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Talismans video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML-sED3fAzY   Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E18 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, mark, Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we are talking about talismans and touchstones and things that we do during the course of our day to remind ourselves that we are on a naturalistic, pagan, pagan path and to remind ourselves of our practice. Yucca: Right. And these could be things, we could have objects that help. Remind us but also moments in the day or activities that we're doing that we can use as, as metaphorical touchstones, right? Mark: Right, right. I mean, we've talked about a daily practice before. Those tend to be. In the beginning and the ending of the day, not in the sort of rush of the middle of the day. So what we're really focusing on, on with this podcast is more about what do we do just to bring back to mind that we're on this path and that these are our values and that kind of stuff, while we're in the midst of all the various business that we have to take care of during the day. Yucca: Right. So why, actually, why don't we start with one? You were just telling me about that. This was one of Michael's suggestions who we've had on the podcast before he was on the council. And you were saying it was 13 o'clock. Mark: 13 o'clock. Yucca: o'clock, yeah. So what's this 13 o'clock thing? Mark: Which is one o'clock in the afternoon of course. Michael is Irish and apparently there is something that happens at noon every day in Ireland on the public television stations which is called the Angelus, and it used to be a. Catholic thing with, you know, images of the Virgin Mary and all that kind of stuff. And the idea was that you were supposed to stop and pray or contemplate or just kind of remember, you know, that this is your religious path. Well, it's, it's become much more secularized now. They have images of the Irish countryside and. That kind of stuff instead. But it's still kind of a lovely idea. And so Michael suggested that because we have 13 principles and there are 13 moon cycles, and we just like that Yucca: 13. It's just fun. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, it's, it's a cool prime number. That we celebrate something like that at 13 o'clock every day. And just take a minute. That's all, you know, 60 seconds, that's all that it takes. What I do, I've put it in my phone as an alarm to remind me when it's Yucca: buzzes at you at one o'clock, Mark: Well, I actually get a 10 minute warning so that I can finish up whatever I'm doing right there and have a minute, but at, at, at the stroke of one. What I do is I just grasp my suntry pendant that I always wear, that I got at the Suntry retreat last year, and just imagine that I am floating in space, looking down at the earth. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Watching it slowly turn underneath me and just recognize, you know, as Carl Sagan said, this is everyone you've ever known. Everything that's ever happened in human history, all that you'll ever Yucca: king, every baker, every, yeah, every conflict we've ever had. Right. Every. Mark: event, every birth, every celebration, every cataclysm, all those things are embodied in this little planet floating in space. And so I just sort of meditate on that for about a minute, and then I let go of my pendant and go about my day. But I find it's a really wonderful addition to my practice and it's nice to have a little intercession in the middle of the day. That's about my spirituality. Yucca: Hmm. That's great. I love that idea. That's, that's where noom comes from the term originally, isn't it? Weren't there Mark: I think it, yeah, because it was originally Noce Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Noce, which is one of the. Catholic masses that celebrated through the course of the day. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I don't know what I, I know the first one is Matins and the last one is Vespers. Leys in the middle. Yucca: Yeah. So I think that's where the term is coming from, but I don't know enough about it. I just remember hearing that at one point that that's the origin. So it's a but I, I very much like those. I. And Islam has a, a similar structure of throughout the day having the different, the, just a small ritual throughout the day just to remind us. Right. And I think that there's a lot of, of power in that. Just stop for a moment and kind of have that reset. Right. Mark: Right. Yeah. Because I mean, it's so easy to get caught up in all the busyness of everything we have to do in order to keep the functions of our lives going. But one minute of time just to. Refocus on the big picture I think is really, for me, it's been very meaningful and has kind of contributed to my happiness. So, it's something I'm doing and I really appreciate Michael for suggesting it. Yucca: Yeah, that's fun. Mark: So what are some other things that we either practices or. You know, carrying of objects or keeping them in a, in a, a bag or a purse or putting them in our car. What, you know, other things that we might do to remind us during the day of our path. Yucca: Well, there's one that in my family on my adopted side, my stepmother is having a by the door. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: Which is like a the other versions what might be like a Honda Fatima or it's like a protection against the the evil eye, but it's this beautiful, stylized hand. And the traditional belief behind it was, you know, it's protection from the evil eye. But that's something that, you know, growing up we would always have by the door and it would be something that We would just touch on the way out of the door, Mark: Hmm. Yucca: Not as a belief literally that that's somehow going to protect us. But just as a reminder of, hey, I'm stepping out of the home. I'm going out into the world and just to be more aware. Right. And just to kind of, you know, shields up, right? So it's almost like the button of like shields up right? Going out, leaving the, the sanctuary of the home. And so having something like that and I actually have the one that, that I grew up with in, in my home now, and it's just by the door and it's. It's just a nice reminder every time of coming in and out of the home space. Mark: And does everyone in your household do that? Yucca: The grownups do, it is too high at the moment for these smaller hands, but as they get older, I think they, they will.  Mark: Ah-huh. Yucca: the one that we have is, If enthusiastically touched, could come down and break, so Mark: Oh, okay. Yucca: get a little bit older. Yeah. It's one that's made from broken pottery. Mark: Oh like Yucca: made from broken. Yeah. It's a mosaic made from broken pottery from Jerusalem. So it's, it's really beautiful and I would rather it not get crushed, but when they're when they're a little bit calmer, Then maybe they'll get, they'll get to do that particular one. Mark: Okay. Yucca: So in the meantime, they're, they've got plenty of other stuff to do. But that's, that's a type of object that's really nice. And I, although I don't drive a lot anymore in my hanging on my rear view mirror, I have a little bead that when I get into the car, it's just a, I just kind of give it a little boop. And just as a reminder of, Hey, I'm getting into the car, I'm taking on a big responsibility with the life of the passengers, my life, the life of anyone else on the c the road. And just take a moment to center and ground and then, then be on the way before just rush. You know? Cause a lot of times we're so tempted to get in the car. You've got the keys, you know, you've turned the car on before your seatbelt's even on and just, no, hang on. Slow down. About to drive this, you know, very, very heavy piece of equipment, very, very fast. So let's take a moment. So those are two that I have on a kind of a very practical level, but they, they really have that special meaning, so, Mark: I, I like that. I mean this, this sort of illustrates that you can imbue anything really with a particular meaning if you associate a practice with it. So, you know, just a little bead. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. It can just be a little something so that you you know, it, it becomes a part of your pattern as you, you know, you put the keys in, you put the seatbelt on, you, you touch the bead, you start the car, and it's just a part of the routine. Yucca: Yeah. So what about you? Do you have any other ones that you do? Mark: You know, what I do is I carry I carry some talismans and I've, there's a, there's a blog post, or it may be a YouTube video actually, because I think I did it while my arm was broken and I couldn't type.  Yucca: Think it is a YouTube video. I think I've a long time. It's been several years, but yeah. Mark: Yes. That would've been 2017 when my, when Yucca: I'll see if I can find the link to that and put that in the show notes. Mark: Great. Yeah, so that's about talismans and the ones that I carry and what they mean to me. And what a talisman is really is just a little. Something a little token of some kind that reminds you of something specific. So, for example, I have an Arrowhead, which was one of the giveaways from. A, an earth honoring ritual that we did at Pantheon a few years ago. And it reminds me of the broader Pagan community and also of deep time being a, a, you know, a found arrowhead. So that's one. There's another, that's a smooth stone. That I got at a fired circle gathering, and it reminds me of that community and the, the people that I have in my life that really love me. So I have fi and there's a little mala bead that looks like a skull that is a memento mori. It reminds me that I'm gonna die and that I need to seize the day. So there are five or six of these little things. And as well as the suntry pendant that I wear around my neck. All of those serve to, kind of, to bring deeper meaning to my daily operation. You know, if I reach in my pocket for my comb while there are those talismans reminding me again that I'm on this path and I'm, I'm doing this, and it's more meaningful than just kind of wandering through life without. A sense of purpose or meaning? Yucca: So do you have a, is it. Is that part of a ritual in the morning, just to stick those into your pocket or are they already in your jeans and when you put your jeans on in the morning? There they are. Mark: They're already in my jeans and when I put my jeans on in the morning, there they are. The only time they come out is when I wash my jeans and then they go in another pair of jeans. Yucca: they're, they're switching pants. Okay. Mark: Yeah. But like for example, I bring them, you know, when I'm wearing dresses, Slacks to like a job interview. I bring those with me because they, you know, they're the, the emotional underpinning for me, right? They, they serve to represent all that community support and enthusiasm and history that I have as a basis on which to be confident and put myself forward. So, Yeah. So, and I've been doing this for a very long time, and of course, once in a while you'll lose one. And that's okay. These things happen. And, you know, I, I do a little ritual to charge each one when I first start carrying it, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: To give it its meaning. To associate it with that particular meaning. And I find, you know, this is a very old tradition. I mean, Roman soldiers used to carry little, you know, rolled up lead tablets with inscriptions on them of things that they, you know, wanted to happen for them, or ways they wanted to be protected. And we as atheopagan and, and naturalistic pagans, we can do the same thing. Yucca: Yeah, some of the ones that you mentioned reminded me of a few things that I have. But they're not objects. They're actually tattoos. Mark: Ah, Yucca: So a few years back at this point, we did an episode on CILs and I hadn't, sigils weren't really a big thing for me at that point but I played with it. Afterwards. Well, we, we did it a little bit before and I had kind of experimented with it so that we could prepare for the episode. And then I ended up deciding one of them after a few months, I went, you know what? This is really working for me, and I decided that I actually was gonna tattoo that on myself. So I did. Now I have on my left hand because I'm right-handed. Well and multiple other reasons as well. Cuz I wear my watch on my right hand. I wanted to access it on my wrist, but I did some white tattoos, which barely show up because I'm, I'm very very pale skinned. So the white just looks kind of like a scar almost. And so I put some marks on. And so I have one on my wrist. Which is for, for fo remembering where my focus is throughout the day, right. And to be paying attention to the things that I actually have influence over and I can control and not stressing constantly about the things that I. I do not have control over. Right. I have no control over what this weather is going to do, but I do have control over how I'm going to respond to that. Right. And another one I have on the back of my hand is a Memento Mori reminder. And throughout the day, I actually touch these on a regular basis. Just to remind, remind myself. It almost feels like pushing a button, like a Oh, right. Okay. Remember, Where's your focus, right? Or hey, this is, this is what you've got, right? Today is what you've got. You don't have tomorrow promised. And you know, that's okay. Right? What are you doing today to, to really live? Because nothing is guaranteed every day, every new day is a bonus. It's a gift, right? So those are. Those are, those are things that I felt strongly enough that I wasn't going to change my mind about whether or not I had that in 20 years. If I'm lucky enough to be here in 20 years, I'm still gonna be thinking about being lucky to be here in 20 years and where I'm focusing my energy on. But if there's certain other things that I'm working on in particular, I actually really like to use Henna. So Hannah's really nice because it, depending on where you put it on your body, right, there's certain areas where it's gonna fade right away. If you put Hannah on your palm, for instance, it's not gonna last, last for very long. But other parts of your body, it might last, you know, or you're not touching things as much or you don't produce as much oils. But you'll get several days to maybe a week out of time of having that symbol literally on your body or that reminder literally on your body. So. Mark: That's a great idea. I, I love that. I don't have any tattoos. I have design for two tattoos that I want to do, one of which is the Sumtry symbol. But I've just never had the free money to invest in having somebody do it. But one day I, I love that idea and I love the idea of You know, of, of recognizing that some of these things are permanent modes that you're, that you want to pursue in, in life. You always want to be aware of your mortality and its implications that you always want to be able to, you know, focus on what you're able to influence and not stress about the rest. Yeah, so tho those are very tallman. And I think. As, when we look at like tsi, the ice, the so-called iceman, the the, Yucca: Yeah, they had lots of tattoos in various places. Mark: right? And they were very obviously magical symbols of some kind. They, they were not, they were not particularly decorative. But you know, that that man had tattoos, which were clearly meant something. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: We will never know exactly what they meant, but we can conjecture that they were protective or for luck and fortune in hunting or, you know, any of those kinds of things. And so I, I think the history of tattoos, you know, really kind of feeds into what you described for yours, Yucca. That's really, really great. Yucca: and I think there's, so I have, I have other ones too that were done by artists. I've got quite a bit on my back and And those were very meaningful and special too. But there's also something about, for the really simple ones, the doing it yourself. There's something very, Mark: Hmm. Yucca: there was, it was very nice to do that. So just the poking stick, the old style, you know, you just have your, you can buy the kits right, and get the right ink. You don't wanna just do any ink. You have to get the right ink to put in your body and you don't wanna be putting in your lead ink or things like that, right? But that in itself can be a ritual. And actually having an artist do it as well, Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: you can really make that a really special thing. Mark: Sure. Well, and you've got all the endorphins that are provoked by the pain of the, of the tattooing. That puts you in kind of an altered state. I mean, people talk about how tattoos can be addictive Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and I, you know, I understand that. But that, that trans state, that state of being altered by the tattooing process is. Very much a ritual opportunity. It's you know, it's a, a state where you can, being in that trend state, you can apply a layer of meaning beyond simple decoration. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: To the, to the, the symbol that you're putting on yourself. And, and most of the people that I know who have tattoos, they associate meetings with them. They, they, they're not just decorative, they, they, they're there for a reason. Yucca: Yeah. That seems to be pretty, I mean, I can't think of anyone who I've asked about their tattoo and they haven't had some elaborate explanation about, you know, oh, this is, you know, the pair of sewing scissors because my mother and grandmother and I used to this and that, and you know, there's often, often stories that go along with it or, You know, things like, you know, this is my this is my five years sober tattoo, or my, you know, that kind of stuff, Mark: Or the semicolon for people who have survived suicide attempts, for example. Right. Not the end of the story. There's more to the sentence. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: All, you know, there are, there are a lot of different kinds of symbols like that that are very meaningful to people and that I think are some of which are intended to be communicative. You know, they're supposed to tell a story to someone else, and for others it's just you telling the story to yourself when you see them on your body. Yucca: and that's why for me, I chose white. I wanted them somewhere that I could see all the time, but I didn't want something that was gonna be flashy to someone else. Right. So that's why, I mean, I don't think most people even notice it. Right. But it's about, Mark: I certainly never did when we met at the Century Retreat last year, I. Yeah, I, I never noticed them. Yucca: Well I had, when we, then I had the one on my wrist, I didn't have the one on my hand. But again, I don't think it's showing up on the Mark: I can't see it on the screen through Zoom. No, I can't see it. Yucca: I think maybe it shows like you can barely see it, but I see it and that's what matters for me. Mark: course, of course. Yucca: my more visible, my more like elaborate ones. I do still have them so that I can cover them if I want, but the, the stigma around them is really faded, right? People don't get worried about that anymore. It used to be a big deal, but now it's a I don't know if the statistic is real, but it's supposed to be like a third of American millennials have a tattoo, Mark: Hmm. Yucca: like that. Wouldn't surprise me at all. Mark: Me neither. I mean, you see them everywhere and you know, I, in professional office circumstances, I've, you know, worked with a lot of people who, you know, they have sleeves and and all that. So yeah, it's, it's very common to me. I've just never really felt the opportunity. It's, it's not that I'm in any way morally opposed So, yeah, what we're talking about here really is about how do you create symbolic meaning that reverberates through you in the course of your daily operations as opposed to your daily practice, which might be, okay, I do this formal thing in the morning, I do a formal thing in the evening. That's great. But you know, I, I wanna be reminded of my values on a regular basis, and I want to be reminded of the things that I've learned that help me to be wiser and kinder. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So, you know, having those kinds of practices I think is a good way to have a touchstone to go back. those principles because, you know, the world can frazzle you, Yucca: He can't. Yeah. Mark: you know, really pull you out of any sense of centeredness in yourself. Yucca: As you were saying that it occurred to me. There's other points throughout the day that aren't things that I use, but that would be opportunities for other people if it's something that they do. If you wear makeup every morning, Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: a great time. Right to c incorporate some something in there. And just the act of getting dressed too, like you talk about having the items that you keep in your jeans, but you know, is there, is there something when you are dotting your clothing that you are reminding yourself about the, the values that you have or so things like that. Mark: Not ordinarily, but certainly when I'm dressing professionally, like if I'm putting on a suit, I'm putting on a suit of armor. And, you know, I put on a suit to go to war because the kinds of contexts where I need to be dressed that way tend to be ones where I am advocating. Yeah, I'm advocating for something. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm trying to make a change. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And either that or I'm defending myself which is, you know, another, another possibility. So. You know, clothing and costume is another whole conversation we could have. And, you know, maybe we will at some point Yucca: think we should, yes. Mark: I think we should too. Because decorating ourselves in various ways is highly communicative to the people around us. And We make choices about what we wanna say. You know, we, it talks about what class we are, it talks about what gender we are. It talks about what what kind of work we do. It, it, it says a lot of stuff. Our education level. Yucca: views, our, you know, yes. All kinds of things. Mark: Yeah. So let's, let's put a pin in that and, Yucca: Yeah, we'll come back to that. Mark: Yeah, we'll definitely come back to that. But you know, the whole self adornment thing, you know, beyond the practicalities of being warm enough or cool enough I, I think are, are an interesting vein to explore for people that are working to fold meaning into the operation of their lives. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So this is, you know, sort of a. Whirlwind examination of all this stuff, but I, I, I think the, the fundamental point that I want to communicate is that you know, if there's a special rock that you like and it reminds you of something like a beautiful day at the beach or something, don't feel weird about carrying that around. That's, that absolutely makes sense to carry that around. Yucca: That's very human. We've been doing that a long time. Mark: Yes. Yes. And we can do it intentionally and it can become a part of our, of our practice. Yucca: Yeah. Well, this was a fun one. Thank you. A. Mark: Yeah. Thank you, Yucca, and we'll see you next week.    

This interview took place in 2020 with Mark Randall of the World Heart of Connection Podcast and Geelong Counselling Service, Melbourne, Australia. The topics are below and if you've already heard Philip's story you can skip straight to 06:04: 00:22 Welcome 02:20 How did you move from Civil Engineering to where you are now? 06:04 The Calling 06:34 How the website domain name came 07:21 What was it like to connect to yourself? 09:03 Dealing with emotions 10:06 Were you sensitive to your heart in early life 11:11 How do you share with people? 15:50 Does Infinite Touch help them connect? 17:20 Does the Touch help open the heart and blocked emotions 17:35 How can you describe the Infinite Silence? 19:25 As you're sharing are you connecting to the Infinite Silence? 19:35 How do you anchor into that when you have gone to the head? 21:04 As you notice the gap in thoughts are you dropping into the heart? 22:30 Is the Infinite Silence the 'All that is?' 24:39 When you are in that Infinite Silence what happens to your well-being? 25:35 Peace of heart - Peace of mind? 27:24 As men what do we need to do to facilitate more men connecting to the heart? 29:27 Did you have to Meditate Privately at first? 30:00 What advice would you give a younger Philip? 31:00 How would the world be if we all connected within? 32:36 I feel a resonance with the Infinite Silence as you talk about it 33:09 Brief Meditation including an Awareness Exercise 44:34 Meditation Ends & Reflections from Mark To experience the Infinite Silence Self Realisation Meditation please see Episodes 19 - 25 inclusive. This is a series of seven with durations from 0.25 fully guided to 1.5 hours with increasing amounts of silence. For more free Self Realisation Resources visit Philip's Website. Monthly Episodes, Next: Friday 2 June 2023, released at 4pm but usually takes until about 5pm to find its way to the various outlets.

Mark - To be in the Kingdom of God you have to love God and love your neighbor and this you can only do when you are trusting in Jesus Christ as your King.

Atheopagan Web Weaving 2023 https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/aww2023/ Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E11 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca, Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: and this week we're going to talk about dreams. Mark: Ooh. Yucca: Actually can't believe we haven't talked about dreams yet. Mark: It is kind of surprising. We were, we were both kind of mystified as to why we haven't done that yet. Yucca: Yeah, and I'm quite curious because we've never had this conversation. Not only have we not had it on the podcast, but we haven't had it off of recording either. So I don't know what your thoughts, opinions, experiences with dreams are. So I look Mark: Oh, well, I, I, I hope, I hope they're shocking. Yucca: Shocking. Okay. Well, I think a good place to start is def definitely with what are dreams. Right? Mark: Yeah. And I, as you say, I don't know whether we'll have a similar perspective on this. I tend to think of dreams as kind of like the, the brain running a screensaver, drawing on bits of memory and themes of concern, and. Things that are kind of weighing on your mind, whether it's your conscious mind or your unconscious mind, and then putting together these fantastical sort of stories in a. In a very, in an almost random sort of way. There's a lot of random generation in, in dreams that you can see. So that's what I think is the brain doing that and contributes to imagination. It solves problems. You know, we have so many examples of people who have discovered things waking up in the middle of the night going, aha, it out. Right? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that's what I think it is. How about you? Yuck. Yucca: Yeah. Your, your understanding. It really reflects mine as well. It's something that I haven't dug into research on. Right. I don't have a deep understanding of neurobiology. You know, I certainly have read articles here and there and things like that, but it's not something that I've really done a lot of research in. But, but what you were saying about it being basically our, our brains. Processing stuff, right, our experiences, putting together ideas and there being a randomness to it. But I think there's also sometimes parts of it that aren't quite as random though, because we are trying to figure stuff out. Mark: Yeah. Oh, Yucca: we're definitely trying to figure stuff out, piece it together, and there's definitely. There. I mean, there's different kinds of dreams that we can get into. But that sometimes it's just our brain rerunning through the stuff that we're doing during the day. Right. And sometimes it's working on, you know, particularly difficult experiences that we had, you know, running through trauma or things like that is, but I, I think it's a way that, that our. that our brains are trying to make sense of what's going on. And it seems like there's something in there tied in with the sleep that we don't really understand a lot of the mechanisms for yet. We know that sleep is really important for us. We know that it evolved. Really early on because we see it in lots of other species. We see it in very, very different species than us. I remember a few months back there was an announcement about a scientist suggesting that they had recorded what appeared to be spiders having r e m sleep, which is. Type of sleep that we have dreams in that of course they're not inside of the, the minds of these creatures, but that looking at the way that they behaved seemed to match with what we thought other creatures did at the same time that they were going through r e m. And so if it is so widespread, there has to be a really important purpose for it. Mark: Right, right. Well, there's no. . Well, there's two questions there, right? I mean, the first one is, what's the point of sleep? And we have really not very good answers Yucca: Yeah, we know what happens when you don't get it though. Mark: Yes, we, we know that all kinds of things go very, very wrong when you don't sleep. So apparently it's staving that stuff off, but we're not entirely sure why those things go wrong. So that's still a point of investigation. And then on top of that is this layer of. Well then these dreams happen and, and what's that about? I tend to agree that I think it's the brain. Some of it's just random. Some of it's just sort of, you know, rerunning stuff that it's experienced before or imagined before. But some of it is the brain chewing on naughty problems that, that just. You know that aren't easily solved and that are bugging us, Yucca: Right. And we should say before going too much farther, that not all sleep has dreams and not all types of, so there's different stages of sleep and then there's different types of dreams as well. There's these sort of surface level ones and then there's, we were talking about the REM sleep a much. Deeper, more vivid kind of dreaming, so, Mark: Right. And RM sleep tends to be more narrative as well. There tends to be a story, whereas in lighter phases of sleep, it can literally just be flashes of different kinds of scenes and events that don't really tie together. And even though the story can be very fantastical there can be a kind of a line that you can draw through it, and then you can try to figure out what's going on there. And that's, that's part of the age old human attempt at interpreting what dreams mean. Yucca: Right. So that's a nice segue into the next section, which is, you know, what are they mean to us Mark: Mm-hmm. yeah. My answer to that is uncharacteristically vague. Cuz I tend to have very, you know, kind of concrete opinions about things, but I think sometimes they can be very meaningful in very concrete kinds of ways. They can be telling us something. Our subconscious wants us to do or thinks is the right thing to do or you know, or expressing a fear or an anxiety or an anger, you know, something that, that relates to something real in our lives. And then other times, as I said, it's just screensaver and there may not be a lot of content there. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And part of the trick is differentiating between those categories. Yucca: Yeah. Well, I think. There's a component to dream interpretation that's very popular. You'll find lots of books about it where it has certain symbols mean certain things. And I don't buy that on a universal level. I don't think that when you see a Blue Falcon. Flying through a cloud that to every single person that is going to mean the same thing because that I think that each person is going to have a different association with those types of symbols. And I think there might be things that specific cultural groups might have, certain associations with things that would be more likely that, oh, well if you grew up in this particular, Culture and in this particular religion or something like that. There, the symbology might be very different to you than it would be to somebody else. And so, you know what a snake means to somebody who grew up in a Baptist family. You know, there, there might be some similarities between those people, but not that snakes u mean this, like it's a code that we can translate. Mark: Yeah, I, I agree with you. I don't think that there is a lexicon of. Of things that can be experienced in a dream that have direct correlations, like a dictionary that, that doesn't, has never made any sense to me. And I think it's one of the places where Freud really went off the rails. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: it just, I mean, there were a lot of ways that Freud really went off the rails, but but that was one of 'em, Yucca: Yeah. But with all of that, I think that within our own minds that there's a lot, a lot to be discovered there. And as you were saying, the trick, figuring out which is which there's lots of different tools, but a classic one is a dream. Mark: right. Yucca: And keeping a dream journal can give you the opportunity to be able to go back through some of the dreams that you are having. Now for me and my experiences, dreams fade very quickly unless recorded. Once I write a dream down, I norm, I usually remember having that. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: back through and I reread that journal, I go, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, of course I remember that. But if I hadn't written it down, it would just be gone. I don't know that every dream is worth writing down. I certainly, there were times in my life that I wrote everything down, but now someti, if it, it seems particularly important to me, I'll write it down. Or if, or if I notice that I'm having repeating themes and particular dreams, then I'll write that down and reflect on that. Mark: I don't remember my dreams very much. They have to be pretty vivid for me to remember them. And what that has done among other things, is make a dream journal really difficult for me because I decide, okay, I'm gonna do a dream journal, and then three weeks later when I finally have a dream that I, that's vivid enough to remember I've forgotten all about the fact that I decided to have a dream journal. So, you know, that's just sort of a. Particular quirk of mine. But I say this because many other people also have a very hard time remembering their dreams or they don't dream in a way that's conscious enough to capture very often. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just kind of the way we're built. Yucca: Yeah. And it's, if it's, if it's useful to you, right? It's not, once again, you're not a bad pagan if you don't roll over every morning and record down exactly what it was that you, that you dreamt. There's, it could be useful for you and, and maybe not, right? Mark: Yeah, and one of the things that I try to keep in mind when I'm interpreting dreams is that, Even if the symbols and things that I've captured and I'm trying to interpret were relatively random, that doesn't really matter because a random symbol set can be very provocative of subconscious discovery. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: like a, just like a Toro deck. The cards, the cards are random, but the symbols on the cards will provoke associations for you because of your particular consciousness that will, that can help you to learn things, so, Yucca: act of you trying to interpret it is what's going to help you actually figure out what's going on. Mark: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it sounds like you have more of an active and available dream life than I do. What, what sorts of things do you do with your dreams in terms of interpretation? Yucca: Hmm. So there's a, there's another piece we're going to get to later on, which is the lucid component. I. Don't do a lot with the interpretation component unless it's something that, that is really reoccurring. Like, and there's certain kind of classic ones that, that people have of like the falling ones or the this or the that. When I noticed there's a, there's a couple of them that I have that are in the reoccurring, and when that starts to pop up, it's part of a pattern in my life that I recognize of, Ooh, that's that particular. Area that I really struggle with, that I have a lot of stress around. And when I start getting the dream about it, it means, at least for me, my interpretation has been that I'm not giving it the attention that it needs by the time it creeps into reoccurring dream territory. I have left it unde with for too long. So that. Mark: very reasonable. Yucca: Yeah, . But when it comes to the active dreaming, which we will come to in a little bit, that's something that's, that's really central in my practice and something, a tool that I've used for my whole life. So, but before we get there, what about for you with the interpretation? I know you said that you don't really remember your dreams that much, Mark: I, I don't very often, and so really more what I reach for. As I'm waking up and remembering bits and pieces of, of these dreams, what I reached for is what was the feeling associated more than anything else, because that tells me what's likely to be going on underneath the surface of my day-to-day operation. If there's a feeling of shame or a feeling of fear, Or a feeling of happiness. Although for some reason dreams tend to be more warning and work on stuff that's a problem than they, than they are just sort of celebratory.  Yucca: Do you think that that's a, those are the ones you remember because we are. that there would be an advantage to focusing on the worrisome, dangerous stuff or do you think it is? Yeah. Mark: it could be. But I think also, What tends to happen is that the, the more joyous dreams that I have tend to be dreams where I'm lucid and I'm making choices. So, you know, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I do find that I can learn a lot just from kind of the vibe of a, of a dream and maybe some of the more prominent symbols that emerged from that. There have been a few times when I've been killed in dreams Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and those have always been very powerful. And I've interpreted them as meaning, you know, major dislocations or transformations. Sometimes they've come at times in my life when I was in a major transition and so that kind of made sense. Yucca: Was there, did you wake immediately from those, or was there dream after being killed? In the dream. Mark: Both depending. Yeah, there was one where I got killed right at the beginning of the, the dream, and so I had the, there was an earthquake. At San Francisco State University and I was in the Student Union, which is a concrete building, and it cracked and collapsed and killed me and a lot of other people. And we all had to go into the basement of the student union, which didn't have a basement, Yucca: Hmm. Mark: to to stay there then, because we were dead and we couldn't go out in the daylight and we couldn't interact with anybody who was alive. We were still, for all purposes alive, we just had to stay down there because we were dead and some. People were trying to figure out what they could do other than hang out under the student union. And so at night they would go out and explore. And I finally went with one of these exploring groups and we walked to the Pacific Ocean, to the, to a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Big, bright, full moon. Beautiful. And I dived because we were going to live under the sea since we didn't need to breathe anymore. And then I realized as I was diving that the salt water of the ocean was going to be incredibly caustic to me because I was dead and it was just, it was going to burn me alive. And then I woke up. Yucca: Oh wow. Mark: Yeah. So sort of double death dream. That's, that's, that's one that stuck with me. But I woke up before I hit the water. Yucca: Oh wow. of that? Yeah. Mm-hmm. only times that I can remember ever dying in my dreams. I've always been shot. Mark: I've been stabbed, I've been drowned. I've I've a bunch. I, I, now that I think about it, I don't think I have been shot. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: Hmm. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: But on the other hand, you're in New Mexico, which is one of the most heavily armed states in the country.  Yucca: Yeah. I mean, yes, like, but the, unless you're in like the urban areas, the, there isn't actually the, like statistically the gun violence is not Mark: oh no. I'm not saying the gun violence Yucca: yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, we're all, everybody, you know, I grew up around guns. I, yeah. But no, it's never, it's always been . I think it was more influenced actually by seeing TV with like, Mark: Oh Yucca: like movie type of, yeah. It would be real interesting to look into where that is. But that, I mean, that's certainly, yeah, something I grew up around and it's not. It's kind of a, it's a, it's a normal part of life in the, the rural areas. So, but I've never had any, like the roof collapsing on me or, you know, Mark: Well, I'm an earthquake country, of course. So that's, that's something we think about. You know, whenever the, whenever the earth shakes, we think about the roof coming down on us. Yucca: Right. Well, and I guess that makes sense that different people are going to. . You know, I've also never had dreams about a boating accident, not something we do a lot of out here. I don't Mark: Ah-huh. Yucca: of, you know, boating experience, Mark: open water. Yucca: But somebody who grew up on the coast and, you know, went sailing every weekend during their childhood, maybe they'd have a different experience with that. Mark: right. Yucca: so plenty of flying dreams though. Mark: Me too. A lot of flying dreams. Yeah. Lucid Flying Dreams are my favorite. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Cuz then you can go where you want to go. Right. It's really fun. Yucca: Yeah. Well, let's talk about this lucid.  Mark: Why don't you define that for folks first? I. Yucca: sure. So a lucid dream is when you are aware that you are dreaming and you're still dreaming. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: Then there's different levels. You can be lucid but not be. Consciously influencing what's happening, but you can also be lucid and be influencing what's happening. So a lot of times when people say lucid, they mean you can control your dreams, but technically it is just being lucid, being aware of that dream. So there's different levels to that.  Mark: Yeah, the, the awareness is necessary. You have to be aware that you're dreaming in order to be lucid dreaming. The degree of agency that you have may vary. Yucca: Right. So, and this is something that people can just naturally do. It's also something that, that you can learn and train yourself to do. and that's, and people have different levels of comfort with that and techniques for trying to stay in the dream when you realize that you're dreaming, because a lot of people struggle with, once they realize they are dreaming, they wake themselves up. Mark: up. Yeah. Yucca: So for me, I, I've always been a lucid dream. And that's just something that's been part of my life my whole life. But when I was about nine or 10 years old, I started to. Purposefully cultivate it and use it as a tool. And that was something that, you know, I talked, I had interest in and was talking about that with my father and he got me books and things like that. So a lot of what I know about for other, for learning how to lose the dream just comes from having read those books. But I never taught myself to lose the dream. It was just something I always. Did. Which I actually think, I don't know if, if it was something that I always did or if it was taught, because I do remember being very little and having nightmares, and the response that my parents would give me would be about how to change it, right? If I was being chased by the monster, they'd say, okay, we'll go back to. And then you tell the monster that this is your dream, not the monster's dream. And imagine something funny happening instead, right? Like the monster's chasing you, but all of a sudden now you're jumping on the big balls and now you're giggling and laughing together. They were always very specific about, Hey, when you change a dream, don't, don't change it into something hurt, harmful. Right. Don't imagine, you know, the monster getting hurt or blowing up or something like that may get something that is, that is funny or twisted or like in a, in a positive way. Because the implication, they never said this straight out, but the implication was that the monster was me. Mark: Right. Yucca: All of that was just me. Whatever I'm doing in my mind is, is affecting me. So don't make it into like a hurting yourself. Make it into a transformational experience. So I remember doing that, my parents doing that, and I do that with my kids. which is easy because we live in a one bedroom , so anytime they're having a nightmare, I know, I know what they are. And so it's something that, that I think is just really helpful to, to never have the belief in the first place that you can't control your dreams so that you can't influence your dreams because you can't. Right. We're, we're taught that we can't. And the media around it and all of that, it's like, oh no, you, you don't, you don't influence, you don't have control over it, but you do. Right. But do you always want to, is a very, very different pick is a different question. So for me, the dreams that I'm, most of my dreams, I choose to not be con, to be lucid in because I don't feel as rested from. So I will choose, it will, I'll be going to sleep and I'll decide, am I gonna be lucid or not? I'll realize I'm dreaming and go, okay, so let go. I, I literally tell myself, let go and just let the dream happen and let go of that. The lu lucidity. Lucidness Mark: Lucidity. Yeah. Yucca: Yeah. But when I do lucid, I, I do a lot of work when I need to. In that dream state is a, is a really powerful state to go into. I will work through problems that I'm having, I'll do actual ritual in that state and I actually do a lot of work in that state too. So I do a lot of so I'm. Trying to take a whole bunch of information and construct a lecture of how do I take these complex ideas and put them together anytime I need something that's creative but builds it. So I'll go to, so I, I teach a bunch of classes and I need to build a class. I'll go to sleep and then work on the actual outline and structure in the dream state, and then wake up and I'll write it down immediately and I've got the structure. but if I do that too much, I don't rest . So it, it's a, it's a, you know, you're not, I don't know what's going on on a physical level there, but I do not feel as rested when I, losed dream is when I just let myself dream. Mark: Yeah, I don't either. It lucid dreaming feels like effort. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: To me some of which is some, some amount of effort to maintain the dream Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And some of which is just to, you know, I'm, I have to pay attention, I have to make decisions, I have to do all that kind of stuff. So yes, my experience as well is that a lucid dream is not as restful. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I also. Do lucid dreaming? It's relatively rare because I'm usually just not aware of my dreams. But not, I mean, not infrequently with the dreams that are really impactful for me. I will realize, you know, I'm trying to read something and it's gibberish and oh, I'm dreaming, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: or Something happens that's impossible. Well, you know, being a naturalistic pagan when something that's physically impossible happens, I go, eh, I think I'm dreaming. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And. I, I, I have a lot of fun in lucid dreaming. I don't really use it for ritual work or even for, I mean, I suppose I should, given that it's kind of down there in the subconscious, but mostly I just use it to have The one thing that I do do that is kind of self-referential is I like to go and look in the mirror Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and I can't really describe what I've seen. , but it hasn't been my face. It's been, you know, deeper layers of who I am. So that's a very powerful exercise. If you find yourself in a dream and you wake up, go in the bathroom and look in the mirror. Yucca: or pull out the hand mirror that you happen to have in your pocket because it's your dream. Mark: Yeah. Pockets in me, in dreams are like pockets in cartoons. You can pull anything out of. Yucca: They're bigger on the inside. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Well, and the, the looking at a mirror, this, that's one where when people are trying to develop the, to be able to wake up in their dream, that's a classic one is to check whether you're dreaming or not look at a mirror. Another one is to look at writing. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: Look away, look back at the writing. Has it changed? And. We tend to do in our dreams, the things that we do when we're awake. So if you have a habit in your, like waking life where you always push your, the glasses up on your nose or you have a habit where you look at your phone or your watch, or you do you think something throughout the day those are things that you'll tend to repeat in the dream. And so one of the things that people can do to try and learn to lose a dream is to ask yourself throughout the day, am I dreaming? And check if you're dreaming, but you have to actually do the things so that you repeat that in your dream. Because if it's not actually a habit, you won't actually do it in your dream. But yeah, you check and you go, okay. I look at my watch and right now I look at my watch and there's actually the time on it. I look back and it's the same time, so I go, yeah, I'm, I'm awake. Right? Mark: Yeah. Yucca: But then once you're in the dream state, you mentioned this, this maintaining yourself in the dream is the next challenge, right? Is to not wake up immediately. For me, it feels like when I start to wake up, it feels like I'm almost being pulled backwards through like a gel. The image that I think of is if you've ever watched Stargate, There was a movie for it and there was a delightfully campy TV show for a while. Whenever they go through this, the Stargate is going through this, like this jelly plasma thing. I always feel like I'm getting pulled back through that and I feel like I can't breathe when I'm traveling through that, but if I can just pull myself back. I just like step back into it that I stay in the dream state. But if I let myself go back all the way through, the moment I get through that jelly, I'm awake. But I can go, okay, I'm gonna go right back to the same spot in that dream. That dream's still there as long as I don't fully get up, right? If I have to get up and go do something in the house you know, the cat broke something on the table or the. I go up to go use the restroom like that, then I'm, then I've left the dream. But if I haven't gone that far from it, I can go right back to the same spot. Mark: Right? Right. Well, that's cool. My feeling about being pulled out of the dream is much, it's much more vertical than it is horizontal. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: I feel like going deeper into the dream is literally sinking going lower. Whereas I feel like it's, it's like scuba diving in that it's about buoy. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and your natural buoyancy is to go back up and come out of the dream. And so the challenge becomes to make the motions or do whatever the effort is to stay down. Yucca: Interesting. Mark: So that's, that's more of how I experience it. Scuba diving is very dreamlike anyway. Just being down there or, or, or skin diving, snorkeling, same kind of thing. Being down there with all those fish and stuff in that very slow moving language environment because of the density of the water is very dreamlike to. Yucca: and your body being able to move in ways that you couldn't on dry land. Mark: Right. And it's a full body Yucca: twist around and move and, yeah. Mark: and it's a full body sensation. So, which is, you know, we tend, we tend to just sort of experience with our hands and faces and, you know, not, not have the rest of our bodies engaged so much. Yeah. So that's. That's a cool thing that I enjoy doing. The but, and, and this, this struggle to stay down happens when I realize that I'm dreaming. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That's the, that's the crisis point where it arises. And then I either win or lose, you know, I either stay down or I don. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: But if I do, then I feel I have a lot of freedom to just explore and to do thing, to fly and to jump off high buildings cuz I'm afraid of heights and stuff like that. So I have a, a catalog of many impossible experiences that I've had that are as vivid in my memory as my actual memory. Yucca: Right. Well, those are actual memories. But they aren't memories of things that you physically did. They're memories of things that, that your brain still thinks you did. Mark: Yes. Yucca: Yeah. It's, and it's amazing how the, how powerful the feelings. Can be, I mean, probably most of you have experienced, have you ever had a fight with someone in your dream and then woken up and you're still mad at them and you know that they didn't really say the thing, but you still feel it. You're still so mad at them. And it's like they, they would've never done that thing, whatever it was ever. Right? But, but you still experienced that. I think that's just so fascinating with, with dreams and, and I hope we. To learn more about why our brains do that. Mark: Yeah, that, I mean, that's the big question to me, the, I mean, the fact is we do it. There's a lot of descriptive literature about what it is, and. kind of patterns of how it works. But the big question of, but why, what exactly are we accomplishing by doing this? Even though I know in my own personal life that I do accomplish things in dreaming you know, I, I have experiences and I learn things. Yucca: And, you know, as you're saying that, it, it, it makes me think about other places in our lives where we have tools that we use, like meditation, like ritual. These are things that we're, we have some insight into with science. But largely we really don't understand them, but we can still, even though we, we don't yet understand them on that level, we can still figure out how to use them because they still exist. And that's, that's where the art part, that's where the craft part comes in. These are tools that we're using, Mark: I think of it as, Yucca: why. Yeah, Mark: oh, I'm sorry to Yucca: go. No, please. Mark: Well, I think of it as rather like the domestication of fire. We didn't understand what fire really was for. Hundreds of thousands of years, but we were still using it. We were making it, and we were transmitting it, and we were using it to cook our food and to illuminate our dwellings and to, you know, create heat in the wintertime and all kinds of stuff. And you know, I mean, I've heard it said that the most sim, the most mysterious and complex thing that humanity has ever discovered is the human brain. You know, there are the, the range of possible manifestations of behavior that come out of human brains is just astounding, and we don't understand very much about it at all because it's very hard to observe it while it's. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And to translate the experience of it working, which is consciousness into some kind of objective data about what that process is. So, yeah, I mean, I would, I, I believe we will learn more about that. I don't know that it'll ever be completely done and dusted, but Yucca: I don't think science works that way, frankly. Mark: No. Yucca: that the more we know, the more questions we have, and that is beautiful. That is just amazing. Mark: About simple things like how fireworks, you know, we, we, we can get pretty good answers that don't leave. A lot of questions left. Yucca: To on a certain scale. Right, right. We can go. Okay, so we're talking about the splitting of molecules and the recombination of, but let's start talking about, okay, those, but why were those molecules bonded to each other in the first place? Mark: Right. Yucca: What are they made of? Mark: is a molecule and, and what's that made of? And then what are those made of? And then what are those Yucca: Right. And why? Okay, so why so it's doing this because of this particular force. Why does that force exist? Is that force connected to something else? You know, there's all, it just keeps going and going and maybe, maybe there's a simple answer to all of it, but I think we're a ways away from finding that if it Mark: Well cer certainly all the quantum stuff, there's plenty of questions left, plenty of vast. Vast acreage of unknowns. But as you say, within a given scale context, you can understand how something works, and I doubt that we will understand why the human brain works even at its own scale, much, much less at deeper levels. But even at its own scale, there's. When you have trillions of informational connections working at incredibly fast speeds, I just think it's gonna be impossible to ever chase those things down. Yucca: Yeah, well, and each one being, as far as we know, very different The way that the, which connections my brain makes versus your brain. Mark: Well, right. I'm, and I'm just talking about one brain. I'm not talking about brains in general. I'm just talking about one brain. Yucca: but we have, there are things that we have learned, right? Like learning about the different, you know, kinds of connections and neurotransmitters and the, you know, which particular elements do we use in order, you know, all that stuff. Mark: Sure, Yucca: so much progress. Mark: tend to be associated with particular senses or particular processes? Yucca: Oh, but then they go and change on us because that's what we find. That's amazing. When, and not in all the cases, but there's many cases where we found when someone's had brain damage in one area and then another part of the brain starts to perform the function that usually would've been in that part of the brain and wow. Mark: I read a, a fascinating article by a woman, God, where was this? The Atlantic, I think. And she literally has half of a brain. Yucca: Hmm. Okay. Mark: it was discovered in adulthood when she had an m r I, that one in, Yucca: born this Mark: she was born this way and she's of perfectly normal intelligence. She, you know, she has an absolutely ordinary life, Yucca: Okay. Mark: but half of her brain never developed. Yucca: What's filling in the physical space where the other half would be. Okay. Mark: Yeah. To reverse spinal fluid. Yucca: Yeah. Wow. Mark: Pretty awesome, Yucca: pretty popular now. Mark: Yeah, Yucca: a lot of Mark: lots of studies and, and all that kind of stuff, Yucca: yeah. How interesting. Hmm. Mark: and I mean, that's fully coordinating both sides of her body. That's, you know, doing everything that a brain does and it's just doing it with half as much. Yucca: Wow. Have they checked in with siblings to see if they, that Mark: don't, I don't remember honestly, it, it was a while back, but it was a pretty wild article. I should try to find it. Yucca: Yeah, that's, that's interesting. This stuff is fun, Mark: It is, it is. And one of the places where we encounter the mysteries about the brain is in dreaming. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Because dreaming is a mysterious process. Why am I being shown these images? Why am I finding my, yeah, why am I finding myself immersed in, you know, these particular situations and these particular, you know, colors and objects and characters and plot lines, and, you know, what, what is all that? Yucca: Why are those two people actually one person, I don't know how this happens for you, but sometimes characters in my dream are not really, they're rarely one person. There's several different people at once. Mark: I don't have that at all. Yucca: no, you'll have a, there'll be someone, okay. For me, they're, they will be several different people and sometimes they'll think about, so why was it that so-and-so was also so-and-so? Like what overlap am I seeing there? Or did it not really matter for the dream, who the other person Mark: are, these are recognizable people from your life or they are characters that were created in the dream, Yucca: Well, people from my life, but also movie characters and think characters. Either a, a human, there's somebody, whether that's somebody is a real person or not. Right. Like there could, there, for instance, is making up there could be Santa, right? Like there's, you know, never met Santa. There's, as far as I know, no real Santa, but Santa can show up in my dream and Santa can also be my second grade teacher at the same time in my. But that's just, you know, why, right? That's one of those interesting things to think about. What's there's, there's gotta be some connection there, or maybe not, but me trying to figure out what that connection is might reveal to me something about my feelings about my second grade teacher, you know? Or why am I thinking about, why am I thinking about her right now? You know, how many decades later? Mark: right. Yucca: So, Mark: Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff, and I'm sure that our listeners have a very broad range of different kinds of experiences as well. You know, if you want to email us at the wonder podcast cues gmail.com or comment on this Yucca: you're listening to it online? Mark: listening to it on Yucca: yeah. Mark: You can go ahead and comment there. You know, what was your most vivid dreaming experience? What's been your most amazing experience? In the dreaming realm because it really is a pretty remarkable thing that we do. We spend a lot of our time asleep and, Yucca: It's glorious. Love it. Mark: we don't spend as much, I don't spend as much time asleep as I wish I did, Yucca: and that's one that I, that I have looked into the research on, which is very distressing about the sleep deprivation especially in the United States. Very worrisome with, with teenagers in terms of what's happening with their sleep deprivation. It's Mark: my local school districts here just made a ruling that they were not going to start classes until I think, eight 30 in the morning, maybe nine, Yucca: Oh good. Mark: classes had been starting at seven 30 and it's just, that's not good for a developing marine. Yucca: it isn't. Well, and, and then this is one area where there's research as well into chronotypes. And it, this seems to be pretty universal across cultures that the, that teenagers. Will naturally stay up later and wake up later. That seems to be, that's not just coming from our, like our cultural stereotypes that seems to be across cultures. And getting less sleep than we need has a negative impact on so many different levels for us, and it increases risk of all kinds of things. So I, I think it's ridiculous to. To be making teenagers get up and be being sleep deprived because of that. And I know we can go, oh, we're supposed to be teaching them, you know, responsibility and all of that, and it's like, hmm. Not at the cost of their physical and emotional wellbeing and their ability to learn, because you're not gonna learn as well when you're sleep deprived. Mark: Right. Yucca: And what, what are we teaching them that them fitting into? These particular hours that we've for some reason chosen that probably have more to do with like the hours of operation of factories. We care more about that than their wellbeing. I don't know. That's, there's my soapbox. Sorry, I'll Mark: Well, I don't dis, I don't disagree with any of it. It, it certainly, Yucca: frankly, eight 30 is still Mark: I'm just glad that at least. I'm just glad that some of the more progressive districts are starting to pay attention to this research and to think about, and parents complain because parents want the childcare, right? They, they want to get out of the house in time to get to work. And I mean, you know, just the whole system is interconnected. Levels of dysfunction. Yucca: Yeah, that's a whole nother area. Mark: It is, and it's not a particularly cheery area, so let's move on. Yucca: We should. Yes. Now actually there was a very cheery, exciting thing that you wanted to announce. Mark: Yes. We've talked about this before, but tickets for the atheopagan Web Weaving online Conference, which will be June 4th of this year. The tickets will go on sale next Saturday. April 1st. Tickets are from 10 to $50. There are scholarship tickets for nothing to spend anything. Nobody's turned away for lack of funds. We're encouraging giving at least 20 so that we can cover the expenses of the conference, but you can get information about it at. AP society.org/a WW 2023 and we'll put that in the, Yucca: And the show Mark: in the podcast Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And you can download the program there and look offerings of workshops and activities and all that kind of stuff, it's gonna be a really great opportunity. To see other people that are following these paths and exchange information and learn stuff. So I really hope you'll take a look and consider coming. Yucca: and both of us are doing workshops, so. Mark: That's right. I'm doing one on the clerical path. And you're doing one for kids, right? Yucca: I am, yeah. I'm gonna do a kids circle, so, yep. Mark: great. Yeah. Exciting. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: yeah that's two months away, but tickets will go on sale next week and you can look at the program it's downloadable in either PDF or format. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: You can look at those, Yucca: And it does always help us to get people to know ahead of time how many people to be expecting. Mark: That's right. If, if all the registration comes in at the last minute, it could be complicated for us. Our current Zoom account, this will be done over Zoom. Our current Zoom account allows a hundred attendees. If we have 98 attendees three days before the event and then another 300 people register in those last couple of days, we're gonna have to call Zoom up at work capacity and you know, all that kind of stuff. So, Yucca: So we'd of course love to have Mark: ask you to get your tickets early. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yes. Yeah, for sure. We would be, You know, arrange for more, more seats with Zoom. But it would be a lot better if we could do that a week in advance rather than two days in advance. So get your tickets early. Yucca: Yeah, and we'll see you there. And as always, thanks for hanging out with us on today's episode, and we'll see you next week. Mark: Have a great one.    

