Podcast appearances and mentions of mark i'm

After successfully having a career in the restaurant industry, Gino Barbaro became increasingly interested in the opportunities that investing in multi-family units could bring and the financial freedom one could attain. After conversations with his friend, Jake Stenziano, Gino and him decided to form a business partnership founding their real estate education company, Jake & Gino. Gino Barbaro is an author, real estate investor, and entrepreneur who is the co-founder of the real estate company Jake & Gino. Currently, they are in control of 1,400 units and are passionate about mentoring others to follow their long-term wealth strategies.   In this episode of Multifamily Real Estate Investments with Don and Eden, Gino will share his unique story and path that led him to multifamily real estate investing. He also will talk about the importance of the right mindset into becoming involved in real estate syndications and why having the right mindset is so important.     Highlights:  Gino’s Beginnings in Real Estate  Why Gino Decided to Not Only have a Career in the Restaurant Industry Forming a Partnership Importance of Mindset  Current Projects and Future Outlook   How to Connect with Gino Website: https://jakeandgino.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jakeandgino Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakeandgino/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Transcription Hey guys, I'm very excited to tell you about our new website DonandEden.com. We have put a lot of hours into making the website very accessible, beautiful, and comfortable. You could find ways to contact us for a variety of options if you would like to network, we always want to hear new stories and get to know you better. We would displace some of the past deals we were involved with, you could learn from each of those deals. The important lessons we have also experienced on the website, you would be able to invest with us on our future deals if passive investors, and even as general partners. Today, Don will interview a person who is very dear to both of us, and his name is Gino Barbaro. Gino is the part of the famous duo Jake and Gino who is in control of over fourteen hundred units. Gino will share his story and the path that led him to real estate investing as well as the right mindset you need to be able to do this. Also at the end of the episode, Don and Gino will discuss one of our deals that are coming up, and we are very excited about the development of 28 units in Hollywood, Florida.  So stay tuned and enjoy the episode.  Welcome to the real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden, where we cover all aspects of real estate investing with special attention to multifamily apartment buildings and off-market strategies.  Hey, Gino welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing really good. Thanks for having me on. Of course, I'm honored. If anybody, I'm honored to have you on the show it's going to be you the person that helped me so much in my career and developing myself as a real estate investor. I've learned so much from you. So I'm very honored as I mentioned. Thank you for putting the time to do this. Thank you. Yes. So you are a very accomplished man, and it seems like your whole life is about doing and creating. So I want you to tell us a little bit about your career how it started and what currently drives you.  Well, my biggest accomplishment, I think, is being a father of six children.  That is by far the most important thing to me, and that's the reason, believe or not why I got into real estate because I was in a tough business. I was in the restaurant business, and it just took a lot of time.  It took a lot of energy, a lot of effort, a lot of long hours and a lot of long weekends working on the holidays- it was difficult, and I was the son of an immigrant. So that's what I thought everyone did. I mean, I was working hard, but I didn't feel fulfilled, and I seemed like I was always away missing those important things with my family. So I was back in 2008, the Great Recession came in, and I was making pretty good money. The restaurant and everything changed, and I said to myself I need to go on a different path. I need to find something different, and I already had a job. So I didn't get into a residential real estate. I didn't get into fixing flips. I tried to get to the multifamily, and I think that was the saving grace me.  Try and get into a multifamily business, buy properties still have the restaurant, but do this on the side and make some extra money because as to have a large family it's a lot of mouths to feed. That was my priority to do something where I can get a little bit of extra passive income on site. And over the years from 2008 to this point continue to buy. Continue to grow. I just got fortunate enough that back in 2016 of March I left the restaurant and I dedicated my life full time to real estate.     That's beautiful. So you decided to focus on multifamily whereas other investors typically when they start they try to focus on single families because they have the conception that this is the safest thing to do and that was our conception when we started doing business in real estate.   But you challenged that and so you tackled multifamily right from the beginning. So tell us a little bit about that? How was it? How difficult was it to get into that arena?   Well,  in the beginning, everyone believes what they think. If you believe it's easier to get into single families, that's what you're going to believe. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone knows how to buy a home so they think, hey single family's easy I can get into it I've done it before.  Everyone hears the word multifamily commercial, and they start shaking their boots, and they think of commercial financing, and real estate is a team sport. And for me, I didn't want to have another job. I didn't want to fix and flip a home. I mean, I love that process, it's a lot of fun. But once you think about all the hours and the time that you need to do a house, the capital gains, the risk factor, and where you are in the market cycle. All of a sudden you've done all that work, and then you've got to go and repeat it; it didn't seem like it was a really good strategy for me. I wanted something that would have at least residual income. I wanted something more I built long term wealth. Yeah, I wanted something where I could have the capital gains to avoid tax benefits there. I want something where I could build a business where it was scalable. So if you're thinking about buying single-family homes take a step back and say to yourself, how is it going to be when I have ten or eleven or twelve houses spread out all over the city. They're all different. It's going to be harder to manage every single one of them if I've got ten homes and three of them are vacant. That's a big vacancy. As Jake and I started on our twenty-five-year property they were all in one location. I was working full time. I could manage these part-time at the very beginning, and it was easier because they're all in one location. There was one landscaping bill. There was one garbage bill. There was one utility bill. There was one roof there. So it was just easier for me. There was an economy a scale thing. There were scalability factors and all those other factors that I've mentioned. It just made more sense.  Yeah. Also when you flip a home it feels like a job.   you make good money. I mean I've done that before, and you make good money. I get a good day you're placing your time so that you can earn money. So it's a good job, but essentially it's a job. It doesn't create residual income for you as far as multifamily does. And also I mean you could get there it’s not scalable, but it's possible. I mean it's possible to hold 20 single families and make residual income, and welfare. But it's not as easy and as convenient so I can relate.  Well, I think the problem is most people like that don't mean effect. It's so much more rewarding to actually buy a house fix it and then flip it three months later and get paid. It's a great feeling right, that's a transaction. It's a lot harder.  using my immigrant background to be a farmer plant the seed water the seed weed the garden take care of it let it grow and wait six months and pray that it doesn't rain hardly ever hail. There's a lot of risks involved that's an entrepreneur's journey because you're holding on and you're delaying the gratification.  Whereas I think single-family homes you're fixing the flipping it's a different process it's a different mindset. You're going to get into multifamily think of yourself as an entrepreneur. You think of yourself as someone who's solving problems for tenants. And the more tenants and problems you can solve the bigger portfolio, the more money you are going to make and the more as you scale bigger and gains the more property and more units the more cost savings you're going to have the more revenue generator rate are you going to have and that's how you start becoming really successful in this business.  Yeah, I agree. So you've entered the multifamily business. I mean a few years back so it's not like you've been doing that for 30 years while you were in the restaurant business. So how did your life change ever since you got into multifamily.  Well I mean for me, the best thing was I went to coaching school. I became a life coach because I didn't know what I wanted right.  I mean, I think the most important thing that everyone on this call has to figure out is to keep becoming clear with our lives, what is the clarity in your life? I didn't want to work twelve hours a day doing more at a job that I didn't like anymore. Now I'm working just as hard, but I'm doing something that I feel fulfilled in, and to me, it's not a job.   I don't even know what day it is today, to be honest with you. I mean the weekends to me are just like any other day or whenever I want to. For me, it was hard because I was working and it was like you said every week the week is over you get paid you start the next week, and it was just boring, and it was not fulfilling. Also when we bought our first property it was exciting because it felt like we did something different. Then three months after that first property we bought our second property. So we had 60 units within the first three months of buying the first deal. It took us 18 months to get our first deal. I mean it was hard out there I had done some coaching I had gotten together with mentors I had gotten together with Jake as a partner. So Jake and I took 18 months to get that first deal. But that second deal came right after the first because we had the credibility. We had met the broker we had understood the market. We had chosen the market and focused, and we had built a team. And I mean things are changing. I started seeing real estate as a business which is what it is whether you're going to fix a flip whether you're going to wholesale whether you're going to master lease whether you going to buy commercially. It has to be treated as a business. And you want to take yourself out of the day to day operations and think more long term and think bigger picture and build a business. And if you can't if you're out there trying to buy a business you can't scale that business then it's not a business, it becomes a job. That's why when you're buying a couple of single-family homes that can't be scaled if that model can't be scaled and you can't pull yourself out of it then it's not a business it's a job.  Here’s some that I learned from you, is the famous scent as you always say that transactions pay equity bill make you rich. That's right. I've learned that pretty well, and that's what we are trying to establish as well. So I know you wrote two books two of which bestsellers. So let's talk about these books a little.  I know the first one is we'll get our profits, and then the other one is family food and the fairs. So just from the titles, I could understand that these are two completely different books. So what's special about these books for you? And how has the experience of writing them?   Well, the great thing about it was back in 2008, I was trying to do something in the restaurant that we call multifaceted.  I had seen back then it was a shift. I mean all of a sudden you have to see trends you have to see what's going on with demographics, and it's exploding now. If you understand the new demographics now we're where people are not going out to eat they want to have delivery they want to have stuff brought into their house. Whole Foods is taking over a lot of it. Trader Joe's a lot of prepackaged foods. I said to my brother we need to do something different here at the restaurant we need to create other streams of revenue whether that is writing a cookbook which is what I did. I wrote a cookbook called family food in the fryers, and I wrote it for a bunch of Catholic brothers where I would go down and do a lot of mission work for and they were terrible cooks. So I said that was the mission, I said let me write a cookbook for them. And I ended up branding the restaurant then we created the company called Geno's family where I wanted to have my family teach other families how to garden, how to grow vegetables, and how to bring it into the house how to cook with them and then what I did with that company as I was sourcing physical products from China where there was cutlery whether it was vertical garden bags whether it was e-books and all that kind of information. And I was creating a little business within the restaurant and career multiple brands or multiple revenue streams. I was also joined tomato sauce selling it.  Unfortunately, as I'm doing that, Jake and I find out while this real estate is pretty cool and my brother was not ready at the time to start transitioning; he didn't see what I saw so since my brother Mark I'm surprised it's real estate. So Jake and I start buying these properties and about at about a year and a half after we start buying. We wrote this book with all our profits. And the reason why I wrote the book is it makes you go in there and research and learn and become a much better investor because even though you're learning you never stop learning is always things changing in the market and I electric let's write this book just for fun. We sat down, and it took us about a year to write the book believe right. I mean we're not good writers, and we're not that smart. So it took us a lot longer than what it should have. But I mean it gave us the clarity on what our strategy was we were buying these deals from mom and pop owners, and we were using the simple buy right manage right and finance. That was our three-legged framework on how to buy a multifamily property. So it gave the clarity, OK this is it let's put it down on paper. And then from there, we said what. Let's start coaching people and teaching people how to do what we're doing. So from that book, came up the Jay congenial program.  Beautiful. So tell us about how you met Jay and the other half of the famous duo Jake and Gino? Well  I mean sometimes people they gravitate towards you. He was a pharmaceutical rep back in 2010-2011, and he was using a restaurant, and he was good friends with my brother.  My brother is handling all the outside of the restaurant his deal dealing with the pharmaceutical reps that he was getting catering from our restaurant going to doctor's offices and selling pharmaceuticals. And when the sunshine came in that all changed the whole health care model changed and he saw that as a threat. So he decided to move down to Knoxville Tennessee, and I said Jake when you get down there let me know, we'll start looking at deals.  I know what kind of person he is, and for anybody out there looking to get into partnership with other people, you have to stop and think of why you want to in partnership with people.  I saw Jake as someone similar to me; he works. Rick is a super hard worker; he's always working. He's always thinking about the next step. He's got value-based decision making where he's got a great core belief; core values are really powerful. He's got a lot of integrity. He's got a lot of ethics, and he does the right thing. So I gravitated towards all of that, and I liked the way he worked because I worked just as hard. So if you're going to partner with other people make sure you look at that make sure you look at the background make sure you look at them saying what. It's not my job, It's not in our vocabulary, It's all about helping each other out. So I met him he went down and like I said from 2011 to 2013 we're looking to buy a property. He ended up buying a house because his wife moved down and then we bought that first property. He is the property manager because he was in the market, so he brought value that way by managing the property. And I was the one who had the experience the education I knew how to read the deals I don't want to raise the money. So I had that experience between the two of us. We just hit it off. We had a great partnership, and we just decided to stick with it. And like I said once you started growing we're like what let's start a podcast. What's the worst they can have. We've just started the podcast, started meeting people, talking to people and just really learning the industry from the inside out.  That's beautiful. So how do you guys currently divide the workload between you two now that you've been in a partnership for quite a while?  each other well.   