Podcasts about mci worldcom

Walt Pavlo went to work at MCI at a time when telecoms were hungry for go-getters. It was the early 2000s, and Walt enjoyed the freedom and aggressive nature of a recently deregulated industry. But soon he realized that MCI's most lucrative customers were also its flakiest, and the pressure was on to manage millions of bad debt that accumulated on the books. In this episode, Walt explains how he concocted a fake-loan scheme that netted him money far beyond his dreams — and yet how hollow it felt, right up until the moment it all came crashing down.  Walt Pavlo is a nationally recognized speaker who writes for Forbes and NYU Law School on white-collar crime and criminal justice. He founded the firm Prisonology in 2014 as a consulting firm to support federal criminal defense attorneys by providing experts who have retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He is the co-author of “Stolen Without a Gun: Confessions from Inside History's Biggest Accounting Fraud, the Collapse of MCI WorldCom,” which covers his stint working in the company's billing department and committing fraud.

As business owners, we often feel imposter syndrome or worry about our status. Have you ever wanted to elevate your image and be more relevant? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Michael Sartain, CEO of Men of Action Mentoring to talk about how to make high-status friends and attend VIP events. You'll Learn [03:27] How to Utilize Networking [19:03] Becoming High-Status Using Social Media [26:54] How to be Relevant [38:58] Social Media is Fake [53:21] Authenticity vs Effective Content Tweetables “You need to be the person who always solves problems for other people and ask for nothing in return.” “You're building a brand. Status is status.” “A lot of our beliefs that we're holding on to that are holding us back.” “You make millions of dollars from solving other people's problems, not by doing what you love.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Michael: Your ability to grow is based on your perceived status, your perceived trustworthiness, your perceived know how. Not your actual know how.  [00:00:11] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing a business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:30] DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:10] Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:13] So I have an awesome guest today. I actually joined his program just for kicks. This is Michael Sartain. Michael, welcome to the DoorGrow show.  [00:01:22] Michael: Hey, what's going on, man? Hey, I gotta be honest with you. Two years ago, I didn't know what doors meant and then I started hanging out with Justin Waller and he's like, "yeah, man, I have 300 doors." [00:01:29] I was like, "bro, what are you talking about?" [00:01:31] And then he's like, now he's got 400 doors. And I was like, "oh, it's like all these different properties." And then my buddy Myron he's got 17 homes that he owns up in Connecticut. He told me about, and I didn't understand how this whole thing worked. And then the property management side of it, like "my company, we're like, we're buying properties because we want to use the depreciation. And we need someone to keep, you know, these places rented, blah, blah, blah." And then the property management, I don't know that much about it. So that's why I was really excited to come on here and check this out.  [00:01:57] Jason: Cool. Well, yeah. And I didn't know very much about like maintaining a presence. [00:02:03] Looking cool, like actually looking cool on social media instead of just trying to look cool. And and so I've learned some good things by being in your program. So let's get into a little bit of background about you for those that are like, who's this Michael guy? And maybe how you kind of got into entrepreneurism and I think that'd be relevant to anybody listening. [00:02:25] Michael: So I'm originally from East Dallas. I grew up on the good side of the tracks and went to high school on the bad side of the tracks. And graduated from my high school, barely like did anything. It was not a very good experience. And I got into UT Austin because I was in top 10 percent of my class. [00:02:39] Went there four years, studied astronomy and business and then got out of there. And then I ended up managing a nightclub for a while, for a couple of years because MCI Worldcom and Enron had gone out of business. So if you know, UT Austin, Enron was like a huge supply of jobs once you graduated you know, as a Longhorn. [00:02:56] Once they go out of business, none of us can find jobs. I ended up working at a strip club for like several years as a DJ. And this is the first point in my life where I'm like, "okay, there's something going on here. There's things that I've been taught growing up, but there's something different now." Of course, I want to preface this. [00:03:10] By no means am I saying that people who go to a strip club or people who work in a strip club are indicative of the median of society. They clearly aren't, clearly are not. What I am saying though is that you can see the extremes in society when you go to places like that and from those extremes, you can see overt reactions. [00:03:27] One of the things that I do in my course is I teach how people can network, get invited where the cool kids sit like that phenomenon of where the cool guys are and the not cool guys, the hot club versus the not club that the club people don't want to go to, or the party everyone's trying to get into. [00:03:42] What is it that causes that phenomenon of popularity and status? There has to be something that can explain it. And so what I've been trying to do for the last 15 years is use evolutionary studies in order to figure out a way in order to do that. And so a lot of times when you do that, you know, you can see subcommunication between a man and a woman and you don't really know what's going on. [00:04:02] They have the internal focus of what's going on, but when you see it in like a nightclub or a festival or someplace like that, you see very overt communication. And from that, you can learn a lot of cool stuff. It's like watching, you know, crows you know, pick at a carcass versus watching a giant white tiger go kill a gazelle. [00:04:18] Like that is overt examples of predation that you can see and be like, okay, this is how biology works. This is how natural selection works, et cetera. And I know for your audience, you're like, "where the fuck's he going with all this?" Yeah. The reason why, just to explain. I got fascinated. I did seven years in the military after 9 -11. [00:04:33] I joined and I flew a KC 135 as an instructor navigator. And then I was I did counterintelligence for about the last two years I was there. And then, so, in that time period, I learned how a very structured business could work and like how accountability works. Accountability and leadership, I learned very much during that time period. [00:04:49] But at that same time period, I was also going out a lot and I was like very interested to me in like, what is it that caused certain men to be phenomenally good with women and get a lot of people to show up to an event and then what caused other men to just not get it. And I always, I also noticed that there was a very small group of men that got it. [00:05:05] And then a very large group of men that didn't understand this concept whatsoever. So I became fascinated with that idea of 2011. I ended up retiring from the military and I ended up moving to Las Vegas and this is the first time when I started going out to some of these nightclubs and these venues here in Las Vegas. [00:05:19] And I meet a lot of real estate agents. I meet a lot of accountants. I meet plastic surgeons, doctors. And it was very clear to me like that some of them got it and some of them didn't get it. I threw a real estate event recently where we took a blue heron home. And then we had a charity event for animals. [00:05:33] And while we're there, I invited every single female influencer in the city to show up. Well, these, some of these girls were interested in getting into real estate, but I just want you to imagine it was just like a regular real estate event that you have, except you're doing it for animal rescue. [00:05:47] So now all these people who are in real estate, mortgage brokers, et cetera, property managers like yourself, they would show up to this beautiful three story house. It was catered. It was beautiful. And then every pretty girl in the city in Las Vegas who wasn't working that night showed up to this thing. [00:06:01] So now you're drinking champagne. There's three times as many girls as guys. Some of you guys are listening to this and you're like, "okay, now I understand. I'm starting to understand what he does." You're able to create these incredible environments and in doing so, just imagine, everyone... I try to teach networking through events. [00:06:17] That's basically how I try to teach networking through small events at your house or large events, you know, like a CES conference. I try to teach networking through those mechanisms. And then I try to show how evolution created humans throughout history. Dr. David Buss writes in his book the evolution of desire throughout history. [00:06:34] The men who have worked in groups and in tandem with one another always had access to more resources and always had access to more women. And so that's the reason why, you know, I teach these concepts. And so what happens is that blue Heron thing that we did, the guy who ran it, he's at the forefront and he goes, "I want to just thank you guys for coming out here and helping me, blah, blah, blah." [00:06:52] He had endeared so much goodwill with every mortgage broker, real estate agent. It was really crazy. All these other real estate agents wanted to train under him. People started sending him business. His business blew up. Another example I give, that's Jeremy Green's name. I have another example of my buddy, Mark Pearlberg, who's one of those also in my program. [00:07:09] Mark is an accountant. Mark started to see the way that I would use zoom calls and on the zoom calls, Mark would go on and show. How he understood accounting backwards and forwards better than everyone else who was listening, he showed himself to be a subject matter expert in the zoom calls. He was hosting in doing so, just imagine Jason, like, you know, I don't believe accounting is your specialty, but if you listen to accountant at first, it's interesting, but after like an hour and a half, you get to the realization, like, "this is interesting, but I don't want to do this." [00:07:37] And then at about the two hour mark, you're like, "This is interesting. I don't want to do this. How much do I have to pay you to do this?" And so because what we did and he started hosting a podcast and because he started hosting these zoom calls with other professionals, now he tells me, he's like, "I actually had to slow down the podcast because I can't handle all the business that I have. [00:07:55] There's not enough of me. In order for me to be able to do this." And he works from home. He just, an incredible lifestyle that he's created. So when we go back to what we're saying before, you know, I learned initially, "okay, what are the mechanisms that cause people to be cool or not cool, to be popular, not popular, to be low status or high status?" [00:08:13] I learned that when I was working in Austin, you know, nightclub, I learned that when I was in the U S military, like what good leadership and bad leadership was. And then I learned it in the last 13 years here living in Las Vegas. And I took all those lessons and I, from the last say, 25 years, and I put them into a course called the men of action course and try to concisely take this 25 years of knowledge and put it into one space so that everyone can learn how to do these kinds of things. [00:08:35] Now, here's where it might be confusing for some of your audience, the mechanisms that men use in order to show status with women in order to date them and the mechanisms that men and women use in order to pitch an idea or to sell a product are the same mechanisms. They are the same. This is difficult. A lot of people don't grasp this. if you guys ever want to see a great example of this, great book you should all read is Oren Klaff's book called pitch anything. Listen to some of the words he uses. Jason, you remember eliminate neediness. [00:09:06] Do you remember that? Eliminate neediness. Where does that come from? Where does that come from? It didn't come from self help. Eliminate neediness is a dating concept. Okay? Avoid beta behavior. Do you remember? Oren Klaff says this in his book. He goes, "avoid beta behavior." Where does that come from, Jason? [00:09:21] That is a dating concept. So where do these things come from? At the highest level Jordan Belfort, he calls it goal oriented communication. So goal oriented communication is, "will you go on a date with me?" Goal oriented communication is, "Ken, will you invest in my project?" Goal oriented communication is, "will you come work for me?" [00:09:36] Goal oriented communication. I'm doing this because this is like the apex of community of goal oriented communication. All these places meet at the apex, and that is the understanding of basically Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people, get people to talk about themselves. You can find common interests, figure out ways to break rapport, all these different things. [00:09:53] And like what I teach my clients, Jason, the number one thing I teach my clients when it comes to high stats networking is you need to be the person who always solves problems for other people and ask for nothing in return. A great example is, do you remember Harvey Keitel in the movie Pulp Fiction? [00:10:08] You remember he's the wolf? Do you remember Pulp Fiction? I haven't seen Pulp Fiction. Okay, so tonight you're going to watch Pulp Fiction. Every single other person watching this has watched Pulp Fiction. [00:10:17] Jason: I know, everybody else has watched it but me, so.  [00:10:19] Michael: There's a point, there's a point where they have to clean up a dead body and they have to call this guy named the wolf and he just, he fixes things. [00:10:25] He's a cleaner. The wolf shows up in his Acura NSX, it's Harvey Keitel and he just fixes things. He goes, "are you going to listen to me or do you want to go to jail?" And he does, he just fixes everything. That's what I become. I'm the guy who fixes things for other people. I have a bunch of friends. I help them find people for their sales team. Most of my friends have met their boyfriends or girlfriends through me. I help people find their employees. I'm the hub. I'm the hub of the social wheel. And that's what I teach you to do in my course. If you cannot replace your social circle, your girlfriend, or your job in 15 minutes, you don't have enough abundance and I need to teach you how to have more abundance. [00:10:56] And so how do you do that? There's just certain mechanisms that people who have an abundance mentality and understand networking have, and when they use those techniques, then they can have anything they want. They get into any door. So another example, Jason is like the guy who goes to the Tai Lopez conference or the Taylor Welch conference or goes to see Cole Gordon or goes to see Wes Watson or goes to see whoever. [00:11:17] The guy who is like, "Hey man, thank you for your time." The one who like goes and pays Patrick bed David for his counseling. And then there's the guy who Patrick Bet David who goes to see Patrick David for his counseling. And then Patrick David was like, "Hey man, can I come visit you and hang out? Come meet my wife. Let me take you out to dinner." Does that make sense? There's a mechanism you'll see, like with a lot of people have asked me this before. Why is it that, you know, other people are like paying to listen to Justin Waller speak, but like Justin Waller and I are like close friends? [00:11:42] Why is it that other people like buy Rollo's book, but Rollo is one of my best friends? Why is it like all these other people call me and I'm not trying to say this to brag, but the reason why I'm trying to say this is there's a status line that you get to where you're a customer, and then you're his friend. [00:11:56] How do you cross that status line? This is such a key for those of you who are like, trying to get into sales or trying to understand networking. It's just like, I'm paying this guy, like how much, like I'm paying Tony Robbins. I'm a customer. I'm customer. Now Tony's like sending me messages on my birthday. [00:12:09] What is that status line? Some people's like, "well, you just need to have more money." And I'm telling you that is not what the case is. That's definitely not what the case is.  [00:12:15] Jason: Who would want to connect with people that they're only connecting with you because of money? I mean, that'd be a really shitty reason to be connecting with somebody.  [00:12:22] Michael: In the beginning, you will. But after a while you learn, whenever I go up and talk to my favorite influencer, let's say I paid for his coaching program is my voice cracking or my eyes getting big is my vocal tonality changing because I see this person as high status. [00:12:38] Am I dressing too fancy to try to show off? Am I doing too much or am I just like just the normal dude? I am. Oren Klaff, one of my favorite YouTube content creators. I don't know if you are not Oren Klaff. I'm sorry, Orion Terriban. All right. His name is Psych Hacks. Well, I had him on my show a couple of days ago. [00:12:54] He kind of converges behavioral economics with evolutionary psychology. And he basically talks about the sexual marketplace as far as economics is concerned. Okay. Really great person. Have him on my show. Ask him a bunch of stuff during the show. One of the things I talk about is like, "Hey, Orion, I know that you do some sales stuff, some coaching stuff. If you want my help, I'll help you how to, you know, put out a low ticket offer, high ticket offer, how you can like buy back your time." he's like, "yeah, you know, I can't scale myself that much." I was like, "okay, so you're going to read buy back your time by Dan Martell." [00:13:21] And then I gave him a bunch of books, you know, that would probably help him. And then at the end, I was like, bro, anytime you want to call me and you ask me about any of this stuff, I'll help you. The guy who has the world, you guys look it up. The guy with the world record in the high jump on planet earth is a guy named Darius Clark. He went to Texas A& M. He's the leading scorer in slam ball. Have you ever seen slam ball, Jason? Remember the trampolines and the basketball, they go dunk on each other. Anyways, I bumped into Darius at a slam ball game. We started talking and I'm, and then Darius is like, "Hey man, I want to level up my social media." [00:13:50] And I'm like, "Darius, let me figure out ways that I can help you level up your social media." So it's like one guys are like a professional athlete. Another guy's an accountant. You might be saying like, "why is it you're able to do all these different things?" And the reason why is because these are evolutionary problems. [00:14:04] These are evolutionary challenges that all men we're looking for. There are three things that really differentiate men from women. Three massive things. There's more than three, but these are the three biggest ones. Jason here. Number one, this is the most obvious one. It's upper body strength. Men are about two standard deviations stronger than women as far as upper body strength, meaning the medium grip strength for a man it puts them in the top, you know, 98 percent and top 2 percent of women. Makes sense.  [00:14:27] Jason: Yeah. Which also throws off our balance is higher. Yeah.  [00:14:31] Michael: Correct. Also. Yeah. It also, there's a reason why some of the reasons why men live shorter lives is because they keep their weight up here around their waist. [00:14:37] Whereas women keep it below their hips. And that's really, it's further away from their heart. There's a couple other things according to that now that's the first thing. The second one is a variety of sexual partners. Men are again, two standard deviations. Yeah. Far more like meaning the median man is interested in more women than the other way around but puts them in the top 2%. [00:14:55] But the third one, and this was a really interesting one and I knew this one, but it was Tai Lopez I was at his house last Wednesday. And he was explaining this, do you know the main thing where women just do not care that much about at all? But men are obsessed with, you know what it is? It's in your title. [00:15:09] No, it's in your title.  [00:15:10] Jason: Let's see, friends, high status, what I don't know?  [00:15:13] Michael: Status. Women in general do not care as much about status as men do, meaning women don't kill each other over status as men have been doing for the last hundred thousand years. So in fact, Dr. Buss, women care about men having status. [00:15:26] Jason: Women care about men having status.  [00:15:28] Michael: Women care about the men that they're with having status, yes. Yeah, okay. Yes. I see. Meaning they care about status as an object to obtain, but not as a something for themselves. Or rather, if you've ever, if you've ever lived on a military base, it's one of the strangest things. [00:15:41] Whoever the base commander's wife is, she's like the leader of the wives. It's so weird. She did nothing. She didn't go to officer school. She didn't do shit, but because she's married to the 06, the base commander, whenever they have engagements, she is... it's so funny. Anybody who's been in the military, you know, this is true. [00:15:58] Whoever the base commander's wife is. She's all of a sudden like the leader of all the events, even though why? Because she's married to the base commander. That's the way it works. So men, women in general in gendered into themselves, don't care as much about status as men do men severely care about status far more than women do. [00:16:16] And so because of the, these concepts, that's why you'll see like with a lot of the stuff I'm saying when it comes to sales, this is for men and women, but when it comes to dating, women do not sit there and have to show their status in order to attract men. But the other way they do. Does that make sense? [00:16:29] Yeah. And that's why it's like an important differentiation to make. And that's one of the other things I teach in my course. Like when you also, when you're selling to men versus women, it's something that you need to understand. You don't necessarily need to sell to women based on status. Like how, "Hey Sherry, how'd you like those big shoulders to show off those muscles to get those guys?" No, they don't. It's that's a status thing shoulder to waist ratio is like a male strength machismo testosterone status thing that women just aren't as interested in, you know, so there's just interesting concepts like that. [00:16:59] This divergence innate differences between men and women and where do we find these differences? We find them in evolutionary studies.  [00:17:05] Jason: So I think it's really interesting what you talked about earlier. You mentioned like this gravitation towards basically what works, right. And we see this everywhere. [00:17:14] Like I've been in lots of different programs. I've worked with lots of different mentors, coaches, read lots of different books and I'm noticing more and more I evolve as a human being. I'm noticing more and more parallels between the best ideas. Like I just read a book on kids. It was like how to talk so kids will listen and how to listen so kids will talk. And it's probably one of the best communication books I've ever read. Like anybody could learn from reading this book because to some degree, we're all little kids in bigger. [00:17:44] Michael: Even without kids.  [00:17:45] Jason: And also I was like, this is brilliant, like self talk like psychology even in this book. [00:17:51] And I'm like, this could be applied to so many different things. And it talks about empathetic, like being empathetic in your communication. I'm like, this is brilliant. This will work so effectively for sales or for anything. And people think, "oh, it's for kids." Right. And so what works works. [00:18:05] And I read another book, something about relationships by David B. Wolfe. It was a really good book, and this was for grownups, but there were so many parallels between these things. And you had mentioned also with dating and you know, for example, sales really, there's so many parallels between going out and trying to get clients and trying to get dates. [00:18:27] Michael: The higher you go, they're not parallels. They're exactly the same. When you get to the top, they're exactly like what I'm saying is when you get to the top, meaning like Hugh Hefner, like when you're at the top and then you just see, it's just a total presentation and it's nothing but just showing status. [00:18:42] Oh, it's the same thing. It's the same. I bought a Tesla that like Playboy is a brand. Tesla is a brand. You start to see they're doing the same thing to your brain.  [00:18:51] Jason: So for the business owners, listening to this, who are not trying to be Hugh Hefner. Right. They're not, and maybe they're married like me and they're not like trying to get women, but they do want to increase their sales. [00:19:03] They do want to increase their status and they want to figure out how to attract more business. What are maybe some of the things that they could do to be more attractive to the real estate investors that they're trying to get as clients?  [00:19:18] Michael: Yeah, I will tell you the first thing is you need to be a way more cognizant of how you are perceived socially and for a lot of people, one of the things you have to understand is the more things become digital and the more your image can be spread across social media platforms, the less your actual merit of your business matters and the more the perception of your business matters. [00:19:40] Jason: Yeah. How do they get an accurate view of how they're perceived?  [00:19:46] Michael: You could ask other people. I mean, generally the market is going to tell you, right? What is the price of of a commodity? The market's going to end up telling you right. In a free market economy, but it's like when you make social media content, you need to make them the content to market your business in a sexy, fun way that catches people's attention, but it doesn't have to be extremely representative. And I know this is really hard for a lot of people to do because they're like, "no, I'm just going to be myself and make content that feels organic." And I'm just telling you that doesn't work. [00:20:14] I don't care what Gary Vanderchuck told you. That is not the way the world works. Everyone else is stunting. Everyone is using FaceApp and Facetune. All these other people are just showing images and pictures of the best parts of their life. I post on social media all the time. I did not post anything about me feeding my cats this morning. [00:20:30] Like, the people want to see the cool stuff. That's just generally the way it is. So, you're, the way you are perceived on social media again, that's what we, you know, Men of Action, our group, is when you're in a community that gives you accountability and feedback to let you know, hey man, this is not a good post or this is a good post. [00:20:45] When we are on Instagram specifically instagram trades, a currency and that currency is called status. That's all Instagram is. Facebook is not like that. By the way, you guys will notice for those of you do any kind of marketing, Facebook is going to work really well for your 38- 40 year old audience and older. [00:21:01] And Instagram is going to work for your audience below 38 to maybe 28 and then maybe to 25 and below 25, it's going to be TikTok. And you'll notice, depending on which audience you're trying to get to, that's where you're going to see the most prevalence on those different platforms. Also, you're also going to see the most politically progressive of those platforms will be TikTok and the most politically conservative all those platforms will be like Twitter or X. So you, these are kind of the things that you have to learn. What you need out there is a perception that people have of your business and you have it as an entrepreneur. So you need to be trustworthy. You need to seem like, you know, more than everyone else, like you're a subject matter expert and you need to seem extremely motivated. [00:21:40] And in doing so as well, when you show images of your business and you personally, you need to show relevancy, competency, access to scarce resources, and social proof. Those are the things that will help. So what I mean by social proof? Other people in the industry following you on Instagram is a great way to almost look like a testimonial or maybe they leave comments. [00:21:59] That's a great way to show social proof, relevancy. Are you trying to use banner ads from 25 years ago? Or you're like, "Well, I'm still using email blasts." Okay. If I'm talking to a guy in real estate and he's telling me about email blasts, I know he's not relevant anymore. If I'm sitting there talking to stuff, if that's all he's talking about, right? [00:22:17] If he's sitting there being like, you know, he doesn't use Instagram, but he's got an SEO guy. I'm like, okay, he's not relevant anymore. He doesn't know. He hasn't changed things. But when I talked to a guy and he's like, "yeah, what I did was I started a podcast and in my podcast, I do 20 minute interviews with different people using restream. And then I have a guy come through and make clips and then I have, and then the best clips I end up promoting those clips on Instagram or using meta. Facebook Ad manager, meta ad manager, and in doing so, then I make the best ones and I turn them into advertisements and I put a CTA at the end." I'm like, okay, that guy's relevant, that guy gets it. [00:22:49] Jason: Then we're relevant here at DoorGrow.  [00:22:51] Michael: What you're doing is extremely relevant.  [00:22:52] Jason: If they have an AOL email address, they're like, "what's your email?" [00:22:56] Michael: That's exactly, it's not relevant.  [00:22:57] "It's aol.Com." [00:22:58] "I have a Facebook, but I don't have an Instagram." You're just not relevant. Like I can tell you're not relevant. When people are like, "well, my audience isn't on Instagram." It's like, it doesn't matter if your audience is on Instagram, you're trying to grow your audience. And by the way, the market will tell you what it wants. And every day, I'm sorry for those of you who don't want to hear this. Every day, each one of these platforms becomes slightly less relevant. Okay? [00:23:19] TikTok is on its uprise right now. Instagram is becoming less relevant because of TikTok, Rumble, YouTube, and Facebook to a certain audience is also already completely irrelevant. You'll see women below a certain age do not have a Facebook, but they do have an Instagram. [00:23:32] So the answer is to have all of them. All of you should have, you should be making 30 to 90 second content, the up and down type of content. Not landscape of profile content. You should be making that and it should be going on Snapchat. It should be going on X. It should be going on YouTube. It should be YouTube shorts, TikToks, and Facebook and Instagram reels. [00:23:50] It should be going at all those different places. You can use HubSpot or some other platform in order to post that content. And the content doesn't just have to be clips that go viral from podcasts. You can do man on the street videos. And here's a big one. All of you can do this. You can do reaction videos. [00:24:04] All of you can do reaction videos. They're so easy to do. And by the way, you don't even have to like, you're just like, "Michael, I don't know how to use OBS and I don't know how to do a reaction video." All you have to do is sit like I'm sitting right now. I'm in my den. You know, obviously I put some soundproofing behind me, but I'm in my den, I got a big ol ring light in front of me, and somebody comes up to me and goes, "Michael, what do you think about the Trump assassination attempt?" [00:24:23] Or "Michael, what do you think about, you know, Kamala Harris or whatever?" And I'm like, and I just turn my camera like this, like I'm talking, "Man, I'll tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you just say, and as soon as people watch the video and they're like, "This guy's about to tell me what he's thinking." [00:24:35] Then everyone will watch. And then some of you are listening right now and you're like, "I'm just a property manager. I don't want to talk about politics. Really go watch Ryan Pineda. Go watch Bradley, go watch Codie Sanchez, go watch Tom Bill. You go watch any of these guys who are crushing it in their fields. [00:24:51] They give their opinions on everything. Did you guys hear Alex Hormozi now talks about dating? What? Yeah. You're building a brand. Status is status. Like nobody cares. This is the other thing, Jason, a lot of your clients, and this is something I've talked to you about, and everyone in my program hears me talk about this ad nauseum. [00:25:08] Is the concept of like, I'm afraid that I'm going to post the wrong thing and nobody holds you accountable for anything you have to say, like, I was just looking at a video of Kamala Harris at a P Diddy party, walking around with Montel Jordan. No one seems to care that ever happened. No one cares about Joe Biden talking about, "I don't want to send my kids to school with the monkeys." [00:25:26] Nobody cares about it. No one cares. Like you said, like Donald Trump had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant and they brought it up during the debates and no one cares. Literally one of the most popular movies of all time The wolf of wall street is a about a man who did 15 months in prison for securities fraud, punched his wife in the stomach, kidnapped his own kid, did quaaludes and slept with prostitutes, and then afterwards, he is one of the top sales trainers in the world today. But you guys think anyone cares. Caitlyn Jenner runs over someone, kills them, and then four months later is named woman of the year. But you're like, "Michael, I'm a property manager. What if I post the wrong thing?" Here's another thing, Jason, and this is a poor reflection on humanity, but it's absolutely true. [00:26:09] If you get popular enough, they will forgive you for anything. And if you don't believe me right before OJ died, I had a conversation with him and they had offered him millions of dollars to do a fantasy football podcast, and I was like, OJ, what about those people you stabbed 56 times? Nobody cares. So many of you are watching this right now and you're like, you have 400 followers on Instagram and you're like so worried about posting the wrong thing, bro. [00:26:32] You don't have 400 followers on Instagram. You have four followers on Instagram and one of them's your mom. No one cares what you're doing. Most of you on social media are irrelevant and because you're irrelevant on social media, in reality, you're invisible. Listening to this, when you ask me what the advice is, your job is to become visible. [00:26:49] Some of you will be offended by what I say and the rest of you will be successful. You've got to decide which one you want to be.  [00:26:54] Jason: So I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second here, right? A lot of property managers, they think "I'm going to go start posting about property management. And maybe I'll get some investors that want to like work with me." [00:27:06] And so they start posting property management with this false assumption that people really care about property management, right? And so the analogy I'll usually share with property managers is I'll say, "how many plumbers are you following on social media?" And they'll say, "none." [00:27:23] "Why?" I said, "they want your business. Why aren't you following them?" And so there's this false reality that these social media marketers will sell to property managers. They're like wasting their time. And some of them spend a lot of money and time with these social media companies, wasting time promoting their property management business on social media, when nobody gives a shit about property management, even their clients don't wake up in the morning and go, "man, I'm thinking about property management." [00:27:50] Jason, what should they be doing instead?  [00:27:52] Michael: Yes. Jason you saying that just got me. I want someone who's watching this to do this and then tag me in the video when you do it. Jason, as a property manager, do you ever have nightmare tenants?  [00:28:03] Jason: So to be clear for those listening...  [00:28:05] Michael: yeah,  [00:28:06] Jason: I'm not managing properties. I'm coaching property management business owners, but they would say, "yes," they have nightmare tenants. All the time.  [00:28:12] Michael: Do you ever have nightmare vendors? Like guys who come like when I say vendor, what I mean is the plumber, the carpenter, the guy who comes...  [00:28:18] Jason: Yes, they have problems with vendors constantly, they have nightmare owners. [00:28:21] They're managing properties.  [00:28:22] Michael: What about, well, I wouldn't do nightmare owners cause you're trying to get business. I wouldn't talk about nightmare owners. What I would talk about is. I would start off a clip just like this. "I had a nightmare tenant. This guy was destroying," and then it would just show pictures. [00:28:34] "This guy was destroying everything in the place. I swear. He didn't know how to, he couldn't aim and hit the toilet. He has just destroyed the place. And this is what I did to fix it. And here's three tips for you to deal with a nightmare tenant." Viral. Yeah. Viral. Not only are you viral. Everyone's coming to you. [00:28:52] It's like, "man, I don't want a nightmare tenant. I just bought this two bedroom, two bathroom. I don't want a nightmare tenant. I'm going to go do what he does."  [00:28:59] Jason: I don't want it to be a meth house eviction. Like, yeah.  [00:29:02] Michael: Yes. Yeah. You know what i'm saying? Like that's what I would do. I would go over like what are these and because what you're going to do is what are the biggest fears of the people who are hiring property owners, my nightmare tenant, my tenant who doesn't pay. Like those kind of things, and I would make content. What are the three steps that I did to do with the five tips that a lot of people's in this place don't do right? I would make content like that. And you could do opus there's these ai software apps that'll basically take the clip and then they'll just inject B roll that fits whatever the words you're saying. [00:29:33] You don't have to hardly do any work when you do it and then all of a sudden it's like, "it was a nightmare. This guy's made my place look like a roach house. Roach infested." And then it'll actually pull up an image like a whatever, a stock Shutterstock image of a roach infested home, whatever. [00:29:47] Jason: Now they're using ai. Even I'm seeing a lot of AI images Just flashing. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah. Correct.  [00:29:51] Michael: It could actually illustrate using artificial intelligence, illustrate the image for you. You could actually do that. So you don't have run into any copyright issues. Right. Or any permission issues. [00:30:00] There's just so many ways to do this. But what are you doing? You're showing relevancy and competency. You know how to use Instagram. You know how to create a clip using artificial intelligence. You have good audio. You have good lighting. You're showing relevancy. You're showing competency. You're showing high intelligence. [00:30:15] You're showing high social status. And then in the comments, you're like "LMAO." Like people are laughing my ass off. "This happened to me." "Oh my God, Jason, same shit." "100 percent true." And now I have social status. I have all these things. Why? Because I made some content that was engaging about something that is incredibly unsexy, which is property management. [00:30:35] That's how you do it. What are those ultimate fears that your prospective clients have? And I would just do nothing but make content about that. I have a friend of mine, FedEx fearless. His name's Bismarck. And this guy, he goes, "these are three reasons why you are ugly." And I'm like, "what?" [00:30:48] And like, he really goes after people. "This is the reason why your girlfriend is cheating on you right now." And everyone just, I'm like, "what?" And I don't want to watch, but I'm like, I need to watch this video.  [00:30:57] Jason: What's going on there? Yeah.  [00:30:59] Michael: It's so great. It's so great. " No, Michael, you need to be authentic with your social..." no, you don't. You don't need to be authentic. You need to capture people's attention. You need to be attractive. Your primary job is to be attractive on social media. Now what happens is now you got them with the hook, "Here are the top three things that I do to deal with this horrible tenant that I have" And then when they come in the hook now throughout there you give those three, explanations But you also throw in a little piece of advice that shows just a little humble brag that shows "In my 27 years of property management, this is the thing that I've learned." [00:31:30] Okay, little humble brag. And at the end, it goes, "if you want to learn more, comment, the word guide below," or if you're on YouTube, you'd be like, "go down into the description and click the link. And then blah, blah, blah." And it just ends up right down your sales funnel, maybe to a low ticket offer, maybe an ebook that you wrote something like that. [00:31:45] And the next thing, you've 10xed profits. You've 10x revenue. You're selling a course on property management while writing a book on property management, while having a podcast on property management, while being a property manager, all of it at the same time. And then you got to hire a new accountant because you got too many write offs. [00:31:59] Like you don't have enough time to pay your taxes. You got to get too much money. That's it. That's how this works. And that's about what I just explained to you. It's just the difference between getting it and not getting it, being relevant and not being relevant. And so a lot of people, what they're, they listen to me and they always make me out to be the bad guy because cause what I do is I tell people, no one cares about you. And no one likes to hear that. They like to think that the rest of the world cares about property managers. But like you said, no one's following plumbers. Right. But if I was a plumber, I would do the same thing, "man, I walked into this house and this toilet had exploded and just have an image of it." [00:32:30] And it'd be like, "okay, I need to hear what this is." "And then a monster crawled out of the toilet." I'm just kidding. And like, I would just, that's what I would do just to keep people's attention.  [00:32:37] Jason: So for those listening, can we qualify you a little bit related to social media, because you've got a good following? [00:32:43] You've got a sizable business because people listening if they don't know who you are, I want them to recognize you're very qualified to talk about this. Not so humble brag about yourself for a second.  [00:32:55] Michael: I have a men of action. We have 1600 clients that have gone through there. [00:32:58] 200 video testimonials if you go on the school server. And also we have a free community a free school server. What's about 43-4,500 guys in there. You're welcome to message. One of the things that I've told people is that if I join a group and they tell me not to talk to the other people in the group, I know this is a scam. [00:33:12] You'll notice sometimes with MLMs, you'll see that. I implore you to talk to anyone, any client that's ever gone through my program and they will tell you how incredibly satisfied they were. Also you, Jason, I'm sure you've seen my course is extremely comprehensive. It's about 65 hours long. That doesn't even include the live calls. [00:33:29] And then also there's a book, there's a required book list that you have to read in order to go through the course.  [00:33:33] Jason: I'll tell you right now, like an eight figure business for you.  [00:33:36] Michael: Just today, we've done eight figures in total, but as of this month, this is the first month we'll recross the mark. [00:33:42] It was what? 833 a month or something like that. We cross that this month. So that's about, yeah. So we're doing about a little bit under eight figures in revenue per year.  [00:33:50] Jason: This is more than any property managers probably listened to my show. So just for perspective. Okay. Yeah. Got it.  [00:33:57] Michael: Yeah. I mean, because coaching is scalable. [00:34:00] That's the reason why. And like the other thing I want you guys understand is a lot of people got into real estate because they were trying to find a scalable way of making income and they're using you to make their lives scalable. So if you guys read, buy back your time by Dan Martell, they're paying you to buy back their time as real estate owners. [00:34:15] That's what their job is. And essentially you're going to eventually do the same thing. You're going to pay someone to buy back your time from them. So the main difference, and I'm sure many of you entrepreneurs already know this, but. When you start off in the workforce, you are trading your time for money. [00:34:28] You're working at Chick fil A or McDonald's and you're being paying an hourly salary later on. You're trading your money for time. I pay one guy. He comes into my house. He turns on my computer, he turns on my camera, he turns on my lights, he sits me down, and then he just starts yelling at me to talk about certain subjects, and I have no idea, I'm just like, drinking coffee, and I'm like, what up, and he goes, "what do you think about this?" And I'm like, "oh man, let me tell you something, and then they record it," and then it's just a reaction video, and I do nothing. [00:34:53] I pay to get my time back. I have several editors that live in Romania and Nigeria and all these, because I don't want to edit videos anymore. I used to be a video editor and a videographer. I don't want to do it anymore. I pay one place to do the live editing for my podcast. I don't want to do that anymore. [00:35:07] I pay to get my time back. For those of you who are considering hiring a personal assistant, once again, highly recommend Dan Martell's book, Buy Back Your Time. In the book, he talks about taking your yearly salary and divided by 8, 000. And that's what you pay the guy hourly. Take your yearly salary, how much you make in a year, your yearly income divided by 8, 000. [00:35:24] That's it. They go over the reason why, but it ends up becoming like a 40 hour work week. You end up paying him one, you pay him half of what one hourly wage for years. So if your time is worth a thousand dollars an hour, you might pay him 500 an hour to get certain things done for your life. And one of my favorite sayings in that book is something done 80 percent right is 100 percent awesome. [00:35:43] And like, it was one of the hardest things to give up. The guy who does my timestamps, that was really hard. I love doing timestamps because timestamps were giving me clips and those clips would go viral and the virality would make me money, but I had to give that up. And eventually you're going to give up all these processes. [00:35:57] Another thing I'll explain for you guys who are entrepreneurs, one of the greatest tools you will ever find is an app called loom. Look up loom. What loom is allows you to make videos, but the video it's like, it's showing the screen on your phone or it's showing the screen on your computer while they're listening to your voice and you send it to your person. [00:36:12] So like, for instance, I do mass invites for certain events that I do. So I'll go on loom and I'll have a guy, maybe he speaks you know, Farsi or maybe this guy speaks like his English. Isn't that great? What I'll do is I'll go through my invite slowly and I'll do it like for 30 minutes, I'll just do invites and I'll show so he can see what it looks like. [00:36:28] And then I send it to him and then he looks at it and he has no questions. And my invites are done like that. Loom is one of the greatest way of passing along SOPs to people and then using them in order to buy back your time. So understanding all these concepts, it makes you more relevant, makes you more competent. [00:36:43] It gives you higher status. It gives you more access. And these are the things that you're looking for. In any walk of life, but especially in something like property management and you guys also understand as property managers Your job isn't sexy So what you have to do is you have to show the sexy parts of your job, right? [00:36:57] When I my favorite one are accountants and dentists. They're not my friend my friends who are dentists who know what they're doing, they show the fucking horror job teeth, You know car accident, messed up teeth, meth addict, whatever, and then they get the teeth back to 100%. And like me, as someone who doesn't care that much about dentistry, I'm just like staring like, "Oh my God, that was incredible." [00:37:17] Yeah. what you do is you figure out people's primary driver emotion and their biggest fear. And then from those things, from the primary driver emotion and their biggest fear and from those things then you make your content attacking those primary driver emotions and those biggest fears, okay. And when you do so it doesn't make any difference if you're an accountant It doesn't make any difference if you're a property manager doesn't make any difference what it is that you sell people will watch and they will be obsessed. [00:37:42] My brother, he watches videos of horseshoes. They basically, you know, they shave off the end of the horse's hoof and then they put the shoes on. He said it's like the most relaxing thing in the world to watch. And I wouldn't even think about that, but why is it? It's like something we don't even think about that much, but it's pretty amazing. [00:37:56] Like when you see, it's like very relaxing to watch stuff like that. You can do stuff like that.  [00:38:00] Jason: There's a guy that's viral for just, he finds distressed houses. And he just cleans up their lawn and the sidewalk. He's like, "Hey, could I mow your lawn? And it's like relaxing to watch the transformation." [00:38:12] Yeah.  [00:38:12] Michael: Another one that's great was if you guys watch the early Ryan Pineda stuff, what was he doing? He was flipping couches. He would find crappy couches, clean them up, and then he would sell them again. And he made a living from flipping couches. There's just all these different things. And like the concept of it sounds so boring, but I want to watch someone do it. [00:38:28] Right. It was the one where you'd buy those storage units and then you'd see whatever's in this. Oh, I forgot what that was. It was pawn shop, pawn stars or something where the people would buy storage units and open up in there. And there's like, sometimes there'd be nothing in the storage unit. Sometimes there'd be like a dead body in there or some crazy shit. [00:38:41] Like they find like a skull and like all of a sudden. Bag full of money. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, you guys know the producers were putting that bag of money in there, right? Like that wasn't real. That wasn't real.  [00:38:52] Jason: Reality TV isn't real either. You like to say social media isn't real and that's okay or something. [00:38:58] Michael: So rule number four in men of action is social media is fake and I'm okay with that because the money's real. And the world isn't fair. And I'm okay with that.  [00:39:05] Jason: Yeah.  [00:39:06] Michael: The world isn't fair and I'm okay with it. Rule number four in a, in social and of action is about acceptance. It's about accepting the world the way it is and never being a victim. [00:39:14] It's sure things are hard for you, but you're never a victim. You might be too short. English might not be your first language and you're having a hard time speaking it. You might be born poor. You might be born with some kind of ailment or disability that you feel like holds you back, but that's where you are. [00:39:27] You start from where you are. And then you create from there. Okay. You were saying something before about how you notice like all these books kind of converge in to the same place, three books that have nothing to do with each other, but it's the same concept. Ready? The power of now by Eckhart Tolle, the subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson and sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. [00:39:45] You're like, wait a second. It's all the same thing. It's all the same. It's all this. I get to choose how react. I get to tell myself stories that change my behavior. It's all three of these books that have nothing to do with each other end up being the same book, not exactly the same book, but similar books. [00:40:00] Because once you get to the highest levels of enlightenment, transcendence, goal oriented communication ends up being the same thing for everyone.  [00:40:07] Jason: There's a one of my favorite books is by Byron Katie called Loving What Is. And basically, she takes you through this process of just asking yourself these four sort of questions to challenge your current view of reality. [00:40:21] And it takes you out of this victim sort of view. It's very much like cognitive behavioral therapy, maybe, or something like this, right? Yes. Or CBT or something. But yeah, so asking this question, is this belief that I have actually true? And a lot of our beliefs that we're holding on to that are holding us back. [00:40:36] And like, if we're not getting results in life, it's because we currently have beliefs that are not working for us. And so, if you see people that things are working well for them, even though you think, like, somebody might be watching right now going, "Michael is completely full of shit. He's throwing out all these crazy stuff and he's, he worked at a strip club" and somebody's like, so against that or whatever. [00:40:56] They're like their own stumbling block and they're in their way and they won't pay attention to the truth or the things that you're sharing that are good because they're so stuck on everything in the universe having to look a certain way that they are not even open to receiving more, they're not willing to challenge their own thinking. [00:41:13] They're not going to progress. They're going to stay stuck.  [00:41:16] Michael: They identify more with their identity than they identify with success.  [00:41:20] Jason: Yeah. Good way of saying it. And I love how you talked about kind of these currencies. One of my mentors in the past was Alex Charfen. And he's from here in the Austin area as well. [00:41:30] And he was talking about time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. He calls the five currencies. And Hormozi went through Alex Charfen's like coaching with me. I met Layla and Alex in this. And one of the things that I then saw Alex talk about these currencies. But what I thought was interesting is Alex said the most significant of those five currencies in order to scale and grow your business is focus. [00:41:52] It's the most important to scale, grow a company. And then Dan Martell, I once saw him teach this framework that was, it was like about the power of one. He's like, "the most effective business is a business has one sales funnel, one product, one..." it was like all ones, like, And I see property managers, a lot of times they'll try and like start five different businesses. [00:42:14] They're like, I'm going to start a cleaning company, a maintenance company, like all these other things.because they're complimentary real estate brokerage. And then they wonder why none of them are growing because they lack focus. And so all these things kind of converge, making sure that we have focus. [00:42:28] You also mentioned Dan Martell, who I think is a brilliant entrepreneur, he generally was coaching like software companies, SAS companies to help them grow and scale, but his stuff's applicable to coaching businesses. I've noticed it's applicable to anything because the principles are valid. [00:42:44] And one of the things I've had my clients do to get them to that next level, to basically get their time back is to have them do a time study to where they become accountable for their time, which things are positive and which things are negative, like plus or minus, which things give them energy in life and which things take it away in their own business. [00:43:00] And I have them do this like usually once a quarter. And when I did my first time study, I realized I was doing like four hours of podcast production in a week. It all added up and I was like, holy shit. So then I just hired a company to do it. It was a no brainer to let that go because it was stupid at that point for me to hold on to that once I could see that challenge. [00:43:20] And you mentioned loom, awesome tool for like one of my favorite tools, like it, which is next level. It's like loom, but it's Wistia's video recorder. It lets you actually record the screen and yourself. And then after the recordings made. You can then have it mid recording. You can switch which parts are showing and have segues between the two. [00:43:42] And it's super fast. It's like super cool. But we use tools like that.  [00:43:46] Michael: Productivity. Yeah, definitely.  [00:43:47] Jason: Yeah. So, I love all these ideas for collapsing time. Michael has dropped several awesome tools, knowledge bombs, ideas for those that are listening and also how to leverage content social media wise. [00:43:59] So what you know, if we were to bring this full circle what would you say is the most important thing that maybe business owners or property managers could be doing to scale and grow their business?  [00:44:13] Michael: Right now? Again, one more time. It is: understand, your ability to grow is based on your perceived status, your perceived trustworthiness, your perceived know how. Not your actual know how. Like, I can tell you so many guys that I know that are real estate experts on YouTube. And then I have my friends of mine that are real estate agents. And they're like, "that guy doesn't know shit." And I'm like, "no, he's coaching the white belts." That's the why, the reason why he says the things that he says. [00:44:39] And they have a hard time dealing with it. So, understanding that concept. And then. You have to leave yourself. You have to subvert your own ego, go on places like TikTok or Instagram places you'd never think to go to, and then look at who's going viral, who's in your exact industry, and you're going to need to take pieces from what you see. [00:44:56] Like, what are the kinds of videos that do really well? And you're going to be able to find those very quickly. You can literally right now would go on Tik Tok and look up property management and you'll find a bunch of videos, like just pick the ones that go the most viral or a real estate, a podcast, and then pick the topics that go the most viral and just blatantly steal them, steal, blatantly steal everything. [00:45:19] You in the beginning, no creativity necessary, just steal. Okay, and you do that for a while and then you start to sort of get your footing And then you start to realize wait a second, I've been running ads and my ROAS per dollar my ads is x 1. 2 or 2. 0 or whatever but in organic my cost per lead is like nothing because my organic traffic, it costs me so much less to get a lead. [00:45:44] It's incredible. Then I go on someone else's podcast because my content is getting better and better. And then all of a sudden now, you know, Rich Summers and Ryan Pineda want me to come on their show to talk about, you know, maybe I'm on ice coffee hour or whatever, talking about real estate. [00:45:58] And then I get on bigger and bigger shows and now my cost per lead decreases even more because I just had this simple understanding that the way it works is my perceived status my perceived know how and my perceived trustworthiness to other people are the reasons why people will buy my product. Now you may already obviously everyone who's listened to this if you have any success in property management You already have your funnel is probably dealing with either word of mouth shaking hands, or it's dealing with some sort of paid advertisement, but I implore you try organic. Try to use organic and then organic meaning using Instagram posts or Facebook posts. [00:46:33] And then once you do that, try to take your best content and turn your best content in an advertisement and promote those, promote that content. That's something we've also been doing. And if you want examples on everything I just said, a great book, a great place to start is the 100 million offer series by Alex Hormozi. He goes over every single thing that I just talked about. It's absolutely fantastic. It's really great stuff. The difference is with my program, MOA, we're a little bit more bespoke for what it is exactly that you're doing. But we're mostly talk about networking. And then the other thing is, When you actually meet that person in person that you want to work with, do you come off as a fan boy? [00:47:06] Do you come off as too eager? Do you, does your body language show signs of neediness or signs of low status? Are these things that you can watch? And then how do you figure that out? You watch yourself on camera. Do you watch yourself on other people's podcasts? Because that's one of the things is like as social media grows and more people are exposed to more people, just remember like if you consider in the plasticine, you know, we live in hunter gatherer societies of 150 people and now we can legitimately have a hundred thousand friends on social media in that kind of situation because we're exposed to more people, we are more attuned to status, physical appearance, et cetera. And so now what happens is humans essentially become more shallow. [00:47:46] They become more attuned to other people's status and rightly or wrongly. Is it a negative commentary on humans? Yes, it probably is, but it's the world you live on. And if you want to get rich, you need to listen to what I'm saying. And if what I'm saying, offends you, get ready to stay poor. Like, I'm sorry. [00:48:01] If you guys are listening to this right now, and you're like, "No, social media is going to go away and we're going to go back to walking up to doors and do an email blast and buying banner ads." If that's what you think, go back to your AOL. com email and just keep believing that's the case. [00:48:16] It's all about the handshake. It's like, if that's what you believe, that's fine. But for the rest of you who are ready to understand that if you think things are bad, I got news for you. They're only going to get worse. Meaning people aren't going to put their phones down at dinner. People aren't going to take fewer photos. [00:48:30] People. I was reading something. It was like, like in one day, now more photos are taken in like an hour than were taken during the entire year of 1985 or something like that. It was like the amount of photographic and video data that's uploaded in one hour exceeds the total photographs taken in an entire year back in the 1980s. [00:48:49] Some absurd number like that. If you think things are going in one direction, things are getting faster. They're more virtual. They're more digital. Digital, they're going to be controlled by artificial intelligence and they're going to be more scalable. You need to get on that train. The train is leaving. [00:49:05] You need to get on the train. Now, if you don't want to get on the train, that's fine, but notice as the world passes you by and the rate at which it passes you by only increases every year. If you want to learn about that, read Ray Kurzweil series called the singularity is near, and you can see how he talks about the rate of change is increasing, and then the rate of change is also increasing. [00:49:24] Jason: Okay, so this is awesome stuff. So Michael one thing I want to point out for those that are listening. Because I think you've sold your Men of Action short a little bit. So I'm gonna, I want to say something about it because what I think is in, what people think is in there probably based on what you're saying is it's a bunch of social media stuff and it's like how to, maybe how t