Mark: Well, look, it's really it's a, it's a long journey. I've read your book, I've read many books, I've been in this game for a long time. It's very difficult to sum it up in literally minutes, I suppose. But after reading a book just recently, and listening to all your podcasts a lot lately, I've delved into a lot of it and taken many, many things out of each person's story, which I can resonate wholeheartedly with. But I probably got into Options back in 2006. And I've probably come and gone with it a lot. I've started and stopped, due to various reasons, obviously, life, I've got kids and family and work commitments and stuff like that. But it's always been, I suppose, a hobby. But trying to make that jump or trying to get into it. Full time is obviously difficult for lack of funds or lack of time and effort. I don't know, there's always seems to be something that comes up that stops me from progressing. Having said that, I'm a pretty committed person. I'm pretty disciplined. I've been doing it now for a long time. But like, if you look through him on the table here, I've got trading stuff sitting everywhere, notes. Mark: I've crunched the wheel so many times I've done the shiny diamond thing. I've gone from one program to another. I've spent numerous amounts of funds on various programs and different services such as yourself. I don't know this Option Genius has been around in my life, I suppose, on and off. So I don't know like I've all I'm a big advocate for what you say and what you do. I've wholeheartedly believe that I've been selling options for a long time I've done credit spreads, I've done strangles I've done butterflies, I've done covered calls, I've done a lot of those strategies, or centered around selling options. And I've been doing it for a long time. But for some reason, I just can't seem to break through the ceiling, I just cannot seem to be there to go from this hobby, like training interest that I seem to be involved with, to getting to that next level. I suppose I when I found out that we're going to do this call. Set last night I sat down I tried to write out things that would be good to discuss or to ask you. And I've got like all this paper sitting you have all these notes that I've made, as you would have seen in my email, it was quite lengthy. I think one of the assistants said all that email is probably the longest one I've ever received, that I really okay then.  Allen: Like, you know, because we get, we get lots of emails every day and some people, right? Some people write two paragraphs, but when somebody goes in deep, and they really share their, you know, their soul pretty much. It's like, Hey, I've been doing this and this and this, and this, and I don't know what's going on, then, like we you can feel it when somebody is really, really wanting to make it work. And so those most of those get passed on to me. And when I read it, I was like, alright, you know, we need to we need to talk about this. Because if you've been doing this for years, then like, I have not doing my job. I've let you down in some way that because you know, you shouldn't still be feeling that way. I know. But it's not uncommon. You know, we come across many, many people that come to us and say, hey, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. But you know, it never clicked for me. But you will.. Mark: Yeah, I can see that. So many people that you talk to, you know, have the same they're trying and trying to trying to find the right system, the right setup the right, whatever it is just can't seem like I feel to break through that ceiling. Like you're stuck underneath the water. You're swimming hard. You're learning this, you're watching that you're reading this you're researching. You're looking at the charts to pair with analysis, paralysis, all that stuff. And I've made lots of trades. I've done lots of trading. I've been I've been I won't say successful because clearly we wouldn't be on this call otherwise, but I've made money, but I've also lost money. I've got scars, I've got all that stuff I've had I've had losses, but still here I am battling looking at all that stuff that you talked about in the book in that book really resonated with me there's a lot of stuff in there that I thought I can do this. I know I can do it. Why am I doing it? Why it's just what why does it elude me so much? Is it just a pipe dream and more and more just a duck on the water swimming and just never gonna get there? I don't know. Allen: So you know, when we when we got the email, when they forwarded to me, they asked me like, hey, what do you think the problem is here? Does he not know enough? And my answer to them was No, I think he knows too much. He knows too much. That's part of the problem. I'm just guessing here and I wanted to try to get to the root of it. But you know a lot of the times when so there's there's different things that you need. Everybody needs different things to in order to succeed in anything. Obviously, you know, you need to know what to do you need to how to do it. You know, you have to practice you have to put in the time. You need somebody Do that can actually has doing it like coach that's teaching you, you need a team or a teammate or somebody to do it with. These are all different things that that can help. But a lot of times we come across people that have been, you know, bouncing around from program to program, like you said, they know all the different strategies, they know everything, they know how it works. Some people come and they know it better than I do. You know, so they're, they're telling me that, oh, the Vega this is this and the Gamma and the theta and the row and all this other, you know, they're touching on the Greeks, and they're managing by the Greeks, and they're doing all these complicated stuff. But they're like, it's still not working, why is it not working? So I think, if it can work for somebody else, it can work for you. And I firmly believe that in just about anything, except maybe sports, you know, should somebody else could dunk the ball, maybe I can't dunk the ball. But in trading, a lot of it is I think, 80 to 90% of it is menta. Mark: I've totally, totally, totally. Allen: So there might be something that is holding you back, or, you know, maybe like I don't know, so let's get into it. So now you've mentioned a couple of times that you haven't gotten to the next level. So tell me what is the next level? What is the goal that you're trying to get to? Mark: Well, I think the goal is the same for everybody's, you know, everyone's trying to make income, like, right, I have a I mean, I'm in I'm a cop. So I work in a profession that I see myself coming to a fork in the road. I've been doing this job now for over 14 years, for 10 years. And before that I was in a private industry, we had a family business. So I understand all the dynamics of running a business, how it operates. We had a family business for over 30 years. And long story short, we got out of that for various reasons. And then I got into the government sector, which is a totally different psyche altogether, which took me some time to try and come to terms with. Having said that, I've forever in my wife, and I've come from a family that has been heavily invested in property, shares, businesses, and stuff like that. So I've always had this belief that I can do something with my life that will be able to produce constant income money have investments, like I've had investment properties, and I've done the share thing now on the option things for a long time. And I'm not destitute, I'm not desperate, I have a house, I have three beautiful children and family sort of stuff. But I want to go to the next level I want to be able to provide, I want to be able to teach my kids trading, I want to be able to show them how to invest all the money stuff, like all that sort of thing. I feel as if I'm promoting this stuff, yet, I haven't really truly succeeded myself. I haven't got to the level where they can say okay, Mark, look at you've got all this great stuff, and that show me how to do it. And when they do ask me, I'm sort of thinking so I will not really, I can talk about it. I've read about it, and I'm doing it, but I really haven't got what you think I have. Having said that. Getting back to the trading side of it. I think I want to have this as a business, I can see the potential in it as you can do from home. It's all in front of you in the net. I don't have to go out I don't have to be injured tree. I understand that. I do know a lot about it. I understand all those things you just mentioned with the Greeks and what not right? And I probably do, I probably do know too much. And I do want to keep it simple. I do say to myself, when I'm doing it, just keep it simple. Why do you need to have this indicator? Why do we need to be having that? I totally agree with what you've promoted and talked about for so long. And I think I was probably watching on Option Genius probably before you even started doing podcasts. But over the years, I've come and gone. I've been involved with and I've been with other things. And I've on and off as we mentioned before, right? All right. Does that help answer the question? Allen: No. So what what what do you mean by the next level? Is it an income? Is it is it a certain amount of money in the account is a certain amount of money every month? Where it is it that you say okay, now I've arrived now I have achieved my goal? What what is that number so that you would be able to be like, Yes, I feel happy though. Mark: Okay, so I've sort of thought about that. And I've put a number down to 10k. Now that's a pie in the sky dream. That's a pie in the sky dream. I know. And that's a long way off being achieved. I would just like to be able to see some consistency, all that stuff that you promote consistent, being profitable, and I can do that. But then as you know, you get one or two trades that wipe you out, wipe it back to zero and then it got to start again. Right? So just not we're just not getting that constant. Right? What do they call it.. Allen: Okay, so 10k is the goal. Now, it's not a it's not a it's not a pipe dream. It's so 10k is the goal. If you got 10k every month, you'd be happy. You'd be like okay, I've made it you know I'm accomplishing And that this stuff is actually working. Finally, this stuff is actually working if you were making 10k a month. So tell me, what is it that you think is keeping you from doing that? Mark: Well, clearly a lack of funds at this stage. But I have had numerous accounts where they've had a substantial amount of money in there, but I've just brought it right back down to just doing one lots, until I can see the consistency and seeing that, the, that my trading works, it's consistent, well, then we can scale up. So I'd rather than that, so I'm happy to do just one month a month, which means I'm not gonna make 10 grand in the near future, right, those types of trades, but we can scale that up at a later date. Allen: But what do you so if you were to say, hey, Alan, give me this one thing, and I know I can make tons of money. What is that one thing? Mark: Well, I suppose it's like a business plan, isn't it, like a franchise to follow a step by step thing, do this, do this, do this, do that put it on, obviously, there's a little bit of, there's gonna have to be a little bit of a thought process and feel for the market. But I suppose I need a plan. Like I know how to put the trade on, I know how to do a credit spin on it, for example, but I suppose I need a set of rules or business plan or like something to follow. So that way, I can just follow the recipe for a particular day, not particular strategy, but it's very hard to identify it or pinpoint it down to one thing. Like I've written all these notes in the book and pages and pages of all these things that you're discussing the iPad and whatnot, and try to answer those questions myself. Like, what am I looking for? What's stopping me I've written here a recipe, a plan, a template to follow rules to follow or to abide by tools, treat it like a franchise, for instance. So that way, I'm not deviating to another thing. So I have it on my wall and write down Am I following those particular plans? Does that is that sort of answer the question?  Allen: So do you not have any trading plans right now? I mean, you said you were in different programs and everything so did you do you have any that you've been using as a guideline as a framework? Mark: The cover I've written things down in the past but I suppose sticking to it, or having it visible is difficult. I suppose someone to write one with me or for me to say right this is a trading plan. This is what you need to have in it to follow I suppose I haven't really been given a choice like if it says write a trading plan, write down this stuff, write it down, but I suppose I just want to try it like this is what's going on my head just put the trades on just put the trades on work with the probabilities. Yeah, it should work out. Allen: Okay, and are you conservative or aggressive? Mark: I believe I'm conservative in the sense where at the moment like with the one loss, so like, if I was aggressive, I'd be going right I'm pretty positive this trades gonna work of two or five, or 10 lot but at the moment, it's like let's just hold back and do one more being conservative. I think I can be aggressive if I need to be but on how Allen: And how much percentage return are you looking to make? Mark: I knew you're gonna ask me that question. And I don't actually have a percentage. I've just I suppose a bad way of saying it but I just keep putting the trades on and hope that the probabilities work out so I don't have a particular percentage amount that I've got Okay. When you ask that question Allen: obviously so obviously you know, just putting the trades on hoping they work out that's not working. So we're gonna have we're have to refine this What strategy do you think most appeals to you? Mark: Well, obviously I've been working on the credit spread that's probably the one thing that I've done the most of the credit spreads like I've done in many others, but that's the one that I've probably done the most so in the last few years. Allen: Okay, and are you keeping track record of all the trades that you've been doing? Mark: No, I don't. I have written them down in the past. I do try to follow that put it in a journal, but over time, it just becomes cumbersome I suppose like it's writing it all down. I don't I don't stick to it. It's probably the kind of problem there. Allen: So what you said is you want to franchise, and in the franchise are going to tell you the first thing is to document everything you're doing. Because we cannot tell what's going wrong if we don't know what you already did. So having a firm plan that says okay, I'm gonna put this trade on and writing down why, why am I putting this trade on? Because it's moving higher because it's got news coming out because it's high. It's, you know, very volatile right now or the IV is off or whatever their reasoning is, you put the rig, you put it there, you write the trade, you record what happened, why or why did not work out. And then after you do a whole bunch of these, you can go back and look at it and say, okay, every time I do a trade that's at, you know, 35 Delta, it works wonderfully. But every time I do any other Delta, it doesn't work. So I'm just going to do that 35 delta. So if you want to find your own trading plan, then this is how you do it. Now, this is a long way to do it, it's going to take a long time, because you're going to have to test different things and try different things and see what's working, what's not working. But it would be one way for you to create your own plan based on what you find you're more comfortable in, because some people they come in and they tell me, hey, you know what I want to do Credit spreads, and I want to do 2025 Delta spreads, some people don't want to do five Delta spreads, you know, so everybody's comfortable with different things. And then based on the amount of credit they get, then we can figure out okay, how do we how do we manage the trade, some people should be not managing the trade at all, they should just be getting in and getting out at a certain amount. Some people, they can go ahead and say, hey, my trade is going bad, I'm going to, you know, adjust it or do something else with it. So depending on what we're thinking, when we get in will dictate what we do when we're in the trade. Mark: So now that I know what I do for trades, there are particular entry signals that I looked for, like I don't just go and find a stock and then look up a chain and then play delta and put it on. I do have, like, for example, I think there's market volume, I use volume. So obviously, when volume is increasing, I'll have them put on a put trade, obviously, when the stocks turning or progressing. And obviously over the three averages, like you say, things like that. So there are particular indicators, and not too many I do try and keep it fairly simple, I believe, before I put anything on, so I do try and put the weight in my favor. And the advocate of that, of course, by using those some small indicators to try and get it on sideways or progressing in the in the direction that we think it's going. So I do look at that I'm not a big person, I'm gonna use a 35, Delta, or 45, or whatever. Right? Okay, I understand the Delta side of things. But it's more about volume, I suppose at this stage and what. Allen: Okay, so that that's good to know. Right? So I mean, what I would do is, I probably have a sheet, kind of like a checklist, you know, so get it out of your head, and onto an actual piece of paper, where every single trade you have to mark it off, you know, the volume is high, yes, you know, movement is this way or whatever, whatever your your things are, you check it off. One, two, three.. Mark: I actually have done that I can attest that I have done that I've written down, like when the bar gets lower than the level of bar, it's time to get in or when a turn when it points up. It's getting. So I have written most things down in the past. Yes. Allen: So that'll be your trade law right there. That's if you do if you have the discipline to do that, before you put in the trade, you'll you'll know at the end, okay. You know, just go back to that journal and be like, Okay, what worked and what didn't work? What are the patterns. And that's kind of the stuff that I was doing originally, when I was first starting to figure this stuff out, is look at every single one. And now I have my my checklist, where if there are two or three things that I cannot mark off, I don't put the trade on, because I know that hey, there's not enough, you know, these things are really important. I want them, I don't want to put a trade on without everything checked off. Allen: Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to lose, like you still lose on the trade with everything checked off. But like you said, you know, we're putting the odds in our favor. As many times if you have a checklist, like you said you did. That's your journal right there. And so before you put on the trade, you just mark it off, you know, check, check, check, check, oh, I can't check this one. Then later on, after the trades are done, you do 2030 trades, at least, then you can go back and look at and say okay, I lost on these three trades. What is the pattern I lost on these five trades? What is the pattern? And you might find a pattern, you don't have to but you might find something that say okay, these indicators, you know, they're not working or they are working. The other thing is, I mean, it's, it's really simple, right? You find the strategy that you want. And you said, Hey, I found the strategy. Second step is to find the trading plan, that you think you think will work and then is just test it and trade it and do it over and over over again. But the important part is that you have to stick to the plan. Do you think you stick to the plan, or is it? Is it a discipline? Mark: Tell me, tell me, what got you out? I've read your book or listen to your story. What part got you through that ceiling? Obviously, we're doing the same thing as we all do for such a long period of time. But there must have been something that clicked or something that you did or something did you get into? Was it a program for you? Was it someone that you got? Hold on What, what got you to that next level that we all tried to get to? Allen: It took time, it took discipline, there were a few things that really helped me. One was really sticking to the rules that I had set up. And really, it's about, you know, when it comes down to it, it's about putting the trades on with the odds in your favor as many ways as you can. And I learned about that later on, you know, having different different levels. But what I started to do, and the ones that I really started doing well on, and in the beginning, were iron condors. For some reason, that strategy really, really clicked with me. And I was like, Oh, my God, I gotta work. No, no, it doesn't work right now. But he's like, you know, that strategy really worked. And it was like, Oh, I can adjust it. So I might never lose money in the trades. It's just really awesome. But I still was having trouble following the rules. Because, you know, you have to work that. So there were there were a few ways. Number one is my wife got involved. Allen: So every day, she would, like I would have a list of all of my trades, and I would have all the rules, like when I needed to do what, so every day at a certain time, she would come upstairs because I was working from home and she wasn't she wasn't working. So she would come upstairs. And she would ask me, Okay, let's go through every single trade one by one by one. And so she'd be she'd have her notes. And she's, okay, this trade on Russell. Where is it now? And they go, Okay, this, it's up this much money, or it's down this much money? Okay. When are you going to adjust? Well, when this happens? And they said, where is it now? Say, Oh, it's right here. So do you have to adjust it? No, not yet. Okay, cool. Next one. All right. I did this. Okay. Why did you do this trade? And when are you going to adjust it? Should you have adjusted it? Yeah, I should have adjusted already. Why didn't you adjust it? Ah, I don't know. She's like, Oh, what the hell are you doing?  Mark: All that is basically you got your wife involved? Allen: I mean, not just involved, but she was holding me accountable. So I had to answer because she doesn't need to know anything about trading. But she just needs to look at my rules and ask me the questions like, hey, what's the trade doing? Is it up or down? Why have you not? What are you going to do about it? And if there is something to do about it, what are you going to do? So it's just asking yourself those questions every single day. And it helped. I used to do that on my own. But I would always ignore the answers. Because I didn't have anybody to answer to. It's like, oh, I'm a trader, I'm the boss, I make my I'll make the decisions. But when she came in, I knew I had to answer to her. And if I don't have a good reason, then I'm putting her money on the line as well. Right? I'm putting her future on the line as well. So we would have a discussion about that. So I knew in advance, I knew, Okay, she's coming at one o'clock, I need to make sure I got everything right. I'm doing everything right. Otherwise, we're gonna have an argument. And so I needed her. Like, in the beginning, I wasn't, I was I lost a lot of money. And so the only reason that I didn't have to go out and get a job was because she was patient with me. But it was part of it was like, she's going to be the boss, right? Until I turn it around. And until I break the ceiling, she's the boss. She's going to tell me what I can do what I cannot do based on how I'm doing. And so I call that my one o'clock, you know, fire drill. It's like every day at one o'clock, I still do it. I go through every single trade and I look at it and say okay, is this trade up or down? It's up. Okay, good. Allen: What happens if it goes down a little bit? Am I still going to be okay? Yes. Okay, move on to the next one. And so I don't have time to do that on 100 trades. So that's why I limit the number of trades I have. But every day I go in and I look at it and I monitor it I know where each trade stands. So that before it starts to get into trouble, I know and I can look at it and be like okay, this one I need to monitor this one I need to adjust early or this one I need to maybe just exit it because it's not acting right. It's not acting properly. So It kind of gives me you know, so having that while you go in every day and look at each trade, and everybody does that. But in order to you ask yourself the right questions, and then you have to do what you need to do. So just monitoring the trades, and just checking on them is not enough. You have to know, okay, this is my plan, and I have to do this, then you have to stick to it. And then if you have an accountability partner, or if you have a wife or a child, or whatever, if somebody comes in and asks you, hey, you were supposed to do this, well, why didn't you do it? And then you have to answer to them. So when you have somebody else there, that automatically, I mean, that instantly made me better, like instantly, the first day, second day she came in, you know, I just I just started following the rules, because I knew I had to, I had to give her an answer. So that was one of the things that did it. Allen: The other thing was that I realized that this is a long term game. And so you've read the passive Trading Book. So I wrote that book, because I saw that if you're only selling options, eventually, you don't like the options can go against you. So what I mean by that is, in the financial crisis, when we had the financial crisis in 2008, there was everything was just going up and down. And so if I had options on if I trades on those trades lost, and then I could never get that money back. That's when I realized that, okay, you know, if I want to play the long game, if I want to be in this forever, I cannot let something else knock me out. I cannot let a COVID 19 pandemic knock me out, I can't let the financial crisis I can't let you know, the President making some decision and sending the stocks down, knocked me out. And so I started building up the foundation of stocks, and using those to generate capital on those. And the idea is, hey, I want to own the stocks as my foundation. But I want to use options as basically like a rocket ship, you know, so I wanted to boost the returns. So I'm gonna have conservative stuff in the in the main portfolio, you know, where I have the stocks, and I'm making money. Mark: I totally agree with all right. Yeah. Allen: So, you know, that was now Mark: I totally agree with all that, definitely. Allen: So you can't start off that way. Because it takes a lot of money to own that stocks. So in the beginning, you do have to get good at picking one strategy, getting good at it, just following it and being disciplined, and saying, Hey, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to follow it along. Now, again, long term, picture wise, every month, you're not going to make money, every trade is not going to make money. So you have to have that in your in your mindset that, hey, sometimes it's gonna work, and sometimes it's not. So there's lots of lots of little little things that you can improve on it. But the biggest thing that I'm seeing is that you have to follow the plan. Mark: So Allen, do you think that I would benefit? Like I know you're selling plenty of courses, promote what you promote in the book. And I totally agree with all that, I get it on one side. But if I was to do another course, such as yours, I my fear is, and we're just going down that same rabbit holes, as I've done before, hence why I'm confused as to why I can't seem to break that ceiling. If I was to go into a course such as yours, this one that you're the passive trading and whatnot, I worry that I really fear that a year I am going into it again, I'm doing another course. But I understand the strategy. I think now I need more of a coach, maybe I need maybe that one on one, maybe maybe that's what I need. Or maybe there are things that I'm not happy to admit to that I do that I need to be changed. I need to be molded stead of going down this direction on to be heading over in this little bit direction over here with my trading. I understand the why thing. That's a great thing in my voice. She's a great supporter of me. I am trying to I'm trying to get out of work. She works. I'm trying to get her out, keep trying and trying and time is your course gonna sit me on that path to freedom. Allen: So it's like, you know, I mean, I'll give you an example. Like when people go to college, right? They everybody's told go to college, go to college, some people they go to college, and they just they just party the whole time and they don't get anything out of it. Some people go and they study, study, study, study, study, and they get a good job. Some people go and they make lots of contacts, you know, they they meet, they make lots of friends. They meet lots of teachers so that when they get out, they know a lot of people and they have a good network and then that helps them so it's really up to each person individually. Now I would love to say that yes, every single person that takes my course makes them million dollars. But that's not the reality. You know, people come in, life happens, they take it seriously, they don't take it seriously. And, you know, that's, that's one part I cannot control. So I cannot tell you that, yeah, you know what, it's going to work for you just because it's, I'm amazing. And I'm a wonderful person, and it's just gonna work. 90% of it is on you, I can give you everything I know, I can do it with you. But again, the markets have to cooperate. Number one, and then number two, it has to click for you, you have to do it, and you have to practice it. And you have to stick to the plan. A lot of times when people come into my programs, and they tell me Oh, hey, you know, I'm doing XYZ, I'm like, but that's not what I have in the plan. Allen: That's not what I have in the program. They're like, yeah, no, but I'm changing. I'm like, okay, but have you done it my way? No, not yet. But then why did you join my program, you could do your own way. Without my program, you don't need to pay for my program, right? If you're going to pay for something. And if you believe that, hey, yeah, this guy knows what he's talking about this thing works, I think it works. If you're going to pay for it, then just follow that step by step by step and don't change it. Unless it works.  Allen: When it starts working, then only then would you say, Okay, now I'm going to, you know, change it up, because I think I can, I can be a little bit more aggressive, or, hey, I want to be a little bit more conservative, or I want to change it up a little bit. But you don't do that until it's always working. So the problem is that people that have been doing this for a long time, they know all the strategies, they've listened to many other coaches, you know, they come in, and they're like, Well, you know, I don't like that one thing, I'm going to change, I don't like that thing, I'm going to change. And so they start doing it their own way and they don't listen. And so you can't take stuff from this course and this course and this course and mash it into a Frankenstein, and then tell me "Oh, it didn't work?" Well, because I don't know why that guy told you to do that. And I don't know why that other guy told you to do that. Or the only thing I know is if you do it this way, you'll get the similar results that what I'm doing. Now, if you add and change it, then I can't help. So, you know, like you're saying that we have, I think there's like four pillars that I tell people that people need. So if you want to learn how to do something, you need these four pillars. Number one is you need the right strategy, which you've already said is, hey, that's the credit spread, right? Number two, you need the trading plan that works. So number three, is you need other people to do it with because you're doing it all alone, like you said, you know, you might need a wife, if you don't have a wife or partner like that, then you can have a community or other students that are doing it the same way. Allen: And then number four, you need a coach that can actually show you what he's doing, because he's still doing it. And he's actually doing it right now, instead of somebody that said, oh, yeah, I was a market maker 30 years ago, and I don't trade anymore. So I think those are the four things and depends on which everybody needs. So the coaching part is the one that takes the most time. And that's why those coaching programs are the most expensive. Allen: In my passive trading course. You know, we give you the trading plan. It's like okay, here, this is the plan, these are the rules, you follow it and, you know, good luck. But there's no one on one coaching. There's no group, you know, where we are, where we're doing and looking at the trades. And so when we have that passive trading course, it's a cheaper course. And so people would join it, and they would go through the modules. And some people would have a lot of success, some people wouldn't. So I said, What, what's the problem? Why are they not? Why is it not working? And I realized that it would help if they could just spend a lot more time with me. And so we created that credit spread mastery course, where every week, we get on the call, and we're just looking for trades, we're managing trades, we're adjusting trades, doing it together. So the point of that is, here's the rules. Here's the trading plan. Now let's do it together, over and over and over and over and over and over. And so once you have that habit of doing it the same way over and over and over the other, the other ideas, the other habits kind of die off. So I've seen that that program does deliver results. So we back it up and we say hey, look, if you're in our program, and the program doesn't work, like you don't if you're not profitable in our program, then we keep you in the program. We keep working with you. We keep you in the class until you become profitable. And so even if the markets not cooperating That's fine, we'll learn how to manage it together. And then we'll stay longer in the program, if you'd have to be.. Mark:  So with your target trading alum, obviously, it does take a type of market. And obviously, that's why through the last six months with Covid whatnot, it would be easy Earth to do that type of training, because obviously, it just went straight up didn't keep they're still on put, credit spreads the load of was money for Jim, in a market such as what we're in now, which is up and down, up and down. It's far more difficult, isn't it? Allen: Currently it is more difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible. So we do have to dial back our, we have to dial back our expectations. So last year, the year before, you know, making 10% a month, 7-8% a month, not a big deal, it was pretty simple. You know, put the trades on most of them work out in anybody, and everybody was making money. Like any you know, you could buy anything, and it was going up any everyone is making money. This is a market where you have to be really good at selection, trade selection, and management. So you have to know when things are turning around, and when to get out before they get really bad. Allen: So the trade management, sticking to your stop loss is very important right now. And those are things that most people get afraid of, you know, so it's like, okay, I put the trade on, it should work. And then oh, no, the stocks turning around, what do I do what I do, and they don't do anything. So if your thing is part of, if you're doing as part of a group or in a program, then be like, hey, we need to get out, we need to get out, get out, get out. Some people let people know, Mark: There's that mental component, that's the biggest part. And as I've gone along this journey, if all these years, I've realized more so in the latest year, it's not about the strategy. It's not about all that stuff. That mental side of it, it's 80-20, Mark Douglas, the book, the trading zone, I listened to that over and over and over again, and various other podcasts and whatever other things, but trying to pull the trigger when you're in a loss is it wasn't so hard, we put this trade on, it was gonna work a met the probabilities, it was all looking good, it was under the over the top of the averages. I had volume, blah, blah. But all of a sudden, now I'm underwater again. And here we go again, and then I've got to pull a trigger to get out to take that loss. Mark: And I have taken some big losses in the past, I've had to pull the trigger, just recently with the weekly trading system. And when that I mean, there's Solomon says, I've been there for a couple of weeks, again, I've been on and off over the over many years. And all of a sudden, now I'm having to pull the trigger again to get out because we lose money. Like it's hard. It's another scar, isn't it another scar, not a scar, it's another get back down there. You know, I don't want to see you do any good. It's difficult, you know, and that's that mental side of it is arguments or trading? Allen: Yep. The emotions, you know, the emotions have to be kept in check. So there's different ways that you could do that, you know, one, one of the ways is people say that you divorce or divorce yourself from the outcome. So whether you win or lose, doesn't matter make a Mark: ..difference? Exactly what I totally agree with that. And that skill is very difficult. Allen: Yeah, your job is to just follow the plan and stick to the plan. And if you can do that, eventually, over the long run, it'll work out, you know, maybe you have losing trades, that's fine. But over the long run, it should work out. So too much of it, like you said, you know, like, oh my god, I'm, I'm going to be negative again, oh, my God, I'm gonna have to pull the trigger. And oh, my God, you know, when you have that kind of reaction, that compounds and it just makes it all, it makes it much harder to get out of the trade when there is a loss. The other there's one lady, she told me something that really worked for her. She goes, You know what, this is not my money. This is God's money. And what what are you talking about as God's money? She goes, Well, I use this money. And I use the gains from the money to do good. Because they use it for charity work. So she's like, I don't need the money to live. Because I have enough income I have enough. You know, I have I have money coming in that I live off of. But this is my trading money. And so I take the money that I make, and I give it away to charity, and I do good things with it. So it's really God's money, and I cannot lose God's money. There's no way I can lose money. And so if I'm if I'm going negative, that the trade is losing, I get out right away because I don't want God mad at me because it's not my money. So that's another way you could look at it. That you know, again, it's it's taking yourself out of the outcome, you know, and it's not like okay, it's not under my control. So you've got the wife coming in and asking you what you're doing and why it's working or why it's not working and being accountable. You have you know, not looking at the outcome just getting better as a trader, just hey, I need to do my skills, whether it wins or not, that's not up to me. That's up to the market, I can't control that. But I can follow my plan. That's up to me. The other thing is, you know, not looking at it in emotional point of view, like, Hey, this is not my, maybe this is my kid's mind. Maybe this is, you know, God's money, however you want to look at it, but it's not yours. So if you lose it, it's bad. Like, that's the worst thing to happen. You know. So there's, there's three different ways that you can mentally overcome the different obstacles. But again, I think one thing that we haven't talked about yet is to simplify, right? So you've done all the different strategies, and I'm sure, you know, some of it is creeping in. And, you know, it's like, oh, you know, I got to do this, or I'm going to, I'm going to wait for this indicator, or I'm going to wait for these Bollinger Bands, or the Fibonacci, or the technicals, or any of that stuff, the more you simplify it, the easier it becomes to actually follow through with it. And so I think, you know, just one strategy, not chasing after the shiny object, you know, it's like, Hey, make a decision. If it's spread, spreads, and that's the only thing you focus on, and you get rid of everything else, you stopped listening to everything else, you unsubscribe from all the emails, you know, whatever, whatever service that you choose, like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to follow this plan, I'm going to, you know, if you've taken a course, maybe you've already taken a course, you have a course that you've tak`en and be like, Okay, I like this course, I'm going to follow this course, we'll get rid of everything else. Just go through it. Master that and don't do anything else until you know what that is, until you get the results that you're supposed to get it. In the beginning, when I started screwing up, like I would learn something, and then I would do good for a little bit and then I would mess up. And then I would do good, then I would mess up. So I was like, What the hell do I do? Well, I would always go back to the basics. I would imagine that I don't know anything. And I would go back to step one. Okay. What is a call? What is the put? What am I doing here? What is the strategy? How am I supposed to put it on? What are the rules and I gotta follow them step by step by step, not like, oh, you know, I'm gonna, I think this stock is gonna go down or or, you know, there's a Fibonacci retracement level, and there's some support here. So I don't have to adjust. No, forget all that stuff. I don't know any of that stuff. All I know, is the strategy and my trading plan. And that's it. And so that was, you know, you go back to the basics. And that will change your mentality of it, like, Okay, how do I manage the trade? How do I deal with this? Allen: Again, if there's other things involved, like stress, you know, if you're under a lot of stress, you're going to make the wrong decisions. If it has to work. If I have to make money this month, from my trades, you're going to make the wrong decisions. It's not going to work out in the long term. So there was a there was something another trick that one of our one of our students taught me. And now everybody can't do this. Most people can't do this. But what he does, is that he takes whatever money he makes trading this year. He will live off that next year. So when he's trading next year, he doesn't have to live off that money. Because he already has the money set aside from the last year. If that makes sense. Mark: You need a big bankroll sounds like a real estate agent. Allen: Yeah, you need Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was. He was a politician. But, um, he has obviously, other people's money then. So I mean, he did have, you know, he had, he had a large account to do that. But eventually, that would be the best thing to do. You know, you have you already know your expenses are covered. Right? Now, you're only focusing on the plan and focusing on on just winning and just trading properly. It's not it takes the emotion out of so whatever you can do, whatever trick you can use to get that emotion out of it, that will make you a better trader. One, one more thing that that that that I've seen is happening to me is, the more you do it, the more of a habit it becomes. So if you do, you know, 50 trades, that's a lot better than five trades, but 500 trades is a lot better than 50 trips, if you do them properly with the right practice. So eventually, you get to the point where Oh, it's just another trade. It's not a big deal. It's just another trade. There's another one coming. So if I get if I hit my stop loss, yeah, it hurts. I hate it. But it's Just another trait, you know, I'm going to move on, move on to the next one, move on to the next one, because every month is a different ballgame. So you start over, you get to start over again and again and again. And so that is another trick that you would help in the long run. But again, you know, you have to, in before all of that happens, you have to have the confidence that this actually works. Mark: So what do I truly do believe in? Allen: Yes, you say that you say that. But then you also say that, you know, I can't do it. It's not working. It's not working. But you, you you've heard it that it works, you want to believe that it works. But I don't think you have that conviction yet that it works. And so the only way to get that conviction is to get it done for yourself. Right? And so it might be that you take a maybe you take a step back, and you go even simpler. And you say you don't want not the credit spreads, how about I do something like maybe a naked put, right, in a naked put, I'm going to make money if the stock doesn't go down. And it'll expire. And then I'll sell another one. And I'll sell another one. And I'm going to sell it far out of the money. So that I just when I just make that 20 bucks, or that $30 or whatever it is that small amount I'm just going to make month after month after month trade after trade I'm going to make and if the stock drops, okay, no fine, I can buy the stock, no big deal, I'll buy the stock. And then I'll sell covered calls on that stock. And so the covered call will expire, and I'll make something the covered call was expired, the next month will expire, and I'll make something so you build up that confidence that you know what, there is a way to do this. That's another option, you know, if you want to go that route, so you really got to figure out like, okay, you know, it's a, it's a personal thing, I wish I could just tell you that, hey, this is the one thing you need to do. But for everybody, it's different. And unless I spent a lot more time with you, unless I see all of your trades, unless I see you know, your emotion, how you handle the emotions, I won't be able to tell you. So that's kind of like in our in our program, what we do is we tell we give everybody a spreadsheet, and we say, hey, look, you have to fill out the spreadsheet, you have to put every single trade on the spreadsheet. And then they shared with me so that I can go in and I can look at them. You know, I could look at the tray. And I'll go in I'll see like, why did he do this trade? This doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm calling this Hey, John, why did you do this tray? Allen: And he goes, well, no, that's not gonna work. And he goes, okay, okay, fine, I'll do it. All right, done. You know, and if they're doing all the trades, right, then it's probably working. And most of the time, it's not working, like if they're not making money, then we can identify, Okay, what are what is not going right? You know, there was one of our current students, he was doing several trades, and he was still negative. So I looked at his spreadsheet, and I'm like, Okay, what's going on? What do I see, and his trade entries were great. You know, he was picking the right stocks, he was doing it properly. But whenever he lost, he would lose a lot more than he should have. He just wasn't getting out early on time. And so that was the biggest thing is like, you're not getting out. This is it, you know, your losses are too big. Doesn't matter how many trades, you win, your losses are still too big, you're still going to be negative. And so we worked on that. And then over time, he got better at getting out earlier and earlier and earlier. But he had, you know, he had somebody to look at that and to point it out, and to hold him to it. So that eventually he did it over and over and over again. And then by the end of the class, he was positive. He was like, Yeah, I fixed it. Again, that's all you need to do. That was he needed that one thing, everything else is simple. The training plan I could give you, you know, you could go do it on your own. But the discipline part of it, that's sometimes where we need help from somebody else. And so whether you know, it might be a wife might be somebody else, it might be a trading partner, somebody you work with, it might be a coach. So I think that might be one thing that you could implement. Mark: So just quickly, what what's the key points in a trading plan make like entry criteria, stop losses or that sort of stuff. Is there anything else that I can many points or rules should be in a trading plan? Like what I try and put a trading plan together, that is doable and simple to follow. To look at rather a complicated bloody list of all this crap, what would be a good trading plan? Allen: So, you want it to be simple and easy to implement. But you don't want it to be too simple, where it's just broad, like anything can happen. So, you know, I've seen people that have a trading plan that says, I'm going to do an iron condor on this stock 45 days to expiration, I'm going to sell a 10 Delta calls and sending out the puts. And that's it. That's my whole plan, and I'm just gonna sit and let it expire. That's a trading plan. It's very simple, right? You know, what you're going to do you know, what you're going to how you're going to do it, you know, what you're going to trade it on. And you know, when. And so now that pretty good plan doesn't work. So whoever's listening don't don't do that one. We've back tested that, and it didn't work. But there are, there are times there are several months where it does work, just because it has, you know, 80% probability, but over time, it doesn't. So that's the basics, you got to know what you want to trade, you need to know the strategy, you got to know what you want to trade. And then you have to know what constitutes a good setup. So when it comes to credit spreads, you mentioned credit spreads. So I like to do that, depending on the size of the of the trade, if it's a you know, maybe a $5000 $10,000 trade, then I'll go into I can go into a stock, or I'll go into an index ETFs are good, too. But they're their strikes are a little bit smaller. So you got to do a lot more contracts. But if I can go into a stock that has, you know, five point spreads, and I do 10 of them. That's a $5,000 trade. That'll work. Allen: So you can, what do you want to trade? And then what's the proper setup? So for me, again, I like to keep it simple. So if I see a stock that's trending, as moving up, or moving down, then I'm happy to trade it. Because I'm, I'm more of a trend follower, you know, so there's people that think, okay, if the stock is gonna go up, it's going up, it's going to keep going up until something big changes, there are other people that think the opposite. They're like, Oh, if it's going up, they just kind of come back down, because it's gonna do reversion to the mean. And sometimes that works. And sometimes it doesn't. So I don't really buy that I just like, hey, if it's going up, then it's telling me that it wants to go higher. So that's basically what I'm looking for. In a setup, I'm looking for the stock to tell me what it wants to do. So if I see a stock that's jumping up and down, no, I don't know what it's doing. I don't know what it's telling me, I can't understand the language, I'm not going to trade it. If it's going up, then I'm going to play it bullish. If it's going down, I'm going to play bearish. And sometimes, you know, it turns around and you get banked, but most of the time it's going to work out. So that's the kind of setup I'm looking for. And then over the years, you know, we've added other things to look at, you know, how do you make sure that all of your trades are not in the same sector? Right now, you know, right now, oil has been doing well. So all of the oil companies were doing great. But then they all turned around and went down all together. So if you have 10 trades on in different oil companies, that's not that's not diversification. That's the same trade. And so if they turn around, I'm going to turn on together. So that would be one way of putting the odds in your favor by having you know, only a small portion of your account in one sector. So you have to separate that. How do you diversify by time? You know, so not putting all your trades on on the same day. That's another way to do it. So you diversify by time. So there's so many different ways that you can do it, some of them might make sense to you some might not. And then, you know, we have other students that come in and say, Well, I do it, you know, I look for this also in my trade, like, Okay, if that's what you want to add to it, then add it. Don't subtract things that I've given you. But if you want to add to it, one student said that he likes to look at the weekly chart, I usually look at the daily chart, see how the stock is doing. He likes to look at the weekly chart as well. Allen: So I'm like, Okay, fine, you can add to it, you know, if it doesn't hit your criteria on the weekly chart, then just means you'll have less trades that qualify, but it's not gonna it's not going to put you into a trade that's going to hurt. So when you're basically you just have to figure out what you think is going to work. And then you have to test it. So back testing, and paper trading are really really, really helpful. Especially back tests, Mark: I find paper trading useless. To be honest. You lose interest very quickly. It's very easy to lose in that type of trading. Yeah, go ahead. I've done a little bit of paper trading and I've just found that I find okay, it's gone the wrong way. But I got it wrong. You just let it go. Because it doesn't mean anything. It has no significance, does it? Start with money trading? Yeah. You've got a connection heavenly with the with the live trading, because actually, it's not your money tied to it. Allen: It's not your money. It doesn't matter what the style of the trade does, you're only focusing on becoming a better trader, the goal is not to make more money, the goal is to become a better trader. Right? It's kind of like playing poker. It's like when you when people go to play poker, right? They'll professionals, they'll tell you that if they play their hand perfectly, and they lose, they're okay with it. Right? If they play, if they mess up, and they still win, they're still mad at themselves. Because I didn't play it right. I didn't play my cards, right? Even though I won, I don't care, because long run, it's going to hurt them. If they keep playing incorrectly in the long term, it's going to hurt them. So that's the goal to become the better trader. And the end results, the profits will take care of themselves. So paper trading is practice. That's all it is. Right? If you didn't need to take that on board. It's slow practice. Back testing, I prefer back testing way better than paper trading. Because you can go really quick. You know, if you if you come up with a plan, like okay, these are my criteria, I got these seven criteria on my trading plan. I'm going to enter when I see this, this and this. I'm going to exit when this happens. I'm going to adjust it this way If this happens, okay, I got that right and down, and that you can even just come up with your you can just guess No, I think this one's good. This one's good. That's my plan. Okay. You pick. You pick a stock, spy. Great, perfect. You go back to yours in time. January 1, put the trade on. How does it do? Oh, it made money. Awesome. Cool. February, how do you do made money? Great. March. Oh, we lost a lot of money. Doing it, huh? Okay. APR, how do you do? And then just do it month by month, I want back testing one month or one trade, you know, might take you five or 10 minutes. And so you can get years worth of practice in just a few days by back testing. And you'll find that Mark: It's something that I've never done is back testing. Is there a particular software that's adequate for that sort of stuff? I've never really looked down that line. I've heard about it. I've listened to it, but I've never actually really done it myself. Is there anyone ticular that would be worthy. Allen: The one that I use, the one that I use is called the option net explore. option that explore? Yeah, and I think I think they're based out of Great Britain. And so basically, it's, it's an options selling platform, you know, so it looks like your broker's platform, you put the trade on, and you go through it day by day by day. And it doesn't do it all for you, you actually have to look at it every single day. And if you want to make changes, you can make changes to it. That's what I like about it. There are other software's that you just put in the strategy, you press a button and it'll tell you "Oh, you made money or you lost money". That's not the point. We want to get better as a trader. Right. And so this one is like, Okay, I put the trade on, click a button. Oh, stock is down today. Do I need to do anything? No. Okay, next stage. Oh, stock is back up again. I don't have to do anything. Next stage. Oh, stock is down again. Oh, no, I'm at an adjustment point. Okay, what adjustment am I going to make? I'm going to do this adjust. Okay, cool. Let's see, did it work out? Go there forward today forward a day forward a day. Oh, expiration day stop. It worked. So it's, it's just, you know, there's no money, right? It's just about becoming a better trader. It's just about getting the practice doing it over and over and over again. So that I think would definitely help you as well. Mark: Okay, so one of the things obviously, we talked about discipline and the mental game, what's probably the best thing to follow, or to train your mental strength, like, as you said, like a paper trade or a live trade, you should be able to make that same decision, then in there without any emotional war. What's the best way to get to that level of trading where you whether you win or lose, it's just business as usual? Allen: Yeah, I've done to you have to divorce yourself from the outcome, whatever, whatever that takes for you. For me, in the beginning, it was getting my wife because I knew how I would have to answer to her. Mark: And scary Allen: I didn't have it. Exactly. It has to be scary. Because if you do it properly, she cannot get managed. Right? It's like, Hey, I followed the rules, babe. I did everything I was supposed to do. It still didn't work out and she'll be like, Okay, fine. That's no problem. But if you do not follow the rules, that's when she gets manage. And that's when it gets scary. So yes, you have to make it scary for you not to follow your rules, because a lot of us a lot of US traders, like, if we lose money, yeah, we don't we get mad about it, we're like, oh, man, I lost money, we feel bad about ourselves. But it doesn't hurt enough. You know, it's kind of like these people that say, Hey, I want to lose some weight. You know, so they make a goal, I'm gonna lose some weight, I'm gonna lose some weight, they tell everybody, and they do it for a few days, and then they give up. But then there's this website, that what, what this website, basically what it does is, you have to pick a, maybe a political party, or a person or some organization that you hate, you actually hate them. And you have to put up a lot of money and say, Okay, if I don't stick to my goal, this organization is going to get $5,000 or $10,000. So that makes you because it's now becomes a different level. It's not about just the money, or about doing the thing. It's like, okay, you know, let's say, for example, I don't want to give my money to anybody like the Save the whale Foundation, right? I don't want to, I don't want to give my money to the whales, I hate whales, I want them all to die. I don't want anybody to save the whales. So if I don't lose 10 pounds, they're gonna charge my credit card $5,000 and give it to the whales, and I hate whales. So I want to do whatever I have to do to lose that money to lose that weight. You know, because I don't want that well to be saved. You have to want something more than what you have. So there's, that's another psychological trick. No, in trading? We sometimes we get used to it, you know, it's like, oh, last? Oh, well, you know, we get used to it. And it just, we gotta it's just the mental part of it. Mark: Definitely, definitely, it's a huge part of it. Something I didn't I didn't realize, until much later down the track of trading, how big a part of mental side of it really is. Allen: I mean, if you find trying to avoid is difficult. Yeah. So if you find yourself having a problem with discipline, make it simpler, cut it down, make it as simple as possible. Find the trade that you know will like you know, the naked call or the naked put the covered call, these are very simple trades, they're really hard to mess it up. Right? On the naked put, if you get assigned the stock, hey, that's great. I just bought the stock much cheaper than it was before. And I'm going to own it. So you want to you want to do it on companies that you're going to own you want to own for a long period of time. That's the only way it really works. You can't you can't be selling naked puts on stocks that are just, you know, going crazy. That's the wrong way to do it. So you know, if you can simplify it, if you can find some way to have somebody else monitor you, and hold you to your fire, you know, hold your feet to the fire like, hey, you need to follow this, why aren't you doing this? Or, hey, it's not my money. Right? I'm doing it for somebody else. This is my kids inheritance, right? I cannot mess it up. So I have to follow the rules. One guy, when I was in, just after high school, I became an agent, a real estate agent. And as an agent, as a brand new agent, they tell you that you have to do a lot of things that you don't want to do. You have to talk to hundreds of people all the time, you have to cold call, people say Oh, Hi, are you doing? Do you want to sell your house? Oh, hi, do you wanna say, Well, you know, they have to keep doing things that you don't want to do. So it was like, okay, in the guy, the guy is like, hey, most of you guys are not going to do it. But if you want to be really, really, really motivated, what you need to do is go out and buy a fancy sports car. Sounds like what you're talking about, what do you do a fancy sports car? Because yeah, you need to go out and buy an expensive sports car so that you have that payment that you have to make at the end of the month. And so that is going to make you work your butt off because you have to make the payment. And as I go I mean, I understand what he was saying. I was like, No, I'm not doing that. But then eventually I didn't make it as a realtor. Maybe if I did do that, maybe I just didn't do the work that he told you to do. I just didn't do it. It wasn't the reward wasn't worth it for me. Mark: It was up to risk, I suppose. Yeah, Allen: I mean, you know, so with your training, you got to figure it out. Is it really worth it? Is the goal that hey, I want to quit my job. Is it I want my wife to quit her job. I want the kids to have this vacation or whatever it is. You have to burning. Yes, just eat you up every single day. You have to really really, really want it Mark: Explain to me how and it's burning me. Allen: Then the discipline has to stick. Because if you want it, but you're not disciplined, and your losses are too big, then it's it's not there yet. So I think, you know, if you don't have a trading plan, I'll just give you the training. You know, I mean, it's not that hard. It's not it's, it's the training plan helps. But it's up here. And it's the practice just doing it over and over and over again and having confidence in the plan. Because then if you have confidence, you'll stick to it. If you don't have confidence, you're going to change it, you're going to you're going to add things to it, you're not going to follow it, you're going to forget about it. Like with the paper trading, that's exactly what that is, you know, so it's not real. So, oh, well, I'm gonna ignore it. I'm gonna forget about I'm gonna do that.  Allen: That really resonated with me Allen's that that point, like, go back to the paper trading, treat it like it's somebody else's money, and then make it work. Don't look at it as just as being as a fake account, that doesn't matter. Allen: I mean, I wouldn't Yeah, I would prefer you do back testing, it'll be much faster. Mark: To look at that I'll get, I'll get onto that particular site that you've made. Yeah, Allen: That'll give you years of experience in just a few days. And so, to me,