Well, what ends up happening is there are certain inflection points, in any business, I think after we got off two-hundred units all of sudden Jake said I need to property manager and I need to hire some property managers we had 60 units the third deal was one hundred thirty-six units. So when we had that third deal we started hiring full-time property managers full-time maintenance. So we did that. That was the first step. And then when we hit about six hundred fifty units we decided to hire a regional manager. We just needed more staff. As you start staffing up and at that point, I was doing. I was sold to the restaurant I left the restaurant. Jake was doing day to day in the property management, and I was pitching in.  I was helping out filling out quick books and doing all the reporting. And then when I said Jake I'm going to do the education day in a day full time, there's a lot of stuff involved in the very beginning creating lessons creating videos getting people to come on the podcast. The date you do day to day with the property management. And then from there, those were the two streams of revenue on top of the investment which was the third stream of revenue, so those three streams. A year and a half ago, we decided we've got about 900 investors on our database. Jake, I can't reach out to them and set up thirty-minute meetings and you can either one, or we create a syndication company gets another partner for that which we hired Dillon Obama. He's our third partner. We have another partner Mike on that so let's do that. You have these symbiotic relationships between a syndication company that is raising money in an education company that is teaching people and also fulfilling them over to our syndication company. If they have extra money they can they can invest with us a property management company that runs these investments and the investments themselves.  So as we started scaling up we saw that we'd rather share the pie with other people who felt our core beliefs then try to keep for ourselves because it's hard to start scaling up and picking out what you do what you don't like. I love the education aspect of it. Jake loves the property management aspect of it. Our partner loves to speak to investors. He loves to underwrite deals, so if we can all work on our strengths and grow the business and try to keep it as a multifaceted business where each entity is helping the other entity it works well, and you'll figure that as you start scaling.  That's the hardest thing for an entrepreneur when do you hire somebody else. I mean we hired our first sales guy for Jacob Gino about two years ago 18 months ago and then only three to four months ago we hired an operations manager. We should have hired sooner; we just didn't know you'll figure that out. As you see, you start yourself growing and, you start doing tasks that aren't necessary if you aren't there to generate revenue. That's why you say to yourself OK, I have to pull myself out of this task and hire somebody to do that. Does that make sense?  It does make a lot of sense especially because I'm also in a partnership and I know exactly how important that is to have a mastermind, and sometimes you're not sure about things, and you could talk to somebody about the way you say things, and then they see things differently. And then you come up with the best solution. So it only makes sense to me, and I think it's beautiful that you guys are so symbiotic as you mentioned and that's amazing.  So I'm going to see you be doing that very soon. Trust me because once you have a great system and a great business it's all a communication right. We have something that we call Level 10 meetings every week.  We are on meetings with every single one of our entities and then might take up five or six hours a week, but it's really important to have her be on board. We've done something called scaling up with Patrick coaches because as you start growing if you're going to be an educator you have to believe in your product. You have to go out there and invest in yourself and invest in your company. So for you to grow and you're doing something new you've never done it before you really to go out there and invest in yourself and invest in your company, so that's first and foremost.  But I see you guys doing the same thing? You've got a beautiful model. You already employ virtual assistants amazingly you have a system set up. You are going to be teaching your process and then from that money make what you do the money you make. You replicating put into other investments and you start multifaceted, and I can see the picture already being painted with you guys as well.  Yeah. I mean I think it's what's special about our motto is that we came from the background of being a residential wholesaler. So as a residential wholesaler, you like a multifamily investor on steroids.  That's the way I like it because you're able to do some things that other people are not doing since it's just not a part of the industry.  a lot of people say, hey talk to the brokers and an established broker they should ship which we're doing, and we're doing everything, but the off-market strategies that we are implying are getting us ahead. And I can already see that we're getting to sellers that otherwise, we have never sold the property because they never had even that idea. So you're essentially the broker when you're addressing the sellers directly then you're essentially the broker because you're getting them before other brokers do. And then you're also saving the commissions that they would pay for brokers.  So it makes sense, and that's the best so much value. You guys have so much value that model and what's great about it is that you're in a tough market right now.  Can you imagine when the market cycle resets, and you're going back to the buyer's market you guys are going to clean up? So continue to do what you're doing because everyone always says now's not the right time to get in the market. It's never the right time to get into the market. It's never the right time to have a child. It's never the right time to leave your job. It's never the right time to get married. It's only the right time when you decide is the right time and what you need to do is learn what strategy to employ in that specific market cycle. I mean the real estate comes out three pillars it comes down the market cycle, it comes out to debt, and it comes down to exit strategy. If you can employ all three of those who make a wise decision on all three of those you can buy in any market, you just need to know. So as you'll see as the market resets you guys are going to you're poised to crush it as this market is going down because you've created the relationships you've already spoken to the sellers three or four times so when they're ready what are they going to call they're going to call you because you're already in touch with them a couple of times.  Exactly. I could always see that coming, and what else. When we started doing residential wholesale then a lot of people told us not to do it in Miami. The Fort Lauderdale Miami area because this market is very competitive, and it's very difficult for beginners.  So it was competitive, and it was difficult to get in, but it was very rewarding when not the first deal. So it's the same thing, and in today's market and multifamily, it's hot. But if you get a deal then it's good for you because you couldn't so easily. So there are advantages to this as to every market. And if we're already talking about the market I wanted to ask you a question which I've already preferred. So what do you think are the adjustments that the investors that are trying to get into multifamily or investors that have already done a deal or two in multifamily? What do you think are the adjustments that they should make in today's market?  I have a couple of different ways to look at that question. The first thing is when Jake and I started all I knew was that I'm going to buy a deal on myself.  That's not the only way you need to buy multifamily nowadays. If you have a strong balance sheet and you can be a sponsor on a deal, you can get it into multifamily. If you have sweat equity and you live in a property you live in a market, and you find a deal you can run day to day you can get a deal that way. If you want to find a partner and partner up with somebody you can get a deal that way. If you want a syndicated deal and raise funds for your deal you can get the deal that way. If you want to raise funds for somebody else's deal you can get into a deal that way. There are so many different ways to get into multifamily as I said; it's a business, and everyone that's out there sees these hundred unique properties in two hundred unique properties, and you see all these syndicators out there saying I'm closing two-hundred-fifty units. Yes, they closed, but they had a lot of help from a lot of people raising money. It wasn't just them for the majority of the people. Jake and I raise our funds for our own deal we've had a couple of key people bringing down payments, or we've given them a little part of the general partnership, or for the most part, they are our investors. If we had problems raising the money we would go out and ask you or someone else, hey can you bring money toward deal raise money? You are compensating. That's one way for you to start. I think what people need to do more than anything else is they need to decide that multifamily is for them.  I think once they understand it multiplies for them. And that is the right business model to employ going forward. Because, I guess food water shelter, and those are three basic needs.  You can buy it on the internet yet it's very hard actually to replicate it; there's not enough affordable housing coming online. The demographics going forward whether it's the immigrant population, the millennials or the baby boomers, they're all going to rent more. That's just a fact. Read the book Big shift, a great book about demographics and what's going on if you can understand that you can see what's going on in the rest of the world as far as having negative interest rates as far as people wanting to park their capital in a viable asset. That's why multifold is hot right now, and I think going forward in the next five to 10 years you're going to see that trend continue. Now the important thing is I think you need to focus on a market and you should South Florida is very competitive red hot. Why is that? It's because there's a lot of jobs down there. There's job growth down there. People are moving to Florida I think a thousand people a day relocate to Florida all the baby boomers. That's right. It's the baby boomers coming down, and they're actually selling their houses in New York and California, and cashing out and coming down here buying a small condo or renting an apartment right. And jobs are coming down here that's why. So it's the quality of life. It's the actual tax savings. There's no state income tax, and it's just a great place to live. The people here are great. I moved from here two years ago from New York. I love it. I cut my tax property taxes in less than half — no state income tax. I love the weather. People are visiting me now. This is not the Florida that I knew ten years ago. It's not.  It's going to reach a different conclusion completely, and I think the other thing to finish that point, focus on a market.  That's why the Southeast is competitive because that's where people are flowing. Texas is going to continue for the next five to 10 years because they're leaving California they're going to Boise Idaho, they're going to Salt Lake City, they're going to Nevada, they're coming to Texas because of the tax savings and the quality of life. So focus on a market that you like that U.S. population and job growth continuing on and if we do get into recession those people are not going to buy homes they're going to have to rent. So if you can play buying a place that has enough supply and demand there you're going to have better chances of withstanding any recession.  Yes. So assuming there is a recession you think that the eight class properties are the first ones to get the impact by the big class and the secrets are safer? I think so.  it's really weird, my mom used to have a condo in Deerfield about four or five years ago, we're still going down there every year.  I was amazed at Boca on a ten; there all the new builds that were going on there; the old builds were vacant, and they were putting up new stuff like you couldn't believe especially the commercial. My fear is as we get a slowing down a recession will rebuild us continue to do. They continue to build through the slowdown because they have the permits and that's what they do. So any new stuff coming online. Just be careful in your market take a look at concessions as you see a concession is basically, hey let me give you microwave for free let me give you a month's rent for free. As you can see those concessions going up, that's when you're going to see that there can be softening made in the space. Now what might happen in that a space, it may trickle down into space and say,  what I can get an apartment and be a lot cheaper. I can be where we play in the B and C space, they're not going to be as effective as much because those tenants never really buy homes, and they're not really you can't compete with the 1970s and 1980s build with a brand new 2018 build that has a pool, clubhouse, café, and a fitness center. It doesn't they won't compete there's no competition with mine. So the strategy of buying right, if you can buy those assets right and you can weather the recession the downturn. The only thing that I want to that would worry about in a recession is you're hoping that rents don't decrease a lot. I mean you think occupancy is going to stay in the low to mid-90s but if your rents start decreasing and there's a lot of competition a lot of people fleeing that's where you're going to have problems. But I think space is the first one is going to get affected in the recession.  I agree.  I wanted to tell you about the deal that we've done in Hollywood since the area so well. So everybody is saying that it's so difficult to get a good deal in multifamily. So then there is another very efficient strategy, and we've started to implement it which is to buy lots that are zoned for multifamily based on the city that you live in.  Right, they currently have a single-family on them. Now what happens in that scenario is that it's not multifamily like syndication like the classic syndication, but your dancing with the developers. What happens is that a developer would come over and give you a quote to develop the land for you, and the land becomes the equity. So you bring in the equity, so if you could syndicate the money to buy the land. Right. It's sometimes expensive because some multifamily land that you could work with the developer to develop. That's another strategy that we are implementing currently we're going to build. I believe it's twenty-eight units, but some people say 36. We don't know yet, in Hollywood a lot that we bought. So we bought this thought. We bought it for I would say half the price than what it's worth. Even less so 30 cents on the dollar. And then now developers are coming over, and they want to develop it because the multifamily market is hot. So that's another strategy that I know is good for the market that we are at right now. So I know we've already discussed that, but I wanted to mention it since I love that strategy. So why? Because you're going to have a brand new building that has no deferred maintenance that's going to have nice rents and you're basically in it.  I don't want to see it for no money down, but you're basically in it for a little bit of money down, and your equity is that property, so you've created a ton of value. You're not the classic entrepreneur, or that is taking something you repurposed it; you've taken something, and you've made what we classically call a higher and better use. You've done that. You attract a lot of values from that. And it's market, that's worth something maybe ten years ago. It wasn't worth it because the land was a lot cheaper back five, six years ago but now the land is at a premium. These builders are looking for that so that they come in and they need to split some of the profits with you, but they get that land at a decent price per door they're willing to do that. So any author listening listens to that stretch don't do in Hollywood, don't do it in Miami. You can do it anywhere else in the country, but that's an awesome strategy. Great. Great idea.  Love it. So one of the best ways to connect with you in case anybody wants to invest with you or listen to your podcast go onto our website.  Jake and Gino come on there; we have all the podcasts we do for weekly podcasts.  We have the multifamily zone podcast with my wife and me, just talking about working with your spouse growing the family how to teach kids about money and all that. We do a ramp partner syndication podcast, and we do a movers and shakers podcast with our students highlighting students. We closed the deal, and we have our flagship will our profits podcast and just gone. You can do your outcome. Reach out close there, and just ITunes we are on. We have an Instagram page or a Facebook page, and you can reach out to me. Jake & Gino and general if you have any questions I'd love to talk to people.  Wonderful thank you so much for being on the show today. I appreciate it. And it's always nice and a pleasure to talk to you.  The pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having me on. All right.  Thanks for listening to the real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden. Stay tuned for more episodes till next time.

