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The Nightly Rant: Examining Society from a Sarcastic Point of ViewWelcome to The Nightly Rant with your hosts, Mike and Torya. In this show, we take a sarcastic look at society and dive into various topics that provoke thought and conversation. Today, we want to discuss the importance of being prepared to answer questions and engage in meaningful dialogue when expressing opinions publicly. We believe that adults should act like adults and handle disagreements in a mature manner. Let's dive into the details.The Importance of Being Prepared to Answer QuestionsMike: "People in general should not ask questions unless they're prepared to hear any answer."Torya: "I'll take what you just said a step further to also include stating your opinion publicly."Mike: "If you state your opinion publicly on something, then you need to be prepared to answer questions. Some people are going to be confused. You put your opinion out there that that is influential. It means something. I don't care who you are. Be prepared to answer questions. That's all."Torya: "Influences at least one other person in the universe."Mike: "Be prepared to answer questions. That's all I ask. Is that bad?"Torya: "Well, why are you asking the questions? What is your goal with asking people questions about their opinion?"Mike: "To understand their viewpoint on that issue."Torya: "Because to tell them how wrong they are, that they're dumb or that their opinion is factually incorrect. No."Mike: "In fact, usually these days especially, I will say your opinion is completely valid, but it isn't one that I completely connect with because I don't understand this aspect."Torya: "Can you explain?"Mike: "And I blah out whatever the question is and then they attempt to answer. And most times they don't even attempt to answer because they don't care. They just growl back at you and it's like, no, I was truly trying to understand where you were coming from."Torya: "Well, then if your intention is to just understand, then no, right, you're not doing it."Mike: "Exactly. There's nothing wrong. Then if your intention is to drag them into a trap and then pounce on them and beat them to death, yeah, that'd be pretty wrong."Torya: "Or at least mean and nasty. Sure."Mike: "Which is wrong sometimes."Torya: "It's fun."Mike: "Well, it can be. I won't lie. It can be."Torya: "Especially when somebody has a really obscure and ridiculous and factually incorrect opinion. But I digress. We don't need to go there."Mike: "Well, yeah, and why can't somebody disagree about that and not make it be such a big deal? I mean, come on, there's a specific incident in my head. And the minuteness of the topic, if you think about it, it was like less than a grain of sand in the grand scheme of everything. Right?"Torya: "We've had disagreements about things way bigger than that and laughing together about something else five minutes later."Mike: "Nothing. That's like nothing. That's what I'm trying to say. It's like fart dust is a bigger deal than that."Torya: "Fart dust pretty bad."Mike: "And yet people who are allegedly adults make it about them and, oh, we need to quit the friendship. And that's literally what people do these days. Grown ass adults. Yeah, grown ass adults just leave and don't talk to you anymore. They don't have even the balls to say I'm going to say it. They don't even have the balls to say, fuck you."Torya: "Wow."Mike: "They don't have the balls to say anything. Yes, I'm the reason never for the E. It's always all me now."Torya: "I feel like all the words are fair game, though."Mike: "But here's the thing. It's like they don't even have the guts to say goodbye. Like, I'm done. That's a woosy move. I mean, those are the kind of people that disappear from their family, too. No BS."Torya: "I had a great idea earlier, and I was thinking that it'd be great if society would just chew up these cocksucking assholes that you're describing. The people who don't function as part of society because they're just too fucking wrapped up in their own self."Mike: "Yeah, they're not adults."Torya: "Chew them up and shit them out into outer space using the Earth's giant rectum. Yeah, the Earth is going to grow a giant rectum and it needs to shit these people out because they're destroying."Mike: "The world in many senses of the word. Yes, they are."Torya: "They're the most hostile people yet. They're the people who will call everybody else hostile."Mike: "Well, and that's the thing. There's also this issue where adults can't be adults, they just can't. Like we're talking about ghosting. That's not an adult move ghosting people. That's a little baby's move ghosting."Torya: "Right?"Mike: "Oh, where's your friend Johnny? Oh, I don't talk to him anymore. It's what the little kid does. It's not what an adult does."Torya: "Right? And then there's poor Johnny crying in the corner because he doesn't know why nobody likes him. And also, Johnny will continue to be an asshole for the rest of Johnny's life because nobody has ever told him why they don't like him."Mike: "Which in my opinion, makes you the asshole for not pointing it out to."Torya: "Right?"Mike: "I mean, if you pointed it out to him and he continued down the pathway, you pointed it out to him, and he gets to continue down the pathway if he wants to."Torya: "You've got to tell people how you feel about things. You know, it's interesting. When I was in Canada, not this most recent time, but the time before, I was hanging out with Alicia, you know, how she has miniature humans. Well, the boy miniature human punched the girl miniature human. And she came screaming and crying to know kid stuff. And Alicia told her that she needed to go tell miniature boy human how it made her feel so that he would apologize to her."Torya: "And she did, and he apologized and then gave her a hug for a five year old. People. Yeah."Mike: "And, you know, the honest truth is there's no reason whatsoever for someone to act like everything's okay when there are obvious signals that everything's not okay. There's no reason for anyone to ever do that to anybody. That's why I think we talk about this all the time. Our relationship works because it takes you longer than me to get there, but we tell each other, well, that bothered me when that happened."Torya: "I know that I'm a little bit irrational. Okay, whatever. Don't even no commenting. Not allowed. I know that I'm a little bit irrational, and sometimes I don't know if I'm actually annoyed with you or if I'm being crazy, so I need to take some time to decipher if I am being crazy."Mike: "But see but that's fair, because that means instead of that even makes you even more reasonable, because instead of putting our relationship through a roller coaster of crap, you take the time to filter it yourself. Here's the thing, though. A lot of people would bitch at you for that, but I commend you for it because you still come forward with the issues to get them fixed. You do."Torya: "Think about it. You're doing something that's annoying the crap out of me. Okay? Not right now. This is a hypothetical you are doing something."Mike: "Well, it's a hypothetical reality. It happens."Torya: "Yeah. Anyway, I could say something right then when you're being annoying in my hyper irrational, super annoyed state sure. Which what would happen bad?"Mike: "Let's just say doom would ensue. Always."Torya: "Nobody needs that. Or I could stew quietly about it for a while and then come back to it the next day when I'm not crazy and decide if I was actually annoyed with you or not. And then if I was actually annoyed with you, I could be like, hey, Mike, you did this thing. Please don't do it again."Mike: "Yeah, you know what, though? I obviously am the same person as you, so I obviously approach that same issue the same way as you. And I, though, have one time only with you, followed the completely reasonable give her the benefit of the doubt approach. I've done it many times, but once and only once did I regret doing it. And you did something like you had a comeback of, like I can't even remember the comeback at this point, but it was really this really sassy."Mike: "You didn't deny that you were doing something and that it would have bothered me. You didn't deny that at all, but instead, you just sort of ignored it. And went like, what about this? And it's like, wow, man. That isn't how we're supposed to deal with each other. We're supposed to deal with each other face to face. We're not supposed to try to duck around one another. And that's how that felt, right?"Torya: "That's why everybody has to calm down."Mike: "Before issues should be correct. Exactly. And that's the thing. There's times when you do have to wait, and there's times when you should take time to think about things. And I think it's more adult like to wait rather than overreact. However, I'm going to say something different. One last thing. When someone does that to you, they overreact. It's best for you to quote overreact back and protect yourself. That's what I think."Torya: "Well, because then you're going to get the whole thing out of the way right there, instead of you stewing that I overreacted and making it a fight the next day and the next day and the next day. I agree with you. If one person has already gone off the deep end, well, you might as well just have the knockdown drag out fight right there. Just get it over with."Mike: "I think we agree with that. And it's healthy. That's the healthy way, and we act like adults about it. And that's the key thing, though. You have to be able to speak your mind without the other person getting offended. And honestly, I think a big thing that most adults just don't have any longer than they used to is the ability to separate things. Just because you're not the most empathetic person in the world doesn't mean you're stupid."Torya: "Yeah, that's what I was going to say before you had something else you had to say. If I didn't take the minute to calm myself or minute or hours or six days, whatever is necessary, all arguments I had with everybody would be like, my fight with the Sam's Club lady where I called them an idiot and."Mike: "They walked wasn't your that wasn't your proudest moment."Torya: "Or my slight disagreement with that soccer mom that one time that I won't repeat."Mike: "Well, what's funny about that? What's funny about that is both of those situations turned out okay in the end, but they had the potential not to be. But here's the thing. By us being reasonable people, 98.5% of the time, you can get away with a slip up like that. And the rest of the people are like, in particular the soccer incident, the rest of the parents, you were like, oh, I'm so sorry that I said that in front of you. And they're like, Are you kidding? I would have said worse to her."Mike: "She deserved what you said. And then everyone that was literally the opinion, they would be like, oh, I would have said worse. Oh, she deserved it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not a single person sided with the other person. Not a single person. Now, here's the thing. We still set our apologies to everybody. To everybody."Torya: "Even though the person I exactly."Mike: "Even though they supported us, we still apologized."Torya: "Well, to be fair, I used the worst word Americans can possibly use in front of, like, twelve year old children."Mike: "Well, the twelve year old children were out on the soccer field, though Mitchell."Torya: "Said he heard it."Mike: "Well, it is what it is, man. You did apologize."Torya: "That's what I felt like I needed."Mike: "But you apologized. You did. To everybody. And yet the point is, they were supportive of us because we had always been reasonable people. We didn't yell and scream on the sidelines at our kid, at the referee. We didn't do that stuff. We sat there and we cheered."Torya: "Called the referee a sight."Mike: "We talked to each other."Torya: "Only when you were egged on by other groups of people, though, too."Mike: "We would just talk to each other and ignore everyone. I mean, that's just how we handled things. And so it's sort of annoying that people go down roads that they don't even bother to think about. Well, are they the type of people that would act that way?"Torya: "So can we officially shoot these hyper aggressive snowflake motherfuckers into space?"Mike: "Yeah, with the rectum. You said this already, and I fully agree with you."Torya: "Well, I need to know if other."Mike: "People."Torya: "We're not feeding the rectum Taco Bell."Mike: "Both of those are going to make a great audio club. That's the little shorty. Munch, munch, munch kapow. And we're not feeding in Taco Bell. Just wow. All right. Well, I think we have beaten this topic to death. I didn't even expect us to talk about it for this long. Here's what I want to kind of close up with tomorrow, which is the day after we record this, which will be weeks from the time you hear it."Mike: "We are getting involved in our very first official sporting event together. We are going to play fantasy hockey with the rest of our family. Yes, we are. And we suck at this for my ultimate failure. We're going to learn this quick. So with that, that is all I've got for you people."Torya: "Good night, everyone."Mike: "Hasta La Bye bye."Conclusion and Future OutlookIn this episode of The Nightly Rant, Mike and Torya discuss the importance of being prepared to answer questions and engage in meaningful dialogue when expressing opinions publicly. They emphasize the need for adults to act like adults and handle disagreements in a mature manner. The hosts share personal anecdotes and observations to highlight the negative consequences of ghosting and avoiding confrontation.The conversation delves into the significance of open communication and the ability to separate personal opinions from personal attacks. Mike and Torya stress the importance of understanding different viewpoints and seeking clarification rather than resorting to hostility. They also touch upon the need for self-reflection and taking the time to assess one's own emotions before engaging in discussions.The hosts conclude the episode by announcing their participation in a fantasy hockey league, highlighting the importance of learning new skills and embracing new experiences. They encourage listeners to approach disagreements with maturity and respect, fostering a culture of open dialogue and understanding.Moving forward, it is crucial for individuals to recognize the impact of their words and opinions on others. By being prepared to answer questions and engage in meaningful conversations, adults can foster a more inclusive and understanding society. The Nightly Rant serves as a reminder that communication is key, and it is essential to approach disagreements with empathy and respect.TimestampSummary0:00:15Introduction to the podcast and topic of the day0:01:34Importance of being prepared to answer questions when stating opinions0:03:34Adults making small disagreements a big deal0:05:02Criticism of people who ghost others without explanation0:06:34Society's inability to handle conflicts maturely0:08:25The importance of open communication in a relationship0:09:11The need to address issues face-to-face rather than avoiding them0:10:59Reacting to overreactions to protect oneself0:11:46Having a knockdown drag out fight to resolve conflicts0:12:22Lack of empathy and offense to criticism of empathy0:12:27Torya talks about needing time to calm herself before arguments0:12:55C mentions the soccer incident and how it turned out okay0:13:48They discuss apologizing to everyone involved in the incident0:14:11C talks about how they were always reasonable people0:14:54Torya suggests shooting hyper aggressive people into space0:15:55They mention their upcoming fantasy hockey event0:16:22Closing remarks0:31:54Mike thanks listeners and asks for a rating0:32:06End of transcript

Rounding Up Season 1 | Episode 11 – Successful Curriculum Adoption Guest: Dana Nathanson Mike Wallus: Adopting a new curriculum is not for the faint of heart. What makes this challenging? Well, beyond the materials themselves, a curriculum adoption may represent many things: changes to longstanding practices, beliefs, and classroom culture. On today's podcast, we'll talk with Dana Nathanson, the elementary math coordinator in Leander, Texas, about how leaders can effectively design, manage and sustain a successful curriculum adoption. Welcome to the podcast, Dana. I'm thrilled to have you and be able to talk with you a little bit about the work that goes into adopting and supporting the implementation of a new curriculum.  Dana Nathanson: I'm excited to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.  Mike: Absolutely. So, in your case, we're talking about the work that you did in Leander, Texas, when you supported the adoption of Bridges in Mathematics. I'd love to start by talking about something that feels really critical when a school or a district adopts a new curriculum: the idea of buy-in. How did you think about building buy-in for teachers when you adopted Bridges in Mathematics in your district?  Dana: I think that's an interesting question, because we do hear a lot about, ‘How do you get people to buy in?' And in our district when we think about buy-in, I think about, ‘That's my idea. And so how am I going to get people on board with my idea?' And so, really, we want to kind of flip the script on that and think about ownership. And so, when we think about, ‘How do I get people to kind of own this idea with me?' Then that is really where we see true empowerment. And so, we really approach this with that kind of lens to be thinking about, ‘How do I get people to own this, um, process and own what good math instruction looks like with me?' So that when we do adopt that we are adopting something that aligns with our vision for mathematics and what we want to see students participating in and being a part of in the classroom.  Mike: That really feels different even just to hear you talk about it. Ownership kind of conveys this idea that there's a shared responsibility as opposed to buy-in, which is, can I convince you to do a thing?  Dana: Right, right. And so, to get that ownership, we were at a time in the state of Texas where we were adopting new standards. And so, it was kind of, like, the perfect timing to think about, ‘How are we going to really get a clear picture of what we want math instruction to look like?' So, we did a lot of work with our teachers up front prior to adoption on what are those standards going to look like and how are we … or what do we feel like is the best way to teach math, really, in the younger grades? And so, we did a lot of learning together, a lot of reading. We really grounded ourselves with some of the work of Cathy Seeley, who is a former NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) president. She wrote a book, called ‘Faster Isn't Smarter.' And so, we kind of looked at that as a good starting point for, ‘We want all students to have opportunities to make sense of math, do the math and use the math.'  And that kind of became our foundation. It's not just about procedural fluency, but conceptual understanding and then ultimately, transfer. And so, we grounded our work in that and tried to bring people along as far as owning that vision. And then from there, we really looked at what teachers wanted from a resource. And thinking about the use of continuous improvement tools, we used feedback loops, consent-o-grams to—all along the way—so that we could really feel like everybody was owning. They wanted a parent component. They wanted more technology. They wanted practice opportunities through, through games. And so, when we established a rubric together with teachers and administrators, then that really helped us when we came to adoption because we were looking for something that checked all of these boxes.  Mike: Yeah. The story that I make up as I hear you talk about that, is that you had a level of consensus around what you were looking for, which made it a lot easier to make a decision that you felt good about, that you felt like people could own.  Dana: Right. Exactly.  Mike: So, I think anyone listening to this podcast knows that schools and districts have limited resources. So, the thing that I'm wondering about is, what were some of the supports that you prioritized during the first year of your implementation of Bridges?  Dana: So, I'm fortunate to work in a team of, there's three of us at the district level, to support all of our campuses. We have over, well, we have 28 elementaries and we're about to open 29; and so over a thousand elementary teachers that we support. But we knew that the three of us could not do it alone. And so, we are also fortunate that we have an instructional coach at each campus. Now this instructional coach is not specific to math. They support all content areas, but we had to bring them along. We had to get them to own it, and we had to have them feeling comfortable. And then we also created a teacher-leader system where we had a lead teacher from each campus. And we really focused on the instructional coach and the lead teacher as our early adopters or our campus champions to really help us rally—rally everyone around, um, owning this vision for mathematics and also the implementation of a new resource. And what a great opportunity along with the implementation of our new standards. And so, we did pay our teacher leads a stipend for that year. And having the instructional coaches in place was critical because it's those two groups that we would be able to lead and then they would take back to their campuses. Another thing that was also critical in that first year was administrator support. And I know that we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but I just want to highlight the fact that our campus principals were really great about giving teachers time in that first year of implementation to work as a professional learning community together, to have half days to plan and support the new adoption that we had.  Mike: There's a lot that you shared there … Dana: ( chuckles )  Mike: ( chuckles ) that I'd love to dig into a little bit. I think what strikes me about what you said though, particularly at the last part first, is the way that you worked with and supported administrators in really designing a year one where teachers had space and time to actually really devote mental space to thinking about a new curriculum: how it's designed, giving space to plan. That feels like it was an intentional priority that you worked with your administrative team to create.  Dana: Yes, that was very intentional. And it was evident when we began our first Getting Started trainings that summer. And we also trained our ICS (In-Class Support) and our lead teachers first, so that they could kind of get the buzz going for summer professional learning. And I thought it was also great that we were able to have the resources available. If you attended the training, you left with your resources. And teachers were so excited to get all of the great resources that are provided with Bridges. So, that was kind of a draw for them. But then once they had their resources and you start to dig through everything, there's another level of support that is needed. And so, we actually had what we called open houses prior to school starting so that teachers could go around to different teachers' classrooms in the district to see, ‘How did you set up your Number Corner? How did you provide space or how are you structuring space in your classroom for Work Places?' And so, we had a lot of teachers [who] would go around to other teachers' classrooms at other campuses and kind of explore to see and get ideas from each other, which was really powerful. And we created the space up front for that prior to the school year so that they would have that opportunity. And I also want to say at this time, seven years ago, we had a pretty good Twitter presence during this, so that we could also have people online. And I know Twitter's kind of blown up since then, but we were on Twitter a lot, and just being able to share that way, as well.  Mike: So, I love this idea of giving teachers space and time to get their materials and get set up. And the open house idea feels really supportive. One of the things that I sometimes think about is an adoption and an implementation might be a pedagogical shift. There might be a different understanding of the mathematics. But the truth is for a lot of people, the very first thing is, ‘How am I going to find a home for all of these things? What will my classroom look like?' You're kind of attending to that really important need that people have to have met even before they're trying to grapple with the curriculum itself.  Dana: Right. And so, to give that time for them up front to kind of get settled in—with what's this going to look like and how do I make it work—I think was key. And I talked a little bit earlier about the principals being able to provide some half-day plannings for teams throughout the year. But we also offered what we would term ‘power hours' after school. And we would host these in teachers' classrooms. And so, this month we're going to talk about the Work Places because we thought it was so critical that the teachers played all the Work Places so that they would know. And that's how you kind of get their ownership of that, too, as well. And so, we would have these power hours after school, where they would come and play the Work Places, or maybe the next month we're going to do a Math Forum together. That's coming up. And then the next month we're going to go through all of the Number Corner. Now you guys have all these great videos, but this was before you had those for Number Corner. And so, we were just really trying to get teachers in each other's classrooms sharing and making it easier. And we would all make the charts together so that they would have them ready for the next month. And we would see a lot of people on Twitter posting: ‘Here I am at my son's baseball game with my binder, learning.' ( laughs ) But I mean, that's just part of the process, too, right?  Mike: Well, you've really started to address the next thing that I wanted to bring up, which is, when I think about having been an elementary teacher for 17 years, what strikes me is that in education, we sometimes give ourselves really short windows of time to do a complete ‘implementation' quote- unquote. I can't tell you how many times I've heard this year is literacy. Next year is math. Dana: Right. Mike: I think what you're starting to address, but that I wanted to ask you directly is, as an instructional leader, how have you really tried to maintain the integrity of your implementation over time? Maybe just talk a little bit about how you've thought about that process of maintaining and sustaining.  Dana: So again, we leaned heavily, and we still continue to lean heavily, on our instructional coaches at campuses. So, each nine weeks, especially in the first three years of implementation—but even now— we'll dive into what does that curriculum look like for the upcoming nine weeks? And we'll give them ideas and point out specific things that are coming up so that they know how to share or how to kind of pull these things out when they're planning with the different grade levels. And so, we would continue to meet with them, but we always start with that unit introduction.  Mike: Hmm.  Dana: And if teachers can just take the time to read this, and this was another big sell from our department for Bridges, was the built in PD (professional development). If you read those introductions, just, like, how much learning that the teachers can have. So, those first years we really wrapped ourselves around those introductions and the learning together as teams. But we also took, at the time you guys had an Implementation Guide …  Mike: We still do.  Dana: Then I will plug the Implementation Guide. Now it's expanded a lot more. But we took that and we had teachers really pick what's a strength for you on here so that other teachers could come see that modeled for them. And then, what's your area of growth for this nine weeks or for this year? Are you going to focus just on Number Corner, but what parts of Number Corner? Or you want to work on the Work Places, but you're not really implementing the sentence frames correctly. So, whatever that goal is for you, and then the instructional coach and the campus administrator would know what that is, and they're able to support you or come give you feedback on that. And that has really helped us because that gave also administrators, kind of the look-fors that they should see when they walk into classrooms. And our department is fortunate to be able to walk with administrators and our instructional coaches so that we could all kind of participate in this coaching together around what we want it to look like, and then where it's going well. And we bring teachers across campuses and classrooms to see where it's going well, and really having them focus on some goals that they want to set to improve.  Mike: So, I suspect unless Leander is a magical school district that's different from everywhere else, you don't have exactly the same staff that you did … Dana: ( chuckles ) Mike: … seven years ago when you started your process. So, you probably know where I'm going, which is … Dana: Yes. Mike: … how do you account for the fact that teachers, like everyone else, have lives? And sometimes they move on from the grade level that they're teaching or their families move somewhere else. You have new administrators and educators coming in. How do you account for, kind of, that turnover that's just natural in education?  Dana: Right. So, we have the natural turnover. But also we are one of the fastest-growing school districts in Texas. And we continue to open about one school at least, sometimes two a year. So, we know that training and learning together is so important. And so, we have sent our curriculum specialists have participated in many of the Bridges trainers of trainers, trainers of leaders, and for Getting Started. And so, we still offer a two-day for that every summer and also in the fall. And we offer that special session for our new administrators, and we even have turnover in our cabinet. So, we offer that training, and I sit down with superintendents and our area superintendents, because we all have to own, own this. And so that is just a yearly thing that we do. But then also continuing to use our campus champions. We have continued that teacher-leader program. They support our new-to-district teachers as well, and then our instructional coaches. So, it is an ongoing cycle. And I will tell you, at first we kind of say, like, ‘If you can get Number Corner, your Problems & Investigations, and your Work Places down,' then we kind of introduced then the assessment piece the next year and then the intervention piece. So, we have layered it in that way so that it's not so overwhelming for our teachers. And then it just becomes part of your practice.  Mike: Thank you so much for that, Dana. The next piece that I wanted to go to, and you've alluded to it throughout this, is the role that instructional leaders—be they administrators or instructional coaches— play … I was reading a bit from The Wallace Foundation about how critically important principals are. Anthony Mohammad talks about how administrators are the ceiling on where a building can go. Can you talk in a little bit more detail about the kind of work that you did to bring your instructional leaders, particularly your principals, into the process of owning the adoption and the implementation?  Dana: This is still a journey. And so, I want to make sure that I plug that, that even though we are seven years into this adoption, we're still on a journey. Everybody's on a journey. We're not at the end of the race when we think about best practices and instruction in mathematics. But to bring our administrators along, we are fortunate to have instructional leadership meetings every month. And so, we really focus on curriculum with them. We focus on best practices and really, we bring learning to them. And we use a lot of the resources that The Math Learning Center provides. We will learn through some of the blog posts together, reading those together. But really what we wanted upfront before adoption and through the adoption process was for our principals to really own the fact that all students, each and every student, can learn math; and making that accessible to all of our learners. And so that is a mindset. We did a lot of work around the mindset work with Jo Boaler and Carol Dweck. And so, thinking about how then, we wanted—we're not a district that just throws out the direct instruction piece either. We still value that direct instruction. But we want to see that blended with investigating and exploration for our students. And then also having that small group time where they're able to reinforce through Work Places. And so, we really wanted our principals to be firm in the components so that they would know what to see in the classroom, but also firm in the fact that we want to see visual models. What do our standards say? What are the best practices for mathematics say? And the use of manipulatives. And that our Number Corner is meant to be a routine and why we value that for practice for pre-teaching and reinforcing. And what's the value of playing the games in Work Places? So that they would understand these components and really own that they want to see these in the classroom because that's what we know is best practices in mathematics.  Mike: When you think about Bridges, in particular, as a curriculum that you've adopted, were there features of the way Bridges is structured or organized that you really felt like it was important to help people understand going into it? And what I mean by that is, in some ways, Bridges is a departure from a traditional curriculum. And I'm wondering what were the things that you identified that's like, gosh, I've just got to make sure people understand this about how it's designed to work?  Dana: Again, it's kind of the three components that I already alluded to, but really that Number Corner piece. Really thinking about Number Corner as an opportunity for the whole class. And we even kind of connect it to a read-aloud. This is an opportunity for the whole class to come together and to, either it's going to pre-teach some things or it's going to reteach some things. And so how are you making sure that those routines are in place and making sure that we have secured small group time for the Work Places to happen? And that's what we call our small group time, is Work Place time. Because we're talking about how the teacher is floating about the Work Places and observing how they're communicating and playing the game and how they are talking about the math with each other. So, I would say, the Work Places and the Number Corner are really, kind of, the areas that were a little bit harder to bring people along.  Mike: What strikes me about what you said is that you describe the function of those two pieces of the curriculum, Number Corner as a tool to have consistent, long-term opportunities to either reengage with big ideas or pre-engage with big ideas that are coming up. And then the idea that Work Places are an opportunity to practice. But they're so much richer of an opportunity to practice than the worksheets that I remember as a kid, where there were 25 naked number problems and two story problems at the bottom ( chuckles ). They function in the same way in the sense that they're the opportunity for longterm practice. Dana: Right. Mike: And the added bonuses, as you said, when the teacher's moving about the classroom, they can formatively assess and listen to what kids are saying. But they can also jump in and do some miniconferring with children in the moment. Dana: Right. Mike: To help guide them or move them or advance their thinking.  Dana: Exactly. And just thinking about that Work Place time and when teachers are thinking about, ‘Oh, I have to plan something different for this small group.' Well, bring that group together to engage in the Work Place with them so that you are right there observing and having, like you said, that conferring time or that mini-lesson over the Work Place.  Mike: Well, before we close, one of the default questions that I ask anyone who's a guest is, if someone was listening to this podcast and they were charged with leading an adoption or an implementation of a curriculum, what are some of the resources you would recommend for someone who is looking for guidance on how to do this work?  Dana: Well, now I would definitely use the blue ( laughs ) ‘Principles to Actions' NCTM book, because I think this sets the great stage for, what are those teaching practices that we want? But also it talks about the elements. One of the essential elements is specific to curriculum. I didn't mention this earlier, but we also had parents give us feedback along the way. And I think that that is also critical, as well as students. Let your students have some hands-on experiences with the resources so that they're able to even advocate and say, ‘This is how we want to learn math.' There's no denying when you see that students are feeling successful, but also when they are loving what they're doing in the math classroom.  Mike: Well, I was just going to say, everything that you talked about today, I think that the word that comes to mind in addition to ownership is investment. As I've listened to you, I keep thinking, you invested time and energy to make the things that you were looking for come to fruition …  Dana: Uh-hm.  Mike: … to continue the journey, as you said. And without investing in those really important things, the outcome might look really different at this point in time. Dana: Right.  Mike: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dana. I've learned a lot from the conversation. It's been a pleasure talking to you.  Dana: Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.  Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2023 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Email from Dan – I read an article you suggested and am unconvinced with your thoughts Angeline - 'the Secret' - what is the catholic perspective? John - left the church and recently came back - when I came back I went to a mass where St Michael prayer was prayed and I remembered it from childhood Email from Mike – To what extent do you think Jesus set up the Church as we know it today? Henry - can we really be damned to hell since we can't make decisions like the angels did? Stella - A priest purposely kicked me. What should i do? Call him or talk to him after mass? Brian - Daughter is getting married - niece in the wedding party is gay. is that okay? Sharon - Sister in law had a catholic funeral and now a year later she will be buried in ground (urn). Does a priest need to be present?