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E32 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science Based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca. Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark. Yucca: And today we are talking about transitioning into the autumn or the fall. That sort of nesting and collecting of your acorns, metaphoric and, and all of that. Mark: Yeah, because. I mean, if you're like us, the autumn is a, a really lovely time. It's just, it's a time to be enjoyed for so many different reasons. And as pagans who like sort of the products of nature, right. There's a lot of stuff out there. There's leaves and there's. Pine cones and there's late flowers. And of course there's all the stuff pouring out of the gardens. so there's just, there's a lot of opportunity to decorate and celebrate and kind of button things up for winter around our homes. So that's what we're gonna talk about. Yucca: Right. Well, and there's also a lot of those practical things that we're doing that are a wonderful opportunity to invite more meaning and ritual into our lives as we're doing those things anyways. Right. Mark: Yes. Yes. Yucca: So Mark: Yeah. I mean all that food preparation stuff that, I mean, it's practical, right? Because it's food preparation, but it's, it's pretty witchy stuff. When, when you, when you get down to it, you know, the brewing and the pickling and the drying and all that stuff, it's all very witchy. Yucca: Yeah, well, and, and even things also like you're switching out, you're bringing your sweaters out, right. Bringing those out and, and going through and making sure the moths didn't get into them and putting the there's the heavier blankets on the bed and, and all of those sorts of things, you know, there's, there was an episode we did. Few years back at this point about the kind, bringing the magic into things we talked about. Like, you know, when you're putting the shampoo on your head, it's not just shampoo, but it's your, your magical potion of charisma or whatever it is. You know, there's so much of that, that this time of year, I think there's just a opportunity for, Mark: Yeah. There's at, at least in the temperate zone, there's so much of a sense of transition. There's kind of a magic in the air. The weather is changing. The character of the light is changing. It won't be long before. In most places. Daylight savings thing changes. So the whole sense of the length of the day changes and that's just a really ripe canvas for for doing our creative ritual activity around Yucca: Yeah. So last week we did talk about the Equinox. But there, are there any things that you have been doing? Since then in the, in the last week or so, or things that you will be doing that fit in with this transition theme that we're talking about? Mark: Well, one thing that I did was my Northern California atheopagan affinity group, which calls itself the live Oak circle went camping last weekend. And that was really cool to, you know, to do, to do an Equinox ritual in person with people. And we're still getting to know one another and still kind of feeling our way. So, you know, that, that will, that will mature over time, but it's really a lovely group of people. Very diverse, very interesting. And I just, I had a wonderful time And so that was something that I, I did for the Equinox season that I'm really happy about. Go ahead. Yucca: is, is camping during the winter a, a possibility, or is this really your last camp of the, the year? Mark: It's a possibility, but you're gonna get rained on Yucca: Okay. Mark: and I don't mind snow for camping very much because it's dryer. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: But rain can really be a pain. Yeah. I mean, it's, everything's all muddy and it, it can really be a pain. But that said the I've gone camping in say February, which is the wet month of the year for us. And it's been glorious. It's, I've gone out to the coast. The, the waves are all stormy and there are not many people out there because it's not tourist season. So you can really have a wonderful experience doing that. Yucca: Mm. Nice. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And I'm sorry. I think I had cut you off. You were starting to say something else as well. Mark: Probably, but I have no idea what it was now. So that's something that I did. And my partner NAIA brought home a an armature for a reef. This made out of grape vines this week that we're going to put seasonal things on and hang on our door. So that's another thing that hasn't been done yet, but will be we have to go out and collect some leaves and pine cones and things like that. Because it's just, the leaves are just starting to turn here. I mean, week before last, we had. We had temperatures from the high nineties to 117 over a space of about seven days. Yucca: so hot. Mark: And so now I think the trees are figuring out that, okay, we're done with that now. It's it's time to start shutting down. Yucca: Right. And some of that is, is cued by the light more than the temperature. It depends on the species, but the, the light can really play a role in, in what they're doing. Mark: Mm-hmm Yucca: Hmm. Well, we don't have a lot of trees that do change in the autumn. We have a few but for the most part, you can still feel it in the air here. But the flowers have really changed. This is the end of our monsoon season. So we had a lot of. Flowers. And this past week, the, the kiddos and I went out and just gathered a whole bunch of flowers. And we had a dear friend with us as well, who showed the kids how to leave the, the flowers and they made flower crowns. And even though that's something that is more associated with spring, On like a larger level for us, it's more of a fall thing because that's when we actually have the flowers, right. We have like some little tiny things in the spring, but they're just, but usually the, the end of winter is very dry for us. Right. When we do get snows, it's more in, in the beginning of win, like more in a January, February time. But by the time we get into March and April, there's not much moisture. So there really isn't a lot in the spring, but in the autumn, we've got these All kinds of MOS and sunflowers and Veria and all of these beautiful things to, to weave in and add. And we were talking about be before we started recording, I was showing mark the, the photos from it. And mark, you suggested, and I love this idea of putting, if you had leaves putting leaves in doing leave crowns. You know, the cone pine cones and, and whatever it is, that's in your environment. That is, that is fall or autumn for you. Mark: Sure. Yeah. I mean, one idea that you could do as a part of your Equinox celebration actually would be to have to crown like an autumn king and an autumn queen or autumn royalty of whatever gender, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: To kind of oversee the feast. Right. And it'd be really cute if those were kids. Yucca: Yes, Mark: so Yucca: the kids with, with flower crowns and leaf crowns is just cute. Just too cute. Mark: you bet. So that's, that's something else that you could do, theoretically. I. I mean, there's, there's so much that's so aesthetically pleasing about this time of the year to bring it into your house and make it clear that there's less of a division between inside and outside, I think is something that can be really valuable for us. Yucca: yeah. Some of that, depending on how far north or how far cold your climate gets. It is a little bit of a last chance this time of year for some of the outdoor stuff, because when the snows do come, when the bitter cold does come, there's a lot more of that. Just staying nestled inside. So I think of this a lot as like a nesting time getting ready, right? Just like that's what I see the animals outside doing the ones that stay here. We still have a few that have not left. I saw some hummingbirds today and I'm going, Hey. Get going get going. You're not gonna like it here. But the ones that, that stay here, you know, all of our little rodents and the Jays and things they're busy as can be right now, just packing away their cheeks, full the Jays. It's so funny. They can have multiple, we leave sunflower seeds out for. Which they've now planted everywhere. But they can fit multiple ones in their beak at once. So you'll see them going by with like three or four seeds in one beak and then the, all the squirrels and chipmunks with their faces just stuffed full of whatever it is that they can find. Mark: Nice Yucca: and so I, I kind of feel like that, right. Just stuffing, you know, it's time to stuff, things in, but it's a good time also for a fall clean. We have a spring cleaning as a Mark: Mm, Yucca: in the larger culture, but it's a good time to do that. Fall cleaning and clean out all this stuff from summer, that's gone. Right? You're getting rid of that stuff. You don't need that anymore. And bring out, you know, bring out the things that you do. What are your, the boots, if you're in a, I'm sure this is for your environment. You probably have some big boots. The rain boots Mark: nice rubber Wellingtons. Yeah. Yucca: You know, maybe put those flip flops away, bring out the wellies. Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I, I think of it this way. We're gonna be spending a lot more time indoors now. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Uh, going forward for the next six months or so. Right. Because the conditions are going to get more inhospitable outside. So let's make the inside a place we wanna be, you know, let's make it cozy and comfortable and pretty and practical and all those different kinds of dimensions of what makes a real home. Yucca: mm-hmm yeah. Mark: And there are ritual things that we can do that can contribute to that, which is, can be fun. I think, you know, assembling that reef and putting it on the, on the doorstep, I think is gonna be a great thing. I. Also getting dried squashes and pumpkins and so forth to, to decorate the front area just. Yes. We, we were talking about this before we started to record. Yes, it's true. Pumpkins tend to be associated with Halloween and Hallows, but they're available now and they're actually pouring out of the gardens right now. So, you know, grab a few. Yucca: Yeah. And there are some, some really fun ones. If you haven't grown them, that's one of the ones I really encourage you to try. Because squash are pretty forgiving for, for being grown. And you can grow in a five gallon bucket and get one of those. You can, you can grow maybe one plant, but you could do something like one of those, those little Jacky littles. Have you seen those little pumpkins? They're about the size of like your fist? Mark: Oh yeah. Yucca: Yeah, those are a great one. And some of the smaller ones, you could grow a big one, but those are ones that you could do in your window. If you don't have any backyard to put it in, if you do, but you gotta have your big container, right. You can get away with one or so, and then they'll just take over. But the smaller, the smaller, the winter squashes, the more of them you're likely to get. If you're trying to grow one of your, like your huge, like fair winning pumpkin. You're not gonna be able to pull that off indoors or on a balcony, but something little you might be able to. And they're usually pretty easy to save seeds from too. So if you go to the, the farmer's market or even the grocery store, and you see that really weird pumpkin with all the like bumps on it and those strange colors and stuff. Just save one or two of those. Right. And see if the next, next year, maybe you can get that to, to grow in your house or on your porch or, and if it doesn't work, then would you lose Mark: Right. Yeah. Yucca: You're gonna, Mark: You, you, you had the pumpkin anyway, so yeah, it's what you lost was one bite of toasted pumpkin seeds. Yucca: Yeah. So, yeah, so pumpkins And depending on how far along they are in your climate, the dried sunflower heads. Mark: Huh? Yucca: those ones. Mine. They're not in my area. They're not quite ready. We need another, another couple weeks. But for the big, like the mamma sunflowers and they're just so beautiful, you see that spiral pattern of the seeds, assuming you can get to it before the birds. Mark: right, Yucca: Yeah, but if you pick it before the seeds have developed, then you're, they're not gonna develop on the, the head. Right? So if you, if you wanna save one of those, let's say you have several flowers, you can put a paper bag over it, as long as it's still attached to the, the plant, but it won't fully develop. It's not like some of those little grasses and things. If you cut those off early, then they'll just ripen really quick. There's just not enough time for those big sunflowers to do that. Mark: that makes sense. Yucca: So, yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So. Mark: and of course, you know, we're talking about produce. And so even if you don't have your own garden, this is the time for the fruit stands and the vegetable stands. And, you know, it's, it's a time, even, even if you do most of your shopping at a market, you know, if that's where you get most of your food, do some exploring, find out what the local varieties are of things. You know, play around with some new vegetables, because there are gonna be weird things that you just don't really recognize or understand how to use. And of course you can pick up things for preservation, which is a big part traditionally of this time of year. As people work to save as many calories as they possibly can for the winter, when. When the food systems are not gonna be producing, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: so, Yucca: And this is a fun time of year to, to try with the pickling and the fermenting. Speaking of those sort of witchy looking and feeling things you'd have those nice jars. That's definitely fun to do. Mark: Yeah, get some local honey and do a quick bead. That'll be ready by hellos. You can do some of that.  Yucca: Yeah. Mead and insiders are really easy. They're not like they're not like beer that is much more finicky and you need more equipment and stuff Mark: and there are so many more steps. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: For for beer. Beer is really actually a pretty complicated chemistry experiment when you get down to it making the, the wart so that the food for the yeast is absolutely perfect to create a particular flavor is really, you know, an art. It is, it's an art and there are people that are very good at it. I'm not one of them because I discovered that. There's all this fantastic beer available for 10 bucks, a six pack and I don't have to learn to be a master. Other people have, have done that for me, Yucca: Right. Mark: but I do like Yucca: gonna be, if it's something you're gonna be consuming a lot of versus something you're making just a small amount for. Just sort of the joy of it, you know, you have different considerations. Mark: right. Yeah. I mean, if you're only doing the five gallon. Car full, then that's a pretty easy project. Yucca: yeah, Mark: So it's something to look into it's and, and there is definitely a sense of pride and accomplishment. When you make a nice beverage like that and people enjoy it and appreciate it, and it gives you an opportunity to be creative about bottle labels and all that kind of stuff. It's fun. Yucca: another one to, to look into if you're interested in making things like that, but you don't want as high of an alcohol content is kombucha. Kombucha is really easy to make. And when you make it at home, it can have a higher content than what you would buy in the store. Still not gonna be very much though. Like if you wanna have an alcoholic kombucha, you've gotta try, you've gotta go out of your way to make it that way. You're not gonna accidentally make it as high content as your CIS or wines, beers, things like that. So you'll get a pretty low amount. That's a really fun one that also, if you're looking for something to feel super witchy with, like it makes this SCOBY on top that it makes is this bizarre, bubbly looking. It's really cool. And if you've got kids, you can, that you can lay on poke it and stuff and it's, it's fun. So,  Mark: another option, which is fully non-alcoholic is to make what are called shrubs. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: Shrubs are syrups that you add to sparkling water. They're made with vinegar and sugar and various kinds of herbs and fruits. So like strawberry and basil is, you know, one combination. There's, there's lots of recipes on the internet for making shrubs. I know it's a weird name. I didn't get it either, but that's what they're called. They're called shrubs. And they used to be very popular in the 19th century. They were, they were very, very common. And so you make these concentrated syrups and then you mix it with sparkling water and it, and maybe toss in, you know, another basal leaf or something for some fresh aromatics. And there are these very complex, interesting things to drink, but they don't have any alcohol in them. Yucca: Yeah. That sounds like something I'm sure that somebody is really passionate about and has their, their blog or channel on the boat. Mark: yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yucca: yeah. Well, pivoting away from the kitchen in the home, there's also things that That we might be doing like the buttoning up of the windows. Right. You're making sure that your windows seal properly and that the, the door isn't, isn't letting a draft through or something like that. And so that's, that's really a lovely time to maybe do a, a home. Kind of protection ritual or cleaning ritual or something like that, where maybe you're checking the window for the drafts, but you know, maybe there's something that you wanna be meditating on at while you're doing that or sprinkling some salt as well. Right. You're gonna protect from the drafts, but also, you know, protect on, on just sort of the symbolic level. Mark: Right. And you can be very specific about that sort of thing. I mean, what occurs to me is you can dip your fingertips into some rainwater that you've saved and then sort of flick it at the front door and it doesn't go through. So the, the point being, you know, we're rain proofing the house, we're demonstrating that this. The weather's not going to get inside. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Putting salt at the corners of the house is of course a traditional protection thing as well. There are lots of various witchy sorts of activities that I think can give us more of a sense of comfort and solidity and security in our, in our homes. Even though, you know, they're just symbolic actions and we know that, but that, that doesn't matter. They still affect us. And there's a good feeling about kind of taking care of yourself that way about going through all of the gestures that are necessary in order to feel like you are in a secure and happy, warm, and cozy place. Yucca: Mm-hmm . Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, this is just, this is just one of my favorite times of year. I just wanna say that, right. just, oh, the chill and the it's still hot in the middle of the day for us, but in the mornings and the evenings, it's got that little brisk and, you know, so there's just so many lovely things. And as always, we really love hearing from all of you. And you tell us about some of the things you do.  Mark: Yes, especially if you're in other climbs because you know, there's a, there's a woman who's on the atheopagan council who comes to the Saturday morning zoom mixers pretty frequently. And she was just saying this morning that it's just barely starting to be tolerably. Cool there now it's still pretty hot and she's in Tampa, Florida. So she's actually in the subtropics. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Which is, it's just, it's a whole other deal, right. You know, the, the dreaded season is not the winter. The dreaded season is the summer. Yucca: right. Mark: it's very hot and very humid and just not very hospitable full of bugs. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Um, so Yucca: we're ready for the mosquitoes to take a break. Mark: are Yucca: really ready for them to Mark: I, I see, okay. Yucca: yeah, but I'm sure their mosquitoes are on a different level. Mark: Yeah, well, because of all the moisture everywhere, right? There's just there's enough moisture to support so much growth. So all the plants, all the animals, they really go to town. Yucca: yeah. Mark: What else I'm trying to think of what else? I mean, this is a real season for paying attention, just watching what's happening with the sky. You know, noticing the branches of the trees against the sky as they get more and more naked and lose their leaves.  Yucca: And in some places that's a, that's an overnight. It's amazing how quick things change. Right. And in others, it's a slow, kinda drawn out process that, oh, what are we going through? And it just hap and then others, it just happens. Mark: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. To me. The the time change is always kind of slamming the door on the remnants of summer and, you know, really, you know, bringing winter on board. But the time leading up to that, you know, the whole spy month of October and, you know, I mean they're Yucca: have some good topics coming up for October. I Mark: oh, we do. Yucca: October. Mark: Yeah, me too. There's just, there's so much to be said about not only our practices as pagans, but just living a life. You know, the, the kinds of considerations that we have at that time of year are so profound thinking about mortality and about ancestry and all those kinds of things. But this is the, this is the onset of that. This, this moment right here is when we slip from summer into this different transitional kind of state. And I, I just really enjoy it. I find myself even more attentive to what's going on outside and around me, because it's so beautiful. Yucca: Yeah. Hmm. Mark: So I hope that wherever you are, you're having a similar experience of Of wonderful arrival of autumn wherever you may be and feel free to drop us a note about how you're experiencing that or what any of your traditions are for the autumn and going into going into that. October season you can reach us as always at the wonder podcast, QS, gmail.com, and we always enjoy hearing from you. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So thanks everybody. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Thanks. Thanks for being with us. We always appreciate so much that you listen.    .