Today is the start of a multiple part series on social security. We'll be discussing topics such as the state of the fund and reforms that are aimed to help the program and more, so tune in and catch up on social security.Helpful Information:PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/Contact: 813-286-7776Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com----more----Transcript of today's show:Mark: Hey gang, welcome into another edition of retirement planning redefined with the boys from PFG Private Wealth Financial Advisors, John and Nick, once again here on the program with me as we talk about investing, finance and retirement. Always go to the website and check them out at pfgprivatewealth.com that is pfgprivatewealth.com. While you're there, subscribe to the podcast. Give us a like and check us out and all that good stuff. Subscribe to it for past episodes as well as future episodes. And of course anytime you hear anything, you've got a question or concern, give them a call before you take any action. 813-286-7776 is the number to call. If you hear a useful nugget of information and you want to learn more, again, reach out to them at (813)-286-7776. Guys, I hope you're doing well this week. Nick, what's going on man?Nick: Yeah, we're doing well. Staying busy for sure. Today what we wanted to do is kick off a multi session on social security.Mark: Okay. Cool.Nick: And we just want to let everybody know. We know that some of the people that'll be listening to this will have become familiar with us through either the more comprehensive classes that we put on around town or via a financial wellness workshop. And social security has been one of the hot topics for a long time and it continues to be as it is more in the news with the different pressures and some of the funding issues and those sorts of things. And then obviously with everybody, so many people and so many baby boomers getting closer to retirement, although we will be getting into it fairly comprehensively in this session, we just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that if they were interested in having us come in, whether it's some sort of association or an employer based kind of program, we like to do the lunch and learns or some sort of financial wellness workshop.Nick: And we've got about a 50 minute session that we'll do on social security. And from the feedback that we've gotten, it's been one of the most positively embraced sessions that we've done. So we just want to let people know that if they wanted a more comprehensive overview on this or they thought it might be beneficial for their employer or fellow employees or coworkers, that that's something that's available.Mark: Awesome. Yeah. When we get into that we'll have this multi-part series on the podcast regarding social security. And again, as Nick mentioned, if you want to talk with them, (813)-286-7776, (813)-286-7776.Mark: John, how are you man? You doing all right?John: I'm doing great. How are you doing?Mark: I'm doing very well. Thank you for asking. And you know, Nick got us all set up there for the conversation. So what do you say we dive into it? How does it work? I mean, what's the crux of the whole social security situation here we're looking at?Nick: Most people are obviously familiar with the fact that they are eligible for social security and they pay into the system, but not a lot of people are familiar with how it all works and ties together. We always like to start off in explaining people how the program is funded. A lot of people have seen on their pay stub where it might say FICA and they're not really quite sure what that is. But out of that 7.62 that comes out of your paycheck for those FICA tax is 6.2% of that is for social security. And one of the things that we have found over the years is that many people are not familiar with the fact that the employer also pays in 6.2%. Some people have this idea that the program is fully funded by the government and really it's fully funded by them and their employer.Nick: Letting them know that about 12.5% of their income each year is going into the program towards them is something that is important for them to understand. And for some of the higher income earners, they may have noticed at a certain point of the year that their paycheck gets a little bit bigger. And usually that's because payroll tax is capped, so people no longer pay in on earnings over ... In 2019 on earnings over $132,900. And as we talk a little bit about some of the things that'll change over time with the program, one of the things that's in the news the most is that cap and removing that cap so that it's similar to Medicare where people will pay on, no matter what their earnings are, they will continue to pay into the system.John: That cap's actually been going up aggressively. You know, I think a few years ago it was $112 Nick, and I think now they've jumped it up to one $132.Nick: Yeah, yeah. They've definitely been indexing it up faster than inflation, that's for sure.Mark: Yeah. And depending on what happens in the elections coming up next year, you know, depending on who gets in, there's conversations that that 6.2 could be raised as well. So if you're still working, so that could go up substantially as well.Mark: How much can somebody expect guys? I imagine that's a big question that always comes up is, what are we looking at? I know you can get your estimates, obviously, from the website. They don't even send those little papers out anymore I don't think. They used to send them out every year, then it went to every five years. I'm not sure if they even still do that.John: They do occasionally, and I'm not sure the exact how often, but I know that from our classes we're starting to have guests say, yeah they're getting the statements. But it's based off of your earnings record. And one thing that's important to understand, it's actually your highest 35 years. So a lot of people when I first started working, I think the first year I was 18 I made like $12,000.Mark: That's pretty good for 18.John: You're [crosstalk 00:05:20]. Yeah, exactly. Your highest earning years are really later in life, once you hit your 50s and 60s. So that's important to understand if someone's thinking about retiring early to make sure that they look on the statement and see, Hey, what years do I have that are significant in here? Because if I stop working my last seven years, you know the benefit that I'm seeing on my statement's actually going to be less.John: Because when you get your statement, what it shows if you continue to work up until that age, not if you stopped. So that's important. Another thing we tell our clients and anyone that comes to our classes is to make sure that you look at it, see if there's any zeros in there. Because if you do have zeros in your highest 35 that will actually bring down your benefit and that's something you may want to consider maybe working a couple of extra years to make sure that you maximize your social security retirement benefit as best you can.John: And you're right, you can go on social security.gov and pull up your statement. They'll ask you a lot of funny questions. What was the color of your first car? Most likely most people get locked out unfortunately, but it's good to go check it out if you haven't done that in awhile.Nick: Yeah. Another thing to just make sure that people know from the standpoint of those highest 35 years is that's in relation to the cap. And so you know that cap that we mentioned earlier, that $132,900, it's in relation to that. Just because there may have been a period of time, we've seen it in some circumstances, where maybe somebody took some time off to stay home with the kids and then they're returning to work and before they took time off they were making a higher income. And although, from a pure dollar standpoint they may be making more dollars now as in relation to the cap, that may not necessarily be the case.Nick: That highest 35 earning years is in relation to that cap. And with how social security date change the mailing out of the [inaudible 00:07:04] and that sort of thing, we absolutely recommend that people, although it can be a little bit of a pain from the process, to really get logged into the site, make sure they understand how to access that statement, make sure they understand how to read that statement. Especially from the standpoint of people that we have that are self employed. We have them double check their statements to make sure that their income is being correctly recorded because they may be paying in their self employment tax, which is essentially payroll tax. Making sure that that's recorded properly so they're going to get the benefits that they're entitled to down the road.Mark: Yeah. Now guys, I've heard through the years that if you see those zeros on there like John mentioned that that's not really on the social security to fix that. That falls back on you in trying to follow up possibly with past and employers. Like if you know you earned something in a given year and you're seeing a zero, is that still how it is? Is that the way that it goes? Do you need to talk with the social security office about that or do you need to track down that past employer?John: You do need to reach out to them and Nick's, I believe, grandfather did that and Nick can share that story.Mark: Oh, all right.Nick: And this was years ago, so I don't know any details on it, but my grandfather was from Cuba and so he had a natural distrust for the government. And when he was a professor at the University of Rochester and when he went to retire and file for social security, he did not agree with the amount. And due to his non-trusting nature, he happened to have every pay stub that he ever had in the basement. And so he was able to figure that out. Luckily now we have things that are more electronic and we do have people try to keep some sort of record and haven't had anybody recently deal with that in any sort of deeper way.Mark: That's good.Nick: But usually a tax return will help. And tax returns are one of the things that we have people ... We've got a portal for clients and we have them upload those tax returns so that they can be a really good resource down the road in case there's any issues.Mark: Well that's cool. Yeah. I mean I'm 48 and I think about myself and I think God, if I had to go back and figure out who I worked for when I was 20 and what they owed me or whatever, or what I paid in, I don't know where I'd start. So that was awesome that your grandfather actually kept all that stuff. Because I know that for a lot of people that would be definitely a challenge. But that's just something I thought about and I wanted to bring that up and get your guys' opinion on that.Mark: So if you're talking about things that are really important to people, obviously a big question for boomers, and I'm sure you get this at the wellness events that you do and just in general is the constant question of the health of the fund. Is it going to be around?John: Yeah, that is a 100% the main question we get at the workshops and also when we're doing planning for clients. But as it states today there's actually a surplus and the fund is actually growing. There's roughly $2.9 trillion in it and when you say trillion it doesn't really in reality mean much, we have no idea what that actually equates to.Mark: It sounds like a lot.John: [crosstalk 00:09:56] Surplus, it is a lot. But the surplus is about $3 billion a year between money that's coming into it through the payroll taxes and also the interest earned on the balance. Just to kind of give some people some numbers because they're always asking. In 2023, 2024 that surplus actually will stop. So it's actually going to be going into a deficit and then in 2034 the fund's basically exhausted and then it's just going to be paid through basically money coming in through payroll taxes and then the money's going to come out. An then in 2034 when that happens, based on the numbers, the estimates, is looking like there's going to be a 21% reduction of benefits. So you're going to get 79% of the benefit owed to you. And again, that's if no changes happen, which we'll we're going to go into shortly. Nick will start it up where we're talking about some of the reforms that already have been happening and that will continue to happen.Nick: And we do tend to ... Some of these will probably be repeated throughout the series about social security. And earlier I mentioned the increase in max earnings, removing that cap. That's probably one of the lowest hanging fruit from the standpoint of people getting on board with making higher income earners continue to pay into the system. Right now, the earliest retirement age that somebody can collect benefits from is 62. So that's an age, especially with the longevity of people's lives and people just living longer overall, that 62 will probably start to increase. I'm sure people will be grandfathered in at a certain age or certain, your worth and before it will be grandfathered in, but-Mark: It seems like that's a really-Nick: John and I suspect that our-Mark: Yeah, that seems like the easiest one too for a lot of things. Right? Just push it back for people under a certain age, like 50 and under or something, just push it back.Nick: Yeah. And social security ... The trickiest thing and probably one of the biggest reasons that not much has been done with it is because, frankly politicians are worried about not getting voted back into office, so-Mark: Yeah, it's a political poker chip for sure.Nick: They [inaudible 00:11:53] can down the road and try not to tick people off at least to a certain extent. So raising that initial retirement age from 62 probably upwards of ... They'll probably ease it in, but I wouldn't be surprised if John and I, our initial retirement age is closer to 65 or higher.Nick: They've talked about doing means testing from the standpoint of if people have a certain amount of income on that they wouldn't collect their social security. I think that one will probably be a little bit more difficult because usually that's income focused and honestly there's a lot of ways around that.Nick: But another thing would be that cost of living adjustment, and that's been tinkered with a little bit really over the last decade as inflation stayed low for a little while and interest rates were really low. But that could be something that they adjust. But realistically what we think will be the easiest things to do will be to take up on the payroll tax, potentially have employers put in a slightly larger percentage than the actual employee. It's something that they can do. Increasing that cap or the earning cap or removing the cap in general, and bumping back that initial retirement age, are all things that we think will be a big deal.Nick: The other thing could be the, really the increases, the percentage increases that social security provides for people that defer taking their benefits. So if they wait, any year after full retirement age, there's an 8% increase. And so that's something that'll probably drop as well.Nick: The good news is that this is pretty actuarial and really all you have to do is math to figure it out. It's just going to take people being willing, people being the government, being willing to make the changes.John: Yeah. And they've already, in 2015 they actually closed some of the loopholes which we've been seeing a lot of in planning some strategies that people were using are going away, which helped the program out. They're already doing some things. And the big thing that ... One of the things Nick talked about was the cost of living adjustments. To me that's one of the ones we need to keep an eye on because when we're doing planning, it really helps out the plan when you have some type of guaranteed income that actually goes up with inflation.John: Historically, social security has gone up about 2.6%. It's been low over the last five or six years due to inflation, but that's actually a pretty nice benefit when you look at what you start with at let's say 66 and what you end up with that age 85. It's a big amount. When you look over that 20 year period.Nick: Probably the one people want to fight for the most to maintain from the standpoint of anybody that's likes to be active or have a vested interest in the topic, that cost of living adjustment's really, really important for them.Mark: Absolutely. Well, let's take that point and segue into an offer for you guys. If you're listening and you want a free maximization strategy and the social security guide to anyone who emails in, just email john@pfgprivatewealth.com that's john@pfgprivatewealth.com. Again to get that free maximization strategy and social security guide here on the program.Mark: And I that's going to do it for us this week on the podcast guys. Really good information to start this week, talking about social security here on the show. We're going to continue on, as Nick mentioned earlier on, and do a multi-part series on this next time here on the program. We're going to talk about integrating social security into your retirement plan, making that part of the plan and some things to look for and think about in regards to that.Mark: You've been listening to retirement planning redefined with John and Nick financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth. Again, that's PFG Private Wealth and that you can find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com and subscribe to the podcast while you're there. Don't forget to email John if you'd like to get that social security maximization or give him a call at (813)-286-7776. If you've got some questions about your own social security, get on the horn with them. Come in for a consultation and a conversation. (813)-286-7776. This has been retirement planning redefined for John and Nick. I'm Mark and we'll see you next time.