Mark Ledlow and Mike H. return in this week's episode of The Fearless Mindset podcast, to further discuss the untold truth about the situation in Ukraine. Mike is a U.S. military veteran who is currently doing voluntary work in Ukraine doing rescue missions for Ukrainian locals who need help amidst the ongoing Russian attacks. HIGHLIGHTSMike's living situationMike finding new purpose in volunteeringMike on continuing his voluntary workWhat keeps Mike fearlessFaith taking Mike to the right directionQUOTESMike: "The biggest concerns is human trafficking. You got all these refugees that are coming across the border, and there are people out there that will take advantage of this stuff.”Mike: "There's a lot of stuff that's being pushed out in the media that I haven't really heard. There's no telling what the Russians have been doing.”Mike: "To see people that are willing to die, I mean literally know they're gonna die but are willing to fight and defend their country until their death is just an experience.”Mike: "I left the military in 2012, and for a long time, I was really lost and didn't really know what my next step in life was and just kind of felt like I was spinning my wheels and ended up joining an organization, and just volunteering and once again found a sense of purpose.”Mike: "I've been through a lot in my life and been through war and been through cancer, and I'm here. And I definitely serve a much larger purpose.”To help Michael H. in his mission to save lives in Ukraine check out the link below:GoFundMe - https://gofund.me/aa73eae6To hear more episodes of The Fearless Mindset podcast, you can go to https://the-fearless-mindset.simplecast.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc. You can also subscribe to the Fearless Mindset YouTube Channel to watch episodes on video.

Mike C-Roc Ciorrocco is the CEO of People Building, Inc., and the powerhouse behind the "What Are You Made Of?" movement. He is a performance coach, author, dynamic public speaker, visionary, and thought leader. He has been featured by Yahoo! Finance as one of the Top Business Leaders to Follow in 2020 and is on a mission to build people. He is driven to inspire others and he measures his success on how he is able to help others achieve greatness. C-Roc had a fire lit in him at an early age. That fire has ignited him with a fierce desire to compel people to see the greatness inside themselves using past life events to fuel their fire. Past hardships can be a powerful gravitational force that keeps you down and forces you to think small. To get out of orbit you need Rocket Fuel. Mike "C-Roc" Ciorrocco shows you how to convert past adversity into ROCKET FUEL to break free from the negative pull of pain and despair. In his new book, C-Roc offers life-changing lessons in personal transformation by asking yourself What Are You Made Of? This powerful question will ignite within you a thrust to greatness! Learn how to overcome painful past obstacles and achieve a fulfilling life where you're in command of your future. If you're ready to shoot for the stars, C-Roc says, "Thrust is a must!" Strap in and get ready for the ride of your life. Mike's latest book: https://amzn.to/3wwkTX5 CEO - People Building, Inc. C-Roc's Website: https://www.mikecroc.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikeycroc/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikeciorrocco YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGWHuKojqZfcXmvGCAi_t1Q LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-ciorrocco/ Email: info@peoplebuildinginc.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, welcome, everybody. Today, my guest is Mike "C-Roc" Ciorrocco. I'm really excited to have this talk with him and I know you're going to enjoy this. Mike, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Mike: Thank you, Joe. I'd like to start every interview that I go on with gratitude and just really express that to you for allowing me to come on and share with you. And thank you to your audience for listening and showing up. Joe: Absolutely, man, I love that gratitudes a huge thing in my life, so I'm right there with you. I appreciate it. I think it's important that everyone has their back story makes up sort of what they've become in life. You know, it doesn't define who they become. But there is something about what has happened throughout your life leading up to where you are now that has molded this person that you've become. And I Mike: Right. Joe: Am interested in that. And and I always start with this, just like you always start. What is it? What are you made of? Right. That's what you Mike: They Joe: Start Mike: Had to turn your head sideways, I love Joe: perfect! Mike: It, you know, now, you know, I came from a broken home. I don't remember my parents together, Joe. I grew up around a lot of broken people, alcoholics, drug addicts, people suffering from anxiety, depression. My grandmother committed suicide after taking too much anti anxiety or depression medication. You know, a lot of things I went through as a kid just watching just destruction. And, you know, I think that decisions we make and Focus's that we have either go towards living and surviving or destruction. And I was seeing the destruction part and I wasn't OK with that. And I didn't want to accept that. So I would always try to help people switch around even from a young age. I was just not OK with what I was seeing. And, you know, my mom when I was three or four years old, I just remember her always telling me that I inspired her and I was going to be a leader. And I think subconsciously, subconsciously, she was doing that because she knew what was going on in the family and knew that I was gonna have to deal with some things. And so I had that programmed into me. So I was always just looking for people to help, looking for people to show them a better way and not buying into what they were telling themselves. And so, you know, that's just something I experienced at a young age. And really when it came down, what lit my fire and what I made of, I would say, is rocket fuel. Because when I was eight, my mom was moving on to her third marriage and I wasn't really up for going into another man's house and learned another man's rules Joe: Hmm. Mike: And but decided to give my dad a try who was moving on to his second marriage. And at that time, you know. I broke my mom's heart by doing that. I didn't know that at the time, but she told me later on that, you know, she cried herself to sleep at night when I left and I was our first child, you know, and when I moved to my dad's, everything seemed fine at first. But after three years, you know, during that three years, there was a lot of conflict. You know, there's a when you had step parents into the mix, any time that stuff happens. The kid is the only link between the past relationship and so a lot gets taken out on the children and anybody that's been in a broken home that dealt with child support, custody battles every other weekend, things that parents jealous, things like just everybody that's been through that knows what I'm talking about. And so a lot of that time they're in from eight to 11 hours, experience a lot of emotional, psychological abuse threats, things like that that were really probably not directed towards me, but came my way. And at nine years old, I would sleep with my baseball bat a lot of nights Joe: Wow. Mike: Because I was scared. And no kid should have to go through that, through that, of course. But that's what went into making me look. I went through these things. I went through court, child psychologists, to see if I was mature enough that at a young age to figure out who I wanted to live with, like all that kind of stuff Joe: Make Mike: And. Joe: Your own decisions, all of that, that crazy. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, yeah, Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, Mike: And seeing parents fight Joe: Yeah. Mike: And, you know, just just not not happy environment, and so that's what went into me. But the thing is, is that I was always on the right side of the track. Thank God. I was always looking at how can I be better not being accepting of it. Let me look at the bright side of things. Let me look at, OK, what is this doing and how can I take advantage of using this to a better life? So one weekend I was coming home from my mom's house Joe: And Mike: And Joe: So Mike: I Joe: I don't mean to interrupt. Was this Mike: Noticed Joe: All Mike: For. Joe: In Maryland or all back on the East Coast or. Mike: This is in Pennsylvania, outside of Philly. Joe: Ok, cool. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Ok. Mike: So so my mom was living in Maryland, and you know what, I got to about 10, some 10 years old, give or take. I was coming home from my mom's house one day, one weekend after being there and my stomach was in knots. I was anxious. I don't want to go back. And my mom was saying something was wrong. She questioned me and I told her, you know, when you go through abuse, anybody that's been through abuse, you can probably relate to this. That one you don't just like to share because you're afraid that people won't believe you, too. You kind of you're so accustomed to going through it, you're not sure how bad it really is. Somebody on the outside would be like, holy cow, you're dealing with that really. Joe: Yeah. Mike: But as you're going through it, you just think it's ordinary. Another thing, maybe you're embarrassed that you let it go on for that long. And then the weirdest thing is that you're actually concerned with your abuser. You're like, what will happen if I share this to them? Joe: At. Mike: You know, just a weird thing. So I finally came came to the realization that I need to share that my mom said, you know, I'm going to get you out of there. I'm going to file court papers. You don't need to be going through that. That's not ordinary. You need to, you know, in a better situation, she said. But if you do if I do this, you need to stick to your guns. You've got to be like really, really firm because they're going to try to talk you out of it. And in life, when you believe in something, you've got to stick to your guns, man, because people will have agendas and they're going to try to talk you out of it, move one way or the other. And at the end of the day. If you do that, you're not going to live the life you want to live, so she reminded me that, you know, 10 years old, you know, filling my head with great stuff, you know, and I went back home that day and waited and waited weeks went by and waited for those court papers to be delivered. You know, I just knew it was going to happen. And I didn't tell my dad about it, of course. And then finally, one day I come home from school and the tension in the house, you could feel it like it was something was up. And I knew what the deal Joe: Mm Mike: Was. Joe: Hmm. Mike: I had to feel the first. I thought I did something wrong. You know, I'm looking around like, what did I do today? He had his papers in his hand. My dad did. And I knew, like, oh, here we go. And he told me to go to my room. Now, my dad was my hero. He had a successful masonry business, very hard worker, big forearms, rough hands. Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, you tell he's a hard worker and he always cared a wad of hundred dollar bills in his pocket. And I thought that was the coolest thing and had a rubber band around Joe: So Mike: It Joe: Did Mike: And. Joe: My partner, it's so buddy. Mike: Yeah, yeah, it must be the last thing Joe: Yeah, and. Mike: He would always show me the money, and I thought it was a cool hundred dollar bills, Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, so he came back in front of me and I didn't get into the discussion with him because my mom said, stick to your guns. So he proceeded to tell me how my mom would have guys coming in and out. Why would you want to go there? You have it made here. You have everything you need. They're poor. They don't have anything. You know, my mom was I mean, we look at the houses. Twenty five, thirty thousand. Our house broken down cars in the driveway. You know, we went on vacation to the Jersey Shore. Joe: Yeah. Mike: But we stayed in a rundown motel, one room for kids, two adults, and we were I just remember just the other day, we were actually able to bring some friends with us sometimes, which just makes it like just I don't even remember how that worked. And we would take black trash bags as a suitcase. So, you know, share my story. By the way, back in the day, I was kind of embarrassed by that. I just didn't like to share that, you know. Joe: Yep. Mike: But I started to realize that the more you share your story, the more impact you can have and the more people that can relate to it and maybe change your life for two Joe: Yep, Mike: Or millions, Joe: Yep. Mike: You know. So I started sharing that. But just to wrap it up real quick, so when I did confirm that my dad took that wad of hundred dollar bills out of his pocket, peeled one off, crumpled it up and threw it at me and said, if that's the case and you want to move there, you're going to need this when you're living on the street with your mother one day. And I remember that 30 some years I lived off that spark that was lit right there because I'm stubborn, my shirt that I think is, say, Joe: And. Mike: Stubborn, perversely unyielding, it's a good thing when it's on the right thing. But, you know, I was like, I'm not going to let that happen. And so 30 some years, I was driving off that spark until two years ago. I really subconsciously I was doing that. I really realized two years ago, wait a minute here, there's something magical that's going on. My life keeps going on its upward trajectory. No matter what happens, no matter screw ups, let downs, disappointments, what is happening here and what I found, which I wrote in my book that's coming out Monday, May 3rd on Amazon Rocket Fuel, I was taken everything that would stop normal human beings or slow them down, store it in my fuel tank instead of my truck, would weigh you down and converted it into rocket fuel for my future to become unstoppable. And I found that and I realized, wait a minute, this is not just a concept. This is an this is a law. If you do this, you really are unstoppable to live in the life of your dreams until you're plucked from this planet. So that's why I decided to write this book that Grant Carter wrote the foreword because it was so powerful. I got to get this message out to people. So that's a little bit about the story. There's you know, that's the short version, actually. Joe: No, that's all good. That's exactly what I wanted, the only piece that I still need to figure out is what did you do? How did you figure out what you wanted to do in life in that middle section of where people go to college or they get a job? Or what Mike: Yeah. Joe: Did you do during that time? Mike: Well, I played football and I didn't drink any alcohol or party all through high school, I played football, baseball wrestled, but football was my love Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: And I just I always thought about I want to go to Ohio State, play football, because I just love their team. I watched them play Michigan all the time growing up. And I never grew tall enough, never grew fast enough Joe: I feel your pain. Mike: That. Yeah. So five, six and three quarters, you got to be really, really fast if you're five, six Joe: Yeah. Mike: And three quarters. So I decided to go to Division three. I played football in college study business. But when I got to college, Joe, I lost my focus and I started chasing girls and party in which I never did before. And it was like Disney World first, you Joe: Yeah, Mike: Know what I mean? Joe: Yeah. Mike: And I just lost, man, I four, five, six, seven years in that range. I was just it's all I cared about was parties where the girls at and I need to be around people. And so that's that's the lead up to that. And then eventually I met my wife, who just the commitment to my wife straighten me up. And I was off to the races. I think that my thing with my wife right now, I joke with her all the time, is I have to outsource. I have to earn her spending on Amazon and deliveries to the house. So it's constantly like this. The other day she's like, I look I go up in the kitchen and there's a piece of decking, like the composite decking. Joe: Oh, you know Mike: We Joe: That Mike: Have Joe: That's Mike: A wood Joe: Going Mike: Deck. Joe: To be redone. Mike: And I'm like, I already told you, oh, not right now. It seems like I already had somebody come over measured Joe: Oh, Mike: On my car and drive back down into the cave. Joe: That's Mike: I call this my studio, my cave. I got to go make some money now. Joe: That's so Mike: A Joe: Funny. Mike: Great motivator. Joe: That is awesome. All right. Well, that's where and was college. Mike: Salisbury University in Maryland. Joe: Ok, and then ever since you've stayed in Maryland, Mike: Yeah, Joe: But Mike: I Joe: Now Mike: Moved Joe: You're Mike: To Joe: In Mike: Connecticut Joe: Ocean City, Mike: For a period of time, Joe: Yep, Mike: But we moved to Ocean City Joe: Yep. Mike: Now. Yep. Joe: Which is beautiful. I love it there. OK, cool. Yeah. And I'm Mike: Thank Joe: On the East Mike: You. Joe: Coast. I'm originally from New Mike: A Joe: York. Mike: Cool, Joe: So. Mike: Cool. Joe: So this leads right into the question that since you're going to do the decking, are you still doing. Are you still in the mortgage business because that's your. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, Mike: Yeah, Joe: Ok. OK. Mike: Yeah, we have a have a division that I run with three best friends, they take care of the day to day operations Joe: Yep. Mike: And it's a large division under our nation's lending. And we run it like our own business. And it's great people, great culture. It's just phenomenal. Joe: And Mike: So. Joe: You've been doing that quite a long time, right? I've saw Mike: Yet. Joe: You've gotten rated as number number one in Yahoo! Finance are right. I mean, you have. Mike: Yeah, so 2006, I got into it and started as a loan officer and just went from two employees and started a branch and vision and two employees up to 40. Joe: Wow, that's incredible. OK, cool. So when did you make this shift of and you talk about this in one of your videos about sharing your story and you share. You also mentioned it when you were giving your story, how important that is. And when did you make this when did you allow yourself to say, OK, I have this business and I have great partners and people to run this business? When did you decide to at least start your company now with what you're doing with your podcast, in your book and everything? What was the trigger for that? Mike: Yes, so early, twenty, nineteen, my stepfather, George, she took over from my dad when I was 11. He was a great guy and he passed away in twenty eighteen and a heart attack suddenly. And I wrote about this in the book, the story about how he found out and everything. It's it's you know, but but at the end of the day, he had a passion when he was passionate about something like football, baseball, hunting, fishing. He would get up and just go nuts, like deep voice, like everybody couldn't, like, really understand him. He was like so passionate, like they would be taken aback by him. And when he passed away, you know, a couple of weeks after he passed away, I had this passion or energy, something spirit come inside of me. Like, I just felt different. And I realized that I wasn't playing a big enough game in life. You know, I was doing well in the business and the mortgages and all that. But it just that's not the game that I was designed for. I was playing small and I started to realize, wait a minute, I need to open myself up to other opportunities, because if I just focus here, this is where I'm going to stay. And I was having truths that I was telling myself and beliefs that I was telling myself is that this is it for me. This is I'm stuck, you know, Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: I don't necessarily love the mortgage business. It's great and all that. But the end of the day, I just had a bigger, bigger calling. And so I started trying to figure out, OK, how can I get known in this calling of building people? Because that's what I actually do at the mortgage business. It wasn't the mortgage business. It was I was building people. I was helping develop people. And so I said, how can I get known more in a bigger, bigger scale mystate instead of just my town? Then I was like, that's not big enough. I'll come up short. How about the country and then the globe? And then I was like, you know, what? If I start really expanding my mind, I'm like, if there's aliens, which I've never seen one, but if there is, let me see if I can get aliens to know who I am and really go for that and then come up a little short and I'll be all right. And that's the way I started thinking about things and started trying to impact and share my story with tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people. How can I do that? And I started to obsess about that. And that's when the podcast came. The book idea came and and I just started networking like an animal and going on. You know, I've done three hundred interviews in the last year. Joe: Oh, that's crazy. Mike: So just really lean into it and that's how it all started, and then now I'm into tech, into the tech world where I'm developing a tech product. I co-founded the company. And also we have other we're creating a tech portfolio of other co-founders, non tech entrepreneurs that have ideas that think that they can never do it. They usually go to the grave with those Joe: Mm Mike: Things. Joe: Hmm. Mike: We're bringing them into the world and giving them the resources they need to actually co-found their companies and creating unstoppable people. Because my mission, Joe, is all people are unstoppable to live in the life of their dreams. And so everything I do, I filter through that mission. Joe: It's so cool, man, and it's so funny because you hit it right on the head with with the same thing with me, it's like you don't have a successful business. But I know it's not my calling. It's not what I was put here to do. And and everything that I do should be so much more impactful and so much bigger. And I've had this I had the conversation with David Meltzer. And at the same Mike: Yeah. Joe: Time, he brings you back in focus and he's like, yeah, but you should know that you you have everything you need. You just got to get out of your own way. It's not a matter that you should focus on wanting more. You have it all. You're just Mike: Yep. Joe: You're literally getting in your own way of getting it done. Mike: Yeah, and that's the thing, it's the truths that we tell ourselves we're living an illusion, we let the illusions that we have based on our beliefs and past experiences, and we let that affect us and limit us and block us. And really, at the end of the day, you know, we'd rather explain our life instead of actually intervening in it. We'd like to explain with excuses, you know, and justify things and, you know, at the end of the day, man, we just tell ourselves what we can tell ourselves that helps us survive. And to me, that's not good enough, because you're going to always come up a little short, so why not thrive and really go after it? And, you know, there's not everybody that's going to be able to do what we do. So why don't we take it up a notch and get get really abundance, like go after abundance so that we can help other people and distribute this information to other people. So that's the kind of things that I started thinking. I started hanging around people that coach and mentor me the right way, thinking big, you know, also, you know, still like Dave Meltzer talks about, you've got to be happy now. It's not like later, Joe: Yeah, Mike: So. Joe: Yeah, so I don't want to go down the current path, I follow him, I love the stuff that he does. I know that it fits the mold for a lot of people that are in the real estate world. And but Mike: Yeah. Joe: I also know that he's doing a lot of other things. But how he wrote the foreword to your book, which is amazing, how how much did he influence you making this jump to doing what you're doing now? Mike: So when George died, my stepfather, my brother was read in the next room and he said, Mike, you've got to read this book, this guy sounds just like you. I'll take a look at it. I started I saw Grant before and like pictures, but I thought he was like a real estate. Joe: Yep, Mike: I thought he trained realtors, Joe: Yep, Mike: I wasn't even sure, Joe: Yep. Mike: Right, so I read the book and I'm like, holy cow, this guy speaking to me, he's going through similar situations that I've been Joe: Yeah. Mike: Through. Like, I can totally relate. And I but but the big thing was about it was I've always had this big think, but I got cocooned for a while by people that I surround myself with that were broken thinkers, broken mindset, people, people that didn't fit my culture, but they produce. So I kept them around and people that quit on me. And I let that affect me personally. And I got into this situation where I was invalidated, me myself. I felt invalidated on being the animal that I actually am. And so when I was reading that book, I'm like, wait a minute, this this shows me something. I'm not the crazy one. Those people are the crazy ones. I have an animal. So I did unleash it. So I was able to unleash the beast and that's what it did for me. And then I just immersed myself in this content, hung around with all these people, build relationships inside his company, because I just want to be around those types of people. Joe: Yep. Mike: Great, great friendships. Like I said, Jerry Glantz, a friend of mine, I just you know, I'm proud to have them in my in my circle. And so when when I wrote the book, the book actually came from an idea that I got while I was interviewing grad on my podcast about I asked him the question, what would it take to get into outer space? Not like literally, but figuratively speaking, getting away from all the gravity and negative suppressors of people and things that can mess with you. When can you get that amount of money or that amount of whatever it is? And he said people aren't ready for that discussion. He said that's just something the answer doesn't people don't like the answer to that question and I'm like, well, what would it take? You know? And I started thinking about rocket fuel. Rocket fuel is what it would take. Take it all that stuff, converting it and fuel your way up there. And then once you do that, you remove all that stuff out of your way. There's nothing to stop you and you become unstoppable and indestructible. And that's the thought that started going through my head and I started obsessing about it. I'm like, I got to write this. So when I did that, I'm like the only person that would make sense to be writing the forward for this book is Grant. I don't know if he does afterwards. I don't know if he charged me. I don't know anything. I'm going to make it happen, though. And that's what I started thinking all the time. I just dwelled on it, wrote it down and. Book is almost done, and I made a phone call and there are some details that went into doing that and I just got done and his name is on the cover of the book is for Written Joe: Yeah, Mike: By Grant. Joe: Yeah. Mike: So that adds to credibility that I may not have had before, but the content in the book is just so powerful, man. It's just I actually can be honest with you about something like like I'm always honest, but like just totally transparent. I read that book over and over again during the editing process. Right. And I got so sick of it and because I've read it so much, but then I haven't read it in a while and I went back and my team, we go through in the morning and we'll pick a passage to read out of it just to see what what we come upon. And I don't even remember writing some of the stuff. I'm just like, wow, this is like this is really good stuff. Joe: That's cool, Mike: So it's a weird Joe: Yeah. Mike: It's a weird mind game when you're writing a book and then to see the actual finished product. It's a good time. Joe: That's really cool, yeah, I look forward to reading it, I it's, you know, just talking with you, I can tell we're in sync on a lot of this stuff. You're ahead of me because you wrote a book and I haven't done it yet, but I know that it's a good process to go through. Where did you figure out where you wanted to start in the book in regards to your life? Mike: So, you know, I started share my story that I share with you and I have other parts of my life in there, too, that are just crazy, blew people's minds. But I really what I did was I started writing in my phone while I was on airplanes and I would just write ideas in my phone and and I would write stories that happen in my life. And then my podcast, we transcribe the podcast episodes, the first few that were a monologue style, and we just created a framework. And then it doesn't look anything like it started. That's how I got started with it and just started, you know, what kind of what went into me, what am I made of? And I just went into that and started sharing it. And then the lessons that broke off from each of those things, because, you know, a lot of people have been through