and now, you're going to start baking the chicken but you're going to do it step by step methodically and I'm going to watch you and be very closely paying attention. And I'm going to ask you questions and I'm going to say 'why did you squirt that there and why did you do this and why did you turn on the oven right now'. And I'm going to ask you about that stuff and challenge you to make sure that you really got all the different pieces of what it takes to master this skill. And then I'm going to do that again and again and again. And after we feel pretty good about chickens, we'll go back to the classroom and we'll talk about cooking steak and then we're going to repeat this process over and over." That is much more the picture of how that mastery of that skill is replicated in another person is that mentorship model. And we've seen that with stone masons and carpenters and plumbers and chefs and caterers. And on down the line through most of human history, we can see that that is how skills are passed along. What I think we're missing is that there's a lot of value to be gained by applying those models to software development. As a matter of fact, I think if you ask most developers, regardless of the skill level even if they were a senior developer -- although certainly the intermediate and junior developers are more willing to admit it. But I think if you really ask in their heart of hearts, almost all the developers would say, "Oh, I'd love to have a mentor to help me get better but I don't know how or I can't afford it or there aren't any available or I don't know what to do," because we haven't prioritized as our part of the industry making education more effective. And so, when you talk about 'I need to practice a thing, not just know the theory', you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right that sitting in a classroom and learning a bunch of stuff which ironically that's what I do. I teach corporate training classes, I threw out a bunch of information then I know as I'm throwing out that information, the vast majority of it isn't going to be retained because the only stuff that will be retained is the stuff that somebody gets a chance to practice pretty quickly. And by pretty quickly, I think probably that horizon level is about three days beyond when you've learned it. If you don't get a chance to really practice, and I don't mean just the artificial stuff that we teachers come up with like a silly little toy examples and the foobar kind of stuff, I mean really practice in a context of something that matters and that you're thinking about it and you need to solve it. If you don't get a chance to practice some of that theory within about three or four days, you're going to lose it. So, I present to you a set of information in a week-long training course that you really ought to actually learn. And by learn, I mean more than just hear the theory but also practice it. You really should learn that over 12 to 24 months. But I give it to you in 40 hours because that's, again, the industry incentivizes how quickly can I check off the check box then my developers learn how to become React developers or that we learned about JavaScript. Instead of focusing on how do I really get them to know it. And the only way to really get somebody to know it is to have somebody watching over them as they practice what was taught. You teach a little bit and you have a bunch of practice. And that practice can't be just the developer has to figure it out on their own and make their own mistakes and figure it out through Stack Overflow, it has to be monitored, it has to be proactively mentored. And they have to take a little bit of learning, a lot of guided practice. Pipeline that across, that's how we make this educational process for developers become much more efficient, much more effective. And so in a sense, what I'm trying to do is disrupt my own educational model and try to [inaudible] myself as a business by saying, "I teach it in the classroom but every time I walk out of that classroom, I feel empty inside," because I feel not just tired physically because it is exhausting, but I also feel empty inside because I know that what's really missing is that I just contributed to yet another transactional learning experience. But what really is important is for people to know that learning that is most effective is learning that's relational. Learning has to be paired with people because at its heart, what we do as developers is a people game. It's not an 'instruct the computer' game. The 'instruct the computer' is a side effect of what we do in connecting with people and passing along information and skill and knowledge. We've got to do that because we are throwing all kinds of money and time and effort at figuring out how to make people learn better through books and videos and conferences and tech schools and the list just goes on and on and on. And it's good that there's a wide buffet for people to pick from, there's no question. But most of that stuff isn't as effective as it ought to be, and that is why people have to keep doing it over and over and over again. They have to try all these different things because they don't get satiated by picking the one right thing that they ought to have fixed. I happen to be obviously very bias, but I happen to believe that a lot of the problems