    We start by talking about a burnout experience I had a few years ago, and how I recovered. In essence, we're talking about managing your nervous system. Doing so is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health and well-being. There are phases of this experience which Matt details on this show. The first is fight, flight or freeze. The next is impaired decision-making ability and the final phase is mental and physical burn out. Matt shares his experience with burn out and then goes on to explain his current strategy for avoiding a nervous system meltdown. To understand his strategy it's important to first understand some basics about the nervous system. Your nervous system is divided into two parts: the sympathetic (this is where the fight, flight or freeze system comes from) and the parasympathetic (this is where all the healing happens within your body). Going more in-depth, in most instances exercise puts your body into fight or flight mode. This includes things like lifting and running. The exercises that are healing for your body are tai chi and yoga, they activate your parasympathetic nervous system. When you're breathing deep and slowly that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, when your breathing is more rapid your sympathetic nervous system is engaged and you go into fight, flight or freeze mode. Personally, I've been doing breath work for 20 years including meditation. Breathing can change your brain state, belly breathing is a necessary part of this. By allowing your belly to come out with your breath your lungs will open up so you can get fuller and deeper breaths. I start every day by doing a few quick exhales and then long and slow inhales. I do the 10-10-10-10 process which is 10 seconds in, 10 seconds hold and 10 seconds exhale and then 10 seconds with no breath. This is also called box breathing and you can start with just a few seconds (like 4 or 5) and work your way up to 10. Healing The Body to Avoid Burn Out Next, we talk about brain waves and neural feedback. Neural feedback is brain measuring feedback system that feedbacks to you what is happening. It's like a GPS system that trains your brain to hit different states. These different states fall in one of 5 categories, three of which are healing and two of which are fight/flight/freeze. The healing states are alpha which is when you are relaxed but alert, then there is theta which is even slower and deeper than alpha. And the last of these three is delta - that is the state we are in when we are sleeping. On the fight, flight or freeze side, the two states are beta and gamma. Beta is when you are engaged and focused and thinking. Anxiety looks like too high levels of beta. Gamma is a very high spiritual state, it is very powerful and intense but there is a cost to it. We also discuss dopamine levels and blue light from social media and technology, before we move into how to know we are overstimulated and heading towards burn out. One of the big X factors in avoiding burn out is resilience, there is a physical component to this. Matt has worked to increase his through neural feedback and also cleaning out his limbic system. (The limbic system is one component of our nervous systems, it is responsible for our emotions). He has cleaned out his limbic system by facing and healing old emotional wounds. Take for example the person who was bitten by a dog and doesn't like them, even though it's been 40 years since they were bitten. They haven't healed that experience and their limbic system will respond to dogs as if they were about to relive that old experience of being bitten. One way to work on these old emotional wounds and put your nervous system in a more relaxed state is through EFT (the Emotional Freedom Technique), it is also known as tapping. EFT immediately starts to shift your nervous system into parasympathetic. When you tap the specific points in EFT your nervous system shifts over into a parasympathetic state.  You can also do neural feedback, meditation and practicing gratitude. Pay attention to how often you laugh - if you are laughing you are probably in parasympathetic mode. Another piece of avoiding burn out is macro and micro recovery. In general, the harder you want to drive the harder you need to focus on recovery. If you want to drive your body like a race car then you need a really good pit crew and really high-quality components to put your car back together, or you will crash and burn! There are some supplements you can take to help with this. For the fight, flight or freeze, things like coffee, THC, caffeine, etc would fall under this category. But you can stack parasympathetic supplements with sympathetic supplements to counterbalance their effect. Matt talks about which he likes best and why, plus which essential oil has been shown to increase alpha brain waves. You'll also hear how we both healed ourselves with magnesium and why floating was part of that! It's all here on episode 31 of Awesome Health Podcast with Matt Gallant. Episode Resources Magnesium Breakthrough Oura ring Biostrap Info on EFT The Powerful Engagement, by James E. Loehr and Tony Schwartz PDF on Flight, Fight or Freeze Masszymes (code cheat10) Read the Episode Transcript : Wade Lightheart: Good afternoon. Good morning and good evening, wherever you are. It's Wade T Lightheart here with my cofounder of BiOptimizers Matty G. I am so pumped about today. Wade Lightheart: We haven't done a podcast together. We haven't done an Awesome health Podcast forever. And crime is pretty much, and we're gonna actually increase these over the next while because you know, Matt is a wealth of information. He's on the bleeding, the literally the bleeding edge. He does bleed literally to kind of optimize his health regularly by taking a variety of blood extractions and testing a lot of different things. We're going to get into that in one of the future podcasts. But today we're going to go kinda back the truck up. We're going to talk about something that every high performer deals with and everybody listening to this is going to deal with this. And that is burnout and its relation to the nervous system. What is the relationship? Because if you're kind of into by optimization, uh, or you know, you call yourself a biohacker or whatever, everybody gets pretty much into that area because their, their mind is writing checks that their body can't cash. Wade Lightheart: Uh, and you know, part of the, uh, pro high performer is to find that balance, that balance between am I performing at a high level and am I destroying my body to do that? And it was kind of cool in the 80s to do that. It's not cool as we move into 2020 it's about I want my cake, I want to eat it too. I want to be a superhuman. And we're on the edge of the evolutionary parts of what it takes to become a superhuman. And most people want to become a superhuman because they recognize, you know, there is that angle that we were getting. We're getting examples of people who are delivering at super high levels, but what is the, what is the components? What do you need to do? What are the daily practices? What are they, what are the things to watch out for? How do you end up in the burnout? How do you destroy yourself? Matty G, what do you gotta say about this right now I've been doing all the talking, let's say on this Matt Gallant: because I'm going to make a bold statement, which we both love to do, which is I think in terms of quality of life, understanding what we're going to be talking about today, probably the most important thing, and we're going to get into that. So there's my bold statement, the most important system in the by for quality of life. That's the topic. Wade Lightheart: All right. Matt Gallant: So let's, so, so wait, let me cue you what for a second. So, you know, just a little bit of background. Wait, I've been friends for what, 20 years, a long time. And uh, we went through something a couple years ago that I, I've never seen him go through that in our relationship. And it was incredible, you know, less than, I mean, I always love learning from other people's mistakes. And, uh, we had, you showed me again in a lot of things of what not to do and it was really powerful and, and, and I was thinking about that the other day in aspire, today's topic. So why don't you share what happened and the aftermath of that. And I think it'll, it's a perfect segue into the today's conversation. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. Great. So I'm going to talk about the deep level or the deep cost of, uh, doing more than your physiological capable or, and what are the general go to moves that people make on a consistent basis rationalize, which sets them up for a deep failure. So a few years back, um, so keep in mind, I'm kind of living the, the, what I would call the Tim Ferris lifestyle, the quote unquote four hour work week. Nobody actually works the four hour where we, but you know, I'm traveling around the world, I'm living where I want to live, I've got multiple online businesses and then everything is kind of, you know, going along and you kinda just assume, but what happens inside any business, there are certain components where you've got to get laser focused. You've got to adapt to new skills, you've got to develop new capabilities. And there's an easy assumption, especially in today's world where we kind of, we all think that we can do multiple things, you know, 50 different things because of all the digital technology. Wade Lightheart: But there's a certain point in our biology where we don't adapt to these, what I would call silicone brain and our carbon brain or carbon brand is the one we were born with. The silicone brain is the extension and right now there's a lot of input data that's coming in in the nervous system, especially if you're running businesses and when you go up in business there's more data coming in. So I ran into this trouble and so what my answer was is, well I'll just work more. Okay. So I can remember it started, I was in Bali and uh, you know, I'm running a company that I'm, I'm in kind of startup mode over there. I've got on one business that's kind of in steady mode and then I've got BiOptimizers which is going into grow like extreme growth mode. And as you can imagine, those are three different stages of business that don't actually match. Wade Lightheart: And so I'm doing mornings with one business partner, uh, early. More like I'm a meeting with him doing that stuff. I'm doing my regular business, my kind of cashflow business in the afternoons and I'm staying up till like three four 30 in the morning. So I'd sleep three hours, wake up, do one business, go for a massage in the afternoon, come back, go to work again, sleep for an hour and a half, wake up and then work the evenings. And it all looked like it would go right. So after a couple months of that, I was really starting to pay the price and what I'm doing to, to manage that. As I'm upping, I'm increasing my caffeine take, I'm increasing my new tropics so that my brain is focused. So I, I feel like I'm laser and for some things you are, and I feel like I've got the energy cause I do, but it's like paying your mortgage off with their credit card, your, your, you've got your mortgage at 5% interest, which is manageable maybe over 30 years. Wade Lightheart: And then you've got your credit card bill, which is at 19.99% so I'm paying the 5% with the 19.99 so that the deficit is growing. Like if you've been in New York city and you've seen that deficits sign of how much the national debt is going, that's a great example. And only you're doing this not just with money, you're doing this with your physical energy units and still kind of manageable. So I move to Panama because I'm like, you know, I can't handle it. It's the time zone. You know, if I would just in the one time zone, now keep in mind, Matt and I are living about eight and a half minute walk from each other. And over the course of, I believe it was four and a half months, Matt and I saw each other physically five times. Okay? Like we're best friends, we're hanging out all the time. Wade Lightheart: I only got time to see him and, and he's, and what happened is I'm, I'm still burning and I'm still going. I'm still trying to do all these things. And what happened is the unexpected happened. I had a problem in my growth business and that was a challenge with my partner. And there was a bunch of challenges that came up. And that's the piece that takes you out. It's the unexpected where you've got to go to another level and solve problems. You haven't. So, well, guess what? That's when I ran out of gas and literally physiologically I was burnout. Um, it didn't matter how much caffeine I was taking, it wasn't helping. It was also putting me in an unresourceful psychological state and unresourceful emotional and, and, and at the very low point, uh, Matt and I went for dinner at a restaurant. He like, Hey bro, how's it going? Wade Lightheart: And I said, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm living in hell and I can go back years and years before. Um, when I was competing, and Matt could comment on this. In 2003, I went through a similar process. I was running my personal training business. I was preparing for the Mister universe contest and I had a serious problem with the relationship with and my relationship partner was addicted to drugs and creating a lot of havoc. And even though I broke up that was dealing with all these other X factors that you can't plan, plan on. And that set me up for the big burnout after mr universe. I was able to maintain that level for nine and a half months, but eventually the wheels came off and it was another six, seven months before I recovered from that. And I had to get rid of some things. Wade Lightheart: And so how do you handle this? The question is, and so how do you handle this? And, and for me it involved, uh, I had to go off caffeine completely. I stopped coffee. Um, I had to stop putting hard stop times on when I was working, when I wasn't working. Uh, I had to start taking vacations. I wasn't taking vacations, you know, the, the four hour work week, it looks like you're on vacation, but you're really not, you're, you know, or that kind of digital nomad lifestyle. And, uh, and then I had to take a hard look about my own skillsets based on where the growth I wanted to experience in my own business. So how do I, how do I become more efficient and more effective at new things? How do I let go of things that I'm not good at? How do I improve the physiological recovery components in my body, which we're going to get into here. Wade Lightheart: And what are the things do I gotta drop that's maybe, you know, how do I get out of the credit card paying the mortgage debt from an energy kind of standpoint? So that's where I was. I implemented a lot of new things. One of the, you know, one of the big things that getting off the caffeine, cranking magnesium, uh, to, to, to, to, you know, literally the toilet, the toilet experience where you're, you're watching, you know, cause that's one of the big nervous system burners, uh, essential fatty acids and things like that. So yeah, that was, that was my perspective perspective. Quickly, we'll dive into a little bit more of a, Matt, you want to add to that from your perspective cause you're on kind of the outside looking in and you know me pretty well. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. You know, it was um, first of all I understood why you were doing what you were doing. Uh, I think it was again, a lot of things you could have done differently, which was pretty much we're going to talk about today. All the different things that you can do. Just to zoom out. What we're really talking about is managing your nervous system and we're gonna say managing, cause I like it better than balancing balancing. What does that really mean? So, um, managing nervous system is probably one of the most important things to avoid waiting experience or to avoid the slot zone. Cause if you go to the other mode of just, and I've got friends that are stuck in that zone too, which is not good. Um, or they're just kind of relaxing for years and they're not technically retired. But anyways, so hold on her topic. But we're really talking about managing nervous system. Wade Lightheart: And when I was looking at Wade, he was cranking, cranking, cranking. Then I first thing I think the first system that went offline was probably his emotions. Um, you know, again in, we're gonna talk about kind of the different set of emotions in the different parts of nervous system, but he shifted completely to fight or flight or freeze zone emotionally. And then the, the mental capacity started dropping. Just the kind of decisions you were making, waiters, the way you were thinking. I'm like, you know, I know, I know you enough to know that that's not the thought you would've had prior. And um, so that was the kind of the next phase. And then you kind of like, you described, you went to hell. And then just to make this more real on a numbers level, I have this neurofeedback system at home and at wired Wade's brain to it. Wade Lightheart: And the amount of electricity in Wade's brain in that moment was about a quarter of my friend who's 76 years old. Like, like he is, you know, we're not gonna say he was brain dead, but it wasn't far away. On an electrical level, literally. Um, and, and for those of you that don't understand that that's a lot of your, your states in your mind and how you think come from electrical energy. So Wade had literally like just burnt out. The electrical energy is brain plus his body weight. It took you what, like a year to bounce back from that, you know, like, like on all levels. Like you, you kind of were coming and I I was seeing you come back online again first. Uh, your, your executive functioning, your brain and then your emotions, but it took you about a year. Is that right? Wade Lightheart: Yeah, it uh, I would say yeah, probably a good year. Yeah, it was about, it was about 12 months to recovery and, and going back, say when I had my other burnout in 2003, that was a six month recovery period. It was actually actually if I look all told it would be nine months, cause there was the three months of catastrophic rebound rug gained all the weight and things like that, which is usually a sign of adrenal fatigue. You start just putting on weight and can't kick get it off, that's a, that's a good indication that you're, you're tracking in the wrong direction. It's kind of like the fat cat businessman image that we all have in our minds. And um, and so this time it was about a year. So you're looking at, if you look at the age difference, there was an extra three months of recovery even though I had way more tools than I had back then. So you're probably looking at a two X Wade Lightheart: factor just with the age. Um, and my rationalization for it. No. I want to be quick about, before we get into the mechanics, the rationalization was as it is, you know, my mentality is just go in and take on as much as you can until you blow. And when you blow, you get really laser clear with kind of painful realities of what's working and what's not working. I'm not recommending that strategy. It's a strategy that I've done to make quantum jumps and I feel I made that quantum jump now. But you can avoid that. You can avoid that. Matt, what's your, what's your comments on that as far as how you kind of look at it cause you're kind of a hyper growth oriented person and in far as burnouts in your own life of what you've had and what you and why you've kind of aggravated there the way that you approach things now. Wade Lightheart: Yeah, I think, um, I only really hit one burnout, which was in my twenties there was a lot of like micro things. So, but in my twenties I decided to do a crazy experiment of sleep deprivation and work a holism to the max. So I got up to, I was doing 80 hours a week in the gym, like literally 80 hours in the gym working. I was a trainer, plus I was training twice a day. Plus I was recording a hard rock album, plus I was learning marketing. So I was doing all these things at a time and I'm like, okay, well I need to sleep less. How old were you at this time? Um, was 25 photos on that later or probably had much more severe consequences. So I'm like, okay, I need to sleep less. So let me start cutting my sleep back by 15 minutes, like every week or so. Wade Lightheart: So starting out like seven hours and six and a quarter, six and a half and five and then I, you know, and then it got to the point where it was a really interesting thing. I think around the five hour Mark, like I had to