there's people that have been through a lot more than I have. But my story is pretty crazy. Like there's some stuff that happened to me that nobody could imagine going through. But I'm still here, brother, and I'm still going hard. Joe: I hear you. I see that and you brought up a good point and one of the videos that I watch where you said people discount their story, right? They don't think, why would anybody care? It's not that Mike: Yeah. Joe: Special. Well, when were you able to actually take your own thoughts as part of your own story and make that switch where you said, wait a second, you know, what I've gone through is important. If it can help one person in the world, that's value enough. I mean, when did you or did you not ever doubt that your story was powerful? Mike: No, so I would I never shared it and I saw Pete Vargas share his story on the 10x growth conference stage in twenty nineteen, I'm sitting there watching and this is the first big stage, I think, that Pete was on. He was nervous and scared and his face, you could tell, is sweating and he would tell you this. I'm friends with Joe: Mm Mike: Him, so Joe: Hmm. Mike: It's not something I'm talking about. Joe: Yeah, no, no. Mike: But I thought to myself, I'm watching that. I don't know who he was at that time, but he was telling a story about his father and he was like really connecting with me and the relationship and how he grew up in a rough spot. And then they came back together and how it all worked out. And I'm like, wow, this is just like powerful. I felt like everybody else disappeared in the place and it was just him talking to me. And I'm like, I need to learn how to do that. And if he can do it, I know I could do it. That's what went through my head. And I told the guys I was with when we got in the car afterwards, I'm like, I'm going to be on that stage. I'm going to share my story one day and I know I can do it. And so then I started sharing the story of one person, two people, five people. And they were like, that's all. I really can relate to that. Then I said, Well, shit, I need to go to ten million people Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: If I could do it and how can I do that? And that's when I started obsessing about getting known and sharing that story. And, you know, I was able to talk to Pete after that and actually learn from him how to share your story. And but I shared that that that story about seeing him in the audience and how everybody just disappeared and how he connected with me. And so it's pretty powerful stuff, Joe: Yeah, Mike: Man. Joe: That's really powerful, but that's got to be a little eerie to just be sitting there Mike: The. Joe: And all of a sudden it's just like a movie where everything around you blurs out and it's just Mike: Yeah. Joe: The two of you. Yeah, Mike: Yeah. Joe: That's incredible. Something real light like question I have for you. The logo is it is a logo. And I'm going to take a guess and I'm probably going to be wrong. And you're going to say, well, nice try, Joe, but does it have anything to do with the Lynch? Mike: So the sirocco, the blue. Joe: Yeah. Mike: Yeah, so it's just upside down, see, and in two hours that are, you know, for Cerak and then it just has a little dude in there holding up the world, if you can see him. That's what it has now. It doesn't. I Joe: Ok, Mike: Didn't see that. So linchpin, Joe: Only because Mike: Huh? Joe: When I read some stuff from you talking about, you know, in some of the verbiage that I read about you and on your website, you mention Mike: Yeah. Joe: The word linchpin. I can't remember the context, but it was. Mike: Yeah, no, you know what, I. Joe: And then when I looked at a picture of a lynchpin, I was like, wait, it is Mike: I Joe: Round. Mike: Got to Joe: And Mike: See what a picture of a linchpin Joe: You Mike: Looks like Joe: See Mike: Because Joe: Now Mike: Because, Joe: I have Mike: You know, Joe: You thinking. Mike: Like that's. Yeah, I got to look at this because maybe maybe, yeah, maybe it does, Joe: The. Mike: So I didn't design the logo myself I had professionally done, and maybe he had that in mind as well. Joe: Only because it's mean you could kind of say it a little bit. I don't know. Mike: Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying, Joe: Right, Mike: Yeah, Joe: It's Mike: No, Joe: Round Mike: I didn't Joe: With Mike: Have Joe: The Mike: That. Joe: With the thing through it, and I'm thinking, OK, well, maybe it's kind Mike: Yeah. Joe: Of hinting towards it and and I Mike: Now, Joe: Said, Mike: It was really just the sea Joe: Yeah. Mike: And the two hour and holding up the world and helping lift up the Joe: That's Mike: World, Joe: Cool, Mike: That's what Joe: That's even cooler, so you can Mike: The. Joe: Throw my idea right out the window, Mike: Now, Joe: But Mike: I Joe: I Mike: Like that, I like that. Joe: Do I do some upfront investigation of the person I'm talking to in the life and all of that stuff. And I saw that, you know, because you're doing your mortgages. And I saw that Jennifer is in real estate and I don't Mike: Yeah. Joe: Know if she still is, but. Mike: Yes, yes. Joe: So that's a really cool synergy between the two of you, first of all, I think that probably works really well. But just for the people in the audience who had a great relationship with their significant other, how important has that been in the balance of your life, especially what you went through as a young, you know, a young man being able to have that support in and you found the love of your life and it's you know, there's that whole synergy there between you. Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's it's everything, I mean, like I said, I made a joke about trying to earn her spending with that, but then on the day she does a great job, she did she was a stay at home mom for a while until our youngest was in school. And then I said, you know what? I'm going to try to you know, we've got to figure out something because I'm giving deals away Joe: Uh huh, Mike: To people. Joe: Yep. Mike: And, you know, it would be great if you get a license and she ended up doing it. And she's just the type that if she gets into something, she goes hard with it. And she did great the first two years, just fantastic. I didn't even realize how much money she made last year until I saw ten ninety nine. I'm like, wow, you did great. But she's just phenomenal and aligns well with our business. Obviously I don't do mortgages much anymore. Joe: Yeah. Mike: I don't do it all. I just I work on the business maybe an hour a day. My team runs the day to day. They do a fantastic job. And so but it aligns well, obviously in a lot of our people, their spouse got their real estate license, too, because it aligns so well. Joe: Mm hmm. Yeah. Mike: So, yeah, but but at the end of the day, we are you know, I'm very clear with what I'm trying to do, my dreams. And she is clear on the fact of her dreams and the fact that she's willing to support me and run through fire for me. And Joe: Yeah. Mike: It's just a great feeling because I can't do it without her, obviously. Joe: Yep, yep, I just wanted to sort of bring that up, because I think it's important I have the same sort of relationship with Joel Mike: And Joe: And Mike: It's Joe: My significant Mike: Awesome. Joe: Other. So it's Mike: Yeah. Joe: To me, it's super important. And with what happened with covid, you know, a lot of things just stopped. Right. And Mike: Mm hmm. Joe: Changes were made. And so she got furloughed from doing her day to day job and has not been brought back. But she's always had this dream of doing photography. And so now I basically have said to her, you are not going back and you are going to from this point forward until whenever the world ends for you, you're going to follow your dream. So I Mike: Awesome. Joe: Think it's important. Right. And to Mike: Yeah. Joe: Support each other and it's nice to see that you have that same relationship. Mike: Yeah, so, so, so important that it aligns I mean, so much conflict comes from just not being aligned with the mission, Joe: Yep, Mike: You know, Joe: Yep. Mike: And I think that people need to realize that their personal dream, their mission, I call it their purpose, their mission. It's it's more important than anything when it comes down to it really is. Joe: Yeah. Mike: And that's why it's so important to share that with your partner, to make sure that they're on the same page with you. Joe: So let's talk about that. I'm sure I'm probably older than you at this point, but we're Mike: Yeah, Joe: At Mike: Definitely, definitely. Now Joe: The. Mike: I'm 40, I'm 40 for some, I'm Joe: Oh, Mike: A Joe: My gosh, I'm so Mike: Young Joe: Old, Mike: Pup, Joe: I can't. Mike: But I am going on 18 years of marriage. This May so. Joe: Congratulations, that's awesome, yeah, Mike: Thank Joe: Joel Mike: You. Joe: And Mike: Thank Joe: I Mike: You. Joe: Are 20, I think, at this point. Mike: Ok, cool, congrats. Joe: Yeah, I turned fifty nine this past February, so, Mike: Oh, man, I Joe: You know. Mike: Can't tell. I really can't Joe: Yeah, Mike: Tell. Joe: Well thank Mike: Maybe Joe: You. Mike: That's why that's why you shave your head, because that way you can't see any Joe: That's Mike: Gray hairs. Joe: Exactly, exactly right. They got my eyebrows Mike: Hey, Joe: Are still dark, Mike: Look, I'm with you the way the. Joe: So do you ever look at where you are now and you look back and go? I mean, and I think we've talked about this with some of the great people, like, you know, we can bring up David Meltzer again because he's just he's like one of my mentors. I love the guy at the Mike: Is Joe: Death. Mike: Awesome. Joe: You know, what is what's the saying? Something like the the teacher. The teacher appears when the student is ready, Mike: Yeah. Joe: Right? Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah, teachers. Joe: Yep. Mike: Yep, exactly. Joe: And it's the same thing with life. Like things come when the time is right. And some people would argue against that. Some people would say whatever. But you just started on this path now, right. Something flipped when you're 40, when your stepfather passed away, it said there's you know, and you might have felt that your whole life because you people like you and I always were pulled towards something. Right. We're entrepreneurs. We've always worked towards a greater goal of whatever. Do you ever look back and go, God, I wish I had started this sooner? Or is it like, no, it's this is the time. This is the right time. It's happening now. You know, I'm interested in what your thought process is on that. Mike: Well, I'm curious, asking the question, you must have felt some kind of feeling about that in the past, maybe. Joe: I constantly go like I had, I chased another dream up until this point, and that Mike: Yeah. Joe: Dream didn't happen for me and I openly admit all the time that I didn't put in the work to make that dream happen. I'm Mike: The. Joe: I'm a trained you know, I went to college for music. So my whole life has been surrounded by music. And one day I was going to tour the world and be this famous drummer for and I always use the example because I love his music. John Mayer. Mike: Yeah. Joe: That never happened for me because I know now I can look myself in the mirror and go, You didn't put in the work. You didn't put in the Mike: Yeah, Joe: Tent. Mike: The commitment, Joe: Yeah. You Mike: Yeah. Joe: Didn't do the ten thousand hours. You Mike: Yeah. Joe: You would rather had gone down to the college campus bar and had a bunch of beers and chicken wings with your buddies Mike: Yep. Joe: Instead of going back into the practice room and spending another four hours at night. So I am fine with I get it now, but now Mike: Yeah. Joe: I'm trying to take like the rest of my life and make it amazing and live much Mike: Yeah. Joe: Bigger. And so I am at the stage right now doing that change, shifting Mike: Mm hmm. Joe: My my frame of mind. I know the world is abundant. I know that everything you know, I just have to look towards the good of everything. And the more I focus on the good and the abundance and the gratitude, more of it just keeps coming in. In the last two months, it's been incredible for me. And so and it's I always was the oh, woe is me. Like I work my ass off. Why am I not getting that? Why am I not Mike: Yep, Joe: Doing that? So Mike: Yeah. Joe: That's why I asked you this question Mike: Yeah, Joe: When that, Mike: Yeah. Joe: You know, was the shift with your with Mike: Yeah. Joe: Your father, your stepfather passing away and you just saying when you said you felt it in your heart, you were like, I need to do something bigger. Was that the pivotal point for this? Mike: Yes, it was, and I did look back and be like, man, I cannot believe when I started finding out things and becoming aware of things, I cannot believe I didn't start this sooner. I didn't know that. Like, I just felt like I had wasted I went through a period of time where I felt like I wasted time and time is so valuable. And I said, you know what? I don't know how much longer I have on this planet, but you know what, at this point, the window keeps shrinking. I got to pick up my urgency. I got to move faster. I got to demand more and be louder and be more impactful and be just more intense than I would have had to if I started a long time ago, that's all. And so at first I did look back and with some regret. But then I quickly got out of that and said, OK, what have we got to do to get this done in the window that I do have left? So, yeah, I definitely and that was the pivotal, pivotal point, of course, working towards it my whole life, not knowing it. Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, there's a story in the Bible and they made a movie about it with Steve Carell about Noah's Ark. You know, it was told over some years he took to build this big arc and he didn't really know why he was doing it, he was just being told to do it by God. If you believe in God, Joe: Hmm. Mike: Which I do, or if it's intuition or whatever. And he got these animals and people were laughing at him and discouraging them and he just kept doing it anyway and building a ship in a place where there's never rain. Joe: All right. Mike: And did it make sense, it didn't seem to make sense at the moment, but he kept doing it and he kept being committed and doing it and doing it and doing it before you know it. The rain came, washed everybody away, and he survived with all the animals that he had and his family. And so I look at that lesson and I started to see this now. I started to see that the things when I'm committed and obeyed to my purpose, my mission, and I filter things through that, whether it's the people I hang out with, my actions, my words, my thoughts, my environment, when I start to filter through that mission. I'm obeying what I'm supposed to be doing and things just magically work out and I start to see opportunities everywhere, but when I don't do that, they're missing. And so you don't need to know what the end game is necessarily. You should be shooting for something, but just be looking for the opportunities. As long as you're obeying your mission and filtering everything through your purpose or mission or whatever you want to call it. Joe: Yeah. All right, well, that makes me feel good that I'm not the only one that had some regrets, so thank Mike: The. Joe: You for being vulnerable and saying that because I definitely have gone through it and I have like I said, I'm older than you. So I think, you know, think, Mike: None of us are alone, Joe. None of us are, you Joe: Ok. Mike: Know, I've anything that you go through, there's somebody else out there experiencing it for sure. Joe: Right, and I think that's what you're a lot of what you talk about is it's so important to share your story because it literally could help one person, which would be a huge help. You never know where they are in their state of mind. And if it lifts them, that's awesome. But imagine being able to help tens of thousands of millions of billions of people. Right. So I understand that's what the goal is for people like us who want to do that. So I I wish you the best of luck in doing that. And and same Mike: Thanks. Joe: With myself. Mike: Yeah, Joe: They've Mike: You, Joe: Got Mike: Too. Joe: To get it done. Mike: That's right, Joe: Ok, Mike: That's right. Joe: So you said something earlier about the book, which is the name of the book is Rocket Fuel. And you said it's May, May 3rd. Mike: Yeah, May 3rd, Monday, May 3rd, it's coming out on Amazon, and, you know, it should be a best seller based on we have we presold it. So I'm thinking that it's not going to have a problem being a best seller, number one best seller. Joe: Yep. Mike: What we shall see. But I'm going to do a bunch of lives that day, Instagram and Facebook lives, and just have some fun with it Joe: Cool. Mike: And celebrate. Joe: Ok, cool, so let's talk about it a little bit. Mike: Sure. Joe: You said something earlier that I thought was really cool, which was taking you said something about taking whatever comes in and not putting in it in the trunk, but putting it in the fuel tank and making rocket fuel. So explain Mike: Yep, Joe: That again Mike: Very Joe: To me, because Mike: Good. Joe: I I loved Mike: Yeah. Joe: It when you said I was like and I didn't even write it down. Mike: Yeah. Joe: I was like, no, that's got to go up here in my brain. So I would love to Mike: Well, Joe: Hear that again. Mike: Well, when you want something in life and things come your way to stop it or slow you down, if you remove a one thing, obviously that's going to help. But removing is not good enough for me. So I take all that stuff. Haters, people that discourage me laughed at me. What I'm trying to do, screw ups of my own people trying to screw me, all that stuff I just stored in my fuel tank. And usually people put it in their trunk and that weighs them down. You know, most people quit on their dreams because other people are talking Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: About them and saying, no, you're not the same. Why are you doing that? In all kinds of different things? I take all that and say, you know what, like here's an example, by the way, I stored in my tank, my fuel tank, to convert it into rocket fuel rather than my trunk, where it weighs me down. And some of the people closest to me, you know, like some of my business partners and friends and they know who they are. I talk to them about it. And I said, you know what? You keep saying the stuff like, hey, why don't you go do your podcast? Hey, you know, just this stupid digs like that, right? At the end of the day, they're trying to get at me, but they're really just talking about themselves, reflecting upon themselves and the fact that they should be doing that and they're not. And so I know that. And I tell people, you know, you want to say that, great, you're not going to achieve what you think you're going to achieve because all you're doing is giving me more fuel and I'm going to push it even harder. So when somebody says that to me, I'll do it on purpose, where I'll push harder and then I'll show it up in their face a little bit more to about. They're seeing so many posts on Instagram, I'll make sure I send it to them in a direct message, because that way it shuts them Joe: Yeah, Mike: Up Joe: Yeah, Mike: For Joe: It's weird, I don't Mike: Not Joe: Understand, Mike: Being. Joe: I don't understand, like people want to bring you down to their level, right? We deal with that all the time. And and social media has done so much to expose those people. And I just don't understand why they can't be happy for you. But they. Mike: Well, they can't because so I've already realized this in my mind now I know this, it's not them personally, it's their mind. And what it's happening is they just the subconscious mind just justifies where you are. It's trying to justify the truths that you told yourself and when something comes in to threaten that. You have to basically there there things fire off to protect their subconscious beliefs, and so it's not really them personally that's doing it and that's why you can't take it personal. You need to understand it. And then when they're doing it, you need to lay it out to them and let them know, hey, listen, I know what's going on here. I get it. You're where you are and you're trying to justify where you are. And you're saying this stuff to me. I don't take it personal, by the way. I use it as fuel. So thank you. And if you want to say more, continue to give me fuel. Great. But I would rather be able to help you. On break the like, just open up your truths and change them, change your beliefs. And expand your mind and see what you can achieve instead of worrying about what I'm doing and that's the way I handle it, I don't really get fired up or angry or take it personal. It's just a situation where they're going through it. And I think we've all been through it Zoom. I think I'm more understanding of it, Joe: Yeah. Mike: But I will not. But if they don't listen to me when I talk about that, I will not spend time with them because I'm not going to spend time with people that don't align with the mission. Joe: Totally agree. So the book Rocket Fuel coming out May 3rd on Amazon, who is this book for? Mike: Specifically, this is for people that have gone through things in life. And they feel like they keep getting held back or slowed down by things are stopped and they're just they're just done with it. They're they're at the point right now where they've had enough. They're getting sick of where they are and they want to do something about it. And they are looking for that breakthrough that that that superpower, because really it is it's like John Maxwell, House leadership, because this thing is so powerful. And I validated it so, so thoroughly that it's a law, it's the Rockefeller law. And so it's for people that are just sick and tired of being where they are. And they want to advance. They want to have a better life, life of their dreams. And I believe, like I said, my mission is all people are unstoppable to live in a life of their dreams. And so that's what's for. Joe: Yeah, and I saw that it seems like part of the focus is about past pains and obstacles and how you you basically help with the book to to change, take people and turn it around and say, you know, like you're saying, use those things as rocket fuel to get you to the next level. So don't lean on them. Don't have them in the trunk, don't have them as baggage, but instead take what you've learned, take what has happened and convert it to rocket fuel by doing whatever you talk about in the book. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Right. Mike: Yeah, the magic, the magic, here's the magic, right? The magic is when you have something happen and you get that feeling in your chest, that's where it hits me, by the way, like something Joe: Hmm. Mike: Bad happens and like this speed to which you can recognize that and convert it and look for opportunity. That's when you master the Rockefeller law. That's what it's all about, the longer time it takes, the more doubt creeps in, Joe: Yeah. Mike: A more negative energy creeps in, the more victimhood creeps in. And the missed opportunities happened during that period. So you want to shrink that window to as little as short as possible because we all feel it. We're all going to still feel it when something bad happens at first, but recognize it as fast as possible and start to look for the opportunity, not play the victim role, take responsibility for everything. Joe: Yeah, that's great. OK, I want to honor the time we have that we so we're going to do an hour or so. I want to just go through this real quick. So you have your own podcast, which is what are you made of? Which is on the wall behind you, where you interview. I assume, you know, other entrepreneurs and people that have amazing stories to tell and share. You release one week, twice a week with a human. Mike: Well, it started out once a week and then I had so many that I was doing, I had to do two weeks. Right now we're on a two week schedule. Joe: Ok. Mike: So, yeah, I just load up. I go hard, man. Like, if I see somebody I want to show, I go after him like an animal. I get them on the show and I don't care how many I've already had in the can. I just still just keep loading them up Joe: That's awesome. Mike: And uh. Yeah. So. Joe: Ok, cool. Besides that, you are you do some performance coaching, correct? You do some coaching in general, you Mike: Yeah. Joe: Are doing some speaking. You're going to continue to to build that Mike: Yeah. Joe: That part of your career. You're going to be on stage with Grant one of these days. Mike: Well, yeah, but so the coaching part, I want to do, the coaching part of switching that into, you know, I still have a couple of clients, but really focusing on the tech side of things and developing these entrepreneurs and young entrepreneurs into this tech world and using my specialty performance and business coaching and what have you into that, not getting paid directly for it. But but from the companies that I'm developing, Joe: Yeah. Mike: I'm really focused on that. And then I was on a 10x growth stage this past March. Joe: Oh, congratulations. Mike: Let me tell you, it took me two years to step on that stage. Joe: Hey, Mike: Thank you. Joe: That's awesome. The tech thing is it is there more that you can tell us about it or a way that people can find out about it or a. Mike: Yes, so the best thing to do, really, I mean, if you if you message me and follow me on Instagram, you're going to see all kinds of stuff coming out here very shortly on it. But I have a tech product called Blueprinted. It's being printed. This is my the one I co-founded. And this product basically, I looked at digital training and video training and I saw, like, how ineffective Joe: Mm Mike: It was Joe: Hmm. Mike: And the fact that only 20 percent of people actually complete the courses. So that means the people that are marketing these courses that are good at marketing are making money without concern for the Joe: Correct, Mike: Success Joe: Yeah. Mike: Of their student, their clients. And I thought that was an ethical problem. And I looked at why people get bored. They don't finish it, they get distracted, they don't retain the information. Or when they get done, they're like, what's the next step? Like, what am I supposed to do? Where do I put that Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: Where where do I take that and how long do I do that? And so I thought to myself, what if there's a way to have a project management based software technology that has a marketplace where people that have had success can come in and algorithmically step by step, put the success steps to what they've done, whatever vertical, Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: Build that blueprint in our platform and then sell it on the marketplace to to people that want to know how to be successful in that area. So it could be anything from a business to a podcast to digital marketing agency, whatever it is. Because if you look if you're going to build a house, you wouldn't want to watch a YouTube video. And on building that house, Joe: All Mike: You'd want the blueprints. Joe: Right. Mike: So this is a market disrupter, industry disrupter. And I can also see another industry being created from this, like there's web designers when websites came out. Well, there's going to be a lot of people that don't want to build their own blueprints. They want to take the content and give it to somebody and have them do the blueprint for Joe: Mm Mike: Them. Joe: Hmm. Mike: So there's going to be a whole industry just on blueprints. And so, yeah, this is a phenomenal thing. And it's coming out hopefully in the next 60 days, give or take. And I'm just fired up to get it in people's hands, man. Joe: That's great, man. You got a lot of irons in the fire. I like Mike: Yeah, Joe: It. Mike: But Joe: That's Mike: Thank Joe: Awesome. Mike: You. Joe: All right. So I want everybody to go and check out your podcast. The book is released on May 3rd called Rocket Fuel. Get in touch with you on on any of the social media. What's the best way to get in touch with you Mike: Instagram, Joe: On. Mike: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, either one, but Instagram, it's Michy Cerak. Joe: Like you see rock on Instagram. Mike: Yep. Joe: Perfect. All right, man, this is a pleasure for me. I love talking Mike: Metohija. Joe: To another person Mike: Yeah, buddy. Joe: And it was great. And I really wish you a ton of luck with the book. I'll make sure when this episode gets released, I'll have a cover of the book. This will also go like you do on your podcast, will go to the YouTube channel so people will Mike: Thank you Joe: Be able to Mike: To. Joe: See it. I'll put the link to the Amazon in there. Anything else I can do to help? Let me know. But it was a real pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate Mike: Well, Joe: Your time Mike: Thank Joe: And. Mike: You. Thank you, Joe, I appreciate it was a great interview. Great questions and I really enjoyed it. Joe: Thank you, ma'am. You take care. Good luck with the book. Good luck with the podcast. Good luck with the tech software and Mike: Thank Joe: Everything Mike: You. Joe: Else. And just have an amazing year. Mike: Thank you, you, too, bye. Joe: Thank you.