Abigail, (Abby), Stason is all that. Abby grew up in New Jersey and eventually served in a 20-year career with Wall Street firms including Meryl Lynch. She was a sales leader and worked to train and supervise brokers.   Eventually, she decided to leave the financial world and begin her own company, Abigail Stason LLC., to teach people about skill building and authenticity. Today she works with individuals, teams and companies to help them become more authentic and truer to what they do.   Abby and I get to have a good conversation all about authenticity and truth. We discuss the many complexities around truth and authentic behavior that we face today. At one point I ask Abby if she feels that our world regarding truth and being authentic is more complex today than in the past. Her answer is quite interesting. Listen and see what you think.   About the Guest:   Abigail “Abby” Stason (she/her/hers) is a master teacher and skill builder. A former Wall Street executive, in 2010, Abby left a 19-year career to become an entrepreneur. She is passionate about championing equality and human development. Abby uses neuroscience to convert abstract learning concepts into pragmatic practices that apply in our day-to-day world.   Abby equips human beings and leaders with behavioral skills for a modern world and global gig economy. Abby is the author of Evolution Revolution: Conscious Leadership In An Information Age, a handbook of human and leadership development skills that she converted to e-learning programs. Her mission is to be an exceptional partner to the human race and planet and to facilitate global consciousness.   Abby enjoys the outdoors in all forms: hiking, cycling, snowshoeing, and swimming. You will find her strolling through a farmers' market for fresh produce to experiment with new recipes or at a coffee shop enjoying a matcha latte. She also volunteers for her teacher's foundation, the Gangaji Foundation Prison Program.   Ways to connect with Abigail:   https://abigailstason.com https://consciousleadership.online/home https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigailstason/   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/   https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, welcome once again to unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. And from my perspective, the unexpected part is what makes it the most fun. We get to do all sorts of unexpected things from time to time, and we'll see what happens with our guest this week, Abby Stason, who is a master teacher and is very much involved in dealing with the world of humanity and being very concerned about people, and I don't want to give any more away, because I think it'll be a whole lot more fun to hear it from her. So, Abby, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Abby Stason ** 01:57 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, and you know, I just lit up. Also when you said unexpected, the unexpected happens when we're inclusive and we don't know what's going to happen, and that's where the interesting stuff happens. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 02:11 that's what makes it the most fun. I love telling a story about one person that was on our podcast a long time ago now, gosh, almost two years ago, he was a software engineer, and he lives in Southern California, in an area called Dana Point loves to swim in the ocean. And he, while we were talking, talked about the fact that he went in the ocean once in the winter, and he decided after that that he was going to swim every every chance he got in the ocean, whether it was winter or summer. And I asked him about being afraid in the in the winter, and he said, Well, it was a little bit daunting. The first time I went into the water, it was 55 degrees. And he said, I noticed that the closer I got to the water, the slower I moved, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do this. And then he finally just said, I'm going to bite the bullet and do it. And he jumped in. He said it was only a couple seconds. He was used to it, and he's been swimming in the water, even in the winter without a wetsuit, ever since, and he swum nose to nose with dolphins and other things like that. So he's had a lot of fun doing it, but then that led to a 10 minute discussion between us on the whole subject of fear, which is not anything that either of us anticipated talking about. So the unexpected is definitely a part of what we   Abby Stason ** 03:34 do. Yeah, and I applaud him. I would need a wetsuit to do that, yeah, to overcome my fear. I need a wet suit. And you know, I appreciate you always in the discussions we've had and how you hold it, this is an inclusion and diversity can be a heavy topic, but I appreciate how you hold it lightly. And you know, let's have some fun, because if we take it all too seriously, that's when we get a little bit in our own ways.   Michael Hingson ** 04:02 Well, yeah, I think the problem also is that people take it, I won't say way too seriously, but they take it in a way where it ends up really being much more divisive or non inclusive, or less diverse. I just had a conversation with someone who is a guest on our podcast, and we were talking about disabilities, and I said the biggest problem that I see is that people with disabilities are not really included in the conversation in so many different ways. We we we don't talk about disabilities, we don't talk about people with disabilities, and we're left out. And I've said, I said to him, one of the things that I've heard from a few people who have been on experts on diversity, is, but disability is it starts with this. It's not you're it is not the same. I. Yeah, and my point is, disability exactly is the same, because every single person on the planet has a disability, and reality is so disability starts with dis, so does disciple, so does discrete, so does discern, and yet we don't regard those in a negative context. So the reality is, we can re evaluate and change how we view some of the words that we use. And as I've indicated to people on this podcast as well, every person on the planet has a disability, and I can make that case very, very well. We won't spend a lot of time on that here, but I could make that case and point out that everyone has a disability of some sort.   Abby Stason ** 05:40 I would echo that. That, yeah, that's, that's well said, Actually, and I'm pretty appreciating what I'm learning already, of course. But yeah, you know, agreed. And can we just see each other as humans? Just we're all humans. Disability   Michael Hingson ** 05:56 really needs to be viewed as not some thing that a few people have that makes them less than us, but disability is a characteristic that manifests itself differently, but for everyone you know, and the argument that I make is most all of you are light dependent, and from my perspective, that makes you awfully disabled compared to me, because I don't have to worry about whether the lights are on and, and the reality is, though, that your disability is covered up by light bulbs and by so many other ways that light on demand is made available today and, and that's fine, but don't knock the rest of us just because We don't happen to have the problem that you do when you think that you're superior, because you can go turn a flashlight on, or start a flashlight on a phone if, if power goes out, that works only if you have the device. And so your devices cover up your disability, but doesn't change the fact that it's there. Yeah, and,   Abby Stason ** 07:00 and, you know, society tries to tell us what ability or disability is. What if we just flip those? Yeah, you know, what if we what if we just flip those? Because that's where we have to get past societal conditioning. Who, who decides who to say, who's disabled or not? I mean, yeah, we're all human beings, if we can look past the surface to see that we have, you know, we're all the same. And, yeah, to get past societal conditioning on who we say is better than less than or what the expectations are, you know, and how we set up our lives and systems around that. I think it's a it's a good inquiry and a good investigation, and something for us all to continue to talk about and to bring to light.   Michael Hingson ** 07:49 Yeah, I think it is something that's very important to do, and hopefully more of us will do it over time. Well,   Abby Stason ** 07:55 that's why you know what you're up to is so important, and you inviting me into this discussion and others into the discussion you're leading away with it. So I appreciate being here, and I'm proud to be sitting here next to you over technology. Well, thank   Michael Hingson ** 08:10 you. It's good to have this opportunity and get a chance to visit. Tell me a little bit about the early Abbey, growing up and all that stuff.   Abby Stason ** 08:18 Yeah, the early Abbey, the early Abbey. That'd   Michael Hingson ** 08:21 be a great TV that's a great title for a TV or radio show, the early Abbey. I was watching on I was watching on TV, looking at a guide, and there was a show, and my wife and I used to watch it, The New Adventures of Old Christine. So we can talk about the early Abbey.   Abby Stason ** 08:40 The early Abby, there's a bit of, you know, it's a bit of excitement, a bit of drama, a bit of sadness, but, you know, I was born and raised, am I going to go through my entire life to end here? Whatever   Michael Hingson ** 08:51 you'd like to Yeah, yeah,   Abby Stason ** 08:53 I was born and raised in New Jersey, and you know, where, very early age, where I knew that, you know, one thing that I always loved is the truth. I loved hearing the truth no matter what it is, whether it's, you know, I'll use these words, good, bad, or whatever. But I love the truth. And I noticed that people around me didn't love the truth. So I at, you know, at times I kind of, you know, I was active, I had a healthy life, and all that. But one thing that in throughout my lifetime, which I'm bringing this up, because it brings me to today, is that I was penalized for telling the truth. It wasn't popular for telling the truth, you know, and and I really struggled with that. I mean, I'm a privileged person, and I always, yeah, I always had an internal disconnect with that. But I love the truth no matter what it is. And I find myself today now just getting very excited about the truth, the truth in myself. You know, when I screw things up to the truth and what's happening anywhere to the truth around inclusion? And diversity? Yeah, so it was pretty, I pretty, pretty much compacted myself and didn't align with who I was, because it wasn't always comfortable to tell the truth. Because, you know, to, you know, I'm LGBTQ, I'm a woman's you know, if you're in a environment where being a female, you're suppressed, and you try to tell the truth about what you want, or if you try to tell the truth that you're in love with someone of the same sex, you know, that was penalized. So I really struggled as a youth trying to tell the truth. And so today we come full circle. I'm just, you know the truth is it for me, I'm, you know, I love the truth. So you know, admitting when I make mistakes, and telling the truth about that to the truth of what's happening in the world, or any of it, and not calling it, any of it, good, bad, right, wrong, you know. And I spent, you know, 20 years on Wall Street, and you can imagine truth telling, talk about truth Yeah, you know, or lack thereof, yeah, right. Truth telling in Wall Street was, was something of a, you know, yeah, kind of like avoiding the truth a little bit the corporate world can be, you know, lifted to an art form, you know what I mean. So that's why I always kind of grappled with that. And, you know, and that's one of the reasons I left was to, you know, really start telling the truth. And what it comes down to is being more conscious. In essence,   Michael Hingson ** 11:27 where in New Jersey are you from?   Abby Stason ** 11:29 I am from, you know, a very small town. Everyone says Now everyone I'm listening on this is probably she doesn't have an accent, although some people will pick up sliced trace, traces of so I can hear a little, yeah, I was just gonna say you're probably picking up on it. I'm from a very small town in Warren County New Jersey called Belvidere. Okay, right on the Delaware River, right? Yeah, okay. I lived   Michael Hingson ** 11:51 in, I lived in Westfield for six years. Oh, great, yeah.   Abby Stason ** 11:54 So Westfield, so, you know, you know, you know Belvedere, and you know some people, it's not like Newark for the viewers listening, and it's the farmland of New Jersey. And, you know, we used to go sleigh riding, and lakes would freeze over. We'd go ice skating and all that. We never locked the doors. Went to the shore every year.   Michael Hingson ** 12:15 What's, what's really funny about Westfield for me is that before we moved there, we had selected property and then chose to build a house, because my wife was in a wheelchair her whole life, and so we chose to build a house, because if you build a house, it really doesn't cost a lot more for access than it does just to build the house. If you buy a house and modify it, it costs a bunch of money. Yeah, the the only, the only extra expense we had was that it had to be a two story house, because that's what the development had. So we did spend 15,000 extra dollars in the construction of the house to put it in elevator. But beyond that, you know, it didn't cost more. But still, when we were once, we selected the property and we were back in California telling people where we were going to live and all that. I had never heard of Westfield before we went there. But I was amazed at the number of people who knew about Westfield New Jersey here in California.   Abby Stason ** 13:12 Well, so I so when it then fast forward. I was working in lower Manhattan, you know, after 911 which, you know, obviously, yeah, so I lived in Summit, New Jersey, Ah, okay, but yeah, so I lived in Summit, took the train to Hoboken and then took the ferry over to the ferry, yeah, her open edge center, yeah. What?   Michael Hingson ** 13:33 What did you do on Wall Street?   Abby Stason ** 13:37 I was in sales leadership, you know, basically in charge of brokers, if you will. You know, help, you know, supporting them, hiring, firing, you know, helping clients with issues, anything you can imagine. So   Michael Hingson ** 13:52 you must have had a lot of fun dealing with people and the truth from time to time.   Abby Stason ** 13:58 Well, you know, yeah, you know was, it was, so you everyone's gonna on the call, will probably stereotype me a little bit, and being on Wall Street, and that's quite all right, because it's, it's the stereotyping is a little bit. But, you know, it's an exciting industry, yeah, it's got a little bit of its warts on it. You know, one of the things that was really tough was being a woman. So I left Wall Street in 2010 so, you know, it was 19 years on Wall Street. It was pretty tough to be consistently the only woman in the room. So I really had to take care of myself. And, you know, meet kind of the challenges that came with that sometimes It'd be my meeting and I'd be asked to get coffee because I'm the female, or I'd be asked to take notes because I'm the female, you know. So that got a little bit tiring, but I never became a victim of that. Victim, any of us in an underrepresented group of any kind. It's easy to go to victim, but I chose not to do that.   Michael Hingson ** 14:58 That's really the issue. Is. And it's a matter of, are you going to be a victim or not? And that's of course, what happens so often, is that that we seem to learn to be a victim, rather than recognizing that we don't need to be. We discover, for all too often, that people just decide to be a victim and they don't need to be a victim.   Abby Stason ** 15:22 Yeah, you know, it's because you, because we, you, we are a little bit victims. But there's, there's an essence of going for victimhood, you know, unnecessarily. So it's, rather than whining about it, it's understanding that this is the reality that I live in. And so how can I meet this. How can I take care of myself? You know, how can I respond with ability versus reacting, you know? And, you know, bringing in other underrepresented groups, I mean, certainly you come across that same type of we just talked about disabled people and, you know, there's black people and, you know, underrepresented groups, it's easy to go to victim but I encourage people, and I never got victim me about it. It's just like this is a reality I live in. What can I do and how can I spark a greater discussion? Are people available for a different discussion around this? If not? Okay, but just keep going.   Michael Hingson ** 16:18 Well, it gets back to the whole thing we talked about earlier, about disabilities and so on, because so many people, like people who are blind, specifically people who become blind later in life, grow up sighted and in an environment that says you're not whole if you can't fully see. And all too often, they end up being victims or view themselves as victims and don't recognize that. Okay? So they're still traveling down the road of life, maybe in a different lane, but you're still going down the road of life, and you can learn to do and choose to do all the things that you could do before. It's very rare that there isn't something that a person who is blind can't do, that a person with eyesight can. Yeah, probably blind people aren't most likely going to be football players. However, being football strategists is another story, yes, and and so sometimes exactly what we do changes. But on the other hand, like I said, the whole issue of light dependence, I'll, I'll put my ability to understand a lot of my surroundings up against what most people can or or don't do in terms of understanding their surroundings, because people don't learn to really observe, whereas it's part of my way of life.   Abby Stason ** 17:47 Yes, and it's an opportunity to to ask, How can I cultivate resilience? You know, if I can use a such any situation to strengthen my resilience, then that's, you know, you know, talk about having fun, you know, it's, you know, I'm not making light of any situation. But if I can cultivate more resilience and learn, it's a you know, I matured really quickly. You know what I mean? You know, I grew up really quickly, which was delightful, right? It was delightful. And, you know, I want to say too, that working on Wall Street as a leader was extremely satisfying from the front. So people are people are people. So one of the things I love doing is human development, so I got to do that a lot on Wall Street. So I was really pleased with my ability to impact people's lives, even on Wall Street well.   Michael Hingson ** 18:40 And the reality is that the people on Wall Street, by and large, were very intelligent, very creative, very bright people, and had some real challenges and pressures to live up to in order to do the things that they do. So I can understand where the environment developed from, although, as you point out, the issue of getting people to grow and recognizing that a female can can do things as well is, is something that some people accept and some people don't. But that's not just Wall Street that, unfortunately, is a guy thing that has to change. Well,   Abby Stason ** 19:19 I think it's, it is, yeah, it's a guy thing, and it's, you know, we all can change to see, you know, we are just human beings. Because actually, gender and race are just social constructs. Actually, a lot of the social conditioning that comes with anything that we stereotype has a lot of baggage to it. Can have baggage, and we're not align with ourselves, and we're trying to fit into society's mold. And conditioning is useful, but if left uninvestigated, yeah, you know, it's, you know, it's not as much fun, no, right? Because, like, we can see this wants to change, but yet we keep doing the same thing, and that's just stuck, stuck. Yes,   Michael Hingson ** 20:00 I was watching a commercial last night about, well, this woman comes on and she's talking about Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, but he was not the first baseball player of color, if you will. And talked about the Negro League and that, there's a whole podcast about that now, which I haven't listened to yet, but I can relate to being different than most people. And also, I'm well aware of the Negro League, which it was called, and and appreciate it and look forward to learning more about it, because I believe talent is talent, wherever it comes from.   Abby Stason ** 20:39 Yeah. And this notion of, you know, can I be true to myself, no matter what? You know, can I be really true to myself, you know, with who I am, and can I be real no matter what? And in some places, to be real means I will scare the heck out of people, you know, again, for the biases, you know, if I show up as a strong female, that's the success, like ability bias is negative for women and positive for men. So then I start scaring people. So then I need to stay conscious to that, to see how I'm being received, and where's the conversation headed, and how can we connect beyond Yeah, how   Michael Hingson ** 21:18 do we help people grow?   Abby Stason ** 21:19 Yeah, that's right, it's an opposite opportunity that's really well said. It's an opportunity to stretch and grow.   Michael Hingson ** 21:24 So what did you do after you left Wall Street?   Abby Stason ** 21:27 Well, so I, you know, and going back to what I was saying, what I love doing was, you know, I got results because you want to, you know, you want to have positive results and disciplined business practices, takes care of the day to day. But what I really loved doing was leading and developing people, mentoring, coaching, developing human beings. You know, I have no problem developing someone younger than me, them going off to be a CEO and work for them. So I decided to follow that passion. I was in the Bay Area. Wanted to stay, so I leapt, you know, took the leap. I leapt off the cliff, then started my own practice of basically teach us more of a teacher than a coach. I basically teach people skills around everything we're talking about. You talked about fear earlier, etc, but that's really satisfying for me, because that's what I love to do. I consider myself a Constant Learner.   Michael Hingson ** 22:22 And where do you live today?   Abby Stason ** 22:24 Now, I live in Oregon. Okay, I'm in Southern Oregon, so that's   Michael Hingson ** 22:29 a little bit away from Wall Street. Yes, it's a long walk, but that's okay. So you and what does your business do today?   Abby Stason ** 22:46 Yeah, so basically, I teach people skills, you know, I do one on one sessions. I do team workshops. I do I help companies with their cultures and team workshops. I have an E learning platform. I have a whole curriculum that I teach people skills, specifically skills to navigate the human condition you were just talking about. And I read, or, excuse me, listen to that podcast about the gentleman at Dana. Point is really interesting. So like him, you know, overcoming his fear? Well, we have fear throughout the day, so fear is a big driver of our behavior. So that's something that I teach, is how to overcome fear. And you know, in short, I'm sharing my journey for my own development, my own human development. Here's what I've learned, here's the skill I've learned, and here's what worked for me. And also I clients kept asking me questions, how do I do this? How do I do that? So finally, one client said, you know, I want, I don't want another catch phrase. I want frameworks. I want skills. I'm like, You got it here. I am well.   Michael Hingson ** 23:46 And the fact is that if you really look at fear, most things that we fear or are afraid of never come to the light of day. They're not they're not real. We are. We're really good at creating fear out of nothing and and it really is nothing, and we we don't step back enough, or we don't learn, as I describe it, how not to be blinded by fear, especially when it's unexpected things that come up that can really be perilous. We really, those are the times that we really need to keep our wits about us. And the reality is, we can do that. Yeah,   Abby Stason ** 24:26 yes, and you're right. Wait the human. You know, humans are wacky, wackiest species on the planet. We are great, and we are the wackiest. I put myself at the top of the list. I mean, we will, you know, this is the mind body connection. We will actually create a fear response in our physiology based on some story we're telling ourselves. Yeah, we we know this scientifically. So it's like, why would we ever do this? Like, I'm looking at you. You're in your home. I'm looking at me. I'm in my home. You know, we're both. Safe. There's no reason for us to be fear. We're to be fearful. You know, we get along great. But you know what we do is we make up stories in our head, and then we go into a real fear response, and then our behavior comes from that. We know why that is. It's exciting. We live in exciting times because we know now I get very excited. As you can tell, is we know now, as opposed to even 1015, 20 years ago, how our brains and our biology impact our behavior like it's it's no more a mystery to us, and we're going to get just continue to get more and more informed about that, including why we exclude people, and why we treat people of different colors or disabled people differently? So I think we're in an exciting time   Michael Hingson ** 25:46 well, and the reality is that a lot of the well, most of the time that we treat people differently is because we don't understand, and to some degree, or for some people, to a large degree, we don't want to understand. We don't want to be as, as people would say, confronted with the facts. Don't confuse me with the facts. That's what I believe. Is what I want to believe. And and there are issues with that that really should allow us to move beyond it and recognize that we all have gifts. As I've said, the thing is, disability does not mean a lack of ability, and disability is truly a characteristic that we all have that manifests itself in different ways for different people.   Abby Stason ** 26:37 Absolutely, and you know when we you know, when you see someone who's disabled, someone who's different than you, we immediately go into us. Our brains go into us versus them, and then we also assign all of the behaviors of those biases that we've been taught, whether they are accurate or not. So I'd love the reframe you were talking about earlier, about, you know, disabled people, they really have abilities, but we have stereotypes about disabled people. We have stereotypes about women, we have stereotypes about men, we have stereotypes from about blacks, any, you know, any of it. And it's all just this old wiring, which is which I find exciting, because we can actually rewire that.   Michael Hingson ** 27:24 Yep, unfortunately, we grow up learning one way to wire, and it is something that we can change and we should change. Yes, it's also a growth issue, because for years, people thought what they did about disability or people who have disabilities. And the fact is that as we evolve, hopefully we recognize that our own views are not really necessarily totally accurate, and we should change them and be a lot more inclusive than we tend to be. Yes,   Abby Stason ** 28:00 and that takes this is where conscious, you know, being conscious and aware of my self as I see someone who's different than me, requires me almost to stop and pause for a split second to interrupt any kind of conditioning that comes In. So this is where we can make more space for humanity, and I'm not. It doesn't mean slowing down. It just means stopping and saying, Okay, I'm looking at this person. What are the stories I have running? What are the biases I have running? And can I let those go and make different associations, or be open to actually get to know this person before I make any judgments about them, yeah, you know. So that interrupts the brain wiring, you know. And I love our brains. If we didn't have conditioning, we wouldn't be able to live, you know, if we didn't have social conditioning, you know, social conditioning is useful. For instance, we have stop signs and street lights and other norms that really help us get through our day to day. We wear uniforms. You know, imagine walking into a hospital and seeing everyone dressed like ranchers. I don't know. You know people. You know cowboys. You mean they're not right. You'd walk into the hospital and need treatment and be like, wait a minute, I'm not in the right place. And you would go into a fear response. That's why we have uniforms and some other norms. But when those norms keep us from really connecting is when it's problematic, and we're seeing that   Michael Hingson ** 29:34 well, this, this concept that you talk about and that you address regularly, about being real. What? What got you started down that road and deciding that that was a really important thing to do?   Abby Stason ** 29:49 Yeah, so it great question, you know this word authentic? I don't think people know what it means to be real or to be authentic. And if. If it's sometimes dangerous to be real or authentic. In some communities, you know, I'm thinking some places where women, if you want to be real and take off, you know, don't, not cover your face, that can be dangerous. You know, that's the extreme horn of it. But really it's aligning your your inner experience with your outer expression. It's knowing what your values are and standing for them. It's allow. It's aligning with your commitments in the world and who you want to be you know. So I don't think people know what it means to be authentic. It means to be, you know, exposed for the truth of who you are, but that, you know, context matters also. It's not in a vacuum. But I think it's helpful to know, really, what it means to be authentic. It means that that I'm not hiding myself from you. You know that I'm transparent. I don't walk up to someone and just say, Here's my life story. But right? You know, I think when we're authentic, we're revealing what, what wants to be revealed. When it wants to be revealed, we're not wearing some persona, some mask, you know, we are aligned with who we are. We know what our values are and stand for that. It's, you know. It's about, you know, being congruent, you know, living and leading or whatever in alignment with what you profess to stand for. So if I stick, you know, yeah, go ahead, are   Michael Hingson ** 31:28 we taught not to be authentic?   Abby Stason ** 31:32 Well, I, you know, I'll say the answer to that, I think, is yes. I mean, are we taught not to be authentic? I think we're taught. We're not taught anything. We kind of grow up and we inherit. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. We grow up and inherent crafts and values from our parents. And don't ever when we start to get to adulthood, really ask, Well, who am I? Am I? Are these just values of my parents? And, yeah, there's social pressures to act certain ways, so we adopt those, rather than saying, you know, do I want to adopt these? Am I working in the right place? You know, so are we? We're not taught, really. We're taught to go along, to get along. That's a lot of what we're taught to go along, to get along, at the expense of ourselves. And I'm not saying we should fight against everything, but I think there's an opportunity for us to, you know, be in the truth of who we are and align with our own values and what's true for us. And also, you know, the brain is wired to go along, to get along and lessen so that so it can be very fearful to go against what a group is saying. So that can be challenging for people, even though it might be healthier for whatever's happening.   Michael Hingson ** 32:57 But you know, the reason I asked about being taught it may or may not be volitional, but when I look at well, very frankly, look at politicians and how often they will deny something, they can be caught doing something or having done something, and sometimes that goes to extremes. Nowadays, you could do something 30 years ago and still be chastised for it and drummed out of the core, if you will. But the bottom line is that all too often, politicians will just deny with the hope that, well, if I push back hard enough, then people will believe it didn't really happen. And the result is that, in fact, they did something, and that teaching, or that activity, teaches so many others, especially kids growing up. Well, if they get away with it, why can't I? Yes,   Abby Stason ** 33:51 exactly. That's really well said. You know, politics is a great example of where you rarely hear the truth, you know, and also we're as humans. We're really not wired to speak fact to fact. I mean, we don't. We don't really speak fact to fact. In other words, we don't get on this zoom call and say you have headphones on. I don't, you know we don't. We just don't talk that way, like you have a gold shirt on I have a blue shirt on. That's not how we communicate as humans. The brain is wired to contextualize everything. That's okay, but then understanding that what comes out of my mouth is my opinion. It can be a judgment and intuition, and that's okay too, but we treat some of these things that we see on the news as facts when it's an opinion. So then you can take the opinion in and either agree or disagree with it, but we say that that's the truth well,   Michael Hingson ** 34:57 and sometimes you. We hear something say on TV that is an opinion, or it's not even a good opinion, because it clearly goes counter to reality and to facts, and yet people still say it, and if they don't get caught somehow, then it stands, and a lot of people call it gospel, and that's unfortunate, because what they're really counting on is that most of us don't ever go into an analytical mode where we really look at things and say, is that opinion? Is that true? I should really look into that for myself, right?   Abby Stason ** 35:42 And this is herein lies the suffering and the challenge of being a human being where, you know, to take responsibility for, am I treating that as truth? Am I investigating? Am I doing my own, you know, due diligence? No, I'm not saying we should go and all become scientists or anything like that, but certainly, you can tell an opinion when you hear it. But a lot of people, this is about being unconscious. You know, it's just, I'm not making anything good, bad, right, wrong, but there's consequences to not challenging anyone, and particularly our politicians and leaders, elected officials and anyone, and challenging each other to lift humanity into again, the truth and the facts of the matters and and also inviting people to say, hey, you know, that's not exactly true, but you know. Let's take a look at that. You know. But we consider things as truth, and then we take that and we then what, you know, and you're alluding to that, is that then we we take action based on something we think is true. Or   Michael Hingson ** 36:49 sometimes people will say, Well, you said that, but that's not what I have experienced or what I've observed, but that's but that's fair. It's fair to then have the discussion. Yes, and it may very well be that both sets of experiences are absolutely valid. And if you will, true, although it is so tempting to say you can't handle the truth, but we won't go there. That's that's a different movie.   Abby Stason ** 37:18 That was a good impression.   Michael Hingson ** 37:19 I actually was somewhere I cannot remember when it's been several years. I love, I love movies and lines, and I was talking with someone, and they said, Look, all I want from you is the truth. And I couldn't resist so I said that you can't handle the truth. And it really, it really busted up the whole atmosphere, and people were able to talk a whole lot more more seriously after that. Of course, there was another time I was somewhere and somebody said, Surely that's not the case. I said, Well, yes, it is. And don't call me Shirley, but, as I said, movies, but you know, from   Abby Stason ** 37:59 airplane, that's from airplane I'm tracking. I'm totally tracking.   Michael Hingson ** 38:05 Yeah, what can I say? I love to personally inject humor where I can, and I think that we take things so seriously sometimes. But the reality is, truth is important, and authenticity is important. And I guess I'd ask you, why is that's the case? Why is why should we really be authentic? Well,   Abby Stason ** 38:28 first of all, it's more satisfying on an individual level. So that when I'm aligned with who I am and I'm telling my truth, that is my experience and what's true for me, it's much more satisfying. Here's the other thing, you know, it avoids a lot of drama. You know, it opens up connection. It avoids drama. It takes away the blaming shaming. If we really make truth the primary goal, you know, then actually we have in the time we spend in drama and arguing, we have more time and space to enjoy ourselves. But it's, it's when we, when we don't tell the truth, our self esteem takes a hit. So right, when I'm not telling the truth and align with who I am and I'm not authentic with myself, you know, standing for what I you know, behaving a way that about what I profess to stand for, my self esteem takes a hit. Now, if my self esteem takes a hit, and we're all doing that, our collective self esteem takes a hit.   Michael Hingson ** 39:32 I also would submit that not telling the truth or not being truthful is stressful and it's a lot harder to do. Some people learn to do it very well, unfortunately. But it doesn't change the fact that in general, it's a lot harder to do, because you always have to worry about, am I going to be caught?   Abby Stason ** 39:55 Yep, spot on, and then I'm then, then it's like, okay. I lied, so then I have to cover up the lie, and then I Okay, so then I have to build on the lie. It's, it's a lot of unnecessary suffering, yeah. And the truth can be really inconvenient, you know, that's the other thing. The truth can be absolutely inconvenient. Oh, sure, you know. So. And then that might mean I have to rearrange some things in my life if I tell the truth, or, you know, if I, you know, this is the thing too. So here's the other thing is, society doesn't isn't compassionate. When we make we're all human beings, and we make mistakes, right? We do harm others and we make mistakes, but society is not forgiving or compassionate or doesn't make it cool to like, raise your hand and say, I really screwed this up. Here's what I did. I take responsibility. I want to clean this up, you know, and here's what I've learned. But instead, we blame and shame, and particularly in an era of social media and everything now visible, we just blame and slam anyway, you know, the cancel culture, so we don't make it easy to tell the truth about screwing up and then recovering from that, because I think there's a lot to learn when you know, even these politicians that make mistakes, or any of these high profile people, everybody makes mistakes, but we slam them and just try to blame and shame them and just annihilate them, instead of saying, Well, what, what happened? What was your experience when you were doing that? Or what? What have you learned? You know, where do you think that comes from? It Right? What's coming to mind? I'm going to say it just because it's here. Is the when Will Smith slapped rocket Oscars. And I'm thinking, what an opportunity to sit there and say, Okay, what happened? What did you learn? Instead, it just blew up into a ton of drama, yeah, you know. So we miss out on opportunities to grow our humanity by if anyone wants to tell the truth, it's it's hard because you'll get slammed, you know, literally, you can be canceled. You can lose your job, you know, all that. And sometimes that's appropriate. I mean, there should be consequences. I'm not saying, you know, when you tell the truth, some people, I might have to go to jail, and that's part of their taking responsibility. But overall, what we're talking about is the day to day things that happen that we could really benefit more from learning rather than blaming and shaming. In my opinion,   Michael Hingson ** 42:38 do you think, Well, what do you think society really says or believes about being real?   Abby Stason ** 42:45 Oh, gosh, yes, societies, you know, it's my experience. He says, Be Real, as long as it's what we say you real is go along to get along, you know, if so, you know, you know, look, there's, I'm LGBTQ, I'm happy to be bisexual. There's 300 plus lawsuit law, pieces of legislation against gay people. There's X number against transgender people. Now that's now you're saying that now the society, the government is saying to me, you can't, you shouldn't do that. So we're going to write laws against you. So this is where it gets tough. You know, I want to be real, but this is where intelligence comes in, context comes in. And I also say self care. Yeah, self care. I I'm teaching, especially now the I'm teaching women and underrepresented anyone in an underrepresented group, you know, self care has got to be non negotiable, because you're it's swimming upstream, and I'm not, yeah again and not victimy. But let's get in the reality of that you have to take really good care of yourself.   Michael Hingson ** 43:55 You have to be the first to take responsibility for doing that, because no one else is going to well said   Abby Stason ** 44:00 you should repeat that, and that should podcast if you're listening to this, that's the that's the main message from this repeat, that you   Michael Hingson ** 44:09 have to be the one to do it, because no one else is going to you have to take care of yourself. And that's that's absolutely fair to do. And I would go beyond it to say you need to really learn for you what self care is about. You know, for a person who is blind, let's say who has become blind, who grow, who has grown up with an attitude that blindness is less than being able to see, now you're suddenly confronted with it. What does that mean? Self Care wise, as opposed to say someone who is LGBTQ in terms of their sexual orientation. But the reality is that both do have things that they can do to care for themselves, mentally and physically in order to be able to continue to function. And first. I recognize that they are just as much a part of humanity as anyone else's.   Abby Stason ** 45:05 Yes, I just was quiet because that was well said, Very well said. So I hope everyone listening in, you just go back repeat what he just said and just repeat it, because you'll listen to it over and over. That's, that's the core message of this podcast, right? And I'll add, you know, I'm looking at you. I can see you have gray hair. I'm turning 58 in a few days, you know. So now ageism starts to come in, right? You know, I'm 58 so if I act, society says I should act like a 58 year old. So I have big energy, as you can probably hear in my voice, I'm pretty active and, you know, I'm not really intimidated by getting older, you know, I'm certainly don't act as energetic and athletic as a 25 year old. But society says I should act a certain way in my age, you know. So the, you know, going full circle to your society question, yeah. I think it's a time to examine our societal conditioning and ask what's outdated?   Michael Hingson ** 46:07 Yeah, and the reality is that things become outdated because we learn which we should do, and we recognize that some of our basic core beliefs that we were taught aren't necessarily, really so yes, totally agree, yeah, and it is. It is still something that we do need to and should learn to deal with. It's fair. Again, I talk a lot about blindness, of course, but that's what I tend to know a little bit about anyway. But I know that that the views that people still all too often have are very outmoded. I still hear of people who are losing their Well, let me do it this way. I hear about people who go to ophthalmologists because they don't see as well as they used to, and the doctor says, well, you're going blind. There's nothing I can do. And the doctor just walks out of the room. Or the doctor says, you know, go live in a home because you can't do anything anymore. You're, you're going to be blind. And that's not real. Yeah,   Abby Stason ** 47:16 wow. That's, that's, yeah, that's right there. That's a, oh, that's really, well, I feel offended Just hearing that, you know, I feel offended just hearing that's not inspirational, it's not looking at possibilities, it's not helping anyone. It's and it's not true. Yeah, that's right, because there we can all do things   Michael Hingson ** 47:38 well, the reality is that that we have, having been in the World Trade Center and escaping on September 11. The reality is that proves that anyone can be in an unexpected situation, and it's a question of how we choose to deal with it. Of course, a lot of people tell me, Well, you must have been so afraid or, of course, you didn't know what happened because you couldn't see it. Well, excuse me. You know they couldn't they couldn't see it. One is really easy. I was on the 78th floor on the south side of the building, and the airplane hit on the area between floors 93 and 99 on the north side of the building, basically 18 floors of concrete, steel and everything else between me and where the plane hit, what was there to see. Nobody could see it, and nobody and when we were going down the stairs, none of us knew what had happened. I never really learned what happened until both towers had collapsed, and I called my wife, and she is the first one who told us how two aircraft had been crashed into the towers. Now we knew that something was going on, because one of my colleagues saw fire before we evacuated, so we knew that something happened. And then as we were going down the stairs, we smelled fumes from burning jet fuel, but we had no idea what really had occurred. There was no way to know, but I was the one. But I was the one who observed to people around me, I smelled in the fumes from burning jet fuel. And other people said, Yeah, we were trying to figure out what that is. That's what it is. You're right,   Abby Stason ** 49:12 yeah, you know. And you're hearing, I'm imagining is, is very strong, right? The brain will make up for loss. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 49:22 only if I use it, only if I and that's, it's, that's a good question. But the reality is, only if I learn to use it. Your hearing doesn't become better simply because you lose your eyesight. It's like, you take a person from SEAL Team Six, and you, you take someone from some other profession that doesn't require as much eyesight, they're not going to see the same one will see better than the other because they've learned to use their eyesight. And it's the same thing with hearing.   Abby Stason ** 49:57 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, yeah, I'm just, I notice I'm thinking of you and the towers, and what an experience. And it's a privilege to sit across from you right now and just, you know, yeah, it's amazing that you were there and lived through that. And I have a special, just a special type of feeling for the people of New York. And, you know, I worked in lower Manhattan after it was 2004 to 2006 and that's one of the reasons I went to work in Manhattan. Lower Manhattan is to, I don't know, I felt drawn to go there and just be a part of that. And it was a privilege to work there for two years   Michael Hingson ** 50:41 after, after all that had happened, where were you before then,   Abby Stason ** 50:46 I was in Atlanta, Georgia, okay, yeah, I was in the southeast. And, yeah, I was offered a job, and in same company, Merrill Lynch and I was offered a job in lower Manhattan. I just felt like, you know, I felt called to go and do that. And mostly because of 911 it was like a privilege to work with people who had lived through it, and, you know, like it's a privilege to sit across from you. It's, of course, one of the most recognizable, impactful events in the USF, yeah, you know, I mean, I'm putting that lightly. I'm not even giving it justice,   Michael Hingson ** 51:22 but it is one of the things that that we learn to deal with, and that's okay, but, but the reality is that I think even with that September 11 is, for a lot of people, just history. I mean, you've got a whole generation who never experienced anything relating to it and just reading about it. It's like Pearl Harbor for a lot of us, is just history, unless we take the time to really step back and and think about it and internalize it. Now I love to collect old radio shows as a hobby. So I've heard many radio broadcasts, not only about Pearl Harbor and that day, but other things relating to world war two and so on that make it very real. And have learned to use my imagination, and I hope people will do that regarding September 11 as well, because even though maybe you weren't born yet, or for those of us who were born who were able to remember it, but only saw it as whatever the size of our TV screen or our newspapers were, it's important to internalize that and think about it and decide, what does that really teach us about history? And I don't think it does teach us that Muslims are evil or anything like that. I think it teaches us that there are thugs in the world who want to force us to try to bend to their will. But the reality is that we're stronger if we work together, because after September 11, just the way this country behaved for a while. Then unfortunately, we started to see things like MCI WorldCom and Enron and other things like that, and politicians who really lost all the momentum that we had gained after September 11.   Abby Stason ** 53:18 Yeah, and I'm really appreciating, you know, really you said it really well too. Kind of a summation is we don't internalize our experience, so we skate over our direct experience, whether the experience be astronomically stressful and traumatic, like 911 but you still don't want to skip over your direct experience. You know, we don't internalize our experience. We we interact superficially, and we just say, Oh, that was okay. This was great. That wasn't. This was awful. Rather than really getting into our direct experience, that's where we can build resilience, that's where insight and wisdom comes along. Like you just said, yeah, really well. Said, appreciate the wisdom I'm getting today. I always learn something. I'm like, I wonder what I learned today. Well, here we are. I   Michael Hingson ** 54:15 hear you me too. I figure if I'm not learning at least as much as anybody else, then I'm not doing my job very well, because I I love doing this podcast, because everyone who comes on teaches me a lot, which I value a great deal, and then putting it all together is a lot of fun. So, you know, tell me, tell me a little bit more about what it is you do today, and what's your company and so on.   Abby Stason ** 54:44 Yeah. So my company name is my name, Abigail station LLC, really the nice, creative name, yeah, I know. Well, you know, it's just was easy, easy, and got recommended to me. But, you know, in a nutshell. Yeah, everything we're talking about is coming full circle because people want to show up. People want to be real, they want to be authentic. They want to be pleased with how they show up. They want to know what their values are. So it's it's like navigating the human condition in our modern world, in a global gig economy, requires skill, right? If I have an experience, what does this mean for me? How am I treating people that requires skill? So I basically teach skills on how to navigate the human condition, particularly while relating to others. It's one thing to be skillful when I'm by myself, but you know what it's like when we get we start working as a team and launching a product. You're shaking your head, right? We   Michael Hingson ** 55:44 impress ourselves very easily, don't we?   Abby Stason ** 55:48 That's where so we, you know, and it's important today, as opposed to years ago, when we worked on assembly lines. You know, we're well past that. Yeah, we're working on an assembly line. You didn't, you know, you basically said hi to your neighbor, you didn't have to share ideas and wisdom. You didn't have to collaborate with them. So now, everything in the workforce today in a gig economy, a global gig economy, across cultures, right across languages. So what's required of us is to be skillful human beings. So that's I have a curriculum that centers around that. So I do that in a one on one forum, Team workshops, open workshops, retreats, you name it. Anyone who wants to learn how to be, how to behave, more consciously. And I'm not making it good or bad, right or wrong, right?   Michael Hingson ** 56:34 How do you do that? How do you teach skills?   Abby Stason ** 56:38 Oh, like, literally, you know, so I'll, you know, I have framer. I talked about frameworks. So I have a skill like presence. I teach a framework on what it means to be present. Emotional Intelligence is a skill. And I, you know, it even like I'm laughing, because emotional intelligence is necessary. It's non negotiable for resilience. We know this scientifically. If you're not emotionally fluent, you're you will hurt your immune system. But people don't know actually how to feel their emotions. So I teach people that to notice the sensations in their body, to then capture the wisdom from that. How to Speak the truth, right? We've talked about that, how to listen, how to cultivate self esteem. So I have processes, many processes, if you will, for each skill, it's just like, Look, let me simplify it for you. You know, everybody's got a hobbit hobby of some sort, a hobbit, a hobbit, a hobbit. Covid might have a hobbit. I have five out here in my closet so, but everybody has a hobby of some sort. Well, let's say so I was a run. I used to run. I didn't go out and run a marathon in the first minute. What did I do? I learned how to train, right? So it's just like that, except we don't do strength training for our behaviors. Yeah, so it's, it's repetition, it's, it's a workout, if you will.   Michael Hingson ** 58:10 What kind of suggestions do you have for people who want to, want to get real, who don't necessarily know how to get real, especially people from underrepresented groups.   Abby Stason ** 58:25 Yeah, so, so for that, I mean, you know, I have you look me up at Abigail season.com, and I'm, I, you know, I'm happy to help anyone. But with underrepresented groups, it's particularly more important so that the skills there are, knowing when I'm present, knowing when I'm emotionally intelligent, because you're gonna have you're gonna be especially if you're an underrepresented group because of what we talked about, you'll be criticized for being real. So you have to understand your emotions. You have to know what your values are. You have to know what you stand for. And I will add self care because of what we talked about, because as an underrepresented group, we're swimming upstream, so you have to really understand how to take care of yourself, because we need to be strong as underrepresented groups. And I'll go back to my days on Wall Street. I was, you know, a lot of swimming upstream, you know. So I was okay. How am I doing this week? Am I taking care of myself? Each of those is a skill.   Michael Hingson ** 59:27 How do people do all of that? So, you know, when, when you talk about these are the things that then one needs to do. How do they do that?   Abby Stason ** 59:37 How do they do that, like, so, actually, you know.   Michael Hingson ** 59:42 So how do they learn about self care, for example, and so on. How do they learn about being more competent about themselves? Yeah,   Abby Stason ** 59:51 okay, so, so, you know, you can get, get support. You can, you know, one, I'll say you can buy my book. I mean. Abigail station.com, my book is called evolution, revolution, conscious leadership for an information age. So I have the skills in them that actually teach you how to be you know again, how to learn what your values are, how to thrive. You have five buckets of thriving, spiritually, mental, physical, emotional and financial. And I have a worksheet so you can actually fill out the worksheet to see where you're thriving or not, and what bucket you need to you know correct for, where are you doing in each bucket. So it's, it's again, it's it sounds, it's not abstract. It's just like if you're learning how to play tennis, you pick up a ball, you pick up a rack, and you start hitting it right? Well, just like this, you pick up a worksheet, you fill it out, and you examine what's true for you, and then you put it into practice.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:01 And important to do. And in our cover notes, we have a picture of the book cover and so on. So I do urge people to to look at that and and get your book to really understand a lot of the insights. And I think that that's the issue, is that the ultimate answer I would think to them to my question about how do people do it is you ask questions, you go to people like Abby, who have the information, and listen to them. You figure out what will work for you, but really take the time to figure it out, and then you can put it into practice.   Abby Stason ** 1:01:40 It's a matter of stopping to investigate what's going on with me. How am I doing and where do I need support, and all that and all that. It's just, it's skill we it's my experience, and what I teach is we can be more skillful human beings. It's a complex world now,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:02 do you think it's more complex than it used to be?   Abby Stason ** 1:02:06 I think we make it complex. Okay, that you know, that's what I happen to. Think it's my experience too. And this is what notice, how I'm notice what I'm saying. It's like, it's my experience. Here's what I think, you know, my it's my opinion and my experience. Notice how I'm saying the truth is XYZ. Notice how I'm saying that, right, right? It's my experience. It's my opinion that we make it complex, but yet, the skills that I teach, they're simply said, but they're not easy, right? It's a challenge of a lifetime.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:42 Well, I think there's a lot to be said for all that, that that we make it a complex world. Is it really more complex than it used to be? Maybe not we. We tend to want to think that it is. But is it really of has the real dynamic, have the real basic concepts changed or not, and that's really the issue, and that's why I agree with you that we tend to want to make it more complex. Oh yeah, there is a lot going on, things like social media and other things bring us closer together and so on. And so there's a lot of stuff going on, but we're the ones that have control over that, right?   Abby Stason ** 1:03:27 Well, Said, because we can go back to take a responsibility for our part, right? How am I showing up on social media, etc?   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:34 Well, if people want to reach out to you, how do they do that? Yeah, they can go   Abby Stason ** 1:03:39 to Abigail stason.com,   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:41 would you spell that, please? Yeah,   Abby Stason ** 1:03:43 I should just going to say it's A B, I G, A, I L, S T, A, S O N.com, you can email me at Abby, a, b, b, y, at Abigail, stason.com, and I you know if you're interested, if they're if you anyone's interested is listening. In a good place to go is go to my website, Abigail station.com, go to my blogs. It's a good way to pick up a lot of these information. I don't I don't send out it. I don't flood you with emails. Come to my blogs. That's a good place to get some exposure to some of this. Pick up my book, evolution revolution and conscious leadership for an information age. And I have an online course too, a self study course that you can sign up for. It's only $250 that walks you through each chapter. I made it priced at a price point to get the skills in as many hands as possible. Cool,   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:38 well, I hope people will do that, I think there's never anything wrong with doing good skill building and growing and stretching. One of the things that I've talked about a lot on this podcast, that I've learned to do over the years, is to spend a little bit of time each day thinking about what happened today. How did it go? Why did. That not work. Why did that work? And even when it worked, could I have done it better? And what can I learn from everything that I do? I just think introspection is a beautiful thing.   Abby Stason ** 1:05:09 Yes, and I want to stress what you said at the end, and what have I learned about myself? That's a great summary. You know your process right there. Listeners follow that process. Absolutely,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:22 I've learned I used to talk all the time about listening to my speeches because I was I travel and speak. I like to record them, and I've always said I'm my own worst critic. So I listened to speeches because I'm my own worst critic. And I'm going to learn from that. What I realized is how negative is that? And I've learned that what I really should say is I'm my own best teacher, and I will learn from it. And I just think that's I think we need to look at the world in a more positive way, and even the things that aren't necessarily working right, we can be more positive about what we do.   Abby Stason ** 1:05:56 Yes, and notice the reframe of that. Instead of putting yourself on trial. It's simply what, what did I learn, and how can I grow? That's it, and that's   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:06 the way it ought to be, yes, yes, and, and look, you know, it's   Abby Stason ** 1:06:09 way more fun, righ