that developers face, a lot of the overhead of code maintenance and all of that stuff, it could be solved if people were trying to implement mentorship for developer education. And that's what I'm trying to do. My recent efforts are around upending or reimagining the normal corporate developer training. Of course I still offer that. And if anybody wants me to come teach, I can still do that. But what I'm moving towards and building a startup to offer mentoring at scale because I believe that's where we move it from transactional relationship. We make it about people and then we get a chance to really practice what we're learning. That's how you take a person, and get them from being junior to being intermediate or from intermediate to senior is that they have to have practice. Would you rather them figure it out on their own and make lots and lots of mistakes or would you rather them be guided and monitored as they go through that process of practice? I think the latter would be a lot more effective. CHARLES: For people who are excited about this, who want to figure out ways in which to engage in this relational learning, this can be a very expensive proposition especially for smaller companies. But even for larger companies, one of the things you're hoping to address is a way to make this when you say 'do it at scale, make it more accessible' in terms of those time and resources. KYLE: In a sense I would be failed at the start if I didn't feel like I had a model for scaling mentorship. If I was just on here and [inaudible] saying, "Hey, everybody. You should go mentor," and I had no way of doing that, then everybody will say, "Okay, that's all well and great. Thanks." And as soon as this podcast ended, they'd just go on back to their normal day jobs and fix anything. I really do believe that there are ways to scale out and to make it effective. That doesn't necessarily mean that the price tag is cheap because time is expensive. And what we're saying is you need expert time paired with your people to get them to where you need them to go. But I want to push back on the notion that expense makes things inaccessible, because I want to point out -- this is almost like I'm doing a customer pitch. But I just want to point out that there's an awful lot of things that we spend money on as managers of software development teams. For example, I've talked to managers of software development teams and they've said, "We probably spend 70% to 80% of our time maintaining our existing code and fixing bugs, and only maybe 20% of our time implementing new stuff." Some people listening would say, "Good lord, I'd love to have 20%. We probably spend 5% of our time on that and 95% on maintenance." So those numbers differ. But there's a lot of overhead associated with running a software development team. And one of my theories which I believe we will prove out as we scale this out, one of my theories is that if you want people to avoid having to come back and return on something. One of the ways to do that is to empower them with better education before they write that line of code. I think even though yes it will be more expensive to get your developers mentored, you will actually not spend more as a company, you will spend much less because you'll be investing that money much more effectively in the things that actually make them retain and get a chance to practice that. It also means that hiring will be cheaper because you'll know much more deeply what your company wants and needs and that will make it a lot easier to identify the right candidates. It means that the total cost of ownership of yourself will be vastly less. So there's lots of dollars here that I think we can pull that we are, in a sense, wasting or misappropriating to make it more effective to invest in mentorship. I think what we need is a process and a model instead of tools to do that, and that's my mission. That's my goal. CHARLES: I am very, very excited to see that, because I know that that is something that one, holds the value. Here at the Frontside, we see as one of our core beliefs and one of our core aspects or mission is to level people up and make sure that they can improve themselves as a developer and improve the quality of the products that they develop. But it's definitely something that we've struggled with. So, I'm really curious and excited to see the outcome of this. So, we'll be on the lookout for it. Is it still under the radar? KYLE: There's no company name to announce yet. There's no website or Twitter account. But I can say that it's been under active development now for four to six months. I have a team of founders with me and we are formalizing our process in trying to get funded for that. I hope within the next few months that there'll be a much bigger announcement about where we're headed with it because I'm all in on believing that it's not just good enough for me to keep churning. I get emails and tweets weekly. I get a couple to maybe five or ten sometimes in a week of people saying, "Hey, I read your book," or, "I watched your Frontend Master's training video," or whatever, "And that's awesome. I'd love it if you could help me with something. Could you spend some time? How much would I need to pay you to get a few hours of your time to sit here and talk with me?" And it pains me to get these kinds of requests. And