There can be only one, but Highlander's had a surprising number of media adaptations and spin-offs over the years. We take a look at all of them and even get some behind-the-scenes gossip about the infamous comic book tie-in: Highlander 3030. ----more---- Episode Transcript   Episode 05 [00:00:00] Mike: It's fine. It's fine. I'm not bitter. Mike: Welcome to Tencent Takes, the podcast where we make comics trivia rain like dollar bills on Magic Mike night. My name is Mike Thompson and I am joined by my cohost, the mistress of mayhem herself, Jessika Frazer. Jessika: Muahahaha! It is I hello, Mike. Mike: Hello. If you're new to the podcast, we like to look at comic books in ways that are both fun and informative. We want to check out their coolest, weirdest and silliest moments, as well as examine how they've been woven into the larger fabric of pop culture and history. Today, we are traveling through time and talking about the 35 year legacy of one of the strongest cult franchises around, Highlander. But [00:01:00] before we do that, Jessika, what is one cool thing that you've watched or read lately? Jessika: My brother has some copies of classic Peanuts Comics, and it's so much fun. It's good, wholesome, fun. And Snoopy- related media always makes me nostalgic. And Mike you've mentioned before that we're in California in the San Francisco Bay area, but fun fact, I live right near Santa Rosa, which is the home of the Peanuts creator Charles Schultz when he was alive. So there's a museum there and an ice skating rink. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Which is super awesome And Snoopy on ice was huge when I was a kid. And that is definitely the place I also learned to ice skate. By the way, they throw a mean birthday party, just saying, not right this second. Not this second. [00:02:00] We should do it is what I'm saying. Mike: We should do it for ourselves. Jessika: No, that's what I'm saying. Oh, I don't have children. Mike: But we do. Jessika: Yes, they can come with us, like they're invited. Mike: I mean, are they? Jessika: Look at you hesitating. Mike: We took the kids to the Peanuts museum right before the lockdowns happened. that really Jessika: That's really lovely that's nice got to do that. Mike: There’s a lot of cool stuff to do. It's really interactive. It's also just a really fascinating experience because there's so much about the Peanuts during their, what 50 year run give or take. It may not have been that long. It may have been 30 or 40, but it was a long time, and I really dug it, like there was a lot of cool stuff, so yeah . And also the cool thing about Santa Rosa is they've also got all those Snoopy statues all over town too. Jessika: They do. Yeah. All the [00:03:00] Peanuts characters actually. Cause they, the Charlie Browns and the Lucy's now and the Woodstocks. Yeah they're all over the place. But that used to be something fun we could do as a scavenger hunt, and actually that's something you guys could still do even with the lockdown. Cause most of them are outside is just find that list of where all the Snoopy's or whatever character is and go find them all. Cause we did that at one point, like as an adult, obviously. Well, what about you, Mike? Mike: The complete opposite of something wholesome. Jessika: Perfect. Mike: We didn't actually have the kids for a few days. They were with their dad and we couldn't find anything new to watch. So, we wound up bingeing the entire series of Harley Quinn on HBO Max. Jessika: Oh, you’re ahead of me then. Damn you. Mike: This is my third time going through the series. We've just gotten to the point where we turned it on when we want to watch something that's kind of soothing in a way, even though it is not a soothing TV show. But I still am [00:04:00] having these full on belly laughs where I'm breathless at the end and it's just, it's so smart and funny and absolutely filthy with the violence. And then there are these moments of sweetness or genuine reflection, and it's just so damn refreshing. I was never much of a Harley fan, but this show and then the Birds of Prey movie really made me fall in love with that character. Also side note, Michael Ironside who played General Katana and Highlander II. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: He shows up in Harley Quinn doing the voice of Darkseid, which is a character he's been voicing since the nineties when he first started doing it for the Superman animated series. Jessika: Oh, damn. Mike: So, just a little bit of symmetry there. Mike: All right. So before we begin, I have to say that this episode wound up being a rabbit hole full of other rabbit holes that I kept going down. So, I want to give a little credit where it's due for a ton of my research. I really wound up leaning on two books: John Mosby's Fearful Symmetry [00:05:00]; and A Kind of Magic: The Making of Highlander by Jonathan Melville. Likewise, there's a YouTube series called Highlander heart hosted by Grant Kempster and Joe Dilworthand, and an associated Facebook community with the same name that were just invaluable for my crash course. And finally, I want to give special, thanks to Clinton Rawls, who runs Comics Royale, and Matt Kelly for taking the time to chat with me because they didn't have to, and they provided me with some really useful information for this episode. Jessika: Yeah, I'm super excited about what lies in store. What's really funny is I've actually, I feel like a kid before it test. Mike: Right? Jessika: like I'm a little nervous because I've been cramming so hard for this Mike: We both have. Jessika: No, you, especially you, especially like you should be much more nervous than me, Mike. No, I’m just kidding, please don't take that on. Oh, but yeah, no I'm super excited and really ready to talk about all of this stuff and learn more because I've just been consuming the media and the [00:06:00] comic books. But, you’re going to give me some back knowledge that's gonna blow my brain and I'm excited. Mike: Oh, well, I'll try to live up to that high expectation. Let's assume that you didn't know what the topic of this episode was. And if someone asked you what cult property from the 1980s. Spawned five movies, two TV series, a Saturday morning cartoon, an anime film, several video games, multiple tabletop games, audio plays, roughly a dozen novels, and four okay, technically six different comic books. What would your first answer be? Jessika: Oh, goodness. What's funny is probably not Highlander. I'd probably I would say like Batman, honestly, Mike: Yeah I would've gone with something along the lines of G.I. Joe. Jessika: Oh, yeah. Mike: Or some weird Saturday morning cartoon, something like that. I never would have guessed Highlander. I never would have assumed that. but it's just, it's really surprising to see how [00:07:00] much has been generated out of this initial movie. Were you fan of the movies or the show before we started bingeing everything for this episode? Jessika: So I was actually a fan of the show via my dad who had it on hadn't watched the films before, because I was born in 1986 fun fact. Mike: Right. Jessika: I was born when this thing was sent into the world. We both were at the same time, apparently. I didn't have that exact experience of growing up watching it, but he definitely had the TV show on in the nineties Mike: Okay. Jessika: So that was what I was familiar with and I loved it and I would run around chopping things; I'd be at work, I was actually like when I got older I'd be like, there can only be one, and I’d like have to like swipe at someone. Mike: It’s such an iconic line. Jessika: iIt is! it transcends. Absolutely. Mike: Yeah. I was pretty young when the movie came out and the show was how I became aware of it. And then when the show was airing, I was in high school. And then I became [00:08:00] aware that there was a movie that had inspired it. And so I was able to rent that when I was old enough to be trusted, to go rent movies on my own by my parents. Back when we couldn’t stream everything. Jessika: Oh my gosh. Mike: And there were rewind fees, Jessika: Oh, my gosh. Be kind rewind. Mike: Speaking of things from the eighties: it’s funny we'll talk about it later on, but the show really brought in, I think a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't have been fans. Before we start talking about the comic books, I really want to take a few minutes to talk about all the media and content that spun out of Highlander because it's a lot. And it was honestly in a couple of cases, really surprising. I didn't know about half of this stuff before I began researching for the episode, and then. Like I said, it was just constant rabbit holes that kept on leading me down more and more research paths. And it was really fun. But I want to talk about all this now. Jessika: Perfect. This is exactly what we're here for, and I think that people want to hear it too. [00:09:00] Mike: I hope so. Okay. So why don't you summarize Highlander? If you had to give an elevator pitch, Jessika: The film follows the past and present of Connor MacLeod, an immortal who is just one of many vying to be the sole victor in an age old battle, where in the end, there can only be one. Like very simply a lot more to it, but like how much of an elevator pitch. Mike: I think that's pretty simple. It's about an immortal who basically keeps on fighting his way through history and there's these really wonderful catch phrases that get us hooked. The movies got actually a really interesting origin story of its own. It was written by this guy named Gregory Widen when he was in his early twenties. That was when he wrote the initial screenplay. But he had already had a really interesting life up until then. He was one of the youngest paramedics in Laguna Beach at that point in [00:10:00] time. And then he went on to become a firefighter while he was still a teenager. By 1981, he'd also worked as a DJ and a broadcast engineer. And then he signed up for a screenwriting course at UCLA and he wrote this feature length script called Shadow Clan. And it would go through a number of changes before it became Highlander. But the core theme of an immortal warrior named Connor MacLeod wandering across the centuries is there. He wound up getting introduced to producers Bill Panzer, and Peter Davis who decided to option the film. And then they hired the screenwriters, Larry Ferguson and Peter Bellwood to rework the script into what we eventually had wind up in theaters. And once the movie was green-lit, they brought in Russell Mulcahey to direct it. And I vaguely knew that Mulcahey had been doing music videos before this, for the most part, he had one other cult movie ahead of time. It was a horror movie, I think, called Razorback. But I didn't realize which music videos he'd been making until I started doing all [00:11:00] this research. So I'm going to give you a small sampling and you're going to tell me if you've heard of these. Jessika: Okay. Sure sure sure. Mike: Okay. The Vapors “Turning Japanese”. Jessika: Uh, yeah. Mike: Yeah, okay. The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star”. Jessika: Wow. Yes. Mike: Duran Duran Duran’s “Rio”. Jessika: Wow. Mike: And Elton John's “I'm Still Standing”. Jessika: Yeahwow. That's actually a variety of characters. Mike: Right? But also those all really iconic music videos. Like not only songs, but music, videos cause those were all in the very early days. And the dude's entire portfolio is just iconic. If you think about the music videos that really defined the genre Jessika: Yeah, sometimes you just got it, I guess. Huh? Mike: He has a lot of those music video elements. A lot of times in the movie, it feels like a music video, like when Brenda's being chased down the hall by the Kurgan and it's got all that dramatic lighting, or that opening shot where they're in the [00:12:00] wrestling match and you see the camera flying through everything. Jessika: Yes! Mike: That was wild. That was really unusual to see camera work like that back then. The movie was distributed by 20th century Fox. And I think at this point, We'd be more surprised of 20th century Fox did a good job of marketing weird and cool, because they really botched it. They wound up forcing cuts to the movie that created really weird plot holes because they didn't feel that audiences needed it or what would understand it, and they wanted to make it simpler, but it really made things more confusing. European audiences on the other hand, really embraced the film because they got a much better version. So case in point, I'm going to show you the two main posters for it. This is the American poster for the movie. Jessika: Mmhmm. Oh, wow, he’s scary. Wow wow wow, okay. Before I even say any of the words, what you first see is Connor [00:13:00] MacLeod, but it's this awful grainy picture of him. He looks like there's something wrong with his face, which he shouldn't necessarily. And he looks like he's about to murder someone. He's like glaring off into the distance. And at the top it says, Oh, it's in black and white, by the way. at the top it says, He fought his first battle on the Scottish Highlands in 1536, he will fight his greatest battle on the streets of New York city in 1986. His name is Connor MacLeod. He is immortal Highlander! Credits at the bottom, rated R, absolutely rated R. Mike: Also, I feel like featuring original songs by Queen does not get the billing that it should. Jessika: I agree. I jammed my way through that film and this just the whole series, [00:14:00] actually the whole franchise I jammed my way through. Mike: Yeah. And if you listen to the kind of Magic album that is basically the unofficial soundtrack to the movie, and it's so good I don't know how they got those perpetual rights to Princes of the Universe, did. Every time I hear that song, I get a little thrill up my spine. All right. So here's the poster though for the European release. Jessika: All right. So, Ooh, this is totally different. This is Whoa. This is way more exciting. Okay. First of all, it's full Color, my friends, right in the middle in red it says Highlander right under it “There can only be one” in yellow. Oh it's amazing. There's a little sticker at the bottom that says featuring original songs by queen. Look it, trying to sell it, I love it. And then there's Connor MacLeod in the center of the screen [00:15:00] dramatically head back eyes closed screaming his sword thrusts forward and behind him is the Kurgan, oh my gosh so good. It's so - Oh, and a backdrop of New York city. All in lights. It's beautiful. Mike: Yeah. It’s one of those things where basically, that documentary that we watched seduced by Argentina, they talk about that where they're just like 20th century Fox fucked us. Jessika: And I didn't realize how much until, because I did watch that as well. And I'm like how bad could it be? But I that's pretty bad. It's a pretty big difference. It's like watching, that'd be like going, expecting to see like psycho or something. Mike: Honestly, I keep on thinking of Firefly and Fox and how they just totally botched the marketing for that show and then the release, and issues with Joss Wheden aside. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: It’s one of those [00:16:00] things where again, it's a really beloved cult property with a really devoted fan base, even, 5 years after it was released, shit, almost 20. Jessika: And I do love Firefly, again, Whedon aside. Mike: I do too. Jessika: And it makes me a little sad think about it because it had so much potential. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Oh, it's so rough. It's rough to see. Mike: Yeah. What were your overall thoughts on the movie now that you've seen it because you hadn't seen it before this, correct? Jessika: No. I had only seen the TV show and probably rightfully so, because that was much less violent. I mean, much less graphically violent. They were still beheading motherfucker every episode, but, versus the film, which is like blood and like half a head and wow, there, it goes the head. But I actually really liked the movie. It was adventurous, it was thrilling and told a fairly cohesive and interesting storyline which unfortunately had an ending. But it still took us on an emotional journey. [00:17:00] Mike: Yeah, and I feel the same way. Jessika:: And how all the camp that I love from the 1980s and the special effects are just chefs, kiss love it. Mike: There is something so wonderful about the special effects from the 1980s, because they're so earnest all the time. And at the same time they look so cheesy by comparison now. Jessika: But you can tell they were trying so hard. It's almost like a little kid who's just learning to finger paint and they walk up and they're like, I did this thing. It's so good. You're like, it is really good. It's really good for where you're at. Mike: Yeah, exactly. Highlander is very much a quintessential eighties film to me, and there's both that nostalgia factor, but also it's a pretty tight little film. It doesn't really try to do anything too grandiose or too world-building because I don't think they expected to really make the sequels that they wound up doing. Which speaking of which we should discuss the sequels. [00:18:00] Mike: Like, I feel like you can’t discussion without talking about the sequels. And honestly the first time I ever heard of Highlander as a brand really was when I was visiting family in Texas And we were watching a Siskel & Ebert episode where they were thrashing Highlander II. Jessika: Dude, Siskel and Ebert I'm sure hated this. This does not surprise me in the least. Mike: I don't remember much about it, I just remember being like, oh Sean Connery's in a movie, well that's cool. Because my parents had raised me on all of the Sean Connery James Bond movies. Jessika: Yeah casting, come on. Why? Why? They had a French dude playing a Scottish guy and a Scottish guy playing a Spanish Egyptian guy. It's. Mike: I believe label was a Hispaniola Egyptian. They kinda darkened up Sean Connery a little bit too. I'm not sure. Jessika: It felt that way. I was just hoping he had just been under the tanning beds, but no, I think you're right. [00:19:00] Mike: Highlander II was definitely the most infamous of the sequels. And I mean a huge part of that is because it had such a batshit production and there’d been so many different versions of it. It was so bad that Russell Mulcahey reportedly walked out of the film premiere after only 15 minutes. There's this great documentary that you and I both watched on YouTube, it's split up into a bunch parts, but it was a documentary they made for the special edition of Highlander II. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: It was the third release of the movie that they put out because the first one was basically the bonding company for the films. Investors took over the production and assembly of the movie due to the fact that Argentina, where they were filming. And they had gone to Argentina because a, it was gorgeous, but B because it was supposedly going to be a third of the cost Jessika: Yeah. Mike: To make a movie there than it would elsewhere. Argentina’s economy collapsed and went through hyperinflation. And as a result, everything just went haywire. But they went back years later and they not only recut the [00:20:00] movie, but they refilled or added in certain scenes I think four or five years later. And then on top of that, they did the special edition a few years after that, where they redid the special effects. And I don't know it's kind of funny because it's not a bad movie now. It's not terrible. I feel it's an enjoyable film in its own way. But it's also funny where you watch that documentary and they're talking about the stuff that they're so proud of. Russell Mulcahey was talking about how proud he was of that love scene. I'm using this in quotes, love scene between Virginia Madsen and and Christopher Lambert where they just decided to do it up against the wall of an alley? Jessika: That’s always an interesting choice to me. Like you really cannot wait. Mike: Yeah. And then he was like, I thought that was a really hot scene. And I got to sit there and I'm like, I don't, I can't view this through the lens of, a 20 something guy in the 1990s. I don't know what my interpretation of it would have been then, [00:21:00] but watching it now watching it for the first time when I was in my twenties and the, in the early aughts, I just was like, this is weird and sorta dumb. And also they don't really have a lot of chemistry, but okay. Jessika: Yeah, it just kind of happens. They're just like, Oh, here you are. Mike: Yeah Right I don't know. At the same time it was cool to see they did all those really practical, special effects where they actually had them whipping around on the wires on like the weird flying skateboards and stuff. I thought that was cool. Jessika: I thought that was neat too. And how he was like, yeah, I actually got on top of the elevator and he was excited. Now he got on top of the elevator. Mike: And then they basically just dropped it down, like that's wild. So how about Highlander three? Jessika: Ahhh… Mike: Yeah, that’s kinda where I am Jessika: It’s very forgettable in my book. Mike: I feel like you could wipe it from the timeline and no one would care. Really, it felt like a retread of the first movie, but with the shittier villain in a way less interesting love story. honestly, it was a bummer because Mario [00:22:00] Van Peebles, the guy who plays that the illusionist I can't even remember his name. It was that forgettable. Jessika: Yeah, no, I can't either. Mike: Mario van Peebles is a really good actor and he's done a lot of really cool stuff. And it just, it felt like he was the NutraSweet version of the Kurgan Jessika: I like that. Yes. Yes. Mike: All of the mustache twirling, none of the substance. Jessika: It leaves a little bit of a weird taste in your mouth. Mike: Right. Splenda Kurgan! Moving on Highlander, Endgame. Jessika: What I do like about this film is that in both the TV series, as well as the film, there is the actual crossover. Connor shows up in Duncan's world and Duncan shows up in Connor's world and there is that continuity, which is good. And I do appreciate that because, before I got into this, I assumed that the character was interchangeable and we were just seeing different actors James [00:23:00] Bond situation. And when I went back and realized like, Oh no, he's his own character, they're blah, you know. Mike: I dunno I saw this in theaters I love the show and I appreciated that it felt like an attempt to merge the movies in the series and of the movies, I feel like this actually has the strongest action scenes. There's that bit where Adrian Paul faces off against Donnie Yen. And I was like, that's gotta be really cool to be able to sit there and show your kids much later in life: hey, I got to do a martial arts scene with Donnie Yen and he didn't kill me in the movie. that's pretty dope. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: Again, it felt underwhelming. It just wasn't all that interesting. And also I spent years being mad at that movie because the trailer brought me into the theater expecting something way different than what we were going to get Jessika: Okay. And I don't know that I saw the trailer. Mike: It has, it has a bunch of scenes with Magic where Connor and Duncan jumped through a portal [00:24:00]. Jessika: What? Mike: And a sword gets thrown at Jacob Kell and he catches it midair. And then he does something else where he's holding a sphere where you see Connor's face screaming and then it shatters. Jessika: What’s with all this weird, extra scene stuff in these trailers. I don't understand. Mike: Yeah, it turns out that this hasn't, this has never really been officially confirmed, but reading between the lines yeah, it’s been confirmed. They basically filmed extra scenes just to make it more appealing for people. So they would show up to the theaters. Like they filmed scenes, effectively they filmed scenes just for the trailer the director when he was asked about it in Fearful Symmetry. He basically said, yeah, I know there was some stuff that they filmed for marketing afterwards, and I wasn't involved with that. And then I think it was Peter Davis that was asked about this for the book. And he basically said, Oh, this is a really standard practice. People, or accompanies [00:25:00] film stuff for for marketing purposes all the time. And that's where he left it. Jessika: Oh, okay. to know. Mike: I was really grumpy about that, but that said I've softened a little since then. Do we even want to talk about the Source? Cause I feel like that's something that we shouldn't talk about in polite company. Jessika: No pass. Mike: Okay. Jessika: It happened? Mike: It happened, it was a thing that happened that was going to be a trilogy. They were planning to make that into a trilogy of movies. Jessika: Ohh rough times. Mike: Oh it's real bad. I don't think you were able to watch this, but Highlander, the search for vengeance. It's the anime. Jessika: No, I couldn't find it. Mike: Yeah. It's not available for streaming and it really it's really a bummer because it's actually pretty good. I'm not quite sure how to qualify it because it's not a live action movie and it doesn't star Duncan or Connor, but it's a full length anime. It's a full length movie in its own right. It focuses on Colin MacLeod who he’s [00:26:00] an immortal, who's technically part of the MacLeod clan. He's born as a Roman Britain and then he's adopted into the MacLeod clan after he fights alongside them later on. They keep on doing this. They keep on going back to dystopian SciFutures, which I kinda like, Jessika: I love, bless their little hearts. Mike: Yeah. A lot of the story actually takes place in this post-apocalyptic 22nd century, New York. And I haven't seen this in about a decade because it's not available on streaming. I don't have the DVD anymore. I really should pick it up before it goes out of print. But the movie fucking slaps. It was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, he was really big in the nineties. He did Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust. He's known for really cool looking movies that are also really violent at the same time. Like you look at his characters and you're like, Oh yeah, no, they all look interchangeable because they're also similar one movie to another, Jessika: Oh, I see. Mike: But they're really cool. And the movie was written by David Abramowitz, who was the head writer [00:27:00] for the TV show. So it felt like a pretty legit Highlander story. Honestly, if we had to talk about this and ask which of these movies or the sequels were our favorites, I would probably say the Search for Vengeance. Because I loved it so much, but since that wasn't a theatrical release, we'll exclude that and you didn't get to watch it. Of the sequels, which did you enjoy most? Jessika: Mike, why don’t you go first. Mike: Okay. I'm a little torn, I guess I enjoyed Endgame mainly because it feels like part of he in quotes, real Highlander story, I guess it's the least terrible of the sequels. And it brought in my favorite characters. The final version of Highlander II, is I don't know. I don't hate it. It honestly feels like a cool dystopian cyberpunk story with some bizarre Highlander lore shoehorned in, but at the same time, it's not the worst thing I've ever watched. How about you? Jessika: Funny [00:28:00] enough, I was going to say Highlander II, but maybe just a bit more so if it were its own standalone movie and not try to be a part of the Highlander franchise. The idea of the shield is super interesting and I think they could have elaborated more on the lead-up and the resolution of that issue rather than having to also make it about the Immortals in their forever game. Mike: Yeah, I agree. How do you feel about moving onto the TV series? Jessika: Oh, I am pro. Mike: Okay. I personally feel like this is the property that sucks all the air out of the room when you're talking about Highlander. Jessika: Oh no. Mike: Yeah, I mentioned that this is how I really got introduced to the brand. I started watching it in high school, around season three, which was when it was really starting to get good. The first two seasons I feel were kind of when they were ironing out all the rough spots. But I wound up watching it through the end. So if you're listening to this podcast and you have never seen the [00:29:00] show Highlander, the series ran for six seasons, which is a good length of time for any TV show. And it followed the adventures of Duncan, who was another member of the MacLeod clan. He was a distant cousin of Connor. And the show bounced between Seacouver, which is a fictionalized version of Vancouver in Paris. And it basically retcon things so that the original movie didn't end with The Quickening, but that the battle between the Kurgan and Connor was it's implied, it was the start of The Gathering. That's my interpretation of it. Jessika: That was what I got too. Mike: Yeah. And Christopher Lambert, he shows up in the pilot to help set things up and get them moving. But I think that's the only time we ever really seen him on the show. Jessika: Correct. He's really just an intro. He's in that first episode only. Mike: You have rewatched it as a have I . We haven't watched the entire series all the way through, but we've watched a lot of episodes. Jessika: Correct. Mike: How do you feel [00:30:00] it measures up today? compared to that nostalgic view that we had before, Jessika: I had a lot of fun watching it, actually. definitely super cheesy. I don't love all of the characters I watched a lot of the first season, then I bounced around I think I did the top, like 25 on a list that you sent me. But Duncan’s just so codependent sometimes with his characters and it's like the one time the Tessa goes on a hike by herself, she gets kidnapped by an, a mortal and it’s like, oh my God, she can't even go on a fucking hike, are you joking me? And the one time he goes to the store by himself, he gets kidnapped and it's like, oh, come the fuck on you guys. Mike: Yeah, I feel like it generally holds up pretty well. It's a little uneven, but when it hits , it really hits. And it's a lot of fun. And considering that it was a relatively low budget show on basic cable in the early to mid-nineties, there's a lot of stuff that has aged way worse. [00:31:00] Jessika:: Absolutely. It exceeded my expectations on the rewatch, for sure. Mike: Yeah, and I have to say that one really cool thing about Highlander is it's got a really large female fan base. And I suspect that the show is really responsible for that. Jessika: I would agree. There's a few reasons. Mike: Are six of those reasons. Duncan's abs? Jessika: Like 10 of those reasons are all the times he gets surprised in a bathtub. I know I messaged you while I was watching them, because I was like Duncan got surprised in a bathtub again. Mike: I don't remember which episode it was, but there's one where he is surprised while he's in a bathrobe and he's got, it's not even tighty whities, it’s like a bikini brief, and watching that, I was just sitting there going, thank you for this gift. Thank you. Thank you for this visual treat that you have given us in the middle of my very boring work day. Jessika: It’s [00:32:00] also that there are such a wide variety of female characters. I would say, Iit’s not just the other female person he seeing or whatever, the love interest, there are other female Immortals and they a lot more frequently than they do in the films. I can't recall if they have any female immortals in the films. Mike: They do in Endgame. Jessika: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I thought there was, there were some in there, but that’s tailing into, I mean yeah. Mike: Yeah. And the Source had them too, but meh. Jessika: Oh yeah. Mike: I will say that the show was pretty good about writing pretty strong female characters, I felt. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: And we'll talk about Amanda in a little bit, but I have to say that I really liked how she was written and how Elizabeth Grayson played her through the original series and then her own afterwards. I dunno. I, what do you think is the sexiest thing about Duncan MacLeod? I'm curious. Jessika: He seems [00:33:00] really like trustworthy, but like and sexy trustworthy. It's like, he'd be the dude. I called if some guys were fucking with me. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: I kept on thinking about how there's this Tumblr post that's been going around the internet, regularly, and it's this discussion about which Disney men women find the sexiest guys always thinks it's Gaston. Jessika: Oh lord, why? Mike: It’s that male power fantasy thing where they're just like, oh no, like he's like really charming. And he's really muscly. And the counterargument from women is usually A no Gaston sucks and B we all like Roger from 101 Dalmatians. Jessika: Oh yeah. Roger. Mike: Which, Roger is very much my personal role model. The dude's a talented musician, he loves animals and he's got that great, a snark where he literally is trolling the villain when she comes to his house with a motherfucking trombone from upstairs [00:34:00]. And I think Duncan's a little like that. Like he's cultured and he's worldly and he's got this wicked sense of humor. And he's also the type of dude who has no problem reciting poetry in public or making his partner breakfast in bed. Jessika: Yeah, absolutely. Mike: So it just it was something that came to mind while I was rewatching all this stuff. Jessika: Yeah. just as like a wholesome guy. Mike: Right? Jessika: He always has good intentions. So that's actually what it feels like. He's always coming at things with good intentions. Mike: Yeah, and he's not perfect, but he's always trying to do the right thing, which I really appreciate. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: What was your favorite episode? Jessika: I went back and forth. I really like the Homeland episode, and like I said, I've really only watched a good chunk of most of season what I would say, and then so kind of bounced around, but season four, episode one. It was really sweet to see [00:35:00] Duncan take the obligatory trip back to his Homeland to pay respects. And it also had a good lesson in not judging a book by its cover as the main character assumes that Duncan is just an ancestry tourist, which was super interesting. She was super hating on it but I was like this is interesting instead of visiting what once was literally his home during formative years. So it was just such a wild thing to see her be like, what are you doing near those graves? And he can't really be like, they were my parents because you cannot even read them. They are so old. Mike: The funny thing is I didn't rewatch that episode during our refresher, but I remember watching that episode when I was about 15 or so. Because it's stuck out to me. Jessika: It’s really good. And of course, Duncan, he always has a good intention. The whole reason he went back was because he figured out that somebody had been [00:36:00] pilfering graves Mike: Yeah. Jessika: And he had to return what was in this grave. Mike: I know he's making the rest of us look bad. So mine is, it's unusual suspects. It's from season six, which I feel is actually pretty weak season overall. And it's this really silly one-off episode, starring Roger Daltry of the Who fame. He plays Hugh Fitzcairn, which is a character that he shows up in plays a couple of times throughout the series. And at this point in time in the story, he was dead, but it's a flashback to the 19 teens or 1920s. 1920s, because it ends with the stock market crash, but it's a take on the British country, house murder, mystery genre, and it's really fun. And it was just this really refreshing moment of levity after what I felt our run of really heavy, and in my opinion, not very good episodes. The end of season five and the beginning of season [00:37:00] six are all about Duncan confronting this demon named Aramon and it's weird and it's not very good. And I really don't enjoy it. This is all my opinion. I'm sure that I'm insulting some Highlander fan who absolutely loves this, but it's a fun episode in its own. And then it's a good moment after one that I didn't really enjoy. And so it's got that extra refreshing bonus. I just, I want to note, it's really funny to me how intertwined Highlander has always been with rock and roll and music in general, because they had Mulcahey who do it, doing all these music videos and stuff. And then they kept on having musicians show up as guest stars. I think it was there's a character named Xavier St. Cloud, I think who was played by one of the guys from, again, I think, Fine Young Cannibals? Jessika: Yeah, I think I actually watched that episode. Mike: I think he was using nerve gas to kill people. Jessika: Yes I did watch that episode. That was a wild one. Yeah. Mike: Yeah, and I think he shows up later on too. [00:38:00] I can't remember but anyway, I really appreciate that they gave Roger Daltry of all people, this character, and he just really had fun with it and they kept bringing him back. Jessika: Yeah. He was a good character every episode he was in my other favorites was the one where they had Mary Shelley and he was in that one too. I believe. Mike: I think so. Yeah. No, it was, the series was really fun, and I liked that we can sit there and pull all these episodes just from memory that we really liked. Jessika: Absolutely. Mike: So season six , they were trying to find a new actress who could carry her own Highlander show. And so they tested out a bunch of different actresses in season six and gave them either really strong guest appearances, or they were basically the main character for episodes. But they wound up not going with any of them. They went with Elizabeth Grayson and gave her the Raven where she reprised her roles Amanda. Did you watch any of that? Did you get a chance to? Jessika: I watched the [00:39:00] first and the last episode of season one, I can only find the first season. Is there only one? Mike: There’s only one season, it didn’t get picked up again. Jessika: Oh then there you go. Then I could have only, I know I was scratching my head. Worried about where else do I find this? Mike: Well, and it ends on a cliff-hanger. Jessika: Yeah, exactly. That's where I was like, let's go. Mike: It ends with Nick becoming immortal. Jessika: Oh, see, I didn't quite finish it. Cause I was hurriedly setting it up in the background. Mike: Yeah it was fine. I thought Elizabeth Grayson is really charming in that role, but at the same time, there wasn't a lot of chemistry initially between Amanda and Nick, I felt at the very beginning. Jessika: I agree, not in the first episode. Mike: By the end of the season, it was there, and I think they were also, as is the case with most shows first seasons, they were trying really hard to figure out what they wanted to do. And so originally it was a cop show with an immortal, which there are certainly worse pitches that I've heard. Jessika: Yeah. No, I agree. Mike: But yeah. sad that it didn't get to go further [00:40:00] Jessika: I'm tempted to go back and watch all of these things. I may have to do a pallet cleanse of something different. I may have to go back to my Marvel watching. Mike: On top of this, there was a Saturday morning cartoon called Highlander, the series or Highlander, the animated series, and it was set in the future. It's in a weird alternate timeline. It stars another MacLeod. It's fine It's a Saturday morning cartoon. I didn't even care enough to really go back and watch it because being that great. They did some interesting stuff. Like they brought Ramirez back if I remember, right. And then they also had a thing where instead of beheading other Immortals, the main character had an ability where he could be voluntarily given their power. Jessika: Oh. Mike: So he had all of their knowledge and power. And again, it’s again in a dystopian future where another immortal has taken over the world. Jessika: Wow. They just love their dystopian future. Mike: They really do. But yeah, it's fine. I think it's streaming on Amazon prime. I was just so focused on everything else that I didn't get a chance to go and [00:41:00] rewatch it. Jessika: Huh, good to know. Mike: We're going to go over all the other various pieces of media real quick. and then we've got one side tangent and then we're going to go through comic books, but. Jessika: I'm so excited. Mike: Books, Highlander wound up having a pretty substantial literary footprint. The original movie had the official novelization. There wasn't really anything after that until the show came out and then the show had 10 novels and an anthology and an official behind the scenes kind of book called the Watchers Guide and it's full of essays and interviews and photos. And since then, there've been a couple of non-fiction books, like Fearful Symmetry, which is about everything Highlander related. And it's almost like a textbook, but it's pretty good. And then there's also A Kind of Magic, which is more focused on making of the original movie. And those are both actually really good. I liked them a lot. They were really easy to read. [00:42:00] There were audio plays, which I keep on forgetting audio plays are a thing at this point, but it's by this company called Big Finish in the UK. They do tie-in audio dramas for television properties. Most famously they do Dr Who. They wound up doing two seasons of audio plays. The first had Adrian Paul reprise his role as Duncan and they take place after the series ended. And then also after the events of Endgame, you can't really find them anymore. Because they just, the license expired so they aren't selling them as far as I'm aware. Jessika: That's super interesting though. Dang. Mike: Yeah. And then the second season focuses on the four horsemen Immortals, remember Jessika: Okay. Mike: Do you remember them? Jessika: I sure do. Mike: Because we were talking about this a little bit, but it was all about Methos and the other guys that he hung out with when he was effectively, a comic book villain who would've if he’d had a mustache to twirl, he would have done it. Jessika: So quickly. Yes. Mike: I thought that was really interesting. There were a couple of people in the Highlander Heart [00:43:00] group who talked about it and they seem to really like them. I can't comment, but it was really neat. Games, this is the one that's really interesting. Highlander actually has been turned into a number of games over the years. There's a couple of tabletop games we're going to breeze through. So there was two different card games in a board game. One of the card games was released back in the nineties, it was a collectible card game. And this was right when Magic: The Gathering was really hot and everybody was trying to get in on that action. And then recently there's a new one called Highlander: The Duel. And it's a deck-building game where you play as Connor or the Kurgan going up against each other. And just a couple of years ago, there was a board game that got kick-started, it was in 2018 and it's this fast paced game for two to six players. The reviews across the web were pretty positive. And again, it's one of those things where it's Immortals battling for that mysterious prize. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: But it's cool. Jessika: Nice. Mike: I’m actually pretty surprised [00:44:00] we never got like a tabletop RPG because they are not precious about applying the license for Highlander to stuff. I'm amazed that nobody went to them and said, Hey, we can make this cool historical RPG where we sorta start having players wake up and then they have flashbacks or whatever. And Jessika: Yeah Oh that would have been cool Yeah Mike: Right? But yeah we never got anything like that which I was really I actually that was the one thing I expected and was surprised to see that we never got. Okay. So we're going to go into mini tangent with video games even though they aren't technically related to comics. The first game for Highlander was a 1986 tie-in release for home computers. It was a really simple fighting title. It wasn't well received. It was apparently pretty bad. So after that the animated series had a tie in called Highlander: Last of the MacLeods. It was released on the Atari Jaguar CD console. If you remember that. Do you remember the Atari Jaguar? Jessika: Oh my god, no. I don't. [00:45:00] Mike: It kinda got lost in the shuffle in the early to mid nineties of all the different consoles that were coming out. But you can find footage of this on YouTube and it's one of those early 3d games. And so it got a lot of praise for his exploration elements and animated video sequences, but it also got a lot of criticism for its controls in combat. After that there was actually going to be an MMO called Highlander, The Gathering. And it was in development by a French studio called Kalisto entertainment, which was honestly weird because Kalisto's catalog up until now were mostly middling single-player games. They'd gotten famous for a series called Nightmare Creatures, but they also did a Fifth Element racing game on PS2 that I had and was actually pretty fun. Anyway, Kalisto went bankrupt before the MMO could come out. Jessika: Oh! Mike: And none of the folks who, yeah, that's video games. Jessika: Fair enough. Mike: So they went bankrupt. The MMO hadn't come out yet. And the folks who wound up with the rights afterwards just decided to kill the project. There's [00:46:00] one other game. That's become the source of a lot of speculation. And it's only known as Highlander: The Game it basically came about because Davis Panzer productions that's, the guys who own the rights to Highlander, and SCI, which was this holding company that owned a bunch of video game groups. They decided to ink a deal, to make a Highlander game. They announced that they basically had done a partnership back in like 2004, 2005. And at the time SCI owned Eidos who was the publisher that gave us Tomb Raider. So they were a pretty big name. The game itself was formally announced by Eidos in 2008 and the development was being handled by another French developer called Widescreen Games. It was going to be an action role-playing game. It would star a new Immortal named Owen MacLeod. The story was going to be written again by David Abramowitz and that added some [00:47:00] serious legitimacy to the project for fans. Actually, why don’t you read the summary. Jessika: Would love to my pleasure. Summary: Owen is captured and enslaved by Romans who force him to compete as a gladiator. During this time, Owen dies only to come back to life. Methos, the oldest living immortal approaches Owen to be his mentor. He teaches Owen about the game and how he and other Immortals can only be slain by beheading. As with other immortal MacLeods Owen is pursued throughout his life by a nemesis. This enemy proves to be extremely powerful. One that Owen is unable to defeat Owen learns of a magical stone, fragments of which are scattered all over the world. Throughout the game, Owen embarks upon a quest to recover these fragments and restore the stone in an attempt to gain the power to overcome his foe. [00:48:00] So dramatic. I love it. Mike: What's Highlander without any drama? But that sounds rad right? Jessika: Oh, it sounds amazing. Mike: The game was announced with a trailer in 2008 that really only showed some of the environments from different eras and then it ended with an image of Owen, but it looked promising. And then there wasn't much else after a couple of years of pretty much nothing but radio silence, Eidos wound up canceling the game and that's where a lot of the speculation has started. There's not a lot of information on Highlander: The Game. I keep waiting for one of those gaming history YouTubers to get ahold of an old dev kit and then do a video with a build, but that hasn't happened yet. So really it's all kind of speculation and wishful thinking about what could have been. And it also seems like some of the details are getting muddied as time goes on. Like Fearful Symmetry talks about the game of it but they [00:49:00] have the segment. And again I want you to read this. Jessika: Sure sure. The gam was so far along in its development stages that segments including backdrops and some of the gameplay options were presented at a Highlander Worldwide event in Los Angeles 2006 and got a very positive reaction. The beautifully rendered backdrops were almost movie quality and included the likes of Pompei, a dark forest in the Highlands, New York, and Japan as gameplay locations and introduced us to another MacLeod, Owen, the same surname but a much earlier vintage. Mike: Yeah, so, I think Mosby is a little overly enthusiastic about all of this, and this is because I think Mosby doesn't have much familiarity with how game development works. It sounds like they had concept art on display and were discussing gameplay [00:50:00] rather than showcasing a build of the game. Concept art and design discussions are things that happen very early in game development. But if you're an outsider, looking in this stuff could easily be interpreted as things being much further along than they were. Jessika: Ah. Mike: Yeah. Now that said, I did work in video games for almost a decade, and a few of my coworkers were actually involved with Highlander the game. Jessika: What? Mike: Every one of them over the years has told me the cancellation was a mercy killing. And again, this is from multiple sources, so I'm not going to name or identify because, I don't want to make things awkward for them. But basically the game was garbage . It's not really surprising to hear cause widescreen never really made a good game, the best reception that any of their titles got was just kinda mixed. But earlier this week, I actually called one of my friends. Who'd been [00:51:00] attached to the project because I wanted to get more information about this game before we recorded. Jessika: We need to get you a new shovel, you dug so deep for this. Mike: With both hands. But, they confirmed what I've been hearing from other people the gameplay itself wasn't just bad. It was boring. The biggest problem was it didn't know what kind of a game it wanted to be. Basically, it was trying to do everything all at once. There were a bunch of traversal elements, which didn't really make a lot of sense. Like why would you climb a Manhattan skyscraper when you're a roided out dude with a sword? Couldn't you just take the elevator? Or I don't know the stairs? There was going to be a bunch of Magic elements in the gameplay, which, isn't really, that's not really a thing in Highlander. There's that fantasy element because we're talking about Immortals who can't die unless you cut off their heads, but generally Magic isn't a part of the accepted Canon. And then the combat, what they were aiming to do something like [00:52:00] God of war, which was really big at the time. But, it wasn't great. My friend also pointed out that Owen looked like a bodybuilder, but his fashion sense was from that industrial metal scene of the late nineties, which neither of those things really fits with the Highlander aesthetic because Adrian Paul was arguably the most in shape of the Highlander actors. But even that was, he was a dude who was like, yeah, I could achieve that if I was really good about my diet and then just worked out aggressively but not like Hugh Jackman does for his Wolverine roles. Jessika: Yeah, yeah. Mike: So I'm going to send you a screenshot of what Owen looked like in the key art the initial title it does. Jessika: What? It looks like Criss Angel. Mike: Right. And they're trying to recreate that iconic pose of The Quickening from the first movie that Connor does at the very end where he's getting raised up and, by the rails of Lightning, or the wires [00:53:00] of lightning. Jessika: Yeah, I get what they were trying to do. Mike: Yeah,I wanna know, what the fuck is up with those weird straps with rings that are going down his legs. Jessika: I don't really know, I was trying to figure that out myself. So just so that everyone can really get the picture that we're getting here and you'll, you might understand why it's taken me so long to describe it. I had to take it all in first. Mike: Yeah, it’s a ride. Jessika: It’s all very monochromatic. And the background is of course, a cut of the statue of Liberty, the backdrop of parts of New York that I'm sure aren't even next to each other, which is always funny. And then what is this? Is this the new guy, or is this supposed to be Duncan? Mike: Yeah, this is the new guy, Jessika: It’s Owen. Mike: Yeah. It's Owen. And then Connor and Duncan were supposed to appear, supposedly. I know Peter Wingfield was recording his lines for Methos. Jessika: Well, if they haven't killed off Methos that makes sense. And I don't know in the series if they have, and maybe Duncan makes [00:54:00] sense if he hasn't died yet, but. Mike: Yeah they can't kill off Methos, Methos was my first gay crush. Jessika: Yeah. He's. Slightly problematic in a couple episodes, but he's a great character overall. But he's very Chriss Angel, he's wearing like a trench coat and that has to be some sort of a lace undershirt or something. Mike: lAnd he’s got like a weird really, like baggy leather pants. Jessika: Yes. Which cannot be comfortable. It's doing this weird pooching thing in the front. Mike: Yeah, and then I think I saw another screenshot where it looks like he's wearing skater shoes tennis shoes as well. Jessika: Oh, Vans Off the Wall, man. Mike: Just once I want to see a MacLeod in the movies with a good fashion sense. Jessika: Yeah, I mentioned that I wanted to cosplay as Duncan, which overall would be a great idea. But then I was looking through his outfits and I'm like, what do I wear? Do I wear this weird white tank top with these like acid wash jeans [00:55:00] and a belt? Or is this the one where I'm wearing like five shirts and a long jacket? Is it that day? Mike: You know who he looks like that guy, Canus. Jessika: Yes! Yes, does. He has the lace shirt and everything. Mike: And the dog collar. Jessika: Oh my god, it was so funny. I told you, I think it was trying to be edgy. Mike: Yeah, and instead it comes off as really queer-coded. Jessika: It really does though. I know, my little queer brain was like bling. Mike: Yeah, It feels like they weren't really getting the essence of what Highlander actually was and who these guys were, because usually the Highlander characters are a little bit more believable and ordinary because that's the whole idea is that they're walking among us and we have no idea unless they tell us. Okay. On top of all this. So remember how I mentioned that trailer was just showcasing environments for the [00:56:00] game. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: There was a reason for that. The reason was that they couldn’t get the character models to work. Jessika: Oh! Mike: So the shot of Owen at the end it's actually just animated key art it's the same it's the same art that you just saw. It's that image. It was just slightly animated. And then they released a couple of screenshots for the game, but apparently they were really heavily photo-shopped well, beyond industry standards. So, it was one of those things where, this was a turd and it needed to be flushed. And it finally did. But Widescreen went under about a year after the game was formally announced. They were working on another big project and apparently that got taken away, and as a result, it just caused the studio to implode. By this point in time Square Enix the guys do all the final fantasy games had bought Eidos and they formally canceled it. We're not sure why exactly, my guess is that it was probably, they just looked at cost it would take to finish this game and then the [00:57:00] amount that it would need to sell in order to be profitable or to meet their sales expectations for it and they just thought it wasn't worth it. But yeah, my friend actually said they were embarrassed to work on it and they would have been fine even if it had been an average game, but it was just bad. Even one of those kind of middling average games, I think that would have been fine, that would have lived up to the Highlander bar. Finally, there's that Highlander game that spark unlimited was working on. I never even heard a whisper about this until. We watched that episode of Highlander Heart focusing on video games, and they brought Craig Allen on to talk about the project. Based on what we know now, I think this might be why Square Enix was holding onto the rights for another year after they shut down Highlander, the game, just because they had this other title, theoretically in development or very early development. Based on the footage that they have, it looks like they had at least done enough development work to put together a vertical slice that they could show for pitch [00:58:00] purposes and at conventions. But I thought it was really promising looking overall. What did you think? Jessika: I thought it did look really interesting the game play itself I did like the idea of having a female Highlander. That being said, they had this whole concept about what Craig Allen was calling beautiful damage. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: And it was this whole thing about, oh it was the first female Highlander and her looks go when she gets damaged, and that's her whole motivation is to stay pretty. And I just, that gave me a huge headache, and it of course was super male-gazey I mean, the game itself seemed that way. Mike: It was weird because I would love to see women and Highlander being built a little bit more like warriors, like a little bit more muscly, which would be in keeping with people who battle across the centuries. [00:59:00] They don't need to be super jacked like the Amazons in Wonder Woman, but making them look like stick thin suicide girl, punk rock chick from the late aughts. Didn't quite gel with me. I understood what he was talking about though, because that was the thing where they were starting to do permanent cosmetic damage in video games. That was something that was really big in the Batman Arkham games. Every time that you got knocked out, you'd come back and you'd have a little bit more of your outfit chipped apart. So, after a while Batman's looking pretty ragged and you realize maybe I'm not as good at this game as I think I am. Jessika: Yeah And the concept itself is really interesting It just I guess was the way it was phrased by this person. And it very much was he was so proud of the fact that it was the first Highlander female in a video game. And then everything was just like so incredibly sexist. I was excited that I wasn't Mike: We're also viewing it, with the lens of 2021 at this point. At that time, [01:00:00] that was before they had relaunched Tomb Raider, in 2013, 2014, where they made her much more realistic. She was still very fit, but she wasn't the Lara Croft that had generated a lot of criticism. I think possibly, I don't know, but I hope that it would have been marketed a bit differently if it had been done today. That said we also don't know exactly what it would look like as a final product. Jessika: Oh absolutely, yeah. Mike: It’s, I agree. It's a little bit problematic viewed through the current lens. At the same time, like a lot of the Highlander properties when it was being done, I think it was kind of just par for the course. Jessika: Yeah, fair enough. But, I did like the idea of having a female Highlander and having her have a whole story regardless of whether it's the first one to be completely [01:01:00] tragedy laden which was the other comment like her experience a ton of loss because she's female and experiences empathy unlike the male characters. Mike: I really didn't like that. Actually. I thought that was. I mean the, the whole thing where they were saying we wanted to focus on lifetimes of tragedy as opposed to enjoying multiple lives. And I'm like, that's the whole purpose of Highlander. That's what I really like is when you sit there and you watch them having fun and doing all this interesting stuff. Jessika: Women aren't allowed to have fun, Mike. Mike: Apparently. Jessika: We just have to have lives full of tragedy and pining for people that we've lost in our lives. Mike: Well, yeah. And we all know that the dudes don't have feelings, so we just, you know, go on and enjoy things. Jessika: That does suck that Hugh they don't give men the ability to have that capacity or give them the the credit to have that capacity. Mike: I will say, I am sorry that this one didn't get further along the development [01:02:00] stages, because it certainly seemed like it had a lot more promise than the title that was canceled right before it. Jessika: Yes, the gameplay itself looked more interesting, it looks more complex, it easier to navigate. What they were showing us was really intense. Mike: I really liked that whole idea of being able to view the environments in two different eras. It reminded me a lot of another Eidos game called legacy of Cain soul river, where there was a spiritual world and then a physical world. And you could flip back and forth between them, which was kind of cool. Jessika: Oh, that’s neat Mike: Yeah. I dug that. I liked the idea of exploring the same environment in two different areas. I thought that was really neat. Jessika: Yeah. Mike: Let's move on to Comics. Jessika: Sounds great. Mike: Okay, so, I’m curious. When do you think that Highlander got big enough to get a comic book? Jessika: I don't know maybe late nineties Mike: 2006. Jessika: Wow [01:03:00] That's later than I had expected. Mike: Yeah. There wasn't a comic adaptation of the movie when it came out, which is weird, there wasn't one here in the States. Highlander Heart, in their YouTube podcast, noted there was a series of five newspaper comic strips that were published as part marketing promotion. The hosts weren't entirely certain if they're exclusive to Europe or not. I don't know. I haven't been able to really find much reference to it. After the movie came out, though there was a two-part comic adaptation in Argentina. It was published through El Tony Todo Color and El Tony Supercolor they were sibling comic anthology magazines, and here's the weird twist. It looks like this was an unlicensed adaptation. Jessika: Mmhm, interesting. Mike: So now we're going to take another side tangent. The important thing that you need to know is that Argentina had just come out of a brutal military dictatorship that came about as part of Operation Condor, which is this horrific program the United States was involved in. And it isn't really taught about in high school history, at least it [01:04:00] wasn't when I was going through high school and I went to a pretty good one. did you ever learn about that? I'm curious. Jessika: No, I did not. Mike: Okay I'm giving you an extremely TLDR read of this, but basically this was a program in the seventies and eighties when the US backed military dictatorships across South America. So our country helped these groups, kidnap, torture, rape murder, thousands of political opponents, like Argentina was especially brutal. There were literally death squads, hunting down political distance across the country. It was a really horrific time. I want you to read this summary of what was going on during that time, actually. Jessika: Give me the really fun stuff I see. Mike: Sorry. Jessika: No you're good. It is estimated that between - 9,000 and 30,000 that's a huge span. Mike: I know, it’s such a margin of error I don't understand. Jessika: Lack of record taking will get you there quick, I think. I'm going to start over, but we’ll leave that in. It is estimated that between [01:05:00] 9,000 and 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, many of whom were impossible to formally report due to the nature of state terrorism. The primary target, like in many other South American countries participating in Operation Condor, were communist guerrillas and sympathizers, but the target of Operation Condor also included students, militants trade, unionists, writers, journalists, I don't love this, artists, and any other citizens suspected of being left-wing activists - well take me the goddamn way away. Mike: Right. Jessika: Including Peronist guerillas. I don't love that. Mike: No it's really awful. And based on that list of targets, it's not surprising that there was a lot of media suppression during this time. Democracy returned to the country in ’83, and there was this explosion of art across the mediums. Argentine Comics [01:06:00] saw this Renaissance period. A lot of them though, weren't really licensed and let's be honest. It's not like there's an internet where IP owners could monitor stuff like this and shut it down when they learned about it. There was also this drastic comics increase in the area due to create or publishing Zines because the eighties was the decade where personal computers suddenly became commonplace and all of a sudden pe

Julie Charlestein is a fourth-generation CEO and president of Premier Dental (https://www.premierdentalco.com/), a global dental development and manufacturing company serving the worldwide oral health professional market since 1913. Julie is the first woman and the fourth generation of the Charlestein family to lead the company. Since accepting the position as CEO, Julie has implemented changes to adapt to the times, and advanced its product line to advance Premier's market impact. The Charlestein family have adopted an interesting ownership and control structure for Premier which Julie has kindly agreed to discuss with us today. Standout Quotes: * "Even though I had proved myself and worked in the company for 15 years before I became CEO...people were still looking at me like did I deserve to be there?" - [Julie] * "The way that the transitions are the easiest is when everything is written down" - [Julie] * "Giving one person control, I think, removes a lot of the family bickering" - [Mike] * "Remember who you are" - [Julie] * "The dollar is Round" - [Julie] * "I think giving the next generation members the opportunity to opt-in, rather than have an expectation, often creates the greatest want" - [Mike] * To start a revolution, the only solution, evolve" - [Julie] * "Don't let perfect get in the way of good" - [Julie] * "Science doesn't always sell" - [Mike] * "Family is family and that's where you should be connected" - [Julie] Key Takeaways: * The company was started by Julie's grandfather while working for his boss as a Dental Instrument Sharpener and has transitioned from the marketing of dental consumables for other brands to focus on their brand. * Joining the family had never been an expectation by the family or part of Julie's plan, but it was looked upon as a thing of pride for the family. * Julie explains that when it came time to join, she took conscious effort to familiarize herself with the general goals and ideals of the family business * Highlighting factors like her young looks and family background, Julie describes the impression she got when she joined the family business, who thought she didn't deserve to be there. and after working hard, she proved them wrong. * The transition of the business from her father to her was seamless, and void of the typical situation where the prior generation holds on to the business even after completing the transition process in writing. Julie also notes the critical role of ensuring all processes involving transition are penned down in legal documents. * While getting together as a family is pivotal for a family business and is being inculcated, there is room for improvement. * Julie's Family Value: "Remember who you are", you need to have a sense of who you represent including your family, your community, the company. * Another family value from Julie: "The dollar is Round"; this means you can have money now and it can just as easily roll away from you, then roll back towards you. * Describing the evolution of the business under her, Julie explains her goal to make the company more data-driven and consumer-led, through branding, marketing, digitization, and social media. * One key lesson from a significant failure while running the family business was that "Science doesn't always win", as the scientific * superiority of a product does not guarantee sales. This was realized following the creation of a multipurpose dental product, which seemed like it could do everything, but the product only ended up confusing consumers due to a lack of specificity in function. This experience had a strong impact on the parameters surrounding any development within the company. * From Julie to her kids: Remember who you are, The dollar is Round, Respect, and Family ties. Episode Timeline: * [00:49] Meet today's guest, Julie Charlestein, a 4th generation CEO. * [01:37] The backstory of Premier Dental Family Business. * [09:28] Growing up, was joining the family business always an expectation? * [14:22] Julie describes the transition of the business from her father to herself. * [24:16] Does the family get together regularly for a family meeting or family council? * [25:27] Are there any key values passed down through the generations that still hold today? * [26:52] Do you do anything intentionally to document the history of the family? * [28:10] Is there a 5th generation already involved or interested in the business? * [29:40] The Evolution of the family business under Julie. * [32:58] Julie describes one of her most significant failures. * [37:25] Is there potentially another chapter for you beyond your journey with the family business? * [38:10] Julie's letter to her kids For more episodes go to BusinessOfFamily.net (https://www.businessoffamily.net/) Sign up for The Business of Family Newsletter (https://www.businessoffamily.net/newsletter) Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeBoyd (https://twitter.com/MikeBoyd) If you feel it's appropriate, I'd so appreciate you taking 30 seconds to Leave a Review on iTunes (http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1525326745), I receive a notification of each review. Thank you! Special Guest: Julie Charlestein.