In this podcast series, we speak with friends of SSPI who recently made big executive moves. We'll find out what they're doing now and what they hope to achieve in their new roles in the industry. In episode 1, SSPI Director of Engagement Tamara Bond-Williams speaks with Jennifer Manner, Senior Advisor for Space and Satellite Policy at the Office of Spectrum Management in the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Jennifer A. Manner is the Senior Advisor for Space and Satellite Policy at the Office of Spectrum Management in the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). In this role, Jennifer is the principle advisor to NTIA on spectrum management issues related to space and satellite communications. Prior to joining NTIA, Ms. Manner served as Senior Vice President, Regulatory Affairs at EchoStar Corporation, Deputy Chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology, as well as the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Jennifer has also held senior positions at the FCC and in industry, including at MCI/WorldCom (not Verizon) and Skyterra (now Ligado). Jennifer has held leadership roles in a number of organizations including the Global Satellite Operators Association, the Satellite Industry Association, and the U.S. ITU Association. Jennifer has also held leadership positions in a number of U.S. government advisory committees including Chair, Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee and Vice Chair of the FCC's World Radiocommunications Advisory Committee and the Commerce Department's International Trade Advisory Committee. Jennifer also holds leadership positions at the International Telecommunications Union. Further, Jennifer served for over a decade as a professor of law at Georgetown University Law School teaching international telecommunications law, and continues to teach at Carnegie Mellon's Executive Education Program in Technology Policy and the Silicon Flatirons Program at UC Boulder. Jennifer is also an author of numerous articles and several books on spectrum and telecommunications including Spectrum Wars: The Rise of 5G and Beyond (Artech House 2021). Jennifer is currently working on her latest book, Spectrum Wars: A New Hope for Connectivity (expected release 2025). Jennifer is also a filmmaker, with her latest film, When Wire Was King: The Transformation of Telecommunications is available on PBS, as well as Amazon and AppleTV and other streaming platforms. Jennifer holds a B.A. in Political Science and Theater from the State University of New York at Albany, a J.D. cum laude from New York Law School and a LL.M. with honors from Georgetown University Law School. Jennifer lives in Bethesda, MD with her husband, Dr. Eric Glasgow, and her golden doodle, Charliedoodle.