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Droves of workers are retiring early or taking a break from work as they change career paths. It's become known as The Great Resignation. On this episode, we'll highlight some of the key takeaways of a recent Forbes article and explore a lot of the impacts on retirement planning from across different age groups in the wake of this massive workplace shift that's underway. Forbes Article: https://bit.ly/3JtbbeQ Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Hey everybody, welcome in to the podcast. Thanks for tuning in to another edition of Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick, as we talk investing, finance, and retirement. And we are going to discuss the Great Resignation on this podcast. And if you're not familiar with that, well, that's been all the mass exodus of people leaving work over the last three to four to five months. And we've got some interesting key takeaways here to talk a little bit about this. Droves of workers retiring early, or taking a break as they consider this career path, that's been called now the Great Resignation, and there's a Forbes article, we'll probably take a link and put that in the show notes as well. But guys, what's going on? How you doing Nick?   Nick: Good, good. Staying busy, kind of getting rocking and rolling to start off the new year. So, you know, I think a month or two ago we had hoped that maybe it'd be a little less chaotic from the standpoint of the whole pandemic thing, but I think everybody's just kind of plugging away and recovering from the holidays.   Mark: Yeah, definitely. John, how you doing my friend?   John: I'm good. I'm good. Doing good.   Mark: Yeah. Nothing, nothing too crazy going on. Into the new year all right?   John: Yeah. Yeah, it was quiet. So just hung out with family locally here and in Tampa area. So it was just a nice little break and like Nick said kind of excited to be back to doing some work here and the holidays it's always nice, but at the same time, I'm kind of ready to get back at it.   Mark: Yeah, exactly. So have you guys heard this term, the Great Resignation, are you guys a little bit aware of this and what's your thoughts? We'll get into it here, some data here in just a second, but just have curious if you've heard it or not.   Nick: Yeah, I definitely have. I think it's interesting. I think depending upon who you talk to, their interpretation of it is a little bit different, but in my mind it's really, it's kind of, to kind of think about it from the perspective as almost like a real estate market, there's a buyer's market and there's a seller's market. And I think that really what's happened is not all, but many companies have been slow to kind of improve wages and pay and benefits and things like that and so this has kind of put things into kind of the worker's hands a little bit more and given them a little bit of leverage from the perspective of competitiveness from a company standpoint. And that obviously, that doesn't deal with the people that are in between or are waiting to kind of figure out what they want to do with their whole life, that sort of thing, but more specifically, the people changing jobs and how difficult it's been for employers to keep employees.   Mark: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely all over the map and John, we're going to talk a little bit about it from the different age groups, but for the most part, we're going to look at it as it affects retirees and pre-retirees, but have you seen some of this stuff? Are you familiar with it?   John: Not necessarily the term itself, but yeah, we've seen a lot of this with our own clients that are basically doing some job changes or just outright, just retiring early which I know we're going to get into. But yeah, we're seeing quite a bit of this. And then we see it when we're trying to personally and work wise trying to get service work done. It feels like-   Mark: Big time.   John: Feels like no one's working anymore. My local Dunkin' Donuts here, I can't go in to get a coffee because they don't have enough workers, so everything's drive through. But it just [crosstalk 00:03:23] seen across the board.   Mark: And that's part of it. Yeah. And that's part of it. So a lot of times, I think, when we think about this what's happened in the pandemic, we automatically go to the lower paying scale jobs, the fast food type jobs, and that's definitely a big piece, but for an example, 4.2 million people quit their job in October of 2021. So just a couple of months ago and there's been a lot of other people quitting. So there's been, I think somewhere now around six, six and a half million, I think over the last four to four and a half months. And it's not just the lower end stuff. And of course it's also unknown how long these people will stay out of work. Some of it could be retirees or pre-retirees that are just like, you know what, I'm not going back.   Mark: I'll use my brother as an example, he's 63 and he's like, as long as they keep me working from home, I'm going to stay. But the minute they tell me, I have to go back to the office. I think I'm going to pull the trigger and retire early, even though his plan calls for him to wait till 60, his full retirement age, which I think is 66 and seven months or something like that. So let's talk about it from that's kind of standpoint, guys.   Mark: I've got three takeaway categories here, or actually four. I'm going to kind of give you guys the headline and let you guys roll from there a little bit on this. Okay. So we'll dive into it, hit it however you'd like, not just the lower income scale, but also the upper end, or people just closer to retirement things that you might be seeing or hearing. So number one, if you are going to step away early, taking a break from Social Security, whether it's short term, long term or whatever, don't sell short that, the impact that, that can have to your long term benefits.   Nick: So, depending upon how long you are out of work, it's important to keep into consideration that when you're not earning an income, you're not building up your Social Security credits and so that's something that can impact you down the line. And I've actually had this come up a little bit lately where people don't quite grasp the impact, the positive impact of Social Security, or how much, or how important it is to their overall plan. So it is a big deal and you want to make sure you still have your 10 year minimum work history. It's important to remember that, really the benefit that you receive is a cumulative kind of record of your highest 35 years of income.   Mark: Right.   Nick: So every year that you have a higher year than a previous year, adjusted for inflation, that's going to knock out the other years and you really kind of help bump that benefit up.   Mark: Right. And if you're stepping away in your fifties because of this Great Resignation type of thing here, that's some prime earning years. So that's where I say you could be putting a big dent in that.   Nick: Yeah, absolutely. And realistically it always does kind of go back to the whole plan concept of that we really try to harp on people about, is we have had some people retire early because we have had a bull market for the last 10 years and they've done a good job with saving and those sorts of things, but we kind of verified it through the planning, the whole retire really early on a whim or not really looking at it from an analytical standpoint can definitely be pretty, pretty dangerous.   Mark: Yeah, for sure. So you definitely want to make sure that if you are stepping away from Social Security, you're looking at what it could do to your long term strategy, six months, a year, retiring early, whatever the case might be. Just make sure you're strategizing that with your advisor.   Mark: John, talk to me a little bit about takeaway number two, the 401k isn't a rainy day fund, is kind of the category I had. Because over the last two years, and even the last six months, there's some pretty interesting stats about what people are doing with their 401ks.   John: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, during COVID 2020, there was some ability to actually access for 401k funds or retirement funds without any penalty.   Mark: Right.   John: And not even have to do a loan and that's gone away. So now, not that... Fortunately for our clients, and I think we do a great job educating them, we haven't really seen too much of this where clients are taking out 401k loans. But I have had conversations with some individuals that have done that. And it's just kind of like, "Hey, how much can I pull from my fund? I did this, what are the impacts of it?" So it's just important to fall back to the plan. And we do a... One of our biggest recommendation's to make sure that people have an emergency fund and whether it's three to six months or a year of emergency savings, because, as you know the pandemic hit in 2020 and no one saw that coming and you just don't know what's going to happen in the future. So it's important to have an emergency fund to help out in certain situations like this, so you avoid pulling from the 401k loan because you really want to let those assets grow for your retirement and not access it for rainy day funds- [crosstalk 00:08:10].   Mark: Kind of a stop gap.   John: .... on things like that.   Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's some negative impacts of doing that though, John? I think one of the things people get lost on is just the compounding of it over time, right?   John: Yeah. So you take out 40 grand out of it, basically, especially, let's say you did that in 2020, let's say you took out $40,000 there, you just lost the compounding over the next year and a half, two years of which has been really excellent in reality [crosstalk 00:08:33] with what the market's done. So not... You're just not losing that $40,000, you're losing what that $40,000 could have grown to, which is the importance of having, again, the rainy day fund, so you can let that money in there, let that money grow for you and earn and work for you.   Mark: Yeah.   John: And then nevermind then you're paying money back into it that are after tax dollar. So there's a lot that goes into it that you really need to evaluate it. Sometimes it's you have to because you have nothing else to pull from.   Mark: Right.   John: But it's always important to plan and make sure that you... This is the last resort.   Mark: I hear a lot of advisors say taking that loan against it is usually the later, like if it's kind of like the last in the line, if you really need it, okay, here's where we can go. But let's try not to. Just simply from a multitude of reasons, especially with the resignation, right? If you take a loan against your 401k and you leave the job, you have to pay that back. Correct?   John: Yeah. That's a great point that you bring up. Most companies will give you 30 days to pay it back. So example, you take out that $40,000 and all of a sudden it's, "Hey, we're downsizing," and you get a pink slip, and not only you got, now you all of a sudden you got to pay 40 grand back to your 401k within, a 30 day period, maybe 60 day period. And if you do not pay it back, you're going to be paying taxes and penalty on that, on those dollars.   Mark: Pretty stiff. Yeah.   John: Yeah.   Mark: Yeah. So that's another takeaway for that. And Nick, let's stick with the 401k for a minute for the next one. If you are in this kind of nomad thing where you're jumping out of one job, you're waiting a bit, maybe going into another, looking for a better option for yourself, seeing who's hiring, whatever the scenario is, take that 401k with you, right? Don't just leave it back behind at the old place.   Nick: Yeah. It can be, realistically the more accounts people have, the more places, the more often things are overlooked, not checked up on, not taken care of, so we definitely are fans of consolidating. Whether it's rolling it into the plan at your new employer or rolling it into an IRA where you can control the assets yourself or work with an advisor to manage them for you. Just like so many other things, it's one of the things that former or past employer 401k plans are oftentimes one of the most overlooked and non-adjusted things that we've seen people kind of not take care of.   Mark: Yeah.   Nick: And then they lose a lot of long term money on it because of that.   Mark: Well, you got to think about the vested portion too. Right? So if it's, let's say you're 50 or something like that, and you're pondering this, make sure you under... that you're getting the fully vested part before you jump on. There are some people that could say, well, all right, maybe I'd better stick this out a little longer or whatever the case is.   Nick: Yeah, absolutely. There are some people that... It's much more common for people to move from one employer to the next these days. Especially in certain industries where they can be almost more of a tech role or consultant role, things like that. And sometimes, because of that, their employer has put in a decent amount of money, so an employee's contributions are always vested, it's always their money, but they could have substantial employer matching that vests over three to five years. Or some other sorts of benefits, even if it's not exactly the 401k, but maybe there's a stock plan that has vesting. It's important to take those things into consideration because we've seen people leave tens of thousands of dollars on the table.   Mark: Right.   Nick: Not realizing that it was a factor they should have taken into consideration before they switched employers.   Mark: Yeah. Don't leave that behind. Right? So definitely take it with you, whether you're rolling it from the old one into the new one. And if you do it properly, it's not going to, it's not an issue, right, Nick? So if you've got it in the old one and you roll it to the new one, you just go through the proper channels and there's no taxable event and so on and so forth. Same thing if you move it to an IRA, correct?   Nick: Correct. Yeah. The goal is always to make sure that it's rollover, it's not taken as a lump sum distribution-   Mark: To yourself.   Nick: Yeah. So you always want to make sure that when the rollover happens, it gets paid directly to the new custodian. So it's not written out to you. It's written to the new custodian, whether that's a Fidelity or a Vanguard or whoever it may be, it's paid directly to them, the funds go over and that avoids there being any sort of tax liability or penalty if somebody's under the age of 59 and a half.   Mark: All right. So let's go to the fourth takeaway here, guys. I'll let you both kind of jump in and out on this. John, I'll start with you. It seems like this whole resignation thing is kind of tailor made for those early retirement dreamers. Kind of go back to my brother's conversation there about, Well, if they... I'll retire a couple years early, if they make me go back to the office kind of thing, but I'll work from home." So it's enticing for sure, but point out some challenges to just ponder if you are retiring early, ahead of what you originally planned, you guys kind of divide up a few of these, if you would, but John go ahead and start with a couple of bullet points to think about.   John: Yeah. One of the things that I think about is qualifying for Social Security. The earliest you can draw Social Security is age 62. So, if you're retiring at let's just call 57, you got a decent gap of where you can't take any Social Security. So you really have to evaluate are there any other income sources coming in like a pension or maybe some real estate income or whatever it might be. And then if there isn't, is your nest egg able to sustain your plans. [crosstalk 00:14:06].   Mark: Five years, yeah.   John: Yeah. Is it able to work if you're using your nest egg to basically live off of for that period of time. So those are one of the things. And then you always want to of look at as one, we've had situations where one spouse might retire early and the other one's still work and they say, "Hey, we could live off of just one income for the time being. And if we need any extra money, we have the nest egg that we can pull from as needed." So that would be a big one to really look at.   John: Another one that we come across quite often is healthcare coverage. I'd say one of the main reasons that people don't retire. From our standpoint, what we see is really healthcare. So they wait till they're 65, so they can draw on Medicare. And prior to that, they just kind of look at the cost of going to the Marketplace and say, you know what, this is probably a little too rich for my blood, so [crosstalk 00:14:55] kind of hold off.   Mark: And if you use your example of 57, I mean, you're talking eight years, what are you doing in that gap? Right.   John: Yeah. And we've seen everyone's situations different in what their premium is, but I've seen some premiums for individual at that age at $10-11,000 per year. Nevermind, the coverage isn't as good. So that's [crosstalk 00:15:12]-   Mark: And that's not per person too. Right. So if you and the spouse.   John: Yeah, yeah. Yep. That's per person.   Mark: Can your retirement accounts handle that for that setup that we just talked about or whatever the case might be and then realizing that that's also, that your retirement is now going to be longer, right, because you've retired early, so it's the kind of great multiplier. So those things just kind of compound and go up from there. Nick, do you agree with that and what's some things you see?   Nick: Yeah. For sure. It's definitely a slippery slope when you start to factor in. We've got some clients who work for large employers, their total health premiums for the households can run $2-3,000 a year for both of them. So when you go and you take... You go from $2-3000 for both of you while you're working to somewhere between $8-20,000 a year before Medicare age, it can be pretty substantial. And oftentimes, for many people, there's going to be a price increase, even when they're on Medicare from if you were working for a company that was a larger employer and had pretty inexpensive health benefits. So that makes a huge, huge difference.   Nick: And one way that some people have managed things from that perspective are with some of the Marketplace options out there will kind of connect people with specialists that can help on the medical insurance side of things. And you may be able to take money from taxable accounts that don't have large gains to put your income lower so that you don't pay as much, but in reality, to be frank, usually the only people that can do that are ones that have saved substantial amount of money into a non-qualified account, which usually means they have a lot of money. So, it's less of an issue. So really looking at that, looking at the different types of accounts, when you create your withdrawal rate, and figuring out, hey, how can we keep your income taxes low, not a only for a short period of time when you're in retirement, but kind of building flexibility throughout your retirement, where you're not just letting this tax bomb grow, or you're not using all of your Roth money first or leaving it all for the end.   Nick: It's usually kind of a bit of a balance. So we harp on it a lot, but this is really where there's so many factors and things like this. That this is where kind of software and the tech tools that we have today really help us tailor make a plan, come up with a really good income and liquidation strategy, help us figure out what kind of gaps are we going to have between the time that you retire and when things like Social Security are going to kick in to help supplement the income, and then when Medicare's going to kick in to help reduce expenses. So, it's definitely a puzzle and fortunately we enjoy putting the pieces together.   Mark: Right. Well, look, if you're on the fence, well, if you already did the resigned and walked away, hopefully you had a plan in place, but if you're not, if you're among some of those folks that are still considering, I've heard some interesting stats that they think that's going to happen. Again, early on the first half of 2022, make sure you're talking with an advisor about all the different things that could happen if you do step away early. Most people, hopefully do, but sometimes you just get frustrated or whatever the case is. And a lot of it does have to do with this kind of going back to work, staying working from home, it got good to us, we really kind of, in some ways, very much so enjoy being able to work from home, in other ways we kind of missed the camaraderie. So there's a lot of different things to just kind of take into account before you pull the Great Resignation.   Mark: And with that, we're going to wrap it up this week. We're going to knock out an email question here real fast. Whichever one of you guys want to tackle this, but we've got one from Rebecca who said, "Guys, every six months or so I tell myself, I need to start saving more for retirement and I pretend like I'm going to get serious and actually do it. But then I can't stay motivated to increase my savings. I'm putting a decent amount in the 401k and I have a pretty nice balance there, but it feels like I could be doing more. It's the beginning of the year, I want to be more motivated. How do I do it?"   John: This comes up quite a bit. And I'd say the easiest way to save is probably the 401k, because it's done through payroll and you really, once you start saving in to it, you really don't miss the money coming out into it and you can always adjust it. And we've had some people where they say, "Hey, I'm putting enough into my 401k, what else should I do?" And the first step is just really just setting up an account and you can start with as little as $25 a month, or $50 a month, but once that account's open, it's much easier just to say, hey, let me up this. So I would say the first step is look at the 401k and if you don't want to continue contributing to that, just open up an account somewhere with your advisor or on your own and just set it up monthly, and then you can always adjust it as needed.   Mark: Yeah. Or maybe a Roth, right? If she wants to look at a tax, something more tax efficient. So...   John: Yep.   Mark: That's another way to look at it. But yeah, I think if you automate it and you just put it in play, Rebecca, that should hopefully get you... You just, if you don't see it and you don't think about it and it's just happening in the background, then that's the beauty of it, so then you don't have to worry about necessarily getting motivated. But another way might be to sit down with a professional and start getting some advice. It doesn't matter really on your age, the sooner, the better. So if you got questions, need some help, reach out to John and Nick, go to the website, pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com.   Mark: Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you like to use, Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, just type in Retirement Planning Redefined, or again, just find it all at their website, pfgprivatewealth.com. If you got questions, need some help, John and Nick are here for you.   Mark: Guys, thanks for hanging out. I appreciate it. Talking to me about the Great Resignation and we'll talk about it in a couple of weeks here, we'll see what's going on.   Nick: Thanks, Mark   John: Thanks.   Mark: I appreciate your time as always. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me. We'll see you next time here on the podcast, with John and Nick, this is Retirement Planning Redefined.

Welcome back to another episode with Mark Schaefer. In the last episode, we talked about Mark's book Marketing Rebellion and the need for human-centered marketing. Today, we will continue the discussion of Mark's book by discussing four strategies for human-centered marketing: constant human truths, values-based marketing, customers as our marketers, and honesty and consistency. We'll also discuss tectonic shifts and fractures in the status quo.     Focus on Constant Human Truths     Many companies Mark consults with feel overwhelmed. There are so many options and things to do. He often tries to emphasize the constant human truths, which he discusses in his book. These truths are that people want to be loved, belong, be acknowledged, and be respected.   Mark said we are too focused on technology. We need to put these human truths first, and then we can think about how technology can help us provide for these needs. “I'm not anti-technology. [But] I'm anti-technology when it creates barriers with our customers. When we do things like spam them or send them robocalls, that will just tarnish our brand,” Mark said.   Being acknowledged is one of these important truths. In Mark's book, he discusses statistics that say 50% of young people said, “It's important for me to be acknowledged by my friends on social media,” but 60% said, “It's important to be acknowledged by my favorite brands.” It is more important for them to be acknowledged by their favorite brands than their friends. There's a longing to be acknowledged.    The pandemic has made a lot of these needs more prevalent. People are feeling more lonely, isolated, and depressed. Mark believes companies have a role to play in this. Customers are telling us there's a way to engage with them: give them a place where they belong.     Consider Values-Based Marketing     There is a lot of research from companies like Deloitte, Accenture, and McKinsey that shows loyalty has been declining over the last 20 years. 87% of our customers are “shop around” customers. Research by Harvard shows that almost all of our traditional marketing activities are not building loyalty except for one: demonstrating shared meaning or shared values.   A well-known example of this is Nike and Colin Kaepernick. Some people think Kaepernick is a patriot and a hero and others think he's not. Nike made a deal to do a line of clothes with him. When they did that, Nike's value went down by about $4 billion in one day and people were burning their merchandise in the streets. Two weeks later, however, Nike's valuation was even higher than it was before.   Mark had a friend who said he was so mad he was never going to buy from Nike again. Mark told him, “They don't care.” Nike realized that in order to earn their audience's trust, they have to show what they stand for.    Nike also knew that Adidas was trying to make a deal with Kaepernick. They had both looked at research to find out what their customers believe, and they were looking for ways to align themselves with those beliefs. It was a race for shared values.   This is a very, very effective way to create loyalty, but it's not for everybody and it's not necessary for every company. We don't all have to express our political or other views. If we think about all the products we've purchased in the last two weeks, how many of them do we know where they stand on political or other issues? For me, it's none of them. Values-based marketing can work very well, but it isn't necessary for every brand and many brands do well without it.      Embrace Customers as Our Marketers     In the past, we were the markers; we viewed ourselves as the marketing team and the marketing agency, and we decided how to market our brand. There is a fundamental shift happening as our customers become our primary marketers. As we discussed in the last episode with Mark, two-thirds of our marketing is occurring without us.   As Mark found this research for his book, he was overwhelmed by how wrong we were in the past. He thought, “I don't know what it means to be a marketer anymore,” because the customers have control now.   Instead of trying to hold on to this control, we should embrace it and earn our way into being part of the dialogue. We shouldn't bother, annoy, or interrupt our customers. We should let them speak and then join the narrative.   Many people are in love with content marketing, but the content has no value unless it's seen and shared. Mark said, “The value is in transmission. It's getting that story, getting that content, to move in that two-thirds. That's where the marketing is occurring.”     Be Honest and Consistent     A long time ago, Mark realized he can't depend on social media, Facebook's algorithms, Google, or SEO. There are thousands of other digital marketing consultants out there, so he's never going to have a number one ranking on Google or beat out the richest competitors. He can only depend on himself.   Mark creates content that is so honest, it's unmissable. People know from his content that he doesn't have an agenda. He's just trying to find the truth; he's on the journey with them through the good, the bad, the success, and the failure. He's consistent through it all.   We often think that success will happen overnight, but most often success comes from consistently showing up.    Mark shared the example of a band called the Black Keys. Before the band was big enough to play arenas and sell out Madison Square Garden in 15 minutes, Mark had the chance to talk to them when they were playing shows for about 1,000-2,000 people. Mark asked the drummer, “What was the catalytic point that took you to the top?” The drummer said, “There wasn't one. We've been touring for seven years, we've made seven albums, and every year we do a little bit better.”   Hard, consistent work will eventually lead us to where we want to be. Mark said, “There is no overnight success. You just [have] to keep on working, working, working [with] patience. Consistency is more important than genius.”   Gain Momentum through Fractures in the Status Quo   On this show, we talk a lot about tectonic shifts or changes in the business landscape we can leverage to help us grow. Mark talks about a similar idea that he refers to as fractures in the status quo. Like tectonic shifts, these fractures can lead to great success.   Fractures in the status quo create new and unmet or underserved customer needs and provide opportunities when we can meet them with our core competencies. When our initiative meets that fracture, we can burst through it with all our might and speed to create winning momentum.   Bill Gates was able to leverage one of these fractures. He had access to early computer prototypes as a teenager, allowing him to learn how to code—his core competency. When the fracture came, personal computers, Gates leveraged that competency to build software and find success.   We need to be aware of our own core competencies and the fractures or shifts happening in the world. Then we can leverage them and gain momentum.   Mark's Manifesto   While Mark was writing Marketing Rebellion, he reached about the halfway point and realized there was no way people would be able to remember everything he was covering. Mark challenged himself to write a 10-point summary of the first half of the book. This summary became the Manifesto for Human-Centered Marketing. A hand-drawn copy of this manifest is available here. We should also create manifestos to communicate our core mission in a way that will inspire our audience and help them remember what we're about.    Key Takeaways   Thank you so much Mark for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:   People want to be loved, belong, be acknowledged, and be respected. We can help fill those needs for our customers by acknowledging them and creating a place where they belong. Almost all of our traditional marketing activities are not building loyalty except for one: demonstrating shared meaning or shared values. Customers are in control of our marketing now. Instead of trying to hold on to this control, we should embrace it and earn our way into being part of the dialogue. Consistency is more important than genius. Being authentic and consistent with our customers will help us gain big success little by little. Fractures in the status quo provide great opportunities for us to gain momentum. We need to be aware of these fractures.   Connect with Mark   To learn more about or connect with Mark:  Connect on LinkedIn  Visit his website at BusinessesGrow.com  Check out his book Marketing Rebellion   Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?   Please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:   Download the free Passion Marketing ebook at PassionMarketing.com. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast. How can we shift our marketing to be more human-centered? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Need help with your digital monetization strategy? Visit MonetizationPartners.com to schedule a free consultation.   Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/4-strategies-for-human-centered-marketing/ 

Mark Schaefer is a globally-recognized author, speaker, podcaster, and business consultant who blogs at Grow, one of the top five marketing blogs in the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University. Mark has written eight bestselling books, and his newest book is called Cumulative Advantage. Mark has many global clients including Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the US Air Force. He's been a keynote speaker at prestigious events all over the world. He's also appeared as a guest on CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CBS News.    Today, we're going to talk about one of Mark's books, Marketing Rebellion, and the need for human-centered marketing.   Why We Need Human-Centered Marketing   Mark was recently on a Zoom call with a client and an agency that's working with them. He was on mute during the call, but they could see his face was getting more and more disturbed because they were proposing spamming customers. “The first thing we need to do in our marketing is to stop doing what people hate. We need to treat each other like human beings and treat our customers like we would like to be treated,” Mark said.   Those old strategies used to work, so many people still lean toward them today, but they aren't working well anymore, and eventually, they're going to go away. Our customers won't put up with it; if we do something that annoys or interrupts our customers, the customers will rebel and they'll win. So we have to adapt to a more human, customer-centric model.   If we want to keep our customers and get ahead of the curve, we need to market in a new way, a way that respects our customers, their lives, their time, and their privacy. This is why Apple is updating its privacy features and why Google is trying to figure out how to protect its customers in regard to third-party cookies. These companies are trying to position themselves with the right side of the rebellion; they want to be on the customers' side. They don't want to be who the customers are rebelling against.   This is the time for traditional marketers to be humbled and listen to the newer people who may be more in tune with what the customers want and how to better market to them.   Treating Our Customers as Humans   Mark greatly admires Seth Godin, an author, and former dot com business executive, but he disagrees with something Seth said in his book This is Marketing. In that book, Seth says that marketing is about changing and manipulating people. Mark thinks that maybe this was true in the 1970s, 80s, or even 90s, but customers are different than people were back then.   We have the world at our fingertips. We have the accumulated knowledge of the human race in the palm of our hands. Customers can make really good decisions by looking at reviews or seeing testimonials; they can go down the rabbit hole on any product out there.    Mark said, “Marketing is not about trying to manipulate people. It's about coming alongside them at their point of need and saying, ‘You know what, we respect you. We respect your intelligence. We respect your privacy. What can we do to help you?'”    We should be asking “How can we help you save money? Make money? Have a more healthy life? A more entertaining life?” It doesn't matter what we are selling, the role of our company should be to help them in whatever our field is. We shouldn't view them as just the people who give us money. We should treat them as human beings who have real lives and real problems.   Helping them may not be enough. We talk a lot about passion marketing on this show because it is such a relevant topic. Our customers have so many options to choose from, so we have to show them why they should choose us by building our products and services around the things they are most passionate about. If we don't, we will never become a priority or differentiate ourselves from a sea of good options.   Being In vs. Being Part of the Community   To be a successful brand today, we can't just be in a community, we have to be part of a community. Being in a community is donating money to a charity for example. Being part of a community is something more.   For example, a few months ago, an ice storm hit the US, impacting many places not accustomed to that kind of weather. In Texas, many people lost their power and their heating. There was one furniture store that didn't lose its power. They told people to come to their store if they were cold. They brought in food, set up a play area for children, and had more than 500 people sleeping overnight on the mattresses in their store.   That store was part of the community. They asked, “How do we act like human beings? How do we act like friends?” If our friend is cold, we say come warm yourself. If our friend is hungry, we say come and let me feed you.    “In this era right now where so many people are suffering, there are so many unmet and underserved needs, we have this opportunity to not only be memorable but to be legendary. I can guarantee you there's no one in the city of Houston that will ever buy furniture from anyone again, other than Mattress Mack. . . . You're just acting like a human being. You don't have to be a marketing wizard, you just have to be a good person,” Mark said.   The companies that get down in the trenches, roll up their sleeves and become part of the community will thrive. The companies that are wed to the old ways and advertising agencies' scripts are going to become irrelevant.   In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this change. There was a video on YouTube called “Every COVID-19 Commercial Is Exactly The Same”. It has taken the ads from many large companies and edited them together to show that they all had essentially the same script.    These companies that couldn't break through the old ways became laughing stocks, but the companies that act as part of the community and do things that mean something to their customers will become legendary.   The End of Control   In Mark's book, he discusses some research done by McKinsey. Over 10 years, they looked at 200,000 customer journeys across 90 different industries and found that two-thirds of our marketing is occurring without us. A brand used to be what it told us. Customers didn't have a choice. They didn't have the internet or social media. If they wanted to learn about a company, they had to engage with their ads.   Now a brand is what people are telling each other. They're in control. They're defining the message based on their experience. We don't have a choice. We have to understand how we get invited to that conversation.   Mark got sick with COVID-19 at the end of March 2020. His business crashed to almost zero. He had to pivot and work in different ways. He had to connect to the opportunities and needs that were present right then. He stopped his marketing and asked himself, “How do I help people? How do I help my community?”   Mark is a teacher, so he started teaching how to handle things like anxiety, disorientation, and uncertainty in his blog posts. The traffic on his website doubled, so he turned those blog posts into an ebook and gave it away for free. He turned that into a speech to inspire people at leadership meetings. In June, July, and August of 2020, Mark had record-breaking months because he let the people's needs control his business.   We shouldn't try to control our brand or our messaging. We need to come alongside our customers and listen to their needs. They have to invite us to that conversation.   Just like in a marriage, we can't trick someone into loving us. We can't trick someone into marrying us. If we trick someone, even if we're successful, it's not going to work long-term. Our goal is the long-term, lifetime valuable relationship with that customer. If we trick someone into marrying us, how well is that marriage going to work out? How happy is that marriage going to be?    We can't change our customers just like we can't change our spouses. A marriage only works well if there is respect, love, and understanding. We must do the same thing with our customers. We must accept them and love them for the unique person they are.   A chef needs many different spices in a kitchen to make many different kinds of food. If their only option was cinnamon, their food would be pretty boring. Some foods call for cayenne pepper or oregano. Each spice brings value to the kitchen just like each unique person brings value to our life.   Key Takeaways   Thank you so much Mark for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:   Customers won't put up with annoying or manipulative marketing anymore. We need to shift to a human-centered approach. We must treat our customers as humans, think about their needs, and build our brand around their passions. To be part of the community, we need to serve our customers during the good and the bad times. We need to treat them like friends. Two-thirds of our marketing is happening without us. Customers control our messaging, especially with the internet. We need to listen to them and join the conversation, but not control it. Now a brand is what people are telling each other. They're in control.  We can't trick our customers into loving us. Like a marriage, long-term relationships with customers will only work when there is respect, love, and understanding.   Connect with Mark   To learn more about or connect with Mark:  Connect on LinkedIn  Visit his website at BusinessesGrow.com  Check out his book Marketing Rebellion   Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?   Please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:   Download the free Passion Marketing ebook at PassionMarketing.com. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast. How can we shift our marketing to be more human-centered? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Need help with your digital monetization strategy? Visit MonetizationPartners.com to schedule a free consultation. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/why-we-need-human-centered-marketing/ 

In a previous episode of Monetization Nation, I shared an interview with Mark Morris, a Harvard MBA and highly successful business management consultant. This episode is part 2 of my interview with Mark. In this episode, Mark shares stories and secrets about how entrepreneurs and CEOs can leverage crowdfunding platforms and video to raise necessary capital without having to give up any equity. Monetization through Crowdfunding Crowdfunding companies like Kickstarter and GoFundMe help entrepreneurs to raise money and keep more control of their businesses. Mark tells the story of a crowdfunding solution that had been developed to take advantage of social networks to enable fundraising for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. After Mitt's campaign ended, there were calls to use this crowdfunding technology to facilitate other types of fundraising. To make the solution more robust, it was integrated with other social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube to allow a more visual message to be told and to better facilitate social sharing. That was what started a company named Fundly, one of the first solutions to empower social media fundraising. Mark said that with Fundly, the response rate was 10x higher and the donations were substantially higher. Mark believes that Fundly illustrated the power of connecting with people who share one of our passions. It also illustrated the power of video to tell a story. When there is a fundraising campaign for a new business product, a family in crisis, or another social cause we care about, video helps capture the emotions and build strong connections that make us want to participate.  Mark feels that these crowdfunding platforms with videos are a tectonic shift in the ability of entrepreneurs to raise funds and test products as entrepreneurs.  Fundly was purchased by GoFundMe.  Crowdfunding Platforms Reduce Risk Mark believes that crowdfunding platforms reduce the risk for investors and entrepreneurs. When investors look at a company that has gone through Kickstarter and has a lot of support, it is an entirely different value proposition because so much risk has been taken off the table in the deal. One of the biggest risks new ventures face is “Will people buy my product?” When entrepreneurs know there is a high demand for their product, this risk is already overcome. A successful crowdfunding campaign removes risk because it allows entrepreneurs and investors to know that customers are going to be interested in this product.  The Girls Scouts is a great example of this. The Girl Scouts pre-sell their cookies. Then, they know exactly how many cookies to make, and aren't stuck with unsold inventory.  Crowdfunding Leverages Passionate People Crowdfunding campaigns can build buzz and momentum for the product or cause, and create a bandwagon effect where people want to buy or donate because they see other people doing so. In some cases, it becomes a herd mentality. One of the best parts of crowdfunding platforms is that they allow us to harness the power of people who are passionate about our cause, campaign or product, and help those passionate fans share that passion with their connections. This is important because most of our potential customers don't trust us, and when we reach out to them directly, we are not credible. But, when our passionate fans reach out to their connections for us, it helps the credibility our passionate fans have with their friends and family to flow through to us.  The Power of Video in Crowdfunding Mark told the story of a student who raised about $100,000 by selling wooden watches. Mark said that the student's success was all about the video. The watches existed prior to this student. The student didn't manufacture the watches. He bought and resold the watches, but he told a great story. It was the telling of the story, and the lifestyle portrayed by the video that made people interested in buying it.  Mark explains that most things are not brand new. They have usually existed before, but they are new to us. Mark said there is a difference between a customer saying to themselves "I'm aware that exists," and "I need that in my life." That type of awareness is often best achieved through video and not text.  The advantages of video vs. face-to-face sales pitches can include:  (1) allowing the message to scale and reach a much larger audience,  (2) the ability to re-film and get our message right,  (3) editing our pitch to a much more concise and effective message, and  (4) adding emotion-evoking music to our message.   Because of these reasons, I think Mark made a strong point that video is arguably better than face-to-face sales. Mark talked about videos that go viral because they are funny or strike a chord. He uses the “United Breaks Guitars” video as an example of a video that went viral because it connected with video viewers.  Mark believes stories that are funny, emotional, or connect to a common experience are easier to tell with video and song.  Connect with Mark To connect with Mark and learn more about his consulting services, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-morris-1b711b161/. Key Takeaways Thank you Mark for sharing your stories and insights about crowdfunding and video. Here are some of my top takeaways from today's episode. Crowdfunding platforms can be used effectively to help social causes and political campaigns monetize through donations. Crowdfunding platforms can also be used by entrepreneurs to pre-sell products so they don't have to give away equity in their businesses. These businesses sell products to get the money they need instead of selling stock.  Crowdfunding platforms can lower risks for investors and entrepreneurs. Almost all of the successful crowdfunding campaigns have a video, which helps better capture emotion and build connections. Crowdfunding can cause a bandwagon effect where people want to buy our products or support our cause because they see a lot of other people have already done so. Crowdfunding platforms help bridge the credibility gap by helping our passionate fans share our products and campaigns with their trusted connections, which helps their credibility to flow through to us. Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content: Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business Follow the Monetization Nation Blog. Subscribe to the Monetization eMagazine. Join our private Monetization Nation Facebook Group. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Connect with Nathan on Linkedin.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram.  Follow Monetization Nation on Twitter. Share Your Story  When have you observed a company use crowdfunding and video effectively to raise money? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/37-how-to-leverage-crowdfunding-platforms-and-video-to-fundraise-without-giving-up-equity/