drink water nonstop to stay awake. Like if, if I, if I got even like 1% dehydrated I would just crash. The other thing too is like you get so sensitive with food, like certain foods would make me crash instantly. So you know that was kind of interesting experiment cause every little thing would either just throw me off or keep me going. But I, I just crashed and burned and our thicker on four hours and 25 minutes or 15 minutes at four, four and a quarter is when I ended the experiment had declared unsuccessful and then read a book called power sleep and went the other way and it took me, it took, I think it took me like four months and, but I wasn't using caffeine, thank God. Wade Lightheart: But, um, I hadn't discovered caffeine at that point. It took me I think four months of sleeping around 10 hours a day to, of recover from that and then then my sleep kind of normalized. But that was it. So since that time, you know, I've become very, very hyper aware of, okay. You know, there's all these signs that I look for including, um, you know, my executive functioning starts dropping. In other words, my capacity, how I feel, um, I'm not enjoying work as much. And that's a classic sign too, from like over training, even in the gym, like you're training really hard and you just, it starts to feel like a chore. That's a scientifically that, okay. Time to back off. Um, so I've got all these different signals. Plus I use like the oral ring so I can see my HRV and my heart rates. Wade Lightheart: So, you know, that starts getting out of whack. I know my nervous system is stressed. We'll talk more about that in a second. But yeah, so, so my strategy now, and you know it, we'll talk about how to change this permanently too. Cause I used to kinda hit a red line maybe three, four times a year now. Okay. I got to go on vacation versus now, I can't remember the last time I hit, it's probably been like a year and a half, two years now. Like there's still like a yellow zone on the heart, on the RPMs that, uh, that I'll hit, you know, a couple of times. But I don't tend to get red. And like I used to. And a lot of it's because of the stuff we're going to talk about. So I just want to zoom out and break down what we're talking about. Wade Lightheart: So we're talking about the nervous system, which divides into two. So you have the parasympathetic system, which we're going to call the healing system of the body. Okay. And it's a very accurate description because all the healing happens in that zone as far as your body's concerned. Then there's the sympathetic nervous part of the nervous system, which is fight, flight, or freeze. So let's just go back to the caveman days. And there is a cyber saber tooth tiger chasing you. You need to activate your fight, flight or freeze system a hopefully fight or flight kicks in. Cause if you freeze your dead, um, but either you're running really fast or you're gonna fight this threat and that's a huge part of, you know, survival. Right? And really it's kept us alive. And if it wasn't for that, probably, uh, there'd be no humans [inaudible] ology these, these are, these are things that are built over millions of years in your nervous system that are intrinsic with being a human. Wade Lightheart: It really intrinsic with being an animal. You can see that in a dog or cat. Like, you know, the, these are all part of the animal brain. I mean really we're talking in bacteria will recoil against a toxic substance, right? It's flighting from it. You know, you took a single cell organism with mercury and it recoil. So it's built rate into every cellular system that we see today. Just kept us alive. So, so just for the purpose of this podcast, we're going to talk about the healing system and we'll just call it the fight or flight system. Um, so you know, again, when there is a threat, just to go one level deeper here, when there is a threat, there is again three potential responses, which is, you know, I'm gonna fight this thing. I'm going to run away from this thing or I'm going to freeze like a deer in the headlights, which is probably the worse option. Wade Lightheart: So that's again, the fight or flight. So let's go through different things in different parts of the body and we're going to kind of, uh, organize them in different categories. And by the way, there's a P O one page PDF that you can look at that'll show you this as bioptimizers.com/nervous system and you'll be able to see what I'm about to walk us through. So let's start with exercise. And exercise is primarily fight or flight. So when you're lifting weights, that's a fight or flight response. You're playing sports, it's a fight or flight response. Even things like running, I mean, you're literally like it's flight, right? Like you're running. Now on the healing side, there are some exercises and two that come to mind is, is tide CI and yoga. So Tai-Chi is this really slow type of, of movement that again, with the breathing and just this slow movement activates your parasympathetic, uh, or in your healing part of your nervous system. Wade Lightheart: So I haven't done Tai Chi. I've done a lot of yoga. And yoga is really interesting because it's really, you know, it kind of physically intense, but because you're breathing and really slowing down the breadth and breadth is a huge part of managing your nervous system. And we don't want you to talk about your breathing techniques in a, in a minute cause you've been a lot of that. But when you're breathing deep and slowly, that activates the healing part of the nervous system. If I start hyperventilating, that activates my fight or flight response. And that's what happens when you're fight or flight. You know, you start hyperventilating because you're trying to get more oxygen to the brain. So anyways, Wade, maybe talk about the breathing stuff and we'll, we'll get into meditation in a second. But uh, I know you've done a little bit of yoga and I know that you do a lot of breathing exercises almost every day. Wade Lightheart: So maybe talk about the breath and how you use it to change your nervous system. Yeah, I agree. Great points. So, and I will make one caveat in regards to yoga. Some of the newer forms of yoga are what I would stay more into the fight or flight stuff. So when you get into the stuff like the power yogas and things like that, which are outside of maybe the classical styles that were cultivated in India, cause you know, yoga has got all these branches are now moving more to an exercise format. And those, I'm not saying I'm not discounting that they're valuable as an exercise, but they will not give you that parasympathetic response the same way. So let's talk about healing. Um, with the breathwork. So I've been doing breathwork literally for the last 20 years and through meditation and you learn a lot of different things about breathwork. So the breathing is, and we talk about this in the awesome health course. If you haven't downloaded or got involved with the health of melted RV, we actually go really, really deep on this where I can share with you exactly how you do these things. Wade Lightheart: Breathing is the only thing that you do, both consciously and unconsciously. In other words, you can think about your breathing and change its rate either faster or slower or it happens unconsciously. And for most people it's unconscious. You don't ever think about it. It just happens unless of course you're under water and suddenly here without it, then it's like, Oh, um, so what was discovered in ancient forms of practice and going back at least 6,000 years, maybe even beyond that, is that you could change your brain state, your focus ability. And now that's all been proven through science. That was kind of a lot of thought of airy fairy ideas by these kind of mystical people that you know were funny. Beards and roads and stuff and well it actually has now been proven by science. Thank you to the Dalai Lama who I think brought a lot of advanced, uh, breathwork people are meditators to the world of science so that we could actually track and see how their brains look in their brains look very different than the ordinary person. Wade Lightheart: And one of the ways they do this is by practicing and breathing. So there's a couple of things to do now. What's interesting in Eastern philosophy, the exhale is the start of the breath. And what the exhale process does is it takes carbon out of the system. And by de carbonating. The blood is actually what creates the healing component. The oxygen component will come on by itself, but by starting with the exhale, a conscious exhale, then when the oxygen comes in, then you're going to load up your hemoglobin a lot more, carry more oxygen into. If you carry more oxygen inside the cell without a like a rapid kind of breathing, that's what switches you over into the healing side of the nervous system of the parasympathetic. So all breathing practice would start out with maybe some short quick breasts like and then a slow or even a double in. Wade Lightheart: Here we go and take us short and then a slow so that you actually start to train your body to take a deeper breath and to lower part of lungs is mostly when you're sitting, you're getting about 30% of the oxygen inside your body. The other piece that you need to learn to, which is counter to my bodybuilding world, is to learn how to belly breathe. So, fortunately when I was a kid, um, I had a world-class music teacher and they taught us how to belly breathe and belly breathing is where you actually let your belly come out even while you're sitting. And what that does is that opens up your lungs so that you can get fuller, deeper breasts. Now I know bodybuilding, which I learned years later, is you're always trying to keep your stomach in. So you think about a bodybuilder wear to the beach, right? Wade Lightheart: Cause he's holding that in. So practicing learning to let your belly on the inhale as opposed to inhaling through the chest, which is what most people think they do there. It's got, you know, it's kind of like this way as opposed to slower down, deeper inside your body. And even the top musical people, if you go to Roger loves a course, I think he's the best speaking a coach in the world. He spends a lot of time on teaching you how to breathe. That's how the best musicians make the best sounds and get that deep resonant voice that you hear through singing is how you belly breathe. And so what I do, I start every day. I do some quick exhales, right? I do some quick exhales and then I do long and slow inhales. I'll start off with the process. I call it the 10 10 10 10 program, which is 10 seconds in tech, 10 seconds, hold 10 seconds, exhale, 10 seconds with no breath. Wade Lightheart: Now when you start that out, you're probably only going to do maybe three or four seconds and what's interesting is you'll start to realize is that you don't have the lung capacity, you, it feels like you don't have the lung capacity to hold your breath. It's particularly on the exhale more than three or four seconds and there's a panic part which indicates that your in sympathetic nervous system as you go through this, and sometimes it's called box breathing, you know it's what your, each breath is the same amount. By doing that, imagine a foresight at breath that the, you know, your exhale and then your inhale and then your hold and then your exhale and leave. Each one of those are the sides of a box. Okay. Those, if you're doing five seconds or 10 seconds or however long, those are going to indicate how quickly you get into sympathetic. Wade Lightheart: And usually once you get over that between five and 10 seconds, if you can get into that range, you're going to be moving into sympathetic nervous system, or excuse me, parasympathetic nervous, out of sympathetic into parasympathetic, so out of fight or flight into healing. And think about this. When you're in a stressful situation, let's say something's coming up or you're going to go on stage to speak, or you've got a fight coming up or something stressful is coming in, what do people naturally do? They go, you know that you, you instantly do this. And so what you're doing is consciously leveraging that response, slowing it down so you don't go into that adrenal fight or flight vote. And now one last piece before we kick it over to Matt is there's a lot of different ways that you can do this and there's various techniques where you start actually working in feeling the energy revolve inside your system. And that's what people are talking about, chi or prana. And as you deeply meditate, you actually get to feel these systems that aren't available to us. But when I was in the middle of my fight or flight craziness was literally the first time in 20 years that I wasn't able to do my meditations. Wade Lightheart: I literally couldn't do my meditations because I wasn't able to escape the fight or flight mode. It was so ingrainly deep. And that was of course a extremely painful. Matt Gallant: So there's also, first of all there's a lot of different breeding techniques and what we do is great and it does get a lot of benefits to clearing out CO2 and and different things. Um, I got wired to a medical grade breathing HRV machine. So let me just talk about heart rate variability for a second because it's probably the most useful number to manage your nervous system, your age, your heart rate variability. HRV is the best indicator to see where you're at in which direction you're going in. So what that means, it's actually the time in between the heart beats and going back to breathing. When you inhale, you will typically see a shortening of the time. Matt Gallant: And then when you're exhaling that it, it goes a little longer. Now if you're stressed out, there is no, there's very little variability. That means the heartbeat is like kinda like a piston. I remember thinking is not a good thing. No, it's not means your body's stress versus if I'm breathing and I'll talk with the kind of the metric breathing naturally, I'll just call it. Uh, I should see massive variability, which by the way, a couple of tools to measure that. One is the o-ring, which I have one right here that kind of gives me my score for the night. I can see kind of a graph of what happens to my heart rate variability. Um, and another one, which is more of a real time is called the buyer strap. So we'll put a link, um, and, and the again bioptimizers.com/nervoussystem so you can see the, the links and perhaps invested in was quick, quick, quick question, which do you prefer? Wade Lightheart: Um, for what reason? The bio strap versus the oura ring. I think that's a good distinction. Matt Gallant: I like, I liked the oura ring for measuring how fried my nervous system is in the morning. I think. I think it's got a better set of metrics and algorithms, but the buyer strap, um, let's, I want to do something and just see what my HRV is or again, it's not just HRV, it's got a bunch of metrics. I can't do that with the o-ring. So the bio strap for like more real time. I, let's say you want to do an experiment, see, Hey, how did that affect my HRV? Literally two minutes you push a button and two minutes later you get a score. So I like both of them. I use them for different things. But so that's a good question. So anyways, HRV is the most important thing. Going back to this machine that I got wired to. The way it works is you, you do these different breathing times and again, it's not a box breath. It's you know, either four seconds usually starts four seconds and four seconds out, five seconds in, five seconds out. Like you fold the system and then it tells you exactly what your optimal breathing pace is to maximize HRV. In other words, to relax your body. And for me, for an example, it was like six and a half seconds. So in other words, if I just breathe like Matt Gallant: I mean no, no holding and no pressure, no pushing. Cause it was interesting if I, if I kind of like, cause I did, I've done a yadda, a lot of yoga and yoga you do like you kind of like, you know, kind of squeeze your throat a little bit to push the bread out a little slower. If I did that, it would actually stress out my nervous system a little bit. So again, there's a lot of different breathing techniques. I'm just sharing this one. So for most people's like five, six seconds just in out, um, no, nothing for his big belly breath like Wade said, those, those things work. So anyways, that, that I think covers exercise. There's a lot of other stuff to talk about. But this is a great segue into brainwaves. Matt Gallant: So both Wade and I have done several rounds of medical wiring level, neuro feedback. So what is neurofeedback? It is a brain measuring feedback system. You get these electrodes wired to your brain and they feed back to you what's happening. So if you're doing the right thing, you get a a reward in the form of these beautiful audio tones. And if you're doing the wrong thing and go silence, your brain's like, Whoa, that didn't work. Let me try something else. And when you're doing the right thing, you're like, Oh, okay, that's what I need to do. Let me do more of that. So think of it kind of as a GPS. If you're driving around and you head on on the wrong street, the GPS has a turnaround. Um, that's basically how it is. But you're training your brain to hit all these different States. Matt Gallant: So there's five major groups of brainwaves and there's three of them that are in the healing side, and two are more on the fight or flight side. So on the healing side, yet alpha, which is relaxed but alert. And then that's a great kind of first goal for meditators is to reach that state. Um, then if you slow your brain waves down even more to I four to seven Hertz, then you hit feta, which is a lot slower and much deeper state. And then if you slow it down even more, which is what we hit when we sleep also is about zero to four Hertz. That's Delta. So if you think about how much healing, how, like all the healing in your body pretty much happens when you're in Delta. Deep sleep, most of it, right? Your growth hormone, your testosterone, all your hormones get produced in that phase. Matt Gallant: So again, going back to that's the healing side now on the fight or flight side, yeah, beta. So right now we had an hour in beta, we're engaged, we're focused, we're thinking, and you know, if, if beta goes too high in the wrong places, the brain, that's what anxiety looks like. That's what happens. It's like your brain has too many, uh, the of these beta brain waves and you know, we all know people like that. They're kind of stuck in that mode. You know, the way I would describe these people is they sleep. They, you know, that's the only time they're in parasympathetic, the only time during healing and they fall asleep. And most of them actually, if you have a lot of beta usually is bad sleep. It's a whole other topic. And then they wake up, they go right to beta, have a cup of coffee, go, you know, and then they fall asleep at night and then they repeat that cycle and they, they, they're kind of stuck into those two zones. Wade Lightheart: Can, can you talk about, cause I see this happening so much more with the role of digital devices now, and you could talk about blue light or stimulus and, and all that sorta stuff, which is, you know, Dr. Cruz talks a lot about this stuff. What's your take on all that and, and, and the role of technology of keeping us locked into beta and also maybe people not getting out into nature. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. That's, um, let me just finish the fight or flight on the brainwaves and we'll, we'll segue right into that. Cause it's a perfect segue. So the last wave I'll put in fight or flight is gamma, which gamma is an incredibly high spiritual state. Like you just kinda have this universal connection with higher power would say it that way. And one of our mutual friends, um, we named his name just to protect his anonymity, but he has the highest gamma that's ever been recorded at one of these brain, uh, facilities. And, you know, it fries him. I mean, it's a very, very intense brainwave. I mean, it's very intense. It's very powerful. It's incredible spiritual, but there is a cost to it. So, so that's why I kind of put in fight or flight anyways because the, a lot of psychics and stuff in that zone, I would think. Wade Lightheart: Or they kind of, you know, it's kinda like the wizard on the movie that pulls off the magic spell and then they're kind of wiped out on the song. It's kinda like, well, all right. So just to be completely unfiltered, um, one of our main spiritual mentors, David Hawkins, it does a lot of stories like this. They kind of had these massive spiritual jumps. Now, in my opinion, what's happening physiologically based on what we currently know is they have this massive, massive gay gamma Brae burst like a gamma burst on stars. They're just like, they're the same GAM all the time. And what we know with these experiences is that it takes them years in order to learn how to live with that, learn how to manage that and for do a Cawkins took them about seven years, um, at cart, totally three years anyway. It was all come on him or her Rishi didn't talk for years. Wade Lightheart: You can look through the histories of these kind of advanced mystics who been floated. Most of them go through this period where they're just, they're just not functional in the world at all. And I think a lot of it is learning to, to function with gamma, learn it that, you know, having the nervous system respond and adapt so that it had been as back to your question, um, first of all is, so let's segue to your transmitters and then we'll segue into your question because the neurotransmitters are the explanation to your question. Correct. So on the healing side, we have four main treat neurotransmitters. We have serotonin, which gets released when you eat sugar. That's one of the reasons people eat a lot of sugar because it makes them feel a little more relaxed. We have endorphins, which, you know, if you go to the gym it's kind of the rewards you get afterwards. Wade Lightheart: Running long distance biking. Endorphin highs. Matt Gallant: We have oxytocin, which is kind of the, the love molecule. When you first started dating someone first 12 months, there's a huge, or when a woman gives birth to a baby through the birth canal is the biggest boost of oxytocin. There is, I think. Right. And also that's why women love cuddling after sex. Cause there's a big oxytocin release and then there's an end of mine, which is the bliss molecule. So all four of those are more and bliss potential, easier in fight or flight. But those are on the healing side. And then on the fight or flight side, we have adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine. So if we look at technology and you know, all the phones and all the apps, they are, they are hijacking or dopamine system. So every time you get notifications that's activating dopamine, your brain feels like, Whoa, Hey, I'm a little bit important. Matt Gallant: Somebody reaching out. Somebody liked something, somebody messaged me. And when people are messaging you and commenting on your stuff or liking your stuff, that is releasing dopamine every single time. So most of us, and I'm not immune to this, we're all trapped in these dopamine loops to various levels. And you know, there's a lot of things we can do to manage that. Um, and some people again are really completely lost in it. Now blue light is, is actually more fight or flight. We know this because it's designed to wake us up, right? When somebody hit our eyes, it's like go time versus you know, other colors of light like orange and the reds or more relaxation. And you know, if for those of us that wear blue light blocking glasses, we know that our brain starts just shutting down and downregulating. So that's the price on your nervous system of using these devices in a perfect world, probably three hours, four hours before bed. Matt Gallant: You just, you just get off the phones and the iPads. Your other thing too is that, ah, sorry, TVs, TVs. I mean old TV watching TV is an alpha. It actually increases alpha. It's where a lot of people like watching TV. I like watching TV. For me it's a good segue. Now the light is a different story, which I can hack with glasses. Now obviously depends on what I'm watching. If I'm watching horror movies and Rambo and commando and whoever, shoot, that's more dopamine, right? That's going to, so what you're watching is going to influence your neurotransmitters. Correct. But I like why wearing glasses couple of hours before bed. And that will again tell my brain to, it's nighttime, let me shut things down. But there's also the effects of wireless waves. So Bluetooth, wifi and what it seems to be doing is increasing dopamine. So even even just the, the waves that are blasting us nonstop, right. If I put my phone, probably 15 wifi that I can catch with my phone. So, and there's all kinds that I'm not seeing. Right. Um, so those waves seem to be increasing dopamine. So we have w the, the dopamine from the apps that dopamine from the blue light and the dopamine from all these singles. So it's not, it's no mystery that people are being hijacked from this stuff. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. Powerful information. Okay. So here's the stressors. How do we get it? So what are some physical indications that you've seen? If you could maybe walk me through some stages that people might notice when they're becoming overstimulated and headed to run down. What would you say from your observation? Cause you know, you've, you've dealt with a lot of high performers, you've coached a lot of high performers in you, you're pretty much surrounded by high performers. I was like what do you, what did you notice that they've given you feedback as well? Matt Gallant: So, well one of the big X factors of whether you burn out or not is resilience. So we could do a whole podcast on resilience cause it's a really interesting thing. Um, and resilience is primarily an emote. It's more of a limbic system thing. Now there's a physical component. Resilient. How tough are you in your pretty example wave? You know, you're as tough physically as, as anyone else I am that I know. But you know, one of the things that I've done, um, to to like probably increase my resilience, I'm going to say like 500%, maybe more in the last four years has been the neurofeedback but, but it's more specifically I'm cleaning out my limbic system. So you have all these, Wade Lightheart: when you say w when you say limbic system for our listeners, what do you mean by the limbic system? Matt Gallant: Okay. So the limbic system is one of the components of our nervous system. Okay. So it's kind of a sub component of it and that's where all of our emotions, so the emotional part of our nervous system is the limbic system, we'll just call it the emotional system. So we had this emotional system and when we see things that are similar to other painful experiences that we've had in the past, and if these painful experiences are not healed, okay, heal is the key word. If they're not healed, we will feel you're threatened by that experience or something similar. That experience for exactly whatever this, this thing that's in front of me that's reminding me of that thing that was painful. I go right to fight or flight, right, right. To fight, flight or freeze. I mean it's immediate because, and, and a great example, and we all know people that been bitten by dogs and you know, they're 40 50 60 years old, they'll still be scared of that, of that dog, even if it's like a small little dog. Wade Lightheart: A dog comes into the elevator, there's sweat, perspiration comes up, their tension comes up, the heartbeat adrenaline response. If you were to look at that, it's pretty significant. Or someone that's been in a car accident, they get in the car again and all of a sudden they start having a physiological response. Matt Gallant: Yeah. And it's very true even on micro levels. So for an example, you know, your mother told you, uh, you know, your grades aren't good enough. You know, like one of the things my dad told me like one time I hit like 96 and he's like, where's the other four? And that was something that I had to, to identify and heal because it was kinda driving the perfectionism in me and, and it was so, so there's a whole consequence cascade of consequences that can literally lead to character defects and sometimes character assets. Matt Gallant: Uh, and I love Joe Dispenza, us models on that. But going back to healing, one of the things that works incredibly well is EFT. So EFT immediately starts shifting your nervous system into parasympathetic. It's a very, very fast response because you're hitting these nine points. EFT stands for emotional freedom technique by the way. Correct. And there's probably more commonly known now as tapping. So you have these points you have, and if you're watching the video, you have this karate chop point, top of the head, top of the I side, below the eye, below the nose, below the lips, right where the crease in the chin, his collar bone, and then ribs. And when you tap these points, you're, your nervous system literally shifts over, which, so if I bring up and I like guide, I'm actually certified and I've guided people countless times to do this and I've never seen it not work. Matt Gallant: And I'm talking about like bringing up really painful experiences and shifting from, Oh wow, that was a really traumatic experience too. I'm at peace with it. I mean, big ones might take 15 minutes, but usually it's like five minutes. And for me, because I've done it so much, um, it's probably like 60 seconds, two minutes sometimes. So it's really good a thing. Probably one of the best sites to learn is that www, EFT, universe.com, or you can go to YouTube, just countless videos. So that's one thing. Um, the other thing you can do is neurofeedback, which again we talked about, so we don't really have time to talk with. That'd be a whole other podcast. Um, you know, meditation is definitely parasympathetic and, and you know, especially again, if you hit as soon as you hit alpha, you're in healing mode. So alpha theta you hit start handies a slower brain waves and that's the people that are stuck in beta all the time. Matt Gallant: If they could just learn to shift their brain waves over to a slower mode, they're are going to start healing. Um, so things you can do when you meditate that are highly effective. And again, these are different emotions that are parasympathetic, that are healing. One of them is gratitude, which is this at this point is extremely highly researched. Um, if you're actually feeling gratitude, you're in parasympathetic, you are in healing mode. You cannot, and I'm not talking about saying thank you verbally. I'm talking about feeling gratitude in your heart, in your body. If you're feeling that sensation, you are definitely in healing mode. There's no two ways about it. There's a lot of new techniques that people are talking about is starting the day by doing a gratitude list or sharing your gratitude list or what you're grateful for getting this as a practical implementation because a lot of people don't really feel gratitude, you know, in the world today, even though as humans listening to this podcast, we're in the top 1% of humans in history of the planet, most people are focusing on what they don't have as opposed to what they are. Wade Lightheart: And that that's the comparison problem is, is real and present and bring yourself back to that gratitude practices is a great, is a great thing. Yeah. Um, happiness in general. So you know, if you're feeling happy probably in parasympathetic joy, which you can kind of measure with laughter, which is one of the things I kind of pay attention to is like how much am I laughing? And if I, if I'm not laughing, I'm probably in fight or flight. Like, you know what I mean? Whatever. If I'm laughing a lot that I know I'm in a good space first my nervous system goes and if I notice that I haven't, I'm not really laughing. You know what I mean? Uh, and it's one of the things I look for in people too. Are they laughing a lot or do not laughing and I can kind of gauge where they're at, um, feeling, you know, peace, serenity. Matt Gallant: Obviously if you're feeling peace and serenity, serenity now as they said in Seinfeld, then yeah, you're in parasympathetic versus you know, fear, anger. Obviously those are total fight or flight or freeze emotions and then even drive like, you know, getting stuff done like Wade, you burn, you are burning yourself thought necessarily fear and anger for you is dry. That, that intense willingness. So you know, and I spend probably like eight hours of my day, sometimes 10, sometimes 12 in that zone. And it's just something to be mindful of. Is that, yeah, when we're driving hard on our projects or business or jobs or careers that you know, that his fight or flight like and it's a low level or fight or flight, I mean sometimes it's high level if you're really dealing with a lot of stress, which goes back to resilience, but you know, driving this is a fight or flight thing. So any comments on that Wade? Because again, that's really what took you out. Yeah. Wade Lightheart: I think there's also part of the representation of it comes down to what is valued in your own life and, and not understanding the recovery to drive ratio and how the, the harder you drive, the more to you need to manage your recovery. And uh, there's a great book, the powerful engagement, uh, which really breaks this down about the difference that started off with tennis players. And even though they all had relatively the same level of skills, the guys that were doing these micro arrests were actually dominating the tennis field. And it was an unconscious practice which had all kinds of applications in the business world. And one of the things that I think you were really clear about, um, is your commitment to both micro and macro recovery. You kind of went into that earlier cause you probably hit that burnout zone in your 20s and said, okay, I, and you know, we talked about how you, that became kind of like a, uh, an a breakthrough attention unit and for people who are listening to this podcast, that's what our whole point here is to create a breakthrough awareness level that the harder you want to drive, the more you need to focus on recovery and micro recovery and macro recovery as well Wade Lightheart: recovery components. It's like a race car and F1 formula cart. If you think about it as going around the track at 200 miles an hour and guess what? It needs to be fueled up a lot more than your regular car. It's burning through tires at a lot more than a regular car. Um, so if you wanna drive at 200 miles an hour in your life, you better have a pit crew and you better be putting all the high components or recovery on it or you're going into the wall and you're going to crash and burn. Matt Gallant: So we're, we're, we're about at the end of the, of the show. So I just want to start talking about, you know, supplements and different things that shifted nervous system. Let's start with the easy one. The fight or flight stuff. Um, coffee, you know, any type of stimulant, you know, even the new nicotine, I mean, all of those are, you know, we'll put cocaine, amphetamines, you know, all of that stuff is, is fight or flight or freeze, right? Wade Lightheart: What's your opinion on, uh, all the kind of, uh, cognitive enhancers that you see people using in the digital world. And also in, um, education universities like Ivy league schools and stuff. What would you clarify those and, and it, Matt Gallant: most of them are fight or flight on the Modafinil goals and which the, I would, Daphne knows probably like a two out of 10 cause there's a scale right? Like not everything is just tense. Wade Lightheart: Let's just talk about that because I think there's a lot of people that are using these things. I mean like Ted talk, I talk about the guys on wall street are now on cocaine, testosterone and Aderoll, you know. Matt Gallant: And you don't see testosterone is more of a fight or flight versus estrogen's more healing. So you know, the point is that yeah, like is probably like a seven or eight Modafinil is probably like a two on that, on that fight or flight scale. So there is, you know, again scale. But yeah, almost all the nootropics now there are some exceptions. So let's shift over drug the drug based nootropics. Yeah. But even, yeah, even some of the cleaner stuff. So if we shift over to [inaudible] and so the better blends are a combination of boats or for example LFE is parasympathetic, parasympathetic healing, which counterbalances a lot of the caffeine issues. So you can stack parasympathetic substances with stimulants and have a much more balanced nervous system response versus just going completely fighter flights would. That is a great tip for everybody. Well, just to cover some substances. Matt Gallant: We got reishi, I would probably rate it pretty low on healing, but you do feel a little bit of a shift. El Athenian, one of my favorites, I take about 400 milligrams before bed every night. CBD, CBN, CBG, those are three different cannabinoids. They are definitely on the parasympathetic side versus THC. More fight or flight lavender oil, one of the only oils research to show to increase alpha brainwaves, which is healing. I like taking a actually oral lavender oil before bed. Ashwagandha, I took two grams last night. I was a little wired, um, during the day. Shifted me right over and had a decent sleep. But the one I want to talk about and we'll do a whole podcast on this, uh, because they're gonna run out of time, but it's magnesium in both Wade and I uh, healed ourselves, healed our nervous system using magnesium. Like I got to the point because I was uh, you know, squeezing my drawings too much and my nervous system was literally getting raw. Wade Lightheart: You can burn the myelin sheet off your nerves and I couldn't drink coffee anymore. Like, if I drank coffee, I instantly felt like frazzled. I didn't get to it to the level we'd got, but I'm like, okay, I can't drink coffee anymore. I'm done. So I did a big magnesium cycle for around I think 90 days and around the 60 day Mark I'm like, I felt completely different. I felt kind of permanently relaxed. The magnesium is kind of the, the parasympathetic mineral, you know, nothing shifts you over on a mineral level or a