Welcome to our latest podcast episode where we delve into the world of real estate innovation with Brian Charlesworth, the CEO of Sisu. In a conversation filled with entrepreneurial insights, Brian takes us through his journey from the early days of the internet at MCI WorldCom to revolutionizing the real estate industry with cutting-edge technology. Join us as we explore the inception of Sisu, its growth trajectory, and the transformative power of data analytics in sales performance and leadership.   Key Takeaways: - Inspiration from Challenge: Brian was inspired to create Sisu after witnessing the data management struggles of his wife's real estate team, highlighting that sometimes frustration can lead to game-changing innovation. - Rapid Growth and Adaptation:Sisu's journey from a sales performance tool to a robust real estate platform shows the importance of pivoting and evolving based on customer feedback and industry needs. - Industry Integration:Sisu's seamless integration with nearly every CRM in real estate is a testament to its adaptability and the importance of understanding the customer to create a truly useful product. - Expansion Potential:While Sisu is currently revolutionizing real estate, the conversation with Brian reveals the platform's potential to expand and adapt to other sales-driven industries. - Leadership Through Technology:Real-time data analytics not only improves sales but also fosters leadership, as demonstrated by the evolution of Brian's wife from a salesperson to a leader of leaders.   Get in touch with Brian: https://www.instagram.com/sisuhq/ https://www.facebook.com/sisuHQ/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/sisuhq/ https://sisu.co/   If you want to know more about Dr. Jason Balara and the Know your Why Podcast: https://linktr.ee/jasonbalara Audio Track: Back To The Wood by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artist: http://audionautix.com/  