Meet Mark Morris Mark Morris has had a storied business consulting career. In this episode, Mark will share how captivating storytelling helped save the 2002 Olympic games, along with his insider story of helping create Burger King's viral Subservient Chicken campaign, which some believe is one of the top-10 marketing campaigns of all time.  Mark Morris has a Harvard MBA, is a University professor of business management, worked as a consultant for Bain and Company and Deloitte, and has consulted for more than 100 companies.  He was also in New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a CEO client. The day before that, the Olympic committee had been in New York looking for a place for the Olympic flame to rest during the Christmas holidays.  Scandal Surrounding the 2002 Olympics Mark had the opportunity to assist with the marketing and communications for the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympic Games. It was projected to be the worst Olympic games because of a bribery scandal. This scandal was having a huge effect on the credibility and monetization of the games, and sponsors were not wanting to be associated with the scandal.  Mark feels that the Olympics is one of the most passion-filled events. It is filled with people who have dedicated their lives to being elite athletes.  As Mark met with the team trying to move the focus away from the scandal, they decided to focus on telling the stories of the Olympic athletes and what they had overcome to arrive at this event. They felt that the focus should be on helping people connect with the athletes and their stories. Instead of trying to focus on defending the scandal, they moved on and focused on creating connections with the athletes. As the team behind the 2002 Olympics was able to successfully focus on telling these athlete stories, the focus did shift away from the scandal and sponsorships did come back.  These Olympic games had been projected to lose a huge sum of money greatly due to the scandal. However, in great part because of this storytelling strategy and the connections with the athletes, the games became profitable. Some even said the 2002 Salt Lake City Games were the best-run Olympic games ever.  Subservient Chicken Mark worked with Burger King to launch a new chicken sandwich. Before that, Burger King had a "chewed and glued" chicken sandwich that wasn't whole-breast chicken. Mark was helping them launch a higher-quality chicken sandwich that could be customized. With this launch, they rolled out the "Have it your way" campaign. To do this, they hired a person to dress up in a chicken suit and recorded him doing about 400 different actions. Then, they put it online so people could type in commands to have the chicken do things "your way." This became the "Subservient Chicken" phenomenon, and it went viral. Many of the people thought that the chicken was doing their commands live and didn't realize it was all pre-recorded.  Here's a quote about the Subservient Chicken campaign from Adweek: “The ‘Subservient Chicken' instantly struck a nerve with bloggers, in part because the site's technology allowed users to type in nearly anything and get a response from the chicken. He could do jumping jacks, dance, do push-ups and even watch television. He seemed impossible to stump. Within a day after being released, the site had a million hits. Within a week, it had received 20 million hits. Who was behind this strange Web phenomenon? Many visitors to the site were surprised to see it was Burger King.” Mark remembers taking the Subservient Chicken to Fox News in New York so that the newscasters could "have it their way." Later that night, Mark took the Subservient Chicken clubbing in a stretch SUV. Some people rank the Subservient Chicken as one of the top 10 marketing campaigns of all time.  Hard Times are an Opportunity to Create Connections Hard times are sometimes the best times to connect with people. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were the worst terrorist attacks in history, but they created a more unified "tribe" of Americans. Another example is when a group of students go through the challenge of business school together and become very bonded.   Mark believes that when we focus on the hard times it can cause us to feel crushed, defeated, and hopeless. But as we work to get through the hard times together, it can become binding to an amazing degree.  Mark went into business because of a hard time he experienced. Mark's dad was an entrepreneur who went through an economic downturn. He went from having lots of business and opportunity to having very little.  Mark tells the story of sitting in a college economics class and the teacher being able to predict the past and the future because he understood the laws or tectonic shifts of economics. Mark felt like he was observing magic tricks. He wanted to go into business because of what he learned, and because of his desire to help others learn these things. The power of being there for our customers during hard times and the opportunity this provides to build long-term loyal relationships isn't about being opportunistic. It's about valuing our customers beyond the dollar, especially during hard times. For example, Mark was with two executives in New York during 9/11, one from California and the other from Utah. Both executives rented cars and drove home, and the car companies waived all the charges. Recurring Revenue The New York Times was able to use its credibility to build one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, paywall/subscription recurring revenue stream of any news organization. Mark thinks recurring revenue is similar to utilities. Many businesses today have reconsidered how they can add recurring revenue streams to their business models. Mark explains that the software industry has done a great job of shifting from one-time sales of software to software as a service with a recurring revenue stream. Connect with Mark To connect with Mark and learn more about his consulting services, visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-morris-1b711b161/. Key Takeaways Thank you so much Mark for sharing your stories and secrets with us. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode: When we face a scandal or other crises, using great storytelling to build connections can be a powerful tool to shift the focus away from the scandal to something much more positive.  When we are in the midst of something negative, it is often difficult to just remove the negative. That leaves a void and something has to fill the void. Often it is much easier to make the negativity go away by focusing on replacing the negativity with something positive.  When we can create marketing campaigns that our target audience feel are personalized (like the Subservient Chicken), it can greatly increase our ability to connect with that target audience.  We should look at hard times as an opportunity to build deeper connections. When we are there for others through their dark times, it can build loyalty that lasts forever. Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content: Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business Follow the Monetization Nation Blog. Subscribe to the Monetization eMagazine. Join our private Monetization Nation Facebook Group. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Connect with Nathan on Linkedin.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram.  Follow Monetization Nation on Twitter. Challenge If we desire monetization we have never before achieved, we must leverage strategies we have never before implemented. I challenge each of us to pick one thing that resonated with us from today's episode and implement it to help achieve our monetization goals. Share Your Story  Who do we know that is going through a hard time right now, and how can we be there for them during that hard time? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://www.monetizationnation.com/14-how-storytelling-helped-save-the-2002-olympics/

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S2E02 TRANSCRIPT:   ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. And today we are going to be talking about holidays. What they are, how they fit into our human experience here in the world. A little bit about the Wheel of the Year as celebrated by pagan folk, many pagan folk, and then some tips on inventing your own holidays and some fun holidays that have already been invented that we want to make sure you're aware of. Yucca: So that's one of yours coming up. Mark: Yes. Yes. Slogg is coming up in January and we'll tell you all about it. So holidays much. That this is an important topic for pagans, because for many pagans much, if not all of their celebration of their religion is focused on those eight days around the course of the year. You know, some people like me and you have daily practices and other things that we do on a more frequent basis, but for an awful lot of pagans, I know it's really those eight holidays, the four solstices and equinoxes, and then the points in between the solstices and equinoxes to create eight equidistant spokes to a wheel around the course of the year Yucca: and some- it doesn't seem to be quite as common, have a, a lunar observance as well. Mark: Oh, you're right about that. I completely overlooked it. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yucca: But it, at least from what I have been exposed to, it seems like the, the solar wheel of the year is more, it seems to be more universal. Mark: And that's of course there are, you know, there are folks following Norse traditions and Greek traditions and Roman traditions and so forth, which are not in any way oriented that way. The wheel of the year was originally created as a Wiccan idea synthesizing folk traditions from throughout Europe and kind of pulling them all together into this system. But it works very well for nature-based pagans because it's rooted in reality and the reality of where the Sun is in relation to the Earth and what the axis of the earth is relative to the sun. And so over the course of the year, we go through these seasonal observations that have direct correlation in what's happening in the physical world, outside us. Yucca: Yeah. Well, let's, let's pause on the Wheel of the Year and talk about holidays first. Just holidays in general. Mark: We've just got a whole bunch of them Yucca: we have, right. And we're not talking about the holidays as is in the cluster of a bunch of things that often happen in December, but. Holidays as in moments set aside throughout the year that have special meaning and that have special behaviors around them. Mark: Yes. This is one of those things that is ubiquitous, so it must have some inherent human need. In every culture throughout the world, there are special days where you don't just do your routine of food gathering and processing and, you know, making shelter and doing all those various kinds of things. Instead, you suspend all that stuff and you do things that are often cultural, religious, freighted with symbolic meaning, right? And so so holidays become one of those interesting topics like laughter and music and dancing, where you have to ask yourself how and religion. Of course these things are universal. So what does it say about the human organism that we have these things and that we value them? Yeah. So what is a holiday then? Well, we've just described it as a day that you take when you do something cultural or religious, instead of doing instead of doing your ordinary routine, and that can even be true of holidays that are highly secular. I mean, 4th of July is it doesn't really have much in the way of a kind of deep metaphorical content to it, but there is the tradition of fireworks and there is the tradition of barbecues and there's tradition of football, all these things that people associate with that day and find very important. Right? Yeah. Yucca: And then there are points throughout the year, which ties back to the Wheel of the Year that many cultures have. Some celebration around and sometimes they have other meanings also added on with the birth of gods or particular saints that are being celebrated. But there are certain points where it seems like people are recognizing that there is something going on within our environment that is again, shared throughout well, the whole planet. Mark: And in some cases, some holidays are, are extremely specific only to certain people, for example, with a particular name. So you've got in, in the Roman Catholic church calendar, for example, they've got more saints than there are days in the year. So in some cultures you are, you have a sort of birthday like celebration on your saints day. That you were after. And until very recently in countries like Spain you were only allowed to name your children names that were on the list. Right? So everybody had a saints day as well as a birthday, and that was a time to celebrate. Right. So all of these are pieces of. Incorporating culture into the flow of daily life. Right. I mean, I can see particularly how effective it would be to do the St state thing, because. Somebody will be having a saints day every day. And it will continually remind you that you're Catholic and that you need to do the Catholic rituals and, you know, follow the dogma and all that kind of stuff. So that's very effective. Other holidays are much more universal, right. And. One of the things that I find very strange about American culture is that we have holidays that have virtually nothing associated with them other than not going to work. President's day, for example, I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't have deep and abiding rituals for president's day. Yucca: No, and frankly, I work on that day too. Mark: usually haven't because it's, the banks might not be the banks aren't open and Pantheon was usually over president's day weekend, but that's not happening anymore. So So anyway these holidays are a way for us to, sew our cultural and religious experience into our living. And that is something that is really worth looking at for people who are pagans and who are seeking to make sure that they've got everything represented in the calendar of the year that they want to see represented. And if they don't see it in one of those eight kind of guidepost holidays, well then maybe it's time to make up another day to celebrate and observe whatever it is that you think is important enough to deserve that. Yucca: That's right. Yeah, because we, we are choosing to curate our own experience and that's one of the things that we we get to do is say, this is, this is what I want and how do I make this work? How do I make this be part of my experience? Mark: Right. And as we've talked about before, don't worry if it's made up. Cause it's all just made up all of it. Yep. All of it. Every last bit of human culture is made up by somebody at some point, it's made up so you can make stuff up as well as anybody else. And it's just as valuable as what anybody else made up. So Yucca: go on. I was going to say, why don't we talk about the Wheel of the Year as the sort of standard. It's hard to say that there's a standard, but this sort of standard modern Neo pagan temperate approach. Okay. That's a pretty long list of descriptors Mark: A lot of adjectives. Yeah. I thought you were going to say template, but then you said temperate Yucca: template, temperate template. Mark: So yeah for one thing, the, the conventional descriptions of the Wheel of the Year holidays are rooted in the climate of great Britain. Because they were originally described by Gerald Gardner in his publications of the 1940s into the 1950s. And so the climate of that time and that place were kind of what set the standard for what any given holiday would stand for. But. I'm in the Americas. I know you are too Yucca and it's very silly for us, like where I am, for example, you know, the idea of the holiday at the beginning of February, being about the little shoots coming up through the snow and casting seed out on the snow for the birds that are beginning to return. And you know, the earliest, earliest, earliest, beginning of spring makes no sense to us at all because in terms of shoots coming up, that just happened when it started raining two weeks ago, all the green stuff is coming back up again. I've got a nice green grassy yard behind my house now. That was all just Brown and dead before, but. This is the time when the growth happens, because it's when the water comes Yucca: Well. And for us, it's the most cold bitter time of the, it is the true dead of winter for us. There's there's not a lot of new growth happening. It's. It's cold. Mark: Right? Right. Yeah. And then of course there are people that are, you know, truly in the tropics people in Hawaii, for example, I mean, it does actually snow on the big Island. Of course that has to do with elevation 13,000 feet, obviously. But it, but it's true that they still, they do get temperatures cold enough to actually have snow on the ground up at those high elevations. But you would not, you would not describe the beginning of February in, in Hilo as being the, the frozen winter. It just, it isn't. So yes, we, we have this overall model that comes out of Western Europe. And some people are just really firm about that. You know, these, these are the metaphors that were taught to us for all of these different holidays, and that's what we're going to follow. And, you know, it's very, you know, sort of rigorous and traditional. My approach is much more of a what they call an eclectic pig and approach, which is that I am using pagan, symbols and structures as adapted to fit my personal circumstances so that they actually make sense as a way of understanding my world and celebrating my life. And that means that for me, that holiday at the beginning of February is River Rain, which is the festival of water because it's pouring down rain. It has been for weeks and it will be for additional weeks. And that's the only time of year that that happens, but everything is green and lush and the creeks are full and the waterfalls in the state parks are all running and all that good kind of stuff. And so we celebrate water and all the wonderful things that water means to us. Yucca: And of course just well, quite a few hundred miles away, for me it's Second Winter. It's a very different holiday and we're going to come back in just a few weeks and really talk about what this holiday is for each of us. As we, as we go through the Wheel of the Year on the podcast, we, each time we come into a holiday, we talk about it. One of the Wheel of the Year holidays. Right. But I also very much have the same approach that the holidays, my understanding of them is based upon where I live, what's going on here in my ecosystems, in my climate, and also incorporating in some ideas, some themes that are universal themes. Decomposition. Everybody's got that. Yes. Wherever you are on earth, you've got decomposition going on, got points of new life and, you know, different biomes, things like that. Mark: Sure, sure. Yep. Another thing that I do that I know you don't do so much, Yucca is I map the, the cycle of a human life onto that calendar. So for example, when the, when the year begins that you will, I consider that to be the birth, the birth of the new sun, the birth of the new cycle, the new year. And then the beginning of February holiday is sort of an infancy kind of holiday as well as being a celebration of water. And then kind of elementary school level at the height of spring, and it's all very fun and we color eggs and do all those childlike things. And then young adulthood at May Day, full adulthood at Summer Solstice. Middle-age in the, at the beginning of August, elderhood at autumn Equinox, the harvest, and then finally death at Hallows. And decomposition and recomposition between Samhain and, and Yule again. So it's a way for me to reflect on the different stations of my time here on earth and other people's time, and to celebrate people that happened to be in that particular age bracket at the time that they're, that the holidays being celebrated. So it's a way for everybody to get their, their sort of cheering on, you know, we love you as a community. You're good. People go forth and be you. Cause you're cool. And so I've found that very meaningful as well. I know that you have a really interesting wheel that is more focused on the different kinds of creatures different kinds of organisms that you associate around the course of the Wheel of the Year. Yucca: That's right. Yeah. And so, and we'll, we'll get back into that more, but it's the different types of beings that we are in partnership with as humans and the biomes that we have major terrestrial biomes. There isn't as much recognition of the aquatic world for me, but that's because I'm many hundreds of miles inland in a high desert. And although I appreciate it on a, on an intellectual level, have very little daily relationship with the ocean. Sure. But other folks at let alone water in general, we have a lot of that here. You know, sometimes I feel like we're on Arrakis. But why don't we touch for just a moment? I know this is probably very familiar to people, but a lot of our language when we talk about the sun and we talk about holidays, is leftover language from before we really had a good grasp on what was actually going on. We talk about the sun rising and setting, and we talk about the sun's position in around earth and things like that, where that's not what's going on the sun doesn't set and rise. We turn towards it and turn away from it. Our planet is tilted. We've got about right now a 23 and a half degree tilt as the earth goes around the sun. And it's too bad. This is only an audio format because it really helps to have a little bit of a visual, but a common misconception is that the earth is actually wobbling back and forth as it goes around the sun and that's not what's happening. The tilt that's staying the same. It's actually moving slightly. We're talking about several inches a year, but for our lifetime, essentially, it's staying the same. But depending on our position around the sun, what your place on the globe is going to receive more or less light. The proximity to the sun, how close we are to the sun, or how far away has very, very little influence on our seasons. It really is that tilt. And so people who are in the mid and higher latitudes, whether that's North or South, we experience more extremes in terms of the amount of light that we're getting, which is what's causing our seasons, but there's still a shift in that, in the tropics as well. So the tropics are not the area around the equator is always going to get a lot of light, but not as extreme difference in temperatures. So someone in the tropics, the Wheel of the Year set up with our eight holidays that celebrate snow on one hand and long, long days and summer on the other, that just doesn't for that location, doesn't make sense. Somebody might choose to celebrate it for other reasons, but it doesn't match with what's happening in the climate. And if on more extreme levels as well, if you're near the poles, the also don't have the same. Wheel of the year. It's even more extreme in terms of you've got night and day, right. Or summer and winter. And instead of having that be nine and 14 hours or whatever, or a 15 it's six months and six months or whatever you have. Yes. So since I don't live in the tropics. I don't know what a wheel of the year would necessarily look like, but for folks who do or live in, say the subtropics where you've got a rainy season and dry season, aren't two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. There's an opportunity for a lot of creativity in, in designing and creating your own wheel. Mark: Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, I think of the tradition in Canada of celebrating the first snow and, And I could very well see something similar, you know, a wheel of the year that isn't set up on dates so much, but set up on when the first rain comes to start, you know, a first monsoon season. And then when the rain stops for the dry season and then when the second rain comes and once again, for those places that have two cycles but to be honest There are so few changes in the course of that cycle that I don't know that a wheel of the year is necessarily even the best kind of model to use Yucca: the waves of the year. Or there may be some type of tree or some sort of. Symbol that would, that would better fit depending on what that climate is. I mean, there's still, but we're still dealing with the same cycle of the rain. The rainy season and dry season are still being caused by the same, It's the same mechanism that's causing the seasons and the temperate environments. It's still the apparent movement of the sun and the sky, which of course is not the movement of the sun. Sun's moving, but. That's not really relevant to what we're talking about. Mark: Ocean is relative, but let's go down that rabbit hole. Well, yeah, Yucca: I would, another interesting one is we could do a wheel of the sun cycles with the sun going into our 11 or 22 year cycles, but then it really doesn't obey years. It kind of does 11 years. 22, 11ish. So we could Anyways, that's just kind of a fun thinking about on maybe a society level of what would a unified Neo pagan wheel be for an interplanetary society Mark: probably end up looking like the Mayan calendar with wheels within wheels, within wheels of all these different cycles that all interact with one another. Yucca: Well, one of y'all should write that book and let us know. Mark: Yes, please. Please do. I would love to read it. I wouldn't want to do all the calculations necessary in order to write it, but I would love to read it. That'd be the fun part. Okay. Yucca: It's different strokes, but, so, so it might be really an actually it might, if we find someone who does have a tropical wheel of the year or wave of the year. It might be really fun to get them on. As a guest, I would love to talk about what that, that experience is because it's so different than my experience. And it sounds so different than yours. Mark: Yes. I mean, I've been to the tropics for a total of about a month out of my life.So it's not really enough time. Yucca: Yeah. I lived in Costa Rica for a period when I was a child, but I don't remember a tremendous amount. So you know, the, the temperate zones are really are my, my main experience. And nobody ever explained that there were different seasons in different parts of the world. when I was a kid that was not a, you know, everybody taught about the the standard, and even in the, in the desert that we would always have these pictures of maple trees with their, you know, red, the orange leaves and. We've got like little shrubby junipers and pinions. We don't have any of those fall never looked the way that it, that it does in the picture books. And I suppose that's also a good thing to think about in terms of the different hemispheres that some, some folks will follow the Wheel of the Year, based on the Northern hemisphere while in the Southern hemisphere. And some folks in the Southern hemisphere will base the holidays based on what's happening in their climate, two different approaches. Mark: Right. Right. So why don't we talk about some. Do it yourself holidays. What do you do when there's something important for you to celebrate or there's, some milestone that you really feel needs to be marked on a regular basis? Not, not like a one-time Rite of passage, but something that you want to Mark every year, because it's important to you, but it's not enough. Yucca: Yeah. It doesn't match up nice and pretty with your particular date. Mark: And now we can talk about the example that that I have come up with, which is Slogg. S L O G G slog is the, the Demi Sabbath of, of miserable winter. It's the third Saturday in January and Slogg is the point at which it's been long enough since all of the holiday parties and Sweets and cakes and cookies and presents and drinking and all that festivity. It's now been more than a month since then. And it's, it's been pouring incessantly ever since then. And you just really, really, really need a holiday. So I invented this Deming Sabbath called Slogg. And in it you drink mold, whined Swedish globe made with port wine and spices and stuff like that. And play board games and generally grumble about the rain or the snow, either one. And it's just an excuse to get together with a bunch of friends and have kind of a mini Christmas with that isn't with presence or anything. It's just about huddling together as community and enjoying one another in the cozy safety of shelter. Yucca: That's great. I love it Mark: Sounds like you need it more than I do Yucca: Well for us though. It's we, it. We're almost at Second Winter. So it's our, it's two for me that time of year has already transitioned in to that, but I'm getting real ready for, for spring. At that point. Spring, you could be here already. That would be just great, but it is one of the only times of year. that's a very, also restful time for us. Mark: Yeah, we, we have a similar sort of situation that I haven't come up with a holiday for. Cause I don't think a holiday is really the solution in September. It's blazing hot, the fog cycle that works during the height of summer, that pulls coastal fog in over the land and cools down the temperatures by this point, the sun is now the, the axis has turned far enough away that the sun doesn't have enough power to drive that cycle very well anymore. And so we might get a fog blanket every three days or four days, but it doesn't happen daily as it used to. And so the days are just 105 hundred and 115 this past year. Yucca: Well into the forties. Mark: yeah. Yes. For those outside of the U S it's yes, hot, very hot. And so we need something, some kind of holiday that would allow us to sometime around the 10th of September. I think, you know, little, little while before before the harvest celebration, just something. The swimming holiday or a mass Exodus to the beach or something. I don't know. Yucca: Right. Digging burrows and hiding in them. Mark: Time for your annual replenishment of your sunglasses. Yeah. Yucca: So the idea is that you can just make one up. Mark: Yes. You can make it up. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, Wolfenoot. I haven't heard of wolfenoot it was made up by a seven year old and it's a time to celebrate wolves and dogs. All that I know about it is that you're supposed to have cake that's shaped like a moon, and you're supposed to give meat to your dogs as presence because that's what they like. And the motto is no hate only snoot boops. Yucca: And we don't have any dogs. So we bring treats to our neighbor dogs or our, you know, family members who do have dogs. So, and we were joking that cats needed a holiday too, but then realized that that's every day. Mark: a cat. It's a holiday domesticated cat. Yes. Is living the life of Riley. Yucca: So. But we also have others. One that we enjoy is your East night. So we'll celebrate Yuri's Night. And that is basically a celebration of all of the space technology and exploration and all of that innovation, Mark: To, to clarify that that is the anniversary of the first human entry into space. When Yuri Gagarin was launched into an orbit around the earth, Yucca: If you can be near any of the NASA centers on a non pandemic year. Then there's a lot of great parties to be at. Mark: Yeah. And they're similarly at observatories and air and space museums. There are often events that happened on Yuri's night. And I just think it's a great, very optimistic aspirational kind of go science go. Yucca: Yeah, just that celebration of curiosity and achievement and just how cool all that stuff is. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's April 12th. Mark: Yes. April 12th. Before that, the month before that is PI day, which is 3.14. So it's the 14th of March. It is also Einstein's birthday. So it is often observed by atheist particularly is kind of a special day. Another one of these, you know, yay science kind of celebrations. But as far as I'm concerned, it's just an excuse to eat pie, Yucca: eat pie, big pie. Maybe do some competitions on how many digits you have memorized. Mark: I think I have only got 10 or so, Yucca: where you're way ahead of me. I'm woefully few. Like I could make it to five maybe. I can write it symbol though. Okay. Very impressive. Right. Some folks do then the little bit later, May the Fourth. Mark: nerdy ones. Yeah. The star Wars holiday may the fourth be, would, would be with you. Yucca: And in those that same sort of delightfully nerdy veins later on in the year talk like a pirate day. Mark: Yes, 19, 19. Okay. September 19th, international talk like a pirate day and yes, we've observed it for many, many years. We, we think it's a really great thing. Yucca: I think we did on the show last year, Mark: too. We did, we recorded on September 19th and I talked a little bit like a pirate. Which is, you know, the only one, the reason that we think that pirates talk that way is because the actor who played a long John silver in a 1940s production of treasure Island had this broad West country accent from England. And he happened to talk that way. And now, now everybody thinks that pirates talk. That way. Our entire concept of pirates is not very historically accurate, Yucca: It is not, we have been as a parent struggling with how to handle that one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mark: I mean, both in positives and negatives, I mean, you know, they were horrible and bloodthirsty and did terrible things. On the other hand, they had more of a direct form of representational democracy than representative democracy than pretty much anywhere else in the world at that time. So. I mean, there, there was something about Liberty in it. They were just rotten people. Yucca: Yeah. I'm just not so down with the raping and pillaging part, you know? And the issues with modern pirates Mark: modern piracy is horrific. Yucca: Yeah. So, yeah. But tangent let's come back to, so those are kind of some fun ones that are, that are all about. Are there any others? I mean, those are some of the ones that you might find on a calendar like your mother's day and grandparent's day and all of those. Mark: Well, and then there are culturally significant holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, for example Bastille Day You know, holidays that are, that are of meaning to people in other countries or other cultures that have been brought over here. And, and Yucca: we'll celebrate St Patrick's and St. David's day. We're not Catholic clearly, but those are days that are, that are kind of heritage appreciation days. So for our Irish and our Welsh respectively. Mark: The one that I'm always surprised didn't get translated over to the United States is guy Fawkes day. I always would have thought that we would have taken on guy Fawkes day because we were colonized by the English. But I guess not. Of course we were colonized by the English before the gunpowder plot. I don't know, it just seems odd to me, any excuse to blow things up seems to be really kind of American in nature. So, well, we did Yucca: We do that twice a year and that's true. Yeah. Well, and it also kind of depends on, so yes, the, the, the origins of the country, but it's really a big place and where I, where I live, we're in New Mexico. We don't think of that part of American history. I think that the kids probably have to take it once in middle school or something and learn about that, you know, Boston tea party and, you know, 13 original colonies and a few things like that, but it's not really, you know Not a big part of the cultural awareness here on the cultural identity. Our cultural identity is much more about Spain and Mexico and the Pueblos and, and all of that. Mark: Well, that completely makes sense. What doesn't make sense to me is that here in California, I had a real minimum of education about anything having to do with Mexico, even though this was all Mexico. Either about Mexico or the Spanish colonization of the Americas or or of course about California Indians. Who of course were here before, before anybody came colonizing. So yeah, hard to, hard to identify a rationale for that, but there it is. So, I guess the point of all this is holidays are good. They're a human thing that we all kind of need and do. And if you are finding yourself in need of one create it. Okay. You'll find in some cases that many others will have the same need and we'll jump right on it. Or it'll just be too adorable, like Wolfenoot, and nobody will be able to leave it alone. Yucca: Right. How can you, how can you not, that's just too cute. It Mark: really is. I mean, it's holiday invented by a seven year old about dogs and wolves. It's just Yucca: there. Their mom just shared it and it just, you know, it's one of those things that went viral. Mark: just took off. So we welcome comments or questions@thewonderpodcastqueuesatgmail.com. W do you, are there any special holidays, unique holidays that you celebrate? And what are your, what are your cultural practices for those where we'd be really interested to hear Yucca: And if any of you had more information on the tropical wheels or waves of the year, we'd love to be pointed in that direction as well. Mark: Very much so. Yeah. Yes. So thanks Yucca. This has been a great conversation. Yucca: It has. Thank you. And I look forward to very soon getting back together to talk about this holiday that's coming up. Mark: Yes. Yeah, well, in the meantime, have a good Slogg. Yucca: Ahh, likewise! All right. Thank you, Mark. Mark: Thank you. Bye-bye.  

Podcast: The ALPS In Brief PodcastEpisode: Episode 15: 2017 ALPS Year in ReviewPub date: 2018-05-29ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ALPS Lawyer's Malpractice Insurance, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

We speak with Study Cat CEO Mark Pemberton about language learning outside of the classroom. As the corona virus causes schools around China to temporarily close, we consider the possibilities and limits of using apps and technology for language learning. Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. Here, we usually bring you one episode every couple of weeks focusing on a topic.We usually don't do anything related to current events, but at the moment, the coronavirus, as you may have read in the news, is having a huge effect on a lot of students. A lot of listeners are also, like I am, in China. Today, we're going to do a special episode about learning English at home.To help us do that, we have Mark Pemberton. He's CEO of Studycat. Studycat's a company that makes fun and effective language learning apps for kids in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and German. Before starting Studycat, Mark was also a teacher.In this episode, I asked Mark about how students can use technology to help them learn the language at home. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Mark. Thanks for doing this at such short notice. Obviously, over here in Shanghai, a lot of the schools are shut and a huge amount of the population's working from home. It's a really strange time, with the coronavirus, both for business and for education.Mark Pemberton: I was reading today Bloomberg saying that this is going to be the largest work‑at‑home experiment in the history of mankind. From our perspective, it's going to probably be the tipping point for home education.Realistically, people might not be back at school until after Easter. In the meantime, there is no way that people can't turn towards online education to fill that void. It will be very interesting times.Ross: Right. I guess a lot of studying from home is going to happen over the next few weeks and months. That's obviously not necessarily a bad thing. What are some of the advantages of getting students to study at home in general?Mark: To me, it is obvious that if you want to learn a language, the more touch points you have with that language, the quicker you're going to achieve fluency. The gold standard for language learning is to drop yourself, immerse into a new culture, and have to speak the language, which is exactly what happened to me when I moved to Thailand.If you don't speak the language, you can't order food. It's sink or swim. Therefore, take that assumption and build immersion around the learner. When the kids go home, you put the cartoons on in English. You put the radio on in English. Put music on in English. Surround the kid with English, and the kid will do the rest.A lot of parents would say, "I don't know how to do this." Or, "I don't speak English." That's OK. It doesn't matter if you can't speak English. You can create the environment around your child where they will acquire the language very naturally and very quickly.If watching cartoons is a part of that, if playing interactive games is a part of that, then even better, because there's not a lot of research or data about this.To me, it's obvious that when a kid is in a puzzle or doing some kind of brain‑teasing activity, where they're using all of their focus and concentration, then they're learning quicker than they would be if they were just passively watching a cartoon.Ross: I suppose as well as the motivation aspect of needing to learn a language with immersion. I guess you're also just getting fewer opportunities to forget what you've learned because everything will be recycled all the time. That seems to be a big advantage of learning on an app.For example, for a few minutes every day, compared with going to a class once a week for a couple of hours at a time. Anyway, learning at home also allows parents to get a lot more involved in their kid's learning. What are some advantages of getting parents involved in the language learning process?Mark: Our brand is connected learning. What we mean by connected learning is connecting the home and the school to get the best learning outcomes. There's a couple of layers to our connected learning.The first one is connecting the home and the school. The second one is connecting parents, teachers, and kids. The kids are at the center of the learning process. If the parents are involved and the teachers are involved, and they triangulate, that is very, very powerful.I've got pictures of me teaching back in 2001 in my school. I had this hardcore cohort of parents that came to every class, which was great because they helped me manage the class. They helped me translate sometimes.Those parents would go home and they would walk with the kids. They play the tapes with the kids. They do the homework with the kids. Those kids just excelled because they were recycling. They were doing more work than the kids that weren't able to stay home work to...What we're able to say is, put the CD on, put the tape on, sing the song. There's nothing else you could set them at that time. Whereas now, you can assign them homework on their favorite devices.You can track whether they've done it or not. You could see what they did or didn't understand. It's a brave new world of language learning. I wish I had all these tools when I was teaching.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about how parents can best be involved? Imagine that parents being involved can either have a huge positive effect or definitely also seeing have a negative effect sometimes on kids as well.Mark: The kids like it as long as the parents handle it well and don't do that overpowering, "You must do this, you must do that." If the parents play a role of like, "Let's do this together," the kids learn so much faster, and they're so much more fluent.The parents who got such clunky pronunciation, that the kids get this, "I'm doing this better than mom or dad." You get this nice dynamic going if the parents play it right.Ross: The teachers listening to this might not fit into this category, but there's definitely a lot of teachers out there who are less enthusiastic about integrating technology into the student's language learning. How do you think apps can make teachers' lives easier?Mark: When we started doing EdTech early 2000s, I thought that there would be technology in every classroom by 2007, 2008. Then I thought, "OK, well, this is going a bit slow. It's education, maybe it's because teachers are fearful of technology, or maybe it's because the ministers of education are too slow."Now, it's 2020, I would say, with the exception of China, education and the adoption of technology in classrooms have really hasn't progressed at all. Obviously, not all teachers, but why aren't most teachers embracing technology?I don't understand. I've heard people say that they find it cumbersome. Maybe it's the technology's fault. Maybe they find it's a distraction in the classroom.Maybe they find that it's hard to manage a class and manage a technology at the same time. When we were building [inaudible 6:23] schools, we were very, very aware of these issues.We never assumed that the teachers wanted their lives made easier. We assumed that the teachers wanted to be more effective teachers. They didn't want to do monotonous report writing.We don't want to waste time prepping for all these lessons. We don't want to waste time marking all these lessons. We want to walk into a classroom with the kids [inaudible 6:51] knowing the vocabulary. We can actually use their vocabulary in scenarios, in sentence building, in dialogues, and in fun stories.EdTech, I've always believed, has massive potential to level the playing field. Children can go home and learn at their own pace, at their own speed. They can do it again, and again, and again until they're comfortable with the language. Then they can bring that into the classroom and practice the vocabulary learned. I think that's a wonderful outcome.Ross: You mentioned leveling the playing field there, Mark. How can technology do that? What do you mean exactly by leveling the playing field?Mark: There's two layers for that. The first layer is, in a specific classroom, no two kids learn the same way. No two kids have the same personality. It always struck me that the silent kids that would sit in class, they would not speak for the first year, a year and a half.We're always trained how to deal with these kids. The way I dealt with them, I just let them be. They were never making any trouble. They're just very shy. They're only five years old.I remember one of the silent kids, after a year, a year and a half, put a hand up, walked over to me, and said, "Teacher, may I go to the bathroom, please? I'd like to use the toilet." This kid had never spoken one word ever but she had understood all the language. She can speak complete sentences when she was ready to do so.If you're shy and don't want to speak, how nice it would be at home, in your bedroom with the device, rather than being told to stand up and repeat this sentence, or make a sentence, or it's your turn to do this, your turn to do that. When I said level the playing field there, I was also alluding to profit on purpose.EdTech can reach parts of the world that other education solution haven't had the ability to do. You're seeing really progressive governments in Colombia, Uruguay, that are shipping devices out to rural areas, where kids can just start learning where they can't build schools.EdTech will be able to deliver education to the 1.5 billion kids that, right now, don't have access to education. Of course, they need devices to be able to do that. I believe that there will be a day where companies like ours will work with companies like Huawei and other major device manufacturers, and then major charities with big footprints like Room to Read.Then we can deliver these devices with loads of educational software uploaded, and then deliver these devices to the communities.Ross: I love that example of the quiet student just absorbing all that language. I also heard Stephen Krashen give an example of talking about, at a conference giving a presentation, and walking up to someone in the front row with a microphone and seeing the look of fear in their faces.He was saying that, as teachers, we hate being asked questions at conferences. That's something that we do with our students all the time.Anyway, your app, I believe gets used by a lot of teachers in their classes. You must have seen lots of examples of teachers in schools encouraging students to use technology at home and to help in the language learning. Can you give us an example of how that actually works in practice?Mark: We did a big launch a year ago in Shiyan with a group of 40 kindergartens. It went really well. The teachers complained that they didn't know what to do because the kids knew all the vocabulary when they came into the classroom, which always made me laugh.They did some really cool stuff. They would ask the parents to record the kids at home doing their app activities. We got all these videos of kids singing, dancing around the living room, really got lit up by the songs. They started getting the kids to sing the songs every afternoon at the end of class outside the kindergarten.When the parents arrive to pick them up, the kids are all there singing the songs and doing all these different motions and actions. The feedback from the principals of those schools was that the parents had stopped having to send their kids to after school to learn English because they were learning so much English in the school.The blended learning, the flipped learning was working. That, to me, is a success because you're saving the kid's time. The kids in China are not having much of a childhood. The pressure is on from when you're two, three years old. It's the same in Japan. It's the same in Korea.The pressure on kids to do a 7:30 start all the way through to 9:00 or 10:00 at night, when they're only four years old, I just don't think that's right. I don't think there's enough time for them to play. I don't think there's enough time for them to sleep.I would hope that by using their time more efficiently, they could get more rest, more sleep, and more playtime, which is what children need when they're growing up, especially their age.Ross: You mentioned that by using that flipped classroom approach, students learn more effectively and didn't actually need to go to after school English programs anymore. Can you imagine that time in the future when apps or other technology will eventually just replace teachers completely?Mark: Technology would never replace teachers. There will be books in classrooms for the next 50 years. There will be teachers in classrooms for the next 50 years.The notion that AI and robots and technology are going to replace education systems is a fallacy. Everyone should embrace technology as a tool to enhance your ability to teach. That's what it is.Human beings are very unique in the sense that we have this urge to teach. We have this urge to pass knowledge down. It's in our DNA, like it is in no other animals to pass on and to teach, the love to teach.We love teaching and we love being taught. The way that society is being built and developed with kids going to schools, I just don't see that changing in the next 50, 100 years.I've gone full circle as well. I've built systems in 2007. My mindset was, replace the teachers, replace the classroom, build systems that don't need teachers or classrooms. Now, I've come around to a much easier state of mind. If there is a classroom, there is a teacher.That's much easier to build and design technology because you all work together to get the outcome that you want. I'm not saying that the way we educate or the way we use education right now is optimal. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's not going to change.Ross: One other opportunity I wanted to ask you about, Mark, was with AI. A lot gets written and said about AI. Can you tell us about what you think the potential is for AI in helping language learning in the future?Mark: AI, I'm not so sure about this. So much hype about what AI is going to do in education. It's a lot of VC hype about that right now. I wouldn't be putting my money to have into AI. We use very simple AI in our systems for adaptive learning. We are able to see whether a child has issues with certain words.Then we simply use a very simple machine algorithm method to keep reintroducing the words in reward games. We pull trouble words out and we keep re‑displaying them to the kids so that they learn them. I think that's very powerful.I don't think that the brave new world that a lot of people are investing in in terms of AI is going to be as big as people are hoping it will be.Ross: Mark, thanks so much again for coming on. I also know that because of the Coronavirus, you've open up your app for teachers and students to use for free for the time being. Can you tell us how can teacher's listening get access to that?Mark: We've just released a campaign today, Ross, that we are opening up all of our language learning apps to all communities affected by school closure for free usage until this crisis has passed. If you go to studycat.com, you will see all of our apps available there to be downloaded.In China, we have a WeChat platform. If you search for Studycat, you'll find our WeChat platform. Fun English is available there on all Android devices, all iOS devices for the next month, for free. We've survived these things before with SARS. In the meantime, Studycat will do what we can to help you entertain your kids.Ross: Great. Thanks again so much for joining us, Mark.Mark: Cheers.Ross: For everyone listening, please stay safe. We'll see you again next episode. Goodbye.