the reason it pains me is because I would absolutely love to spend that kind of time with people, but that kind of time is so valuable right now. Time is so valuable because the process of mentoring currently is incredibly time intensive. It's very, very expensive to do this. And that's why I think it's not done very widespread is because people haven't figured out how to make it effective, from time and money perspective. And I know that pain personally. I have to turn people down and say, "I'd love to but I'm too busy because…" and then fill in the blank with a thousand things. I'd love to have that time. What I really want is I really want to be able to do this effectively and to scale it, because people are hungry. They want to learn. I believe that what we need to do is unlock that hunger, not necessarily inspire people. I think we need to unlock and empower that hunger that people naturally tend to have to want to get better at what they do. And I think this is one of the ways that we can help people get better. STEPHANIE: I also wanted to point out that for companies that are interested in doing this, not only do junior or apprentices benefit from this model but the senior developers also benefit from this. I have personally seen someone on my team, Alex, from all the times that we've been pairing and talking about JavaScript concepts, I have seen an exponential growth in just the way that he explains things. And they do say the one that does the teaching does the learning. And I have seen that in him and I think it's something that every team could benefit from. KYLE: I 100% agree. And to build on that, I would say what we're really doing with that is we're helping people find more purpose for what they do. And who doesn't want to have more purpose and more meaning? We're giving people a way to -- as I said, all boats rise with the tide. We're giving people a way to help other people around them. And it doesn't have to be like some macro scale thing where you become an international conference speaker. You don't even have to speak at your local city meetup. You can just pair with the person next to you and help them learn the thing that you're learning, and then learn from them. And you've made the world better, you've made the workplace better, you've made yourself better. It goes back to what I said before - I think we have to get better. The biggest thing that's lacking from us developers right now, in my opinion, the emotional muscle that we need to work on the most is recognizing empathy for our fellow human beings for the people around us because I really deeply in my core believe and my DNA I believe that what we're about is people and not about the code that gets written as a result of this connections. If we can focus on building the relationships around this. You don't have to go pay for the service of the startup that I'm building. You can implement this just like what Stephanie just said, by looking for opportunities whether it's coding, whether it's code review used as a way to learn, whether it's doing a brown back lunch, you can look for ways to build the culture of learning into the workplace around you and people will benefit from that. You will inspire people to get bigger and better as a result of providing that environment. CHARLES: Fantastic! If people need to get hold of you, Kyle, what is the best way to reach out to get in touch? KYLE: The best way to get in touch with me is to find getify. That's how people know me online. That's my Twitter handle, that's my GitHub handle, it's also my Gmail address. So, getify@gmail.com. Reach out to me in any one of those channels, probably through Gmail is best. If you'd like to talk more about education, if you'd like me to come and help your team, I would love to come and do a workshop and then build a relationship with you or we can begin this mentoring process as I spin that up. If you're interested in that, if you're hoping to learn from some of my resources, you can check out my book series. I have the You Don't Know JS books that I wrote that many people know about. That's up on my GitHub. I'm almost done with my next book which is Functional Light JavaScript, you can check that out on GitHub. All that stuff you can read for free. You can also buy it if you'd like to -- and I always appreciate people if they want to support me. But check out my books. I have training videos available on FrontendMasters.com. I think I have nine courses and we've already scheduled a few more that I'm going to be teaching later in the Spring. That's a fantastic platform. There's 50 or 60 really incredibly well-versed experts that are teaching on that platform. So, check out Frontend Masters. Some of those videos are also out on Pluralsight. You can check them out as well. Check out books, check out the training videos, get in contact with me if I can help you in some way with training at your company. But I would love it that even if that isn't the channel, if you take nothing else away from the podcast, go talk about learning stuff deeper within the workplace. That will be the best takeaway that we can get from this podcast. CHARLES: Yeah, definitely. I think the things that we talked about here really apply far beyond JavaScript and even really far beyond the technical trade of programming. All right, that's a wrap. Bye everybody!