In this episode, I chat with Todd Brekhus from Renaissance at ISTE Live 23 in Philadelphia! Renaissance has acquired many EdTech companies that you probably currently use in the classroom. He discusses his journey to Renaissance and how it has come full circle to help thread the needle for our teachers and students. To hear more, check out the episode. To learn more, connect with Renaissance using the links below. Buen provecho!   Connect With Gabriel Carrillo EdTech Bites Website: https://edtechbites.com EdTech Bites Twitter: https://twitter.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites Instagram: https://instagram.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQCZcyW4BkCFQ5P2BLK61xg About Todd Brekhus Todd is an education technology innovator with nearly 30 years of experience. Most recently, he helped create myON, a personalized literacy platform that is part of Renaissance's literacy portfolio. Previously, Todd served as Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for PLATO Learning, President and COO of Learning Elements, and Education Program Director for MCI WorldCom. Todd also spent eight years as a technology leader in schools. In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Lamp Lighter Visionary Award by the Association of American Publishers and was named the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient by SIIA Company CODiE Awards. Learn More About Renaissance Renaissance Website: https://www.renaissance.com/ Renaissance On Twitter: https://twitter.com/RenLearnUS Renaissance On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/renlearnus/ Renaissance On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RenLearnUS/

Two smol beans, Mr. Goodbar and Bill Gates, take to the floor. Glad we vacuumed the floor today. Turkey v ham beef in the extended bit. Loud salads and scrambled "eggs." Brian's hair is not (blank). Removed a heart. We take to Reddit to chart and judge unpopular opinions...and we learn some terrible truths. Words. Extended bits. Dingers. MCI WorldCom has all these and more. Not watching the show? Follow us on YouTube to see all the goods! http://watchgreatnight.com We're on TikTok now too: https://www.tiktok.com/@greatnightpod Email us! GreatNightPod@gmail.com is the place to send in games, punishments, stories, or kind words :) Get an extra episode every week only at https://www.patreon.com/greatnight and enjoy the preshow and postshow in all the public feeds! NEXT WEEK: The live show will *actually* be in the daytime--12pm ET/9pm at https://twitch.greatnight.tv/

Brett's got awards, we take a look at your titles, and we fit in a few more MCI WorldCom jokes with Dr. Seuss.  Get an extra episode every week only at https://www.patreon.com/greatnight and enjoy the preshow and postshow in all the public feeds! Not watching the show? Follow us on YouTube to see all the goods! http://watchgreatnight.com We're on TikTok now too: https://www.tiktok.com/@greatnightpod Email us! GreatNightPod@gmail.com is the place to send games, punishments, high thoughts, and anything else.

Two smol beans, Mr. Goodbar and Bill Gates, take to the floor. Glad we vacuumed the floor today. Turkey v ham beef in the extended bit. Loud salads and scrambled "eggs." Brian's hair is not (blank). Removed a heart. We take to Reddit to chart and judge unpopular opinions...and we learn some terrible truths. Words. Extended bits. Dingers. MCI WorldCom has all these and more. Not watching the show? Follow us on YouTube to see all the goods! http://watchgreatnight.com We're on TikTok now too: https://www.tiktok.com/@greatnightpod Email us! GreatNightPod@gmail.com is the place to send in games, punishments, stories, or kind words :) Get an extra episode every week only at https://www.patreon.com/greatnight and enjoy the preshow and postshow in all the public feeds! NEXT WEEK: The live show will *actually* be in the daytime--12pm ET/9pm at https://twitch.greatnight.tv/

Brett's got awards, we take a look at your titles, and we fit in a few more MCI WorldCom jokes with Dr. Seuss.  Get an extra episode every week only at https://www.patreon.com/greatnight and enjoy the preshow and postshow in all the public feeds! Not watching the show? Follow us on YouTube to see all the goods! http://watchgreatnight.com We're on TikTok now too: https://www.tiktok.com/@greatnightpod Email us! GreatNightPod@gmail.com is the place to send games, punishments, high thoughts, and anything else.

We all should have written goals and then the plans to achieve them, yet for some reason few of us do. Most people fall into 3 categories of planning. Which one are you? In this episode, Brad explains how planning comes before doing and in a way, planning creates a blueprint for potential success. It increases the odds that if we follow our plan, we'll enjoy success. Listen now.  Show Highlights Include: The Make Your Money Matter Youtube Show (:30)  Getting to know Brad (:50)  The bankruptcy of MCI Worldcom and how it affected Brad.  (1:30)  Building the frame of your investment plan. (7:30)  The Harvard study on planning and goal setting. (11:35)  3 categories of planning that most people fall into. (14:16)  To schedule your complimentary retirement track review, head to https://onecapital.com. You can also call us at 805-410-5454 or text the word ‘TRACK' and we'll reach out to you. Want to WATCH the show? SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube Channel here: The Make Your Money Matter YouTube Show  

Find out more on our website: https://bit.ly/3L7QciZ In 2007 the world suffered the Global Financial Crisis. The most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. Citizens lost faith in the financial services and the ability of governments to protect their financial wellbeing. This presentation is based on a practitioner's point of view and his experiences in implementing Operational Resilience. Who, What, What Is, Why and How he has defined new ways of working in support of Operational Resilience in an agile digital transformational world. Speaker: Terry Downing FBCS F.ISRM MBCI CITP CBCP NCSP: An operational resilience, business continuity, crisis management information security, systems engineering and IT professional with extensive hands on and leadership experience. His career includes British Army, Accenture, IBM, Colt, CMA, Camelot, RCR, UUNET, MCI WorldCom, EMC, GrIDsure, CitiCorp, Bankers Trust, Legal and General. He holds Chartered Fellow BCS, Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and the City of London, Member Business Continuity Institute, Senior Member ISSA, Financial Services panel member (WCIT), NIST Cyber Security Professional.

It's 12/04/1997 MCI Worldcom is formed, Machine Bolt slams a shot of Precious Keepsake's Truth Syrum, Jamiroquai tries some storytelling on Leno, Whiskey Pete is making $10,000 per corporate speaking gig, and the guys are doing their most humiliating remote to date down at the Studio City Ralph's. Segments include: News, This Day in Music History, and more! Epic!

About This Episode: Vernon Jones was reared on a tobacco farm in Laurel Hill, North Carolina. He was 5th of six children born in a four room cinder block house with no indoor plumbing. His parents Robert and Rufer Jones taught him the value of faith, hard work, self-reliance and self-respect. Prior to public service, Jones had a successful career in corporate America, including Fortune 500 companies such as BellSouth Mobility and MCI Worldcom, and President of the Henry Oliver Company, a consulting firm established by Jones. As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, Jones managed nearly 7,000 employees and directed the day-to-day county operations, which included managing one of the largest police departments in Georgia. Jones successfully balanced budgets, secured dual AAA bond ratings from Moody's and Standard & Poors, preserved over 4,000 acres of greenspace, and passed four bond referenda for libraries, parks, and infrastructure improvements. His 12 years record as a Georgia State Representative includes co-sponsorship of the Georgia Peach Care Act that ensures thousands of uninsured children. Jones is a former Georgia State Representative and lifelong Democrat who made national headlines when he announced his support for President Donald Trump's re-election. Now, Vernon Jones is running for Governor of Georgia. Find out more about Vernon at: Jones for Georgia - https://jonesforgeorgia.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/RepVernonJones Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/repvernonjones/ Check out our YouTube Channel: Jeremyryanslatebiz Make Extraordinary a reality: jeremyryanslate.com/extraordinary See the Show Notes: www.jeremyryanslate.com/877 Sponsors: LinkedIn Jobs: Post your first job for free linkedin.com/cyol Gusto: This episode is sponsored by Gusto. Run your payroll the easy way, the same way we do at Command Your Brand. You'll get a. $100 Amazon Gift Card just for running your first payroll! http://www.jeremyryanslate.com/gusto Sweet Process: Offers a 14-day free trial, but as a loyal listener of this podcast, you can try for 28 days, free of charge. You don't even have to enter a credit card to get started. Just navigate to sweetprocess.com/cyol to start your free 28-day trial today. Audible: Get a free 30 day free trial and 1 free audiobook from thousands of available books. Right now I'm reading "America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization"by Graham Hancock, about building real wealth. www.jeremyryanslate.com/book  

About This Episode: Vernon Jones was reared on a tobacco farm in Laurel Hill, North Carolina. He was 5th of six children born in a four room cinder block house with no indoor plumbing. His parents Robert and Rufer Jones taught him the value of faith, hard work, self-reliance and self-respect. Prior to public service, Jones had a successful career in corporate America, including Fortune 500 companies such as BellSouth Mobility and MCI Worldcom, and President of the Henry Oliver Company, a consulting firm established by Jones. As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, Jones managed nearly 7,000 employees and directed the day-to-day county operations, which included managing one of the largest police departments in Georgia. Jones successfully balanced budgets, secured dual AAA bond ratings from Moody's and Standard & Poors, preserved over 4,000 acres of greenspace, and passed four bond referenda for libraries, parks, and infrastructure improvements. His 12 years record as a Georgia State Representative includes co-sponsorship of the Georgia Peach Care Act that ensures thousands of uninsured children. Jones is a former Georgia State Representative and lifelong Democrat who made national headlines when he announced his support for President Donald Trump's re-election. Now, Vernon Jones is running for Governor of Georgia. Find out more about Vernon at: Jones for Georgia - https://jonesforgeorgia.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/RepVernonJones Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/repvernonjones/ Check out our YouTube Channel: Jeremyryanslatebiz Make Extraordinary a reality: jeremyryanslate.com/extraordinary See the Show Notes: www.jeremyryanslate.com/877 Sponsors: LinkedIn Jobs: Post your first job for free linkedin.com/cyol Gusto: This episode is sponsored by Gusto. Run your payroll the easy way, the same way we do at Command Your Brand. You'll get a. $100 Amazon Gift Card just for running your first payroll! http://www.jeremyryanslate.com/gusto Sweet Process: Offers a 14-day free trial, but as a loyal listener of this podcast, you can try for 28 days, free of charge. You don't even have to enter a credit card to get started. Just navigate to sweetprocess.com/cyol to start your free 28-day trial today. Audible: Get a free 30 day free trial and 1 free audiobook from thousands of available books. Right now I'm reading "America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization"by Graham Hancock, about building real wealth. www.jeremyryanslate.com/book  