Featured in the hit Gimlet Media podcast, ‘The Habitat,' Dr. Tristan Bassingthwaighte, architectural designer, space researcher, and resident of NASA's yearlong Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, sits down with his father, ALPS Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte, to discuss the stress factors associated with isolated, confined, and extreme environments and how to create support systems and wellness systems strong enough to survive a year in space.   Transcript:   MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Good afternoon podcast world. This is Mark Bassingthwaighte. I'm the risk manager with ALPS. Welcome to the latest episode of ALPS in Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I've got a treat for you today and honestly it is very much an honor and a privilege to introduce our guest today, because there's a family relationship here. This is our oldest son, Tristan Bassingthwaighte, and Tristan has an interesting story to share. We're going to talk about and just have a little fun. At the end, trust me, there is a message here that that relates to the practice of law. But before we jump into our conversation and share why we're interviewing Tristan, Tristan, could you just take a little time and share whatever you'd like to share about yourself for our listeners? TRISTAN BASSINGTHWIAGHTE: Yeah. I am originally from Montana as well. I've spent the last 10 years or so living in Hawaii and around the world, have three architectural degrees with a focus in space architecture and extreme environmental design, design t-shirts on the side just for fun, and as part of my research for the doctoral studies, got to live in a simulated Mars base for a year for NASA. MARK:                  Very cool and that's what we're going to talk about and when Tristan talks about his experiences, I have caught up with him and and Singapore where he was doing an internship, I caught up with him and Bangkok, which what were you doing? TRISTAN:             A spring study abroad. MARK:                  A study abroad spring study abroad. That's right. He's been in Copenhagen, did a year in Shanghai. But we're here to talk about this Mars simulation. Tristan, can you give us a little background. Who runs this simulation? What are we talking about in terms of the name of the project and a little background? TRISTAN:             The simulation itself is called HI-SEAS. It's for the a Hawaiian Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's run by UH with a partnership of 10 to 15 other universities around the world. NASA actually gave the program about $17 million to do a series of simulations studying social and psychological aspects of long duration isolation, confinement, essentially trying to find a way to pick a crew for an actual Mars mission that will not self-destruct, remain happy, sort of soft topics, people research. MARK:                  Yes, yes. As a dad, I remember finally over the years and I can recall when you were even a wee young when running around the house, you would say things like, "Dad, I'm going to be an astronaut someday," and "Dad, I'm going to go to Mars." I guess technically with all of the things going on with SpaceX, who knows what's going to happen here. But in your own way, you've already done it and it's just an interesting path. Can you tell us a little bit more about how did she end up here? What got you into the program? How did this all play? TRISTAN:             Honestly, it was a giant almost mistake. I was doing research while living in Shanghai for my masters on extreme environmental design and I came across the blog of a Jocelyn Dunn who was the science officer for HI-SEAS 3. While you can't do any direct communication, because at the time she was in her situation, you can leave comments on blog posts and they can respond. I asked her a bunch of questions since it was related to my research. She got back with her actual mission email. I got a bunch of fun stuff, good data, and she suggested that I was interested enough, maybe I should give a the next mission a shot. TRISTAN:             I said, "What mission?" I had no idea that was going to be a another one. It turned out that it was out of my home university back in Hawaii, so I just kind of applied on a lark. Did all the sociology tests online, did the Skype interviews, talked to the psychologists, and got it all narrowed down. Then was quite surprised when they invited me to the wilderness survival in Wyoming. Went out there, we did a week in the bush, and they picked the final six and I made the cut. I found out later a lot of the people who were also selected for crew specifically told them they wouldn't go without me. I went from not knowing that HI-SEAS existed to be locked in the dome at about three and a half months. MARK:                  That's crazy. Yeah. For those of you listening, this turned out to be, and I think still holds true to this day, the longest simulated mission run. Am I correct? TRISTAN:             It's the longest NASA Mars simulation mission run. They've got one or two longer out of Russia in China, but they were extended isolation experiments, not so much mission simulations. MARK:                  Yes. This project again, listeners, we went 366 days. TRISTAN:             Yeah, we got it on a leap year. MARK:                  Yeah. Really. I want to underscore one point. You shared a comment here about the delay talking to the person that initially got you interested in this. As a parent, when Tristan was on Mars, quote unquote, there is a delay. You cannot have real-time Skype or real-time email or anything. You can send an email and it takes 40 minutes because that would be the amount of time a signal would normally take to go to Mars. TRISTAN:             Yeah, round trip. MARK:                  Everything about simulation, they really did everything they could to to make it feel very, very real. It's just an interesting process. What was your role? TRISTAN:             I came in as the crew architect, essentially, so more of a research role than anything because the Hab was designed, but while in there I was conducting research on how people were reacting to the environment, how we might be able to change it for another series of experiments. I also managed all of the EVAs, paperwork, and was one of the de facto head chefs. MARK:                  Oh, yes. Which I gotta say can as a Dad, growing up Tristan wasn't known in the house or within the family as a, as a culinary wizard. He has a younger sister who actually went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York and is an extremely talented person in the kitchen. But it's been nice that Tristan has since really developed some skills, so I'm proud of that as well. TRISTAN:             Unfortunately, mostly with dehydrated foods. MARK:                  Well that's true. Actually, you should share a little bit about that. What was it like in terms of can you give us just a quick overview of what day to day life is like in this dome? I mean, in the amount of space? Can you take a shower? Do you have personal space? Can you just give us a sense briefly of the environment? TRISTAN:             Yeah. The downstairs, the entire area might be 1000 to 1100 square feet, so a very small home with another maybe 400 square feet up top. Each crew member essentially got their very own closet to sleep in. It's about the size of the bed and that's it. You can have a shower, but you get two minutes of shower water per person per week, make it quick. MARK:                  Yeah. Can you explain why there's only two minutes worth of water? TRISTAN:             Yeah, you were just not allowed to use it. essentially There's only so much water on the planet you would be able to use. It would have to go through $1 million water recycling machine. It's just part of the keeping supplies as efficient as possible. MARK:                  Yeah. That's playing out out. Was their recycling going on? Yes. TRISTAN:             Oh, yeah. MARK:                  Certainly there were water deliveries, but it is very much limited. There were some interesting stories where systems didn't necessarily always work. So food? TRISTAN:             Yeah, food. We have a shipping container full of high quality survival rations. The stuff you'd see online where it's like an old coffee can with say chunk salmon, but it's like $85 for that can because once you put hot water in, it's pretty freaking good. Like, the whole time I was in school, Grad school, everything, like call it that nine year period, in the dome with the dehydrated survival food was the best I ate. By a long shot. I made double layer chocolate cakes, mole sauce, enchiladas. I invented the pizza cupcake. MARK:                  Yeah. Pizza cupcake. Oh, man. Okay. Now you're talking. Of my kind of grub. It'd be fun. How did the sort of day to day tasks as opposed to the research? I guess I'm still trying to get a sense of what it was like to be in the dome socially, because that's really what this whole experiment was about. Was there a lot of camaraderie, a lot of stress, a lot of just, and what did you guys do as a group? Because there's just the six of you for 366 days. No real time. You have no connect. You have no Internet access in terms of being able to browse and say is Earth's still with us? TRISTAN:             No phones. MARK:                  Yeah, no phones. How did that play? TRISTAN:             You do a lot of stuff together because you have to. We had maybe 15 official experiments and then maybe 10 of our own that we're just doing for our own personal research. A lot of those were extra vehicular activities where you would be doing well-coordinated group, trying to do stuff in caves or out with cones, just traffic cones we had taken out, and navigating the lava inside. Inside, there's a team building exercise where your trying to maximize your personal score and the team's score, and it's sort of testing how an individual will favor themselves versus the group with various scenarios. It's all pretty subtle. TRISTAN:             Outside of that, there's definitely, I wouldn't call it a schism so much, but there's always the person, say, at work where you get along with them the best. They get your humor, whatever else, and they'll be your go to lunch person for example. There was definitely that in the dome as well. MARK:                  Just on a smaller scale? TRISTAN:             Yeah, on a smaller scale. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're talking about the social aspects of life there. The first thing you have to do is remove all of the social interactions you might have a family because they're not there anymore. You don't have the ability to be an uncle, or a brother, or an aunt, or anything of that sort. You don't have lovers or dating relationships. It's just you have your coworkers, so your society has become massively simplified and now you're trying to fill the social gaps that have been created with the people that you're with. MARK:                  Yeah. I want to come back to that, but we're sitting here talking and I want to explore the EVAs a little bit as well. But you know, my apologies listeners, I do think I've made an assumption. We haven't let people know where you are. Where is the dome and let's just describe that a little bit, because that plays into the importance of what happened, and where all this is, and why this study took place where it did. Can you fill us in? Where is this? TRISTAN:             Yeah, it's a geodesic dome, so just a half sphere, like a half a buckyball, covered in tarp and it is up on a quarry that's about 80 to 100 foot elevation from sea level, halfway up Mount Loa on the big island of Hawaii. Just barren old lava flows as far as you can see. Some of them are the really smooth a lava flow that looks like frozen syrup and you can run around and on it, others look like peanut brittle from hell. Incredibly difficult to get across. I went through like four pairs of hiking boots. MARK:                  Yeah. I recall I had to help buy a pair. Because they do these resupply missions and so if we learned that that one of the astronauts and most of us are taking care of our own family members, if you will, although you can send things for anybody if you really wanted to. But it takes some time, so we would buy a pair of boots, and it gets sent, and then when the resupply mission approaches Mars and drop some stuff off, so that's how they got through some of this. MARK:                  I can assure you, I was out with my wife when they returned to Earth. We were at the Hab when they came back and got to explore this area. When Tristan shares that this is some rugged remote crazy places, I'm telling you, it is. We've talked about caves. These are lava tubes they are exploring. MARK:                  I assume why, I don't assume because I know, but again to share with our listeners here. You talk about being restricted to the dome and then we had these EVAs. This is not put on a tee shirt and a pair of shoes and go explore. Can you describe this a little bit? TRISTAN:             Yeah. If you want to get outside and it's not for a normal mission thing, because I mean we've got all of our regular EVAs. Let's say I just want to go for a walk, essentially. I would need to create a sort of EVA plan, so like a map and a list of activities where I'd like to go, what I'm doing, and a time for it. I have to submit that to mission support and they will approve or deny it. They usually approve it. MARK:                  There really is, again, there is their mission support. These are people on the ground. There's these delays. It's just like dealing with mission control if you're on the moon, except much further out. TRISTAN:             Much farther. MARK:                  So there are all these time delays. TRISTAN:             Yeah. If I'd like to go outside, I won't even get the basic yes or no for maybe 25, 30 minutes if they're watching their email in that moment. It will normally take several hours. MARK:                  So it's approved. TRISTAN:             Yeah. Yeah. Let's say it's approved. Then the next day, because it's definitely not going to happen the same day, I need to get at least four people together, including myself, so that I've got a buddy to go out with me, I need a Hab comm person to man the radio and monitor where we're at, and then a scribe who will work with Hab comm to write down what we're doing, when we did it, important bits of the conversation to send all this data back since, since it's part of the experiments and if you are actually on Mars, you would of course need to do this as well. Then you need to put on a simulated space suit or the Hazmat suits, wrap your shoes and duct tape and other protection, because it is a very rough. MARK:                  It is like glass. TRISTAN:             You need to set yourself up with a camel bag, a headset that goes around your neck or your ears and hooks into your walkie talkie, and get your fans all set up to keep you cool. That takes about an hour to 90 minutes. Then you've got to go into our little airlock, which is between the habitat and our storage container, which is where all our old supplies are and just count down from five minutes, wait for the pressure to simulate getting pumped out. MARK:                  Right. Decompression. Right. Right. TRISTAN:             Then you can go inside. Then you of course have to follow your mission plan, and take pictures, and do all the rest, so it's still work. If you want to go for a walk, it will take you 24 hours and a lot of camaraderie. MARK:                  Yeah. What I'm hearing, if you even just have, you know some times, I think just day to day regular work, every once in a while something stressful happens, or again you just need five minutes, or you need to see to go out and calm down, or relax, or just take a break and things. This is a day's work. TRISTAN:             Yeah. MARK:                  Okay? How did that impact you and your colleague? TRISTAN:             You have got to do other things. Like say exercise, we probably did an average of two to five hours a day just to resist cabin fever more than anything. Get out the stresses. You can shout into a pillow. You can talk calmly with a person driving you crazy, because if you get into an actual argument going to be awkward for quite awhile. It's hard to repair a relationship when you can't escape each other and calm down. While you could, say, go to your room, you can still hear everybody in the habitat or you could go hang out in the shipping container, but then you're just standing next to a bunch of crates of food in the dark. There's not really like, "I'm going to go to the cafe and relax for a bit." You can put it on the VR headset and look at a beach, but you've got to set up the computer. It's not easy. MARK:                  Let me share a story. I can share. Now, Tristan is certainly someone who's in great shape. Prior to his time in the dome, I never knew him to be much of a runner. I mean, he certainly would work out and do things, but this guy was not what I would call a hardcore runner in any way, shape, or form. You ran a complete marathon in the stone on a treadmill. This was not the world's most sophisticated, high tech, brand new kind of piece of equipment. TRISTAN:             Soviet Russia, for sure. MARK:                  I just share that because, again, I think it's important to understand what we're really talking about here. I mean, to work out on this crazy treadmill with, am I remembering correctly, just one window, which is a small little window to look outside? TRISTAN:             Yeah. The size of a medium pizza give or take. MARK:                  Yeah. Okay. The size of medium pizza. You can run on the treadmill and look out that window. I just think, to me, that struck a chord with me in the sense of, wow just to try to make things work, this is how far you go, and you run a marathon. You know, there was a lot of joy, and pride, and probably working to this. I mean, I think it became something of a goal for everybody to have these kinds of accomplishments. Before I get to some final questions, I want to give you a moment or two. Are there any just sort of interesting stories, anything you'd like to share? Something kind of fun or unique about the whole experience? TRISTAN:             Yeah, I think some of the most interesting parts of it, I mean, were of course like what you found you could get through or how you might react to stress. I have very little doubt that given the right crew I could definitely do it for real. I mean, you're going to suffer a lot but I mean it can be worth it. Marathons are never comfortable but they're always worth it at the end. But I was quite astounded by the geography out there that you don't see typically. TRISTAN:             If you're just standing at the dome and you were looking around, it looks like a bunch of lava flows and rocks. It's barren country. MARK:                  It is very barren. That's right. TRISTAN:             In my time there I discovered completely on my own, or with Carmel or Cyprian, just out looking. MARK:                  Fellow astronauts. TRISTAN:             Perhaps 50 lava tubes, some of them with caves inside bigger than a house. Skylights with beams coming down, two stories, and a little patch of plants growing out. Weird undulating, just smooth caverns moving through the countryside. One of them, we hiked underground for maybe a kilometer and then popped out the other side. We got to map these things and just see the most ridiculous geography you can imagine under there with stalactites of frozen lava, and crystals, and all these things. Surreal. MARK:                  Yeah. That actually in some ways, would it be correct to say that these experiences of really exploring in so many ways, it really is just a foreign landscape, you know? Very few people live in this kind of landscape. There's obviously people in Hawaii that are quite familiar with it. Would that become something of a sanctuary just to go out, and see, and explore some terrain that's just very, very new and very, very different. TRISTAN:             Oh, yeah. I mean, we actually ended up doing a great deal of lava tube exploration mapping sort of additionally that we weren't required to do right, but we just enjoyed being underground so much. Once you get in there, you're out of the sun, your suit cools down. The geography's amazing. Cyprian and I actually repelled down a skylight and found a little cave and crawl to the back, and there was a sort of a hole in there about the size of a lounge chair or whatever. With our flashlights and everything else, we could not find the bottom sides or top. It was a black hole and do an endless abyss. We both said, "Let's not come back here." MARK:                  Yeah. Oops. Wrong footing. Yeah. TRISTAN:             Definitely. It'd be cool to go back with like real climbing gear and a team and see what's up because- MARK:                  Or maybe fly some little- TRISTAN:             Yeah. Put a drone down there. MARK:                  A drone down, yeah. TRISTAN:             But I feel like if I had fallen into that I'd still be falling. Yeah, I don't know what it was. MARK:                  Wow. That's very cool. I'd be curious, would you do it again? TRISTAN:             I would absolutely do an experiment of that nature again. At the time of my life it was perfect for finishing dissertation. MARK:                  It just worked, right. TRISTAN:             Yeah. Right now, working freelance, paying off student loans, it wouldn't be a quite so in keeping with my direction, but if I got hired as a space architect for is SpaceX for example and they needed the crew to do a six month to practice this stuff, yeah, of course. MARK:                  I see where you're going, but let me take that even further. Okay. You've had this simulated experience and let's SpaceX or one of these other companies really does get it together. The equipment's there and they're going to send a crew up. I don't know if it's 10, it's 20, I don't know what these early crews will look like. I think you would agree with me that these early flights, the first manned flights, even if they have stuff already on Mars in terms of robotics and a little fuel or water already there waiting and that kind of thing. I think it's pretty much a given that this would be a one way trip. Would you disagree with that? TRISTAN:             Yeah. It's actually probably safer to do it and than it would be to a sale to America way back in like the 1600s. MARK:                  Oh, that's an interesting. Okay. TRISTAN:             Yeah. Like, you're going to go and the ship design will either have it so that when you land there's already a robotic craft that has been waiting for you or you will stay a full year and make some more fuel and then come back, so it'll either be like a three year round trip or like a five year round trip. But as long as you don't have a crazy equipment malfunction or a solar flare that kills everything on the way out. MARK:                  Yeah. See, that's the radiation piece of this and the low G environment for extended period of time, I still think there's a lot of medical things we don't know. TRISTAN:             Oh, there definitely is. Yeah. MARK:                  That's getting on a tangent here for a moment. But I guess what I'd say, so you've had this simulated experience and Elon calls up and says, "Hey. I saw the podcast." There's a podcast it, it's called The Habitat if you want some fun. Six episodes. I encourage you to take a look. That's a lot of fun too. MARK:                  It's just, "Tristan, we've heard about you we, we'd like to get an architect up there and just have some experience to help with future design. We want to see what it's like to experience the transportation space as well as a livable space out there, so you're the guy." Would you go? TRISTAN:             Yeah, yeah. I would not hesitate at all. That'd be the life's dream, essentially. MARK:                  I take that at face fat cause to be honest, if they offered and said your dad has a slot too, if he wants to go. It's like, "Honey, I'm going. Would you like to come?" TRISTAN:             Yeah. MARK:                  Because you and I are just those kinds of folks. I've a great unknown and the call to go and see and experience that. I get that. Thinking about that, however, in light of the simulation you did go through, are there learnings or takeaways that you have? I know NASA and these university had been processing data and and I don't think as of yet there's been any formal reports released. There's just so much data here to process. Where do you come out with this experience in terms of will the crew using the inline space like example, make it in terms of the social dynamics? What are the challenges? What do you take away from the experience? TRISTAN:             You are going to have a two major obstacles to get over and the main one is the fact that you're in this small space with people, so it's going to be who are you taking with you? If you're going to actually go on the real mission, you would go through a great deal more selection than I went through. More tests. You would probably do three months completely isolated on a mountain with your crew to try and find out where friction might exist, and there would be shakeups and changes for probably five years leading up to the mission. The crew who and end up sending is probably going to be rock solid. MARK:                  The best of the best that just, yeah. Yeah. TRISTAN:            They can read each other's minds and they all admire and respect each other. They know when to shut up. They know when to speak right. It'll be a flawless crew. After that, you have to realize that if you put any person in a barren and white room for long enough, they'll go insane and start talking to themselves. You need environmental stimulation, you need social stimulation. If you can build a small craft to get there or a large base once you're there using robotics or whatever else that's able to, as much as possible, simulate the social and environmental complexity of your life on Earth, you will be happier. That's it. If you can just not sell your soul for mission success, and remember who you are, and what makes you able to last. This isn't a marathon. This is running around the world over a year. If you don't stop and take care of yourself, you're going to break. MARK:                  Yeah. That's kind of where I want to go here in a little bit and wrap all this up. I've had the great pleasure and opportunity to speak with some of the people that designed the mission and some of the researchers. Tristan hasn't shared this yet, but I can share what became a very important, I think, not only for Tristan, but truly for the entire crew, one of Tristan's contributions was just to bring a sense of humor. Any comments on how humor played into ... Would you agree that that that was an important component to kind of keep yourself and everybody? TRISTAN:             Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately at the end of the day, stuff's going to happen with people who are being in transient, or an environment that wants to kill you, or a shift that's not working quite as well, or all of the pancake batter runs out and now we've got to eat healthier stuff for two months until the resupply comes. You can't control any of those things, but you can control how you react to them. MARK:                  Exactly. TRISTAN:             If you have to choose between levity or getting really down about it, one of those is going to lead to a better income. If you watched The Martian, Mark Watney's stuck up there for a long time so he starts making light of himself, and talking to potatoes, and asking goofy questions. That will save you, you know? MARK:                  Yeah. What I liked about it, because we had some conversation via email and there's some other ways that we were communicating that we can't get into right now, but in turns to just that there were different technologies being tested throughout this simulation. But one of the things that I started to see just as somebody monitoring and watching a little bit, you guys quickly had to get to the point of where we can't control this and life's too fricking short, and so instead of getting upset, you had to try to find other outlets to include. You know, if it takes a day to get outside to walk you do that, or you has some fun, practical jokes a little bit that are harmless, and those kinds of things. MARK:                  Let me, as we start to wrap this up and I want to sort of tie it back to some earlier comments you made, would it be fair to say to that an important takeaway would be really beginning to understand the importance of support systems? I recall hearing from all of you in different ways that it was surprising who stayed the course throughout the entire 365 days of trying to remain in contact and who said they would at the beginning and then just drop the Earth, or off the map, or radar, whatever you want to talk about here. Could you share just a comment or two on the value of support systems? TRISTAN:             Yeah. I mean, there's sort of a especially an American cultural thing where, for men especially, we're on an island and Russ supposed to like need or desire anything for anybody. Those are typically the types that end up in the woods by themselves in a cavity. MARK:                  It's the classic right stuff. When you think about the early astronauts, you know? TRISTAN:             Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. If you think of not Neal, called Buzz Aldrin. Like he's got a hell of an attitude, he absolutely knows his stuff, extremely cock shore and independent type of person. MARK:                  He's Frank Borman too, same kind of guy. TRISTAN:             Yeah. Same kind of guy. When it comes to we need to put you in this tin can full of dynamite and throw you to the moon, can you handle this, those are the types that are going to be able to do it right. Admire the hell out them. That's amazing. MARK:                  Yeah, it is. Absolutely. TRISTAN:             You do not want to go on a nine month camping trip with that guy because he's going to make the best fire, and he's gonna cook all the best food, and his bow line is going to be better than everybody's, and eventually that sort of confidence, whether it's a deserved or not, becomes incredibly abrasive. When you start getting into a mission length for anything from living at sea to going to Mars, you need people who are emotionally empathetic, who can listen as much as they can take care of you. Maybe they are hot shit, can do whatever, but they don't need to toot their own horn. They're self confident about it and don't need praise. They will see problems before they're developing and take care of it when it's just a gentle issue versus requiring a massive fix. MARK:                  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well in kind of closing from my own perspective, I'd like to share. I was earthbound dad. My wife and I, we took the time to resupply and we took some time to interact with the astronauts in a simulated environment that was being studied and tested. There were all kinds of things we did. It became very apparent to me that support systems, both internal to the environment that the simulated astronauts, simulated Martian astronauts were experiencing became very, very important, but so did support systems on the ground. Then there was this other component, which we've kind of been talking about just a little bit from the importance of even if it takes 24 hours to get approval, but you need your time to go out and experienced something, to get away, to have a break. You talk about learning to cook, and eating some healthy food, and investing in exercise. MARK:                  My takeaway is just, I walked away from that saying, "Boy, here we are taking people and putting them in an extreme environment, in an extreme stressful situation, and seeing what happens." Thankfully we can do it here on the ground because if this thing goes ballistic in space and somebody just decides I've had enough and opens the door in space, everybody's dead. On a Martian volcano, or I'm sorry on a Hawaiian volcano, that's not the true outcome. MARK:                  I think as I look at practices, legal practices, and the life that's so many attorneys lead, I just think there are a lot of takeaways from that experience that are relevant to all of us. I encourage you, if you're listening and find yourself in a stressful situation at work to look to your support systems, to try to emphasize, if we already aren't, behaviors that lead to wellness and behaviors that work for you. I'm not trying to suggest you go out and learn to run, and get a treadmill, and do a marathon treadmill. We can ride bike, go fishing, you can learn to cook, whatever floats your boat. MARK:                  But I do think my observation from everything these six folks went through was just to say wellness and support systems are far more important than I ever really honestly realized. That has impacted me ever since. I'm very, very proud of all the folks that went through this and was able to be there when they returned to Earth. It's something I will never forget and I just lived it vicariously through my son, you know? MARK:                  Tristan, before we close out, is there any final comments you'd like to share? Anything else? I do really appreciate your taking a little time here with that. TRISTAN:             Yeah. No. I mean, I worked in a firm for nearly two years before going freelance with design and architecture and know what it's like to be in a very stressful environment where your boss doesn't super appreciates you, and you're working 75, 80 hours a week, but being paid for 40 and everybody kind of does it because, you know, we're professionals and it's a pretty unsupportive, toxic culture. I would say that a quote I enjoyed, and it applies, call it the riches of your self-life or your intrinsic value, that sort of thing, is try not to be the richest guy in the graveyard. You don't need to be the most successful guy at work. You don't need to be the CEO. You don't need to have everybody like you. If you just get by, take care of yourself, take care of the people that matter to you, and have a good life, you won already. You don't need to be in a Mr. Work guy and everybody's go-to person, especially when they're not taking care of you either. MARK:                  Right. Right. The way I've said that over the years, it really isn't. Whoever has the most toys doesn't win. At the end, it's not about toys. It's about the experience. Well Tristan, I really, really appreciate your willingness to take the time and sit down and have a chat with dad, but to also allow all these other folks that are listening to be part of our conversation, so thank you very much. MARK:                  To all of you listening out there, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and found something of interest or value to it. Please, as always, if any you have any topics of interest or other folks that you'd like to see if we can interview at some point, please don't hesitate to reach out. My email address is mbass@ALPSnet.com. Thanks folks. It's been a pleasure. Bye bye.  