Neil talks about his childhood wish to stop the waves. DJ and academic Mike Dimpfl talks about his research on "toilet feelings." ABOUT THE GUEST Mike Dimpfl is a teacher, academic, costume builder, and DJ. His academic work explores the connection between hygiene, bureaucracy, and institutional racism, particularly in the southern US. Mike’s costumes often focus on the comic and confusing relationship human beings have to their garbage and to the possibility of the divine. When music is his focus, he is especially committed to reckless abandon on the dancefloor. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE’S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Fraser McCulloch Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Mike Dimpfl, welcome to SHE’S A TALKER MIKE: I’m so delighted to be here. NEIL: It’s impossible to imagine you’re as delighted as I am to have you here. Now, can I ask where this recording is finding you? MIKE: Yeah, this recording is finding me, sitting at my dining room table in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a lovely gray, 64 degree day. NEIL: Do you like a gray day? MIKE: I do right now because I have a bit of sort of structural gardening work to complete. And when the summer comes here it becomes so insanely hot that it’s just completely impossible to be outside. We’ve had a really long, cool spring, so the bugs aren’t here yet. NEIL: What is structural gardening work? MIKE: It’s a critique of the, sort of political economy of earlier forms of gardening. We’re remaking our yard and we’ve been doing all of the actual construction work. So not planting plants, but building walls and building fences and moving dirt around and things that. So all the things that are sort of a pain in the ass and give my sort of inner type A control freak a lot of pleasure, but don’t actually produce anything you would say is recognizably a garden. It’s a lot of getting your hands cut by all of the pieces of broken glass that are in the soil around your house. NEIL: Oh, how come there’s broken glass inside the soil around your house? MIKE: It’s just an almost a hundred year old house, and I think that over time things break and people throw bottles into the former dump behind the former garage that’s no longer there, and you find them and I’ve probably taken out an entire garbage can, an actual garbage can of broken glass out of the yard. NEIL: Wow, one shard at a time? MIKE: One shard at a time, yes. I’m going to start an Etsy store with all of the other things I found, like yard cured fork and yard cured wrench, they have a nice patina. NEIL: Oh, I bet, people would pay a pretty penny to give you their new wrench to make it look that. MIKE: To bury, totally, totally. NEIL: It’s like the kimchi of wrenches. MIKE: Exactly, exactly. NEIL: What drove you to leave New York? MIKE: Oh God, I had a terrible day job, crushing, horribly boring development work that I was doing. And I don’t know if you knew, I’d had a bunch of surgeries on my ears. I had a genetic hearing loss condition and they actually messed it up in my right ear, so I’m super deaf in my right ear now. And it meant that I couldn’t DJ as much. And so I kind of lost the love of New York, and I was like, “Maybe I’ll go back to grad school.” And I did, and of course grad school is a little bit returning to the fourth grade playground. But you realize that your bully is secretly closeted and you’d just know that. And then I did my PhD down here at Chapel Hill and was lucky enough to get a job at Duke, and I teach in the writing program there. And I have been kind of unlearning grad school since then, but enjoying life. NEIL: What is unlearning grad school consist of? MIKE: I mean, I’d be curious about what your own experiences of this actually is because you teach in another kind of weird, precious environment. The performance of mastery, I think is one of the most insane and weird things that we encounter. There’s some tension between mastery and a willingness to just be open to what is, I feel they push each other away. And I feel like a willingness to be open to what is, requires a particular kind of thinking and willingness to take things apart in a careful way. Whereas the production of mastery is, do I know these terms? Can I Lord over this seminar space? Can I make some comment that seems complex? And there’s so much value placed on that style of interaction. NEIL: That question of mastery makes for such a great segue to the first card, the connection between teaching art and 19th century medical practices. You tell someone like, “We will bleed you for 30 minutes and then you must go home and apply the poultice.” MIKE: Yeah like, “Wait for the moon to wax, and put these three stones on your back steps.” NEIL: Exactly, but instead it’s, watch this other artist read this text. MIKE: Yeah, I feel like mastery and practice are at odds with each other. NEIL: Yes, yeah. MIKE: Practice is what I’m into, practice, just keep practicing, right? You just have to keep doing. NEIL: Yes, yeah, and if you’re holding onto idea of mastery, you will make one piece of work, maybe. Because making art is about getting to the place of most resolved failure, where the failure becomes clear, and then that is what carries you over into the next piece. Also this idea of professional development, to use that term where, where so many students have the idea of, “Okay, well, if I do this, this, this, and this, I will have an art career versus if you do this, this and this, you will make art, I guess.” MIKE: Well, I mean mastery, it relies on it in some ways, like the way that we’re so addicted to exceptionalism. It’s a weird narrative that despite the fact that all, effectively statistically, all artists are failed artists, right? NEIL: Right, exactly. Exactly, exactly. MIKE: They’re like, “No, it’s going to be me. I’m going to be the next Jeff Koons, but I hate Jeff Koons.” That whole… NEIL: Totally, that is the Vegas thing that keeps graduate programs in business. This card is writing midterm evaluations for art school is like doing a horoscope. MIKE: Oh my God, I love that for a number of reasons, just because I imagined you doing it. Just sitting cross legged with your taro out and the incense going, just watching videos of student work on your phone or something. You’ve got a very rough hewn robe on, you’re like- NEIL: You nailed it. MIKE: … your wicker sandals, whatever it is that gets you in that sort of coastal medieval witchcraft mood. Yeah, it’s funny, as a grader, I tell my students that I’m a harsh critic, but an easy grader. We have to be able to look at our own work with critical kind of generosity and be willing to be wrong. But to be a generous writer is a whole thing that takes your whole life to do. It’s easy to be critical, right? It’s easy to be snarky and sarcastic or funny or quick, right? You can be creative and original, but also quick in a way that I feel is not always helpful, right? Being generous is about taking care, but also I was just thinking about it and if only we could be actually honest. If only you could just be super honest with your students about what they’re doing. MIKE: I mean, would that change what you said to yours? Because I feel like I am honest to a certain extent, but I’m also not, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I just want to be like, “This is just a terrible waste of your time, this thing that you’ve written. The way that you’re going here, isn’t going to get anywhere that’s going to be fun for you, interesting for other people, allow you to do the work that you’re going to do.” And I never quite do that. NEIL: That’s where the horoscope comes in though, about I’m honest but there’s always kind of a anomic, is that the word? You add this intentional ambiguity. MIKE: It’s both honest and a little bit of a sidestep- NEIL: Exactly, yeah, yeah. MIKE: You’re like, “There’s something that’s not right here. It’s in this thematic zone of things that aren’t right, consider that zone for yourself.” NEIL: You said something about mortality as it relates to grades and we’re all going to die. MIKE: No, my thing was like… I think the thing that I always want and increasingly want, I always want students to think of themselves in their lives… Think of themselves as living their lives, not as having goals about what it should be. I was at Chapel Hill and now I’m at Duke, they’re both iterations of very fancy campusy bubble experiences. The way that we produce the isolation of education always struck me as a little bit problematic. I used to teach about labor at Duke and I’d be on the first day, my activity was like, “On one side of this card, tell me a job that you want based on your experience here. And then on the other side, tell me a job that you would love to have if money were no object or job security were no object?” And it’s like stockbroker, magician. The world of the jobs they want is the world we all want to live in. It’s like, runs a dog farm, is a chef, is a magician. And the really problematic ones are the ones that are stockbroker, stockbroker. MIKE: I think in my most compassionate sense, I want to be like, for kids who are really freaking out, but really good students just be like, “This is great, it wasn’t awesome. There’s a lot more in the world that you should be thinking about besides this class. Go call your mom, go be with your family, go do something that’s about your life that’s worth living because you’re getting lost in the illusion of mastery.” NEIL: Professor Dimpfl, what’s my grade? MIKE: Yeah, literally at the end of all that, I’ll give them this whole… I will put on my NEIL: shaman cloak, I will go for a walk around Duke’s campus and I’m trying to share some… I’m always trying to get all my aphorisms in check and at the end they’re like, “But do I still have an A minus?” NEIL: Okay, those people who you think are going to eventually feel embarrassed for themselves, but never do. MIKE: I feel like they’re from a more perfected future. People who are never embarrassed, I feel like they just are doing it better, right? Their inability to feel shame is in some ways a rejection of our worst selves, right? Shame is a wasted emotion, it’s not even they’re proud, it’s post embarrassment. Not being able to feel embarrassment is not about not being ashamed, it’s just being beyond embarrassment. If we could only live in that world, think about how forgiving you would be about being wrong, if being embarrassed wasn’t a part of being wrong. NEIL: So where does Donald Trump fit in that? Sorry to do that but… MIKE: Donald Trump is from the post embarrassed future, at his best self. There’s some childhood version of Donald Trump that would be able to exist in the post embarrassed future. And in a tragic way, he was just corrupted in the most horrible way by his life and turned into this horrible… He is his own portrait of Dorian Gray, there was some switch that happened. He walked through the mirror, in the mansion early on and that was it. It’s actually Ronald Trump that we wanted to be living with and Donald was the one that we got. But the ethos there, I think isn’t wrong. The content is horrible and hideous, but the idea that you would live in a world where your mistakes, aren’t the thing that define you is a world beyond embarrassment. NEIL: This episode is going to be called post embarrassment, I think. MIKE: I hope for all of us it is, I want that… Because shame is such a heavy, historical emotion. I don’t know if you read, I always want to call it The Velvet Rope, but that’s the Janet Jackson album, The Velvet Rage. NEIL: No, I never did. MIKE: The Velvet Rage is some queen wrote a book about how, it’s problematic in a number of ways, but the overarching theme is that gaze of a certain era learn shame before they have a word for it. And it just festers inside of them and creates all this anger and frustration and all these problems later on in life, the closet and all that stuff. And I think just in general, we govern ourselves so much through shame. Instagram culture is shaming. Facebook culture is all about shame. Mastery is about shame. Our actual inability to deal with the future, and the inevitability of death is about being ashamed that we’re not going to be living a life that’s rich enough to justify our death. I think that there’s a lot tied up in that experience. MIKE: And to be looking at someone who’s beyond embarrassment. I mean, I think about the people that I was like, “Gosh, I hope they feel embarrassed about that.” And now in retrospect, I just admire them all. I’m just like, “God, you just don’t care that everybody hates that joke. You just don’t care.” And your joie de vivre is unassailable and it’s a like a Teflon joie de vivre, what a joy. NEIL: Okay, next card. When someone mentions shit while you’re eating. MIKE: Oh my God… Okay, first of all, it just reads as when you mention shit, because I am this person. I still get toilet news from people that I’ve encountered across the globe, all the time. NEIL: Could you share for the audience, your professional relationship to shit? MIKE: My professional relationship to shit, I am not only a person who shits, like all of your audience, but I wrote a master’s thesis, I would like to say that it’s about toilet feelings. I interviewed a bunch of people who had been forced by the city of Syracuse to install composting toilets in their lake side cabins, as a means of protecting what was an unfiltered watershed. So they couldn’t install septic systems. They had this kind of high functioning, but archaic system where they all had outhouses, and instead of shitting just into a hole, they would shit into buckets. And then every week the city would come around on a shit boat and collect all of their buckets of shit and take them away from them. MIKE: A job that I think about a lot, just when your job is to, in the hot summer sun, drive around on a beautiful, pristine lake with a boat full of buckets full of shit. That boat is post embarrassment, that boat is living a post embarrassment life. We have nothing on that boat. MIKE: Anyway, so I wrote this master’s thesis and I interviewed all these households and it was a lot of older folks, people who have had these cabins for a long time and a lot of retired folks. And I’ll tell you what, if it’s summer and you’re going to visit an old retired couple and you actually want to talk to them about their shitting, they’re there for that. They are really there for that. In some ways, the knowledge of their own death to get back to it, the fact that they’re like, “It’s coming.” They’re like, “There’s no reason to hide.” They’re all trying to, for better or for worse, are trying to deal with these strange toilets that don’t flush and encountering them with their bodies that sometimes don’t work with them. MIKE: So this one couple, the wife was always on antibiotics and you can’t use a composting toilet when you’re on antibiotics because it kills the bacteria in the shit that actually digests the toilet, so it just becomes a kind of cesspool, kind of anaerobic nonsense. And so they had two toilets, one, one of my favorite, the macerating toilet, which is a toilet that has a food processor on the back that you turn it on and it makes this kind of horrible grinding noise, and it turns your poop into kind of a poo shake. And the other was this incinerating toilet, and it has a little jet engine in it and you poop and then this jet engine thing turns on and just burns your shit to ash, it’s like an outer space thing. I mean, obviously I had to use all of them, so it’s this crazy noise of like, “…” It’s like being in an airplane. MIKE: And so to be honest, I did it for two reasons. One was how we structure our relationship to the nature in our households is a real problem, right? We have a lot of weird ideas about what is inside and outside. I think that’s the kernel of truth behind it, if I were to be my post embarrassed self. But I think the other is that I just was so aware of the absurdity of grad school at a certain point that I was like, “I’m just going to write my stupid master’s thesis about people shitting.” So that I get to go to conferences and give presentations, which are like, “Here are things that people said about their own shit.” On panels of academics who were like, “What is the materiality of the biological other?” MIKE: All this theory that actually not only makes no sense, but it’s profoundly unethical and has no politics. And is the bread and butter of graduate school theory. All of these things where they’re like, “What is the boundary of the human? And we cannot tell.” And what do you say? It makes no sense. NEIL: I was just reading Jacques Derrida on the animal, he’s talking about the violence done on the animal. And someone asked him, “Are you a vegetarian?” And he was like, “I’m a vegetarian in my soul.” It’s like, “Fuck you.” I’m sure the suffering pig is so happy that you’re a vegetarian in your soul. MIKE: So happy to hear that, like in a real zen like moment. NEIL: Yeah. MIKE: But the crazy thing about that shit thing is I was at dinner the other weekend with Jackson’s sister’s family and she’s a plastic surgeon. And I just thought about, I’m mentioning shit at the table and maybe people are uncomfortable with that or whatever. And she was like, “Yeah, this…” One of her former clients was run over by a backhoe or something. But she talked about reconstructing one of her breasts and then did this gesture of like, “And then you just kind of stitched up her chest.” And kind of did this putting out a vest of your chest skin kind of gesture. And I had a bite of food in my mouth and I was like… It turned to like ash. MIKE: On the one hand, it was perhaps the appearance of mime at the dinner table that I was like, “Goddammit, mimes.” I wanted it to seal myself up in my own mime box to not have to hear it. But then I was sort of like, “Wow, props to mime, it’s a powerful medium. Actually, I get it now, you can fake make the wall all you want.” MIKE: But when you hear someone mentioning shit, are you that person? Or are you someone- NEIL: I’m not mentioning shit at the table, no. MIKE: You’re not NEIL: I think about it all the time, but I know I don’t talk about it at the table. And Jeff, for instance, my husband, Jeff will casually mentioned shit at the table and I’ve never told him in our 12 years of being together… MIKE: Don’t do that. NEIL: Yeah, because at that moment, something happens in my mouth. Yeah, where it’s just like, it’s wrong, but yeah. MIKE: You got to be post embarrassed about it. You got to just be like, “Yep, I’m just chewing future shit right now.” NEIL: Right, future shit, future shit. I love… Oh, God. Makers spaces and the fetishization of making. MIKE: I don’t even know what’s that… I just want them to just be like, “Call it a real thing.” Where I understand what’s going on there. Makers spaces, it’s like we work. I find it to be such a twee like… The maker space is just Ren Fair trying to be normal. It’s like Ren Fair without the foam swords. I’m like, “What’s the point of going to Ren Fair if you can’t have a foam sword?” It’s like Ren Fair without the carbs, I guess is what I would say. NEIL: I think it’s Ren Fair with 3D printers. MIKE: It’s Ren Fair with 3D printers. Where is the raw craft in that? I feel like 3D printing is the cheating of making. NEIL: But the flip side of it, first of all, this is going to come back to shit, I just realized. But the flip side of it is the fetishization of making. Why don’t you just make and not tell us about it? MIKE: I think that there’s something there, the fetishization of making, because we live in embarrassed culture, so we know that we don’t make anything, right? NEIL: Right. MIKE: In the system we live in, we don’t make anything, right? You don’t make shit, you maybe make your lunch and that’s the end of it. NEIL: You exactly make shit. That is what you make. MIKE: You only make shit, and even that you’re like, “Let’s not talk about it.” The fetishization to me is just all back to the leg, what is missing? I mean, I’ll wear a cutoff overall that’s handmade, for sure. But I don’t need to post it on it in my Etsy account or the hand carved spoons, even though I really love the hand-carved spoons. It was a local spoon maker that I just found that’s in the triangle or whatever, and they make these gorgeous spoons and the fetishization of spoon making is that it’s very hard. People are like, “Oh, it’s a very…” I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but people are like, “If you carve wooden spoons…” It’s some achievement of woodwork to make a spoon. And I always think in my head, spoons have been around for a pretty long time, we’ve known how to scoop a thing for awhile. NEIL: Well, just the idea that you fetishize it by virtue of its difficulty, that is a… MIKE: Totally, totally. It’s like endurance performance art, right? Which I love, I’ll tell you this, I have been doing a performance art project with my friend Ginger for a couple of years now. It’s called, Leaving Impossible Things Unattended, it’s a waste project. And we work with plastic… We’ve made this half mile long braid of plastic bag that we roll in unroll in awkward ways. But we went to Miami to the art fair this year, and the piece that we did, it’s physically super, super hard. But watching people say stuff about it there, it’s like the fetishization of how painful it is, becomes the mark of its value. NEIL: Oh my God, yeah. MIKE: What I want to be is like, “No, encounter your fetishization of that as the mark of the thing you’re supposed to be thinking about here.” Your fetishization of that is more important to me as a thing that you’re engaging with right now, then anything that we’re doing. What is it about you that you need to see someone bleeding from the cut glass that they’re crawling over to be like, “That’s real.” NEIL: The thing I wanted to add, to just put a button on the whole question of maker spaces and what are we making, is when I was a kid, my parents would ask me, “Do you need to make?” MIKE: Oh yeah… Yeah, totally, to take a shit. NEIL: Right, do you need to make? MIKE: Yeah, no, I feel like do you need to make is a North Eastern cultural description for taking a shit that is so like… I want to just know the colonial etymology of that, is it the puritanical thing or like… Also, I find, do you need to make to be similar to people who say that they make instead of take pictures, I make pictures, I make photos. NEIL: Oh, that’s interesting. MIKE: I’ve heard photographers say I make photos, instead of saying I take pictures. NEIL: Oh, right, right, I take photos, yeah. I get that.   MIKE: …around shitting in the exact same… it’s like, do you need to make a shit or do you need to take a shit? I mean, why don’t we say, I need to leave a shit because that’s really what’s happening. NEIL: Okay, let’s end with one last question, which is, what keeps you going? MIKE: I think the thing that mostly keeps me going is a pretty secure notion that it’s not supposed to be bliss, it’s just supposed to be work. So if you’re ready to work in whatever way, then life is just going to keep unfolding for you moving forward, right? There is a future if you think that life is a struggle. Because that’s a beautiful thing, even though it’s incredibly difficult. And I think that, even though I have a deep, deep concern for the future and I certainly worry about it a great deal, I don’t feel hopeless. I don’t feel like a cynic or a nihilist I guess. I don’t have that energy in me whatsoever because it’s not supposed to be easy. NEIL: Mike… MIKE: Neil… NEIL: This is amazing, thank you so much for being on She’s a Talker. MIKE: And it’s my absolute pleasure.

The luxury of perspective is paramount to your success in life and happiness as a person. Many don’t realize how limited their perspectives are in many situations. It’s important to include “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but” in professional and personal conversations. Why? Opening your mind to different perspectives will help you as an IT Services executive or business owner become more successful in all facets of life. For example, if you view someone’s level of success based on one perspective, how will you open your mind to others’ views of success? How will you add value as a business leader? Be open-minded to seek to understand other views of success as it is critical in your ability to be a great business executive.A message from Mike:“To better understand who is in front of you during a business deal, transaction, client meeting or whatever it may be, you need to be able to walk a mile in their shoes. This is a difficult thing for people to do because it takes time and willingness to understand a different perspective before jumping to conclusions and stuck in black and white.I always say when you embrace living in the gray areas sometimes - not just look at your life and others’ lives so black and white, that’s when you really open your view of success. Change your colors or become chameleonic in the environment you are in.”How Perspective helps you as a business owner:It changes the way you produce in a businessChanges your mindset - think about things differentlyBrings more value to conversationsApply creativity to problem solvingBetter performing leader Ways to gain the Luxury of PerspectiveConnect with your own mission as a person and business leader“Yes, and” not “Yes, but”Looking at the gray areas - not just black and whiteWalk a mile in someone else’s shoesDon’t zone out - zoom outPerspective has helped Revenue Rocket facilitate good interactions and improve companies - we’ve been doing it for 20 years! Bringing open-mindedness into our business has helped us and our clients be more successful. Sometimes we call ourselves “chameleons” as we change colors in our environment - how we interact can all depend on the client, the transaction in front of us, and the potential partners at the table.We’d love to work with you on growth strategy and adding perspective to your business. Reach out at mhvarvath@revenuerocket.com

We have to put work into building our self-confidence. This is one of the things that helps us to overcome defeat. Self-confidence also helps us to define and live up to the standards of respect that we expect from others. Always Add to description (Mike): To watch the podcast and find more places to listen click here:www.samjones.biz/podcast-links

"If we don't start doing things differently, there won't be agriculture to pass down." Climate change is a hot-button political issue, but in the Western U.S., no one can deny that the drought and above average temperatures are real. Mike Nolan, a young farmer in Mancos, Colorado, gives an insider perspective on farming in extreme weather conditions, building resilience, and shares how an innovative conservation policy idea that started over beers and ended up in the Senate farm bill. What is the path forward for farmers in the arid West? Mountain Roots Produce: https://mountainrootsproduce.com/aboutus/ U.S. Drought Monitor: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Drought Diaries: https://www.rmfu.org/homepage-2/latest-news/happening-now/the-drought-diaries/ Episode Transcript This is the Young Farmers Podcast. I’m Lindsey Lusher Shute. Today I’m speaking with Mike Nolan, a farmer at Mountain Roots Produce, and chapter leader at the Four Corners Farmers and Ranchers Coalition that’s based near Mancos, Colorado. Mike is already growing in a dry climate, but this year has been especially tough. He explains the challenges brought by drought and severe weather and how he is cop ing with it all. He also tells us how micro-equip, an idea he had over some beers, made it all the way to the Senate version of the farm bill. I’m Julia Sherman, farmer at Rag and Frass Farm in Jeffersonville, Georgia, and a leader of the Middle Georgia Young Farmers Coalition. I’m a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition because it’s so important for young farmers to work together to create change. For $35 a year, you can join too. In addition to being part of a bright and just future for agriculture in the United States, you’ll also get discounts like 40 percent off Filson and 25 percent off farm to feed socks. To join, go to youngfarmers.org. Mike: You know, you guys had that at your place. You had that massive hail storm. Lindsey: Yep. Mmhmm. Mike: You know, we’ve had like kind of like one of those events or something like that, like every 10 to 14 days where it’s like— Lindsey: Woah Woah Woah… Mike: We’re like really? It’s either hail or bug infestations or water issues or smoke or fire or something. Lindsey: Ah wow, you’ve had it all. So can you just, you know, even now when I talk about the water situation, particularly to really new farmers where you are, who are east coast farmers, it’s just so different. I mean you’ve farmed on this side of the country for a while so you can understand the contrast. Could you just very briefly describe how your farm gets water? Mike: Yes, definitely. Um, basically our water rights go back to the late 1800’s. They’re some of the oldest in the state, so a lot of the farms and ranches here have adjudicated water rights. So they’re water rights that kind of stay with the ground. Like ours come off river. So we have river water rights and then we also have storage water rights. So we have storage water out of our lake, which serves to make this valley, and that deeds us an acre foot of water per acre on an annual basis. And then we have– Lindsey: And that’s not water that you have on your farm–that’s in the reservoir. Mike: Yeah, that’s in a reservoir. And that reservoir also serves Mancos role water, which is our domestic water. It serves the town of Mancos and it also serves to Mesa Verde National Park. And that reservoir is small compared to a lot of place s. It’s only 10,000 acre feet when it gets full. And right now after this summer, I think it’s sitting at about 1400 acre feet going into the winter with the 2 municipalities or municipal water. Mancos and Mesa Verde will be continuously using it all winter. Lindsey: Okay. So over 10 percent full. Uh, how does that compare with a normal August? Like where should the reservoir be at this time of year? Mike: You know, normally the reservoir would be 30 to 40 percent full, possibly higher. The tricky part this year, Lindsey, was that in a normal year we get to run off our adjudicated water, our priority water, and in the past five years on this place we can run off river water until about, you know, fourth of July, sometimes early August, and this year we didn’t get a single day of river water. And then our storage water was limited to 60 percent of our total allotment. So this is really abnormal. And the hardest part about it honestly was we didn’t get any precipitation all winter, so the ground was so dry. So even hay guys around here, they could grow two to three inches of water in 24 hours on hay grounds and it would just drop right into the water table. Like you’d come back seven days later and it’d be bone dry. Lindsey: If you have senior rights, then there’s a lot of other people who clearly didn’t get water either. Lindsey: Yeah. Some folks, I mean, some folks still have river water. Um, so here’s kind of an interesting thing. The town of Mancos is priority 3, but the priority is sitting at two right now. Um, so the town of Mancos is actually using their storage water and there’s two irrigators in the valleys that are priority one and two that are using water right now to irrigate hay. So the town has actually fallen out of priority, which rarely happens. Lindsey: So the town has fallen out of priority for its river water? Mike: Yeah. So the town usually is able to pull off the Mancos River for their domestic water use. Um, but right now they’re just pulling off the lake Lindsey: And so they’re further depleting the reservoir? Mike: Yeah. And I don’t totally know what their usage is. It’s a small town so I can’t imagine it’s more than an acre foot or two. So yeah, they were using their lake water. Everyone’s on storage water right now and it’s scary out there. Speaker 2: Yeah. So you have received 60 percent of your total allotment this season for storage water. How is that impacting the farm? Mike: So we, this winter by farm partner and girlfriend Mindy Perkovich and I kind of sat down and we knew it was going to be tight, so we wanted to, we knew we needed to do the CSA crops and we can kick that on domestic water. Then we kind of had tears of like, okay, storage, beets, potatoes, winter squash. You know, last year we did about seven acres in production. This year I think we did about 1.7 or 2 acres of production. So we’re super limited. Our water came on about four weeks later than it should and we’ve been out of water for I think two and a half weeks now. And we’ve had like barely any rain. We’ve been running off our Mancos role water just to ease things along, and we’ve just taken crops that we would like to finish out, like the cabbage and the beans. And we’ve either just mowed them and decked them or picked them early. We could afford the water with rural water. Lindsey: That’s like from the town? Mike: It’s our domestic water for the valley. So it, you know, we don’t like to use too much of that stuff because the Ph is a little bit off. It’s a little bit higher in salt, it’s chlorinated. Lindsey: It’s treated water. Mike: It’s treated water and I hate using treated water for vegetable production personally. Lindsey: And it’s expensive I imagine. Lindsey: Oh yeah. You know, we budgeted about a thousand dollars for the last six weeks of the season to be able to tide us through. Speaker 2: Wow. So what, so what is next for you guys for next season? Doesn’t seem like it’s expected to get much better next year and the reservoirs are lower than in previous seasons. What are you thinking about for the 2019 season? Mike: We’re thinking a lot of stuff. It’s, you know, with all the workers in NYC, you know, we are always talking about resiliency, right? Resiliency and drought. And what I’ve realized this year is that I can totally figure out how to be resilient, resilient with my markets and crop production. What I’m having a hard time with is being resilient in relationships and with mental health. And I don’t think that Mindy and I could do this again next year. I think it would crush us. So if things don’t get better, we’re just going to get jobs for a year. Um, we’ll have some water. We’ll be able to cover crop things great for some rain. Um, in the meantime, financially we’re okay. Like we’d have enough to start up again next year. Um, but if we don’t farm, we won’t have enough to do it again in 2020. We’re being, we’re trying to be really pragmatic about it and not take it too close to heart personally if we can’t farm next year, because fighting it is not..you can’t fight this. In order for us to be looking good next year. Um, and these are things I think folks out of the Mountain West don’t totally understand about water is that, you know, we need some good fall rains to wet the mountains so that the snow, and then we need a good snow pack and then we need a good slow melt. And the reason why we want mountains to go in wet is that if the mountains go in dry, which is what happened last year, the little bit of snow there, you know, for every 10 inches of moisture up there, you can lose 40 to 60 percent of it to the ground and we want that to run into the rivers. So we need to kind of have like a very normal fall, winter, spring, um, in order to kind of pull ourselves out of this. Lindsey: If there are those conditions possibly in the fall, then you and Mindy might consider making a go of it for 2019. Mike: The plan will be to farm next year until we really get those clear signals that it’s not a good idea basically. Every year is a gamble that, you know, I have this silly analogy when it comes to this water stuff that helps me understand it, is that it’s all this stuff. It’s kind of like a GPA. So it’s like you do all this. It’s good, good, good, good, good. And then you have one year or one bad grade and it totally screws you up. And then it can take years to get back to that place that you were prior. And that’s kind of where we’re at now is that one winter is not going to save us. We probably will have a limited year next year. It’s going to take a couple of good winters and some good summer rain to pull us out of this. Lindsey: And what are you hearing from folks who give technical support and are making projections on the weather? Lindsey: You know, all spring they were like “this is going to be one of the best months and years on record” and we have gotten about an inch of moisture or less than that all summer. And so it’s like they’re predicting for a wet fall. But I, I honestly have no idea like what to expect. We’re just grateful that it’s cooled off a little bit because the other thing is that, um, our nighttime and daytime temperatures are five to 10 degrees above average for most of the summer as well. It was, it was a very bizarre summer here. But you know, some of my 80 year old neighbors are like, they’ve never seen this before. So we have some CSA members that do, you know, there’s a lot of folks that work for the FEDS around here, a federal government, whether it’s BLM, Forest– Lindsey: On federal lands? Lindsey: Yeah, national parks, I mean they employ so many people in our region because we’re surrounded by every form of public lands. Um, so there’s lots of scientists and biologists and we have a woman who is a CSA member and she does lizard studies and she was telling us that she’s seeing Pine, Pinyone and Juniper trees that are 80 to 90, 100 years old, just completely dying in front of her plot that she’s researching. Lindsey: Because, because of the weather, because of lack of rainfall. Mike: 2018 is one for the books is the most quiet way I can say it. Lindsey: And then on top of that there was, was the 416 fire, is that the one that has impacted you as well? I know there have there been quite a few in the region. Mike: The big impact of the fires is that, um, it just, it hit the economy super hard. Everybody’s numbers are down. I mean, wholesale numbers are down across the board for farmers. People weren’t eating out as much. Tourism kind of dropped off. Honna and Daniel, who are NYFC members, um, they’re about 45 minutes away from us. They were saying that there was a four or five week period where their wholesale numbers were down about 60 percent or more. Locals were leaving town, so they weren’t buying the local restaurants and tourists weren’t coming and it was just this really weird—. Like one restaurant we sell to was closed for three weeks because the fire, because they couldn’t access it, um, they’ve pulled them out of there on opening night. So we’d lost that account for about three, four weeks. And then you first smoke on top of that and you know, that kind of messes with the plants, we would call it. It was causing all of our head-lettuce successions to bolt, because I think it was messing with their, with their daylight requirements. You’d have multiple times where our visibility was like a mile and a half, two miles and the sun was red. Kind of like the eclipse last summer. And we would plant these head-lettuce successions and they would just barely grow and then bolt. It was usually a couple days after you’d have one of those kinds of smoke events. So yeah, that’s another, another crazy thing about the fires, but the economy hit was the really big one. Um, and I will give props to everyone, like being really resilient about it and also to our elected officials on both sides of the aisle that showed up. I mean we had our congressional rep, both senators, governor, um, everyone in the State House, State Senate, county commissioners. Everyone’s really pushing for people to like come back to our area because we’re such a tourist economy. Lindsey: Just by, just by promoting it and saying it’s still safe. You should come. It’s beautiful. Mike: We’re still open for business. Lindsey: I mean, I guess that sort of brings me to another question. How does policy relate to any of this and what do you want elected officials to do to help farmers in your region? Mike: Havin g direct assistance payment is I think what they really need. There’s so many cattle producers, hay producers, you know, producers that are just on the verge of bankruptcy. The last thing they need is a loan. Lindsey: And you’re talking about like an emergency loan offered by a farm service agency? Mike: Yeah, and those, you know, I appreciate those and I think they work for some people, but we’re down here with our state representative, Marc Catlin, and that’s what all, I mean these are guys and girls that do not want to ask the government for everything. And they were like, we need something. Otherwise, you know, our centennial farms are going to be filing for bankruptcy and we’re done. And there’s no reason for the next generation to come in if it’s not economically viable in any way, shape, or form. Lindsey: I don’t disagree with you at all. But I wonder what is the strategy to keep those farms viable if these conditions continue? Like I think they do need, you know, more than a loan potentially. But like for how, I mean no one knows for how long. What we’re seeing with global warming is only going to make these conditions potentially even worse than they are now. So what are people talking about just like the future of agriculture in the region? Like is there a path forward? Mike: Yeah. So I would, I think that’s a great question. I don’t think it’s smart for anybody to prop up types of agriculture that are long-term unsustainable. Stewardship-wise, but also economically. I think a couple of steps would be to like prop things up now and get it so you know, these families aren’t dipping into all their savings and their kids are going to be left with nothing. Just prop them up for a minute so we can all sit down and figure it out. There are a lot of families in this region who are coming to. I’m on the Mancos Conservation District Board as well. And we have multi-generational families and cattle families that are coming to our offices being like, “what can we do that’s different? Like what crops can we grow that are more profitable, what’s up with all this market gardening stuff? What’s up with this root crop vegetable stuff? Like what can we change to be more economically versatile and resilient?” Lindsey: And what are they growing right now? Mike: I mean in this valley like hay and cattle. There’s no real crop production in Mancos per se. Lindsey: So one of the things that I’ve heard you talk about that I appreciate is this need for young farmers to really stand with multigenerational farmers. Some farmers who are doing things very differently at a much different scale. You describe culturally like the importance of having this farm community intact. Can you just speak to that for a minute? Like why do you think it’s so important to have these larger farms in your region? Mike: Farmers make up two percent or less of the population and whether somebody is raising commodities or you know, these hay guys are raising hundreds of acres of yay, you know, and hundreds of heads of cattle, and I’m over here doing an acre or two of potatoes. We’re all on the same boat. We’re all in that small number of people. So, inadvertently creating divisions, being like we’re really different and better or worse than or any of those kinds of things. I don’t think that’s helpful because you sit down with a lot of these farmers and ranchers and you know, I understand there’s a unique set of struggles that NYFC is addressing really well when it comes to young and beginning farmers and ranchers, but they’re not too dissimilar to some of the things that these farmers or older farmers or ranchers have gone through and also are kind of struggling with too. I mean it’s still hard to make a living whether you’re starting out or three, four or five generations in. It can be really challenging. You know, there’s just such a wealth of knowledge there. And so like that kind of cohabitation is really important to me. Lindsey: We’ve definitely had a similar experience in New York. Just really needing those farmers to be there for so many reasons because they’re the reason we have a tractor dealership and a market, you know, and availability of, you know, mechanics and even if we’re doing things totally differently and even if they think we’re crazy on some level, you know, they still, there’s still like this mutual respect and understanding about the life we live and the hours we work and the seasonality and the risk and that sort of thing that is just like so, so vital for farmers to do well. I think it’s just too hard to be out there by yourself. Mike: It’s pretty awesome to have those kinds of connections. Lindsey: So, you know, on the federal level, I think people are looking at conservation programs. Do you think conservation programs can help them in a moment like this? Mike: Oh yeah. I mean, I don’t have any ground and obviously in CRP. And there’s a lot of ground in our region that’s in those conservation programs, and on a year like this that ground has become really vital. A lot of folks up in the Duck Creek area and some of these other places in Montezuma county and Dolores County, the state has allowed them to graze their CRP ground, which has been in literally a lifesaver for some of their herds. Lindsey: So you guys in the Southwest are really feeling the brunt of climate change. And I think people are, seems like with, with rising temperatures and extended drought, folks are more comfortable pointing to your farm and saying, Oh yeah, that’s climate change. So do you feel, how do you feel about the government’s response on climate and to what extent do you feel like there should be greater action taken on it? Or do you feel like it’s just so slow moving? It’s not really gonna make a difference? Mike: That’s a loaded question. Lindsey: Like, if anyone should be complaining, it’s you and you’ve got a pretty strong case to make that climate is having a major impact on your farm, on the local economy, on food security. I mean, I feel frustrated about some events that I associate with climate change in New York, but we’re not having to cut our production by more than half. Do you feel like, um, we should be taking more action on climate? Do you feel like the farmers in your region are feeling more passionate about climate issues as well? Mike: To be totally frank on a federal level, with the Paris accords and all those other things, I honestly don’t know what the Feds can do. The western slope for the most part is pretty conservative. Folks don’t want government help for the most part. What I see is that that’s changing a little bit. So people want pipelines put in, they want dams and storage upgraded. Um, but what I see is people aren’t really on the ground talking about climate change. What they’re talking about is that water is scarce and water is rare, and we need to adapt our farming models and we need to do all this kind of stuff. So it’s kind of funny. Like I don’t, we don’t actually have the climate change conversation around here all that much, so I don’t know how much whatever the Feds are going to do is really going to change that? There’s a lot of people, the majority of folks around here understand that something is changing and that if we don’t start doing things differently, there won’t be agriculture to pass it down to the next generation. Lindsey: So when they’re thinking of doing things differently, that’s we need to farm differently, we need to manage water differently. It’s not we need to stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Mike: Yes, exactly. Lindsey: And uh, and I guess it’s like we have to bring these communities together at some point, right? Because you guys are feeling that you are, you’re in it, right? You have the stories to tell that I think can really move people to take action, broader action on climate change. Obviously taking care of this season and next season and keeping a family and business needs to be priority one. But clearly to achieve climate mitigation, to lessen the longterm impacts for, you know, for 100 years from now, we all sort of have to have that recognition of how the United States and globally we’re impacting this situation. Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. Mindy and I were having a conversation about this maybe yesterday, the day before. You know, a lot of the old timers that we know, like they just don’t believe in climate change. And I said, well, what I’ve kind of realized is that when you tell somebody who’s in their sixties or seventies that climate change is going on, I don’t know if it’s not that they don’t believe it, but I think their perspective is that they’ve been farming for 60 years. Every year is completely different. They see what they think is climate changing all the time. So telling them like we need to do something. They were like what are you talking about? Like we’ve kind of realized that kind of stuff and I think that’s like, you know, a lot of the others, like the things you’re talking about, I agree with. And I think for me, doing what we can here when it comes to management practices in water efficiency, I think that’s really huge. Lindsey: When President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Accord, was there any reaction from the farm community? Mike: No. Lindsey: No. Yeah. Mike: Not really. But also, you know, we live in the wild west, like, you know, I grew up in California and living here now the political landscape is, I find it super intriguing. It’s like you can throw yourself into a ditch in the middle of winter and anybody’s going to come by and pull you out, like people get along really well here and you know, you just don’t talk politics. Speaker 2: It’s like we have, we have to maintain these strong and positive relationships that are really driven by being neighbors and being fellow farmers and community members, but also figure out some way to recognize and take action on these global issues because they are also impacting us locally too. Mike: I think the other thing, you know, with doing all the advocacy within NYFC and locking down Farmers Union and the conservation district and all this kind of stuff, is there are people in our region doing that thing you’re talking about. And I just realized my role is to not do that. I’m going to sit on my four wheeler on the fence line and talk to my neighbor about, you know, whatever. You know about the boxes and chickens and like what’s wrong with this chapter and all this kind of stuff. And that’s kind of my end. Lindsey: Yeah, I mean it’s all gotta sort of start at the fence line anyways. Right. It’s has to be like a personal trust and communication. Mike: Yeah. Lindsey: So my last thing, I just wanted to congratulate you on micro-equip and getting that into the Senate version of the farm bill. And I wanted to ask you just to, if you could describe sort of the process of making that happen. Mike: Yeah, thanks. You know, it’s funny. So Alex funk, who used to be the western policy director, so we we’re at convergence two years ago in San Diego. Lindsey: And I’ll say, convergence is National Young Farmers Coalition’s gathering of chapter leaders from all across the country. And Mike is the chapter leader of Four Corners. Mike: Basically, we were sitting around one evening after everything having some beers and what I realized about this, it’s very hard to get anything new into the farm bill, and so if you do want to make changes or want something new, to me the smartest way to go about it is taking an existing program and make an adjustment. And part of the inspiration was what you did and what NYFC did in its early days with the micro loan. Lindsey: Microloans. Sure. Mike: Yeah. So you were taking something that’s there and you’re like well let’s just tweak it and see if we can get more people in the door and more people accessing it. So that’s kinda the idea between for micro-equip. There’s lots of programs that small scale growers can access, but there are certain aspects of it that’s really challenging, but the hope is to change the equip program a little bit. So we just have more young beginning and small scale growers walking through the doors in our CRS offices. That alone to me is super beneficial because if we don’t have that generation of folks coming through the door, what’s the point of those offices being there in 20 years? Lindsey: And it’s like the identifiable product for I think a lot of young farmers, the micro loan has been. So, like they know, “oh yeah, farm service agency through USDA. They have those microloans. I should go check that out.” Now that so many new farmers have gotten microloans, it’s like it seems like a place to start for a lot of people, which is great. So and micro equip– so environmental quality incentives program, which is how we’ve used it on our farm for instance, to do high tunnels, to build greenhouses for season extension. Was there a project on your farm that you sort of had in mind when you were thinking about this concept? Mike: I had looking at the cover crop payments. We do a lot of cover cropping here and the payments didn’t make sense for me to access them, both for my agent to deal with the paperwork and also for me to make the trip over the Cortez to kind of deal with it. A lot of the payments for some of these programs… they’re scaled out so big. So the payments per acre are actually really low. So how do you incentivize somebody who’s doing say three acres or two acres of market grabbing crop who’s contributing to the local economy? How do you incentivize them to go and access something for subsurface drip or some sort of other aspect of an equip program where the payments are really low? And I think if there was a micro equip where paper work was kind of streamlined and we could kind of trial out some of these programs to see if they can be scaled differently or the payments could kind of be different, I think that’d be really great. Lindsey: All these programs and why the micro lending program was necessary, all of the paperwork is pretty intense. I mean it’s a lot because it’s written and designed for oftentimes a much larger system, a much larger farm and much more scaled farm than what many of the projects that beginning farmers are bringing to the table. Like that’s, that’s why we just need to have, you know, different, a more flexible system that can make it easy for agents to say, of course. Yeah, let’s, let’s work with you. I have this program that was designed for this case. Mike: Yeah, exactly, and that’s the thing. I will say, I’ll give a shout out to Julie, our NRCS agent over there in Cortez. This program wasn’t coming out of him not being able to do anything or that office not being able to do anything. It’s more that with the hiring freezes and everything going on, these offices are stretched so thin there. So part of the idea of micro equip is to obviously incentivize young beginning and small acreage growers that need to instill, like you’re saying, we need to incentivize the agents. They do so much work and there’s just so much paperwork and bureaucracy to be able to access these things. So if this program can alleviate even a little bit of that, I think they’d be much more amenable and available to work with young, small beginning producers. Lindsey: So the idea for this started with you and Alex having beers at convergence and then like what was the, what was the next step? Mike: Well it’s funny like when we had the idea we weren’t expecting it to go anywhere, to be quite honest. Like, you know, we were just like, we both thought it was a good idea. So then like, you know, Kate Greenberg, who’s western program director, you know, I told her about it and she talked to people about it. I talked to Andrew in DC about it and it just kinda kept on getting kicked around. It was like kick the can to be quite honest. It was just kinda like, oh, this got mentioned here, it got mentioned here, it got mentioned at Bennett staff or it got mentioned to Tifton and it got mentioned blah blah blah. And you know, I think it’s serendipitous to a certain degree. I think we’re lucky because there’s all this awesome NYFC infrastructure. For some silly reason, I love policy. And also, our state Senator Michael Bennett is also on the Senate Ag Committee. So there’s these little things that part of it’s luck, part of it’s hard work. Yeah. And I think eventually it just kind of got picked up like when all that went down and I was like, okay, this is, this is crazy. All of a sudden, you know, there’s like a signed thing with Michael Bennett’s signature being like, you know, “this is going into the farm bill” and he’s like saying my name on the Senate floor and I’m like “okay,” so at least you know, my mom’s proud now. Lindsey: Well, she should be. Mike: Yeah, so it was kinda good. I mean the thing that, you know, if I want to communicate to those listening to the podcast, NYCF members or not, is that those crazy ideas, you know, those late night ideas, early morning ideas like if you think it’s a good idea, try kickin it up the chain. Email your congressional staffer, email your senator. Like if you think you have a good idea, like see if they can go up the chain Speaker 2: I mean the best ideas definitely come from real life experience in the field and interaction with federal programs. We need that as Young Farmers Coalition to know what ideas need to be moved up to Congress. And frankly not everything needs to be in the farm bill. Right? A lot of the micro equip program, or excuse me, the micro loan program was piloted by USDA, by farm service agency, before it was put in the last farm bill. So there are things that can change, you know, just through a conversation with folks at USDA. We can make a lot of change by just as you said, like thinking about how this might be different or how it might be better and with the knowledge that indeed we can be quite powerful in this and really help to make those changes become reality. Mike: Yeah. And I think another big thing for me is like thinking about changes in programs and adjustments that aren’t super major but benefit, you know, your neighbors too, or even just benefit your neighbors. Because what I realized around here is if my neighbors are happy and healthy, that has a direct effect on what’s going on with me. I hope, hopefully we’ll access micro-equip. Um, you know, it’s my plan that if I don’t, that’s okay. I just hope that for a whole bunch of other people, that it benefits them. Lindsey: Well, we’re going to be fighting for it in the House version of the farm bill and the final conference version. Of course, if you know we don’t have a farm bill this year, we will look to your administrative changes or if it’s not put in the farm bill this year, I mean that, that won’t be the end of it. Uh, so thank you so much for your leadership with your chapter, with, with Four Corners and thanks for speaking to me today and man, I really hope that you guys have a good fall because I know you need it. I hope you’re going to be farming in 2019. Mike: Well, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity. Lindsey: All right, Mike, thanks so much. Next week, the farm bill is back. Andrew is going to tell us all about what’s going on in conference committee as they try to get a farm bill done by the end of this month. Thank you to Mike Nolan for being on today’s show. This show can be found wherever you get your podcasts. If you like us, please take a second to both rate and review us on iTunes and tell somebody else about what you learned on the show today. Thanks to Radio Kingston. Thanks to the National Young Farmers Coalition, the whole team for being there, to Hannah Beal for editing and to you for listening. Thanks so much.

Mike: Welcome back, server nation, to Process Server Daily, the number-one podcast for legal support professionals. I am your host, Mighty Mike, the podcast server. I'm excited about today's episode, and I look forward to knocking your socks off. Let's get right to it. Mike: Welcome back to the show, server nation. We are joined by the owner of Alaska Investigation Agency, located in Palmer, Alaska. He started out his career in the Army Reserves and transitioned into private investigation in 2001. Since then, he has owned and operated numerous investigative agencies across the country. Luke Smith, welcome to the show. Luke: Thank you, Michael. Glad to be here. Mike: Thanks. So Luke, tell us a little bit about how you got started in the industry. Luke: About 15 years ago, 16, 17 years ago, a friend of mine was a police officer in Mississippi. He invited me to go do some surveillance with him on some private cases that he was doing, and I fell in love with it. The investigations morphed into process serving, and so now I do both. Mike: That's excellent. Do you remember your first job, your first investigation job? Luke: My first investigation job, I remember it very well. It was a cheating spouse, and I lost the husband in, like, the first block of trying to follow him. Mike: But you've learned a lot since then, right? Luke: I have learned so much since then. I haven't been burned in quite a while. Knock on wood. And I like to think that I'm pretty good at what I do now. Mike: That's awesome. So we don't like to focus on the negative stuff. As humans, we get a lot out of the negative and rising out of the negative and going into the positive, like finding your path in life. And so my first question always starts out with, tell us about your worst experience working in the field. Luke: My absolute worst experience, I was working a child custody case one time, and I was part of the team that located a mother, and I helped the troopers physically take the child away from the mom. Although it was what was best for the child, it absolutely broke my heart, and I realized then that child custody was not for me. Mike: How do you deal with that, Luke? Luke: You go home, and you hug your kids a little bit tighter and a little bit longer, and you move forward. I know it was what was best for the child, but it still was just heartbreaking, and I even tear up now sometimes when I think back to that child screaming and yelling and wanting his mommy. Mike: Yeah, as a parent we always relate it to our own relationships, and you want to be able to help them. But like you said, it was probably what was best. If the mom spends a few weeks without her kid, a few months without her kid, she might turn things around. You know? Luke: Absolutely. Mike: Luke, what do you want server nation to take from your story? Luke: What I want server nation to take from that particular story is just do right by your kids. Yeah, just be good parents. Mike: That's awesome. Yeah, being good parents is a great thing, and so you can ... Being in this job, one of the beautiful things about this job is you get to see the worst of the worst and you know where things could go. I don't know. In some respects, it makes you happier. You know? Luke: It does. Mike: Let's go to the positive now, Luke. Tell me about your greatest experience working in the field. Luke: I tell you what. I did a job a couple of weeks ago, and I followed a gentleman to a restaurant, and I sat down at the bar two people away from him, and I videoed him eating lunch. And then I followed him to his hotel. Six hours later, I followed him to another restaurant, where I sat right next to him at the bar, and we had dinner together. Mike: Wow. Luke: And then I followed him back to the hotel, and I rode up the elevator with him to find out which room he was in in the hotel. In that particular job, I think I pushed it to the limits just to see how far I could go, and it was such a satisfying feeling because he never had a clue I was even there watching him. Mike: So I'm going to sound like a total new, but did you feel like a CIA agent or something? Luke: Every day. Mike: Oh, that's awesome. Luke: No, I feel that way every day. Mike: What I take most from your story is enjoy what you're doing and go after it. What do you want server nation to take from your greatest experience? Luke: Take a few risks, ask that person that you're following to hold the elevator for you, and if you're trying to find someone and serve someone, ask questions. People love to talk, and they will give you just about all the information you need if you sound like you are supposed to have that information. Mike: Interesting. So I've heard it said before that you ask a question, not a direct question, but a related question that some stranger might actually ask. Luke: Absolutely. Mike: That's a pretty cool ... Do you guys still call that sub rosa? Luke: Yes. Mike: Okay, cool. Look at me knowing all the terms. Okay. So Luke, tell me what you're working on right now that you're most excited about. Luke: I guess probably one thing that I love that I have coming up is I'm adding a canine unit to my business. Mike: That's definitely something worth being excited about. Are you getting German shepherds or ... Luke: I'm getting Belgian Malinois. And actually, I have the opportunity to hire a handler that already has two Mals that are already trained. Mike: Wow. Luke: So I'm super excited about that. Mike: So Luke, tell me, why would you need a canine unit? And I think I know the answer, but could you just tell the audience, as a private investigator, what would you use a canine unit for? Luke: There's so many different uses for a canine. Here recently, Alaska has become one of the states that marijuana is now legal. However, you have a lot of corporations up here that it's still against company policy. So we can run the dogs through the companies to ensure that the employees are not breaking policy. There's no law enforcement side to it, but we are not law enforcement officers, so that's okay. The other area is we found that there are a lot of real estate agents that will have us run the dog through a house to make sure that there's no drugs in the house or there was no meth lab in the house or anything like that, just to limit their liability. Mike: Oh, I never thought about that perspective. Just the civil service. Luke: Sure, yeah, absolutely. So we're really excited to get that up and running. We've already nailed down a few contracts, and so we're really excited about that being a part of our business. Mike: Well, that's definitely worth being excited about. I am excited to hear about how you go and serve people on a snowmobile. How does that happen? Luke: Yeah. So Alaska offers unique challenges to the lower 48. Where are you from, Michael? Mike: I'm from New Mexico, but I'm based in Chico right now, in Chico, California. Luke: We're the largest ... obviously, the largest state in the United States. Here's a good comparison. Denver, Colorado, has one and a half million people. Alaska, there's 700,000 people. So we're the largest state in America, but we have the fewest people per acre or per square mile even of any other state. And so of course, if you call me and say, "Hey, what counties do you serve?" we don't have counties. We have boroughs. And we're statewide, but let's say, for instance, I serve the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The Matanuska-Susitna Borough is the size of West Virginia, so we have maybe 300,000 people that live in the borough. And so if you could imagine West Virginia and 300,000 people, they're pretty spread out. Mike: Wow. Luke: So there are tons, I mean, hundreds of villages across Alaska that are only accessible in the summertime via plane or boat or a four-wheeler. In the wintertime, you either take a plane or a dog sled or a snow machine. I mean, that's just part of what we do, and we have planes and snow machines and four-wheelers all at our disposal for serving papers and working cases. Mike: That's why you feel like a CIA agent when you're out there because you're in planes and ... You ever jump out of a plane to go serve someone? Luke: No. Mike: Come on! Luke: No. I did jump off of a four-wheeler once. Mike: Wow! And then I heard something about a moose chasing you. Luke: We have wildlife scattered across Alaska. And inside the city of Anchorage, there's a very large population of moose. I've been chased by moose. I've turned corners and been staring a moose face to face, and you just slowly back away. You don't need that 1,800-pound animal trying to trample you. We have bears that you have to deal with sometimes. Luke: So obviously, everywhere we go, we're armed to the teeth, ready for really the wildlife, not the people. But yeah, I've been chased by moose. I've never been chased by wolves, but I've felt them kind of breathing down my neck, if you will. That one was interesting, a little bit scary. The moose aren't really scary. You just know what to expect from them, and you respect them. This was their land first, so we're just visitors on their land anyway, and they believe that. Mike: It's the truth. Luke: Yes. I have video of moose walking down the street in Anchorage in the middle of traffic, and they just do not care. Mike: That is awesome. Server nation, Luke has been dropping some major value bombs on us today, telling us all about Alaska and the crazy private investigation stuff that he's got going on, from the canines to the planes and the quads, you name it. But prepare yourself, because we're headed into the rapid-fire round right after a word from our sponsors. Recording: Server nation, I know you're with the times, and you want to do whatever you can to have all of the resources for your client. That is why I created 123efile.com. As a process server, attorney, or even an [inaudible 00:10:59], you can visit the website and file your documents in any of the Tyler courts in California. With its easy-to-use, one-page operation, you can have your e-filing done in a matter of minutes and get back to what really matters. If your time is important to you, visit 123efile.com. Mike: Okay. Welcome back to the show. Luke, are you ready for the rapid-fire round? Luke: I am, Michael. Mike: What is your favorite skip-trace tactic? I imagine it's got to be a little bit different in Alaska. Luke: My favorite skip-trace tactic is going and asking the wildlife if they've seen my skip. Mike: You said asking the wildlife? I had to think about that for a minute. I was like, did you just say ask the wildlife? Luke: All right. You know, my favorite skip-trace tactic, I think, pretending to be a guide because there's so many fishing and hunting guides in Alaska that you can call just about anyone up and say, "Hey, I'm a guide, and I'm looking for this person. They booked a thing with me, and I'm just trying to confirm," and they will tell you where they're at, where their mom and dad are at, how to get in touch with them, what they drive, when they come home. They'll give you everything because, up here, hunting and fishing is a big business, and it's a big deal. Mike: So who do you call for that? Luke: The skip that I'm looking for. Mike: Oh, you call the person. Oh, wow! Luke: Or their family members. Mike: Oh, wow! So they're like, "Yeah. Oh, you're a guide. Yeah, let me get him over here." What's the incentive for them to help you, though? They're like ... because it's their friend or family, and they want to connect them to the guide? Luke: So many people up here need to hunt and fish just to feed their family. It's the sustenance thing. So maybe this isn't the best wording, but I prey on that a little bit, if you will. Mike: No, yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, we manipulate things all the time. People say, "Hey, what are you doing stalking that girl?" I go, "Oh, that's my job. That's what I do." What is your favorite tool for defense? I know you said you're armed to the teeth. What does that entail? Luke: You know, my favorite tool for defense depends really on where I'm going and what I'm doing. I always carry a firearm everywhere I go. I am a certified firearms instructor. But if I'm going out to some of the remote locations, I'll carry a shotgun along with my sidearm. I do carry concealed when I'm in most areas because I don't want to approach people looking like law enforcement. Mike: Yeah. Luke: And in Alaska, everybody carries a gun. It's legal to carry a gun here concealed or otherwise, and so everybody has one. So even people walking around showing their sidearms, it's not really that big of a deal. My personal preference is to keep it concealed, though. But if I'm going, like I say, out to remote locations, I'll carry a shotgun mainly for bear protection. Mike: Well, that's awesome. That's some cool defense. What kind of pistol do you carry? Luke: I carry a Glock 19-9 millimeter. Mike: Luke, what book would you recommend? Luke: What book would I recommend? Mike: From guns to books. Luke: I know a couple of different people that have written books, and one is a skip-trace queen. Her name is Valerie. She wrote a book, "Skip Trace Secrets." That's a very, very good book. And then also another friend of mine, Kimberly, wrote a book about process serving and mayhem, and she's got tons of funny stories in those. I can't remember the exact name of that book, though. Mike: That's okay. I'll look them up, and I'll link them in the show notes. Anybody who's interested can go to processserverdaily.com/Luke, and they'll see all the show notes word for word and the links and everything. Luke: Perfect. Mike: Luke, what is the greatest advice you've ever received? Luke: I think the greatest advice that I ever received was be professional, be respectful, and be ready to take care of business regardless of what that is. Mike: To close this awesome episode, can you tell me what parting piece of advice would you give the servers out there that are ... Maybe they're struggling. Maybe they're new. Maybe their business is circling the drain, and they don't know what they're doing wrong. What advice would you give them? Luke: My advice to all the servers out there across the board is be professional, do not be judgmental. We don't know what people's stories are. Do what you say you're going to do in a timely fashion, and hang in there and just keep pounding the pavement. Mike: That's awesome. So if you had to start your business over again, Luke, how would you ... What would be the first thing you would do? Luke: I would go get a job somewhere. Mike: So you would work for another company? Luke: If I had to start my business all over again, I think I would probably have made a lot of contacts prior to opening my business because, in this business, that's what is very, very important, is your contacts. Mike: That's perfect. They say your net worth is your network. Build your network, and you'll grow your business. Luke: Absolutely. Mike: Luke, what is the best way that we can connect with you? And then we can say good-bye. Luke: You can connect with me through Facebook or my website, alaskaaia.com. Mike: So Luke, I want to personally thank you for coming on this show, man. This has been really cool. I'm excited to share it with the world. Luke: Thanks for having me, Michael. Mike: Well, I'm going to have to come visit one day. Luke: You do that, buddy. Mike: All right, partner. Well, until next time, server nation, you've been served up some awesomeness by Alaska Luke and Mighty Mike, the podcast server. Server nation, I want to personally thank you for listening to today's episode and ask you a question. Do you or your staff need additional training? Can you handle more clients, but you're not sure where to get them? I've developed a solution. Psduniversity.com offers a step-by-step online training by the top legal support professionals in the industry. Visit psduniversity.com.