Hello to you. My name is Michael Santos and on behalf of everyone on our team, I welcome you. Our websites include PrisonProfessors.com and ComplianceMitigation.com.   We offer services to help people and businesses with risk mitigation and avoiding government investigations.   For those who have been targeted for prosecution, we create mitigation strategies. We help with sentencing and preparations for the journey ahead.   Visit us at either Prison Professors dot com or compliance mitigation dot com. Call or text 949-205-6056.   Episode: 153: Why Every Business Should Invest in Compliance Training   If we ask any group to give us their impression of successful technology companies, we’re likely to hear the following names: • Apple, • Google, • Facebook, • Amazon, and • Microsoft. Many of us would consider the above-mentioned companies as models of excellence. They’re famous for creating trillions of dollars in value, creating millions of jobs, generating billions of dollars in tax revenues, and providing enormous value to consumers. Besides being success stories, the companies share something else in common. Each of the above-mentioned companies has been the subject of a government investigation. Our team at Compliance Mitigation does not make a judgment call with regard to the reasons behind the investigation, or the usefulness that the investigation would serve. Rather, we want more entrepreneurs, business leaders, and team members to understand how government investigations can threaten businesses and careers. The more a person knows, the more equipped a person becomes to make better decisions—hopefully to avoid being brought in as a witness, a subject, or a target of a government investigation. From our perspective: • Business leaders define success by solving problems for customers, bringing value to shareholders, and creating jobs that contribute to vibrant communities. • When investigators begin their task, they define success by obstructing business operations, or complicating the lives of business leaders and the entire teams that they target. Big-government leaders do not limit their attacks to the most successful companies. Elected officials create many government agencies that investigate business operations, business leaders, and people who have decision-making power in businesses. That means even small companies—and leaders of those companies that have decision-making power—are also vulnerable to government investigations and to charges for white collar crimes. For that reason, it makes sense for business leaders to learn about government investigations. That insight can help people involved in businesses both save and make money. You might ask, “How can investing in compliance help a company or people make more money?”  • Compliance is all about transparency. It’s about documenting processes and following best-practice approaches to business. The more we train people how to follow such procedures, the more effective we become at messaging. If we communicate well, we’re more successful at showing the value proposition we offer. How does investing in compliance help a company or an individual save more money? • Investing time and energy to develop effective compliance systems is like an insurance policy. It can lead to lower business insurance costs, and it can lower the enormous risks that business owners and decision makers have to reserve for litigation expenses. Good compliance systems can also lower the risk levels to corporate fraud. Besides saving or making money, investing in ongoing compliance training represents an excellent insurance policy for the company. No company wants to become the subject of a government investigation. They are costly. In many cases, those costs exceed millions of dollars, both for the business and in many cases, for individuals. Investigations, potentially, can obliterate a business and lead to loss of liberty for some people.   Evaluation: In June 2020, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division updated its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs. Essentially, the government white paper offered guidelines for prosecutors to consider when they deliberated over offering leniency, non-prosecution agreements, or deferred-prosecution agreements to businesses. According to the guidance, prosecutors must question the business as follows: 1. Is the corporation’s compliance well designed? 2. Is the program being applied earnestly and in good faith? In other words, is the program adequately resourced and empowered to function effectively? 3. Does the corporation’s compliance program work in practice? If we know that prosecutors will ask those questions when assessing a business’s compliance program, then business leaders and team members should ask similar questions. By investing time, energy, and resources to understand the importance of compliance, leaders can design a best-practice approach in the design of their compliance training. Large companies may deploy resources to hire white-glove law firms that specialize in risk management. Those law firms may earn millions of dollars in fees by doing a deep dive to understand a company’s operations. They will perform risk assessments to identify potential problems, assessing the regulatory landscape, the potential clients and the business partners, as well as transactions with foreign governments, payments to foreign officials, use of third parties, political contributions, and so forth. Small to mid-size companies may not have the resources to hire such law firms. Yet if they’re doing business, their lack of resources will not make them any less vulnerable to investigations and potential prosecution. In fact, those small- to medium-sized businesses may be easier targets for government investigators. For this reason, all businesses benefit by helping team members learn more about the real-life consequences that followed for people that lost their liberty as a result of government investigations. Such training spreads awareness on the collateral consequences that follow bad decisions made during the course of business. In making people more aware, our team at Compliance Mitigation can lessen risks for individuals, and for businesses that want to show a commitment to minimizing problems with regulators. Companies that want to minimize risk levels would do well to train their team members. As we say at ComplianceMitigation.com, we did the time so you won’t have to.   Corporate Fraud: Internal corporate fraud is an ever-growing problem. Government prosecutors bring charges against thousands of people every month for white collar crimes. Those charges leave businesses vulnerable to ongoing problems, including massive legal fees, large fines, and potentially, criminal liabilities. Management leaders may not have a clear process on how to prevent fraud, or how to respond if they uncover a fraud. We offer this introductory compliance course to assist companies with the following objectives: (i) Help all team members understand the implications of a government investigation, (ii) Identify best practices within corporate operations, and encourage employee compliance, (iii) Improve messaging and corporate storytelling, (iv) Minimize risk to litigation, (v) Teach businesses how to develop a best-practice approach to respond to a government investigation, (vi) Develop a mitigation strategy in the event of a government investigation. We encourage company leaders to use the modules our team at Compliance Mitigation creates to help more people understand the costs and collateral consequences of a government investigation. Strength comes through proper preparation. Members of our team have worked with numerous entrepreneurs that didn’t know their business practices violated regulations, or how their policies could expose them to the enormous costs of litigation or a government investigation. For example, a small business that advertised debt-relief services accepted advance payments from consumers. The business owner hired scores of telemarketers that sold the service. By accepting advance payments from consumers, the business leaders and decisions makers made themselves vulnerable to government investigations. They didn’t understand the Federal Trade Commission’s prohibitions against collecting advance fees.   Nor did they understand how a government investigation could lead to: • litigation, • an asset freeze, and • forfeitures that would cripple their business. Good compliance training helps leaders make better decisions. By investing time to both learn and teach, leaders can create a culture that minimizes exposure to risks in an era of big government. Larger companies have different complications. People become complacent, expecting that they’re operating without risk to regulation or interference from government. Sadly, many rank-and-file employees get dragged into investigations. Their responses to the investigations can bring them into further problems. Our nation’s prison system confines thousands of people that once worked in large companies. Prosecutors convicted those people of white-collar crimes, even though the people professed to be doing their jobs without any knowledge that they were breaking laws. Other people began working in a company with the best of intentions. Yet something happened during the course of the person’s career. Thinking that they could get away with something, they engaged in behavior without fully understanding the consequences. For example, consider the case of David Smith, who faced charges for crimes he committed while on the job as a manager at Quest Diagnostics. David concocted a reimbursement scheme, creating systems that would lead his employer to reimburse him for fraudulent expenses that ran through a complex web of transactions. Smith created fake companies, invoices, and expense reports for payments he’d supposedly made on Quest’s behalf. An internal investigation revealed that Smith had forged his boss’s signature. The internal investigation uncovered losses totaling more than $1.2 million. Quest referred the case to the FBI. A judge sentenced Smith to five years in prison. Beside the financial loss and Smith’s criminal liability, the distraction undermined confidence in Quest Diagnostic’s management team.   Better compliance training serves companies and individuals by: • Broadening an awareness of the consequences that follow white collar crime, • Helping people think before they compromise their values, • Providing transparency into businesses processes, potentially lessening occurrences of internal corporate fraud.   Fraud Triangle: People like David, in the example above, may not set out to engage in fraudulent behavior. Educators identified a “Fraud Triangle” that, theoretically, created a perfect storm for fraud. The three corners of the triangle include: • Opportunity: A person like David Smith had to be in the position that would allow him to create the scheme. If he were not in a managerial position, he would not have been able to initiate the scam. • Pressure: David Smith’s supervisors may have considered him a competent, trustworthy employee. They may not have known pressures he felt in his personal life. • Rationalization: A person like David Smith may think that the company is so big and profitable that no one would even notice the missing funds.   Although hindsight is 20/20, we can always learn from real case studies: • What if Quest Diagnostics invested more resources in its compliance systems? • What if the training systems included lessons on the high costs of corporate fraud, both for the business and for the people that knowingly engage in white-collar crime? • David Smith may have been in a position to commit the fraud, he may have felt pressure, and he may have been able to rationalize his crime. The question remains: would better training have convinced him to act with more integrity? Consider the example of Walt Pavlo, a person who writes a popular column for Forbes online. In January 2001, a federal judge sentenced Walt Pavlo to 41 months in federal prison. The sentence followed Pavlo’s conviction for white-collar crimes that included money laundering, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice. Walt had worked hard to earn an engineering degree and an MBA. Those credentials led to a leadership position at MCI WorldCom, one of the world’s most valuable companies at the turn of the century. In his role as a finance manager, Walt described pressure he felt to report higher revenues than the company earned. The supervisors that oversaw his department wanted to boost WorldCom’s financial performance, likely with pressure from the top. When Walt saw that other leaders entered fraudulent transactions, he felt justified to create his own fraud to enrich himself. Ordinary people may not expect a multi-billion-dollar, global corporation like WorldCom to engage in fraud. Neither would they expect a family man with a professional education to exploit the fraud he discovered—then create his own scam. Members of our team have met and interacted with thousands of people that served time for white-collar crimes. Despite leading or working with companies that had compliance-training manuals, they did not get the message.   Human Stories of Noncompliance and Fraud: To make compliance a part of any corporate culture, leaders should include regular training that includes real-life stories. Those stories will help all team members appreciate the magnitude of problems that come with a government investigation. When leaders and team members grasp the severity of consequences, fewer people will participate in the type of behavior that can increase risk levels for businesses and organizations. As an added bonus, by investing in compliance training that works, businesses and individuals may qualify for leniency or mitigation in the event that investigators begin asking questions. It’s impossible to predict who might commit fraud within an organization. The vast majority of people that engage in white-collar crime do not have criminal histories. Yet as the theory of the fraud triangle suggests: • those people may be in a position to commit fraud; • they may feel pressure that induces them to participate in fraud; • they may rationalize their behavior for any number of reasons. Good training may lower risk levels for businesses and for individuals. Consider statements that our team at Compliance Mitigation found online:  According to Carnegie Mellon University’s report on Insider Fraud in Financial Services, employees working in accounting, operations, sales, upper management, customer service, purchasing, and finance commit 75% of all corporate fraud.  Employers frequently assume that people always act with integrity, even after being hired. Since businesses incentivize managers to focus on meeting targets and goals rather than detecting fraud, commitment to ongoing compliance training frequently suffers.  In a report that Intel published, Grand Theft Data, inside sources cause 42% of all company security breaches. Those security breaches can lead to government investigations and litigation, exposing businesses and individuals to enormous levels of stress.  Corporate fraud represents one of the government’s highest criminal priorities. The FBI estimates that white-collar crime costs Americans more than $300 billion annually. Those crimes run the gamut, from accounting schemes designed to deceive management, investors, auditors, and analysts about the true financial condition of a company, to cases involving fraud on the government and insurers, vendors, and clients.  Government agencies scrutinize telemarketers, brokers, crypto currency businesses, cannabis, financial services, and the healthcare field.  The FBI partners with numerous agencies to capitalize on their experience in specific areas such as securities, taxes, pensions, energy, and commodities. The Bureau has placed greater emphasis on investigating allegations of these frauds, and FBI agents frequently broaden their reach by partnering with other agencies, such as the:  Securities and Exchange Commission  Commodity Futures Trading Commission  Federal Trade Commission  Internal Revenue Service  Department of Labor  Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,  US Postal Service  Secret Service.  The Department of Homeland Security has its own independent mandate to criminally pursue fraud, financial crimes involving blackmail, contract fraud, grant fraud, money laundering, bribery, immigration fraud and program theft.   Government investigations are likely to increase as a result of COVID-19. The CARES Act, subjects companies to additional scrutiny by establishing three new oversight bodies:  (i) the Office of the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery within the Treasury Department;  (ii) the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, consisting of the IGs for Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor and the Treasury, among others; and  (iii) the Congressional Oversight Commission.  In fact, dozens of cases have already been brought in connection with abuse of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). The Value Proposition Building a compliance program will protect businesses, shareholders, communities, and individuals. On the surface, the investment may feel like a wasteful expense and hassle. Yet effective compliance programs represent an opportunity to both increase revenues and decrease risk for debilitating costs. They provide an excellent return with peace-of-mind. As an aside, they may pay for themselves in a variety of ways, including: • Eliminating fraud, waste, and theft of company assets • Creating a more inspiring corporate culture with transparency • Opening opportunities for increased efficiencies An effective program will improve internal communications and messaging with prospective customers. Good compliance metrics may also put a company in a good position for a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), which may avoid total disruption. In these cases, the government brings an action but realizes it needs the assistance of the company itself in order to prove wrongdoing by the individuals involved. For example, federal prosecutors entered into Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Samsung Heavy Industries in 2019. The company agreed to settle matters by paying a fine and cooperating in with the government’s investigation of bribery. The DPA likely saved millions of dollars for shareholders and may have spared some people from going to prison. Maintaining compliance equips employees to do their jobs well, reach career goals, and keep customers happy. To paraphrase Warren Buffet: • It takes five years to grow a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it.   An integrated compliance program becomes a valuable corporate asset. Leverage the compliance training so that people can empower themselves to reach their highest potential. By showing everyone to act in accordance with corporate values, leaders protect the enterprise, the team members, and shareholder value.        

Wealth is morally neutral, but as MCI-WorldCom, Enron, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Purdue Pharma have shown, an unbridled pursuit of wealth can lead to our downfall.

In this episode of Disruptive CEO Nation, we speak with Skyler Ditchfield, co-founder and CEO of GeoLinks. Skyler is an award winning, lifelong risk taker and entrepreneur delivering innovative telecom solutions. He shares how GeoLinks was started in 2011 with $550 in startup capital and a bold vision and now stands as a highly recognized change maker in the network connectivity marketplace. Our conversation covers his founder's journey, company growth, culture, team building, taking on the big guys, the value of serving on boards, keeping money in the company, the decision for outside funding and his passion for closing the digital divide by reaching underserved communities and offering price competitive services. GeoLinks has revolutionized the way data is transferred from global data centers to its final delivery destination. GeoLinks builds custom solar powered and wind turbine relays as part of their mission of providing a green network footprint and as solar relays don't require connection to the electric grid it has allowed them to be recognized for emergency connectivity service during severe wildfires. GeoLinks has been ranked on Inc. Magazine's Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America three-years running and they have also been recognized as one of the Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America by Entrepreneur Magazine 2018 and 2019. GeoLinks delivers Enterprise-Grade Internet, Digital Voice, SD_WAN, Cloud On-ramping, Layer 2 Transport, and both Public and Private Turnkey Network Construction. Skyler dove into the world of technology at the age of 13 when he set up a bulletin board system (BBS) to service 200 members of his local community with dial-up Internet. Directly after high school, he accepted a Network Engineer II job at the Private Network Management Center (PNMC) of MCI Worldcom in Silicon Valley where he was the youngest technician at the maximum-security PNMC and then quickly promoted to Network Engineer III. From there he started, sold and bought companies and has become highly recognized receiving honors such as 40 under 40 2019 – Pacific Coast Business Times; Most Influential Leaders 2018 and 2019 – San Fernando Valley Business Journal; 30 Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs of 2019 – Insights Success; and Top 100 Innovator in Diversity and Inclusion - Inc. 5000 2017, 2018, 2019. Discover more by visiting www.geolinks.com or follow on Twitter @GeoLinks_usa or @SkylerJesseD. Connect with Skyler at https://www.linkedin.com/in/skyler-ditchfield-9aa7b946/. #GEOLINKS #5G #clearfiber #DisruptiveCEONation #Industry40 #business #businessowners #founder #entrepreneur #CEO #network #wifi #connectivity #podcast #interview  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Glyn Smith, Chief Audit Executive at Core-Mark International, joins VIP's Casey Hasten in a discussion about his role in uncovering the multi-billion dollar WorldCom fraud and how he assisted the company in successfully moving forward and emerging from bankruptcy. Glyn has years of experience as an Audit professional, holding the Vice President of Internal Audit position at Sabre Inc, Senior Director at Blockbuster, and of course, Director at MCI WorldCom. He joins us in a conversation about business ethics, perseverance, audit practices, company culture and more.About The We Are VIP Podcast:This podcast is brought to you by VIP to add value to your job or candidate search. Each week, we'll bring you helpful tips and insights from leading professionals to help candidates land their dream jobs and help employers find better talent. Hosted by:Casey Hasten, Director of Recruiting at VIPAbout VIP:We utilize a holistic approach to support your strategic initiatives in accounting and finance. From recruiting and strategic staffing, to project management consulting, our service model offers a comprehensive solution that allows for flexibility as you navigate transformation and growth within your organization.Connect:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/270216/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WeAreVIPCompanyJob Openings and Services: https://wearevip.com