Mark Wellman is a nationally acclaimed author, filmmaker and motivational speaker. Despite being paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident, Mark has inspired millions to meet their problems head-on and reach for their full potential. A two-time Paralympian and former Yosemite Park Ranger, Mark's NO LIMITS philosophy encourages individuals to adventure into new horizons; to go beyond the seeming unreachable. Mark is used to being on the road since he travels throughout the year, bringing his adaptive climbing wall to companies, organizations, and schools. We caught him during one of his road trips and he agreed to swing by Golden, Colorado to the No Barriers podcast studio and catch up with his old friends, Jeff, Dave, and Erik. Mark is unbelievably accomplished but also reserved and humble. He talks about his legendary, groundbreaking athletic achievements with the same tone most use to describe what they had for lunch. But there was a time in Mark's life where he was unsure, depressed, and hopeless with no clear path ahead. Mark discusses his near-death injury that he sustained on a climb that left his paralyzed from the waist down. He spent months in the hospital unsure of how to go forward and lost. That was, until he received some wisdom. I had this one physical trainer, she was from Germany, and she said: “You need to train like your training for the Olympics!” And I just really took that to heart.” Mark first was determined to find employment where he could stay connected to the outdoors. So, he went back to school and got his degree in Park Management. He worked as a Park Ranger in various capacities, already shattering people's ideas of what he was capable of, but that was just the beginning. He soon discovered the world of adaptive sports and threw himself into learning more and designing his own adaptive equipment to get back out into the field. It was then he came up with the crazy idea of climbing the sheer granite face of El Capitan. He found a partner, built an ascending rope pulley system, and started to train. Now, folks of many different abilities have climbed El Cap, but until Mark, this was unthinkable. He pulled it off and became the first paraplegic to make the ascent. “Are you crazy to take this paraplegic guy up El Cap? Seems like a really stupid idea. Something could go wrong,’ but fortunately we didn’t really listen to that.” Mark went on to gain tons of media attention, made national and international news, met the President, lit the flaming torch up a 120-foot rope at the Paralympic games in Atlanta; a fun story he shared with us, and continued on to break even more records of athletic achievement, like being the first paraplegic to sit-ski unassisted across the Sierra Nevadas. Listening to Mark describe his epic achievements it's easy to forget he has a disability or about all the struggle that led him to this point in his life. But for Mark, it's about mindset. “I learned my disability wasn’t a death sentence - let’s get on with life, dude!” But Mark wanted to share what he learned with others. He details the spark of an idea he had with a friend that led to the formation of the nonprofit, No Barriers, and the humble beginnings of an organization that is now becoming a movement. He uses his time to speak to groups and offer inspiration, as well as lead hands-on adaptive activities that get people out of their comfort zones. “Let’s get out and enjoy life.” Read Mark's Autobiography Here Visit Mark's website: No Limits Learn more about No Barriers autobiography Climbing Back. The first paraplegic to sit-ski unassisted across the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, --------------- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ------------------------- Dave: Well welcome to our No Barriers podcast. We are thrilled today to have Mark Wellman with us, who's one of the founders of No Barriers. Can't wait to hear some of his stories about what this organization was founded upon. He's really the heart and soul behind why many of us are here at the organization. Before we get into that conversation, Erik, you just came back from a really interesting experience, why don't share with our listeners a little bit about it? Erik: [00:00:30] Yeah, I was at a conference with all these authors. There were four of us, and the first was a lady, she was the author of Hidden Figures, this great book that was made into a movie, these African American women who were behind getting us to the moon, didn't get any credit at first, but then their stories were really illuminated by her book. And this guy who is falsely sent to death row for 30 years. He was incarcerated- Dave: Wow. Erik: In a five by [00:01:00] seven room, had to kind of go into his mind and think about how to expand his mind. He said in his mind he married Halle Berry. They were married for 25 happy years. Dave: When was this set? Erik: Recently. Literally just got out of ... he got out of jail, no apology from Alabama. But he wrote this amazing book, so ... And then a lady who wrote a book called Beauty Sick, mostly [00:01:30] about girls who struggle with body image, and how much productivity is lost in the world because girls are having to pay attention to makeup, and weight, and all the things that they worry about. Guys too, but mostly the focus was on girls, and I have a daughter, so I was sitting there just hanging on every word, thinking about my daughter and her struggle, so it was really book because it was four very No Barriers... Dave: That's a lot of No Barriers. Erik: ...authors right there. [00:02:00] Maybe we'll get them on the podcast at some point. Dave: That sounds like perfect fit for the kinds of topics we explore. Erik: Yeah. And I am totally thrilled... this is great. I'm so psyched to have my friend, all our friends, Mark Wellman on the podcast today. Dave: The legend. Erik: The legend, the dirt bag... is that okay to say? Mark: Yeah, yeah. Dave: You embrace it, right? Mark: It's great to be here. I embrace everything. Erik: Mark almost doesn't need an introduction, but Mark is [00:02:30] a world class adventurer, and an innovator, and is the key founder of No Barriers. Has done amazing things that blow your mind as an adventurer. Has skied across the Ruth Gorge. Has traversed the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Has mountain biked the White Rim Trail. Has climbed El Capitan, Half Dome. We were just talking this morning, your Half [00:03:00] Dome ascent was 13 days? Mark: Yeah, it was. Erik: On the wall. Just, Mark, a hero of mine for sure. You're a few years older than me. When I was a teenager and you were just a little bit older climbing El Capitan and doing all these amazing adventures, you were a huge part of my motivation, so I'm psyched right now. Mark: It's great to be here, thanks a lot Erik. Yeah I guess I could [00:03:30] start off with... 35 years ago I was an able bodied climber and we were climbing a peak called Seven Gables, which is pretty close to the Mount Whitney area. We had a 20 mile backpack to get into the base, and this is back in 1982, I was 22 years old. My good friend Peter Enzinger and I were back there to do this climb. [00:04:00] We set up a base camp about 10,000 feet, and the next morning we got up pretty early, grabbed our technical rock climbing equipment and left most of our provisions at the base camp, our sleeping bags. Sure would have been nice to have that sleeping bag with us but didn't have it. And we climbed Seven Gables. It was sort of technical, kind of a mixed route. There was a little bit of ice, a little bit of rock, and made [00:04:30] the ascent. By the time we topped of it was a little bit late in the afternoon, about five o'clock. We just embraced this beautiful view from the summit. American Alpine Club places sometimes these cairns, or climbing registers, at the top of the mountain. It was kind of cool to see this. In this case it was just a pile of rocks with a Folgers coffee can. And I opened up the Folgers coffee can and dumped out the little pieces of paper, and there's my [00:05:00] hero Royal Robbins had climbed it. "Cool man, I'm gonna put my name next to Royal." Did that, and then we decided we're gonna go down a class four descent on the backside, just scrambling, not roped. We were just kind of walking down a tail of slope. I'll be the first to kind of admit my guard was down. My partner said, "Hey, maybe we should put a rope on [00:05:30] this one section here." I go, "No, no. I wanna get down to base camp, I'm really hungry. There's some really good freeze-dried food I wanna eat." You know that wonderful Mountain House stuff. Erik: And 35 years ago. Dave: Delicious. [crosstalk 00:05:44] Mark: So next thing I knew, I slipped on some scree, and I pitched forward and I started rolling. I made a couple of somersaults and I rolled off about a 100 foot cliff. When I landed I broke my lower back at T 11, T 12. Of course at the time I didn't know it. [00:06:00] I was 22, I didn't even know what a wheelchair was. That happened, and my partner thought I possibly could have been killed. But he heard me yell back at him. He got down to where I was... he said he spent a couple hours with me stopping some bleeding on my legs, and some other stuff. Jeff: What's your recollection of that period of time... Mark: He said he was with me for two hours, it felt like ten minutes. Erik: Right. Mark: And then he left. [00:06:30] He left an orange, an extra jacket, and some trail mix and said "Man, I gotta get out and get some help." So after 30 hours, the best sound I've ever heard in my whole life was the sound of this... [helicopter sounds] ...coming up the canyon. Erik: You almost froze to death. Mark: It was cold that night. Yeah it was real cold. I was laying on some ice. That probably helped because it kept the swelling down in my back. So I'm an incomplete [00:07:00] para. I have a little bit of movement in my legs. They said that might have helped me, the swelling. But the helicopter got up there, it was actually a ship from the Forest Service. They were gonna just go up and see if it was more of a body recovery, but fortunately I waved to them and the helicopter disappeared. About an hour later, a second helicopter came up and this time was from Lemoore Navy Base, and they did [00:07:30] a technical rescue. Flew in, brought the rotors within several feet of the cliff surface, lowered a navy medic, got me in a stokes litter, got me back up into the ship. I was down at a trauma center, they were cutting my clothes off, and a nurse said, "Who's your insurance company?" And fortunately I did have insurance, I had Kaiser. I went through stabilization of my back with Harrington rods. I was in the hospital in 1982 for seven months. Dave: [00:08:00] Wow. Erik: Including rehab? Mark: Including rehab and the whole nine yards. And nowadays, a paraplegic if you go to Craig Hospital, it's kind of the factory up here in the west. A paraplegic will be in the hospital for about six weeks. It's pretty dramatic... in those days, it was a much longer hospitalization. Learning how to take care of yourself. And then... Erik: More time is better, right? I mean, [00:08:30] would make sense right? You can develop more time? Mark: Yeah, a little bit. I think seven months was a little excessive. Erik: Right. Mark: But you know, there's a lot to learn. Your life has really changed. Your spinal cord runs your body, and you're paralyzed from your waist down. You have bowel and bladder issues. You have skin issues you have to be careful about. So all those things were really important, and I had this one [00:09:00] physical therapist who was from Germany and she goes, "You need to train like you're training for the Olympics." I just really took that to heart and started lifting weights. Was ambulating with long leg braces. This was sort of the beginning of the wheelchair revolution where wheelchairs weren't a stale piece of medical equipment, they were a lightweight piece of aluminum that was more of an extension of your body. And the wheelchair [00:09:30] could take you from point A to point B. Fortunately, in 1982 was really when these wheelchairs... they started making lightweight chairs. And I was a part of that. Erik: Not the clunky Vietnam-era things, right? Mark: Exactly. The old Everest and Jennings chairs were more obsolete, and they were using... well there was a woman who started Quickie wheelchairs, Marilyn Hamilton, she got hurt in a hang gliding accident. They took hang gliding technology, clevis pins, aluminum, powder coat. [00:10:00] And they kind of messier of manufacturing these wheelchairs sort of like... taking the technology from hang gliders and applying it to wheelchairs. Erik: We're still less than ten podcasts in here, but we've already heard a lot of stories of people... these No Barrier stories of people who go down deep into these dark places. I don't want to bring you down, but you have a lot of experience right now and so you can look back. You went to a dark [00:10:30] place, obviously. Mark: Yeah. It was close to saying goodbye to this Earth. Fortunately I made it through. I remember getting back into rehab, then I met a state rehab counselor who said, "You know Mark, you have this great love, this great passion for the outdoors, why don't you become a park ranger?" And I'm thinking, "How's somebody in a wheelchair gonna be a park ranger?" I'm thinking [00:11:00] law enforcement, search and rescue, and she goes "No, there's many hats in the National Park Service, or many different jobs." She took me down to Fort Funston where I met a ranger who kind of showed me the ropes and said "Hey, you could maybe do a job, this would be an entry level position, but you could help us plant dune grass and work in the nursery, or you could go to the entrance gate and help out there." [00:11:30] So I did that for a summer and then I went back to school and went to West Valley College and studied park management. Erik: Cool. Mark: And became a ranger at Yosemite. I remember my first job wasn't exactly my idea being a ranger. There I was sitting in this little kiosk, this little booth, at Big Oak Flat, the entrance to Yosemite. In those days it was a three dollar entrance fee and I'd collect the money and be breathing in auto fumes all day long. That really wasn't [00:12:00] my idea of being a ranger. But it was entry level. The next summer I went down to Yosemite Valley and started working at the visitor's center doing interpretation. Interpreting the natural processes of the park, the public. Bear management, geology, climbing was a big subject too. I'd give programs on climbing, talk about A climbing versus free climbing. Jeff: Were you transparent with people that would come through the park, with how your injury took place? [00:12:30] When you'd talk about the [crosstalk 00:12:31] Mark: I was, I was. I would start my climbing program off with my accident, actually. And bring that in, because I think that was a big part of it. They might say, "Well who's this guy in a wheelchair, what does he know about climbing?" I'd kind of bring that in. That was before I climbed El Cap, I was doing those things. Jeff: Were you percolating on doing something like that when you were there? Mark: I was. It's kind of an interesting story. There was a magazine called Sports And Spokes, it was a wheelchair [00:13:00] athletic magazine. On the front cover on that magazine was a DSUSA chapter, a woman who was being lowered down a cliff in a wheelchair on a river rafting trip. The river went over a waterfall, and then you did portage all the equipment around the waterfall. They had a swami belt and a climbing rope and they had a helmet, I guess they wanted to put a helmet on her for safety, sounded like a good idea. And they lowered her down this cliff in this wheelchair, [00:13:30] and it was on the front cover of this magazine, Sports And Spokes. I got the magazine at my little cabin in Yosemite and I had it on my lap. I was wheeling over to the visitor center to open it up in the morning, and I bumped into my future climbing partner Mike Corbet. And Mike's nickname was Mr. El Cap back in the 80s, he had climbed El Cap more than anybody else in the world, over 50 times. And Mike had never really talked about climbing to me because he knew that's how I got hurt. But when [00:14:00] I showed him this picture, Mike's eyes got really big, and he got really excited. He goes, "You know what Mark, I wanna start climbing with you, but what I really wanna do is climb El Cap." And we had no idea how we were gonna do it. Dave: That's great. Mark: That evening, we were sitting at the mountain room bar, we might have had a beer or two. Dave: Or three. Jeff: That's where all good decisions are made. Mark: Where all good decisions are made. So we had a little beer napkin and we started writing down notes. We said, "Okay, [00:14:30] we're gonna take a jumar..." A jumar is a rope ascender, this was back in the day, kind of like what Kleenex is to tissue. So we took a jumar, and we mounted a pull up bar and a jumar, and then we had a second ascender on a chest harness. And we put a rope up right by the Ahwahnee Hotel. Church ball tree. It was an oak tree. We had this rope and we started ascending up into the tree and then he'd lower me back down. So we go, "Okay, [00:15:00] so a paraplegic can ascend a rope using their upper body strength. Now to get on El Capitan, we got to actually protect your lower extremities from the granitic rock." We knew we were gonna be up there at least a week. I don't have feeling in my legs, so I really needed to protect my legs from any kind of abrasion or any kind of sore that could have occurred up there. We went down to this hardware store in Fresno, California outside [00:15:30] of the park. We bought some leather, a speedy stitcher, some closed cell insulation foam, and we just started making these rock chaps and they sort of evolved over a course of six months. We were climbing Jam Crack, Warner's... Erik: Weren't they... what was the material of those? I've felt your chaps before. That sound's weird... Dave: The truth comes out. Jeff: Hey, we're all friends here. Mark: The original [00:16:00] rock chaps were made out of leather and canvas. But the pair of rock chaps you felt were actually made out of some kind of silky material. No, no... Dave: Oh that was lingerie? Not chaps. Jeff: This was the first No Barriers improv meeting, what you're talking about, with your buddy Mike. Mark: Absolutely. Jeff: That was it, that was the genesis of what... fast forward to today, that was the beginning. What [00:16:30] year was that? 1980... Mark: That was 1988. Jeff: 88. There you go. Mark: Yeah 88. I was 28 years old. Erik: So if you think about it that way, No Barriers began in the Ahwahnee bar. Jeff: Yeah, on a bar stool. On a bar napkin. Dave: I know you guys are all dirt bag climbers. I'm not a dirt bag climber. For our listeners who are not dirt bag climbers, someone paint a picture, because we're getting to the El Cap story. Which is a phenomenal story. Paint a picture of El Cap for us, because not everyone knows what that is. Jeff: Yeah, well. El Cap [00:17:00] is probably the most revered, iconic, monolith in North America if not the world. Uninterrupted, over 3000 feet of granite. It is... when you're in Yosemite, you look up at it and it's got this perfectly symmetrical flank apron on both sides that comes out into this promontory called the nose. And [00:17:30] you can't take your eyes off it. If you look away for a minute, you have to look back at it just cause it's so magnificent and powerful. And it represents so much too. If you want to call yourself a climber, you kind of have to climb El Cap at some point. Erik: When you stand in the meadows below, which is just clogged with tourists just all driving by gawking. What I've heard, is you have to look up and up and up, way higher than [00:18:00] you think you have to. Dave: And if you see a person climbing, as a person who's not a technical climber speaking, you think "Those people are crazy. They're insane. What are they doing up there?" Jeff: Erik and I climbed El Cap. And his dad, Erik's dad, and future wife were down there in the meadow with telescopes watching us. We had one of those little lighty things, little sticks, and we were shining our headlamps down at everybody. It's [00:18:30] a magnificent thing, but it's also very intimidating. It can be very cool when you stand up and look at it, but then the idea of going and climbing it I think is a whole different story. Erik: And as a quote on quote gimp, and that's a word by the way that Mark taught me. I never even heard that word before. It's one of those words I guess you somehow have the license to use if you are... Mark: If you are. Erik: If you are in a chair or you are blind. So what did, when you talked about this out loud, what did people [00:19:00] think? Are people like, "You're nuts." Mark: Yeah, we had kind of a mixture of both. People that knew us, were "Oh yeah you guys should go do this." Mark's been training, he's always skiing, always riding his bike, hand bike around... well in those days it was more of a row cycle. And then we had people say, mainly not to me so much but more to Mike, "Are you crazy? Take this paraplegic guy up El Cap? Seems like a really stupid [00:19:30] idea. Something could go wrong." But fortunately, we didn't really listen to that. We just started training, we made these rock chaps. Like I said, they kind of just evolved over about a six month period. We kind of have a little circuit in Yosemite Valley that we climbed together. We did Jam Crack, the Prude, Warner's Crack, The Rostrum, we went over there. Erik: Oh, wow. Mark: So we did some stuff in the Valley [00:20:00] just to really warm up. And then I actually went up and spent a night on El Cap. Because we wanted to feel what that was like. Jeff: Up at sickle? Mark: We actually went to Heart Ledge. Erik: Wow. Jeff: Over on the south. Mark: Yeah, over on the south. The route we were gonna climb was a shield. So... Jeff: Cause it's overhanging. Mark: It was overhanging... once you get over the shield roof it's overhanging. The beginning of it's not. It's pretty low angle. Jeff: Were you scared at all before you did this or [00:20:30] were you just super fired up and kind of naïve? Mark: I was scared the night before. Jeff: You were. Mark: Yeah. Jeff: Like really scared? Mark: Yeah I was... couldn't sleep. This kind of what happened was... really Mike, about two weeks before we're gonna blast off, Mike goes, "Man we've trained so hard for this, I'm gonna write a letter to Tom Brokaw..." who is the national NBC News guy, who is a climber too, a little bit. And, I'm going, "Okay... " so basically [00:21:00] Corbet just wrote out a note with a pencil. He was a janitor at the Yosemite Medical Clinic to support his addiction to climbing. He just wrote a little note to Tom Brokaw, and I think three or four days later he's talking to... Tom Brokaw called the medical clinic and talked to Mike, and said "We want to come out and do this story." Erik: Gosh. Mark: And all of a sudden the pressure was on. That's when I really was thinking, "Wow you're telling national news, this is gonna add [00:21:30] a lot more pressure for myself." But as soon as we got to the base of El Cap and I touched that granite, all that training and preparation really got into par, and I got relaxed. I started doing pull up after pull up, dragging myself up the largest unbroken granite cliff in North America, El Capitan, and the first night... we do something called, we fix pitches. So we were fixed [00:22:00] up about 800 feet. So we had... Mike used to say, "It's always nice to kind of have a jumpstart." Erik: Right. Mark: You know, fix those lines, get all your water, we had 250 pounds... Erik: It's like a trail of ropes that go up 800 feet so you can just... Mark: The next morning... Erik: Start on the ground and zip up 800 feet and have like a jumpstart on this gigantic monolith. Mark: Exactly. And have all your water, all your gear up there. So he had to work three or four days to make that happen prior to us [00:22:30] leaving. Once we left Mammoth Terrace, we were on our own. We went through the Gray Ledges, and we went over... the roof was really tremendous. Because Mike is basically climbing upside down, and then gets up onto the pitch above it and fixes a rope. Then I kind of untied myself and I swing underneath that roof, and you can hear the cheers of the people down below. It's like [00:23:00] what Jeff was saying, It's quite a scene at the El Cap meadow. You really have to have binoculars. It's hard to see climbers up there, because they're so tiny, they're like little ants up there. If you don't know what to look for, it's hard to see these people. The crowd was yelling, and the green dragon would come by. It's a tour vehicle that has it's open air shuttle. Erik: "If you look upright you will see a nutcase [00:23:30] climbing El Capitan." Mark: We could actually hear them talking about "Mike Corbet, Mark Wellman, first paraplegic..." So that was kind of interesting. Finally when we topped out, it was seven nights, eight days of climbing. This was before digital technology on El Cap, when national news came out. They had a mule train, they brought out a satellite dish that was like five feet wide, and we were live on top of El [00:24:00] Cap talking to Tom Brokaw. Jeff: Sick. Mark: And we've got... between the Today Show and NBC News, and in a week we were on TV for like several hours if you took all the time that they played this. There wasn't really much going on in the news, so they really kind of played this story up in a big way. As soon as we got off that climb, about a week later, we're sitting in the Oval [00:24:30] Office talking to President Bush. It was myself, Mike Corbet, "Writtenaur" who was Secretary of the Interior, and Jack Morehead, superintendent of Yosemite. The four of us are in the White House, in the Oval Office, talking about bone fishing because President Bush loved to bone fish and we presented him with a flag that we took with us on the climb, and it changed my life. Erik: Mark, so you're not that old, but I see [00:25:00] you sort of as the father of adventur e sports for people with disabilities. I want people to understand that the idea to climb El Cap back in the 80s... nowadays, I think... how many people have climbed El Cap in chairs, paras? Mark: Oh the chairs? Erik: Dozens, right? Mark: Yeah, dozens. Erik: But you sort of unleashed that. You opened up this door. And now, quote on quote gimps are doing everything, right? Mark: Every summer there's [00:25:30] a paraplegic. Erik: But you opened that door for all of us. So, it's sort of a crazy thought to me. Mark: It is. You can't take the first ascent of El Cap, you can't take that away from me. That's something I'll always remember. It was a huge accomplishment for both Mike and I, and there's been different paraplegics who have gone up it. A gentleman with cerebral palsy, Steve Wampler, was probably the most [00:26:00] disabled person that's been up there. Lots of amputees. I call them amputees, hardly disabled. Paraplegics wanna be amputees. Erik: Those will be our first complaint letters. Dave: Exactly. [crosstalk 00:26:15] Mark: Quadriplegics wanna be paraplegics. Everybody has their differences. There's been a quadriplegic, incomplete quadriplegic, climbed El Cap with Tommy Thompson, good climber. [00:26:30] Steve Muse. Erik: There's that kid who climbed The Chief, he was inspired by you. Mark: Yep. Erik: He was a quad, and he climbed The Chief. He invented kind of this, almost like a contraption with wheels if I remember right, that kind of rolled up the face. Mark: Yeah it was... the premise was taking the Dolt cart. A climber by name of Dolt had this cart and he used to use it for a hauling system on El Cap. Brad "Szinski", the Canadian guy you're talking about, he came up with this [00:27:00] cart. His hands didn't really work as well as a paraplegic, he lost some muscle mass in his hands and fingers. So he had a different type of system where he could ascend a rope using a crank, and developed that. So there's been all kinds of different adaptations that allow people that are wheelchair users to go rock climbing. Jeff: This sort of set you [00:27:30] on this course to being an improvisational pioneer, those are my words. Were you like that always or do you feel like your accident cued you up for this opportunity to then over the past thirty years... Mark: Thirty five. Jeff: Yeah thirty five years. Now you've continued this trajectory of being this pioneer when it comes to just making it work. You make it work, right? Mark: I was so young. When I got hurt [00:28:00] I was 22. I wasn't climbing big walls, I hadn't got to that point yet of climbing El Cap. Finally, when I did have my accident it kind of made sense. The steeper the climb for somebody in a chair the better. Mountaineering is gonna be really tough. There are ways of doing mountaineering. We got four paraplegics on top of Mount Shasta. Erik: Yep. Mark: And there was a guy named Pete "Rikee". It's funny... people [00:28:30] come to me if they've got an idea, a lot of times they'll want me to be a part of the project. Least... Erik: That was a pod that they were in, that had almost like tractor wheels, right? Mark: Exactly. What we did is we took a snowmobile and cut the snowmobile track in half and made a tractor stance. So you have two tracks and a seat with a bicycle crank, and we actually crank our way up Mount Shasta. We had to get special permit from the Forest [00:29:00] Service. You can only be on Shasta for three days, and we knew we were gonna be up there for a week. So I had to drive up... I was trying to explain to this district ranger on the telephone, he really wasn't getting it. Erik: Sometimes they don't get it. Mark: And he wasn't getting it at all. He was thinking mechanical device... Jeff: Motorized... Mark: Right. He knew who I was, so he said "Come up and bring the machine with you so I can take a look at it." So I brought one of the snow pods up there and I met with the district ranger [00:29:30] and a couple of his back country rangers, and they got it. They said, "This is cool man, we'd like to let you guys do this." They gave us a special use permit. The big thing about the Forest Service and wilderness, or National Park Service wilderness, you cannot take... supposedly mechanized devices cannot go into the wilderness. But if you have a disability, your bicycle could almost be considered a wheelchair, or your snow pod can be considered [00:30:00] a wheelchair. Long as it doesn't have a Briggs and Stratton engine on it. That was the big thing, it has to be a manual piece of a gear that's human powered. So we got that, and we got four paraplegics on top of Mount Shasta. Erik: And El Cap really launched you into being able to do all these amazing things, right? You pretty much became a professional climber, adventurer, doing these things around the world. I know you lit the torch for the Paralympics, right? Mark: I did, I lit the Paralympic torch in Atlanta in 1996. [00:30:30] Muhammad Ali lit it for the able bodied Olympics. They had this torch, and the night before we're training for it... it's a big surprise, they don't want to see the person light the torch the night before, no media, so we're out there. I was gonna climb an 80 foot rope doing rope ascension, doing pull up after pull up. And North Face made me a little, kind of a... we envisioned this Robin Hood thing with... behind [00:31:00] my shoulders, this arrow quiver where I put the actual torch in. I didn't wanna burn my hair, what's left of it, so... Erik: You had a lot more hair... Mark: So I said, "Let's make this torch holder so it comes off your legs." So they made that for me. That night we're training, I get up the 80 foot rope, and I lit the fuse and the fuse blew out. Erik: Oh no. Mark: And the pyrotechnics guy goes, it was windy, and the [00:31:30] next day it was gonna be windy too. So the pyrotechnics guy guys... "Okay Mark, I'll make sure this fuse doesn't go out the night you do it." And I go, "Great." So I get up there in front of 80,000 people, I'm climbing up this rope. Liza Minnelli is singing this song and she's going "Go Mark, Go Mark." The whole stadium of 80,000 people is going nuts. So I lit this fuse, and literally the thing blew up. There was fire all over me. And I'm leaning back, hoping I'm not gonna catch [00:32:00] on fire. Then the fuse went up and lit the actual cauldron, and that was the start of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Jeff: You did not combust. Mark: I did not combust. I had the best seat in the house. Erik: You'd be like a Motley Crue drummer. Mark: Exactly. So that was fun. Erik: Takes us on a little tour of what you did. All those amazing adventures that you did after that. Takes us on a little tour around the world. Mark: What a lot of people don't realize, which I think is harder than climbing [00:32:30] El Cap, or spending 13 days on Half Dome was another big ascent we did years ago... but was doing the Trans Sierra ski crossing. I've done it twice now. I did it in 1993, it was a big winner, and I did it in 2011. So we took a cross country Nordic sit ski. You sit low to the ground, you have two skis mounted underneath a frame with a seat, and you're sitting maybe a foot off the snow. And you have two [00:33:00] poles, and you actually double pole. So you're double poling to make this device go down the trail. I was on the US Disabled Nordic Ski Team. Competed in two Paralympics, in France and in Norway. Got beat up by the Finns, the Norwegians, they're so passionate about that sport. Jeff: And they're vikings. Mark: And they're vikings, man. They're so tough. My best finish out of 30 guys was of fifth place, that was in France. [00:33:30] In Norway, I got even more beat up. I wanted to actually get into Nordic ski racing because I had other things I wanted to do. I wanted to try to get into the back country in a Nordic ski. Back in 93 a guy named Jeff Pegles and myself was also on the US disabled Nordic team. We took sleds, little polks, behind our rigs. We had our bivy gear. And we skied 55 miles from Snowline [00:34:00] on the east side of the Sierra on Tioga road, we got someone to open up the gate. Guy that worked for the power company opened up the gate. We got up to Snowline and we skied from Snowline to Crane Flat, which is 55 miles. Jeff: Wow. Mark: Following the Tioga road. Jeff: Just the two of you? Mark: Well we also had Pearlman with us too. Erik: Filming. Mark: He was filming, yeah. Erik: And, you gotta tell the story about the White Rim. So you biked the White Rim, I think you were on one off mountain bikes? Mark: [00:34:30] Yep. Erik: Or some kind of devices, hand crank mountain bikes. And it was so sandy, the story I heard, you had to get out and you had to pretty much pull yourself on your arms and pull your chair, did you pull the other guys chairs too? Or were the other guys' bikes... Mark: It was an epic, groveling adventure. Seems like everything I do turns into that. Jeff: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:34:50] Mark: If you're not suffering, you're not having a good time. That's kind of how it is out there. We had these one off mountain bikes and [00:35:00] we actually did a Jeep tour to kind of check it out a couple years prior. We did have it a little easier, we didn't carry all our water and food with us, we had a swag wagon out there. Suburban, follow the four paraplegics. Myself, Bob Vogel, and Steve Ackerman. We rode this, 52 miles is the full circumnav of the White Rim. There was times, [00:35:30] yeah, it was an interesting experience out there because some of these washes were like moon dust. We couldn't get our bikes through it. So I had a pair of rock chaps with me and I threw the rock chaps on and did some crawling. Had an 11 mil static rope and dragged the guys behind me. Did a few epic things like that. Jeff: I mean, If I'm riding my mountain bike and I come up on that scene in the middle of the White Rim, who knows what to make of that? Mark: [00:36:00] You can walk man, so best thing to do is just walk your bike. Jeff: Like, "You guys are good right?" and they'll be like "Yep, we're good man." Erik: Leave us alone. Jeff: Leave us alone. Mark: Don't touch me. Jeff: There's nothing to see here. Yeah. Erik: Yeah. Jeff: Wow, that's rad. Mark: And then recently, just a couple of years ago... in the winter we had a drought in California and Tahoe, so I circumnaved Lake Tahoe in a kayak in winter. And that was a really amazing adventure. It was 72 [00:36:30] miles, two nights of camping. But the cool thing was, and it was cool at night, it was really cold at night. There was no power boats. In the winter you don't have any power boats on Lake Tahoe, it was kind of like being out there in the 1800s. Seeing bald eagles, none of the tourists were on the water, it was really a fantastic trip. Dave: So Mark, you are someone who really embodies the spirit of No Barriers and you helped [00:37:00] start the organization. So tell us, all these adventures, all these things you've done to challenge what's possible, what people think is possible. Why No Barriers? Tell us that story. Mark: You know, No Barriers... I did a movie called No Barriers, and I got a poster out called No Barriers. It was a word that really meant a lot to me. My wife and I, we were down in San Francisco at a fundraiser... in those days it was called Yosemite Fund, now it's called Yosemite [00:37:30] Conservancy. We were at this dinner, and I met this kind of wild old character named Jim Goldsmith. And Jim came up to me, knew who I was... we started talking. He had a cabin in the subdivision I live in called Tahoe Dawner. So Jim and I, and Carol, and his wife Connie would get together, we had a couple of dinners together. And then Jim started talking about the Dolomites, and his [00:38:00] son-in-law and daughter. And he said, "Man, it would be really neat to kind of do something for disabled people and able bodied people if we did something in the Dolomites." And I go, "Man, I know a couple of guys who I've done some stuff with, a guy named Hugh Herr, double amputee who's done some rock climbing with him, and Erik Weihenmayer." This was probably after your Everest... Erik: Yeah, after. Mark: This was after your Everest climb. And I said "Hey, these [00:38:30] guys..." we did a climb out in Moab Utah, the three of us, it was kind of gimp helping gimp, it was this real magical event out there. Which was really cool... Erik: Climbing the Fisher Tower. Mark: Yeah. The Fisher Tower. Ancient Ark. Erik: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mark: And it was this really fantastic climb. I'd like to get these two guys involved with what we're talking about. SO I called Erik, I called Hugh, and we ended up putting our first [00:39:00] little... in those days, it was more of a festival, we called it, instead of a summit. We did it in the Dolomites. It was a very obscure little place up in the mountains, this real beautiful location, but nothing was really accessible. The hotels weren't that accessible, everything was kind of difficult to put this together. But it was this real magical place in the mountains... Erik: I remember the chair operators didn't even know how to get people with disabilities on the chairs. Mark: They didn't have [00:39:30] an idea. They didn't... yeah. Erik: On the ski lifts. Thank you. Yeah. Mark: They weren't doing adaptive skiing in those days in that little village. It was actually the home of the 1956 Olympics. SO that was kind of my envision was to start this, and who knew it was gonna get into what it is today. It's just amazing what you guys have done, and all the different things No Barriers has to offer people. Erik: What do you think about when you think about the evolution? You had this little germ [00:40:00] of an idea to go to this town and start talking about accessibility and innovation, and some of your lessons about how you've broken through barriers, or how the three of us had broken through barriers. And now, when you look at it today... Mark: [sighs] It's kind of mind boggling how it's grown so big and how many different people it affects, it's not just the disabled community, it's able bodied community bringing everyone together. Trying new experiences. The youth programs [00:40:30] that you guys have been doing is tremendous over the years. Soldiers to the summit. We're having all these guys coming back doing ten tours, they're not adjusting back into society very well, and taking them out into the outdoors with Jeff and different mountain guides, it just changes their lives. Brings them more back into a reality where they can really kind of adjust back into society. And then the summit is just... I love [00:41:00] coming to the summits. I've been to every one now, I haven't missed one since the beginning. It's gonna be fantastic in New York, I'm really looking forward to that. Erik: And you bring your climbing wall, your portable climbing wall. Mark: I'll have... Erik: Almost to every summit. So that's your mission now, right? To go around and use your climbing wall as a No Barriers tool to help people break through barriers. Tell us about that. Mark: Absolutely. Climbing has been such a big part of my life, that I just like to introduce different [00:41:30] people to the sport. A lot of times, somebody that's... we don't say electric chair, electric chair is something you die in. Power chair. A power chair takes you from point A to point B. A power chair user, a lot of times doesn't have all the... there's not as many things out there for a power chair user to participate in. Climbing on my wall, they can. We have these harnessing systems [00:42:00] that support your core. It's almost like a Bosen's chair, pulley system. If you have the desire to get on the climbing wall, we can facilitate that. We don't turn anybody away. We've had people that weigh 500 pounds on my wall before. Very obese wheelchair users... it doesn't matter. I had a gentleman that had spina bifida and he was unfortunately caught up in the American society of drinking a lot of soda, [00:42:30] and became really big. We got him on the wall, it was really difficult for him. We would talk to him and he wouldn't really look at you eye to eye as we were talking. I saw him a year later, he dropped 150 pounds, quit the soda, got into a training, cut his hair in a mohawk, and it just changed his life. Got out of the power chair and was in a manual chair. So climbing was kind of the responsibility of really changing this guys life, and now I see [00:43:00] him down in Los Angeles. I probably take the wall to Southern California maybe seven or eight times a year, San Francisco, Bay Area. I sort of have different groups hire me year after year, once they experience the wall they really want to have it be part of their event. We bring in, mini El Cap I call it, and we get people on it and we have a great time. Erik: And you're traveling around with your wall, full time. People bring you in to create this experience for their [00:43:30] rehab hospital or organization or team, right? Mark: Exactly. All those venues... I do adaptive climbing seminars. So a gym might call me and wanna know, "how do we get an adaptive climbing program going?" So I do that. And a lot of times I'll do not only a seminar on adaptive climbing, but then maybe that evening do a show and tell about adventure sports and where adventure sports have taken the disabled in the last 35 [00:44:00] years. Erik: And you are like Kleenex now, because... you talk about the pulley system, it's not a pulley system, pull up system, a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, Mark Wellman system." Mark: Yeah, it's... yeah it's kind of getting that way. Jeff: You're like Beyonce now. Mark: I'm like Beyonce. It's just kind of neat that my passions over the years... everybody should have a passion. And my passion has always been [00:44:30] to be out camping, doing something in the outdoors, coming up with new ideas, new technologies... and some of these technologies are more like a backyard technology. It's not that fancy. Sometimes some of the most simplest things can change something. Like mountain bike tires on a wheelchair can change a chairs getting into the back country tremendously. Mounting a pull up bar in a sender can allow a paraplegic [00:45:00] to do 7000 pull ups in eight days to go up El Cap. Just simple little technologies can really change peoples' lives, and you can take that backyard technology, garage technology, put something together that works for you that can help a whole bunch of people. Dave: I'd like to go back to that... You've told us a story, sort of the arc of your life, and when I look at you Mark and think about what you've accomplished I think "God, this is incredible. [00:45:30] This is an incredible human being that very few people who had what happened to you would ever have chosen the path that you have chosen." And I think, when I think about our No Barriers community, every so often you get folks who will say "Yeah, that's Mark Wellman but that couldn't have been me. You're putting someone in front of me that's so incredible, how could I possibly do this?" Erik: Yeah, you're de motivational. Mark: Right, right. I know, I get it. Dave: I'd love to hear, what do you think we can... 'cause this is what we do at No Barriers. We... If you're [00:46:00] listening to this, it's not like we take everyone up mountains, but we try to remind them about something in their spiri t... Mark: Yeah. Dave: ...that teaches them anything is possible. So talk to us a little bit about, Mark, how did you get to that point? Is it just sort of who you were from the beginning, was it an evolution? It just seems like everything you encountered, you are like, "I can do more." Mark: I think it's really important for people to get out of their comfort zone. Nowadays, it's so easy for young people to get... they get into gaming. And they [00:46:30] just, you know... it's stagnant. You're not getting out of your comfort zone. And the outdoors has a way of getting you out of your comfort zone. And you can make it safe... you don't need to think about what I do, it's more about finding, maybe getting some different experiences. And that's what's so cool about the summit. You have all these different activities going on where you just get a little taste of it. And hopefully [00:47:00] that little taste will inspire your imagination to want to try it again. And that's where I think it's really important if you're facilitating skiing or climbing, or whatever you're facilitating, you have to make sure that these people, their first experience is a good one. If they don't have a good experience, most likely they're not gonna go back to it. And, it's really important that the very first time... One of our board members, Sasha. [00:47:30] He was an academia guy, a professor. He came to the No Barriers event in Squaw Valley, the first one. Never had tried climbing before, and we took him to Donner Summit and got him up on this road cut climb that's 80 feet with big exposure, and it changed the guys life. It was something he was real nervous about, but it was getting him out of his comfort zone, and him [00:48:00] really having, you know... it was exciting for him, it was thrilling, it was challenging not only physically but mentally challenging at the same time. All those things combined. Kind of changed his life. And he became a board member of No Barriers because of that. Dave: Yeah. Mark: And there's stories like that all the time. Or Mandy, I remember her... wonderful singer. She got on my wall, it was 25 feet, and she [00:48:30] was really scared. It was a really scary moment for her where she had this big fear of heights. It wasn't like she was on a 1000 foot rope, she was on a 24 foot wall. But she might have well have been. Jeff: Relative for her. Mark: Could have been a 1000 foot climb. But she made it through. And came down... I got a guy that helps me, Wes, he's a search and rescue guy, kind of a big guy. He's just magical with [00:49:00] people, and really helped her a lot. So, you have all these different experiences... Erik: And I think that experience, by the way, gave her the courage to go out and do something completely non-climbing related, which was to write music and to go on to America's Got Talent, and... Mark: Exactly. Erik: Get into the finals, and now skyrocket into stardom. Mark: To fame. Absolutely. Making a better quality life for herself. [00:49:30] A lot of times when you say, somebody that's a wheelchair user... what is it, like 90 percent of the people in wheelchairs don't have jobs. And it's always kind of bummed me out, I'm thinking, "Wow." Why would you wanna be caught in a system like with Social Security and be basically poor your whole life, because "Oh I have Medicare, I have my Social Security disability," So you're trying to live on six to eight hundred dollars a month. And you're caught [00:50:00] in this kind of vicious circle. You've got to get away from that somehow, and get into the workforce, be productive. You're gonna feel better, you're gonna be a more productive citizen in this country, and you're not gonna be wrapped up in this vicious circle of never getting ahead and always having the government thumb you down, so to speak. Erik: Last question for [00:50:30] you from my end, this is Erik, and I wanna know, I've made it kind of clear that I look up to you. Tell me, who are the people that you look up to? Tell us about that guy Larry, tell us about some people who influenced your life. Mark: Oh man. There's been a lot for sure. There was a guy named... actually I think you're thinking of a guy named Mark Sutherland. When I first got hurt, Mark was a quadriplegic ten [00:51:00] years post to my injury. And he was back in the hospital. He had a bone spur, the spur was touching his spinal cord, and he was losing some of his action. Some quadriplegic can move their arms and they can push manual chairs, and he was one of those. But he was losing some of his arm strength, so he was in the hospital, and my room was next to his. We would talk at night. 'Cause I was really bummed out when I was first injured. To me, being a paraplegic was a fate [00:51:30] worse than death. I was on the sixth floor, if I could have crawled over to the window and jumped out I would have cause that's how bad I felt. I was just thinking, "Not having the use of my legs, I'm not gonna ski again, I'm not gonna climb." I was 22, I was just like, "Why didn't the mountain just take me." Those were the kind of thoughts I was having. But then I would go into this guys room, Mark Sutherland, and he would talk about, "Oh I had this milk truck that I converted, and I had a stool. One time I was driving it with my hand controls [00:52:00] and I fell off the stool, and I was on the ground and I had to throw my hand on the brake to stop it so I didn't kill anybody." Jeff: And you were like, "That's the greatest story ever." Mark: Yeah. I wanna do that. So I was just hearing this stuff from this guy, and he was talking about girlfriends, and how he was running around doing this and doing that, and I'm going, "Man, this guy has a life." And it was really inspiring to be... so where I was really depressed and laying in the hospital bed, and couldn't feel [00:52:30] my lower extremities, and "What's a catheter?" And I'm just like, "Man, this is horrible, what did I get myself into." And this guy was really upbeat and uplifting... Jeff: Showed you it wasn't a death sentence. Mark: Yeah. Showed me it wasn't a death sentence, and let's get on with life, dude. And it was like, boom. That just changed me. Then we went into rehab together, we were more in a hospital setting and then we both went into our physical rehab. That's [00:53:00] when it just started clicking for me, and that was it. Dave: Well, just to wrap up this excellent conversation that we're having about the history of No Barriers and all that you've done as well just individually, you've seen No Barriers be this thing that started in the Dolomites in 2003, we're 15 years into this. What's your dream for what it becomes? Mark: Wow. I would just consider it to be... I'd like to see maybe a couple summits a year, possible. [00:53:30] More, smaller clinics would be really cool too. I think you guys are really on a good, good path. But maybe some smaller events too. Just keep growing it. Keep doing more of these kinds of things. More technology. Bringing in more people, better speakers. Better people that are... or people that are doing more things that inspire others that give the ideas [00:54:00] to do more things. I'm amazed in 15 years where it's come to. Who knows where it's gonna go. Another 15 years from now, man this could be a huge, huge organization that could affect a lot of people and bring a lot of people together. This whole family, bringing the tribe together. It's always fun at the summits, and seeing people I haven't seen for a year, [00:54:30] spending time with them. I love getting people out climbing, so that's my passion. Erik: What if people want to learn how to get in touch with you, how to work with you, how to bring your wall to their organization? Mark: Yeah. Google Mark Wellman or just go to my website, No Limits Tahoe dot com. Give me a call. Erik: Although they won't talk to you, 'cause you're never home. You're always out [crosstalk 00:54:55] or something. Dave: Always on the road, right. Mark: Well, no, yeah I'm easy to get a hold of. Talk to my wife, Carol, [00:55:00] and I can get back to you. Erik: Right. Mark: Send me an email. I'm better on the phone, I don't like to email tons. Love to talk to you, if you have ideas lets talk about, lets see you at the summit. Lets get out and enjoy life. Erik: Cool. Well thank you so much Mark. Jeff: Listen Mark, I know you well enough to know you don't need to hear what I'm about to tell you, but, I think it's important for you and the listeners to know [00:55:30] in conversations like this, it becomes so clear how you are sort of the upside down pyramid. And you're the point on the upside down pyramid. And it all sort of funnels up from you, really. And I know there's others, but you're the man. And I know it's important for you, it is important for me to know that you know how many thousands of lives you've impacted. Erik: Tens of thousands. Jeff: Thousands of lives dude. You have been the kick starter [00:56:00] and the imputes. And you're just one of the most wonderful pioneers. I know you know it, but you need to hear it more, because you're the man. Mark: I appreciate it man, it's humbling. And, to take a passion that I had and a dream... and like I said, just simple adaptations, a pull up bar on a jumar. Man, how that changed other people to go climb up El Cap, or do Castleton, or whatever [00:56:30] mountain you want to get up, it's been a pretty cool experience. It's been fun to work with other companies. We're making more adaptive climbing equipment now. It's really kind of evolved from just handmade rock chaps to a real sophisticated pair of rock chaps that allows people to get out there and do a lot of cool stuff. Dave: Well it's been an honor to have you here Mark, I know many of our listeners are part of that No Barriers tribe. Many of them will know you, but a [00:57:00] lot of them won't. The movement has grown so big that it's well beyond you. But per what Jeff was saying, it's so important I think for the people of our community to know where this began. Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dave: And you are the point that Jeff mentioned where it began, and so, thank you so much for joining us, we appreciate having you. Mark: My pleasure. Erik: What did you guys take away from that? Might take us a while. Dave: Yeah. Exactly. Jeff: Might be a lengthy debrief on that one. Dave: I guess for me, as someone who's helping to build [00:57:30] this movement, like I was ending with there, just to remember the roots of where No Barriers began which is individuals coming together in small communities around creative ideas to do stuff that people didn't think was possible. And as we start to move to tens of thousands, maybe millions over the next ten years of people that we impact, that there's something in that special sauce that's still about the [00:58:00] individuals getting together having a fun, creative idea and going out and pushing their comfort zone. Erik: Yeah. I think that, No Barriers recipe is sort of hidden right in the story of El Capitan, which is... Mark's a smart guy, but he's not a scientist or anything, he's not Hugh Herr, who's inventing stuff where you go, "I could never do that." What he said is a pull up bar and a jumar. These are commercially available things. I think he had to adapt a few things, but [00:58:30] not all that crazy technology. Pretty simple. You combine that series, that innovation with the human spirit and a great friend or great support system, a great rope team, you do this amazing thing that opens up the door for a lot of people. It's a pretty simple recipe. Dave: It is. Jeff: All the big things that have happened with regards to our species all started with this small [00:59:00] germination of somebody sitting in their theoretical garage just being like, "How do I do this? Hmm?" And head scratch, and start piecing these things together, and then, boom, the movement begins. I think Mark embodies that, and what a great cornerstone for this organization. Dave: Well, and the movement continues. So if you're sitting there listening saying, "I wanna be a part of this organization, I wanna be a [00:59:30] part of No Barriers," please go to our website, No Barriers USA dot org. You can join us at the summit that Mark mentioned that's coming up in October in New York. There are many more ways you can join us but please, No Barriers USA dot org is our website. You can also share our podcast with your friends and colleagues and families, and follow us on our Facebook page. Thank you so much for listening. Erik: Live No Barriers. Dave: Thanks.