macro. Probably the greatest deficiency out there in North Americans right now is magnesium, I think. I think it's only 32% of the population is getting the RDA levels. And that's not what the optimal level is. Yeah. Because probably there's the hard to get from food. That's the problem. It's almost impossible to eat enough magnesium. Correct. Like it's, that's, that's the fundamental challenge. So even if you're, you know, one of these, Hey, let me try to get the perfect guide going. Um, it's, it's really challenging to do that. So that is the list of, um, parasympathetic and sympathetic. Like I said, go to box.com/nervous system. I've got this entire doc including a couple of things we didn't have a time to cover. Wade Lightheart: We'll add them in and throw in a couple of things. So we'll go a little bit longer. What else can we do? Cause I know you've gone, you spent years in testing, literally has insurance of substance and social unload on us a little bit and give us a little extra bonus. Matt Gallant: Yeah. Um, so I'm going to talk about my favorite favorite thing like which this is about biohacking thing. It's not a substance, but it does relate to magnesium. The number one thing for me, like by a long shot, I've talked a lot about our guys. Joe Rogan's, a huge fan is floating. So floating is a sensory deprivation tank. You're literally floating in this salt magnesium, salt soup. It's made with Epsom salts, which is a magnesium salt and you're floating. The water is the same temperature as your body. It's pitch black. So all your senses get a reset. Like you're not getting stimuli like you normally would. Like even if I'm sitting in this chair, I'm feeling gravity right now, right? Like, my feet are feeling gravity from the floor. My butt's feeling gravity from the chair. But when you're floating, you kind of just not feeling anything. Matt Gallant: You're just, you're not really feeling the water. You don't have light against stimulating your brain. It's really usually completely pitch. There's no sound and you're absorbing magnesium. So I love to float for like 90 minutes. And I mean, the level of shift, like I've gone places. I remember we went in LA, I flew in Venice beach, right? Yeah. Flare crash, got the best tanks. That's the one he makes. Joe Rogan's tax. Um, float labs is a, his company. So I flew to LA. I could tell like my, you know, when I get fried, I get these swollen plans here, the lymph nodes, so I could, I was fried. I said, Hey, wait, let's go. Floats away. And I went floating and after the float, all my, you know, all my glands were, we're back to normal and I felt incredible. So there, there's one thing I could recommend is definitely floating, um, to, to shift over your, uh, nervous system. Wade Lightheart: Chiropractic too. I have a world-class chiropractor, which I'm actually going to go see here in about an hour and a half. Um, is also way that you're able to take relief off the nervous system if you have a really good chiropractor. Of course. Uh, I've got what we call the wizard here in Vancouver. There's a Gary down in LA that his, his whole thing at the human garage, they've got some really great things to switch you into that healing mode. And, and a really good chiropractor will be able to take load off the nervous system. And one of the things that I didn't have on those travels is I didn't have my chiropractor Wade Lightheart: who was always giving me that feedback of where I was. And one of the big recovery modalities that I've experienced is by using chiropractic care. Matt Gallant: I will call it out for a shameless pitch. We have a new product called magnesium breakthrough, which is seven different magnesiums, including cofactors in our humble opinions. It is the best bang museum out there. So what we recommend you do if you're feeling a little fried, a little bit in the fight or flight system, is to take around three doses a day. It is better to spread your dose because if you take too much magnesium at once, you may run to the bathroom because it can disaster. But however, key, powerful note, we formulated this, the minimize that effect. So when we, when we formulated this cause it goes different magnets, some magnesiums pull a lot more water than others. Matt Gallant: Um, we minimize the, the water pulling effect. So we recommend starting off it probably half a gram three times a day and then building up to three grams. So it'd be a grand three times a day. That's probably a good dose. Um, I mean if you really want to push it, you can try to get to like four or five, six grams. That's, that's where I ended up, uh, when I was really healing that thing and got it to five grams, um, and felt incredible. So anyways, that is our new product. Uh, magnesium breakthrough.com. You can go on our sidebar optimizer.com and check it out. So amazing product. Really excited to share this because we know both Wade and I have experienced the, the healing benefits of magnesium. Um, it's, it's incredible. It's literally one of the best supplements that I've ever experienced in terms of real world experiential benefits. And that's why we wanted to do a magnesium product and we didn't want to just do another me too. Magnesium. We wanted to do something special, which we have. So wait, maybe we'll close off your final thoughts on magnesium and your experiences. Wade Lightheart: Yeah, so, uh, I went the, uh, of course I'm an all in kind of guy as you imagined. And what I did is understanding when I was cooked a

Fabian talks with Mark Wallace for whom skiing has always been the driving force in his life. It took him from Saddleback to Park City and then all over the world as he lived the dream as a semi-pro ski racer. Mark learned the nuances of ski building during a job at a Boston construction firm, dedicating countless hours during nights and weekends. He started Parlor with two friends in an abandoned funeral parlor in Cambridge, honing the science and art of ski building. We discuss his company's focus and dedication to the sport and its tribe, how far the brand is able to take the important brand traits of customization and personalization and how Parlor leads with authenticity. If you are, just like me, into skiing or snowboarding, this episode is a must. If you like to learn more about connecting with your tribe or honing in the art of customization, this is a must-listen for you as well. You can learn more about Parlor via parlorskis.com, or as Mark showcased his approachability, you can just call him up, "anytime" at 413-884-4747. ________________Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter:               Welcome to Hitting The Mark, which is now a regular show coming to you every second Friday, so be on the lookout. Today is all about personalization, so much so that this episode is catered to one of my favorite things to do when I am not busy running my brand consultancy: And that is snowboarding. In fact, I just came back from beautiful Mammoth Mountain here in California where they - as of February 25th - received a whopping 562 inches of snow (that's more than 46 feet or, for our many international listeners, it is over 14 meters of snow). But I am just as happy to be back at the office since today I am joined by Mark Wallace, Co-Founder of Parlor, a custom ski brand from New England. From the first time his mother carried him down the bunny slope, skiing has been the driving force in Mark's life. It took him from Saddleback to Park City and then all over the world as he lived the dream as a semi-pro ski racer. Mark learned the nuances of ski building during a job at a Boston construction firm, dedicating countless hours during nights and weekends. He started Parlor with two friends in an abandoned funeral parlor in Cambridge, hence the name! Over years and many late nights honing the science and art of ski building, fueled by desire, beverages, and the most delicious pizza in all of Boston, Parlor Skis was born. Welcome to the show, Mark! M Wallace:                   Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely, it just occurred to me that even though we are only 11 episodes into Hitting the Mark, you're the second Mark I'm having on the show. I totally don't believe that this is by accident. Just like there's an unusual amount of dentists called Denis, women named Louise that are more likely to move to Louisiana and running my consultancy FINIEN with a name like Fabian. It seems like naming has a bigger subliminal impact than we thought. But sorry about my detour, I'm very happy to have another Mark on Hitting the Mark. Tell us a little bit about Parlor Skis, how it started, why you love what you do, and more importantly, why do your customers love what you do? M Wallace:                   Absolutely. You hit on something in the bio, but we started building skis in 2009, and we incorporated the business in 2013. We really saw that there was an unmet need, especially in New England, for both a brand that focused on a high-quality laminate construction, so a race style ski, but with a little bit more of an all mountain flair. That's how we started building and designing skis. We very quickly realized that personalization was core to delivering the best product for people. So, in order to, you need to understand the skier in order to build them the correct ski and be able to personalize it with graphics. So really the only way to do that is to build all the skis in house. M Wallace:                   So we set out with the goal of delivering the best ski and the best product to people possible, and we built a factory and a system around building custom skis in order to meet that need. F Geyrhalter:                 So, last year, I published a book titled Bigger Than This, in which I lay out eight traits that I saw startups embody in the way to turn into brands that people love. One of those traits is individuality. I talk about how customization is the best way to make a brand personable and to deeply connect with your audience. And even further, I discuss the idea of blending personalization and customization to create limited and often complete one-off products, and how it works magic for any brand. Your brand's tagline is custom to the core. In what ways do you customize your clients' skis? I mean, how far do you actually go? M Wallace:                   Well, it depends a little bit on the level, right? So we have three main product lines. We have our limited edition skis, which are sort of off the rack, ready to go, and you get all the sort of quality and design that goes into a Parlor, but without the personalization. Then we have two levels of custom ski. Our most popular ski is a custom graphics ski, which it allows you to change the outline, camber, construction and graphics of the ski sort of within a set parameters designs that we use a lot that we know work well. Then we also offer our raven series of black label, which is a full custom experience. With that, you get to control every detail of the ski. Outline, camber profile, construction, side cut, length, graphics, materials, sort of the whole nine yards. So it depends a lot on the needs of the skier and what they're looking for, but all of our skis are done through a personalized fit, so myself or my partner talks to the [inaudible 00:04:51] of our clients to make sure that they have a ski that's both personalizing and customized for their style and aesthetic. F Geyrhalter:                 So really, each ski is built to order at Parlor. How do you keep prices to a still affordable manner while growing your brand? M Wallace:                   I mean, it's been really ... there's a lot of pricing pressure in the hard goods market, especially retail. We felt that there are some custom builders that are much more expensive than we are. We've really worked hard to stay direct to consumer to provide that level of personalization and to keep our skis as affordable as possible. I mean, they're not inexpensive, right, but we feel we build with a higher quality and certainly more attention to detail. We provide a really good value on our skis. F Geyrhalter:                 For sure. I mean, it's truly amazing, because you let people like me come in for two straight to actually build my dream skis that are exactly to my very own specs, where I will build the basis, and cores, and all the way to printing my custom designed top sheets to sanding and then finishing the sidewalls. It's actually rather affordable, right, that entire experience is around the 1,500 bucks, where most top tier off the mill skis will run you around a grand. It's really the same price plus 500 for the two day of schooling, which to me sounds a such unique experience building your own skis hands on. When did you have that epiphany to push customization so far to actually let your customers take over the shop? Is that one of your biggest differentiators from other boutique ski makers? It seems very different. M Wallace:                   Yeah. I mean, we have the largest ski building class, if you will, in the country by quite a bit. It was a, like a lot of things here, one of the key elements to Parlor is the community that exists around it, which is largely based off our clients, but also just sort of people who have a passion about the sport, who're involved in ... we took a page out of Grain Surfboards playbook, we know the owners up there pretty well, it's a handmade wooden surfboard company in Maine where they offer class. They kind of urged into it, and we resisted for a while, because we didn't know how we do it. Then we had a group, a small group of people who really hounded us and wanted to come build skis. M Wallace:                   So we let them do it, and came up with a system and a program, and they had such an amazing experience that we decided to roll it out as a product. So it was really driven by our clients' and communities' desire to delve deeper into understand how skis go together, and create that sense of ownership and pride in that. It did allowed us to develop that product. F Geyrhalter:                 You hit in something super important, community, it seems to me with your events, you have one event called shop night, and you actually invite people over just to watch you build skis. And they can sip whiskey, and have a beer. Is it that community that you built over the years that spread the word organically with Parlor, like through those events? Or was it actually with the help of a PR agency? What was that big breakthrough moment? Was it all organic or was it like a big article or something that really pushed Parlor? M Wallace:                   No, it comes ... we love skiing here, we love talking about skiing- F Geyrhalter:                 You better. M Wallace:                   ... right. We do, and I think that a lot of that sort of grassroots and organic growth came from being very open and inviting to people and sharing that love and passion for the sport. We sort of, we act as a resource for a lot of our clients, we also provide a little bit of ski culture in Boston, you can come here and it smells like wax, and there are ski videos on, you can drink beer and tell lies about skiing. That's a big piece that draws that community together. It's a huge amount of our business is repeat and referral right now, and we're very grateful for that, but I think it really comes from just wanting to really focusing on providing good client service, building relationships with people and providing them with something that's different. Nobody wants to go back and buy a pair of Volkls after they've been to the shop, it's just not ... there's no reason to do that. So, that message has gotten out there, and it's slow and it's hard work, but we believe that if you care about what you're doing and you talk about that honestly the word is going to spread. F Geyrhalter:                 It's about authenticity. You guys do it for the love of doing it, and you have that background, so people can sense that and they can shoot the shit with you and just share that stoke and be the real ... hanging with buddies basically, that happen to build your skis. That's pretty cool for anyone who's a real dedicated skier. M Wallace:                   Right. F Geyrhalter:                 So, from a branding perspective, obviously with skiing and snowboarding, brand recognition is huge. You want everyone in the slopes to know what you're riding. Parlor is a little bit different, it's obviously extremely unique, but you want it to be a talking point when you're in the chairlift, right. From a branding design perspective, which elements actually stay unchanged on Parlor Skis so that I immediately recognize that those are a pair of Parlors, even though you let people completely customize the skis. Is there some consistency from one pair to another? M Wallace:                   All of our skis have a red base inlay that says Parlor on them, black bases, which are the highest quality base with the red inlay, it's sort of one of our signatures. We don't require that our logo is on top of all the skis, we really rely on the sort of word of mouth, again and the people wanting to talk about their product. And answering the, "What are those? Where did you get those?" And having that sense of pride I think, from the imagery standpoint, certainly the word Parlor in our logo font is our most recognizable mark, that's what's on all of our hats and merchandise and stuff like that. That's what lives on the base of the ski as well. M Wallace:                   Those are the things that we use. We also, for people who are into the details, all of our skis have a hardwood sidewall, which is pretty unique in the market, we use a maple sidewall. If you see a unique pair of skis, we also have a pretty standard design aesthetic in regards to the shape and the line of the tip and tails of the ski, although they change a little bit. So people who are familiar with the brand will recognize this short of shape and feel of a Parlor ski certainly if they're close by it. F Geyrhalter:                 It's very cool. How hard is it, how difficult is it for you to keep owning those details and those shapes? Isn't like every season the big guys are coming out with something that might look similar? Or do you pretty much own this kind of style? M Wallace:                   I mean, I think yeah, I mean, the big guys, they move around a lot with shapes and designs. A lot of that is just there's a lot of pressure to move new products, and introduce new products and a lot of that is just marketing stuff. We really believe that if you use the highest quality materials and you customize the fit, you don't need a lot of [inaudible 00:12:47] to sell good skis and to make really high-quality skis. We just have a different sort of set of priorities. I would argue that most of the big retail machine does not have the end consumers' best interest always in mind. Not that they're anti-consumer, but the pressures that are on them to control their material cost, and to move more units, and to refresh their product line, don't necessarily serve the need of providing the best, most consistent product to the customer. F Geyrhalter:                 For sure. For sure. With Parlor, is actually you and the co-founder, are you guys still hands-on creating skis? Do