Mike North: @michaellnorth | mike.works Show Notes: 00:51 - Transitioning from CTO to Independent Trainer 03:37 - Customizing Content and Developing Curriculum 06:37 - Bringing a Developer Into the JavaScript Ecosystem 12:47 - Training Developers with Non-Traditional Backgrounds 16:56 - Keeping Up with “Fifth Gear” 19:27 - Developing Frontend Masters Courses 22:40 - “Progressive Web Apps” 34:37 - Web Security Resources: LinkedIn's REACH Program IndexedDB Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 79. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me today is Elrick, also at the Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Today, we are going to be talking with Mike North, who is doing all kinds of interesting stuff as per the usual so we'll jump right in. Hey, Mike. MIKE: How is it going? I'm glad to be here. CHARLES: Last time that I saw you, I think it was about a year ago at the Wicked Good Ember Conf and we were standing on the beach, drinking scotch and talking about Fastboot but you were doing something completely and totally different then than you are now so I was wondering, we were talking the conversation before we started rolling, that your role nowadays is independent consultant and personal dev trainer. I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that move from the CTO role that you're playing at your old company to kind of moving into that independent trainer, like why and how. MIKE: Yeah, I do remember talking about Fastboot at Wicked Good Ember. It feels like things have moved quite a bit since then. I have always loved teaching developers. When I've been a team lead, it's the favorite part of my job just because I get profound satisfaction out of helping people get over these hurdles that most of the time took me a much longer time with blog posts and podcasts and incomplete examples and libraries that were out of date and Stack Overflow with half answers. I've decided to dedicate myself to trying to make it easier for people in an increasingly complex web development world to wrap their head around everything. While I was a tech lead or a CTO, I always had to split my focus between helping developers grow and something else. Oftentimes, that something else was where the deadlines were and the time pressure was. It felt a little bit like I was driving a car that only had first and fifth gear where you're like on the bleeding edge of open source and what was the latest commit to master and [inaudible]. Then like, "Oh, let's be extremely patient with this person. They've never seen promises before because they came from another programming language. Let's help them digest this at their own pace." It's this slow and patient process of building up from the fundamentals and then the bleeding edge is like, "Let's use Babel Stage 0." It was very hard for those two aspects to exist at the same time in myself so I decided I'm just going for the training side. That's really all I do these days. CHARLES: It was so, but now would you qualify that as the first gear or the fifth gear? MIKE: That's the first gear. It gets you off the ground. It takes you from stop and gets you moving and then you have to develop your own expertise beyond that. But I like to think I'm developing a really, really excellent first gear. Today for example, I'm converting a bunch of Python developers at LinkedIn who are basically the ops team. I'm teaching them Ember and JavaScript at the same time through a series of about 20 exercises over three days. That process is many weeks long without assistance so this is like, "Let's get rolling much more efficiently and quickly," than via DIY approach. CHARLES: Now, do you find you have to custom-tailor for the environment or the developers moving from like someone coming from, say C# would have a different experience than someone coming from Python? MIKE: Absolutely. When I have my material, I have sections that I can drop. If you are a C# developer, I do not have to explain conceptually what 'async' and 'await' mean. You've been working with that for a while. I probably throw up a little example in C# and then the equivalent in JavaScript to sort of create a bridge from your existing expertise into the JavaScript world. Another one -- this is very true -- is teaching Ruby developers how to use Elixir. You don't have to say, "This is a router. We have controllers. There are actions and controllers." There are so many parallels that really it's more useful to help, rather than teach things from scratch to create connections back to the expertise they already have so they're not starting from zero and they can say like, "In the Ruby world, I would think of doing XYZ." Now, I have a map in between that and this new thing. CHARLES: Obviously, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of languages and environments that you could transition to, probably more than matches your own personal experience, in doing that frontline development. What kind of research do you have to do to develop a curriculum for, say someone coming from Clojure or someone coming from Scala or something like that? Maybe that never happens. MIKE: I have a pretty, pretty broad background. My entry into programming was a subset of C and then I graduated to C++ and Java and Ruby and I used to do ASP stuff. I've written iOS apps. I feel like I have enough of a foothold into various areas like I know one JVM language. That is usually enough. If you're running a lot of Clojure, I can at least speak Java to you because odds are, you're working with that and you're seeing that and you know it. Oftentimes, I have what I need. There are situations where I can borrow something in a very cursory level. Not to rip on Scala but I have not found it valuable to make connections to that particular language for clarity and [inaudible] but I have used Haskell before and I'm not a Haskell developer but it is a pure functional language. When trying to help people understand how is this different, then the JavaScript got them running where the Ruby ends up running. It's useful to use something like that. It's a very small language, very simple and you can wrap your head around the basics. ELRICK: What are some of the particular challenges that you face when bringing in a developer outside of the JavaScript ecosystem into JavaScript since JavaScript is kind of the Wild West that you can do everything in JavaScript? What are some of the challenges you face in bringing in a new developer from Python or C or whatever that may be? MIKE: You put it very well. It is definitely the Wild West. You can do anything if you have enough [inaudible] yourself and enough power to get serious stuff done. Really, it's like the explosion in number of choices and tools, the explosion of complexity. I learned JavaScript when it was something that you sprinkle on top of your Rails app for a little interactivity, a little animation on a screen or something like that. I was lucky to learn it at that point in time when that was the norm because I've been able to gradually accumulate for more than ten years now. The tooling like using Grunt, using Golf, using Brunch and then stepping up to other more sophisticated build tools. I learned those one by one in the context of real projects. Now, it's like the mountain is so high, people don't know where to start so that's a big challenge for developers. To throw them into a meaningful project like if you asked a mean JavaScript developer, not angry but the average JavaScript developer, they're like maybe -- CHARLES: I should dare to say that the average JavaScript developer is mean. MIKE: A little bit and probably maybe [inaudible] with me as well, depending on [inaudible]. But they're going to spin up some project with webpack and Babel and all of these tools. If that's your first exposure to the language and to working with the language, you're operating in an environment that you don't understand. Research shows that is the less effective option there to slowly building things up over time. I spend a lot of time going back to the basics and making sure we're not working with promises until we've explicitly focused on them, chained a couple together, managed errors and then now, we can work with Fetch. We're not going to jump into that and throw ourselves into this deep end of the pool. We want to incrementally build up skills. It takes a little bit longer but when you have that understanding as you're learning, you get a lot more out of it because anything that you can't get a grip on to as you learn it, it sort of just evaporates into thin air and don't retain that, even if you kind of fill in those holes later. CHARLES: Yeah, it could be so hard too. Actually, this has been an experience that I've been having, I would say almost for the past two years, as the tools advance, not only you are starting from a place of not understanding but the tools themselves do not teach you. I've had two moments where I got really mad. One actually was on an Ember project and one was a project using webpack but it was the same fundamental problem where in one I was actually working with someone who was very new to JavaScript and an error happens and the stack trace was some just big bundled garbage that gave no insight at all. MIKE: In vendor.js. CHARLES: Yes, in vendor.js or in bundle JS. It was like, "How is anyone supposed to learn?" The most fundamental thing about working with Ruby or working with Node or working with anything is you get a stack trace. MIKE: Debugging is really hard. I think it just takes a little time reaching out to people who are experiencing the Stockholm Syndrome like most of the time, JavaScript developer. We all are working with Ember CLI and webpack. I'm not ripping on these tools but we're used to that complexity in our lives. When we see that stack trace, we're like, "Oh, well. I probably need a source map. I'll make sure that that's there. It's natural that I'm debugging a file that the browser is not really seeing like it mapped back to my source code debugging." This is natural to us. But if you put that in front of a developer who hasn't been living under those circumstances, the number of times they raised their hand is like, "What the hell is this?" It is just amazing and it really helps. I've reset my expectations to what a normal programming experience should be and JavaScript does not provide that today. That is really challenging to keep someone in the midst of all that. CHARLES: I feel like it's hard and do you think we'll ever achieve that? Or is it just going to be a constant hamster wheel of progress versus the tooling to educate what progress has been made or to communicate what progress has been made? MIKE: I think the tooling is fine but it's just that we have a gap in terms of learning experience. We just need really -- I'm not voluntary here because I've got a ridiculous backlog -- a couple long tail horses working with vanilla JavaScript, rendering some stuff on the screen, maybe a course of React but no JSX yet, just create component. A couple of things to fill in a gap between where maybe code school leaves off and where you are expected to be by the time you start interviewing for a spot as frontend developer on a team but there's a huge chasm right now. There's the intro guides and then there's professional life and trying to bridge the gap between those is ridiculously a challenge right now due to the huge ramp up of complexity from like, "Let's do some stuff in the console," to, "Running transpile JSX code with async [inaudible]. We've got regenerator in there to polyfill generator functions." There's so much in your average JavaScript at these days. CHARLES: Your work that you're doing at LinkedIn, part of it is trying to bring and train developers who come from more nontraditional backgrounds, including a lot of things like boot camps. What is your experience of their experience coming in? Are boot camps doing the right thing? Are they teaching the right things? Are they trying to kind of parachute them on top of that mountain? Or do you find that they're just at the base camp, so to speak? Because it sounds like your approach is like you've got to really start from fundamentals so that you can understand the layers of complexity if you're going to, someday stand on them. MIKE: I think a lot of the boot camps are doing an excellent job. These days, the employees we have at LinkedIn who come from boot camps, I would bet on them against your average MIT grad every time, just because their education is so practical. It's amazing that in the world of computer science, the stuff that you're taught in school is a little bit farther removed than one would expect, compared to the stuff that we do every day in our jobs -- building real apps. I do not need to know in my day-to-day work at LinkedIn how an operating system works or how to build a device driver. This is a little bit too fundamental. It's the wrong abstraction for practical everyday work for most people. Where in these boot camps, they focus completely on the practical. In fact, I've been fortunate enough to get involved with the REACH program here at LinkedIn, where we hire explicitly people from nontraditional backgrounds like boot camps. They're not all from boot camps but many of them are. We just hired 30 of them in March. The pilot program, I think we've hired two or three in our New York office and it just went really well. It started like, "Let's double down and double down again and double that again." This time, we're doing 30 and I expect there will be a new round next year where we poll even more. The idea is we take these REACH candidates and pair them with a mentor engineer for six months. At the end of that six months, we had to make a decision as to like this person at the level we expect of an entry level software engineering hire. From what I've seen, we're doing really well at preparing these folks and they're unbelievably valuable to the teams that they've been placed in. ELRICK: That's amazing. That's very interesting. Is there a standardized curriculum thing that each mentor will follow to get this person after they entered his REACH program and then ramp them up or is it like each person just goes and looks at what the person knows and then ramps them up accordingly. MIKE: I'd say, it's a mix of both. We have a set of technical trainings for them or we'll have a testing expert from within the company and teach a little testing seminar to them. There's that standardized curriculum there. But the nature of being taught by boot camp or teaching yourself is that you're going to have holes in your knowledge and it's not often predictable where those holes will be. That's why we make sure we do this mentorship very explicitly and over a long period of time so that if it turns out that you never learned about how to work with tree-data structures. That was not part of the go-no/go decision that brought you on but we should probably, at least get you there. At least to the point where if you're traversing a down tree and you're like parent and child, what is this, what do you mean by leaf-level node. This is stuff that is actually meaningful for web developer in some cases. CHARLES: In the context of the work that you're doing with the REACH program but also touching on something that we talked about at the beginning about the first gear and the fifth gear, part of generating a curriculum is still being in contact with what's up in the fifth gear right because ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're working with people who are in first gear or looking to get a smooth transition in the first gear but at the same time, you want to set them up and you want to be in contact for what's in fifth gear now is going to be first gear in five years. How do you feed that in? MIKE: I'm fortunate to have a great team that I work with here. This group that I roll up to in LinkedIn, they're experts and you probably know of like Chris Epstein and Tom Dale and Steph Petter. A 15-minute coffee break with one of these people is enough to keep [inaudible]. Sometimes, it's a little bit like drinking from a fire hose because it's like I spend an hour with a student trying to help them understand like, "This is why a Promise is useful. Here is the callback equivalent," and then now, "Let's dive in to Glimmer. Why this track annotation is the right way to go for automatic updating." It sends me for little bit of a loop sometimes but it is definitely keeping me up to date. The other factor, of course is when you've been doing this for a while. History sort of repeats itself so a lot of the patterns that we're seeing today, I've seen somewhere else. I was working with code splitting when I was writing Dojo JavaScript code years and years ago. I was defining my module layers in a very explicit way. I had to do that. I didn't have done a webpack that would figure out, put these splits are. But I have that experience to look back to and for that reason, it is not often that an entirely new concept comes along. Oftentimes, they're like amazing refinements on things that how to smell like stuff that we've used before in the software engineering world. CHARLES: Yeah or here's something that has never been used, is very prevalent in these other context which we're going to apply here. MIKE: Exactly. CHARLES: And like, "Oh, my goodness. It's a perfect solution." In addition to the work that you're doing with LinkedIn and developing those training curricula and stuff, you're also doing some work for Frontend Masters in an area that's very exciting, I think to me. I'm sure it's exciting to you because you decided to throw a whole lot of time into developing a course for it. That's in the development of progressive web apps, which for me has been like this thing that I'm so curious about but I'm like a kitten playing with a little yarn ball. I want to dive in but I'm just going to tap it with my paws right now. MIKE: Yeah, it's a really interesting area and I think that even if you're not using progressive web technologies today, it's one of these things that sort of reinvigorates your energy for JavaScript's future and what may be possible soon. Steve and I have put together this amazing progressive web app course, which has I think like 18 short examples of iteratively building up a grocery shopping app. If you've used InstaCard or something like that, we start out with app already built and it's like a single-page app as doing everything that you would expect. After a few of the exercises, it works offline. After a few more, you can add stuff to the card and background sync, push it to the API when you come back online. We get deep, deep, deep into service workers. That's one of the areas that my work at LinkedIn and my teaching with Frontend Masters overlaps really well because I've been heavily involved in creating our service worker for LinkedIn.com. I may be able to take some of what we've learned here and disseminate it a little bit so that, hopefully fewer people have to learn the hard way. It's best to keep things simple at first and add on functionality. I'm about to cross like the [inaudible]. This is my favorite just because the example turned out to fit so well and in particular, on Frontend Masters, I think Steve and I have had contrasting teaching styles but they complement each other so well because I'm like the 'melt people's brains' instructor. I love to throw people exercises that are like 120% of what they can do and it's going to hurt, just like when you're lifting weights at the gym, like you're going to beg for mercy but we're going to make you strong. Then Steve, just listening to him, even with I am in the classroom and he is teaching me Electron. He's so energizing and he's really funny too but not in an overtly cracking jokes kind of way. He's just so fun when he teaches. I think it is a really good combination just because things lined up just by luck and through hard work and just the right way out of a couple of important areas. CHARLES: Now, just for people who might not be familiar with the term progressive web apps, what does it encompass? Do people actually call them PWAs? MIKE: No. I'm going to start, though. I like that. That carries very well over a video chat or something. Nobody knows how to spell that: P-U-A? P-W-U-A? It is a rejection of the old idea that in order to take advantage of some web technology, it has to be supported in all of the browsers that we need to support. The idea here is to hold as a core tenet of our design practices, the idea of progressive enhancement, meaning we serve up a basic experience and where we can take on these superhero features, like the ability to work offline, the ability to receive push notifications, we go ahead and do so. If your browser doesn't support this, that's unfortunate. No big deal. You still get a good experience. But if you're using a very recent version of Chrome or Safari or you have a new Android device, these browsers can take advantage of sophisticated metadata or sped up a background process that can serve up data to your app and your app doesn't even know that there's something between it and the API. That is the idea of progressive web apps -- apps that become superheroes where possible and they still work and provide a great basic experience for antiquated browsers like IE8 and Safari. CHARLES: The idea theoretically, you could work without any JavaScript or whatsoever. What's the ground floor there? MIKE: That is ideal. I think server-side rendering, which is what you're talking about there, even if JavaScript is not working, just HTML and CSS will provide a basic experience. That's great but that's not a modern browser technology thing. If you have JavaScript turned off in today's Chrome, like Chrome 60, versus IE9, both of them working with them without JavaScript. What we're really talking about here is app-like characteristics, where we are pushing web technology to the point where you will swear that this came from an App Store. It's on your home screen. It's running in the full screen. You're getting push notifications. It works offline and you can store a large amount of structured data locally on the device. All of the stuff sounds like the list of reasons to reach for native mobile technology because the mobile web is not good enough. But in fact, it has a feature set of this family of progressive web technologies. It's really like a web app that is so good and so modern that it feels and looks just like a native mobile app. CHARLES: That sounds so hard to do right. MIKE: Well, it is now, just because what we have to work with can be thought of it like a basket of ingredients, rather than a solution that we drop in. But over time, as more people start working with these ingredients, I think we're going to see a lot of consensus around the best patterns to use and boilerplate code will fall away as we can identify that the set is in fact commonly needed and not a beautiful and unique snowflake. CHARLES: Because it seems like the thing that I always struggle with is not wanting to put the critical eggs in the basket of a superhero feature or have you being able to provide an alternative if the superhero feature doesn't exist. Some features, if you just don't have it, that's fine. You can turn it on if the capabilities available but certain features are very critical to the functioning of your application. I'm casting about for an example and I'm not finding one immediately but -- MIKE: Offline is a great one. That fits pretty neatly. If you're using an older browser or if you're using Safari, which by the way, I should stop ripping on Safari. For the listeners out there, we saw a commit lend in webkit, where service for APIs are beginning to be stubbed out. No longer do we have to look at length. Service worker, enthusiasm and Safari has got it in the five-year plan. There was motion last week. We haven't seen motion in ages so thank you Safari Team. Thank you. Keep up the good work. CHARLES: Is there a discipline of Safari-ologists who monitor the movement of Safari to bring this news? MIKE: Of course, we monitor it because right now, Chrome and Firefox, they are pretty much hopeful in terms of supporting this modern stuff. Opera supports this modern stuff. Samsung's fork of Chromes support this modern stuff. Especially when we think about the mobile web, you got to worry about Android and you got to worry about iOS Safari and right now, like we've talked about these progressive web apps, you don't get that superhero experience on an iPhone or an iPad. Once we crossed that threshold, this is going to have a breakaway level of adoption because there are no more excuses. Essentially, for a mobile web experience, you can send push notifications to the user. That is huge. That is probably at the top of the list for why some people use native apps, instead of mobile web. The more we can do that, the more we can make it so that a great LinkedIn experience can be delivered to your phone without having to install a binary. I just have to update Facebook the other day and it was over 100 megabytes. Why do we need to do that? You should be able to make it work with less. I'm sure that there's some great stuff in there. Apparently, Snapchat filters are popular but I don't need this. Can we code split that away or something because I don't want to have to download that? I can't even download it on the cell network because it's over 100 megabytes. It's really exciting to see the web start to compete with this heavy mobile experience because now I think is ready. CHARLES: Now, when you talk about push notifications, you're talking about being able to send things to my lock screen. MIKE: To your lock screen while the browser is not on the foreground, while the app is not open. Essentially, you're installing a lightweight process that runs in the background. It receives events that originate from your server and the user can tap on them and then your little lightweight worker process in the background decides what to do when that tap happens, like open up the app, take them to this URL or something like that. That is a game changer. That's huge. Or background sync like the user added some items to their cart and then they lock their phone and now, their plane has landed. That's why they were offline and they get back on the internet and without them having to touch their phone, now we can push that data to the server and everything's in sync, rather than like, "Please revisit your app. We need to run some JavaScript code to flush IndexedDB or API." It still feels like a hack at that point. This is a fluid experience. ELRICK: Wow. This is exciting for me as I don't have any more space on my cellphone, thanks to all the apps that I have to install to do various things on the web. MIKE: You're not alone. CHARLES: Yeah, it's crazy and just the amount of code sharing that you can have, I guess that doesn't happen much these days on the web where you've got these popular libraries out on CDNs so that the chances are that you've got jQuery 1.2.1 on your cache, you've got 16 versions of jQuery so most of your web applications don't have to do that. I guess we kind of do the equivalent of statically linking everything. MIKE: There is a benefit near that where we have imperative code managing our cache, instead of just relying on the HTTP cache or app cache, if you have a vendor.js file that is not changing over six months, there is no reason you should be re-downloading that every time you deploy your app or letting the browser evict that, just because memory pressure is high from Google image search results or something like that. We really don't have much control over it. But with a service worker, we can say, "Hold on to this," or maybe like prefetch the next version of the app so that we're going to show you the old version now but the next time you refresh, here's the new version available instantly. It's downloaded in the background and it's like click to update your version, like it's already here waiting for you. That's huge. That's amazing. CHARLES: That is amazing. Although the complexity skeptic in me is thinking, "Oh, my goodness. Now, we've got all this state that we're storing on the server. We have to have data migrations." We need some sort of migration mechanism for our clients-side state and perhaps some transaction and rollback in case you're not able to successfully migrate your data. It sounds like a lot of fun but I'm just imagining we really are getting started here. Has there been any work on that aspect? MIKE: If you've ever worked with IndexedDB, it does have a concept of migrations. Basically, the data you store on a device has a version and when you read in what's called a file but it's a database, when you read that in, the first thing you do is you basically bring it up to date incrementally. You'll bring it in, you're looking for version nine like your code wants version nine. What you see is version two because your user hasn't been at your site for six months and you're going to take it from two to three to four to five to six. Each of those, essentially constitutes a migration. We just have to apply the same principles of forward-compatible changes. The escape hatch here is remember it's progressive enhancement so if we had to destroy everything, fall back to a basic experience and start from scratch, like discard all of our data, it's really being held there as an optimization. Some people use this immutable caching strategy or basically, like rolling out a new service worker version constitutes for the most part. Any data that wasn't created by a user you're going to discard that and you're going to fetch it new. You don't have to worry about like, "Crap. This six month-old thing is still plaguing half our users and we can't get rid of it," like you can have [inaudible]. But you should really check out this course. It is simpler than you think and what we demonstrate is not a trivial like hello service worker. It is taking in a classic single page app, making it completely offline, having it exist on the home screen and I think the service worker ends up being no more than 100 lines of code. It's not too bad. ELRICK: I'm definitely going to check that out because my progressive web app journey is still on just service workers. MIKE: That's very [inaudible], though. ELRICK: Yeah. I'm definitely checking it out. Sounds like a really fantastic course. MIKE: I've been focusing a lot on this area and another one is security. The reason I picked these two is because developers are not really going to learn about these on the critical path to [inaudible] plus they learn about them the wrong way. As the JavaScript world is becoming radically more complex with each passing year, I've tried to target some of my efforts towards areas where they are not getting as much attention as I'd like to see, just because we have to focus somewhere. Obviously, getting the app out and figuring out how to make the build tools work for us. Without that, we can't do anything at all. One of the courses that's coming in September for Frontend Masters is a one-day web security workshop or we'll do with like cross-site scripting, how to work with certificates because if you start playing with HTTP/2 -- the next generation of HTTP -- you will need to generate some certificates for development at least today you need to. I've seen some amazingly smart developers get this dangerously wrong to the point where they compromise their own machine and anything that's on that machine, just by trying to set up dev environment. Typically, I'm an optimist but when it comes to this PWA stuff and security, I am paranoid. I feel like, we as a community need to get together and have the discipline to brush up in these areas so that as we introduce all of this new stuff, we don't end up opening a bunch of holes. Nowhere near the same rigor as put into frontend compared to backend and now, the line is blurred. Right now, we're server-side rendering so our code is running on the backend somewhere so injecting something can really mess things up in a bigger way. ELRICK: Yeah, I think that's a fundamental characteristic of someone does going to be involved in security paranoia. You have to be paranoid about everything. MIKE: Yep. I don't trust anything. CHARLES: It's important to make those things easy because I'm definitely fall more into the hippie camp like, "Everything is going to be fine. Let's trust everybody," which is I know is totally unrealistic. But then you get into these secure technologies and you learned enough of it just to get the task that you're going to do and then you forget. SSL is a great example. Over the course of my career, I've learned how SSL certs have worked probably, at least 10 times. ELRICK: Right, [inaudible] you had to set it up in production. CHARLES: Yes, exactly and then I promptly forget about it, never worry about it again and then the next time I'm like, "How did that work? What's this trust chain? What?" ELRICK: Exactly. I read a study from Carnegie Mellon a couple of years ago that showed developers observe security best practices dramatically less than the general public and the general public is not good. Do you know what I'm talking about when I say a certificate warning and a browser, there's big scary red screen saying like something is wrong here? Before the Chrome team put some effort into improving that, 70% of people would click through those and proceed anyway. After their improvements, over a third of people still clicked through and that number when you just look at Canary versions of browsers, that number is actually considerably higher close to 50% of our developers. We're trained by every broken certificate system that exists on the internet like the legitimate ones or maybe some things just expired. They're training people to just click straight through these things and as a result, it is terrifyingly easy to mess with people. We have to remember as developers, our machines, those have the private deploy keys and those have the SSH keys to commit code to GitHub, we have to treat that like it's a private data. It's really, really important that we make it easy and that we make sure that that easy path is also very safe. CHARLES: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much Mike for coming by and talking with us. We touched on a lot of subjects but I feel like I certainly learned a lot. MIKE: Yeah, thanks. It's been so much fun talking with you this morning. CHARLES: Anybody who wants to go and check out those courses, they're on Frontend Masters. Now correct me if I'm wrong, you've obviously got the one on progressive web apps or PWAs. If it doesn't work offline, it's faux-PWA. MIKE: Yes, I like that. That's going to become a t-shirt sometime soon. CHARLES: The fundamentals of progressive web app development, which is now released if I understand correctly. MIKE: Members have access to everything, you can watch the raw video now. The edited course will be available later this year. CHARLES: Okay, and that's with Steve Kenny. I am very much looking forward to looking at that and learning more about it. Then you've also got ones coming up in September on TypeScript web security in Visual Studio Code. MIKE: Yep and members can watch that as a live-streamed event. Frontend Masters even ask people to watch the comment stream so you'll have a proxy question asker or hand raiser in the room. It's really a great experience to be part of a live thing. CHARLES: Oh, man. That sounds awesome. Then if you are obviously doing your independent consulting and if people want to get in contact, how would they do that? MIKE: You can find me on Twitter, @MichaelLNorth or you can visit my website, Mike.Works and I have all of the courses I teach and outlines and I can just open up a little chat bubble on the lower right, ask me any questions that you have. I am really passionate about teaching people. If you like that's useful for your team, please reach out and I'd love to talk. CHARLES: Fantastic. Thanks, Mike and thanks everybody for listening to us. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always do that. We're on Twitter at @TheFrontside and email, Contact@Frontside.io. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Elrick and I will see you all later. MIKE: Thank you so much. ELRICK: Bye.