Prepare yourself for a series of opening songs dealing with circles or rings or roundy things as this week Just One of the Guys starts its look at the fifth week event from 2000, Circle of Fire. Writer Brian K Vaughan had penned a story about a nigh invincible force called Oblivion (catchy...) that is planning on, what else, taking over the universe. Weird thing is...Oblivion is a comic book villain Green Lantern Kyle Rayner thought up when he was eight years old. And now Kyle has called a various group of Green Lanterns from across the time stream to help him defeat this threat. But who, or what are these Green Lanterns? And what do they have to do with Kyle? You'll just have to listen over the next few weeks. Of course we are also continuing our look at the Judd Winick run with Green Lantern #132 as Kyle faces down Fatality...again. But this time out, she's got a yellow Qwardian power ring to try and take Kyle and John Stewart out. Plus there's more development of Terry Berg and the introduction of a psych patinet by the name of Alex Nero. I Wonder if he'll tie into this story which is titled "While Rome Burned"? And we also finish up our look at the Green Lantern Annuals for this run with Green Lantern Annual #9. This was part of the Planet DC Annual event which tried to introduce a group of international superheroes, including Sala, the one we meet in this book. Unfortunately, it's not the Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but an Egyptian Lara Croft wannabe who has to fight Pazuzu. Unfortunately it's not the Pazuzu from The Exorcist. Basically this is like Bloodlines, except the heroes aren't created by brain juice sucking aliens...so yeah. Anyhow, it's a jam packed show, so go grab your mp3 player of choice, download the show, and get to listening!Feedback for this show can be sent to: justoneoftheguyspodcast@gmail.comJust One Of The Guys is a proud member of the Two True Freaks! (http://twotruefreaks.com/main.php) family of podcasts, the best place on the internet to find shows about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comics, Movies, and anything else that the modern geek could ever want. If you are downloading the show through iTunes, be sure to leave a rating, hopefully a FIVE STAR RATING, because every rating we get helps grow the shows on the network! Thanks for listening, and be sure to come back next Friday for another episode of Just One Of The Guys: A Green Lantern Podcast.

We review ‘The Fires of Pompeii' as Donna Noble and the Doctor travel back to Pompeii on the day before Volcano Day! We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 155. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Planet of the Ood' as Donna Noble and the Doctor travel to Donna's first off-world adventure! We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 156. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Sontaran Stratagem' as Martha Jones makes her return to Doctor Who. What happens when Donna and Martha come face-to-face?  What is the Rattigan Academy?? We invite YOU to join the new Discussing Network Facebook group to discuss this episode, comics, Star Trek, and more. The Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 157. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.

We review ‘The Poison Sky' as Martha Jones, Donna Noble, and The Doctor face off against the Sontarans. In the news we discuss a two Doctor story from Big Finish Audio, Fathom Events bringing the End of Time to theaters this August, and Lee inadvertently creates Kyle next obsession! Find out what and more in this episode as the Discussing Network presents Discussing Who Episode 158. Hosted by Kyle Jones, Clarence Brown, and Lee Shackleford. The Discussing Network Discussing Who is part of the Discussing Network. Find out more about the network and other shows on the network by visiting https://discussingnetwork.com.  Join us on the new Discussing Network Facebook Group.  Visit https://facebook.com./groups/discussingnetwork Become a Patreon Supporter! By becoming a Patreon, you can support the show while receiving exclusive perks made available for Patreon Supporters.  Visit Patreon.com/DiscussingNetwork for more information, to follow us on Patreon, and – should you choose – support the show. This episode of Discussing Who is brought to you by Audible – get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/DiscussingWho.  Check out over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. Our Hosts on Other Shows Want more from the Discussing Who co-hosts? Our hosts can be found on the following: Doctor Who: Podshock (Kyle & Lee) The TechPedition Podcast (Clarence) The Relativity Podcast (Lee & Clarence) Discussing Trek: A Star Trek Discovery Podcast (Clarence & Kyle) You can subscribe to Discussing Network on SPOTIFY! Feedback Let us know what you think! Send your feedback via email to discussingwho@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail message on the Discussing Who Call Line. Simply dial (805)850-DWHO (3946). (Airtime and/or long distance rates apply, if applicable.) Already following us on Facebook? Simply send a message on there. Like the show? Want to contribute?  Send us your feedback! We want to hear from you! Additional Information Interested in more Doctor Who Comics? Visit our friends at Titan Comics. Titan publishes comics featuring the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. They also publish comics featuring Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and more! Check them out and tell them that Discussing Who sent you.