you still, are you still going to the shop on a daily basis? M Wallace:                   I'm in the factory every day. I fill in when I need to. I think it surprises some of the guys sometimes that I actually know how to do all the stuff. But I teach a lot, Tyler, my partner, and I teach all the classes. So one of us is always around for the class. It's hands-on for that. I certainly fill in when there's help. I do most of my role now is sales, and marketing related, as well as sort of the day-to-day operations. Tyler runs the shop, we've got a couple of people that help in the office, graphic design, PR, digital, et cetera. So, most of my work is doing that, but oftentimes I'm down in the shop grinding skis or making sure process is working right or fixing a machine. We're very involved in the business. It's a hands on company. F Geyrhalter:                 Multitasking. Yeah. For sure. You have only been around for seven years, I believe, right? M Wallace:                   It seems like a long time, but when you say it that way I guess it's only seven. F Geyrhalter:                 So what are your growth goals if any? Will you expand, or will you even franchise in the future? How far will Parlor as a brand go? How far do you guys actually want to go? Because bigger does not necessarily always mean better as we know. M Wallace:                   Yeah. We're very opportunity focused. But our goal, we've been growing about 30% to 40% year over year for most of those seven years. F Geyrhalter:                 It's great. Yeah. M Wallace:                   We started small. We've cash flow finance the whole business, so that's a very intentional decision on our part. We want to continue to grow to the scale where we can provide the quality and the service that we currently do to our clientele, and maintain the community. So we are building this business to run it, we love what we're doing. We're not sort of ... there are a lot of things we could do to sell more skis, and that's not necessarily our focus, we want to sell to the right people and we want to provide the right product. We are going to continue to grow. We'd like to continue to scale, but we don't have plans for bringing any huge amount of investment and making sure there are Parlors everywhere. The world doesn't need another Volkl, or Rossignol, or K2 in our opinion, but they do need more specialized, personalized companies like Parlor. F Geyrhalter:                 Amen. On your website it says, "Our skis enable you to go beyond your own expectations. We craft confidence, confidence to go a little faster, and a little further." You really use language to bond and to create that stoke to talk skiers language, which for you comes completely organic. Do you write all of the copy? Because you said that you're kind of like put on more the marketing hat these days, and do you have a set of rules? Is it really just you guys changing it up whenever you feel like it needs a little pizzazz? M Wallace:                   Yeah. I do some of the copywriting, we've been really lucky to work with some good consultants over the years. Some of our digital marketing guys are very talented in that front. So, again, you work ... a lot of that is just authenticity. I would say we don't have like ... I mean, we do have brand guidelines, but not in the way that a lot of companies do. We sit down as a group a couple of times a year, and we talk about who we are as a brand right now, are all of our [inaudible 00:17:20] supporting that? What do we want to be doing? What do we care about? What's refreshing? A lot of times, you know, this esteems a passion for this work and quality engineering and delivering a better product and experience to our client sort of always come up. So when you look at language like crafting confidence, or pushing people to go further. If you have the right product, you will have a better day on the snow. It's like, it's the difference between pants that fit and pants that don't fit. If your pants are too tight, you're going to have a bad day. You might not necessarily know that's why you're having a bad day, but you are. So what we do is we sort of sit at that intersection between design and delivery of the product, which gives us a huge advantage. Because the people we're designing skis for the big companies are not connected to their consumers the same way we are, they get a design brief and they have to design a ski for this condition and this market segment, or this person. Every ski we build is tailored for that individual, which just kind of puts our priorities in a totally different alignment. F Geyrhalter:                 Well, it's impossible for any company to be closer to its audience than you are, because you literally create every ski customized, in one way or the other, or to order. So absolutely. I'm actually very positively surprised that a brand like yours, that is trying to stay small, and is trying to really focus on that one product, that you guys meet every year, every two years, and actually talk about what your brand stands for, and really the values of the brand. I think that's really refreshing. Because I keep using the word organic, right, like all of this is just kind of falling into place. But it isn't. And I love that you kind of stop at times and go back to like what's the big Simon Sinek's why? What's the why behind this company? I think it's really refreshing to see you guys do that. What does branding mean to you? We're kind of in midst of that conversation now, but what does it mean to you? M Wallace:                   I mean, branding is sort of the ... it's the way that people view what you're doing. It's the way that your activities and your products are sort of viewed by the world. I think that's an important distinction and something to think about especially for marketers or younger marketers out there. You have an image of what, or most founders right, or people who're deeply involved in a company, an image of what they're doing and what it looks like. It's very difficult sometimes to flip that around and say, "Okay, what are people actually seeing? How is this perceived?" You know, those two things align. I think that there are two challenges, one is sort of finding your vision, and being true to that, and also being able to adapt that based on what people want to see and how they want to perceive a brand. I think that's how I would define it. F Geyrhalter:                 No. It's great. It's the idea of also stepping outside and looking back in, that's really, really the difficult part and you hit that nicely. I've got a question that is a little bit about brand expansion, but it's actually more of a personal question because of my fascination with the sport. I started snowboarding a long, long, long, long, long time ago. I actually built my own snowboard at the time because I couldn't afford buying one because they had maybe 100 of them in Austria. It was like a long, long time ago, I was like six years old or something. So in the first 10 years, there was this friction, skiers versus snowboarders. Snowboarders are kind of like the young punks and the skateboarders in the slopes, and they're just not good for the mountain. They're the bad guys on the mountain. The troublemakers. Now, Parlor just recently, I guess, empowered one of your guys to like start building snowboards. I think you guys are doing that now pretty officially. So, do you see any friction in your community? Because you guys, your community is hardcore skiers. A lot of them, I'm sure, at the price point, are not like 20-year-old somethings and a lot of them most probably have been around when snowboarding and skiing was kind of like very separated. Did you find any of that when you started introducing snowboards? Or is that so long gone and we're all kind of like getting along these days? M Wallace:                   No, I mean there's still a tension. You got to remember, the thing that unites Parlor customers is their love for sliding on snow, and also being outdoors, and being with their friends and family. Those things are sort of universal. I mean, there is a little bit of tension still between the communities, but I think it's become very sort of lighthearted at this point, certainly within our shop there's some banter about it. But I really view Parlor in a lot of ways as a carving company. We make long boards, we make skis, we make snowboards, we've certainly play around with surfboards, kiteboarding is sort of exploding right now. Anything where we can add value and create a better product, I think sort of falls under the Parlor umbrella. As we're sort of expanding the brand, and we were always looking at these different options and opportunities, I mean, snowboarding was the obvious next step, and we've been really successful. Again, we don't build park skis, and we don't build park snowboards. Our snowboard design is very inspired by surfing, it's sort of a throwback in the earlier day in the sport, it's about how you interact with the mountain and creating tools that allow you to do that more efficiently and in more creative ways. Again, there are lots of companies that make great park skis, and great park boards, but that's not really where we sit in the market. Also, I mean, there are a lot of jerks who are skiers too. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh yeah. M Wallace:                   Not anymore than the jerk snowboarders. Again, we felt that those people don't really gravitate towards our brand, so we don't have to worry about it. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah. Yeah. It's on the mountain, off the mountain, there are jerks and there are others. You build the community around the others. So, I have a lot of investors and a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this, especially a lot of like young entrepreneurs, meaning not age, but the age of the company. They're just getting into it. They're playing the startup game, which you and I both played at some point. Do you have a piece of brand advice for any founders as a takeaway of like how they should create their brand and what should be important for them in the first maybe couple months or year? M Wallace:                   I think this applies to all business ventures, and I talk about it a lot, especially I'm doing mentoring or anything like that. You do not be paralyzed by not having all the pieces. My sort of word of advice is just always be doing something. And don't over-commit until you know it's going to work. So, my favorite example of this is there was an executive at TripAdvisor several years ago who if somebody came and wanted to develop them a product for their website, he would give them the button but not the product. If they got enough clicks on the button, he'd allowed them to build the product. I think that is just like I remember learning that in business school and being like, "That makes total sense." Who cares if you piss off 25 people who click on your button and you tell them they got to wait? It's a much bigger deal to build a ski, or build a product line, or develop a whole company around something that nobody cares about without ... you know, you can put up a website right now in like two days for 100 bucks. If you have an idea, put it out there, put a buy button on it, and just tell people you're sold out after they click on it. If a bunch of people click on it, you got an idea, and go run with it. You don't have to raise 10 million bucks to figure out if you have a good idea or not. Just start doing stuff. Don't quit your job, learn, fail fast, and then be able to be fluid enough to make adaptations along the way. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah. That's really great advice. It's interesting because I'm sure that you guys do the same thing with just shaping your skis and trying different things and just like putting it out in the slopes and seeing if sticks. If it sticks with enough people, maybe it's a new line. So, listeners who like the idea of owning a pair of Parlor skis, and really who wouldn't, where should they head to learn more? M Wallace:                   The website, ParlorSkis.com. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, we're @parlorskis, and anybody is welcome to call me at 413-884-4747, anytime or put an inquiry into the website. Those are definitely the best places, but I'm happy to talk to anyone any time about skiing, obviously. F Geyrhalter:                 That's awesome. M Wallace:                   We're very accessible here, so reach out. F Geyrhalter:                 Yes, you are. Because ... thank you for accepting my call to outreach via LinkedIn to be on my show. It was such a guilty pleasure to have you here. I think I might have to book a weekend to build my own board in New England with you soon. You also do boards during those hands-on sessions, right? M Wallace:                   That's correct. We're offering build your own boards and split boards this year. So, we've got a couple slots left. The classes are pretty full. We have been sold out with the class for the last three years. So we have a couple slots open in August, and if you're around, reach out and we're happy to slot you in. F Geyrhalter:                 Awesome. Very cool. Thanks everyone for listening. I appreciate it, and I hope you enjoyed the Parlor story and got some inspiration out of it. I sure have and I'm thanking you, Mark, for being here, really appreciate it. M Wallace:                   Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure. F Geyrhalter:                 Cool. If you guys enjoyed this show, please hit the subscribe button and give this show a quick rating. This podcast was brought to you by PocketNote, a new site that helps founders and entrepreneurs find thoughtful, succinct answers to their startup questions. You can learn more, read through the topics, or submit your own question at PocketNote.co, the Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by the one and only Happiness Won. I will see you in two weeks, when we'll once again will be hitting the mark.

No Episódio de hoje, Japa troca uma idéia marota sobre alguns lançamentos recentes que explodiram a paciência e a expectativa da galera. Junto com Tonim, Markim e o Indiana Jones Guarulhense, Anderson! Sim a lenda […] O post SGB #49: JOGOS QUE FLOPARAM apareceu primeiro em Caipira Furioso.

No Episódio de hoje, Japa comanda o bate papo hilário com nossos brothers Murillo, Markim, Tonim Furioso e junto com eles, nosso convidado Dênis, do canal O Analisador e podcast Sala da Discórdia. Histórias infâmes, […] O post SGB #48: UNPLUGGED – CAGADAS ACONTECEM apareceu primeiro em Caipira Furioso.

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Estrelando o novo quadro do SGB, Markim Furioso, nosso primeiro convidado, chega junto da mesa de um bate papo descontraído e livre com o nosso host Japa e o caipira Tonim Furioso. Dessa vez eles […] O post SGB PASSA O CONTROLE #01: HISTÓRIAS DA VIDA COM MARKIM FURIOSO apareceu primeiro em Caipira Furioso.

his past month was massive according to the stats page in the TA Playlist Hub. Of course, many of those being tracked on site were just playing the latest Games with Gold freebie, but judging by our excellent month of community forum chatter, it's safe to call The Turing Test a riveting choice for the event. Join Kevin, Sam, and Mark (I'm never sure if I should write in third person here) as they wrap up another engaging month with the TA Playlist faithful.  In this episode, we discuss the game's moral dilemma, weigh its merits as an artificial intelligence thinkpiece and argue whether this machine does or does not have a soul. With great commentary from the community, it's obvious by the end that Turing is nothing if not thought-provoking. As the topic of AI is a very special hobby horse of mine personally, I wanted to also call your attention to some extracurricular media on the topic. Artificial intelligence, if it were to ever reach superintelligent levels (far outpacing human capacity) would change the world forever, and not necessarily in a good way. There are a lot of think tanks and scientists working to resolve this issue before it can really become one because by then it may be too late.  The subject isn't entirely pessimistic though, as some, like Ray Kurzweil, believe AI will usher in a new dawn of human progress. Below you can find a few crucial pieces of media if you're interested to learn more. TA Playlist is a conversation above all else. This month was immensely rewarding to have this conversation with all of you who participated. Let's keep the conversation going. WaitButWhy.com's brilliant two-part introductory blog post on why AI is perhaps the single most important problem facing our species Neuroscientist Sam Harris' Ted Talk on the value-alignment problem Sam Harris and computer scientist Stuart Russell (mentioned in the podcast) discuss the problems surrounding unchecked AI research

Why this podcast? The show will explore ways and help you understand how drones might just be the next tool purchase at your site! The possible use cases are incredible and we will explore specific examples through interviews with experts in the field and people like you who are at various stages of use with Unmanned Systems. This show is for you... to answer your questions about what it takes to start using drones, further your use, and understand the opportunities and limitations. Email me your questions, problems, and suggestions. Who - why Mark? I'm your host and the creator of the podcast.  I am a Mechanical Engineer by education (LSU - Geaux Tigers!) and have worked at industrial sites for the last 20 years. With my experience in maintenance, project engineering, and process engineering, I understand exactly what kind of challenges you deal with at your site.  I also understand many of the problems that drones can solve and perform by minimizing human risk and maximizing job efficiency. I am a Director on the board of the Rocky Mountain chapter of AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems Int'l) and work to stay connected to the drone world.  I discovered this passion a about four years ago and see endless possibilities ahead for the technology.  I did achieve FAA Part 107 certification in September 2016. How will the Podcast work? The podcast will primarily be interviews with guests: from manufacturers and service providers to end users and influencers. Most episodes will be ~30 minutes long, give or take. Frequency of publishing will be one show per month at the very beginning (November and December 2017), increasing to every 2 weeks in January 2018.   Also mentioned in the show 970West Studio AUVSI's Xponential Commercial UAV Expo  Connect with me Email me your thoughts and with guest suggestions mark@industrialdrones.org Subscribe to the Industrial Drones Podcast on Apple Podcasts or on Android Join the Facebook Group to join the conversation  Follow @industrialuas on Twitter See it all at industrialdrones.org If you like the show and want to show your support, you can do so through my Patreon page. Exploring unmanned solutions to real world Industrial problems.

32:21 no Rev. Paul Rasmussen Join us each week for traditi

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