Failure Is Always An Option I love that line “Failure is always and options”. I first saw it on a T-Shirt worn by Adam Savage of Mythbusters. In his case, it applied to science and engineering, but it applies just as easily to the world of design. Failure is what lets us learn. Failure allows us to improve, to expand, and to grow. If you fail badly enough at something, you probably won’t repeat the same mistake. In your case as a designer, when I say failure, I’m talking about your designs being rejected by clients. That excellent logo design you created that wasn’t accepted by your client, no matter how hard you worked on it or how much you loved it. Or that cutting edge poster you did that was “too wild” for the event it was promoting. The designs may have been great in your mind, but they were still rejected, making them failures. Who knows why? Maybe the client has different tastes than you do. Perhaps the market isn’t ready for your innovative approach. Or, and I’m just putting this out there as a possibility, maybe your idea stank. Whatever the reason, your design failed. In researching this podcast episode, I looked up some famous quotes on failure. Here are some great ones that could apply to designers. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. – Henry Ford You have to be able to accept failure to get better. – LeBron James One of my favourite ones is from Winston Churchill who said Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill As a designer, you can’t let rejections get you down. And yet I see it all the time in design communities. Designers mopping because a client didn’t like their idea. It happens, don’t fret on it. Pick yourself up and get back at it and try again. Think of your draft process when you’re designing something. Chances are you don’t just come up with one idea and present it to your client. If you do, then I think I found the reason why clients are rejecting your designs. If you're like most designers, you go through dozens if not hundreds of ideas and incarnations of those ideas before settling on a design you think is presentable to your client. If you look at those earlier design drafts, most of them are very poor compared to the presented version. Each one of those earlier drafts was a failure that led to improvements. Those failures allowed you to progress to the next version or next idea which was an improvement over the last one. When a client rejects one of your designs, you shouldn't look at it as a failure. Instead, see it as one more step in the process. Maybe you showed it too soon. Maybe there are more variations to explore or refinements to make. Perhaps you hadn’t stretched your creativity enough to come up with the next, even better idea. It’s all part of the creative process, and you shouldn’t view it as a failure. Doing so is not productive. If a client turning down your design pushes you to create something even better, then nobody will remember your previous unsuccessful tries. Don't get attached to your designs. The trick to getting past failure as a creative is not to become overly attached to your ideas and concepts. I know, it’s tough. You work hard to create something that you think is amazing. Something you know will blow the client's socks off. And then you're shocked when it doesn’t. You feel defeated because, in your mind, it was the perfect design. That’s the problem. When you become so enamoured with your design that it blocks your creativity and prevents you from improving your idea. You’ll never progress as a designer if you allow that to happen. Don’t get me wrong. Being proud of your work is ok. But those great pieces you create are still just stepping stones to even better ideas yet to come. If you want to be a successful designer you need to learn to brush off rejections. Use the failure as a learning experience to improve your skills and abilities and become a better designer. One more thing. Just because a client rejects, a design doesn’t mean it’s a bad design. If you like it, put it aside and recycle it in the future if there’s ever use for it. Maybe, after time you’ll start to see the flaws in it you couldn’t see before. Or, if it still holds up, you can adjust it and present it to another client who will appreciate it. Remember that design is subjective. Not everyone has the same idea of what looks good and what doesn’t. When you present something to a client, no matter what you think of the design, the client has the final say and failure is always an option. What stories about failure do you have? Share your stories about design fails you've had by leaving a comment for this episode. Questions of the Week Submit your question to be featured in a future episode of the podcast by visiting the feedback page. This week’s question comes from Mark What is your policy on sharing the source files with your clients? Some years ago I created a series of packaging labels for a small coffee roaster. Years later, a person I did not know e-mailed me, mentioning that he was now doing a project with the client and needed the photoshop files. Although this was an easy task for me to do, it just didn't sit right with me. I contacted the client to verify this person and they told me they were working on an advertising campaign and that person was in marketing. In the end, I sent the marketer (flattened) psd files and interestingly enough, I ended up working with him on a future project. I have had discussions with others about openly sharing source files with clients. Some say they (the clients) paid for them by paying you for your service while others say absolutely not. What do you say Mark? To find out what I told Mark you’ll have to listen to the podcast. Resource of the week Podcasts In honour of International Podcast Day on September 30th (and the third anniversary of the Resourceful Designer podcast) I encourage you to 1) find new podcasts to listen to. 2) Encourage others to try podcasts. Podcasts are a great way to learn, discover, laugh and be entertained, With over a half billion podcasts available there's sure to be one for whatever hobby, interest and curiosities you have. Listen to the podcast on the go. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on Spotify Listen on StitcherListen on AndroidListen on Google Play MusicListen on iHeartRadio Contact me I would love to hear from you. You can send me questions and feedback using my feedback form. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business, please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com

The List! - Mark Takes Le'Veon Bell Calls - Jake Kiszka (Greta Van Fleet's Guitarist) Sits down with Mark To discuss his Career, his Influences, and Life on the Road - Ask Mark Anything

The List! - Mark Takes Le'Veon Bell Calls - Jake Kiszka (Greta Van Fleet's Guitarist) Sits down with Mark To discuss his Career, his Influences, and Life on the Road - Ask Mark Anything

ALPS recently released our 2017 Annual Report online. Mark Bassingthwaighte was able to sit down with ALPS CFO Sara Smith as she elaborated on a year that was marked by growth and excitement for the company.  ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS' home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with our corporate CFO Sara Smith. MARK: We're going to be talking today about the ALPS annual report which is just out. But before we get into that, Sara, can you just take a little time to share with our audience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. SARA: Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Sara Smith. I've been with ALPS for 15 years. Prior to that, I had a pretty diverse background working at retail and coal bed methane exploration. MARK: Wow. SARA: All sorts of different things. I didn't think insurance would be where I would end up, but I have found it challenging and fun and quite exhilarating at times. I've enjoyed my career here at ALPS. MARK: Very good. Very good. Well, we are here to talk about the annual report, the numbers from 2017 and all the good things that have been happening around here. Why don't we start with some of the most basics, the things that people are most curious about. Can you share a little bit about revenue? What's been happening? SARA: Sure. I think the exciting thing happening at ALPS is just our growth and we have a great trajectory going forward, but we also had a fantastic 2017. We saw growth in key states like Washington and Colorado, where we saw tripled digit growth- MARK: Wow, nice. SARA: ... which is super exciting, and so our overall top-line grew about 6%, which in this competitive and market environment, it's a great achievement. MARK: Yeah. Very good. Not only is growth important in terms of just an insurance company, but claims frequency is also a significant thing. What happened on the frequency front? SARA: Well, we started to think that maybe attorneys weren't having claims anymore the way the frequency number dropped. We have seen this in the industry overall in 2017, but it was great to see in ALPS as well. Our frequency dropped right below 3% so it was great, great year. MARK: Wow. Those are great numbers. Growth is not always built on just revenue in terms of playing with premium numbers and having savings and frequency. Can you share a little bit about what's happening in terms of policies, number of policies, number of attorneys? How are those numbers playing out this year? SARA: Both policies and attorneys grew over 7% in 2017 over '16. That translates to almost 18,000 attorneys in ALPS portfolio at the end of '17. MARK: That's a significant change from when we started all those years ago. SARA: It is. MARK: It's a very different company which is a good thing. SARA: It is a good thing. MARK: Another key component for insurance carriers is just, in terms of their overall stability as measured by surplus. What's happening in the surplus? SARA: Well, surplus is so important and so critical for all insurance carriers and, as a policy holder, it's something you should be concerned with when you look at your own insurance carrier. Basically, that is the actual money available to policy holders beyond what's established for reserves. It's the foundation of security and stability within an insurance company. Our surplus grew 6% in 2017. We're just up over $40 million at the end of the year. So we're in sound financial shape. MARK: Yeah and I think that's a good point in terms of having lawyers understand how insurance companies ... How to judge and determine how secure and stable a company is in terms of longterm presence in a market. SARA: Absolutely. MARK: Or just the ability to pay claims going forward. And these surplus numbers are key. I'd like, shortly, to shift into a little softer side of this discussion, but before we jump there, I would like to make our listeners aware. We have put up the annual report. As I understand it, it's all on our website, interactive. Do you have any comments about that? It's just ... Just go to alpsnet.com. SARA: Correct. MARK: I just encourage you folks, if you have any interest to dig into the numbers a little bit more, all of this information is available. Let's talk about the soft stuff in 2017. SARA: Yeah. MARK: You've shared some things about growth. Lots of great things happening with the company. Just fill us in. SARA: I think that sometimes there's a tendency to look just at the numbers and they tell a great story in 2017 but there is also a lot of foundational work that went into 2017 that is really priming the pump for 2018 and beyond. A couple of those things are ... We did a full rate study of our entire 30 years of data, right? What do we know about our attorneys and what do we not know? What are the assumptions we've made over the years and what are the surprises? So, that was a huge undertaking. Took a lot of time and I think we got some valid information out of that. SARA: The other thing we did is we heard from our policy holders that maybe there was some things that we could do in our policy forms that would be better and more customizable to them. We took a hard look at our policy and developed three new policy forms to better serve our customers. That is a tremendous amount of work. MARK: Yeah. SARA: We spent most of '17 working on that. Of course, that's just the easy part. Now, we have to ... At the end of the year, we started filing our forms and rates and policies in all of our states. So, now we're hurry up and wait and see what happens. MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're also at a point where we're beginning to expand jurisdictionally. Any comments on what's happening there? SARA: Yeah, we have really put some effort forward to diversify our book both geographically as well as just from a demographic perspective.  We did see significant growth in Washington and Colorado and we're going to continue to see that expansion play out. We recently were approved in Texas and starting writing business in April. So that's really exciting. We're on the march to get the last couple of states and get our Certificate of Authority. I expect that our footprint will be much different by the end of '18 then it even was in 2017. MARK: And while we have been recognized as a national insurer, we really now are on the verge of truly being national in terms of just a presence throughout the entire United States, which is exciting. SARA: It is exciting. MARK: It really is. Lots of opportunities coming. There's been some investments in technology as well. Can you share a little bit about what we're doing? SARA: Sure. I think that the consumers ... Consumers overall are changing and they're changing their purchasing patterns and the way that they like to access their information. MARK: Yes, right. SARA: I think that it's hard for insurance companies especially. We all have legacy platforms and we have to sometimes just rip the band aid off. Start over. We are working on finally e-delivery and being able to get our customers what they want, when they want it. So I think it's a huge task and it's much more complicated than you think it would be, but we're getting there. MARK: Very good. Very good. That's pretty much what we wanted to share. Do you have any closing comments? Exciting things to look forward in 2018? What's on your radar? SARA: Wow. So, 2018 right now is ... I'm really watching our rate implementation and execution and making sure that we're doing that in the right way. I think that going into new states is super exciting. How do we build traction? What does that look like? What are we going to learn? Cause you know we're going to learn a lot. We just don't know what it is at the point right now. MARK: And I'm looking forward myself in terms of one of the guys getting on the airplane so we can go to a few new places. Get a few more miles but- SARA: Right, right, right. MARK: To meet some new folks out in these new states. Doing some lecturing and what not. They are exciting times. Well, Sara, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. To all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and I encourage you, if you have any interest in learning more about what is happening here at ALPS, to visit alpsnet.com. There is a link to the annual report interactive and there's some great information there. In addition, if any of you have any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed in the future ... Or even speakers you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  

Highlights April 1918 Preview Roundtable - Dr. Edward Lengel & Katherine Akey | @ 02:50 Spring Offensive on Easter - Mike Shuster | @ 14:50 War in The Sky - Pilots and PTSD - Mark Wilkins | @ 18:30 Basketball in WWI - Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff | @ 27:05 100 Cities / 100 Memorials - Round#2 awardees announced | @ 32:50 Speaking WWI - “over the top” | @ 36:05 WWI War Tech - The Paris Guns | @ 37:15 Dispatch 4/3/18 highlights | @ 39:20 Centennial Social Media - Katherine Akey | @ 41:00----more---- Opening Welcome to World War 1 centennial News - episode #66 - It’s about WW1  THEN - what was happening 100 years ago this week - and it’s about WW1 NOW - news and updates about the centennial and the commemoration. Today is April 6th, 2018. 101 years ago on April 6th 1917,  the United States declares war on Germany which starts us on a path that will change our nation, our people our industry, and our position in the world forever. [clip from April 6th Event] On this one year anniversary: Dr. Edward Lengel, Katherine Akey and I sit down for our April 1918 preview roundtable Mike Shuster, from the great war project blog updates us on the German Spring Offensive Mark Wilkins introduces us to WW1 pilots and PTSD Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff tells us about basketball in WW1 Katherine Akey brings a story from the WW1 commemoration in social media Plus a lot more... on WW1 Centennial News -- a weekly podcast brought to you by the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission, the Pritzker Military Museum and Library and the Starr foundation. I’m Theo Mayer - the Chief Technologist for the Commission and your host. Welcome to the show. [MUSIC] Preface Several months ago during a podcast editorial planning session for an upcoming month, it occurred to us that our planning roundtable might be something our audience would enjoy listening to… We tried it - you liked it - and now we do it! So here is the conversation Dr. Ed lengel, Katherine Akey and I had earlier this week… The question on the table was: “so what are the big stories and themes in April 1918…  in the War the Changed the World? [MUSIC TRANSITION] World War One THEN Preview Roundtable: April 1918 Dr. Edward Lengel, Katherine Akey, Theo Mayer [Closing Sting] Great War Project Next, we are going to go to Mike Shuster former NPR correspondent and curator for the Great War project Blog…. Mike: Your post is a perfect introduction to the month of April as you dive right into the situation on the ground… for Easter Sunday, April 2nd 1918. What was happening on the front?   [MIKE POST]   Mike Shuster from the Great War Project blog. LINK: http://greatwarproject.org/2018/04/01/german-offensive-stalls/ [SOUND EFFECT] War in the Sky PTSD and Flying in ww1 This week for the War in the Sky -- we’re turning inwards with a look at the psychological challenges for those “daring and do” warriors in the sky during World War 1. Joining us is Mark Wilkins, historian, writer, museum professional, and lecturer. Mark is the author of the recently published article in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine called “The Dark Side of Glory: An early glimpse of PTSD in the letters of World War I aces.” Welcome, Mark! [greetings] [Mark -- To start with - how did you get the trove of letters you used for your research?] [How many letters did you go through to start your research?] [OK.. In WWI malady was equated with physical issues, but your article deals with the psychological stresses of the pilot’s experience. Just a year prior they were executing trench soldier with shell shock on charges of cowardice. How did that play out for the pilots?] [Look - the stress for these aces makes a lot of sense… To be an Ace you need to fly a lot of missions. The mortality rate of your buddies is off the charts… and unlike foot soldiers - you don’t have the courage of the guys on your left and right to bolster you.. This is a white knuckle, cold sweat, daily solo experience… sounds like traumatic stress is inevitable.. How common was this?] [What did the men - and what did the command do about this? ] [So after immersing yourself in this aspect of the war in the sky - what is your biggest take away?] [We just had a great question come in from our live audience - Frank Krone wants to know: Did Richthoven - Germany’s Red Baron appear to suffer from PTSD] [You have an upcoming book -- tell us about it -- When is it coming out?] [Before we wrap up - last December we had filmmaker Darroch Greer on the show about his upcoming The Lafayette Escadrille documentary. Was is your involvement with the project?] [thanks/goodbyes] Mark Wilkins is a historian, writer, museum professional, and historical aeronautics expert. You can read his article in the Air Space Magazine, and learn more about his work from the links in the podcast notes. Link:https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/world-war-i-pilot-ptsd-180967710/#0VKtyZX7JLXCy3JU.01 http://thelafayetteescadrille.org/ http://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/communicate/press-media/wwi-centennial-news/4084-four-questions-for-mark-wilkins.html The Great War Channel For videos about WWI 100 years ago this week, check out our friends at  the Great War Channel on Youtube. New episodes this week include: German Armoured Cars in WW1 The Neutral Ally - Norway in WW1 See their videos by searching for “the great war” on youtube or following the link in the podcast notes! Link:https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar World War One NOW Alright  - It is time to fast forward into the present with WW1 Centennial News NOW - [SOUND EFFECT] This part of the podcast focuses on NOW and how we are commemorating the centennial of WWI! Remembering Veterans Re-enactment For  Remembering Veterans -- a small village hosts a big event this weekend! The Midway Village Museum is a 137 acre living history park located near Rockford, Illinois. This weekend, the Victorian village will host the 6th annual Great War event, featuring over 225 re-enactors portraying soldiers and civilians from the United States and Europe. Visitors will have the opportunity to enter encampments, tour a reproduction 150 yard trench system, and watch large-scale narrated battle reenactments. It is the nation’s largest public World War One reenactment -- and we’ll get to speak with some of the event’s organizers right here on the podcast in a couple of weeks to hear how it went. For now, especially if you are in the region - visit the link in the podcast notes for a full list of scheduled events at Midway Village Museum near rockford Illinois . Link: http://www.midwayvillage.com/ Basketball in WW1 Also this week for remembering veterans -- something I did not know much about --- from the world of sports a century ago. Now, I’ve got clear images in my mind of baseball in the era - I also see leather helmets and pig skin warrior on the football grid-iron -- but today we’re going to be looking at another great American institution that - as it turns out - that made a big splash in France during the WWI -- basketball! To tell us about it, we’re joined by Dr. Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a historian, sports writer, consultant, and author. Her website says: Historical Insights COMMUNICATING GLOBALLY -- Sports - Diplomacy & Storytelling Lindsay! Sounds like you fit right in here. Welcome to the podcast! [greetings] [Lindsay For our non-basketball experts - Like me - could you start us off with a brief history of basketball? When did it first develop, and how widespread was the sport in America circa 1918?] [Did the Americans bring hoops to France or were they already playing?] [If Doughboys and the YMCA helped reignite French interest in basketball, was it only in France that this occurred?] [You’re working on a new book about basketball in France -- how popular is the sport there now?] [goodbyes] Dr. Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff is a historian, sports writer, consultant, and author of several books. Learn more about her and her writing by following the links in the podcast notes. Link: https://www.lindsaysarahkrasnoff.com/ https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739175095/The-Making-of-Les-Bleus-Sport-in-France-1958-2010# https://twitter.com/lempika7 100 Cities 100 Memorials Update on Round 2 For 100 Cities / 100 Memorials - Today on the anniversary of America’s declaration of war in 1917, the final 50 awardees have been announced. Here is a section from the press release: CHICAGO, IL, April 5 – On the eve of the 101st  Anniversary of the United States entering World War 1, the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library announced today the final 50 WW1 Memorials to be awarded grants and honored with the official national designation as "WW1 Centennial Memorials". All 100 memorials, in all 100 cities have now been designated including such national landmarks as: Chicago’s "Soldier Field", LA’s "Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum", San Francisco’s “War Memorial Veterans Building and Opera House”, Honolulu’s "Natatorium" and Washington, D.C.’s “National World War I Memorial at Pershing Park”. In addition, many smaller local community projects are being recognized such as: Scranton Pennsylvania’s “Col. Frank Duffy Memorial Bridge and Park”, Cape May, New Jersey’s "Soldier and Sailors Monument", Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s "Emile Ladnier WWI Memorial," and North Carolina's NC State University “Memorial Belltower”, to name just a few. The newly-designated memorials are in 37 different states and each will receive a $2,000 matching grant, towards the restoration, conservation and maintenance of these local historical treasures. Here is John Schwan the Interim President and CEO of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library from the livestream announcement. [insert clip] THEO: So this has been a nearly two year effort to get the 100 memorials designated… But this is not the end of the program - for example, we are going to continue to profile the project on the podcast, we are going to accelerate our Memorial Hunters program to identify and create a national register of WWI memorials around the nation. We are going to continue to encourage and support communities around the country to commemorate their local WWI heroes through their memorials that are all over America - many hidden in plain sight! As Dan Dayton, Executive Director of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission noted in the press release: "I am impressed by the community involvement that has sprung from this project. By focusing on restoring these community treasures, local cities, veterans groups, historical society and citizens have come together to remember the community’s heritage - and that was really a key goal of the program." See a searchable listing of all 100 cities and memorials at ww1cc.org/100Memorials or follow the link in the podcast notes. Link:www.ww1cc.org/100Memorials [SOUND EFFECT] Speaking WW1 Here is our weekly feature “Speaking World War 1” - Where we explore the words & phrases that are rooted in the war  --- When you encounter something that is exaggerated, major, melodramatic, big, HUGE -- ahhh maybe too much!? --  we sometimes describe it as being “over the top”. Which is our Speaking WW1 phrase this week. During WWI, as the soldiers sat in the muddy trenches in anxious anticipation…  preparing to take the offensive… that dramatic moment when the whistles blew - and the men climbed up and over the berms of the trench, rushing out into no-man’s land facing the enemy, shells, gas and machine gun fire, well that was known as… you guessed it - “going over the top”. At the time it was a literal, physical description of what you did - but - appropriately remains in our lexicon today as something seriously radical. “Over the top” - something you might toss off lightly about someone or something - but a phrase with a very heavy history - and this week’s phrase for speaking WW1. Links:https://www.thoughtco.com/going-over-the-top-2361017 [SOUND EFFECT] WW1 War Tech Paris Gun This week for WW1 War Tech -- we turn our attention back to late March and early April of 1918. Paris is under attack as behemoth canon shells -- some weighing as much as 230 pounds fall on the city, killing dozens, creating panic and initially confusing city officials. Where were the guns? The Paris Guns as they came to be known, were sitting 80 miles away, and were responsible. This German supergun was not meant for the battlefield. It was specifically designed to terrorize and demoralize civilian populations. It was so massive that it could only be moved around by rail.. It was created by extending a 380 mm naval gun barrel to a length of 112 feet. that and 550 Lbs of gunpowder gave the beasts their extreme firing range. Ed Lengel mentioned that en route to their target,  the shells literally arced into earth’s stratosphere 24 miles up -- up there, there is almost no atmospheric drag - again increasing the range. The weapon began its assault on Paris late March in 1918, continuing periodically for over three months, until early August. The panic and fear that spread after the initial attacks was short lived and the terror weapon never proved to be much of a threat to French strategy or the population’s morale. Nevertheless, the Paris Guns proved to be a domestic propaganda hit in Germany, as the ability to strike the French capital directly did much to stem the public’s anxiety over the course of the war. The Paris Gun -- It was an engineering marvel -- and it was a terror weapon aimed at Parisians one hundred years ago-- and it is the subject of this week’s WW1 War Tech. Learn more, and see images of the mobile monsters, at the links in the notes. Link: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/03/24/121603152.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/03/30/102683655.pdf https://www.britannica.com/technology/Paris-Gun https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/paris_guns https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/paris-hit-by-shells-from-new-german-gun Articles and Posts For Articles and posts -- We are going to try something new this week. Many of the new posts are featured in our weekly Dispatch Newsletter… so we are going to give you the highlights from the Dispatch as an overview. [DING] A feature in Politico outlines how president Trump’s parade this year, which looks like it is going to fall on or near Veteran’s Day may have special WW1 meaning. It’s an interesting article and an interesting read. [DING] News about Sgt Stubby -- a follow up on the film’s recent premiere, a street fair honoring the pup in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, and a new Sgt Stubby statue planned in Middleton, Connecticut. [DING] Test yourself on your WW1 knowledge by taking a quiz from the National Archives, [DING] Check out a new illustrated battlefield travel guide. [DING] Read a bittersweet story about easter in 1918, [DING] A new exhibition highlights Anglo-American relations during the war -- on view in Bath, England. [DING] Doughboy MIA features Private Edwin C. Kitterman of New Middletown, Indiana [DING] and this week’s featured Story of Service is that of Private Wayne Minor, an Illinois native who was killed in action just three hours before armistice. Sign up for the Weekly Dispatch newsletter at ww1cc.org/subscribe check the archive at ww1cc.org/dispatch or follow the link in the podcast notes.   Link: http://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/communicate/2015-12-28-18-26-00/subscribe.html http://www.ww1cc.org/dispatch The Buzz And that brings us to the buzz - the centennial of WW1 this week in social media with Katherine Akey - Katherine, what did you pick? New Jersey Ordinance Hi Theo -- A really interesting article popped up on Facebook this week about ordnance from WW1 that continues to surface and pose a threat -- but not in Europe, right here on the east coast of the United States! Listeners may be familiar with the Zone Rouge -- a 460 square mile area of France centered around Verdun that has been determined to be too physically and environmentally damaged for human habitation as a direct result of the Great War. There is even an entire department in France, the Département du Déminage or department of de-mining, that has been tasked with safely disposing of ordinance from the world wars. Since its establishment in 1946, more than 630 members of that force have been killed in the line of duty. We have no such force here in the US -- so when seven rifle grenades from WW1 were discovered recently on the coast of New Jersey, explosives experts had to be called in to safely dispose of the munitions. So, how did these grenades end up in New Jersey? It turns out, disposing of unneeded munitions by dumping them into the sea was a commonplace practice -- as recently as 1970. As a result, there are an estimated millions of tons of potentially explosive ordinance on the seafloor -- and every once in a while, some makes its way onto shore. Read more about the Zone Rouge and the intermittent discovery of World War weapons on American shores by visiting the links in the podcast notes. That’s it for this week in the Buzz. Link:https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a19641774/a-century-after-wwi-the-weapons-of-old-wars-keep-turning-up-on-beaches/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/13/the-bombs-beneath-us-unexploded-ordnance-linger-long-after-wars-are-over/?utm_term=.924447a3268d https://www.nationalgeographic.org/news/red-zone/   Outro And that is the first week of April for WW1 Centennial News. Thank you for listening. We also want to thank our guests... Dr. Edward Lengel, Military historian and author Mike Shuster, Curator for the great war project blog Mark Wilkins, historian, writer, museum professional, and lecturer Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, historian, sports writer, consultant, and author Katherine Akey, the commission’s social media director and line producer for the podcast A shout out to our intern John Morreale for his  great research assistance. And I am Theo Mayer - your host. The US World War One Centennial Commission was created by Congress to honor, commemorate and educate about WW1. Our programs are to-- inspire a national conversation and awareness about WW1; Including this podcast! We are bringing the lessons of the 100 years ago into today's classrooms; We are helping to restore WW1 memorials in communities of all sizes across our country; and of course we are building America’s National WW1 Memorial in Washington DC. We want to thank commission’s founding sponsor the Pritzker Military Museum and Library as well as the Starr foundation for their support. The podcast can be found on our website at ww1cc.org/cn   Or search WW1 Centennial News on  iTunes, Google Play, TuneIn, Podbean, Stitcher - Radio on Demand, Spotify or using your smart speaker.. Just say “Play W W One Centennial News Podcast”. Our twitter and instagram handles are both @ww1cc and we are on facebook @ww1centennial. Thank you for joining us. And don’t forget to share the stories you are hearing here today about the war that changed the world! [music] You know ginormous canon that was shooting at Paris - well - man - that was really over the top! [Big boom] So long!

Full Show Transcription Welcome back to the Work Stories Project. I’m your host Carol Xu. In today’s show, Mark and his co-workers will continue with the workplace asshole story. In the last episode, Mark had no real awareness that his co-workers hated working with him for four years. When his manager Miles incidentally broke the news to him, it was a painful revelation to Mark. Mark: It just never occurred to me that I was disliked. So the idea that my self-image of being a nice guy that people generally like… To have that idea destroyed like that was eye-opening and painful. It’s like a revelation. To redeem himself, Mark went and bought flowers for the implementation coordinators (ICs for short), Mark: One flower for each IC and a little note saying, “I’m sorry I’ve been such an asshole” and… I think they gave me a hug. There was reconciliation. Apologies and coming together. It just turned the whole thing around. However, notice there were limits to what a symbolic gesture could accomplish. There were no real conversations where Mark and the ICs sat down and actually got to know each other. Mark thinks that the flowers were a good beginning, but shouldn’t be the end. Mark: It should be “let’s sit down and have a conversation and figure out what’s actually going on with our emotions and the interplay, and what exactly is happening here,” and be honest with each other and get to the heart of the matter. That’s what I value. But in the culture at BISNET at the time, such honest conversations seemed impossible. Mark: That’s corporate culture or whatever. You just can’t talk about that stuff. It could get heated. Maybe it was better the way it went down: “Let’s at least pretend that I’m not an asshole. And you pretend you don’t hate me. Maybe we can actually get to a point where you don’t hate me and I’m not an asshole, [laugh] if we just pretend long enough.” I ask Miles whether there were any lasting changes after the flower gesture, Carol: Do you remember any changes after the flower incident, in terms of people’s interactions or their reluctance (to interact)? Miles: No. I think like most things, it’s hard for people to change, both for Mark to change and for anybody else to change. I see it as a blip and  everything kind of falls back in the realm of people’s behaviors. After the flower gesture, Mark spent one more year at BISNET. During that year, Mark and his co-workers were more patient and tolerant with each other. But his co-workers still didn’t know Mark’s upbringing or understand his particular sense of humor. And Mark still got frustrated by the interruptions and wished in private that the ICs would put some extra effort in writing a problem-solving manual or take some programming training. In 2002, Mark helped to find a well-trained programmer to gradually take over his responsibilities. Mark left the company, on good terms, in early 2003. [music break] But our story doesn’t end there. After Mark has volunteered the story to me, I try to talk to as many of his former co-workers as possible. My conversation with the former IC Letitia reveals something surprising [sound: phone call with Letitia]. It turns out that there is one major difference between Mark’s version of the story and that of Letitia’s. According to Mark, nobody gave him any feedback about him being difficult to work with before the flower incident. Had he known that others hated working with him, he could’ve apologized much earlier. Yet, according to Letitia, she actually heard others calling Mark an asshole to his face, more than once. Letitia: There were people that gave feedback to Mark by calling him an asshole to his face. Carol [in surprise]: Oh really? Was that before or after the flower incident? Letitia: Yes, before. Carol: So they actually told him, “Oh you are being an asshole here.” But he didn’t really respond. And he just continued his way? Letitia: Yeah. But I don’t think it came out as ‘you are being an asshole’, I think it was ‘you are such an asshole!’ (laugh) I think that he had that said to him more than once and by more than one person. I would wager money on that.    Hmmm, from Mark’s perspective, he seems to have completely forgotten about being called an asshole more than once at work. Letitia goes on to say that she also gave Mark direct feedback in the form of an email once. One day Mark left work in the morning. Letitia: He just left. Basically left all of us hanging. I don’t remember what the big overhanging requirement was, but there were a lot of clients affected and a lot of employees of our company that were being affected. That was the time that I sent him an email. I said things to him that probably nobody else did, because I need to let him know, ‘Dude, I don’t think you are a team player.’ And that, in my mind, is one of the worst things you can say to an employee that’s part of a startup, ‘cause you gotta be team player. You gotta work together. You gotta come together for the greater good. And he was exhibiting more signs of “well, I’m the most important person here…” According to Letitia, soon after the email, Mark apologized to every IC with the flower gesture. I ask her how she felt about Mark’s apology. Letitia: I felt a little bit vindicated. I felt like he heard me. So, this is interesting. According to Letitia, the coworkers did give Mark direct feedback along the way. And Letitia’s email probably even directly led to the flower apology. But why doesn’t Mark remember any of that? I need to have a follow-up with Mark to relay Letitia’s perspective. Carol: Letitia remembers others calling you an asshole before the flower incident… Mark: To my face? Carol: Yeah, to your face, like “you are such an asshole” or “quit being such an asshole”. Mark: [long pause] I would think that I would remember that. If I don’t remember it, my only explanation for not remembering it is because it would have to be in a context where that could’ve been a joke or something. Maybe I took it as a joke. Or maybe [pause] I was in the middle of trying to defend some technical thing. My brain wasn’t in processing-emotions mode. It was in talking-about-technical-things mode. Maybe when someone said it, it just bounced off ‘cause I wasn’t in the space to really think about it. I don’t know. As an off-hand comment maybe. Nobody sat me down and said ‘Do you understand that everybody here dislikes you, right?’ Maybe it was a kind of willful ignorance on my part. Maybe I just felt so justified in everything I said and did, that any kind of criticism bounced off until the Miles’ thing? I don’t really know. I then bring up Letitia’s email and the fact that it happened one or two days before the flower apology. Carol: She specifically remember that after the email, she said either the next day or the day after, you brought everybody flowers. Mark: Right, well, part of my problem is I don’t remember the context of the thing very well. All I remember is I talked to Miles. But why did I talk to Miles? So it probably was after some incident that she’s describing. Mark tries to recall what happened Mark: Now that I’m thinking of it, her email was definitely part of it. Okay, this is one scenario that may have happened. But I’m not 100% sure, because it’s so long ago. I think her email spurred me to talk to Miles myself. She may have been the one who told me how bad things were. Then I go to talk to Miles about it. I think I was already upset by the email. When I talked to Miles, he basically confirmed everything in the email and said “It’s not just Letitia.” That was the order of events. I think her email upset me. Carol: do you remember specifically whether she said you were not a team player? Can you recall that phrase? Or what part upset you? Mark: [pause] Okay, a lot has started to come back to me right now. [laugh] So far what I’ve mentioned is… Mark goes on to say that now thinking back he was probably picking up some antagonizing feedback from the ICs along the way. But he didn’t understand what it meant. At the time, he just felt that Letitia and the other ICs had a misunderstanding of him. And they probably put him in the asshole box. Mark: I couldn’t get out of the box, the asshole box. Anything I said or did just reinforced it.” But because Mark never thought of himself as an asshole, all the feedback before the meeting with Miles didn’t sink in. Instead, Mark felt that he was the victim. So he started disliking Letitia. Mark: Because I felt she was the one that had wronged me, that had put me in the asshole box. And I was just some young dumb kid, trying to put some code together for them. Now I’m being labeled as something I don’t feel like I am. I always thought of myself as a nice guy. So when she wrote that email, my initial reaction to it was “this is bullshit!” After all the stress I’ve put myself through for this company and all the shit I put up with. After all that, for her to tell me I’m not a team player. Basically reinforce the idea that I’m some kind of asshole. It just seemed so wrong to me, ‘cause I didn’t see myself as an asshole. So yeah, I got defensive and I went… Mark went to Miles’s office to complain about Letitia’s email. It was then Miles turned around and told Mark that everybody else was on Letitia’s side. Mark: That woke me up and made me realize that I can’t defend my behavior. It doesn’t matter if she’s part of the problem. If she is antagonizing me to a point where I ended up becoming an asshole, that doesn’t mean I’m right to be that way. As our conversation goes on, Mark tries to make sense of why the feedback like Letitia’s email didn’t directly help him and instead agitated him. Mark: I think that was the problem. She just didn’t have an accurate model of me. Her model of me made me out to be an asshole. I feel there were legit explanations for why I was the way I was. That email, I feel was just even more antagonism. That was just her way of trying to tell me how to improve. But it was the wrong way. It was a bad way. Maybe I felt like she was trying to prove that I was an asshole. And I was defending myself the whole time. I’m not an asshole. But we couldn’t have a really deep discussion or anything. She couldn’t ever get a more accurate model of me and what was going on there. She just had some caricature of some guy who thought he was the king, and all her assumptions of me were based on some caricature of somebody who thinks he’s God or whatever. but I couldn’t really address that. All I could do was to really disprove it, to give them the flowers and say “I’m sorry that I’ve been an asshole. Let’s be friends.” That disproves everything she thought about me, whereas everything I’ve been doing up to that point was just reinforcing her preconceived notions. I ask Mark what’s the difference between Letitia’s and Miles’s feedback. Why did the latter finally get through to him? Was it because Miles had power over Mark? But ICs didn’t? Carol: Is it because Miles was your boss and the others are your peers? Mark: Just like Letitia thought of me as an asshole and misconstrued everything I did in that light, I put Letitia into a box: she was an IC who didn’t want to learn anything, who saw feature requests as some kind of personal favor or battle and took it upon herself to antagonize me until I did what she wanted, and to then insult me and call me an asshole if I didn’t do what she wanted. We kind of both caricaturized each other. And Miles kind of stayed out of everything. He was kind of independent third party. So for him to validate her email to me, it added more weight to it. So it wasn’t just Letitia being Letitia… In another conversation with me, Mark compares two kinds of feedback, one straightforward and the other more subtle. Mark: I think there are different kinds of feedback. There’s the “they are gonna quit or we are gonna fire you” type of feedback. That obviously worked. Then there’s this more subtle expressions on their face, the fact they don’t invite you to their houses, the fact that when you try to engage them in small talk, they don’t seem interested. Probably, they think that they are communicating with you, but you are oblivious. And you just think everyone else is being a jerk. In Mark’s case, he felt he had to prove even harder his value to the company. Mark: I was taking in a lot of the negative emotions that people had in reaction to things I said and did. But without addressing this things directly, that just made it worse. The negative emotions and my picking up on them just made me act worse. Then I felt like maybe I had to prove even harder my value to the company and what I’ve done for everybody. “You should be giving me some kind of deference because I’m working so hard and I’ve done so much. Why do you dislike me? That doesn’t make any sense.” I was just confounded by the whole thing, not understanding what was going on or how to get people to like me or… [pause and sigh]. Remember Miles mentioned earlier that Mark’s mom was trying to elevate Mark’s status at the Company’s Christmas party? To Miles and many others, it was an example of Mark’s big ego. When I bring it up to Mark, he explains where he and probably his mom were coming from. Mark: You know, people who stroke their egos, they are doing it for a reason. It’s not because they really have big egos, it’s because maybe they are not feeling so great about themselves and need some kind of propping up or whatever. So, to Mark, maybe much of his ego-stroking behavior was an attempt to simply get others to like him. But to the other people, it was exactly the reason for not liking him. Now we have a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, when the co-workers caricaturized Mark to be an asshole, he actually became more asshole-like. What’s more, because the feedback didn’t match with Mark’s view of himself who identifies as a nice guy and a nerd, it never actually sank in. So now we have a disconnect between the two parties. For the ICs, they thought they were providing feedback to Mark along the way by calling him out as an asshole or telling him that he was not a team player. But somehow Mark never changed or maybe got even more asshole-like. I can see how frustrating it must have felt for the ICs.  Yet from Mark’s perspective, he felt that he was wronged by the ICs. In his mind, the feedback was, therefore, never registered as accurate, useful information, and thus easily forgotten.    So, if the meeting with Miles hadn’t happened, what kind of feedback would get through to him? From whom? I ask Mark. Mark: It takes a certain kind of person with a certain kind of perspective on things and an ability to, like a kind of optimism [smile], ‘let’s just hope that this is well received, because it can always back fire when you are honest with somebody about that kind of thing. So there has to be some magical fairy person at the job who’s willing to stick their neck out and tell the asshole, “you should not act like that here with these people. Maybe in some contexts that would work, if you were in a group of people that are just like you. But you are not and you have to make adjustments.”           So I do think that if someone had been able to set aside whatever trepidations they had about talking to me frankly, sat me down and said, “the people here don’t like you, do you know that?” At any point, if they had done that, then I’m pretty positive that I would’ve responded and “okay, how do I fix that?” [silence] But that’s not how people communicate. They just don’t do that in the real world, or especially in the workplace. Why don’t they? Is it because there’s a fear of… Is it because they are also in the kind of haze? They know that they are tormented by this guy, but they just don’t, they kind of put it off in a corner and try not to deal with it and avoid it as much as possible? So maybe everybody is in this similar kind of haze where “I don’t get along with that person. So whatever.” or “It’s not my job to deal with them. So I’m just gonna tell his boss and just try to get my work done and deal with my stuff. Well, we are all busy after all. Who has the time to play the “magical fairy person” at work? But I think what’s even rarer than time is the kind of optimism Mark mentioned. The optimism to even entertain the crazy idea that maybe just maybe the asshole also has an untold story waiting for you to explore. [music break]   Mark’s story only serves to begin the conversation between you and me or among your colleagues at work. If you want to share your story, please drop me a note on our website Workstoriesproject.org. I’m happy to be your personal researcher and curator on any work-related topics. While doing research for this episode story, I’ve come across so many interesting materials. For example, there’s a blog article by a senior Facebook software engineer. He reflects on his experience of being kicked out of his team once. If you visit the webpage of this podcast episode, you’ll see the links to all the resources that may help you build an asshole-free workplace. [Professor Bob Sutton, one of my mentors at Stanford, even devotes a whole book to the workplace asshole, titled “The No Asshole Rule!” It’s an interesting and provocative read. Tell me what books or resources have helped you surviving an asshole or building an asshole-free workplace.] I’ll keep updating the list as we go.  You may wonder what’s the topic for our future episodes. Well, it largely depends on your request. You tell me what to explore next, as long as it has the slightest connection with the human experience of work. We can always revisit old topics and explore new ones. So reach out to me on our website, Facebook, and Twitter. You are also welcome to join me in a sub Reddit discussion titled work stories project. And don’t forget to subscribe to our show in your podcast app. That way, you’ll be notified about new episodes automatically. All the details are listed on our website Workstoriesproject.org. Let me thank all the story contributors to this episode, Letitia, Miles, Bret, and my husband Mark. Sometimes revisiting the past can be painful and confusing. You all are very brave and generous. I’ve certainly learned a great deal from talking with you. And I hope I can pay it forward. I’m your host Carol Xu. Our sound engineer is Jason. And the music is by Mark. [music break] Hello, you are still there? You must be one of those people who sit through the whole credits after a movie. Are you waiting for a bonus clip? I’ll tell you a secret: I do have some fun behind-the-scene clips from the interviews for you. For example, in one clip, Mark and I kept going back and forth about whether he could be technically called an asshole. Here’s a little sample: Mark: So was I really an asshole? Or am I a special Silicon Valley brand of workplace-too-honest, temporarily autistic, not-paying-attention-to-other-people’s emotions (type of asshole?) Is there a name for that? Nerd? Is that it? I’m not shying away from being called an asshole by other people. That’s fine… Carol: … If we actually have a heart-to-heart with 10 assholes who are recognized by their colleagues, I go interview those 10 assholes. Maybe 9 out of 10 would go, “What? Really?” Mark: [bursts into laughter] You really think so?   Go to the webpage of this episode and click on the link that says “behind the scenes clips” and enjoy! J Okay, that’s it for our show. See you next time! 

In this episode Sam tells us about his recent bariatric surgery (weight loss surgery). Sam goes into detail about what the surgery was, why he had it and how is doing 2 weeks out from surgery.  Sam and Gabe review the movie Captain America Civil War, there are HUGE SPOILERS. TO AVOID SPOILER SKIP FROM THE 58 MARK TO 1 HOUR 21 MINUTES. The guys ends with some improv fun about 2 guys camping out for a movie way too early the theater employee who had to deal with them. If you have any stories you like to share, please do so on Facebook or email us at  lowerthebarpodcast@gmail.com and your story could make it on a future podcast. Like us on Facebook and follow us on twitter @lowerthesam and @lowerthegabe

The Adel Life Group kick off our new series journeying through the Gospel of Mark - To teach others spiritual truth is a high and holy privilege and not one to be undertaken lightly. The teacher should ook to his or her own life and always maintain a close communication with the greatest Teacher of all time - Jesus Christ.

The Adel Life Group kick off our new series journeying through the Gospel of Mark - To teach others spiritual truth is a high and holy privilege and not one to be undertaken lightly. The teacher should ook to his or her own life and always maintain a close communication with the greatest Teacher of all time - Jesus Christ.