In IT we know that the only constant is change. And for the most part, that's OK. What is difficult is when standards or processes are framed as immutable, and THEN they change. How do we adjust when the company spends $5million on a data center expansion, and then moves everything to the cloud 2 years later? Or when Windows abandons the GUI and goes to CLI, while Cisco moves away from IOS commands and on to GUI and API-driven interfaces? Does our religious/ethical/moral background help (or hinder) us from accepting and adapting to these moments in our work as IT pros? In this episode Kate, Josh, and Leon try to unpack the question and formulate some answers. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:49 Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints made an announcement which sent shock waves through the Mormon community and tremors throughout many other religious communities as well. We'll get into the details about that in a minute. But it caused us here at Technically Religious to think about how supposedly immutable truths, whether we're talking about replacing Latin with English during mass or Microsoft's adoption of open source, affect us and how we deal with those changes. Joining the conversation today is Kate Asaff Kate: 01:17 Hello. Leon: 01:18 And Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:20 Yeah, it's still cold in Canada! Leon: 01:23 and I'm Leon Adato and it's slightly warmer here in Cleveland. So Josh, do us a favor and run us down just the main points of the announcement from last week. Josh: 01:34 Sure. So this announcement was made in early April, and in order to understand it, we have to go all the way back to November, 2015, and maybe even a little further. So the Organization of the Mormon Church, or the LDS church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is such that it's a top down organization. So the President, or prophet, of the church, he makes a declaration, often he has to get his two counselors and the other 12 men that sit on the quorum of the 12 apostles. And then those 15 men make these proclamations. So in November of 2015, the church released a policy internally, that was leaked, and then they had to address it publicly, that said that any child who had parents who were of the same gender, so you're in a same sex-relationship or a same-gender relationship or if you are trans-gendered - first, they were now labeled apostates. And that's really heavy language within any religious community. There's one thing to have transgressed, but there's another thing to be considered an apostate. And then in addition to them being an apostate, they also said that no child whose primary residence was with those same sex couples could receive any ordinances within the church. So that spans the entire gamut of: You could not be blessed as an infant within the church; to: you couldn't be baptized; to: if you were in the church - there are certain things that you that you undertake within Mormonism, you know, if you're a boy at the age of 12 (and now the age of 11) you can receive the priesthood - just things that you can't do, many of those rites of passage. So last week, and of course we're recording this in the early days of April, so last week the church came out and said, "Hey, that policy that was put into place in November of 2015? We're going to change that policy. And we're going to make it so that now if you are the child of an LGBTQ family, you can be baptized as an infant, you can be blessed within the church, under the understanding that of course the church is going to reach out to you and, throughout your lifetime because you are now officially a member of the church, once you're, once you're blessed and in the LDS church. That's a huge change because leadership within the church and members at large - admittedly myself prior to my transition away from Mormonism - defended that policy with a couple of talking points. First and foremost that the prophet, he specifies what is the will of God. He speaks for God. He's God's mouthpiece on earth. And second that this was an act of kindness, because we didn't want to - as a church - we didn't want to have people, with their children attending the Mormon church where the Mormon church was teaching that their parents were apostates. And then having to go home to their parents and say, "Hey mom and dad...", sorry... I got... hey, look at that. "Hey Mom and mom, dad and dad." Or "Hey, mom and dad, you know, dad and dad or mom and mom. You're an apostate." Or "You know, we think that you should be excommunicated." And all those horrible things that go along with that. So yeah, that's um, that was huge. I was pretty... I'll admit I was pretty pissed off on Thursday. Not because I disagree with the change that children should be allowed to join whatever church they want to regardless of their parents. I was just pissed off because lots of people put a lot of time and effort into setting aside their personal views and trying to make it so that they align with what they were being told from the top of the church. And then the church went, "Hey, by the way, we're going to change." Leon: 05:36 Right. And you'd actually mentioned in an earlier episode when we talked about opposing as you follow, you said that that was one of the things that caused you and your family to move away from the Mormon church for a while. And then you came back and you suffered censure and a bunch of other things for those views. So you directly experienced some of that just for expressing an opinion. Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that actually goes back pretty far in my marriage. That goes back probably 15 years ago when that particular experience happened. I mean, just to give some context and then, and I know that we want to talk about this as a foundation for IT. And I think there's a great parallel. And Leon, thanks for calling it out. Harold B. Lee, who was the president of the church from July of 1972 until his death in December of 1973, he said this: "You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name's glory." So, you know, pretty powerful language from the LDS church. Fortunately in IT, apart from Mac users, right Kate? Nobody thinks that their salvation from any of their other platforms. Leon: 07:09 I think actually, yeah, there is actually a Mac airbook that blocks the gates of hell. Kate: 07:14 It's actually an iPad. Leon: 07:18 Oh, of course. It would be. And that, with making a little bit of lighthearted humor is where I actually want to go, which is the IT aspects of that. But before we dig too far into that can we think - the three of us - can we think of any other analogs in religions that may have been that same kind of thing? Again, I'm not talking about the fact that things change. I'm talking about things that were supposedly immutable, or somewhat permanent, and then the group, the organization sort of pivoted away from it. And, and I brought up one which was the change from the Catholic mass from Latin to English, which you know, happened I think in the seventies, if I remember correctly? I could be wrong because I don't pay very much attention to that kind of stuff. But I remember that it caused quite a bit of a stir, Josh: 08:13 Yeah, the ordination of women in the United Methodist Church, which happened well before I was born back in the mid fifties is an interesting one. Again, linking it to Mormonism. A woman named Kate Kelly founded an organization called Ordain Women. She's a lawyer and an activist and she was excommunicated by the LDS church in June, 2014. So everyone kind of waits for the day in which women will be ordained within the Mormon church or within the the LDS church. I don't know if it's going to happen, but we certainly see that adopted. And that's a huge thing, right? Because traditionally, you know, as far back as tradition goes religions tended to be very patriarchal. Where, you know, men were the heads, the household, they were the heads of the church. And so for the United Methodist to allow women to be ordained officially, even though it had been doing it for a long time, unofficially. That was huge. Kate: 09:04 It kinda reminds me in the 90's when the Catholic Church decided to start allowing girls to be altar servers. I remember there was a cardinal in Boston who had saw these girls serving and before the proclamation came from the Vatican, the story I heard was that he told the congregation, "Get these girls out of here." He didn't want to see them serving and that it was something, obviously 20 years later it has stuck with me Leon: 09:34 With religion you have things that really are dogmatic. Sometimes we throw that word around somewhat flippantly but religion actually is dogmatic. It has, you know, strictures or rules that are, at least in the eyes of it, internally immutable. And so you've got that. But pivoting to the IT piece, I want to talk a little bit about, about that. What are some of those changes? It's not going to change and then it does and you have to suddenly cope with it. What are some of the ones that we've either heard about or experienced ourselves? Kate: 10:08 Well since you guys were poking fun of me a little bit earlier as being a devoted Apple fan girl I will bring up the 2006 when Apple changed from Motorola to Intel processors. That was a huge thing for the Apple community and you know, many of us had spent years structuring these complex arguments as to why RISC processors are better than CISC processors and you know, insisting that megahertz and gigahertz aren't true measures of processing power. And then all of a sudden, like everything for us was just blown away overnight. Now Macs were Intel based and we kind of had to let go of, you know, our are sworn allegiance to the Motorola chipset. Leon: 10:56 That's, I'm going to say funny, not funny ha ha, but I just had, I would never have expected that to be overwhelming to a community. But I can see that the way that you describe it, I can absolutely understand that you had an emotional investment in a particular hardware standard. Josh: 11:16 Yeah. Well, I think that functional workspace, right? You know, Kate, you talked about defending the position of you know, RISC processors. That's why it's good. That's why it's the thing that makes Apple as awesome as it is. And we all go through that. You know, I've been in the industry long enough that I remember walking into data centers and seeing literally big metal, there were mainframes sitting on the data center floor. The idea that we would virtualize? It blew people's minds and I was like, I thought that was a great idea. Let's virtualize, let's get density. I will admit to being a little slower to adopt a shift to cloud because it, it put in place some barriers to entry for me. When I started my career, I loved the idea of networking, although I'm not a networking engineer, but I loved the idea that you could plug in cables and lights would start blinking and things just work. You know, there was, there was a command line and I actually, I had a reputation for asking questions in class, like "How do you do that from the command line?" But it got beaten out of me. I was that guy. But it got beaten out of me because Windows was the thing, Windows and at the time, a Netware were the platforms for for server managers and that's where I was headed. We've made this swing to having to code, and I don't code, but everything is code now. Networking is code, storage code, servers are code, everything is code. I'm made a very firm stance early in my career that I didn't want to code because I wasn't good at it. I'm still not good at it. I feel like I'm fumbling with 14 hands tied behind my back. I don't know what the analogy is. I just feel dumb. I feel like I'm the guy smashing his face on his keyboard trying to make things work anytime I code. So I get it. Those shifts are hard, and they're not hard because we don't, I don't want to accept the shift to cloud. It's hard because it makes me address other deficiencies in myself that I don't know that I'm 100% ready to address. Speaker 1: 13:24 And I think that that's actually a good point is that the change, the changes themselves may not be so troublesome, but they address either inadequacies or perceived inadequacies in ourselves and we don't like that. We don't always like to have a mirror held up to it. Sometimes I think it's not that though. So given a quintessential example, and I think many of us in IT have experienced this, where on Monday the business says, "Hey, you know, this event is occurring," whether it's a merger or an acquisition or whatever it is, "but don't worry, nothing's going to change for you. Everything's going to be just fine." And then Friday, metaphorically, they say, "Oh, by the way, we're shutting down the location" or "You're being let go" or you know, "We're moving this entire department to merge with this other department" or whatever it is. And, whether it happens in days or weeks or months, "You first told me nothing was going to change. And then it did." And that's the part that I think a lot of us have a hard time coping with. Don't tell me that it's not going to change when you know full well that it is. Enough times in business, things change and everyone says, oh yeah, we had no way of knowing that was going to happen. Those changes are unpredictable and so you just deal with them. But when it's clearly predictable, that's the part I think that is more difficult for us in IT to deal with. And I think that's the whole point of vendors offering what's known as LTS, Long Term Support, for something, like "We promise we're not going to pull the rug out from under you for x years." Josh: 15:09 I want to make sure that we understand or at least that we agree that IT is not religion. Religion is not IT. There's certainly some overlap and are dogmatic beliefs on both sides of of the row. But I tweeted earlier today and I'm going to read it, "A gentle reminder that you are more than your nationality, favorite sports team, political party, or religious ideology. Be more than the sum of your parts. Be better than your weakest part. Be human." And I think that that applies to IT as well. You might have been the person who was responsible for gateway computers, probably cause you liked cows. I don't know. Just because that is what you've always done doesn't mean it's what you always need to do. You are more than capable of transitioning and learning something new. And a coworker of mine, Zach, if you're listening, shout out, he will, he will admit that I am not a great scripter, but I'm also more than capable of being taught how to be an okay scripter, you know? Under his tutelage, I've become kind of useful with powershell and I have even remotely built some shell scripts recently. So it's possible you can be something more than what you thought you always were. And that is really a beautiful thing, both in IT and in humanity. Leon: 16:31 And I've written about that in the past. And I probably will again in response to this podcast about that's actually not what you are. You might be, you know, a Cisco IOS command line jockey. You might be, you know, you might know everything there is to know about the Apple platform, whatever it is, but that's not actually what makes you a great IT professional. What makes you a great IT professional is your sensibilities. The fact that you understand how networking works, how hardware reacts with software, how architecture and design and you know an idea converts itself and moves through the pipeline into an actual product. Those are the things that make you a great IT practitioner and those things will persist even when the foundational platform - software or hardware - change. But again, just to drive it back again, the point is that, you know, we know things change, but when we are told something is not going to change and then it does, what do we do about that? So my question does our perspective, our outlook, whether it's religious or philosophical, whether it's moral or ethical, does that make it easier or harder to deal with? Kinds of events that you know, we promise it won't change it than it does. On the one hand, I could see someone saying that if you are heavily religious, you come from a strongly dogmatic frame of view, then you carry with you baggage of what "forever" means. And when a vendor or my employer says "It's never going to change, we are standardizing on x," and then they change. That can feel like a betrayal because I brought along, "No, no wait, you said the f word, "forever", so you know that means something to me and you just broke your promise." That could be much harder than somebody who might not have, like I said, that baggage coming along with it. I don't know what, what's your take on that? Kate: 18:36 We talked about this a little bit before, but what I found was interesting about that question was that as an atheist, I obviously have a somewhat fluid view of, you know, how the world works and how things are. I am also, technology-wise the quintessential early adopter. I'm the first day that it's available. I will consume it, upgraded, download it, in any way that I can get the new stuff. I'm on board. Josh: 19:03 So I think that that makes you Kate an IT relativist. There's this great thing within Mormonism about moral relativism and how it's such a bad thing, which that is a whole different discussion, but I think that the very best IT practitioners are those who can balance a bit of that. Conservativis... can't say that word... Conservativism plus that moral relativism within IT that you see the changes, you're willing to bring them in, but you do it in a way that requires that you parse them through your personal and your community experience and then say, "Yes, that's something we actually want to bring in to our enterprise. We're willing to adopt it." You need to know about it so that you can also say to someone who has read a shiny brochure or seen a vendor pitch about how amazing a product is and say, "Nope actually that's not something that we want to do and here's why." And being able to speak to a multitude of points. I think makes us great IT practitioners, if you are just that sole sourced individual who only knows about one technology, you're going to find yourself in some IT challenges. I've got a great friend, who coincidentally is also ex Mormon and his name is also Josh. Interesting point. It's interesting for me to listen to him talk about his challenges within his career. He's a great DBA. He is actually not just a DBA, but he designs databases and he's worked on a bunch of different areas and he has really struggled because he thinks that he's only in that data space. And I want to say to him, "Hey Josh," which is a little weird cause I'm calling my name, "Hey Josh, you need to understand that you're better than what you think that you are because first, you're willing to look at your career and figure out the parts that are really useful for you and you know where your weaknesses are." That, for me, is the big part. Are we willing to look at what we're doing today and understand both its strengths and weaknesses and then leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses by adopting other technologies? It would be kind of like me saying, "Hey, Mormonism is still really awesome," - which I do think. There are some wonderful things about Mormonism, but I also am willing to adopt some ideologies from Judaism. Thank you Leon. And I'm also willing and very open to adopting that moral relativism that comes along with atheism and other non traditional religious beliefs." Leon: 21:36 I definitely think, Kate, that we have a new topic idea on the horizon, which is whether or not being staunchly religious makes you more or less likely to be an early adopter of technology. I think as an IT person, I really want to solve that problem because I like new technology and I would hate to think that I'm predisposed as an Orthodox Jew to like not want to do the things. Of course I could be an outlier. I could. So Josh, to your point, I think that that IT is not like religion in the sense that no matter how strongly a vendor or an organization says that something is never going to change, it's gonna. Right? Yeah. I mean we just know that that's the nature of IT, is that things are going to change and probably sooner rather than later when you look at the long game. However, I think one of the things that makes this issue, you know - "It's not going to change," and then it does - similar in both religious and IT contexts is what we as people hope and expect from that event. Which is, I think, that whoever's making the change needs to be transparent about it. I think they need to be intellectually honest about it. And they need to be consistent about it. And what I mean by those things is that they need to say that "This change is happening. We saw it coming, even if we couldn't tell you at the time, but we're telling you now that we knew it was coming. We just had to," you know, whatever it was, the merger was coming, but we couldn't say anything because blah, blah, blah, legal, blah, blah, blah, Wall Street, whatever. Right? Um, it needs to be intellectually honest. We're doing this because it supports our brand values. It supports our corporate goals. It, you know, whatever. And it needs to be consistent. And I think most of all, if people were hurt by that first statement, this is the way it is. "This is the way it's always going to be." And then it changes. And people were hurt. You know, an example that happened a couple of jobs back for me: $5 million investment in a data center, building it out, putting tons of hardware in there, and then they moved to the cloud. What are you kidding me? Like, we just bought all this stuff and the company did say, "We know we hired a lot of you for your depth expertise in on-premises data center operations. And now we're asking, you - we're in fact demanding - that you move to a cloud based model. We know that some of you are going to be upset by this. Some of you may want to leave. We're going to support you in whatever decision you make, but this is the direction we're going. That kind of statement makes it a lot easier to accept the, "We never will... Oops. We are" kind of thing. And I think just to tie it back to our opening topic. I would hope, although I'm not in the community, but I would hope that a statement is made to the families that were hurt within the Mormon community for, you know, the years of being called, you know, apostates and all that stuff, and say "We're really sorry about this and we're going to do what we can to make it better." I would hope that that statement would be forthcoming. I guess time is going to tell. Josh: 24:55 Time will absolutely will. Unfortunately Mormonism does not have a history of apologizing. The unfortunate reality of some of the current leadership has come out specifically and said that the church does not ask for, nor does it offer apologies. Kate: 25:12 A long, long time ago I worked for MCI Worldcom and, if you recall, it is now Verizon business. It was sold to Verizon about 18 months after the CEO promised all of the employees that he was not looking to sell the company. MCI is also a huge company. It had definitely been in the works. So your comment about honesty really struck home with me. Nobody likes to be blindsided by change, but even more, nobody likes to be lied to about it. Josh: 25:45 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Kate: 25:59 To paraphrase and old Greek guy, "the only constant in IT is change."

In this episode, you will learn about how DMOs can band together to come up with great ideas to serve their partners from Greg Evans. Greg Evans has been with Simpleview since 2008 and currently serves as their Vice President of Sales & Account Services. In his role, he provides strategic insight and recommendations for his teams when providing knowledge and best practices to current and prospective clients. He has nearly twenty years of corporate sales and account management experience, having worked for technology-forward corporations such as MCI Worldcom and Iron Mountain. A transcript of this episode is available here: http://destinationontheleft.com/greg-evans/

This week on the I Love Data Centers podcast: Meet Me Room and Internet Exchange Innovation in the Data Center Industry, I interview Hunter Newby. If you've worked in the data center industry for more than a few years and haven't heard name Hunter Newby, you simply haven't been paying attention. Hunter is a 20 year data center industry veteran who innovated the concepts of the Meet Me Room (MMR) and Internet Exchange (IX). Our paths finally crossed last year during a data center conference in DC and a friendship quickly ensued. The conversation shared here covers how Hunter got started in the industry post college, the large impact his father has had on his approach to life, what the catalyst was for starting Telx in 1998 and what it was like boot strapping and growing the company through 2009.   I am certain you will enjoy listening to this interview as much as we enjoyed having the conversation together! Episode 15 Show Notes 2:16 Interview starts 3:48 Where Hunter comes from 6:21 How did you get involved in tech? 13:10 Hunter’s first experiences with computers 14:45 Hunter’s first experiences in data centers 19:36 What led you to want to work at places like MCI WorldCom? 21:00 Going to WorldCom for the first time 26:16 What it took to get Telx up and running 30:09 Did the bubble bursting in 2001 affect your business?    40:43 Thoughts on Open-IX (OIX) 44:57 Why has nobody revolted? 51:15 How Hunter got Telx to become Digital’s exclusive Meet Me Room Provider 58:51 When did things shift to charging for cross connects in Meet Me Rooms? 01:00:20 Where did the peering exchange come from? 01:16:39 What is one belief you hold that most people would find crazy? 01:20:36 What is a common misconception about the data center industry? 01:25:17 What is one of the most influential pieces of advice you received when you were young in the data center industry? 01:28:22 Hunter’s upcoming work, and how to get in touch with him Links mentioned in this episode https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunternewby http://www.hunternewby.com/